At Risk

6

When Liz arrived back at her basement flat in Kentish Town, the place had a reproachful air about it. It wasn’t so much untidy as neglected; most of her possessions still lay where she had left them at the beginning of the weekend. The CD dusty in the jutting maw of the player. The remote control in the centre of the carpet. The cafetière half full. The Saturday papers strewn about.

A faint funereal smell lingered; the armful of winter jasmine that her mother had given her, and that she had meant to put in water before going to bed the night before, was now a sad tangle of stalks on the table. Around it, and thick on the floor below, a constellation of dying five-pointed petals. On the answering machine, a tiny pulsing red light.

Why was the place so cold? She checked the central heating and found that the timer was two hours behind. Had there been some sort of power cut during the weekend? Possibly, but then as far as Liz was concerned, thermostats and the like had always seemed to wield some strange whimsical power that rendered them unaccountable. Moving the time forward to 19:30, she heard the boiler start up with a satisfactory whoomf.

For the next half-hour, as warmth permeated the small basement flat, she tidied up. When the place was well enough ordered for her to be able to relax, she took a cook-from-frozen lasagne from the stack in the freezer (had they defrosted and refrosted in the power cut, if indeed there had been a power cut? Was she about to poison herself?), pierced the protective foil with a series of neat incisions, slid the package into the oven, and poured herself a large vodka-tonic.

There were two messages on the answering machine. The first was from her mother: Liz had left a suede skirt and belt on the back of her bedroom door at Bowerbridge-would they keep until next time?

The second was from Mark. He had rung at 12:46 that afternoon from Nobu in Park Lane, where he was waiting to give an American actress an expense-account lunch. The actress was late, however, and Mark was hungry, and his thoughts had turned to the basement flat in Inkerman Road NW5, and the possibility of spending the night there with the flat’s owner. Following a drink and a bite to eat, perhaps, at the Eagle in Farringdon Road.

Liz deleted both messages. The idea of meeting in the Eagle, a favourite hang-out of Guardian journalists, was insane. Had he told people at the paper about her? Was it common knowledge that he had that most chic of journalistic accessories-a pet spook? Even if he had said nothing to anyone it was clear that the game had moved beyond the realm of acceptable risk into crazy-land. He was playing with her, drawing her inch by inch towards self-destruction.

Taking a deep swallow of her drink, Liz called up his mobile. She was going to do it right now-finish the thing once and for all. It would hurt like hell and she would feel wretched beyond description, but she wanted her life back under her own control.

She got his voice mail, which probably meant that he was at home with Shauna. Where he bloody well should be, she mused sourly. Pacing around the flat, she was brought up short by the sight of the washing machine, and the inverted semi-circle of greyish water. Last week’s washing had now been stewing there for two and a half days. Despairingly, she reached for the knob, and the machine lurched into life.