Until It's Over (7 page)

‘Your women don’t have faces,’ I said.

Owen didn’t reply, just turned over the next picture for me.

A stubby thorn bush in winter, looking as unyielding as metal. That was all right.

Another naked woman – the same as the first? – this time just standing very straight and letting herself be scrutinized by the camera lens.

The same woman, her hands tied with rope, a calm smile on her face.

‘Who is she?’ I asked.

‘Her’s name’s Andrea. We studied photography together.’

I felt a jab of something. Was it jealousy? ‘Does she have a problem doing these?’

‘Why?’ said Owen. ‘Would you?’

‘I don’t know what to make of them,’ I said. ‘I mean, they’re powerful, but I don’t know.’

‘They’re just exercises,’ said Owen, pulling out another print.

A foot, twice the size of real life. You could see every detail – the chipped nail, the hairs on the toes, the tiny specks of dirt.

Like a slap in the face, a sudden flamboyance of colour and life: an ordinary street scene, but Owen had made it look like an exotic carnival, as if Hackney was Brazil. I smiled.

Black-and-white again. A woman sitting by a window, her back to the camera, her head completely bald, her spine running in a knotted track up her smooth back.

The same woman close-up and facing the lens, with her eyes unnaturally wide. In them I could clearly see the reflection of the photographer. I put out a finger and touched it.

‘You,’ I said.

‘Self-portrait.’

Another tree, charred but with shoots growing from its blackened stump.

‘Trees, water and naked women,’ I said. ‘Lots of your photographs don’t look like photographs.’

‘What do they look like?’

‘Paintings. Sculptures. I don’t know.’

‘Do you want to see any more?’

‘Bring it on.’

He put several more prints on the table. I worked my way through them, and it felt like work, under his unblinking gaze. I laid the final one aside and swivelled round in the chair.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘They’re troubling.’

‘They’re meant to be troubling. At least you didn’t just say they were nice.’

I pulled my shirt over my head. ‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘They’re not nice.’

I unclipped my bra and dropped it on the floor. Owen was looking at me with an intensity I’d never seen before, even from him. I kicked off my shoes and peeled off my wet jeans and knickers.

‘You want me to photograph you?’ he said.

I shook my head.

Afterwards he lay beside me on the bed, stroking my stomach.

‘So is it still a no?’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Don’t be such a prude.’

I shook myself free of his touch, got out of his bed and started to pull my clothes on. I had the impulse to shout at him but I resisted it and when I spoke it was in a calm tone. ‘We live in the same house, but until yesterday we’d scarcely exchanged a word. Then in the last twenty-four hours we’ve – what? We’ve fucked. Three times, though the first time it was like a fight and the second time you had your eyes shut all the way through, and then there was this. I have no idea what you think of me. Maybe you dislike me. Maybe you have contempt for me. Maybe you don’t think about me at all. I would feel really uncomfortable letting you stare at me through the lens of your camera in the way you’ve stared at these other women.’

Owen just looked at me. I thought I could detect the hint of a smile.

A door opened and shut downstairs and Davy called, ‘Hello!’ I shivered.

‘Is that it, then?’ I asked.

‘Is what it?’

‘With us – it’s finished, is it?’

‘It? I didn’t know
it
had ever actually begun,’ he said, in an indifferent voice.

‘No?’ I put my hands on either side of his beautiful, hurt face and kissed his angry mouth hard. ‘Then how can it be over?’

That night, I stood by the window and wondered what Owen was doing in his room, just a few feet away from me. But Pippa interrupted my reverie. As always, she didn’t knock or call, just pushed my door open and sat on the side of my bed. Her cheeks glowed. ‘Hey! Guess what?’

‘What?’

‘Mick used to be in the army.’

‘Did he? That makes a kind of sense, doesn’t it? It explains how he can cook meals for large numbers of people, anyway. Why’s he so secretive about it?’

‘He was in the first Gulf War and he left after. He doesn’t like talking about it.’

‘Clearly.’

‘After he left, he just travelled for years. I don’t think he has a clue what to do with the rest of his life.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Oh.’ Pippa gave a little giggle and threw me a coy look.

‘No! You didn’t?’ I said, dismayed at the thought of all that was going on in the house.

‘I did.’

‘You had sex with him? Just now?’

‘I thought he looked sad and I was curious about him. I thought it might cheer him up.’

‘You make it sound like half a pint down the pub.’

‘It wasn’t the most intense experience of my entire life. Nice, though.’

‘Did you just knock on his door and ask him if he wanted to have sex?’

‘Not quite. I went to his room. God, Astrid, it’s completely bare. There’s nothing in there at all. It’s like he’s still in the army. Just a bed and a chest and that cupboard we hauled up from the junk room, nothing else. No personal touches. Anyway, I poked my head round and asked him if he wanted a cup of tea or a beer or something. And when he said no, I just kind of went in. And one thing led to another.’

‘God,’ I said. ‘Mick.’

‘Mick.’ Pippa grinned.

‘Will you do it again?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. It wasn’t like that. It was just fun.’

‘Won’t it be awkward between you?’

‘Why should it?’

I found it difficult to answer. ‘It would be awkward for me, I guess.’

‘I just thought you’d want to know.’

‘Yes,’ I said dubiously.

‘How about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Your love life.’

‘I don’t have a love life at present.’

‘No?’

‘No!’

‘Then you’re going to, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘Come on, Astrid. Owen. I saw the way you were looking this morning. And then not looking. I could have sworn you two had…’

I felt I was being cajoled into sharing confidences. But I wasn’t in the mood for bantering and giggling.

‘There isn’t any “you two”, and I wasn’t looking like anything. I was helping Mick make bacon butties.’

‘This is me you’re talking to, world champion at deciphering erotic glances in the morning. He’s gorgeous and he’s free. Why don’t you pounce? I would. Hey, can I borrow this shirt tomorrow?’

‘All right.’

‘Mick’s got a huge scar on his back. That was rather thrilling.’

Chapter Eight

Some days you draw the short straw. I got up just before seven, ignored Owen, dodged Miles, stepped round Davy, who was dismantling a crooked lintel and muttering something about ‘resident cowboys’, grabbed a piece of toast on my way out, switched on my radio – and immediately there was a message from Campbell telling me to pick up a package in Canonbury and take it to Camden Town. Twenty minutes later, as I was slogging along Hampstead Road on an empty stomach with car fumes in my face, the radio crackled again and he told me I might as well go straight from Camden Town up to Highgate to collect a package. Highgate is up a steep hill. It was a house I’d been to before and it was as high as it was possible to get in London.

Once, on the way up, I had passed a sign helpfully informing me that I was as high as the tip of St Paul’s Cathedral. The woman who lived there was wealthy and chic and I thought she was one of those people who doesn’t see poverty or disease or tramps in doorways. She lived in a different world, one of entitlement, and she treated us messengers like servants, which is, I suppose, what we were. She never recognized me. I was just part of the crowd of people who smoothed her way. One of the stories I told the gang at the Horse and Jockey was how I had been summoned once to collect a Japanese takeaway at the bottom of the hill and take it up to the top. As I handed it over, puffing and sweating while she was immaculate in her linen and her jewellery, I had thought that this was the sort of thing that provoked revolutions.

‘Why me?’ I asked, into the radio.

‘Because you’re there.’

So I dropped off the package in Camden Town, grabbed a sweet crêpe and a coffee from the stand in the high street, and set off in the faint drizzle. There were seriously rich people in Hampstead and Highgate, tasteful shops, expensive restaurants, exclusive schools where girls in pork-pie hats and boys in blazers got dropped off by mothers in four-wheel drives, tall and gracious houses with walled gardens and alarms blinking over their front doors, golf courses. The house was set back from the road. A tulip tree was flowering in the front garden and a pruned wisteria over the decorative porch, two huge empty earthenware pots standing at either side of it. I had never gone inside and only ever glimpsed the hall, which was twice the size of my bedroom and smelled of polish, paint, leather and money.

I swung myself off my bike, leaned it carefully against one of the porch’s pillars, and rang the doorbell. I waited for thirty seconds or so, heard nothing, then rang again, for longer this time, and stepped back. Nobody came. A satisfying little bubble of anger formed in my chest. They make some poor sod cycle all the way up the hill at whim, then can’t be bothered to be there.

I pulled out my mobile, noting the time, nine forty-one, and called Campbell to check there wasn’t some kind of mistake, but the line was busy. I rapped the door knocker hard.

Again, nothing. I knelt down in front of the letterbox and prised it open. It was one of those that are angled in such a way that you can only make out a small strip of the interior. I peered through and saw the first few carpeted steps of the stairs. I twisted my head so my nose was pushed against the aperture and made out the glossy wooden floorboards of the hall. And something else besides. I squinted and squashed my face closer into the door. Something smooth, pale brown. It looked like skin, a segment of an arm. I half stood, bending at a painful angle to get a better look. A segment of forearm becoming a wrist, and then, no matter how I twisted my face, I could see no further.

I called through the letterbox. I could hear my voice bounce round the clean empty spaces of the house. ‘Can you hear me?’

The arm, if that was what it was, remained still. I scrambled to my feet and hammered at the door with both fists, then pressed the bell once more, its discreet chime repeating. I looked again through the letterbox. There was no movement.

There was only one thing to do. For the first time in my life I dialled 999. A voice answered. ‘Which service, please?’

I had to make myself think.

‘Ambulance, I guess. I think someone might be hurt or ill. Someone’s lying on the other side of the door. I can see the arm.’

I gave the address and said I would wait until they arrived, then walked up and down the small stretch of grass, not knowing what to do with myself. Maybe whoever it was had had a heart-attack or a stroke. Or had fallen down the stairs and knocked herself unconscious. Or maybe it wasn’t an arm at all, I thought, and someone would stroll up the road just as the ambulance arrived with its blue lights flashing and I would look like the idiot of the year.

But if it really was something like a heart-attack, shouldn’t I do something about it right now? Or if she’d cut herself and was bleeding profusely, wasn’t it important to tie a tourniquet round her? Didn’t every second count? I should have asked them on the phone. Who would know? I thought of calling Mick – if he’d been in the army, surely he’d know things like that – but quickly changed my mind. Mick was probably at work, but if he wasn’t he was at the top of the house and never answered the phone. I’d get Dario instead.

I rattled the door. I stood back and searched the upper floor for an open window I could climb through. I pulled my tool-kit out of my pannier: screwdrivers, adaptable spanners, inner tube, Swiss Army pen-knife. Useless. Before I fully understood what I was doing I picked up my entire bike and swung it against the large window to the left of the porch. The glass shattered and there was a violent shriek of a burglar alarm.

With my gloved hand, I knocked the remaining jagged pieces of glass from the frame so that I could climb through. I was standing in an opulently furnished living room. I walked through it and out into the hall. On the gleaming boards a woman lay face down. One arm was flung above her head, and one knee was bent. For a moment, I simply stood and stared down at her, unable to move, with the alarm throbbing in my eardrums. Bobbed blonde hair, expensively highlighted. Tanned skin. A blue silk dressing-gown riding up over her slim, impeccably waxed legs. I crouched beside the figure and, with a feeling of absolute dread, put a hand out to touch her arm. It was still warm. I gasped with relief, then tried to pull the motionless body on to its back. I jerked back in horror, letting go of her as I did so. Her head hit the floor with a thump. It wasn’t just the eyes, open and glassy, staring upwards. Or the lips, swollen and blue. Her smooth face looked as if it had been drawn on with a red pen. But then I saw that the lines weren’t drawn but incised, slashes on her cheek and forehead and even across one eye. The iris was crushed, something white oozing out from it.

I thought I should do something, press the chest, give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then I saw the sightless eyes, eyes with nothing behind them. It was pointless.

I stood up and pressed myself against the front door, my hand over my mouth, the body on the floor filling my vision. The alarm swelled in the air and in my skull. I tried to make myself feel that this couldn’t be happening. It was a dream, an aberration. I’d blink and find myself back in my ordinary life, cycling up a hill in the rain on the way to collect a package. My mind focused on other things. I thought about how neat the house was, hardly a speck of dust in sight. How many hours did some cleaner work each week to make everything look as if it was in a magazine? I imagined myself telling the story later, to the house, and I already knew that I would do so with a kind of horrified excitement. I thought about my irritation with this woman, or people like her, as I had hammered at the door, and the way we messengers had bitched about her, and should I feel guilty about that? I vaguely wondered about getting my hair cut. I remembered that it was Miles’s birthday next week and I needed to buy him a present but I didn’t have a clue what. Something for his house – a sharp little reminder that we were leaving it? And that made me think about having to start flat-hunting soon, rather than leave it to the last minute – though I knew quite well that I probably would leave it to the last minute anyway, whatever my resolutions, and spend weeks sleeping on friends’ floors and living out of suitcases. I wondered if my hearing would be damaged by the blasting throb of the alarm, and then I wondered if it was a way of sending people mad, subjecting them to this kind of noise. I decided it would be better to go and wait outside; after all, there was nothing I could do here and it seemed indecent to be standing staring at the flimsily dressed body of a woman who had seemed so impregnable in life. But I couldn’t seem to make myself move. I thought how amazing it was that your brain can hold so many disparate feelings and ideas at once. And all the time I was staring at the impossible dead body on the floor, just a few feet from where I stood.

I fished out my mobile once more, noticing that my hands were trembling, but I didn’t dial because at that moment I heard, behind the house alarm, the sound of a siren. The ambulance at last. I turned and pulled open the door to see it draw up outside the house. People had already started to gather in the road. I watched as a man and a woman jumped down and ran towards me as I lifted up my hand to beckon them on. Then, as they came into the garden and I saw their eyes move from me to the body that was lying behind me in the hall, I turned and vomited into one of the earthenware pots.