The Twisted Heart (4 page)

She had forgotten to leave her towel on the rubber-mesh bath mat, and made a jolty dash to the little stool against the far wall where she'd dumped it with her clothes and pyjamas. Late September, the days were still reasonably warm, but not so the nights. She swerved to avoid a daddy-long-legs, tangled up in a ball of dust and hair, that was berserkly whirligigging round the floor, but her attempt to free it led to her pulling off a wing. When she then executed it, folded in a square of loo paper, the body audibly popped.
Kit was now cold to her bones, and slightly distressed. She dried herself fast and put her jumper back on over her night gear.

She returned to her room, and this time didn't dance, hoppishly or otherwise, but sat on her bed, defeated. When she had gone back inside the church hall after her stint at Pams Cafe, she had unthinkingly checked for any men taller than herself. There had been none. But if there had been lots, or just a couple, then what? Then—nothing in particular.

All the same, the fact was that from that point on she had only inattentively observed any of the people around her, and only a few of them; and those only because they'd been hopeless at dancing, or extra good, or had looked unlikely for one reason or another. Men, women, she had fleetingly watched the odd person, but with little interest.

Joe, Kit hadn't noticed. She was flattered, in a way, that he had noticed her; but not that flattered.

She tried to think how old he had been, and came up with a decade-long span from early thirties to early forties. Either he was rising forty, she thought, but had a boyishness to him that made him appear younger, or he
was
younger, but he'd been through it a bit and life had weathered him. His hair he'd had cut very short. His clothes and name told her nothing. Many kinds of men might wear such clothes and bear his name.

She began to debate with herself quite how negligible the height difference between them had been, and when this got tedious, tried to remember his voice—low, straightforward, from somewhere in the middle of things. It hadn't been local to East Oxford, though he had seemed hard enough. She
thought about it. Really, he had looked, if thin, as though, should he wish to, he could beat a person to a pulp. But why should he wish to, and anyway, so what? Perhaps he—

Kit chided herself for thinking about any of this at all. What did it matter? Jessie Keith,
I cut her across this way
and then down this way, and I threw away the parts of her
I
—

She sat on her bed, defeated. What do I care? she asked herself. He had had a certain air, something about him. She didn't know what, some sort of watchfulness.

By the time she'd got properly into bed, under the covers, Kit couldn't remember how tall he had been, how old, what he had looked like, what impression he had given her: nothing. If required, for unimaginable reasons, to pick him out in a crowd, would she actually be capable of recognising him now? She didn't feel at all sure she would. Then again, she wasn't going back, so what the hell?

It took next to no time lying in bed for her to become consciously unhappy. In a book, she thought, her decision not to go back to the dance club would be the hilarious prelude to her going back to the dance club. But not even in her worst nightmares did she behave like a girl from a hilarious book.

A couple of days after the dance club, at the weekend, Sunday, Kit saw an elderly lady on Broad Street who appeared to be texting someone. Until, as Kit drew closer, she realised that the old bird was fumbling with her glasses case.

Kit was haunted by this error. She had been working hard, sleeping badly, getting up weary in the mornings. On the Tuesday she had lost her debit card and had had to cancel it and order a new one: maddening. In fact, all week, for long stretches of daytime hours, she had felt muddled and despondent, not to mention at night. At least on the Thursday, Orson had turned in a reasonable essay. That was good. Michaela had been being her usual self.

Early on the Friday, while Kit was still in bed, eyes closed, up in her little room, she heard through her open window the throaty honking calls of migrant geese. She pictured them, the entire flock-load, as a single great, low-slung wing only just skimming the city's crowded rooftops, though somehow their crying made the air above sound empty and endless.

It was a damp day. Michaela shuffled into the kitchen in her dressing gown, stood in the doorway and said, ‘I'm not being rude, but I can lend you just the best skirt, and I mean
you do know haemorrhoid cream's an anti-inflammatory so it would totally get rid of the bags under your eyes.
Yes,'
she said, seemingly to forestall dissent, ‘the usual way of doing it mostly
is
cucumber slices. But I mean,
cucumber
slices.' The thought of cucumber slices rendered her temporarily speechless.

Kit remained silent. She had been dividing the last of a jar of cherry jam between two pieces of toast, but paused, knife aloft—they both paused—as the boys a floor down started to whoop at each other, ‘—your dirty
brain
data you dumbfuck
runt
wank'—sneering, insults, of a jokey kind, maybe, ‘
fuckwad
'.

Michaela lost interest. ‘Honestly, it's true.'

‘I believe you,' said Kit, starting to eat her toast, ‘but you must be crazy if you think I'm putting—yuk—haemorrhoid cream anywhere near my
face
, Michaela? I don't mind if my eyes look tired. They look tired because I'm tired. No big deal. I'm wearing a perfectly good skirt already, and I never said I was going anyway. I specifically said I'm not going, assuming you're on about the dance club here? I'm
not going
. Please can I have my breakfast without you getting at me.'

Michaela bent down to glance under the table. ‘You're not wearing the one you're wearing now?'

‘Listen, I'm not
going
anywhere. And what's wrong with it, anyway? And by the way, this is what I wore last time, as it happens, so you know.'

Michaela turned away to refill the kettle. ‘What's wrong with it, seriously, is that it's too long and it's too, just, black.'

‘Yes, and?' said Kit. ‘What difference is it to you?'

Michaela flipped the kettle's on-switch, then left the room, calling, ‘Wait right there.'

Kit liked her skirt. The cloth was fine Italian wool. She had recently bought it in a charity shop. Only after getting home had she noticed the moth holes near the hem, which perhaps explained the fate of a garment that must have cost its original owner one or two hundred pounds. Well, the holes meant nothing to Kit. She was above moth holes. Who judged a girl by moth holes, in this day and age? What was lovely about the skirt was the lazy, opulent ripple to the way it moved.

Michaela returned holding out, not a skirt, but a dress.

‘What?' said Kit.

‘Try it on.'

‘Okay, I'll try it later.'

‘Try it on now. I want to see what—oh, Kit, you caught the message downstairs about the washing machine?'

‘Yes.'

‘Surprise surprise.'

‘I know, “as soon as possible”.
Right
.'

‘I know,
ha ha
. The nearest laundrette is, where? Jericho, Summertown? I wasn't sure.'

Kit, on reflection, taking in how bizarre Michaela's dress was, found that she, too, quite fancied seeing how she looked in it. It was sleeveless, tightly cinched at the waist, had a full skirt to the knee, and was made from pale blue, possibly waxed cotton. To this extent it was almost prim; but not only was the fabric decorated all over with photographically detailed, life-sized renderings of fruit—peaches, pineapples, pawpaws, figs—these fruits looked as though they had been
attacked by a maniac with a machete, giving a wonderful effect of colour, while imparting no less powerfully the impression of carnage.

‘What is this, some kind of po-mo joke kind of thing?' Kit began to shuffle out of her clothes.

‘Hey, at least your knickers are cute,' said Michaela. ‘I like the little lacy bit over your hm-hm.' As the kettle began to boil, she busied herself putting together a bowl of cereal with added bran, and a cup of green tea.

Kit shoved her skirt, jumper and tee shirt onto her chair, from where they immediately slid in a heap to the floor. Then she zipped up the dress's side zip.

Michaela looked round and sighed. ‘That's so depressing to think you fit that when you're about a foot taller than me. Look at you. You look amazing. I mean, honestly, if I looked that good.'

Despite herself, Kit gave a quick twirl.

‘About tonight,' Michaela shifted her breakfast to the table and sat down at last, and Kit sat down too, dressed for cocktails, picking up her own clothes from the floor and stuffing them onto her lap. ‘I mean, sure,' said Michaela, ‘sure, you feel shy and everything, I assume. But, just for a second, Kit, tell me this. If you went, what's the best thing you could imagine getting out of it?'

‘Like what?' said Kit warily. ‘Meaning, he turns out to be—?'

‘He turns out to be—' Michaela lifted her hands up all a-tremble, and cast a look heavenwards, her face a picture of lunatic reverence.

Kit started to bite through her now-floppy, second slice
of toast and cherry jam. ‘I suppose the best, best-case outcome would be—if I clicked with him, you mean?—not being by myself quite so much. Just not
quite
so much of the time, you know?'

‘And why?' asked Michaela. ‘I mean, cool. But,
really
why, as far as you're concerned, besides sex and it's all right you don't have to tell me.'

Kit baulked at this question, unsure what Michaela was after, then slowed to consider it properly. She finished her toast. ‘I guess it would be quite nice when I'm angry to have someone there.'

Michaela frowned. ‘Angry about what? What do you get angry about?'

‘What's it to you? I get angry about the fact that I'm by myself.'

‘But what are you saying? If you had someone there?'

‘Fine. Well, if I had someone there, that I cared about, I suppose I'd have other reasons to be angry.'

‘Like what? You aren't making sense.'

‘Listen,' Kit growled, ‘my
life
makes me angry.'

Shit this! she thought, and tried to discipline herself by summoning up the moment—what, an hour back?—in bed, the calling of the geese, the first migrants of autumn, their anxious crying in the air.

Michaela barked out a laugh. ‘By the way, Kit, if you're going to wear that dress you need to pay heed to your armpits.'

Armpits? Kit was growing cold. She stared across the table. ‘Have you noticed,' she said, ‘depilation, how basically in this day and age a girl is faced with presenting herself as either an infant or an animal? I mean, is there
anything in between, as it's interpreted in the here and now? Because, in the abstract I'd certainly opt to be an animal, but in practice I find myself keeping on trying to be like a child.'

‘I get; but sincerely, don't let it worry you,' said Michaela. ‘Honestly, there's better things to worry about. If you're going to start worrying on that level, I'm not sure I can help.'

‘Well, fuck off then,' said Kit with a lighter heart, ‘because I don't want any help.'

‘Okay, I'll fuck off,' said Michaela. And she did.

Kit, super-efficient, emailed Orson his new reading list—it had hitherto been the last thing she did on a Friday, not the first—then wrote all morning, still dressed in the fruit-besplattered frock, but with her jumper on over the top. At noon, though, she took the whole lot off and put on warmer clothes, a pair of black trousers, a tee shirt and a thicker jumper, and went to the cinema, the Phoenix, to see
Nil By
Mouth
in a lunchtime series, ‘Best of British' retrospective. When the film was over, she strode back to her little room greatly enlivened by the experience—to no end whatsoever—slept for a while, awoke confused, saw fine rain out of the window and remembered that she had a journal on reserve at the Bodleian—needed to go and read a particular article. Besides, she wanted to get back out in the open again even if it was raining. If the piece she planned to consult left her bored witless, she thought, if it left her really bored—really terribly bored—it would remain a technical possibility that she could run back down the Bodleian
staircase, jump on a bus on the High Street, and make it in time for the dance club, Friday, though she was hardly dressed for it now, in trousers and so on.

Well anyway, she thought, at least she had done Orson's reading list for the week, a condensed history of British policing in the nineteenth century ‘= get the background straight'; articles by Dickens's contemporaries deriding his interest in detectives; Dickens's own 1850s articles for his journal,
Household Words
, in which he interviewed and wrote about London's new detectives ‘= pay special attention to Detective Charles Field (portrayed as Inspector Bucket in
Bleak House
)', plus, ‘Questions to Bear in Mind = how sophisticated as literary narratives are the genuine case accounts?' etc., etc.—plenty for dear Orson to get his teeth into.

As for herself, she was now going to go and read this article, whose title she had stumbled on while preparing the list for Orson, an article too detailed for his studies, and probably of no direct value to hers, but who could say? It purported to give the facts behind various of the real detective cases that Dickens had dished up, in distorted form, in
Household Words
: seemed worth a punt. No doubt his detective informants had exaggerated their own cleverness to him. Yes well, okay. So her fate, Kit reflected, come time for the dance class, would depend upon how telling these discrepancies were.

She packed her work bag, took a bagel out of the fridge, filled it with butter, peanut butter, cheese and a suspect lettuce leaf, then made her way, eating, down the stairs, to the front door, out and down the front steps and over the
gravel drive, where, abruptly—confused—she was forced to re-regulate her understanding, because there was no rain. Nor was the gravel wet. Nor was there even much smell of recent wet.

She came to a halt, thought back. On waking from her nap, her vision had been swimey and blurred. Out of her little window she had glimpsed a thin falling in the air. Now she grasped that it must have been her own insufficient and troubled sleep, filtered through bleary eyes, that had conjured the illusion of rain. There
was
no rain. She was discomposed by this fact, set against her recent belief, knowledge, to the contrary.

So much for knowledge, she thought. Kit started walking again. She had also known, believed, for a whole week, that she wouldn't be returning to Intermediate. Yet, as the hour of the second dance class approached, she found herself thinking that it would be pitiful not to go.

Volume 83,
The Dickensian
, Kit took it over to seat 103, happily vacant, and sat down to read, not expecting much. And to her disappointment—after all, she had been expecting
something
—she found the essay cursory and barely helpful. The crime case it examined most thoroughly concerned the unsolved 1838 murder of a prostitute, Eliza Grimwood, in a slum beside the Thames at Waterloo. A decade or so later, Dickens had been keen to get the inside story on a killing that was still notorious. Charles Field, who couldn't pretend his work as principal police investigator had been anything other than a failure, had described for Dickens being challenged by complex false leads—
complex but also imaginary, so the article stated. Kit was already fighting impatience as she reached the concluding sentences, in which the author made two points. First, that Dickens had had a particular interest in the victim, Eliza Grimwood, alluding to her more than once in his later writings. Second, that the details of her murder had been too sordid for him to be able to reproduce them in a family journal like
Household Words
.

Too sordid, how—exactly? Kit felt annoyed. Wasn't it the differences between the
Household Words
accounts and the true facts of the various cases that this article had promised to reveal? As she slumped back in her chair, in close proximity to thousands, millions of printed words, Kit thought about summoning up, out of all those many millions, some small number of hundreds that might make the question clearer.

But was there really much excuse to take the thing further? Surely not. How exhaustive did a person's thesis research need to be? And, more particularly, what did Kit need with the details of another case of brutal slaughter? Wasn't Jessie Keith's death horror enough for one hoppish mind? It was. Whatever had made Eliza Grimwood's murder sordid, it was no business of Kit's. She had masses of real work to do.

In typical fashion, she snapped the journal shut, with what turned out to be an unfortunately loud bang, and, sensing that the day was on the wane, was up on her feet at once, packing her bag. She glanced at the clock, twenty-five minutes to go, took her reading material back to the issue desk, and recognised—that she was playing a shady game
with herself; that although her mind might be hesitating, her feet weren't.