We had met Joe at the pub. My mother and her mini-me, perching on the climbing frame that was for the under tens, bickering for shandy, slipping inside to down the last two inches of any pint that had a back turned on it. Out on the climbing frame in the dark with someone’s fags and a lighter. A figure at the back door, a man watching and then later his arm around my mother. I lounged in the back of the car as he drove us home. Smirking when he told me to put the seat belt on. Looking up to see his eyes in the rearview mirror. At the house, my mother had turned and invited him in.
“That all right with you, young lady?”
And I had said that it was.
The world only really has one story for that girl. That’s one of the reasons why you don’t tell, don’t report. Because among other concerns, it means being that girl. I won’t be her for you. I can’t even be her for myself. Beyond the walls I have erected, I sometimes hear her weeping. Sometimes I do not think it is her, I think it is my mother. I hear the weeping woman behind the wall. Sometimes it is the music I live by.
“Are you all right? Can I help at all?” I looked up. The vicar, of course. A kindly face, but vicars, I wanted to tell him, shouldn’t have beards. Vicars should have nude pink faces. Once, on a Saturday afternoon walk, we had come across rutting donkeys in a field, Peter’s mother had said, “Well really, Richard,” in a disappointed way, and on the way back to the car I had noticed that the vicar, while pretending to stare into a field, was silently weeping with laughter. A vicar should, after taking you to a football match—and God only knew why because none of you liked football—and after listening to the crowd jeering insults and making monkey noises at a visiting black player, say in a tight voice in the silence on the way home, “Those were the men who crucified Christ.” A vicar should be quite shy and get himself into such a state before giving a sermon, your son and his friend were forbidden on pain of death from occupying the bathroom on a Sunday morning
“I am all right,” I told him. I sailed to my feet. The vicar was sorry. He hadn’t meant to disturb me. I was welcome to stay. “It was a very long time ago,” I told him, making for the doors.
I wanted to protect him, Richard White, that is. Protect him from ugliness, keep him innocent. I should have trusted him, but the thing is, of course, that to trust you have to be taught to trust. If I’d been capable of it, I wouldn’t have needed to tell him anything.
Outside, it was raining again. As I left the church behind, I felt myself calming down. Once, I met Peter in a museum. After I’d come to London, but before I’d turned things around. By then, he was working in Geneva and on his way to becoming the Peter of recent years, the outward confidence, the nice clothes, stories that would begin, “After the club, Pierre took us all out on his boat on the lake…”
We’d meet when he was over. Sometimes I put on a front that everything was fine. Sometimes I didn’t have the energy. Sometimes Peter gave me money and it felt like being paid off, the envelope of fifties thrust from his hand into mine and tucked away out of sight with undue haste. Like neither of us could bear being asked what it stood for.
The exhibition was entitled The Secret Cabinet. As we paused on the threshold a glance passed between us, something of the old spirit. We went in. Disappointingly, it was about sex, stuffed with lewd bits of pottery, classical erotica, and ancient sex toys that had once belonged in the private collections of Renaissance princes. But I had liked the idea, the idea of a secret place inside a palace where precious things were kept. That you could be the curator, that you could choose what you kept there, in the secret cabinet.
I was high, I think, that day. It made me garrulous. I tried to tell Peter what I was thinking. He cocked his head. “So what’s inside?”
“Moments, words even. Do you remember the foal with the furry ears?” We had gone to one of the racing yards on race day to buy hash from a stable lad who was dealing. The foal had been a couple of months old. It had raced at me across the dark barn, stood shivering under my hands, its muzzle pressed into my armpit. Like it knew me, like it knew there was something special in me. I thought of David too. David in the little room under the eaves at the manor. Listening to wood pigeons with David on the mattress, the light pink as roses.
“There are some moments, Peter, don’t you think? That are never quite over.”
Peter was quiet. In his eyes was the memory of something awful. He had not understood.
I thought I knew what it was. I thought he was thinking about that morning at the manor, out on the drive in the snow. The body. The cold hands. As he tore his gaze from mine and stumbled away, it seemed like an admission of an accusation I hadn’t been able to whisper, not even to myself.
* * *
I had every intention of going to the office and being productive for a few hours. Afterward, at home, I would treat myself to dinner in bed in my tights where I would lose myself in news websites, celebrity gossip, in the scroll, the Wiki trails, the image parade, the sly, beckoning click bait. But I didn’t go to work and I didn’t go home, not straightaway. Perhaps because it was a Friday, and the prospect of the whole weekend ahead unnerved me to a greater extent than I was willing to admit. I got close, as far as the bar two streets away, where I sat in a corner and ordered the first glass of wine, discussing my choice with the bartender as though I actually cared what it was. He promised me notes of passion fruit and kiwi, something slightly oily with an almost maritime finish. It could have been turpentine. I wanted a tunnel deeper and blacker than the screen could provide, no matter the consequences. I wanted escape, and my body, although part of what I wanted to escape, was also the means.
At five the bar began to fill. At the next table, a girl said something and her friends cried out that it was her, so her, to say what she had said. But even personality seemed to me a game, and she was being congratulated for getting it right, the performance of herself. I sat there drinking with the telephone box still in its plastic bag on the seat beside me. Sometime around the third glass of wine it came: the roar in the blood. A soaring feeling of excitement, the promise of change, the sense I was leaving behind what I knew. Strength. Power. Recklessness. A lurking knowledge, that alcohol didn’t make everyone feel this way.
I got my phone out and went from app to app. By the time I realized I should eat, the kitchen was closed, so I ordered more wine and four or five packets of bar snacks, fancy ones with rosemary and glazing and sea salt, and a joker at the next table thought he’d ask me if I was enjoying those. Possibly he meant it in a friendly way, but I paused in the shoveling to stare into his eyes, so the smile slid right off his face. Then, at some point, I went on LinkedIn and sent a reckless message, before taking up a stool at the bar.
The lights were already flickering on and off in my head, my hand jerking every few minutes to my bag to make sure it was there. At some point, I had the sense to hand my card over and pay up. On the way home, weaving down the pavement, I called Peter and left a message, a long message my phone told me the next day, nearly an hour long, only by then I couldn’t remember what I’d said.
CHAPTER 13
THE BODIES IN THE LIBRARY
Twinkling lights were up in the market square. Christmas was a week or so off, the new millennium within touching distance.