Tideline (17 page)

I sit down on the bed next to him, stroke his damp hair away from his forehead to show that there is no ill feeling after his outburst even though it was hurtful. He flinches from my touch.

‘If you’re not going to talk to me, if you won’t even tell me what’s wrong, I don’t see how you can expect me to help,’ I say. I feel gripped, not by fury
this time but by hopelessness, frustration, at the thought that I must keep Jez like this. It’s not how I want it to be. I want him back in the music room, to go back to the beginning. Show
him I only want to do him good. I never wanted to make this into something unpleasant. Neither do I want him to think bad things about me, to think that I should wish him any harm. That’s not
how it is. It isn’t how I am. Some force is taking what we’ve got and turning it sour. It’s what I predicted in the kitchen when I remembered that East Anglian summer. It’s
like the way they turned what Seb and I had into something shameful.

‘Everything’s going to be OK, you know,’ I say. ‘Everything’s going to be lovely. We just need to get through this bit.’

‘You were taking me home.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I was. But, you know that isn’t possible, the way things are. You said yourself it would be difficult to explain things to everyone. I thought about what
you said, and you were right. It would have been impossible.’

‘Helen and Alicia have no idea where I am, do they? The surprise party was a lie.’

‘I never told a lie, Jez. The party, if you remember, was an idea you came up with by yourself.’

He starts to writhe, tugging at the duct-tape bonds.

‘Why am I tied up? And locked in? Where am I?’

‘SShh. It’s OK. You’re still very close to my house. I wouldn’t have taken you far from me. I’d never abandon you. You know that.’

I pause, waiting for him to calm down.

‘My only regret,’ I go on, ‘is that circumstances are less than luxurious for you for the next couple of days. I’m being forced to keep you in undesirable conditions. But
it’s not for long.’ I look to see if my words are reaching him at all.

He stops struggling and stares at me with a doubtful expression, wanting to believe, not quite allowing himself to.

‘I promise, Jez.’

The cold in the garage makes your bones ache. It’s worse than I’d anticipated. Even under his duvet and with the blankets and hot-water bottle, Jez is shivering, and though I am
wearing my long, black wool winter coat and a scarf and boots over my night clothes, I too am unable to keep my teeth from chattering together. My lips are so numb it’s hard to get words out.
I must bring another duvet down as soon as I can. I don’t want him to fall ill.

‘Think of this as a little adventure, like camping in the woods. I’ll bring you anything, you know that. You only have to ask. Look, I’ve put the acoustic guitar there for you.
And there’s a torch if you need light to see by.’

‘How am I supposed to play when you keep my wrists strapped up with this . . . What is it? Gaffer tape?’

‘I didn’t want to restrain you, believe me. I was worried if you woke up and panicked you might hurt yourself trying to do something silly.’

Neither of us mention what I’ve used to stop him soiling himself. I know how humiliating this would be for him.

‘I’ll cut the bonds off soon if you’re good. I’d like to keep them off so you can play guitar, smoke and wash. I wish there was running water in here. I’ve brought
you a flannel so you can wipe your face. And there’s water in the plastic container. Jez, I’m making it all as pleasant as I can in the circumstances.’

I say I’ll unleash one of his hands now so he can take a drink. I snip the tape off with the kitchen scissors I’ve brought in my pocket. I put the glass of water to his lips.
That’s when he starts to get difficult again.

He swipes the glass from me and it smashes against the bedpost. I can see by the state he’s got himself into that he’s going for me even from this sitting position. He’s
managed to keep a shard of glass in his fist somehow, and as I back away he lurches off the bed towards me. I swivel away from his hand but he catches me on the wrist with the glass shard and drags
it, producing a long line of pinpricks in my skin. Luckily for me, he’s still weak from last night’s drugs, and with his feet and one hand still strapped to the bedposts he can’t
move far. I take advantage of this to push him back down. I kneel on him. He cries and tries to lash out again with his one free hand, but I guess it’s lost feeling in the cold and he
hasn’t much strength. I grasp his hand and twist it. He yelps as I rip strips of the duct tape from the roll in my bag and fasten his wrist tightly to the bed frame again.

I stand and look down at him. Seb often frightened me, he often threatened to abandon me. And he could be rough. But he would never have gone for me the way Jez just did. I swallow.

‘Jez, believe me, I don’t want to have you tied up like this. I’d much rather watch you move, listen to you play. But what you did just then was hurtful.’

I wait a bit and when I see he’s not going to reply I speak to the silence.

‘Everything I do is for your own good,’ I say. I take the scarf from the crack under the window and reluctantly I tie it tightly around his mouth.

‘For your own good.’

It’s pitch black outside, and such a raw cold my eyes sting. It takes me several minutes to adjust to the darkness. There’s not a star in the sky. The tide’s
up high and the water sloshes against the wall only a couple of feet from the top. There’s an insistent
clank clank clank
as if someone’s trying to get my attention from up there on the
steel structure of the coaling pier. Too regular a rhythm for the wind surely, though I know I’m frightening myself. I strain to see. There’s nothing but the thicker black shape of the
pier against the black of the night. The
clank
changes rhythm for a moment, as if whoever or whatever is up there has moved. I do know what the sound is, it’s there all the time, a large
sheet of corrugated iron that has come loose and flaps in the wind, a sound that turns into a
bang
on a particularly stormy night. I walk forward, tentatively. There’s the regular slurp of
the water against the wall. Then I’m certain. I can hear breathing.

I daren’t move. Something’s down there below the wall, on the water. I’m drawn to it, to peer over, to check who’s there. A gaggle of swans rises up and down on the
water’s surface, huddled together against the cold, an eerie silver in the darkness. I feel the swift warm shudder of relief. I think of something I heard once, about how Hindus revere swans
for the way their feathers don’t get wet in the water. The way a saint is in the world without being attached to it. One of the swans lifts its wings and stretches, revealing the muscular
white underside, and I remember a production of
Swan Lake
, the sinuous bodies of the ballet dancers as they moved. The image gets confused with the one I still have of Jez, his arms stretched over
his head as I left the garage. The regret that he’s losing his beauty, as he lies wasting away, assails me again. I move on down the alley towards the entrance in the wall to the River House.
The panoply of images, the swans, the ballet dancers, Seb, Jez, all become confused in my mind.

There’s a bright amber square of light in one of the windows down the alley, but otherwise everyone’s asleep. Not a sign of life. I slip in through the door in the wall, push open
the front door, stop to listen before entering the hall. Is that a door closing gently upstairs? I’m on edge. Imagining things. Every sense aches with the strain. My mouth’s dry. My
fingers tingle.

I stand still for a few more moments barely daring to breathe. Slide through the hall door, leaving my coat and boots in the lobby. Slip into the downstairs loo. Flick the lock across. Wait. Try
to breathe silently, but my breath comes in great loud gasps. I run the cold tap and bathe my bleeding wrist in the icy water. The blood refuses to be stemmed, it continues to ooze out of the
pinprick cuts that turn the water pink as it swirls down the sink. I listen. Someone’s moving about upstairs! I can hear the creak of floorboards, footsteps on the landing. Another door
closes. When all’s quiet I pull the light cord, slide the lock back. Open the door. A slender figure steps towards me in the darkness.

‘Sonia.’

It’s Harry.

‘I needed the loo. Couldn’t remember where the bathroom was up there.’

‘Be my guest,’ I say, wondering what possesses me to employ a phrase I never use. How absurd it sounds, too, in the dark, in the entrance to the downstairs bathroom. Maybe I imagine
it, but I feel as if he stares at my back as I climb the stairs, to return to my bedroom and slide back in-between the sheets next to Greg.

Sonia

The next day, Friday, Greg announces he’s got us all tickets for a dress rehearsal of
Tosca
at the Royal Opera House and that he’s treating us to a trip
upriver on the Clipper, and then champagne and a post-rehearsal supper. Kit’s beside herself with girlish excitement. She and Greg go into a huddle over their breakfast coffee to discuss the
Soprano while Harry has a shower. All this happens in a blur, beyond me. As if I’m watching them from a parallel universe. I can’t leave Jez on his own. Not after the fight last night.
I need to make sure he’s OK and that we’re friends again. The way I left him was so awful, so cruel. I need to make sure he understands that all I feel for him is tenderness.

‘Judy’s coming,’ I complain to Greg. ‘I don’t like to leave her in the house on her own. She never does a proper job if I’m not here.’

This is nonsense. Never in my life have I bothered to tell Judy what to do. She’s been the cleaner of the River House for at least fifteen years and I’ve always let her get on with
it as my mother did before me.

‘Oh, darling. How often do we get the chance to take time out, have a little treat, and with Kit home. And Harry.’

I squeeze my eyes tight shut, seeing Jez in the icy air of the garage. Tied up. Gagged. Lonely. In need of clean clothes. Resenting me.

‘Leave a note for Judy, and try to relax for once.’ Greg comes up behind me, puts his arms around my waist, something I hate, and nestles his nose in my neck.

‘We need to go
tout de suite
,’ he says. ‘Grab your coats and scarves, gang, it’s going to be brass monkeys out on the river today.’

‘I’ll follow you to the pier,’ I say. ‘You all go on ahead while I write Judy a note.’

‘I’ll wait for you,’ says Harry. ‘Go on, Kit. Have a bit of time alone with your father.’

Harry hangs about while I make a great show of writing Judy a note, reminding her we are out of wax for the parquet but that the mirrors could do with a clean, that there’s some lime and
vinegar spray in the cupboard under the sink. It’s such a pantomime. What on earth is Judy going to think? She’ll wonder what’s come over me, after all these years. If Harry
wasn’t staring over my shoulder as I wrote, I’d screw the note up and toss it into the waste-paper basket, but I have to keep up the charade now, for his sake. He seems unable to stand
a decent distance from me. You get people like this. Unaware of physical boundaries, they glean which way you are about to turn and stand right there, in the square foot of floor space you were
intending to occupy. As I go to the sink for a glass of water – for some reason my mouth is still dry – he steps there too and stands with his back to it, arms folded over his Fair Isle
jumper. I notice that the dark stubble makes a shadow across his jawline, that the skin beneath it is slightly reddened and he already has the beginnings of jowels. I realize again how transient
Jez’s youth is, feel it slipping away even as I watch Harry’s mouth, with its thin dry lips, open and close. He’s talking about something I’m not in the least bit interested
in.

‘The rowing club, over there.’ He gesticulates through the kitchen window to the other side of the river. ‘Are you and Greg members? I wouldn’t mind having a go if
you’re still here in the summer. Though I guess that’s unlikely.’

I stare at him.

‘We’ve always kept a dinghy, in a boathouse along the alley. We never had cause to join a club,’ I tell him coldly.

‘Oh, I know where you’re coming from.’

‘You do?’

‘Oh yes. Societies – mostly a waste of time. Better to go your own way. Though Kit and I enjoy the tennis club at uni.’

I want to add that though there is no question I’ll still ‘be here in the summer’, it doesn’t guarantee him an invitation. But he’s started to speak again. I can
barely make sense of the following words that bubble out of his mouth. Something to do with attachment to houses and the need to move on. I don’t want to discuss this with him. I tell him I
need to find the rubber gloves for Judy, and rummage under the sink hoping he’ll take the hint and go. He stands, his feet planted heavily and wide apart on the kitchen floor, as if he owns
the place. How is it that I’m here with this man, when the person I want to be with has to lie, cold and incarcerated, in the garage?

By 10 a.m. we’re on the pier. Sheila, who sells tickets, is wrapped up in a thick woollen scarf, her face redder than ever in the raw gusting winds. Neither Greg, nor
Kit, are ones for chats with the locals, but I like to exchange words with Sheila, so I tell Harry I’ll do the honours with the tickets and at last he leaves my side and goes off to join Greg
and Kit in the glass waiting room at the end of the pontoon.

‘Next one’ll be along in ten minutes,’ Sheila says, ripping off the stubs. An orange lifeboat bounds past, heading downriver, and the pier groans and creaks and bounces in its
wake.

‘They still ain’t found that kid,’ she says. ‘They’ve been up and down dredging the river for days now.’

‘What kid?’

‘Ain’t you seen the papers?

Sheila’s been working on the pier for as long as I can remember. She lives at home in Woolwich with her old dad and so many cats she’s lost count. She reads the local paper with avid
interest, never missing a trick.