Remember Me This Way Page 6

  A knot of fear. I hear his voice in my ear: ‘Don’t ever leave me. If you leave me, you don’t know what I’ll do.’

  I ring Jane from the service station. I am pacing up and down between the lorries and the Snack & Shop. I tell her I’ve worked it out. Zach got to the bungalow and read my letter. He knew I was leaving. He can’t take rejection, Jane, from anyone. But from me? You should see his studio. It’s been wrecked. And there’s blood. I don’t know whose. But he didn’t kill himself, Jane. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. I know him. I know what you’re going to say, but it wasn’t suicide. I wouldn’t . . . I can’t have driven him to that. It’s something far more complicated. I spoke to him on the phone and you wouldn’t have known. He was in control of his emotions. He’s so clever, Jane. He left a message for me in a painting. This is my punishment. That body . . . what was left of the driver of the car . . . I’m telling you, Jane, it wasn’t him.

  Jane asks me where I am. She says to stay there, to get warm, she’ll come and get me. Her voice is calm and gentle. She thinks I’ve lost it.

  I don’t care. I just repeat it to her, over and over. ‘Zach’s alive. Zach’s alive.’

  Zach

  September 2009

  This evening, I followed a woman. It was a little bit sordid – no denying that – but the thrill I experienced was extraordinary.

  It was possibly dangerous, but I posted a profile on an online website. I was an almost immediate hit – thirty enquiries within twenty-four hours. That black-and-white photo, taken ‘unawares’ with my iPhone, was a winner. Three dates so far. The first, a lawyer, was too old, even without the forehead-freezing Botox. She was wasting her time, as well as mine. I kissed her vein-wrinkled hand as we parted and said, ‘Madam, if our paths cross again, then we will both be the richer,’ or something similarly naff and confusing. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but really, who did she think she was kidding, posting that picture?

  Date number two was divorced, pretty, quite bright (a biology degree from York, had worked for GlaxoSmithKline), but she lied to me, too. She told me she lived alone, but I worked out pretty pronto that she had a child. She kept checking her phone and when I came back from the bar, she was whispering into it. I caught the words ‘Bed. Now.’ This sort of deception – well, it’s nothing to build a new life on. Disappointing.

  These first two, I could tell, couldn’t work out why an attractive, normal guy like me had resorted to Internet dating. Tonight’s hopeful, the best of the bunch, thought she had my number. We met in a bar at the bottom end of the King’s Road in Chelsea, ‘just across the river’ from where she claimed to live. She was wearing a purple wrap-around dress that clung to her curves and fell low over her cleavage. Spiky blonde hair, heavy eyeliner, a gap between her front teeth. Not bad actually. Reminded me a bit of a young Vic Murphy. The other two had simpered a little bit, gazed into their wine as they rolled it around the glass. Cathy? (Not her real name, I suspect.) She crossed her legs provocatively, looked at me straight in the eye and said, her vowels flat South London: ‘You don’t have to pretend. Cards on table. I know what you’re in this for.’

  ‘Relocation?’ I said. I was only half joking.

  She gave me a funny look and shrugged. ‘Sex. You’re married. You’re pretending to be looking for “Love? Life partner? Let’s see what happens?” Or whatever lies you concocted for your profile.’

  ‘They weren’t lies,’ I said, truthfully.

  ‘But I’ve been in this game for a while. I’ve met plenty like you. If a man seems too good to be true, then generally he is.’ She licked her finger and ran it around the rim of her glass. It made a small squeak. ‘That shirt – no way you picked it out for yourself. It’s the kind of shirt a woman chooses for a husband.’

  I pretended to gulp and stutter and deny all charges. I talked about shyness, and a long-term partner who had bought me the shirt shortly before running off with my best friend. ‘A guilt purchase,’ I said. ‘Don’t make any judgements on the grounds of a guilt purchase.’ Oh I am good when I need to be. I am bloody good.

  I can be brown, I can be blue, I can be vi-o-let sky . . . I can be anything you like.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I find you attractive. If you can remember my Encounters entry, I said, “long- or short-term commitment, I’m not fussy”. I won’t lie to you. I’m ideally after someone to share my life with, but I’m not going to turn down the opportunity for some fun if it throws itself in my path.’

  I hate it when people say ‘I won’t lie to you’. It means nothing. It’s just one of those phrases they use to make themselves sound more important. A verbal drum roll. And quite often they do lie, or tell a half-truth, or a truth they haven’t properly thought through but quite like the sound of.

  ‘What are you saying?’ I stammered.

  She studied me quizzically. ‘Hmm. Not sure.’

  I managed to change the subject to give myself time to consider my options. She was offering to have sex with me – tonight if I wasn’t mistaken. I was tempted. But she was a little too sharp for my liking; well off beam, of course, but uneasily upfront, confrontational. And anyway, she was wrong. I was in it not for the short but the long game.

  I asked her what she did for a living. A psychologist, administering cognitive behavioural therapy to patients in emotional distress. I pretended to be impressed. ‘A doctor!’ I said, though I knew she damn well wasn’t – all that time lodging with medical undergraduates at Edinburgh taught me the difference between a simple psychology degree and ten years’ hard medical training, even with a bit of postgrad thrown in. All talk, no drugs. Interesting, though, that she didn’t deny it.

  The evening went fast enough. She was good company, simultaneously indiscreet and flirtatious. I particularly enjoyed her description of how CBT is currently helping a couple who have ceased marital relations. ‘On the second day, they can touch or stroke each other anywhere, chest and arms and upper thighs, though not breasts, or vagina, or penis.’ She drew out the sibilants for my delectation. I watched her mouth as she spoke, the space between her tongue and the gap between her teeth. Sex: it has often been my downfall. Almost went home with her then and there.

  She made a big play of paying for the drinks, flamboyantly slapping a pile of notes on the table before I could object. If I had been wearing a tie, I expect she’d have taken hold of it and yanked me out on to the pavement. I managed to wrestle control once we were standing there, told her I needed to head off as I had an early start the next day.

  ‘Home to wifey?’ she said, a little deflated.

  ‘No.’ I tapped her warningly on the nose. She tried to catch my finger with her mouth. ‘But I am a gentleman and I will walk you wherever it is you’re going.’

  ‘I’ve read the small print,’ she said, doing up the buttons of her coat. ‘No personal details on the first date.’

  ‘What do you think’s going to happen? I’m going to strangle you?’

  She laughed. ‘I’m a big girl.’

  But I insisted. I was intrigued enough to want to know a little more. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ I said. ‘It’s late. There are a lot of nutters out there.’

  She relented and let me walk her to the Tube – a bit of a hike, which put me in a bad mood. Still, I stooped to kiss her at Sloane Square, once slowly on each cheek, letting my lips open, feeling her flesh. I let my hand graze her breast. If she wasn’t interested before, she would be now. She tried to keep it cool, waved, a coquettish trill of her hand as she disappeared down the escalator, called, ‘Ring me. Let’s do this again.’

  It wasn’t hard to keep her in sight. You need to stay two or three people behind, that’s all. She didn’t even look round. She stood on the eastbound platform – Circle line – staring straight at the ad for mouthwash on the other side of the track, fiddling with a piece of hair at the back of her head. She undid her coat to retie the belt on her dress, wriggled her shoulders as if to unstick the skin from under her bra.

>   When the tube came, I got into the carriage behind and watched her through the window. She sat down and took a magazine out of her shoulder bag. The Economist – well, that was a surprise. Useful, however, because although she got out at Victoria, the next stop, she kept reading all the way up the escalator and didn’t put it back in her bag until she was on the main concourse. More intellectual, or more pretentious, than I thought.

  Same deal on the train, though my view through the connecting doors was less direct, heads and bodies in the way. I stayed on my feet, close to the doors, checking at each station. When she finally got out, a long twenty-five minutes later, I found myself in a depressing low-level station, miles out in the suburbs. Had it been the Midwest, tumbleweed would have been bowling along the platform, but we only had crisp packets and Aldi plastic bags. I wish I had written down its name. It’s a sign of its tedious anonymity that I can’t bring it to mind. Of course I could look it up, but at this stage I don’t care. Boxland? Moxton Eastfield? Gone.

  Two boys in their early twenties and cheap suits, breathing beer fumes, alighted with me and I walked just behind them. She left the station, a flimsy construction made of cheap bricks and pretend pillars, and crossed the road towards a row of prefab houses. At the end – the boys still ahead of me, shirt tails dangling under their jackets – she took a left into an identical street. The boys went right, laughing, one of them leaping up to try and hit a street light. She glanced over her shoulder at that, her face lit by an orange glow, and I slunk back into the shadows and waited.

  She kept walking for a bit, and I stayed behind my privet hedge. I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d seen enough, but curiosity, the thrill of the chase I suppose, still flickered in my limbs. She stopped halfway along, rummaged in her bag for her keys, and went into a house. I gave her time to take her coat off, clean her teeth, make a cup of tea, and then I slipped along the road on the other side to see where she lived.

  Deal-breaker, I’m afraid. Even if Boxland or Moxton Eastfield had revealed untold delights – a Michelin-starred restaurant, say – I could never be happy with someone who had chosen a house like that. Ugly aluminium windows blocked by grubby net curtains, an elaborate front porch that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Versailles, an area for off-street parking that seemed to have been paved in shiny square bathroom tiles. Disappointing. But probably just as well. Not worth breaking in to check the interior. Sufficient danger signs – the job, The Economist, the clothes. If the property and its location had been tempting, I might have slipped up. I’m going to tinker with my profile. Probably best to find someone without a degree, narrow the field. I yearn for sweetness, I realise, not sassiness. I don’t need to be patronised. People with university degrees – medical or otherwise – think they know everything. Often they don’t have a clue.

  I didn’t feel guilty following ‘Cathy’. If you agree to meet a stranger, what do you expect? It probably would have given her a thrill if she’d known I was out there.

  I would never have imagined her living in a house like that. But of course the thing with people is, you never can tell.

  Chapter Five

  Lizzie

  ‘I’d take a dead body over vomit any day. I’m not being funny. Last night, I was called to an incident at the Taj Mahal – some clever clogs had bitten off his mate’s ear – and I was taking down statements when this young lad leaned forward and puked over my shoes. I was almost sick myself. You know that thing? That other-people’s-vomit gag reflex? My mum said I had it bad even as a child.’

  PC Hannah Morrow, my Family Liaison Officer, is sitting at my kitchen table. There’s a cup of tea next to her, but she hasn’t had a chance to drink it yet. She hunches her shoulders and tightens her grip on her stomach to illustrate the horror of the experience.

  Jane, stilettoed feet on the bars of my chair, says, ‘I think I’d be better with puke than a corpse.’

  ‘Honestly? I’d rather have neither.’

  They’ve been here for at least an hour, talking away like this. I’m like a ghost. I’m hardly here.

  It was past eight when I got back, already dark. Jane was waiting outside the house, pacing up and down to keep warm. Hannah arrived shortly after. I wanted her here because she might be an unofficial social worker (we have that in common), but as a policewoman she has resources. I figured she would help.

  But now she is talking. This chatter – it’s been her way from the beginning, from that night she knocked on the door. She was only twenty-five then. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her. The inanities about what she had eaten that day, what her mum had said or thought, made me want to scream at first. I thought it was stupidity. Now, a year on, a year in which she has bought her own flat and lost five pounds and bobbed her hair, I understand what she’s doing. It’s a coping strategy. She is letting the mood in the room settle.

  Her boss, DI Perivale, gave a talk on Internet safety at school last month and I told him how brilliant I thought Morrow was, how calm and constant even when other people were falling apart. He said something sniffy about how young officers are often better at ‘doing an agony’ than officers with more experience. ‘Doing an agony’: the phrase stayed with me.

  Tonight she was off duty, but she still came. ‘Are you kidding?’ she said. ‘I was bored out of my skull. Nothing on but Antiques Roadshow. It was either you or a phone call to my nan.’

  ‘Was the ear salvageable?’ Jane has leaned across to rest her hand on my knee. She is wearing a 1950s prom dress and fishnet tights. I expect she’s supposed to be somewhere else. She gives my knee a squeeze to show I’m not forgotten.

  ‘The waiter wrapped it in a packet of Birds Eye peas. It never occurred to me you’d find Birds Eye peas in an Indian. Matar paneer I suppose. Anyway, off to A & E and Bob’s your uncle.’ Hannah unwraps her arms and takes a long gulp of her tea. She slaps the mug back on the table. ‘Surprising amount of blood actually. Not as much as the head injury inflicted by a frozen turkey I was called out to witness on Christmas Eve. But more than you’d imagine. Real blood, I should add. Not red paint.’

  She gives me a conspiratorial smile and my gaze reverts to my lap. I am suddenly overwhelmed by tiredness, and it’s as if the compressed afternoon has suddenly expanded beyond reason, so that it could be days, rather than mere hours, since I told Jane, to her audible alarm, that I was coming straight back, placating her by promising to pull over and call her every thirty minutes; days, rather than just an hour, since I first sat shaking in this kitchen while Hannah, who had the police in Cornwall check over the studio, attempted to calm me with their verdict. Paint, not blood, on the walls. Possibly a break-in, although in the absence of anything that could be reported as stolen . . .

  I look down wearily. I’m still wearing my mother’s skirt. It’s filthy, covered in grass stains and muddy paw marks. I try to think when I got them. Was it from laying the flowers at the tree, or from charging down the hill earlier today? I unpick a shred of bramble tangled in the jersey at my shoulder. Under it is Zach’s shirt. The one with the stain. I should try again to get it out. I’m wearing wellies, too. Did I drive back in them? How did I change gears? Or brake? It’s the sort of thing Hannah might pick me up on. I don’t want her to get cross. Not now.

  Jane says, ‘I wish you had let me come and get you.’

  I shake my head.

  She leans over and, with a small, contrite smile, rubs the side of my face with two of her fingers. It must be red lipstick from her earlier kiss. I take a deep breath and look around the kitchen. My breakfast things from yesterday are still in the sink. Crumbs litter the worktop. I haven’t been looking after any of this – this room, this house – since Zach died. The woodwork is grubby and peeling. Brown splatters next to the bin show where a teabag has hit the wall. I’ll have to clear up.

  ‘You both think I’m mad.’

  ‘No,’ Hannah says. She is watching me carefully.

  ‘But I do think Zach’s still al
ive.’ I try to talk calmly. Howard is at my feet, idly scratching. The MacBook is on the table. ‘Why would his laptop be at Gulls? And other things were missing. His Hunter boots. I found them at Sand Martin. They were in the rack.’

  ‘Sand Martin?’ Hannah says.

  ‘I don’t know how they got there. The last time we were in Cornwall together, they were at Gulls, so it means something. I’ll work it out. But that’s not the important thing. Other stuff too. Things had gone. Clothes, a bag, a torch, money that was kept tucked away for emergencies, a picture, I think. I can’t be sure about that.’

  ‘And you searched the house properly?’ Hannah asks. Leaning back in her chair, she rests her knees on the edge of the table. ‘It’s a long time since you were down there.’

  ‘The police thought the studio had been broken into,’ Jane adds. ‘Gulls has been empty for a year—’

  ‘No, but wait. There were flowers already at the tree, lilies. Someone else had left them there. This SUV, a silver one; I kept seeing it everywhere.’ I shake my head, try and clear it. ‘Maybe that’s irrelevant.’

  I’m not doing this right. I have to go carefully or they’ll get it wrong. They won’t understand.

  To give myself time, I get up, take my boot out of Howard’s mouth, and open the door. The garden is thick with shadows and windy. I watch Howard disappear into the complicated gloom of the bushes. When I find my chair again, I sit up straighter than before. A muscle in my leg starts shaking. ‘I wrote him a letter,’ I say. ‘And when I got there, it was opened. He’d read it.’

  ‘What letter?’ Jane says.

  ‘What did you write?’ Hannah asks.

  ‘We’d been going through a tricky patch, you know, with me not getting pregnant, and Zach . . . I had been finding Zach a bit . . . possessive. I wrote things perhaps I shouldn’t have. I said I wanted to separate.’

  Each word creates a new catch in my throat. I cough and then I try to laugh. I rub at an old mug ring on the table, and when I am doing that, Jane puts her hand on mine and holds it. Her nail polish is pale grey, like a nun’s habit.