The Twisted Heart (3 page)

Which led her to ask herself, as she quit the library, what the point was to caring, about anything? For example, why had Joe, if that was really his name, smiled at her on parting? It hadn't felt fair, somehow, the fact that he had smiled as he turned away.

It was dark outside. Kit crossed Broad Street, briefly slewing the axis of her shoulders so that she would pass untouched through a group of revellers, drinkers, loud voices, along to St Giles and beyond, up the Woodstock Road—pale, late-blooming roses glimmering in a front garden—strode at her usual swift pace as soon as this was possible, quarter of an hour to where she lived in a tiny room on the top floor of what had once been a substantial mansion.

It still was a mansion in its brickwork, but the building had been crudely converted years before into graduate lodgings. Kit took it that her own room had originally been quarters for a suffering maid or two. Below her, on the family
floors, other residents of the house had scored a drawing room, a parlour, a visitor's room, what have you.

Kit slipped up to the attic flat, surplus married quarters awaiting renovation, and went into her own room. She shut the door behind her—not a confirmed habit—and began to dance with herself the fastest dance she'd learned in class, though she did this in a quiet, hoppish way; quiet, so that if he was in, she didn't disturb the boy who lived beneath her; hoppish, because strewn across her floor there lay a mass of papers and books.

Hoppishly she twirled, her arms curved out in front of her, in ghost position, imagining being held. And if nothing else, she
was
being held, by her thoughts.

After a few such solitary minutes, Kit took a leap to her desk chair, landing with a gleeful thump on her bottom. ‘Zip, zip, zip!' she cried. She switched on her computer and set to, copying out scribbles from her notebook:

Meaning what? In 1831, if Bulwer's version was moral, that trumped the need to be factual, but in 1840, if it was factual, that released him from the requirement to be moral? Yes? No?

Kit tried for about ten seconds to work out whether or not these positions were mutually exclusive. Anyway, rubbish, she thought. Weren't the murder details, true or false, intended principally to be entertaining? Of course they were. She abandoned the subject in order to construct a new reading list for Orson. It had been amongst a heap of flyers on a shelf below the pigeon holes in Orson's lodging block, before she'd been given his email address, that she had found the leaflet that advertised the St Christopher's Social Dance Club. It was
your
fault I went, she thought, mentally addressing Orson in words.

He had done his
Oliver Twist
essay for her in week one of his course. Week two, this week, he'd done a second essay, on lawyers' clerks. Now Kit wanted him to think about the alluring character of the woman detective in nineteenth-century British police fiction. ‘Orson: Week Three', she tapped, ‘Reading + Questions to Bear in Mind'.

Some time past eleven, exhausted and growing dull, Kit creaked up onto her feet and went to the kitchen. The moment the idea of supper struck her, she wanted to eat; but as she was still deep in mulling over facets of her work—facts, stories, murder—she experienced a blur of disappointment when she discovered Michaela, who had the other room in the flat, perched on the kitchen table with a chocolate biscuit. Still, another human being to talk to.

‘Been out?'

‘Library,' said Kit.

‘Do I smell?' Michaela pushed a stray crumb into her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘Not from here.'

‘Good. Look at us,' Michaela waved her half-biscuit expansively, ‘Friday night. Bloody useless.'

Kit girded herself. ‘Ah, but
beforehand
, you'll be amazed to hear, I went out dancing.'

‘I completely don't believe you. Where? I mean, seriously?'

‘I went to a club—yes, “seriously”—over in East Oxford. Not what you think, a club in the sense of learning how to do—a kind of a mix-up of styles, I don't know, Latin steps and different kind of things like that. It was really funny.'

‘Kit, I'm amazed. Good girl. Good work! I would've never believed it. And those dance clubs. I mean, it's so uncool it's almost cool again.' Michaela shook another biscuit out of an expensive-looking tube. ‘Any blokes?'

‘I'd have expected you to ask me that first.' Kit leant on the fridge, a small, student-grade appliance. She put her elbow on top of it and rested her hip against her hand. ‘Strangely enough, I did get this bloke wanting to know if I'd be going back next week. But it was a trial thing, the class I mean, and I wasn't even in the right level, although it was okay actually, I coped. But, basically, I don't think I'm going again.' She shrugged with false cheer, slopped over further and opened the fridge to assess her supply of one-person food containers and packets. Already she was in
a state of regret that she'd mentioned the dancing merely for the thrill of giving Michaela a surprise. She was happy to be a witness to Michaela's own ups and downs, indeed somewhat relished the details, but was herself by habit reticent.

‘I didn't know you danced in, like, a properly got-together way,' said Michaela.

‘I can't claim it was proper; but my father sent me to ballet lessons as a kid. He wanted me to learn to walk tall, which worked, I have to admit, although I used to loathe it—' coleslaw, garlic bagel, fudge yogurt, ‘—wriggling about with a crowd of midgets in pink tutus, and all I had was a black leotard—ask my mother. Fucking hell. And anyway—' couscous with sweetcorn and red pepper, two days over its sell-by date, ‘anyway, I spent half my time lying on the floor next to the piano because of nose bleeds. But he said, “If you slouch, it'll make you look even taller.” He thinks no one's going to marry me. There was this pair of ancient dinner ladies at my primary school who used to say, “You could be a Bluebell Girl when you grow up.” Have you heard of them, Bluebell Girls?—a particular sort of six-foot, Parisian stripper.'

‘Talking of slouching,' said Michaela, ‘you know Mr Fleet who does maintenance stuff round by the back bicycle lockups in college?'

‘Mr Fleet, yes.'

‘He came up to me this afternoon and started talking about his wife. So what was I supposed to do? He starts telling me about how he thinks she's stopped loving him, and he says, “My wife doesn't kiss me properly any more. She only kisses
me like this.” And he says, “Look, I'll show you.” And I'm thinking, crap, he's going to kiss me. By the way—no, sorry—no—'

‘What?'

‘No, doesn't matter. So, yes, he takes my hand and sort of—kind of flutters his mouth just over it, just—I—I mean, Kit, it was one of the sexiest things that's happened to me in ages.'

‘Well, well,' said Kit with a guttural purr.

‘Yes, I know. And now I can't work out where to leave my bike.'

‘How about—the back bicycle lock-ups in college?'

‘I'd rather drink a pint of piss.'

‘I thought you enjoyed it.'

‘Pay attention,
Farr
. I didn't say I enjoyed it.'

‘All the same, Mr Fleet.'

‘Give up,' said Michaela.

Kit assembled a plate of mixed leftovers and began to eat standing.

‘Was he fit?' Michaela asked. ‘Fanciable?'

‘Who? No. That is, God knows, I don't know. Anyway, I'm not going back.'

‘Come on, why not? Seriously, you're both into dancing, right? Why not?'

‘I didn't go to this thing because I like dancing. I wanted to dance—' Kit choked on a mouthful of dankly chilly supermarket quiche, ‘—to, you know, excuse me, get lost in it, kind of—' the wet pastry was proving horrible to get down, she had to swallow three times, ‘sorry—to enjoy being a bit out of it, you know? Like why I go to the
cinema all the time. It was meant to be the same thing, just with more burn.'

‘How many times this week?'

‘What, the cinema?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh. Every day? Except today, actually.'

‘Honestly. Should I be worried?'

‘I don't know. The death tally is in the order of, well, God, seven named characters, plus a pogrom, yes, plus a comical, multi-vehicle pile up with explosions, plus a bit of the First World War in the trenches, yet again, bore, bore.'

Michaela looked disapproving. ‘Just tell me this,' she said, ‘is there any reason
not
to go for him, that you know of?'

Kit didn't answer—didn't, couldn't, wouldn't. She sat down at the table as Michaela slid off it. Michaela didn't leave, though. She started to make them both cocoas, with Kit's milk, Kit noticed.

‘Anyway, it wasn't a date, it was just a question, and I didn't say yes.'

‘Don't bother,' replied Michaela, ‘I don't even want to hear. It's a date and I'm on your case.' She stood there looking grumpy until the roiling milk almost flooded across the rim of the saucepan, whereupon she swiped it expertly from the gas, placing one overfull cocoa mug on the table by Kit's plate of fridge food, and taking the other with her away out of the kitchen.

‘Up yours,' Kit murmured.

After she'd eaten, Kit ran herself a bath, got in, and lay submerged, apart from her face, in the near-scalding water.
She breathed in the steam. It swirled as she drew on it, blew into it, drew on it, blew into it. Her ears were under. She could hear her heart thumping, and the slow, pulsed flair of her blood as it whirred in her veins. From an early age she had suffered bouts of faintness when getting up too fast, standing still for too long, dancing, shuffling round under-ventilated museums. Sometimes she grew faint simply from lying prostrate in a scalding—

Kit pushed herself up fast, curved up and round, water sloshing everywhere, up into a sitting position, bent her body forwards and over, clutched her legs, rested her head—her eye sockets—on her knees, and forced herself to breathe heavily and slowly through her nose, afraid she might vomit in the water.

When this disorderly spell had subsided, which swiftly it did, and she was able to sit up straight again, she found herself mesmerised by two black arcs of eyeliner on her knee caps. A shiver of mental connections caused her to wonder whether she would ever succeed in making Orson stare at her, as Detective Murray might have done, with a gaze like that of an ox in whose throat the butcher's knife has been buried.

Kit had been unable to resist putting Hayward's erotic novels on Orson's reading list, not that she wanted to confuse him. He was supposed to be mugging up on the undercover woman police detective in Victorian literature, and Hayward, in addition to being a prominent member of a porn-writing syndicate, had been the first English author of any note to include such a figure in his work.
Given that detectives in this period were widely thought of as virtual criminals themselves, and thus a disgraceful reflection on any government that employed them; and given that no women were officially acknowledged on the British police payroll until 1919, Kit wanted Orson to consider whether there hadn't, in the 1860s, been something so titillating about the notion of a secret woman detective, that it made sense for a pornographer to have been the first to enshrine one in print.

Though hinting at this possibility in ‘Questions to Bear in Mind', Kit had decided to leave the word ‘transgressive' to Orson. She bet herself he wouldn't be able to resist, the bet being that if Orson dropped ‘transgressive' into his essay, she would buy herself a fancy new pair of knickers.

The butcher's knife
—her thoughts returned to her notebook; to Detective Murray's memoir. She visualised her own crabbed scribbles. She herself had been pissed on, well, metaphorically, who could say how many times? Metaphorically, being pissed on was an integral part of human existence.
Metaphorically
, the mass of human beings was drenched in urine. Literally, though, she had been pissed on once, aged about fifteen. It hadn't been an act of affection, and she had been forced to try to sort herself out afterwards in the miniature sink of a converted, peach-décor, suburban boxroom toilet, an event so at odds with her own sense of herself, whatever that was, that she had since banished it pretty well completely from her mind. Once in a while though, the memory would leap back out at her. She recalled it now for the first time in two or three years.

Kit's brief phases of nausea, speckled vision and panicky light-headedness she assumed to be a by-product of her blood having to get itself round a long-distance circulatory system. As she sat in the bath—still too hot under the water, but from the waist upwards chilling—her thoughts went into muddled orbit. Who is this bastard, anyway—Joe? Joe
who
? Why the smile? What does he want with me? She took her flannel to the eyeliner on her knees, then attempted to clean the black smears off her flannel, before washing her face and hoisting herself out of the bath.

The attic flat had been divided up in a curious fashion, with the kitchen smaller than the bathroom; while the bathroom had the top floor's most generous window, but neither curtains nor a blind. Except in high summer, however, the panes would quickly steam up when hot water was running, enough to satisfy the most bashful individual, before the condensation would fuse into drops and fall in runnels down the glass. Some of the hot water that you ran for your bath floated off to sheet the uncurtained window, a ridiculously improbable arrangement; but convenient, Kit always thought.