Beneath The Skin

ONE

I wouldn’t have become famous if it hadn’t been for the watermelon. And I wouldn’t have been in possession of the watermelon if it hadn’t been for the heat. So I’d better start with the heat.

It was hot. But that may give you the wrong impression. It may make you think of the Mediterranean and deserted beaches and long drinks with colorful paper parasols dangling out of them. Nothing like that. The heat was like a big old fat smelly mangy greasy farty dying dog that had settled down on London at the beginning of June and hadn’t moved for three horrible weeks. It had got sweatier and slimier and the sky had changed day by day from blue to a sort of industrial mixture of yellow and gray. Holloway Road now felt like a giant exhaust pipe, the car fumes held down at street level by a weight of even more harmful pollutants somewhere above. We pedestrians would cough at each other like beagles released from a tobacco laboratory. At the beginning of June it had felt good to put on a summer dress and feel it light against my skin. But my dresses were grimy and stained by the end of each day and I had to wash my hair in the sink every morning.

Normally the choice of books that I read to my class is dictated according to fascist totalitarian principles imposed by the government, but this morning I’d rebelled just for once and read them a Brer Rabbit story I’d found in a cardboard box of battered childhood books when I’d cleared out my dad’s flat. I’d lingered over old school reports, letters written before I’d been born, tacky china ornaments that brought with them a flood of sentimental memories. I kept all the books because I thought one day I might have children myself, and then I could read them the books that Mum had read to me before she died and left it to Dad to tuck me into bed each night, and reading aloud became just another of those things that were lost, and so in my memory became something precious and wonderful. Whenever I read aloud to kids, there’s a bit of me that feels as if I’ve turned into a soft, blurred version of my mother; that I’m reading to the child I once was.

I wish I could say that the class was held enthralled by this classic old-fashioned piece of storytelling. Maybe there was just a bit less wailing, nose-picking, staring at the ceiling, or nudging than usual. But what mainly emerged as I asked them about the story afterward was that nobody knew what a watermelon was. I drew one on the blackboard for them with red and green chalk. A watermelon is so like a cartoon anyway that even I can draw them. A complete blank.

So I said that if they were good-and for the last hour of the afternoon they were alarmingly well behaved-I’d bring in a watermelon for them the next day. On the way home I got off the bus a stop later than usual, after it had turned up Seven Sisters Road. I walked back down the road past the greengrocers and stalls. In the very first one I bought a pound of golden nap cherries and ate them greedily. They were tart, juicy, clean; they made me think of being in the countryside where I grew up, of sitting under the green shade as the sun goes down. It was just after five o’clock, so the traffic was already starting to grind to a halt. The fumes were hot against my face, but I was feeling almost cheerful. I was fighting my way through crowds of people as usual, but many of them seemed in good spirits. They were wearing bright colors. My urban claustrophobia meter was down from its usual eleven to a more manageable six or seven or so.

I bought a watermelon the size of a basketball and the weight of a bowling ball. The man needed four carrier bags one inside the other, and there was virtually no practical way of carrying it. Very gingerly I swung the bag over my shoulder, almost spinning myself into the traffic as I did so, and carried the melon like a man with a sack of coal on his back. It was only about three hundred yards to the flat. I’d probably make it.

As I crossed Seven Sisters Road and turned into Holloway Road, people stared at me. God knows what they thought I was up to, a skimpily dressed young blonde hunched over and carrying what must have looked like her own weight in iron ore in a shopping bag.

Then it happened. What did it feel like at the time? It was a moment, an impulse, a blow, and then it was in the past. I only really reconstructed what had taken place through the action replays in my mind, by telling people about it, by what people told me about it. A bus was coming toward me on the inside lane of the road. It had almost reached me when a person jumped off the platform at the back. The bus was going as close to full speed as anything ever gets on Holloway Road during rush hour. Normal people don’t jump off buses like that, even Londoners, so at first I thought he may have been recklessly crossing the road behind the bus. It was the speed at which he hit the pavement, almost losing his balance, that showed he must have come off the bus.

Then I saw there were two of them, apparently joined together by straps. The one behind was a woman, older than him. But not really old. She really did lose her footing, horribly, when she hit the ground, and rolled over. I saw her feet crazily high in the air and she crashed against a bin. I saw her head hit the pavement; heard it. The man wrenched himself free. He was holding a bag. Her bag. He held it in two hands, chest high. Somebody shouted. He ran away at full speed. He had a strange, tight smile on his face and his eyes were glassy. He was running straight for me, so I had to step out of the way. But I didn’t just step out of the way. I let the watermelon slip off my shoulder. I leaned back and swung it. I had to lean back or else it would have fallen vertically, taking me down with it. If it had continued on its circular progress around me I would quickly have lost control of it, but its progress was very suddenly halted as it hit the man full in the stomach.

They talk about the sweet spot. When I used to play rounders at primary school and I swung at the ball, mostly it would hit the edge of the bat and dribble off pathetically to the side. But every so often, the ball would hit the right place and with almost no effort, it would just fly. Cricket bats have sweet spots too, except that it’s called the “Meat.” And tennis rackets have sweet spots. So do baseball bats. And this bag-snatcher caught my watermelon right in its sweet spot, right at the perfect point of its arc. There was the most amazing thud as it struck him in the stomach. There was a whoosh of ejecting air and he just went down as drastically as if there were no body inside his clothes and they were attempting to fold themselves up on the pavement. He didn’t go down like a falling tree. He went like a tall building being demolished by explosives around the base. One minute it’s there and then there’s just dust and rubble.

I hadn’t made any plan of what to do next if the man was going to get up and come at me. My watermelon was only good for one shot. But he wasn’t able to get up. He clawed at the pavement a bit, and then we were all surrounded by a crowd. I couldn’t see him any longer, and I remembered the woman. Some people got in my way, tried to talk to me, but I pushed my way past them. I was light-headed, exhilarated. I felt like laughing or talking wildly. But there was nothing funny about the woman. She was slumped and twisted on the pavement, her face down. There was quite a lot of blood on the stone, very dark and thick. I thought she must be dead but there were odd twitches from her leg. She was smartly dressed, a business suit with quite a short gray skirt. Suddenly I thought of her having breakfast this morning and going to work, and then heading home thinking of what she was going to do this evening, making mundane and comforting plans for herself, and then this suddenly happening and her life being changed. Why hadn’t she just let go of the stupid bag? Maybe it had been caught round her arm.

People were standing around her looking uncomfortable. We all wanted somebody official-a doctor or a policeman or anybody in a uniform-to step forward and take charge and make this a regular event that was being dealt with through proper channels. But there was nobody.

“Is there a doctor?” an old woman next to me said.

Oh fuck. I’d done a two-day first-aid course in the second term of my teacher-training. I stepped forward and knelt down next to her. I could sense an air of reassurance around me. I knew about administering medicines to toddlers, but I couldn’t think of anything relevant here except for one of the key maxims: “When in doubt, do nothing.” She was unconscious. There was lots of blood around the face and mouth. Another phrase came into my mind: “the recovery position.” As gently as I could, I turned her face toward me. There were gasps and expressions of disgust from behind me.

“Has anybody called an ambulance?” I said.

“I done it on my mobile,” a voice said.

I took a deep breath and pushed my fingers into the woman’s mouth. She had red hair and very pale skin. She was younger than I’d thought at first, and probably rather beautiful. I wondered what color her eyes were, behind the closed lids. Perhaps she had green eyes: red hair and green eyes. I scooped thick blood out of her mouth. I looked at my red hand and saw a tooth or a bit of a tooth. A groan came from somewhere inside her. There was a cough. A good sign probably. Very loud and close by I heard a siren. I looked up. I was pushed aside by a man in uniform. Fine by me.

With my left hand I found a tissue in my pocket and carefully wiped the blood and other stuff off my fingers. My melon. I didn’t have my melon. I wandered back in search of it. The man was sitting up now, with two police officers, a man and a woman, looking down at him. I saw my blue plastic bag.

“Mine,” I said, picking it up. “I dropped it.”

“She did it,” a voice said. “She stopped him.”

“Fucking KO’d him,” someone else said, and close by a woman laughed.

The man stared up at me. Maybe I expected him to look vengeful but he just seemed blankly puzzled.

“That right?” asked the female officer, looking a bit suspicious.

“Yeah,” I said warily. “But I’d better be getting on.”

The male police officer stepped forward.

“We’ll need some details, my darling.”

“What do you want to know?”

He took out a notebook.

“We’ll start with your name and address.”

That was another funny thing. I turned out to be more shocked than I realized. I could remember my name, though even that was a bit of an effort. But I just couldn’t think of my address even though I own the bloody place and I’ve been living there for eighteen months. I had to get my appointment book out of my pocket and read the address out to them, with my hand trembling so much I could hardly make out the words. They must have thought I was mad.

TWO

I had reached “E” in the register; E for Damian Everatt, a skinny little boy with huge spectacles taped together at one hinge, waxy ears, an anxious gappy mouth, and scabby knees from where the other boys pushed him over in the playground.

“Yes, miss,” he whispered, as Pauline Douglas pushed her head round the already open classroom door.

“Can I have a quick word, Zoe?” she said. I stood up, smoothing my dress anxiously, and joined her. There was a welcome through-breeze in the corridor, though I noticed that a bead of sweat was trickling down Pauline’s carefully powdered face, and her normally crisp graying hair was damp at her temples. “I’ve had a call from a journalist on the Gazette.”

“What’s that?”

“A local paper. They want to talk to you about your heroics.”

“What? Oh, that. It’s…”

“There was mention of a melon.”

“Ah yes, well you see…”

“They want to send a photographer, too. Quiet!” This last to the circle of children fidgeting on the floor behind us.

“I’m sorry they bothered you. Just tell them to go away.”

“Not at all,” Pauline said firmly. “I’ve arranged for them to come round at ten forty-five, during break time.”

“Are you sure?” I looked at her dubiously.

“It might be good publicity.” She looked over my shoulder. “Is that it?”

I looked round at the huge green-striped fruit, innocent on the shelf behind us.

“That’s the one.”

“You must be stronger than you look. All right, I’ll see you later.”

I sat down again, picked up the register.

“Where were we? Yes. Kadijah.”

“Yes, miss.”

The journalist was middle-aged and short and fat, with hairs growing out of his nostrils and sprouting up behind his shirt collar. Never quite got the name, which was embarrassing as he was so aware of mine. Bob something, I think. His face was a dark shade of red, and wide circles of sweat stained his armpits. When he wrote, little shreds of shorthand in a tatty notebook, his plump fist kept slipping down the pen. The photographer who accompanied him looked about seventeen; cropped dark hair, an earring in one ear, jeans so tight I kept thinking that when he squatted on the floor with his camera they would split. All the time Bob was asking me questions, the photographer wandered round the classroom, staring at me from different angles through the camera lens. I’d tidied my hair and put on a bit of makeup before they arrived. Louise had insisted on it, pushing me into the staff cloakroom and coming after me with a brush in her hand. Now I wished I’d made a bit more effort. I sat there in my old cream dress with its crooked hem. They made me uncomfortable.

“What thoughts went through your head before you decided to hit him?”

“I just did it. Without thinking.”

“So you didn’t feel scared?”

“No. I didn’t really have time.”

He was scribbling away in his notebook. I had a feeling that I should be making cleverer, more amusing comments about what had happened.

“Where do you come from? Haratounian’s a strange name for a blond girl like you.”

“A village near Sheffield.”

“So you’re new to London.” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “And you teach nursery children, do you?”

“Reception, it’s called…”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Mmm.” He looked at me musingly, like someone assessing an unpromising item of stock at an agricultural auction. “How much do you weigh?”

“What? About seven and a half stone, I think.”

“Seven stone,” he said, chuckling. “Fantastic. And he was a big chap, wasn’t he?” He sucked his pen. “Do you think society would be a better place if everybody got involved the way you did?”

“Well, I don’t really know.” I fumbled for some sort of coherent statement. “I mean, what if the melon had missed? Or if it had hit the wrong person?”

Zoe Haratounian, spokeswoman on behalf of inarticulate youth. He frowned and didn’t even make a pretense of writing down what I’d said.

“How does it feel to be a heroine?”

Up to then it had been amusing in a way, but now I felt a little irritated. But of course I couldn’t put it into words that made any sense.

“It just happened,” I said. “I don’t want to set myself up as anything. Do you know if the woman who was mugged is okay?”

“Fine, just a couple of cracked ribs and she’ll need some new teeth.”

“I think we’ll take her with the melon.” It was the boy-photographer.

Bob nodded.

“Yes, that’s the story.”

He pulled the fruit off the shelf and staggered across with it.

“Blimey,” he said, lowering it onto my lap. “No wonder you took him out. Now look at me, chin up a bit. Give us a smile, darling. You won, didn’t you? Lovely.”

I smiled until the smile puckered on my face. Through the doorway I saw Louise staring in, grinning wildly. A giggle grew in my chest.

Next he wanted the melon and me with the children. I did my impersonation of a prim Victorian schoolmarm but it turned out that Pauline had already agreed. The photographer suggested cutting it up. It was a deep, luscious pink, paler at the rind, with polished black pips and a smell of fibrous coolness. I cut it into thirty-two wedges; one for each child and one for me. They stood round me on the sweltering concrete playground, holding their melon and smiling for the camera. All together now. One, two, three, cheese.

The local paper came out on Friday and I was on the front page. The photograph of me was huge; I was surrounded by children and slices of melon. MISS HEROINE AND THE MELON. Not very snappy. Daryl had a finger up his nose and Rose’s skirt was tucked into her knickers, but otherwise it was all right. Pauline seemed pleased. She pinned the piece on the notice board by the foyer, where the children gradually defaced it, and then she told me that a national paper had rung, interested in following up the story. She had provisionally set up an interview and another photo opportunity for the lunch break. I could miss the staff meeting. If that was all right with me, of course. She had asked the school secretary to buy another melon.

I thought that would be the end of it. I was bewildered by the way a story can gather its own momentum. I could hardly recognize the woman on an inside page of the Daily Mail next day, weighed down by a vast watermelon, topped by a large headline. She didn’t look like me, with her cautious smile and her fair hair tucked neatly behind her ears; and she certainly didn’t sound like me. Wasn’t there enough real news in the world? On the page after there was a very small story at the bottom of the page in which a bus had fallen off a bridge in Kashmir and killed a horribly large number of people. Maybe if a blond British twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher had been on board they might have given it more space.

“Crap,” said Fred when I said as much to him later that day, eating soggy chips doused in vinegar after a film in which men with bubbling biceps hit each other on the jaw with a cracking noise like a gun going off. “Don’t do yourself down. You did what heroes do. You had a split second to decide and you did the right thing.” He cupped my chin in his slim, callused hand. I had the impression that he was seeing not me, but the woman in the picture with the sticky little smile. He kissed me. “Some people do it by throwing themselves on top of a grenade; you did it with a watermelon. That’s the only difference. Let’s go back to your place, shall we? It’s still early.”

“I’ve got a stack of marking and forms that are about a yard high.”

“Just for a bit.”

He chucked the last of the chips in an overflowing bin, sidestepped the dog turds on the pavement, and wrapped his long arm round my shoulder. Through all the exhaust fumes and the fried reek from kebab houses and chip shops, he smelled of cigarettes and mown grass. His forearms, where he had rolled up his shirt, were tanned and scratched. His pale hair flopped down over his eyes. He was cool in the industrial warmth of the evening. I couldn’t resist.

Fred was my new boyfriend, or new something. So maybe we were at the perfect time. We were past the difficult, embarrassing first bit where you’re like a comedian going out before a difficult audience and desperately needing laughter and applause. Except in this case very much not needing laughter at all of any kind. But we hadn’t remotely got to the stage where you walk around the flat and don’t happen to notice that the other person hasn’t got anything on.

He had been working most of the year as a gardener and it had given him a wiry strength. You could see the muscles ripple under his skin. He was tanned on his forearms and neck and face, but his chest and stomach were pale, milky.

We hadn’t got to the stage either of just taking off our clothes and folding them up on separate chairs in some clinical, institutional sort of way. When we got into my flat-and it always seemed to be my flat-there was still an urgency about getting at each other. It made everything else seem less important. Sometimes, in class on an afternoon when the children were fidgety and I was tired and listless in the heat, I would think about Fred and the evening ahead and the day would lift itself.

We lit cigarettes afterward, lying in my little bedroom and listening to music and car horns in the street below. Someone shouted loudly: “Cunt, you cunt, I’ll get you for this.” We listened to the sound of feet pounding down the pavement, a woman screaming. I’d got used to it, more or less. It didn’t keep me awake at night, like it used to.

Fred turned on the bedside lamp and all the dreary, dingy nastiness of the flat was illuminated. How could I ever have bought it? How would I ever manage to sell it? Even if I made it look nicer-got rid of the flimsy orange curtains the last owner had left behind, put down a carpet over the grubby varnished boards, wallpapered over the beige woodchip, painted the blistering window frames, put mirrors and prints on the walls-no amount of clever interior design could disguise how cramped and dark it all was. Some developer had carved up an already small space to make this hole. The window in the so-called living room was actually cut in half by the partition wall, through which I sometimes heard a neighbor I’d never met shouting obscenities at some poor woman. In a spasm of grief and loneliness and the need for a place I could call home, I’d used up all the money my father had left me when he died. It had never felt like home, though, and now, when property prices were soaring, I was stuck with it. In this kind of weather, I could clean the windows every day and still they’d be smeared with greasy dirt by the evening.

“I’ll make us some tea.”

“I’ve got no milk.”

“Beer in the fridge?” Fred asked hopefully.

“No.”

“What have you got?”

“Cereal, I think.”

“What’s the use of cereal without milk.”

It was a statement of fact rather than a question I was supposed to answer. He was pulling on trousers in a businesslike kind of way that I recognized. He was about to give me a peck on the cheek and leave. Purpose of visit over.

“It’s all right as a snack,” I said vaguely. “Like crisps.”

I was thinking about the woman who had been mugged; the way her body flew through the air like a broken doll hurled out of the window.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“With the guys.”

“But of course.”

I sat up in bed and contemplated the marking I had to do.

“Sleep well. Here, there’s some post you’ve not opened.”

The first was a bill, which I looked at, then put on the pile on the table with the other bills. The other was a letter written in large, looping script.

Dear Ms. Haratounian, from your name I gather you are not English, though you look it from the photographs I have seen. I am not a racist, of course, and I count among my friends many people like yourself, but…

I put the letter on the table and rubbed my temples. Fuck. A mad person. All I needed.

THREE

I was woken by the doorbell. I thought at first it must be some sort of joke or a wino who had mistaken the street door for the entrance to a hostel. I opened the curtains slightly in the front room and pushed my face against the glass, trying to see who it was, but the angle was wrong. I looked at my watch. Just after seven. I couldn’t think of anyone who could possibly be calling at this time. I wasn’t wearing anything so I pulled on a bright yellow plastic raincoat before going downstairs.

I opened the door just a fraction. The street door of the building opens directly onto Holloway Road, and I didn’t want to stop the traffic with my appearance just after I’ve woken up. It was the postman and my heart sank. When the postman wants to hand his mail to you personally, this is not generally good news. He usually wants you to sign for something in order to prove that you have received a horrible bill printed in red threatening to cut off your phone.

But he looked happy enough. Behind him I could see the beginnings of a day that was still cool but was going to be very hot indeed. I’d never seen this particular postman before, so I don’t know if it was a new thing, but he was wearing rather fetching blue serge shorts and a crisp light blue short-sleeved shirt. They were obviously official summer issue, but they looked jaunty. He wasn’t exactly young, but there was a Baywatch-postman air to him. So I stood on the doorstep looking at him with interest, and he looked back at me with some curiosity as well. I realized that my raincoat was on the skimpy side and not joined very well in the middle. I pulled it tightly together, which probably made things worse. This was starting to feel like a scene from one of those sleazy British comic sex films from the early seventies that you sometimes see on TV on Friday nights after you’ve got back from the pub. Porn for sad bastards.

“Flat C?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“There’s mail for you,” he said. “It wouldn’t go through the box.”

And there was. Lots and lots of different envelopes arranged in piles held together with elastic. Was this a joke? It took some complicated maneuvering to receive these bundles with one arm while holding my coat closed with the other.

“Happy birthday, is it?” he said with a wink.

“No,” I said, and pushed the door shut with a naked foot.

I took them upstairs and spilled them onto the table in the main room. I picked a dainty lilac envelope to open but I already knew what they were. One of the things about having a great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather who walked out of Armenia about a hundred years ago with nothing but a recipe for yogurt is that you’re very easy to look up in the phone book. Why couldn’t he have changed his name like other immigrants? I read the letter.

Dear Zoe Haratounian,

I read of your heroic exploit in this morning’s newspaper. First may I be allowed to congratulate you on your courage that you showed in tackling that person. If I may trespass a little longer on your patience…

I looked ahead and then over the page and then the page after that. There were five of them, and Janet Eagleton (Mrs.) had written on both sides of the paper in green ink. I’d save that one for later. I opened an envelope that looked more normal.

Dear Zoe,

Congratulations. You did brilliantly, and if more people behaved the way you did, London would be a better place to live. I also thought you looked lovely in the photograph in the paper and that’s really why I’m writing. My name is James Gunter and I’m twenty-five and I think I’m quite presentable looking, but I’ve always had trouble meeting the right girl, Miss “Right,” if you will…

I folded up the letter and placed it on top of Mrs. Eagleton’s. Another letter was more like a package. I opened it up. There was a bundle of paper half folded, half rolled up. I saw diagrams, arrows, subjects arranged in columns. But sure enough, on the first page it began as a letter addressed to me.

Dear Ms. Haroutunian,

(That’s an interesting name. Might you be a Zoroastrian? You can let me know at my box number (below). I will return to this subject (Zoroaster) below).

You have defenses against forces of darkness. But as you know there are other forces that are not so easily resisted. Do you know what a kunderbuffer is? If you do you can skip the following and begin at a section I will mark for your convenience with an asterisk. I append one for demonstration purposes (*). The section I will mark for your convenience I will mark with two (2) asterisks in order to avoid unnecessary confusion.

I put the letter on top of James Gunter’s. I went into the bathroom and washed my hands. That wasn’t enough. I needed a shower. That was always a bugger in my flat. I liked showers with frosted doors that you could stand up in. I once went out with someone whose only redeeming quality, in retrospect, was that he had a power shower with six different nozzles apart from the normal one above. But the shower in my flat involved squatting in the bath and fiddling with decaying valves and twisting the cable. Still, I lay back for several minutes with a washcloth over my face, showering it. It was like lying under a warm wet blanket.

I got out and got dressed in my work clothes. I made a mug of coffee and lit a cigarette. I felt a bit better. What really would have made me feel better is if the pile of letters had gone, but it was still stolidly present on the table. All those people knew where I lived. Well, not quite all. Another brisk inspection of the letters showed that several of them had been redirected from the newspapers where they had been originally sent. Some of them were probably nice. And at least, I thought to myself, they were writing instead of phoning up or calling round.

At that moment the phone rang, which made me jump. It wasn’t a fan. It was Guy, the real estate agent who was allegedly trying to sell my flat.

“I’ve got a couple of people who want a look around the property.”

“Fine,” I said. “You’ve got the key. What about that couple who saw it on Monday? What did they think?” I had no hopes of them, really. He had looked grim. She had talked in a friendly way, but not about the flat.

“They weren’t sure about the location,” Guy said breezily. “A bit on the small side as well. And they felt it needed too much work on it. Not keen, basically.”

“The people today shouldn’t come too late. I’m having some friends around for a drink.”

“Birthday, is it?”

I took a deep breath.

“Do you really want to know, Guy?”

“Well…”

“I’m having an anniversary party because it’s six months since this flat went on the market.”

“It’s not, is it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“It doesn’t seem like six months.”

He took some convincing. After the call I looked around the room rather desperately. Strangers were going to be coming in and looking at this room. When I moved to London my aunt had given me a book on Household Hints and Handy Tips. It had advice on how to tidy if you’ve only got fifteen minutes. But what if you’ve only got one minute? I made my bed, straightened the rug by the door, rinsed my coffee mug and put it neatly upside down by the sink. I found a cardboard box in a cupboard and I tipped all the letters into it and stowed it under my bed. A minute and a half and I was late at the school. Again. Sweatily late and the day was only starting to get hot.

“So, my love, what can we do to make this more salable?”

Louise was standing at the window with a bottle of beer, brandishing a cigarette at Holloway Road.

“It’s very simple,” I said. “Get rid of the road. Get rid of the pub next door and the kebab house next to that. Decorate. It’s horrible, isn’t it; everything about it. I hated it from the moment I owned it and even if it means losing money I’ve got to get out. I want to rent a small cozy flat with a garden or something. We’re meant to be in the middle of a housing boom. There must be somebody mad out there.” I took a drag of my cigarette. “Granted, lots of mad people have already looked at this flat. I need the right kind of mad person.”

Louise laughed. She had come early to help me get things ready and to have a proper talk and basically because she’s a good person.

“But I didn’t come all the way here to talk about property. I want to know about this new man. Is he coming tonight?”

“They’re all coming.”

“What do you mean all? Have you got more than one?”

I giggled.

“No. He goes round with this gang of boys. I think they’ve all known each other since primary school or something ridiculous. They’re like those six-packs of beer. You know, not to be sold separately.”

Louise frowned.

“This isn’t some sort of strange five-in-a-bed sex thing, is it? If so, I want to hear about it in detail.”

“No, they leave us alone some of the time.”

“How did you meet?”

I lit another cigarette.

“I met them all together. A few weeks ago I went to a party at a gallery over in Shoreditch. It was one of those typical disasters. The person I knew turned out not to be there. So I wandered from room to room holding a drink and pretending to be on my way to somewhere important. You know what I mean?”

“You’re talking to the world champion,” said Louise.

“Anyway I went upstairs and there was a group of good-looking young men round a pinball machine, banging at it, shouting, laughing, having a better time than anyone else there. One of them-not Fred, as it happens-looked round and asked me if I wanted to play. So I did. We had a great time and the next evening I met them again in town.”

Louise looked thoughtful.

“So you faced the difficult choice of which one of them actually to go out with on a one-to-one basis?”

“It wasn’t exactly like that,” I said. “The day after that Fred rang me at home and asked me out. I asked him if he had the permission of his gang, and he was a bit sheepish about that.” I leaned out the window a bit. “And here they are now.”

Louise peered out. They were some way down the road and hadn’t noticed us.

“They look like nice boys,” she said primly.

“That’s Fred in the middle carrying the large bag, the one with very light brown hair, almost blond.”

“So you grabbed the nicest-looking one.”

“The one in the very long coat, that’s Duncan.”

“How can he wear it in this heat?”

“Apparently it makes him look like a gunman in some spaghetti western. He never takes it off. The other two are brothers. The Burnside brothers. The one in the glasses and the cap is Graham. The one with the long hair is Morris. Hi!” This last was yelled down at them.

They looked up, startled for a moment.

“We’d love to come up,” Duncan shouted. “Unfortunately we’ve got to go to a party.”

“Shut up,” I said. “Here, catch.”

I dropped my bunch of keys and, with what I have to say was remarkable style, Graham took off his cap and caught the keys in it. They disappeared from view as they let themselves in.

“Quick,” said Louise. “We’ve got thirty seconds. Which one of them should I marry? Who’s got the best prospects? You can leave out Fred for the moment.”

I thought for two seconds.

“Graham’s working as a photographer’s assistant.”

“Got it.”

“Duncan and Morris work together. They do all sorts of different stuff to do with computers. I don’t understand it at all, but then I don’t think I’m meant to. Duncan’s the life and soul of any party; Morris is rather shy when you actually get him on his own.”

“They’re the ones who’re brothers, right?”

“No, that’s Morris and Graham. Duncan has red hair. He looks completely different.”

“All right. So for the moment the computer people seem the better bet. Morris the shy brother and Duncan the talkative redhead.”

And then they were in the room, filling it. When I’d talked to them about this event they had been asking brashly what sort of women would be there and they had been noisy down on the street, but in my flat they went a bit quiet and polite as they were introduced to Louise. That was something I liked about them, in a way.

Fred came over and gave me a lingering kiss, which I couldn’t help thinking was a public demonstration to everyone in the room. Was he showing affection or marking out territory? Then he produced something that looked like a brightly colored drape.

“I thought this would be helpful. It’s to hang over the damp patch,” he said.

“Thanks, Fred.” I looked at it dubiously. It was a bit bright; its colors clashed. “But I think that surveyors are allowed to move bits of cloth out of the way to see what’s behind them.”

“Let’s get you to the surveyor stage first. Hang it up then.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Zoe says you’re geniuses with computers,” Louise was saying to Duncan.

Morris, who was standing with us, blushed slightly, which was sweet.

“She’d think so,” Duncan said, pulling the ring top off a can of beer. “But she’s got low standards. That’s just because we showed her how to use her own computer.” He took a sip. “Admittedly that was an impressive achievement. It was like teaching a squirrel how to find nuts.”

“But squirrels are brilliant at finding nuts,” Morris objected.

“That’s right,” Duncan said.

“But they’re good already,” Morris persisted.

“That’s right. Zoe is now as good with her computer as a squirrel is at finding nuts.”

“But you should have said it was like teaching a squirrel how to juggle.”

Duncan looked puzzled.

“But you can’t teach squirrels how to juggle.”

I topped up Louise’s drink.

“They can go on like this for hours,” I said. “It’s a bonding thing. Something to do with having been on the playground together.”

I went off to get some crisps from the kitchen and Louise came with me. We could see the boys in the room.

“He’s lovely-looking,” she said, nodding over at Fred. “What’s he smoking? He looks very relaxed. Exotic.”

“He’s got a hippie side to him. Relaxed is good, though.”

“Is it serious?”

I took a sip from her glass.

“I’ll have to get back to you about that,” I said.

A few other people arrived. There was John, a nice teacher from our school, who had asked me out just a few days too late. And a couple of women I had met through Louise. It had turned into a real miniature celebration. After a couple of drinks I was starting to feel benevolent toward them, this new circle of people. All they had in common was me. A year ago I was lonely and lost and I hadn’t met a single one of them, and now they were all coming to my so-called home on a Friday evening. Suddenly there was a chinking sound. Fred was rapping on a glass bottle with a fork.

“Silence, silence,” he said when there already was silence. “Unaccustomed as I am, et cetera. I’d just like to stand up and be counted and say that I like this flat and I’d like us all to raise our glasses and hope that we’ll all be able to meet here again in six months’ time and have another good evening.” There was a general raising of glasses and bottles. A flash went off in my face as Graham took a photograph. He was always doing that-you’d be chatting away to him and he’d suddenly lift up his camera and aim it at you, like a third eye. It could be quite disconcerting, as if all the time he was talking or listening to you, he was really in search of a good shot. “Also,” continued Fred, “it’s also our anniversary.” There were starts of surprise all round, not least from me. “Yes,” he said, “it’s nine days since Zoe and me first… erm…” There was a pause. “Er… met.” There were some suppressed laughs behind me from Duncan and Graham, but not from anybody else. I felt for a moment as if I were trapped at a rugby club dinner.

“Fred,” I said, but he held up a hand to stop me.

“Hang on,” he said. “It would be sad if such an evening were not marked in a solemn way but… what’s this?” He said this last in a pathetically false tone of amazement as he bent down and rummaged behind my armchair. He pulled out a large parcel wrapped in brown paper. “Either this is another offering from one of Zoe’s anonymous fans or else it must be a present.”

“Idiots,” I said, but in a nice way. It looked like a picture. I ripped off the paper and then saw what it was. “You bastards,” I said, laughing. It was an entire framed page of the Sun featuring the headline ME AND MY MELON and in smaller writing: HAVE-A-GO BLONDE ZAPS MUGGER.

“Speech,” said Louise through cupped hands. “Speech.”

“Well,” I began, before I was interrupted by the ring of the doorbell. “Wait,” I said. “One minute.”

I opened the door to find a man dressed in a brown corduroy suit and rubber boots.

“I’ve come to see the flat,” he said. “Is that all right?”

“Yes, yes,” I said eagerly. “Come on up.”

As I led him up the stairs, the talking of the guests became audible.

“You seem to be having a party,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my birthday.”

FOUR

The letters gradually fizzled out. The first flood turned into a trickle, then stopped altogether. For a little bit it had seemed funny. One time I took a bunch of them with me when I was meeting Fred and the guys. We sat at a table outside a bar in Soho, drank very cold beer and passed them among us, occasionally reading choice phrases aloud. Then while Morris and Duncan were conducting one of their impenetrable conversations, which involved them challenging each other to name the Seven Dwarfs or the Magnificent Seven or the Seven Deadly Sins, I talked more seriously about it with Graham and Fred.

“It’s the thought of these people sitting all over Britain and writing eight-page letters to someone they don’t know and looking up my name in the phone book and buying a stamp. Haven’t they got better things to do with their lives?”

“No, they haven’t,” said Fred. He put his hand on my knee. “You’re a goddess. You and your melon. We all loved you before. Now you’re a male fantasy. This powerful beautiful woman. We all want someone like that to walk up and down our bodies wearing high heels.” Then he leaned over and whispered in my ear, his breath warm. “And you’re all mine.”

“Stop it,” I said. “It’s not funny.”

“Now you know what it’s like to be a celebrity,” said Graham. “Enjoy it while you can.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, is nobody going to give me any sympathy? Morris, what have you got to say on my behalf?”

“Yeah,” said Fred. “Tell us, Morris. What advice would you give to a beautiful woman about coping with the pressures of fame?”

And he leaned over and slapped Morris several times very gently on the cheek. Sometimes I was baffled by the boys, as if they were conducting rituals from a strange exotic culture I didn’t understand. One of them would say or do something to another and I couldn’t tell whether it was a joke or an insult or a joking insult. I didn’t know whether the victim would laugh or flare up. For example, Fred never seemed to say anything nice to Morris, yet he sometimes talked of him as his best friend. There was a sudden silence and I felt a twist in my stomach. Morris blinked in the face of our attention and ran his fingers through his hair. I used to think he did it to show how impressively long and thick it was.

“Who can name ten films with letters in them?” he said.

“Morris!” I said furiously.

“Letter from an Unknown Woman,” said Graham.

“Letters from Three Women,” said Duncan.

“The Letter,” said Fred.

“This is too easy,” said Morris. “Ten films with letters in them that don’t have ‘letter’ in the title.”

“Like what?”

“Well… like Casablanca, for example.”

“There aren’t letters in Casablanca.”

“There are.”

“There aren’t.”

The serious conversation was over.

After that I stopped even reading them. Some I could recognize just by the writing on the envelope, so I didn’t even bother to open them. Others I glanced at cursorily and chucked into the cardboard box with the rest. They weren’t even funny anymore. A few were sad, a few obscene, and most were simply tedious.

If I wanted a reminder of the derangement around me I only needed to look out of the window, the frame of which was rotting, incidentally. Young men in beat-up cars, leaning on their horns, faces red with rage. Solitary old women with their baskets on wheels, stumbling through the crowds, muttering to themselves. The winos who sat in the doorway of the boarded-up shop a few doors down from me, smelling of piss and whiskey, with their unbuttoned trousers and their skewed leers.

Madness was coming through the door as well, in the shape of prospective buyers of the flat. There was one man, about fifty perhaps, very small with cauliflower ears and a dragging limp, who insisted on kneeling on the floor and knocking against the skirting boards, like a doctor checking a patient for a chest infection. I stood ineffectually beside him, wincing at the music pounding into the flat from the pub. Or the young woman, probably about my age, with dozens of silver studs around the rims of her ears in a bumpy ridge, who brought her three huge smelly dogs into the flat while she looked round. The thought of what the flat would be like after a week with them in residence made my stomach heave. There was hardly room for a person. One of them ate my vitamin tablets off the table and another lay by the front door, making horrible smells.

Most of the visitors stayed only a few minutes, just long enough not to seem rude, before beating a retreat. A few didn’t mind being rude. Couples sometimes talked loudly to each other about what they thought.

Perhaps on superficial, casual acquaintance, Guy was more like a normal member of the human race. But due to his failure to sell my flat, we were becoming long-term associates. He was always smartly dressed in a variety of suits and colorful ties, some of which had cartoon characters on them. However hot the weather became, he didn’t sweat. Or rather he sweated very discreetly. There would be just one single drop running down the side of his face. He smelled of shaving lotion and mouthwash. I would have assumed my flat had become a symbol of failure that he would have avoided. It wasn’t as if it needed an expert guide. But he kept accompanying viewers, even at awkward times, in the evening or on weekends.

So maybe it should have been less of a surprise when, after a thin, anxious-looking woman had scuttled out, he looked me deep in the eyes and said:

“We must get together for a drink one evening, Zoe.”

I should have come up with some monumentally savage put-down reflecting the deep hatred I had for him and his fake tan and his infuriating euphemisms, but I couldn’t think of anything, so instead I blurted out:

“I think we should lower the price.”

The man who had come to look round on the evening of my not-moving party returned with a tape measure, a notepad, and a camera. It was early evening and Fred was away on some strange regional TV assignment in the Yorkshire Dales, spending thirty-six hours transforming a large and overgrown garden for a program to be shown in about a year’s time. He’d rung me from a pub, his voice thickened by alcohol and lust, and told me how he was imagining the things he would do to me when he returned. Not what I needed to hear: I was struggling with the literacy hour report on the computer. I was trying to produce a pie chart. It had seemed so easy when Duncan, or was it Morris, had done it. The sentence “A type 19 error has occurred” kept flashing on my screen. So I smoked and cursed while the man who might or might not buy my flat poked around. He measured floor space, pulled open cupboards, lifted up the tatty rug, lifted Fred’s ghastly wall hanging and inspected the damp patch that seemed to be spreading in spite of the hot, dry weather, turned on the tap in the bathroom and stood for a minute or so watching the wretched splatter of water. When he went into the bedroom and I heard the sound of drawers being opened, I followed him.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking things out,” he replied, quite unconcerned, gazing into my jumble of knickers and bras and laddered tights.

I slammed the drawer shut and went into the kitchen. I was hungry but when I opened the fridge all I found there was one bag of ancient spring onions, one white roll with mold growing on it, an empty brown bag with a cherry pit in it, and a can of Coke. In the freezer compartment was a bag of prawns, probably well past their sell-by date, and a small bag of peas. So I drank the Coke, standing by the fridge, then returned to the computer and wrote: “We aim to produce not just competent readers, but interested readers. A carefully considered Whole School Curriculum Plan ensures that all pupils reinforce…” Oh fuck. This wasn’t what I became a teacher for. Soon I’d be writing words like “satisfactory attainment levels” and “inputting.”

I put three multivitamin tablets in my mouth and crunched them crossly. Then I picked up the homework-if that’s not too grand a word for it-that I had set the class to and brought home that evening. I had asked them all to draw one of their favorite stories. Some of the pictures were pretty incomprehensible. Benjamin’s zigzag pattern in green and black was “The Big Bad Wolf.” Abstract art, I supposed. Jordane had drawn a round pea-green circle, nothing else, for “The Princess and the Pea.” Lots of them had done pictures of Disney films: Bambi and Snow White and things like that. I went through them and wrote encouraging remarks on them and then put them all in a folder under the table.

“I’m going now.”

The man stood in the doorway, camera round his neck. He was tapping his pen against his teeth and gazing at me. I saw that the bald spot in the center of his head was a cruel pink, and his hairy wrists were sunburned as well. Good.

“Oh, right.”

Not a word about coming back. Bastard.

I left a few minutes after him, to go and see a film with Louise and a few of her friends I had never met before. It was lovely sitting in the dark with a group of women, eating popcorn and giggling. It was so safe.

I came back quite late. It was dark, starless. I pushed open the door and there was a letter on my doormat; someone must have pushed it through the letterbox. Neat italic writing, black ink. It didn’t look like another nutter. Standing in the doorway, I opened the letter.

Dear Zoe, When does someone like you, young and pretty and healthy, become frightened of dying, I wonder. You smoke (there’s a nicotine stain on your finger by the way). Sometimes you take drugs. You eat bad food. You stay up late and the next morning you don’t get hangovers. Probably you think that you will live forever, that you will be young for a long while yet.

Zoe, with your white teeth and your one small dimple when you smile, you will not be young for much longer. You have been warned.

Are you scared, Zoe? I am watching you. I am not going to go away.

I stood on the edge of the pavement while crowds of people flowed past me, jostled against me, and I stared at the letter. I lifted up my left hand and there was a yellow stain on the middle finger. I crumpled the letter into a tight ball and threw it into a bin with all the other rubbish, all the crap of other people’s lives.

Today, she is wearing a pale blue dress with straps. It comes down to her knees, and there is chalk dust near the hem that she has not noticed yet. She is not wearing a bra. She has shaved under her arms; her legs look smooth, soft. There is pale nail varnish on her toes, but it is beginning to chip on her left big toe. Her sandals are flat, navy blue, old, scuffed. She is tanned; the hairs on her arms are golden. Sometimes I can glimpse her milky underarms; the whiter skin behind her knees; if she stoops down I can see that the honey color on her shoulders and throat fades between the beginnings of her breasts. Her hair is piled on top of her head. It has bleached in the sun, so it is much darker underneath than on top. She is wearing small silver earrings, in the shape of little flowers. Every so often, she twists them round between her finger and thumb. The lobes of her ears are quite long. The vertical groove above her upper lip is quite pronounced. When she is hot, like today, sweat gathers in it. Every so often she wipes it with a tissue. Her teeth are white, but I have seen several fillings at the back of her mouth. They glint when she laughs or yawns. She is not wearing any makeup. I can see the pale tips of her eyelashes; the slight dryness of her bare lips. There is a sprinkling of freckles on the bridge of her nose that was not there last time I looked. The yellow stain on her middle finger has gone. Good. She wears no rings on her fingers. On her wrist is a large-faced watch, with Mickey Mouse in the center. She uses a ribbon for the strap.

When she laughs, she makes a pealing sound, like a doorbell. If I told her that I loved her, she would laugh at me like that. She would think I was not serious. That is what women do. They turn what is serious and big into a small thing, a joke. Love is not a joke. It is a matter of life and death. One day, soon, she will understand that. She will know that the way she smiles, or opens her eyes wide when she is listening; the way her breasts flatten when she lifts her arms above her head-these things matter. She smiles too easily. She laughs too easily. She flirts. She wears skimpy clothes. I can see her legs through her dress. I can make out the shape of her nipples. She is careless of herself.

She talks very quickly, in a light husky voice. She says “Yeah,” not yes. She has gray eyes. She is not frightened yet.

FIVE

Everybody knows that schools, almost everywhere except perhaps in busy places like Japan, finish at about four or three-thirty, although the little things that I teach clock out even earlier, at quarter past three. Even people who know nothing else about children know that. They see boys and girls being led along high streets, holding the hand of their mother or trailing behind carers, carrying schoolbags, lunch boxes. I’d already learned that the rush-hour traffic in London was about half composed of vast people-carriers ferrying glum-looking kids in uniform the huge distances between their nice houses and the schools that were considered worthy of them. Because, of course, as I’d also newly discovered, one of the main status symbols of any parent in London is the distance they have to transport their children. The school next door is for poor people, like the ones I teach.

The big joke when people discover I’m a teacher is about how they envy me the short hours and the long holidays. Fair enough, of course, since this was one of the less worthy motives that brought me into this job. My school career had not been a major success, so I didn’t have the qualifications for studying something really important like looking after sick pussycats, which was what I had wanted to do when I was much younger. I had only done well enough to teach small children. That suited me. I liked children, their transparency, their eagerness, and their sense of possibility. And I liked the idea of standing around a sandbox all day and wiping the noses of toddlers and helping mix paints.

Instead I found myself in a job that was more like being an accountant in the middle of a zoo. And the hours were longer than being an accountant. The official school inspection was coming at us like a train. After the kids had been collected and taken back to their apartment blocks, we had meetings, form-filling, planning. We stayed on until seven, eight, nine o’clock, and Pauline would have been better off installing a camp bed and a Primus stove in her office, since she never seemed to leave.

I got away earlier that evening because I had an appointment to meet a man at the flat. Naturally the bus didn’t arrive for ages, so when I ran panting along the pavement only five minutes late at twenty-five to eight, he was standing there in the doorway reading a newspaper. Bad start. I had already given him too much time to look at the area. Fortunately, he seemed engrossed in what he was reading. Maybe he hadn’t noticed the pub, or at least hadn’t taken in its full implications. He was wearing a suit that was a slightly odd shape with lapels that were askew, so it was probably very expensive. He must have been in his later twenties, maybe thirty. His hair was cut very short, and he looked cool in the blistering heat.

“I’m really sorry,” I panted. “Bus.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m Nick Shale. You’re Miss Haratounian.” We shook hands in a sort of continental style. He smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I pictured you as a grim old landlady,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, trying to smile politely.

I opened the street door. There was the usual rubbish on the doormat, leaflets for takeaway pizzas, window cleaners, taxi cabs, and one hand-delivered letter. I recognized the writing immediately. It was the creep who had sent me the letter before-when was it?-five days ago. He’d been back to my door. How boring and irritating. How very nasty. I looked at it for a moment, then over at the man, Nick, who had a puzzled expression.

“What did you say?” I said.

“Your bag,” he said. “Can I take it for you?”

I handed it to him without speaking.

I had my guided tour of the flat down to a skillful three minutes, brilliantly taking in all the points of interest while deftly avoiding areas that were not necessarily to the advantage of the property. Occasionally Nick asked questions that I had now become used to.

“Why are you moving?”

Did he think he could trap an old hand like me so easily?

“I want to move closer to my work,” I said, falsely.

He looked out the window.

“Is the traffic a problem?” he asked.

“I’ve never thought about it,” I said. That was laying it on a bit thick. At least he didn’t laugh. I placed the envelope on the table. Unopened. “It’s handy for the shops.”

He put his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of my living room as if he were rehearsing being the owner. He looked like the squire of a very small estate indeed.

“You’re not from London,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“You don’t sound like it,” he said. “I’m trying to place you. With your name you should be Armenian. But you don’t sound Armenian. Not that I know what Armenians sound like. Maybe they all sound like you.”

I felt oddly sensitive when people looking around the flat turned personal as if we were all going to be good friends, but I couldn’t help smiling.

“I grew up in a village near Sheffield.”

“Different from London.”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause for mutual thought.

“I’d like to think about this,” Nick said with an earnest expression. “Would it be all right if I came back and had another look sometime?”

I was dubious about whether it was specifically the flat he was interested in, but it didn’t bother me too much. Even a crumb of enthusiasm was something.

“Fine,” I said.

“Can I ring you or do I need to go through the estate agent?”

“Whatever,” I said. “I’m at work quite a lot.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a teacher in a primary school.”

“That’s great,” he said. “All those holidays.”

I forced a smile.

“Your number,” he said. “Can you give it to me?”

I told him and he typed it into what looked like a chunky pocket calculator.

“Good to meet you, erm…?”

“Zoe.”

“Zoe.”

I heard him trip down the stairs two at a time and I was left alone with my letter. I pretended to myself to be casual about it for a bit. I made myself an instant coffee and lit a cigarette. Then I opened it and spread it out on the table before me:

Dear Zoe.

I may be wrong, but I think you aren’t as scared as I mean you to be. As you know, I’m looking at you. Maybe I’m looking at you as you read this.

It was stupid but I glanced up and around, as if I might catch someone next to me.

As I said before, what I’m really interested in is looking at you from the inside, the bits of you that you’ll never see but I will.

Maybe it’s that you feel secure in your horrible little flat that you can’t sell. You’re not secure. For example: your back window. It’s easy to climb up on the shed in the yard behind and then through it. You should put a proper lock on it. The one you’ve got at the moment is too easy. That’s why I left it open. Go and look.

P.S. You look happy when you’re asleep. Being dead is only like being asleep forever.

I put the paper back on the table. I walked across the room and out onto the landing. Sure enough the window that looked down on the garden I wasn’t allowed to go into was raised a couple of feet. I shivered. I almost felt that there was a chill in the flat, like in a cellar, though I knew it was a clammy hot evening. I went back into the living room and sat by the phone. I wanted to be sick. But was it an emergency? Was it anything?

I compromised. I looked up the nearest police station in the phone book and phoned it. I had a slightly complicated conversation with a woman at the desk, who seemed to be looking for excuses to put the phone down. I said there had been a break-in and she asked what had been stolen and what damage had been done. I said no damage and I wasn’t sure what had been stolen.

“Is this a police matter?” the voice asked wearily.

“I’ve been threatened,” I said. “Threatened with violence.”

The discussion went on for quite a few minutes more, and after a conversation with a third party, inadequately masked by a hand over the receiver, she said that somebody would call round “in due course,” whatever that meant. I went from window to window, locking them when I could, fastening bolts. As if somebody was going to climb into a first-floor window in full view of Holloway Road. I didn’t switch on the TV or play music. I wanted to be able to hear anything. I just smoked cigarette after cigarette and sipped a beer.

It was over an hour later that the doorbell rang. I walked down to the street door but didn’t open it.

“Who’s there?”

There was a muffled sound from behind the door.

“What?”

Another muffled sound. Awkwardly I pulled back the stiff-sprung opening of the letterbox and looked out. I saw dark blue cloth. I opened the door. There were two police officers. Their car was parked behind them.

“Do you want to come in?”

They didn’t reply but looked at each other and stepped forward. I led them up the stairs. Both of them took off their caps as they entered the house. I wondered if it was an ancient form of respect toward women. To make things worse, I get nervous around the police. I tried to remember if there was anything illegal in the flat, in the fridge or on the mantelpiece. I didn’t think so but my mind wasn’t working very efficiently, so I couldn’t be sure. I pointed to the letter on the table. Maybe I shouldn’t touch it. It might be evidence. One of the officers stepped forward and leaned over the table, reading it. It took him quite a long time. I saw he had a long Roman nose, with a lump where it met his head.

“You’ve had another letter from this person?” he asked finally.

“Yes, I got one a few days ago. On Wednesday, I think.”

“Where is it?”

I’d been waiting for this.

“I threw it away,” I said, a bit guiltily, and then quickly started speaking before he could get cross with me. “I’m sorry. I know it was a stupid thing to do. I just got upset by it.”

But the officer didn’t get cross. He didn’t seem worried at all. Or even especially interested.

“Did you check the window?”

“Yes. It was open.”

“Can you show us?”

I led them out of the room. They followed in rather a heavy sort of way, as if they were being asked to do too much for something so trivial.

“The pub garden’s down there,” the other officer murmured, peering through the window. Roman Nose nodded. “He could’ve seen the window from down there.”

They turned and walked back to the living room.

“Can you think of anybody who might have sent this? Old boyfriend, someone at work, that sort of thing?”

I took a deep breath and told them about the melon and the mail it had provoked. They both laughed.

“That was you?” said Roman Nose rather cheerily. He turned to the other officer. “Danny was first at the scene at that one.” He turned back to me. “Nice one. We’ve got your picture up in the station. Quite a heroine you are to us.” He chuckled. “Watermelon, eh? Better than a truncheon any day.” There was crackling in his radio. He pressed a button and a voice said something that was unintelligible to me. “That’s all right. We’ll be along in a minute. See you there.” He looked back at me. “That’s it, then.”

“What?”

“You get your face in the paper, this sort of thing happens.”

“But he’s broken in, he’s threatened me.”

“You’re not from London, are you? What was your name again?”

“Haratounian. Zoe Haratounian.”

“Funny old name. Italian, is it?”

“No.”

“It’s just that there’s a lot of strange people about.”

“But hasn’t he committed a crime?”

Roman Nose shrugged.

“Has anything been taken?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Are there any signs of forced entry?”

“Not that I could see.”

He looked across at his companion and gave a little nod toward the door that clearly meant Let’s get out of here as soon as we can shut this little woman up.

“If anything serious happens”-he put a gentle but unpleasant stress on the word “serious”-“then give us a ring.”

They turned to go.

“Aren’t you going to take the letter with you?”

“You keep it, love. Put it in a drawer. Somewhere safe.”

“Aren’t you going to take a statement? Don’t I need to fill out some form?”

“If you have any more trouble, we’ll do all that, my dear. All right? Now you get some sleep. We’ve got work to do.”

And they went to work. I looked out of the window as their car pulled out into all the other lights and hubbub of the hot city.

SIX

There was loud music and laughter outside on Holloway Road, as if there was a slightly sinister late-night street party going on. Somebody was clapping wildly. A car horn blared. The hot air held all the smells of the night together: spice, frying onions, exhaust fumes, patchouli, garlic, cinnamon, and the unexpected drift of roses. Occasionally a feeble twitch of wind fluttered the half-open curtains through the wide-open window, but otherwise the heat was thick and deep and saturated. It was the middle of the night but there were no stars, no moon, only the street lamps that cast a dirty orange glow round the room. And noise. People. Cars. I felt for a moment I’d like to be out in the middle of a forest or desert or on the open sea.

I didn’t close my eyes. I looked at Fred and he looked back, slightly smiling, sure of himself, while the sweat from his forehead dripped on my face, my neck, and our hands slipped on each other’s drenched bodies. He was still strange to me: his high forehead, full mouth; his long, slim, smooth, rather soft body. Even after an evening of dancing and then sex he smelled clean, yeasty. Lemon soap and earth, grass and beer. I pulled the damp sheet off us and he stretched out on the narrow bed and put his arms under his head and grinned at me.

“That was nice,” I whispered.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re not meant to say that,” I said. “You’re meant to say something like, Yes, it was nice.”

He shook his head.

“Have you ever had sex that’s as good as that?”

I couldn’t help giggling. “Are you serious? You want me to say, Oh, Fred, I never realized it could be like this.”

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up.”

I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling. I’d hurt his feelings. He looked humiliated and angry. Men.

I sat up, legs crossed, shook two cigarettes out of the pack lying on the floor, lit them both, and handed one to him.

“I’ve never had sex with a gardener before.”

He took a drag and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air, where it hung for a second before dissolving.

“I’m not a gardener. I garden. I help out.”

“Like: I’m not a teacher, I teach?”

He blew another smoke ring and watched it.

“You’re a teacher. I’ll be out of this job as soon as I can.”

“Oh.” I felt a surge of resentment. “Thanks a lot. Well, have you had sex with a teacher?”

He raised his eyebrows at me. His face broke into a leer.

“Never with a famous teacher.”

I didn’t want to think about that. All evening I’d been drinking and giggling and dancing and getting stoned and trying not to think. I’d had enough of stupid jokes about watermelons, and of newspaper articles calling me petite, blond Zoe, and weird letters on the doormat. Of people whom I’d never met thinking about me, having fantasies about me. Maybe there was someone standing outside the flat at this moment, looking up at my open window, waiting for Fred to go. I felt completely sober now.

I dropped my cigarette into the glass by the bed and heard it sizzle.

“Those last letters…”

“Ignore them,” Fred said briskly. He closed his eyes. “What are you doing this weekend?”

“They scared me. They were… oh, I don’t know, purposeful.”

“Mmm.” He stroked my hair lightly. “We were thinking of a picnic on Saturday. Out of town. Want to come?”

“Do you do everything as a group?”

He leaned down and kissed me on my breasts. “I can manage some things on my own. And what’s the problem?”

“Nothing.” There was a silence. “Would you stay the night, Fred? I mean the whole night. If you’d like to, that is.”

It was as if I’d told him there was a bomb under the pillow. His eyes snapped open and he sat up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to be at some old lady’s house near Wimbledon first thing tomorrow.” He stepped into his boxer shorts, his cotton trousers. God, what a speedy dresser he was. Shirt on, buttons done up, socks, shoes from under the bed, patting his pockets to make sure his change was in there. Jacket from the back of the chair.

“Your watch,” I said dryly.

“Thanks. Shit, look at the time. I’ll ring you tomorrow, make plans.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t worry about things.” He ran his hands over my face, kissed me on the neck. “Beautiful woman. Good night.”

“Bye.”

After he’d left I got up and closed the living room window, in spite of the dense heat. The room felt more claustrophobic than ever. I looked out at Holloway Road. It would be light in a few hours. I checked the landing window, which I’d already checked several times that evening, got my watch from the bathroom: 1:45. If only it were morning already. I was tired, but not sleepy, and time creeps when you’re scared. My sweat prickled on my skin, suddenly chilly, and I picked up the sheet from the floor and wiped down my body with it, before wrapping myself up in its thin folds and lighting another cigarette. I wished I had tea in the flat. Maybe there was some whiskey somewhere. I went into the kitchen and pulled a chair up to the high cupboard. There were a load of empty bottles, which one day I was going to take to the bottle bank, and no whiskey. But there was some peppermint liqueur that a parent had given me at Christmas and I’d never touched. I poured a slug of it into a mug that had lost its handle; it was green and viscous and cloyingly sweet, and rolled in a burning ball down my throat.

“Ugh,” I said out loud, and noticed suddenly how quiet it had become; just the occasional minor earthquake of a passing lorry, the slap of someone’s feet passing under the window. It was 2:15.

I shuffled to the bathroom in my sheet; cleaned my teeth and splashed water on my hot face. Then I lay down in bed and tried not to think about it. I couldn’t help it. I turned over the two last letters in my mind. The first, of course, I’d thrown away. But I remembered most of it. The second I had put on my desk. The police obviously weren’t convinced it was by the same person; I knew it was. They weren’t treating it seriously; they didn’t know how it felt to be a woman lying alone in a shabby flat on Holloway Road, fearing there was someone out there, watching.

Despite myself, I got out the letter and read it again, lying in bed. I knew this man had looked at me; I mean, really looked at me. He’d seen things that even I hadn’t bothered to notice about myself: like the stained finger. He was learning me, the way we never learn even lovers. Maybe he was memorizing me, like for an exam. He’d been in here, I knew he had, whatever the police said, and looked at my things, touched them. Maybe he’d gone through letters, photographs, clothes. He might have taken things away. He’d seen me asleep. He wanted to see inside me, he said. Not be, see. I felt nauseous, but maybe that was just the peppermint liqueur, which still lined the inside of my mouth like glue, and the drink I’d had earlier, and the sweaty sex, and the tiredness, and-oh fuck it.

I closed my eyes and put one arm over them so I was in complete darkness. London crouched outside my window, full of eyes. I heard a drop of rain, then another. My mind wouldn’t stop; I couldn’t make it slow down. I went over and over the letter in my mind.

“As I said before”: That was the funny thing. What was it? He would like to see inside me. As he had said before. But he hadn’t said it before, had he? I tried to reconstruct the first letter, the one I’d thrown away, in my mind. I could remember only fragments. But I would have remembered. What could that mean?

A thought stirred, something I wished I could ignore. I sat up, dry-mouthed, swung my legs out of bed, and went into the living room, where I dragged the cardboard box out from under the sofa. There were dozens of letters in there, some not even opened. This could take ages. I went back into the bedroom, pulled on my tatty old tracksuit; then I poured myself another horrible mug of the liqueur, lit a cigarette, and began.

I just needed to glance at each letter to make sure, although actually I could tell by the handwriting on the envelopes that they weren’t from him. My dear Zoe… Miss Haratounian…Go back to where you came from, bitch… Have you found Jesus?… You smile, but your eyes look sad… Good for you… If you would care to donate to our charity… I feel we have met somewhere… If you’re into S amp;M… I’m writing this from prison… I would like to offer you a word of hard-earned wisdom…

And there it was. Suddenly I could hear my heart beating hard, too fast. My throat felt too narrow to breathe. The handwriting, black italic. I picked up the envelope, which hadn’t been opened. There was a stamp on this one; my address, post code in full. I took a violent swig from the mug, then slid a finger under the flap and tore open the envelope. The letter was short but to the point.

Dear Zoe, I want to see inside you, and then I want to kill you. There is nothing you can do to stop me. Not yet, though. I will write to you again.

I stared at the words until they blurred. My breath was coming in little ragged gasps. Raindrops burst against the windows, slow, heavy summer rain. I jumped to my feet and bumped the sofa over the floor, until it was rammed against the front door. I picked up the phone and dialed Fred’s number with shaky, inept fingers. It rang and rang.

“Yes.” His voice was thick with sleep.

“Fred, Fred, it’s Zoe.”

“Zoe? What time is it, for fuck’s sake?”

“What? I don’t know. Fred, I got another letter.”

“Jesus, Zoe, it’s three thirty.”

“He says he’s going to kill me.”

“Look…”

“Can you come round? I’m scared. I don’t know who else to ask.”

“Zoe, listen.” I could hear him strike a match. “It’s all right.” His voice was gentle but insistent, as if he were talking to a small child who was worried about the dark. “You’re quite safe.” There was a pause. “Look, if you’re really scared, then call the police.”

“Please, Fred. Please.”

“I was asleep, Zoe.” His voice was cold now. “I suggest you try to sleep yourself.”

I gave up then.

“All right.”

“I’ll call you.”

“All right.”

I called the police. I got a man I’d never talked to before who took down all my details with painstaking slowness. I spelled my last name out twice, H for horse and A for apple. Every time I heard a sound, I stiffened and my heart raced. But of course no one could get in. Everything was locked and bolted.

“Hold on a minute, miss.”

I waited, smoked another cigarette. My mouth felt like the inside of an ashtray.

In the end he told me to come into the police station in the morning. I suppose I had wanted policemen to rush around and protect me and sort everything out, but this was all I was going to get. If anything, I was reassured by the tone of dullness and routine in his voice. Things like this happened all the time.

At some point, I fell asleep. When I woke it was nearly seven o’clock. I looked out the window. It had rained heavily in the night, and the downfall had cleaned the road; the leaves on the few plane trees looked less bleached and shriveled, and the sky was actually blue. I’d forgotten about blue.

SEVEN

I got to see more important policemen this time, so that was something. If the officers in uniform who had called round at the flat looked like members of the school rugby team, then the detective who talked to me in the police station looked more a geography teacher. Perhaps a little more smartly dressed than any geography teacher I had had, in a navy blue suit and a sober tie. He was large, heavyset. I mean almost fat. His brown hair was cut short and precise. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Aldham.

I wasn’t led to an interview room or anything formal like that. He met me at the reception area and then punched some numbers to open a door to let me through into the real police bit behind. He made a mistake the first time and had to punch in the numbers again, more slowly, with some cursing under his breath. He led me to his desk and sat me down by the side of it, which made me feel even more like an awkward pupil going to see her teacher after school. Or before school, in this case. I had had to phone Pauline to say I’d be in late and she wasn’t pleased about that. It was not a good time, she said to me.

Aldham read the two letters very slowly with a frown of concentration. I spent five minutes fidgeting and staring around the room at people arriving, talking on the phone. A couple of officers were laughing about something I couldn’t hear at the far end of the open-plan office. Aldham looked up.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

“No thanks.”

“I’m getting one for myself.”

“All right, then.”

“Biscuit?”

“No thanks.”

“I’m having one.”

“It’s a bit early in the morning.”

It was quite a long time before he hustled awkwardly back, the plastic cups almost too hot to hold. He dipped a digestive biscuit into his tea and carefully bit the wet crescent of biscuit.

“So what do you think?”

“What do I think? Well, but I-that’s your job, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. What did the other letter say?”

“It was horrible so I threw it away. It had some weird stuff about what I ate. And there was something about being afraid of dying. It sounded as if it was someone who had been spying on me.”

“Or somebody who knows you?”

“Knows me?”

“It might be a joke. Don’t you think you might have some friend who’s doing this for a laugh?”

I hardly knew what to say.

“Someone’s threatening to kill me. I don’t see any joke.”

Aldham shifted uneasily in his chair.

“People have a funny sense of humor,” he said. There was a silence. I was thinking desperately: Could I just be wrong about this? Maybe it was nothing to make a fuss about. “Hang on a moment,” he said at last. “Let me have a word with someone.”

He took a folder out of his desk and inserted the two letters. He took that and his tea and walked heavily across the room and out of my sight. I looked at my watch. How long was this going to take? Was it worth getting my own files out of my bag and doing some work on the corner of Aldham’s desk? I wasn’t quite in the mood. When Aldham finally returned, he was with another man in a suit. He was a smaller, slighter man, graying, who looked as if he was a bit farther up the food chain. He introduced himself as Detective Inspector Carthy.

“I’ve looked at your letters, Miss… er…” he mumbled something that was apparently an attempt at my name. “I’ve looked at the letters and DS Aldham has filled me in on the details of the case. These are certainly nasty pieces of work.” He looked around and pulled a chair over from an unattended desk. “The question is, What’s actually going on here?”

“What’s going on is that somebody is threatening me and they’ve broken into my flat.” Carthy grimaced. “And I’m being harassed. That’s a crime now, isn’t it?”

“In certain circumstances. We have every sympathy for your concern,” he said. “But it’s difficult to know how to proceed exactly.”

“Don’t you think this person sounds dangerous?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Look, miss, I understand you’ve had other mail of this kind.”

I gave yet another recapitulation of my moment of fame, and the two detectives exchanged a brief smile.

“The melon thing?” Carthy said. “That was great. We’ve got the newspaper photo on a notice board somewhere. Everyone thinks you’re a heroine here. Maybe you could go and say hello to some of them before you go. But about the letters: I reckon that in all probability this is just the sort of thing that happens when you become a celebrity. There are sad people out there. This is their way of meeting people.”

I finally lost patience.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough. This person hasn’t just written letters. He’s been in my flat.”

“He may have been.” Carthy gave a long-suffering sigh. “Very well. Let’s think about a couple of things.” There was a moment’s pause. “Your flat. Is it easy of access?”

I shrugged.

“It’s just a normal conversion. There’s a common entranceway from Holloway Road. There’s a pub patio thing next to the backyard behind.”

Carthy wrote something on a large pad of paper that was balanced on his knee. I couldn’t see whether he was taking notes or just doodling.

“Do many people visit your flat?”

“How do you mean?”

“One a week? Two a week? On average.”

“I can’t answer it in that way. I’ve got friends. A bunch of them came round for a drink last week. I’ve got a new boyfriend. He’s been around quite a few times.” More scribbles on the pad. “Oh, and the flat’s been on the market for six months.”

Carthy raised an eyebrow.

“Which means that people have been visiting the flat?” he said.

“Obviously.”

“How many?”

“A lot. Over the entire six months there must have been sixty, seventy, maybe more.”

“Have any people come more than once?”

“A few. I want them to come more than once.”

“Have any of them seemed strange in some way?”

I couldn’t help laughing grimly.

“About three-quarters of them. I mean, they’re complete strangers rummaging through my cupboards, opening drawers. That’s what it’s like trying to sell your home.”

Carthy didn’t smile back.

“There are various motives for harassment of this kind. The most common is of a private nature.” He was sounding embarrassed. “Do you mind if I ask you some personal questions?”

“Not if they’re relevant.”

“You said you have a new boyfriend. How new?”

“Two or three weeks. Very new.”

“Does that mean that a previous relationship ended?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean no. I wasn’t in a relationship.”

“But have you had a recent personal, that is, er, sexual liaison?”

“Well, fairly recent.” I was blushing hopelessly.

“Did it break up painfully?”

“It wasn’t like that,” I said. Now it was my turn to go red. “I’ve seen a few people at different times.”

“A few?” He and Aldham exchanged a significant look.

“Look, that sounds wrong.” I was flustered. I knew what they were both thinking, and there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t make it worse. What made it so ludicrous is that compared to almost anyone I know, I’m a nun: an awkward, embarrassed, inarticulate nun, too. “I’ve gone out with, seen, whatever you call it, two men in the last year or so.” They both went on looking at me as if they were not at all convinced by this low number. “The last of them was months ago.”

“Did it end badly?”

I thought of sitting opposite Stuart in a café near Camden Lock. I gave a sad laugh.

“It just fizzled out, really. Anyway, the last I heard he was hitchhiking across Australia. You can cross him off the list of suspects.”

Carthy gave a loud click of his ballpoint pen and stood up.

“DS Aldham will help you fill out a case form and take a brief statement.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ve told you.”

“I mean, to catch him?”

“If anything else happens, give Aldham a ring and we’ll take it from there. Oh, and take sensible precautions in your private life for a while.”

“I told you, I’ve got a boyfriend.”

He nodded curtly and turned away, muttering something I couldn’t hear under his breath.

EIGHT

I was late arriving at school. Even later than I’d said. When I walked out of the police station, I felt so tired I thought my legs would give way beneath me. My skin felt dusty, gritty, under my cotton dress. My scalp itched. My mouth was ashy. My shoulders were full of vicious little knots, bubbles of stress. When I walked out into the glare of the sunlight, my eyes, which already felt sunken back into their sockets, throbbed painfully. I screwed them up against the dazzle and fumbled in my bag for my dark glasses. Damn. I’d forgotten them. And my vitamin tablets. And I had only one more cigarette left. For a moment, I thought of going back to the flat and having a bath, cleaning my teeth, pulling myself together, before going to school. Or even just going to one of the nearby parks and sitting on the yellowing patches of grass by the side of a pond, watching the ducks, closing my eyes.

Instead I bought two packs of cigarettes, a cheap pair of sunglasses from a roadside stall, and then guiltily slunk into a greasy-spoon café. I ordered two cups of black coffee and a poached egg on toast. I ate slowly, watching people pass outside the smeary window. A Rasta in a yellow cap. A teenage couple, arm in arm, who stopped to kiss every couple of steps. A group of Japanese tourists with cameras and wearing jerseys. Surely they must be lost. A man carrying a baby in a sling; I could just see its tufty head. A woman screaming at the minute, red-faced child at her side. An Indian woman draped in a scarlet sari, picking her way in delicate sandals through dog shit and litter. A flock of schoolchildren carrying swimming bags, herded across the blaring, fume-filled road by a harassed young woman who reminded me of me. A cyclist in fluorescent yellow shorts, head down, swerving in and out of the traffic on thin wheels. A woman with a wide-brimmed hat, a bosom like a shelf, and a tiny poodle, who looked as if she had stepped into the wrong story.

I had stepped into the wrong story. He could be looking at me at this moment. Maybe I could see him, if I knew where to look. What had I done, that this should happen to me? I lit a cigarette, drank my cooling, bitter coffee. I was so late now a few more minutes wouldn’t make any difference.

Before catching my bus up Kingsland Road, I passed a phone box and I had the stupidest impulse to phone my mother. My mother who hadn’t been alive for twelve years. I just wanted her to tell me everything was going to be okay.

Pauline was politely chilly with me when I arrived. She told me a man named Fred had called. He had asked me to phone him on his mobile during the day. She didn’t seem happy to be collecting messages from a boyfriend for an absent member of staff. The primary assistant who was sitting in for me had the children in plastic pinafores, mixing up paints with thick brushes. So I told them they all had to draw a portrait of themselves to put up on the wall before parents’ evening. Raj painted himself with a pale pink face and brown hair, and legs sticking straight out of his chin. Eric, who never smiles, gave himself a red mouth that stretched from ear to ear. Stacey spilled water all over Tara’s efforts and Tara hit her in the neck. Damian started crying, tears dripping onto the paper. I took him into the home corner and asked him what was wrong, and he told me that everyone picked on him, called him sissy, pushed him over on the playground, locked him in the toilet. I looked at him: a pale and snuffly creature with clothes that hung off his skinny frame and dirty ears.

Fred wanted me to come and watch him play five-a-side football that evening. They played every Wednesday, he said-a regular lads’ feature. He was cheerful and laid-back, as if nothing had happened last night. He told me he was deadheading roses in suburbia, but he kept thinking about my body.

Pauline told me I had to have my literacy-hour material ready by the end of the week and did I think that was possible. Oh yes, I replied, unconvincingly, head throbbing. I usually buy a roll with cheese and tomato at the sandwich bar on the way to school, but today I’d forgotten, so while the other teachers ate healthy sandwiches and fruit, I had boiled potatoes and baked beans from the obese dinner lady, followed by steamed pudding and custard. Comfort food: It made me feel better.

I made the children write the letter f over and over again, following the dotted lines on their work sheets. F for fox and frog and fun. “And fuck,” said four-year-old Barny, an August baby and youngest in the class, to the hoots of his admiring friends.

At circle time, we discussed bullying. I didn’t look at Damian when I talked about everyone trying to care for each other, and all the children gazed at me with their cruel and innocent eyes. He sat quite near me, picking bits of fluff out of the rug, eyes swimming behind his thick glasses.

“Better?” I asked him as they left for the day.

“Mmm,” he mumbled, head hanging. I saw that his neck was grubby; nails dirty. I felt suddenly irritated and angry with him, and wanted to shake him out of his hopelessness. Maybe that’s how I was being, I thought: Maybe I was letting myself be bullied.

It’s amazing how much noise ten men can make. Not just shouting at each other, but grunting, screaming, howling, yelling, hitting the ground with a thwack, hurtling into each other, kicking each other’s shins so I thought I could hear the bones crack. I was amazed not to see blood gushing, bodies on stretchers, fisticuffs. But at the end of the hour they were all sweaty, smelly, fine; clapping each other round the shoulders. I felt a bit stupid, standing on the sidelines and watching them like part of the fan club. There were four other women there, as well, who obviously knew each other, were part of some kind of group who went out every Wednesday to watch their men getting pulped. Clio, Annie, and Laura, and someone whose name I never quite got and didn’t like to ask again. They asked me how I’d met Fred, and wasn’t he a charmer, and were friendly in a restrained kind of way that made me think there was a different girl most weeks and they didn’t want to commit themselves. I guess I was meant to have cheered Fred on, as he rushed past me in a hot blur, eyes glazed, yelling something, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.

Afterward, he came over and draped an arm round my shoulder and gave me a kiss.

“You’re sweaty.”

I didn’t mind that much, but on the other hand I didn’t intrinsically take huge pleasure in it in some primitive hormonal way.

“Mmmm.” He nuzzled me. “And you’re all cool and lovely.”

After work, I’d been to Louise’s flat to have a bath, and she’d lent me a pair of gray cotton trousers and a sleeveless knitted top to put on. I hadn’t wanted to go back to my place. “Coming for a drink?”

“Sure.” The last thing my body needed was a drink, but I wanted company. As long as I was with other people, in a public place, I felt safe. Just the thought of it getting dark again, and me in my flat, on my own, made me breathless.

“I’ll see you after the shower.”

One drink turned into several, in a dark pub whose landlord obviously knew them all well.

“And she’s been getting all these mad letters,” continued Fred, as if it were all a big joke. His hand moved round to my side, feeling its way down my ribs. I shifted nervously, lit another cigarette, tipped the last of the lager down my throat. “Including ones that threaten to kill her. Haven’t you, Zoe?”

“Yes,” I mumbled. I didn’t want to talk about it.

“What did the police say?” asked Fred.

“Not much,” I said. I made an attempt at lightness: “Don’t worry, Fred. I’m sure you’ll be suspect number one.”

“It can’t be me,” he said cheerfully.

“Why not?”

“Well… er.”

“You’ve never seen me sleep,” I said and immediately wished I hadn’t, but Fred just looked puzzled. It was a relief when Morris started telling me how they used to come here on quiz night.

“It’s cruel, really,” he said. “It’s just too easy. It feels like helping ourselves to their money. We’re lucky they don’t just take us out back and break our thumbs.”

“The Hustler,” said Graham.

“What?” I said.

“Is my idiot brother boring you?”

“Don’t be mean,” I said.

“No, no,” said Morris. “It’s another reference. That’s what Herman Mankiewicz said about Joseph Mankiewicz.” Now he grinned over at his brother. “But Joseph was the more successful one in the end.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know who these people are.”

Unfortunately, they then started to tell me. To me the interplay of these old friends and brothers was a bewildering mixture of ancient jokes, obscure references, private catchphrases, and I generally thought the best thing was to keep my head down and wait for something I could follow. After a while the frenzied, competitive cross talk subsided and I found myself talking to Morris once more.

“Are you together with any of…” I said in a subdued voice and giving a discreet nod in the direction of the various young women around the table.

Morris looked evasive.

“Well, Laura and me are sort of, in a way…”

“In a way what?” said Laura across the table. She was a large woman with straight brown hair pulled back in a bun.

“I was telling Zoe that you’ve got ears like a bat.”

I assumed that Laura would get furious with Morris. I would have. But I was starting to see that the three women hovered on the edge of the group, mostly talking among themselves and only being brought into the general conversation when necessary, which didn’t seem to be very often. The boys, fresh-faced, bright-eyed after the football, looked more like little boys than ever. Why had I been embraced by their little group? As an audience? Morris leaned over very close to me and I almost thought for a moment he was going to nuzzle my ear. Instead he whispered into it.

“It’s over,” he said.

“What is?”

“Me and Laura. It’s just that she doesn’t know it yet.”

I looked across at her as she sat there, unaware of the sentence hanging over her head.

“Why?” I asked.

He just shrugged, and I felt I couldn’t bear to talk about it anymore.

“How’s work going?” I said, for want of anything better.

Morris lit a cigarette before answering.

“We’re all waiting,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He took a deep drag and then an even deeper gulp of his beer.

“Look at us,” he said. “Graham is a photographer’s assistant who wants to be a real live photographer. Duncan and me go around showing stupid secretaries how to do things with their software that they should have read in the manual. We’re waiting for one or two of our ideas to, well, come to fruition. The way things are now, you need one halfway plausible idea and you’re worth more than British Airways.”

“And Fred?”

Morris looked reflective.

“Fred is digging and sawing while trying to decide who he is.”

“But in the meantime there’s that tan and those forearms,” said Graham, who’d been eavesdropping.

“Mmmm,” I said.

We sat there for a long time and drank too much, especially the boys. Later Morris moved across to be close to Laura, at her request, which sounded more like a command, and Duncan sat next to me. First he talked about his work with Morris, how they were out on the road every day, working mainly separately in different companies, teaching idiots with too much money and no time how to operate their own computers. Then he told me about Fred, how long they’d known each other, their long friendship.

“There’s just one thing I can’t forgive Fred for,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“You,” he said. “It wasn’t a fair fight.”

I made myself laugh. He stared at me.

“We think you’re the best.”

“The best what?”

“Just the best.”

“We?”

“The guys.” He gestured around the table. “Fred always chucks his women in the end,” he said.

“Oh well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?”

“Can I have you afterward?” he said.

“What?” I said.

“No, I want her,” Graham said from across the table.

“What about me?” said Morris.

“I was first,” said Duncan.

There was a little bit of me that recognized that this was one of their jokes, and maybe at some other time I might have laughed and made a flirtatious attempt to play along, but this wasn’t one of those times.

Fred pushed himself against me. Pushed his hand against my trousers, Louise’s trousers. All of a sudden I felt nauseous. The thick, noisy atmosphere of the pub was curdling around me.

“Time to go,” I said.

He gave me a lift back to my flat in his van, dropping Morris and Laura on the way. He must have been way over the limit.

“Do you mind when they talk to me like that?”

“They’re just jealous,” he said.

I told him how the police had asked about my personal life.

“They made me think it was my fault,” I said. “They asked about my sex life.”

“A long story?” There was a gleam in his eyes.

“A very short story.”

“That many?” He whistled.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“So they think it’s one of your ex-lovers?”

“Maybe.”

“Did any of them seem like nutcases?”

“No.” I hesitated. “Except, when you start thinking like that, of course, everyone seems odd, a bit sinister. Nobody’s just normal, are they?”

“Not even me?”

“You?” I looked across at him as he drove, thin hands on the steering wheel. “Not even you.”

He seemed pleased. I saw him smile.

He pushed me back in my seat and kissed me so hard I tasted blood on my lip, and pressed a hand against my breast, but he didn’t ask to come in. And I’d learned my lesson from last night. I didn’t ask him. I waved him off, in a reasonably convincing charade of cheerfulness, and instead of going into the flat I walked down the still crowded road to the nearest pay phone. I called up Louise: Maybe I could go there for the night. But the phone rang and rang and nobody answered. I stood in the booth, holding the phone to my face, until a cross man with a bulging briefcase banged on the glass. There was nobody else I knew well enough to ask; there was nowhere else to go. I dithered on the street for a few minutes, then told myself not to be so stupid. I walked back to the front door, opened it, picked up the junk mail, the gas bill, and the postcard from my aunt, and went upstairs. There were no hand-delivered letters. The windows were all locked. The peppermint liqueur stood on the table, top off. Nobody was there.

NINE

“I really think he’s interested.”

“Who? Fred?”

“No. This man who’s coming back to see the flat. God knows why, but I think he might like it. If only he did. I hate it here, you know, Louise. Really hate it. I dread coming back at night. If I could only get out of here, maybe all the letters would stop and he’d go away.”

Louise looked round the room.

“What time is he coming?”

“About nine. Strange time to be viewing flats, don’t you think?”

“That gives us nearly two hours.”

“Are you sure you want to give up your precious Thursday evening like this, Louise?”

“I was only going to sit eating chocolate and flick through the TV channels. You’ve saved me from myself. Anyway, I like a challenge.”

I looked grimly around the flat.

“It’s certainly a challenge,” I said.

Louise rolled up her sleeves, looking, rather alarmingly, as if she were going to scrub the floor.

“Where shall we start?”

I love Louise. She’s down-to-earth and generous; even when she’s acting outrageous and reckless, I know she’s got her feet on the ground. She gets the giggles. She cries at soppy films. She eats too many cakes and goes on mad, hopeless, completely unnecessary diets. She wears skirts that make Pauline raise her beautifully shaped eyebrows, and high platform shoes, T-shirts with strange logos on them, huge earrings, a stud in her navel. She is small, stubborn, sure of herself, dogged, with a sharp, determined chin and a turned-up nose. Nothing seems to get her down. She’s like a pit pony.

When I arrived at Laurier School, Louise took me under her wing, for all she had been there only a year herself. She gave me teaching tips, warned me which parents were troublesome, shared her sandwiches with me at lunch when I forgot to bring any, lent me tampons and aspirins. And she was my one point of stability in the whole fluid mess that was London. Now here she was, putting my life in order.

We began in the kitchen. We washed the dishes and put them neatly away, scrubbed the surfaces, swept the floor, cleaned the tiny window that looked over the pub’s back garden. Louise insisted on taking down the pots and pans I’d hung above the stove.

“Let’s open up the space,” she said, squinting around her as if she had turned into an unimpressed interior decorator.

In the living room, twelve foot by ten, she emptied ashtrays, pushed the table under the window so the peeling wallpaper was partly obscured, turned over the stained sofa cushions, vacuumed the carpet, while I stacked bits of paper and mail into piles, threw away junk.

“Are those all the letters?” asked Louise, pointing at the cardboard box.

“Yep.”

“Creepy. Why don’t you throw them away?”

“Shall I? I thought the police might need them.”

“Why? You’ve got the perv’s letters separate anyway. Chuck them. Treat it all like the trash it is.”

So she held the neck of a bin bag wide open and I shoved the lavender envelopes, green-ink letters, instruction manuals on self-defense, sad biographies, into it. My spirits rose. Louise went down Holloway Road to buy some flowers while I cleaned out the bath with an old washcloth. She returned with yellow roses for the living room, a potted plant with fleshy green leaves for the kitchen.

“You should have classical music playing when he arrives.”

“I don’t have anything to play music on.”

“We can make coffee at the last minute. Bake a cake. That’s meant to be good.”

“I’ve only got instant coffee and even if I had all the ingredients, which I don’t, I’m not going to start baking a bloody cake.”

“Never mind,” she said, a bit too brightly, cutting the stems off the roses. “Just put some perfume on yourself instead. Can I use this jug for a vase? There, doesn’t that look better?”

It did. It felt better, too, now that Louise was with me, with her spiky eyelashes, scarlet mouth, vermilion nails, tight green dress. Just an ordinary mediocre room backing on to a pub, not a coffin after all.

“I’ve been really thrown by all this,” I said.

Louise filled the kettle. “Where the fuck does this plug in, anyway? There’s no spare socket. That’s the other thing your flat needs-total rewiring. Top to bottom.” She pulled out another plug with a flourish. “You can always come and stay at my place, if it would help. I haven’t got a spare bed but I’ve a spare bit of floor. Come this weekend, if you want.”

I had to stop myself from emitting a sob in response.

“That’s nice of you” was all I managed.

The bedroom looked more or less okay, except I hadn’t made the bed and the laundry basket was nearly full. We put the basket in the wardrobe, plumped up my pillow on the bed. Louise turned back the corner of the sheet, like my mother used to do. Wandering around, she paused and looked at objects on top of my chest of drawers.

“What on earth is this strange collection?” she asked.

“Things people sent me.”

“What, as well as letters?”

“Yes. The police wanted to look at them.”

“Bloody hell,” she said, picking them up and examining them.

There was a whistle, that I should wear round my neck at all times as an alarm. A pair of tiny silk knickers. A round smooth stone that looked like a bird’s egg. A small brown teddy bear.

“Why on earth has someone sent you this?” asked Louise, picking up a slightly grubby pink comb.

“It came with instructions. The point is to scrape it against someone’s nose, well, the bit between their nostrils. Apparently it makes murderers go away.”

“If they keep still while you get your comb out. This is pretty, though.” She was looking at a dainty silver locket on a thin chain. “It looks like it might be valuable.”

“If you open it up, there’s a piece of hair inside as well.”

“Who sent it?”

“Dunno. It arrived wrapped in a newspaper article about have-a-go heroes. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“And these are exciting.” She was looking at a pack of pornographic playing cards. She inspected the picture of a woman cupping her pneumatic breasts. “Men,” she said.

I shivered in the heat.

Nick Shale arrived just after nine, by which time I had had a bath and changed into jeans and a yellow cotton shirt. I wanted to look neat and clean, to go with my flat. I piled my hair on top of my head and dabbed perfume behind my ears.

He was wearing running shorts, and when he took off his canvas backpack, I saw there was a dark V of sweat down the back of his jersey.

“Here we are-I bought you these.” He handed me a brown paper bag. “Apricots from the stall down the road. I couldn’t resist them.”

I flushed. It was like giving me flowers. I didn’t think prospective flat buyers were meant to give presents to the owner. The apricots were golden and downy, almost luminous.

“Thank you,” I said self-consciously.

“Aren’t you going to offer me one?”

So we ate them, standing in the narrow kitchen, and he said he’d bring me strawberries next time. I pretended not to notice the bit about next time.

“Don’t you want to look round the flat again?”

“Sure.”

He wandered from room to room, staring up at ceilings as if he could see interesting patterns on their surfaces. There were several cobwebs that Louise and I hadn’t noticed drifting in the corners. In the bedroom, he opened the fitted wardrobe and gazed for a moment into my laundry basket, a funny little smile on his face. Then he straightened up and looked at me.

“I could do with a glass of wine.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Then it’s lucky I brought my own.”

He stooped down and opened the backpack, bringing out a slim green bottle. I touched it: It was still cold, dribbles of moisture running down its neck.

“Do you have a corkscrew?”

I wasn’t feeling especially pleased about this, but I gave him one. He turned his back to me to open it. I handed him a glass and a tumbler and he poured the wine into both, with a very slow and steady hand so that none spilled. He told me he lived in Norfolk but needed to buy a flat in London because he often stayed for two or three nights during the week.

“So my flat could become a pied-à-terre,” I said. “What an honor.”

“Cheers.”

“I’ve got to go out now,” I said, lying of course. My weekend appointment book was empty.

“It’s a bit late, isn’t it?” he said, draining his glass.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t see why I needed an excuse for a man I didn’t know.

“You should take your bottle,” I said.

“No, you keep it,” he said, turning to leave.

“What about the flat?”

“I like it,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

I heard the door close downstairs. I liked him well enough. I wondered what his handwriting looked like.

TEN

The next day I felt like a robot in class. I was doing a pretty reasonable impersonation of a primary school teacher. The robot got on with a whole-class lesson on letter formation while somewhere inside I was going over things in my mind. I needed to get rid of the flat. That came back and back the way a tune does, nagging at you. I had the tantalizing sense that if I could close the door on that unlovable bit of living space hacked out of an unpleasant house on a noisy road, then I would be able to close the door on other things as well. What I really ought to do was make the flat more secure, but that seemed wrong, like washing a broken bottle. The way to make that flat better and safer was to leave it. Nothing else would do. Starting next weekend I would start seriously looking at other flats.

I’d been too young when I’d bought this one. The money I’d been left by Dad when he died had felt like Monopoly money. There was too much of it to be real. He had said to me to buy somewhere to live; it was almost like a dying command. He was a man who thought that if you owned your own property, then you were safe; the world couldn’t touch you, no matter what happened. So I was a good daughter-although of course I wasn’t a daughter at all anymore, since I had no parents left; I was just me and very lonely and scared-and I did as he had told me. Very quickly. And since I’d moved to London from a quiet village, my only impulse had been to buy something that was in the real city, where things were happening, where there were shops, markets, people, noise. I’d certainly found that.

“Zoe?”

I was woken up out of what felt to me like sleep, and what to an observer would have looked like feverish activity (I was almost surprised to look at my hand and see a piece of chalk and at the blackboard to see a large b and p that I had carefully and unconsciously traced). I looked round. It was Christine, one of our special-needs teachers. The needs in our school were very special. You would see Christine sitting at improvised desks in the corridor with children suffering from an educational disability: abuse, malnutrition, having recently arrived from a war zone in eastern Europe or central Africa, that sort of thing.

“Pauline asked to see you,” she said. “It’s urgent. I’ll take over here.”

“Why?”

“There’s a mother with her. I think she’s very upset about something.”

“Oh.”

I felt a dull ache in my stomach, that sense of an imminent blow. I looked at the class. What could it be? The turnover in our class was amazing. People moved their children away, sometimes out of the country, often without a word of warning. Other troubled children quickly took their place. We had children under court orders, with social service files. I made a quick count. Thirty-one. They were all here. No toddler had wandered off home without my noticing. There was no medication I should have administered. Nobody was foaming at the mouth. I felt better. How bad could it be?

As I walked the short distance to Pauline’s office, I thought how, if I hated my flat, at least I loved the school. In the small vestibule there was a pool of water made out of bricks with big fat fish in it. I dipped my fingers in it for luck, as I always did when I passed. The school was by the side of another of London’s arterial roads. It was shaken all day by lorries making their way up toward East Anglia or down across the river to Kent and the south coast. To get to the nearest bit of scrubby park, you had to lead a crocodile of children along the road and across two dangerous junctions. But that was what I loved about it. It was something from another world, like a monastery, in the middle of the noise and dust. Even when the children were running around screaming it felt like a refuge.

Maybe it was just those stupid fish that made me feel like that, and I’d probably got it all wrong anyway. I remembered some book of facts I’d read as a child on how water conducted sound better than air. The fish probably spent their entire lives moaning about the noise of the traffic and wishing they were somewhere more desirable. I tried to remember what it was like when I lay submerged in the bath rinsing my hair. Could I hear the lorries hurtling past outside? I didn’t remember.

Pauline was standing by the half-open door with a woman I recognized. They weren’t speaking or doing anything. They had obviously just been waiting in silence for me to arrive. I saw the woman every day at the end of school, hovering at the door of the class. Elinor’s mother. I nodded a greeting at her, but she didn’t catch my eye. I tried to picture Elinor this morning. Had she been upset? I didn’t think so. I tried to picture the girl in the class I had just left behind. Nothing unusual occurred to me.

“Shut the door behind you,” Pauline said, leading me in. The mother stayed outside. She waved me to a chair in front of her desk. “That was Gillian Tite, the mother of Elinor.”

“Yes, I know.”

I noticed that Pauline was white-faced, trembling. She was either deeply upset or so angry that she could barely control herself.

“Did you give the class homework last week?”

“Yes. If you can call it homework.”

“What was it?”

“It was just for fun. We’d been talking about stories and I asked them to draw a picture of one of their favorite stories in their art book.”

“What did you do with the homework?”

“I’m trying to get them used to doing homework on time and giving it in. So I collected the books up on Wednesday-I think it was Wednesday. I’m pretty sure. I looked through them immediately.” I remembered doing it-sitting there while that peculiar man who came to view the flat went through my knicker drawer. That was the day I’d found the letter on the doormat. “I wrote nice comments on them and gave them back on the next morning. I don’t know if Elinor’s mother expected a mark out of ten. They’re too young for that sort of homework.”

Pauline ignored me.

“Do you remember what Elinor drew?”

“No.”

“Does that mean you didn’t look at the drawings?”

“Of course I looked at them. I checked when they began them in class and I wrote a title for each one at the bottom of the page. Then I looked at them all when they were finished. I took them home. I didn’t exactly spend hours on each picture, but I looked at them all and wrote something.”

“Elinor’s mother came in to see me in tears,” said Pauline. “This is Elinor’s drawing. Take a look.”

She pushed a familiar large-format exercise book across her desk. It was open and I recognized my writing at the bottom of the page. Sleeping Beauty. Elinor had made a pretty dismal attempt at copying the words herself. The p was the wrong way round and the second word dribbled away as if it had run out of energy. The drawing was different, though. It wasn’t like a toddler’s drawing. Actually there were traces of Elinor’s scratchy drawing here and there, but it had been embellished and drawn over and filled out. The girl was now lying in a carefully rendered room. More than that, I could see what Pauline couldn’t. It was my room. My bedroom. At least bits of it were. There was the picture of the cow on the wall that I had lived with all my life and the mirror with a string bag hanging from its edge. I’d always meant to put it away and hadn’t got around to it.

On the bed, Sleeping Beauty wasn’t asleep and she wasn’t Sleeping Beauty. She was me. At least she had my glasses on. The bed looked more like a mortuary slab. I mean that there were huge incisions in the body, with bits of internal organ, guts, trailing out. Parts of the body, especially around the vagina-my vagina-were so mutilated as not to be recognizable. Suddenly I started to be sick; bitter bile came up in my mouth, and I managed to hold it down, swallow it. But it burned the back of my throat and made me cough. I took a tissue from my pocket and wiped my mouth. I pushed the book back to Pauline. She looked at me earnestly.

“If you have done this as some very strange kind of joke, then you’d better tell me straightaway. Just tell me: Did you do this?”

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak. Pauline rapped on the table as if trying to awaken me.

“Zoe. Do you realize the position you’re in? What do you expect me to do?”

My eyes were burning. I had to stop myself from crying. I had to be strong, not collapse.

“Call the police,” I said.

ELEVEN

Pauline was dubious and reluctant at first, but I insisted. I wasn’t going to leave her office without something being done. Carthy had given me his card, but my hands were shaking so much that I had to fumble in my purse to get it out. Pauline looked visibly surprised as I laboriously dialed the number while looking at the card. I suppose she thought I was going to dial 999 in some hysterical way.

“It’s happened before,” I said to her in explanation. “In a way.”

I asked for Carthy. He was away. So I was put through to Aldham as a pretty poor second best. I was wild on the phone. I said he had to come over now, here, to the school, right away. Aldham was reluctant but I said if he didn’t come then I would make an official complaint and added to this any threat that came into my mind. He agreed and I gave him the address of the school and quickly put the phone down. I lit a cigarette. Pauline started to say something about no smoking being allowed except in the staff room, but I said that I was very sorry but this was an emergency.

“Are you going back to your class?” she asked.

“It’s not a good time,” I said. “I’d better talk to the police. I need to see what they say. I’ll wait for them here.”

There was quite a long silence. Pauline stared at me as if I were an unpredictable wild animal that needed careful handling. At least that’s what I felt she was doing. I felt I would bristle at the slightest touch. Finally she gave a shrug.

“I’ll talk to Mrs. Tite outside,” she said quietly.

“Yeah,” I said, hardly taking in what she was saying.

Pauline stopped at the door.

“Are you saying that someone else did that? That picture?”

I stubbed out my cigarette and started to light another.

“Yeah,” I said. “Something horrible’s going on. Horrible. I’ve got to get it sorted out.”

Pauline started to say something, then stopped and left me alone in her office. I was hardly aware of the time. I smoked cigarettes one after another. I picked up a newspaper from Pauline’s desk but I wasn’t able to concentrate on it. It must have been half an hour later that I heard voices outside and Aldham came in, escorted by Pauline. She had already told him as much as she knew. I didn’t bother with any greeting.

“Look,” I said, pointing at the art book, which was still open where I had left it. “That’s me. That’s a fucking exact copy of my bedroom. You can’t see that from the fucking pub.”

Maybe Pauline had alerted him to my agitated state, because he didn’t warn me or even snap back at me. He just looked at the drawing, and then muttered something under his breath. He looked stunned.

“Where was this done?” he said, looking up.

“How do I know?” It took an effort to slow myself down, to make myself concentrate. “It was just in a pile of schoolbooks. I had it in school last week on Friday when I collected it from the class.”

“Where were they kept?”

“In the classroom. I took them home last Wednesday and brought them back the following morning.”

“Were they ever out of your sight?”

“Of course they were. What do you think? I didn’t sit and guard them all night. Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. It’s just-oh Christ. Sorry. Let me think. Yes, I went out to see a film with some friends. I must have been out for two, nearly three hours, I guess. It was the day I found the letter on my doormat. I told you about it. The first letter-or I thought it was the first letter. I threw it away.”

Aldham wrinkled up his nose and nodded.

“So,” he said. He looked baffled and anxious. He didn’t meet my eye. “When did you return the books?”

“I told you, the following morning. I just had it for that evening. I’m sure. Completely sure.”

“And it wasn’t discovered until today?”

Pauline stepped forward.

“The mother only looked this morning,” she said.

“Have any other books been tampered with?” Aldham asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. I don’t know, though. I…”

“We’ll check the other art books,” Pauline said.

I lit another cigarette. I could feel my heart beating fast. My pulse seemed to be everywhere, in my face and arms and legs.

“So what do you think?” I said.

“Wait,” he said.

He took a mobile phone from his pocket and retreated into a corner. I heard him ask for DI Carthy and then begin a murmured conversation. Clearly there were different degrees of being unavailable. I heard fragments of one side of the conversation.

“Shall we talk to Stadler? Right, Detective Inspector Cameron Stadler. And Grace Schilling?… Can you give her a bell? And send an officer along with the file. Send Lynne-she’s good at this kind of thing. We’ll meet her there… Right, see you later.”

Aldham put the phone away and turned to Pauline.

“Is it all right if Miss Haratounian comes with us for a while?”

“Of course,” Pauline said. She looked at me with a new concern. “Is everything all right?”

“It’ll be fine,” Aldham said. “We just need to go through some routine procedures.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to pick up Ellie’s art book. “All right?” he said.

It was quite a long drive across London. The permanent traffic jam was even worse on a Friday and a lorry had got stuck turning into a builder’s yard, and Aldham took a shortcut that got caught in a residential traffic system off the Ball’s Pond Road.

“Are we going to the police station?” I asked.

“Later, maybe,” he said, in between cursing other vehicles. “We’re seeing a woman who knows about psycho stuff like this.”

“What did you think of the drawing?”

“Some people, eh?”

But it wasn’t clear whether he was talking about the artist or an old woman crossing the road very slowly. I didn’t follow it up.

After almost an hour we drove along a residential street and arrived at what looked like a school but had a sign outside identifying it as the Welbeck Clinic. A female officer was sitting in reception reading a file. When she saw us she snapped it shut and came forward. She handed it to Aldham.

“You stay here,” he said to me. “Officer Burnett will stay with you.”

“Lynne,” she said to me with a reassuring smile. She had a purple birthmark on her cheek and big eyes. On another day, I would have liked the look of her.

I started to light another cigarette but this really was verboten, so Lynne and I stood out on the step and she had one of my cigarettes as well, like a good girl. She didn’t seem very used to it and kept coughing and spluttering. I think she did it to keep me company. And she didn’t speak, which was a relief. It was just ten minutes before Aldham emerged. With him was a tall woman in a long gray coat. She had blond hair tied up on her head casually. She was carrying a leather briefcase and a khaki canvas shoulder bag. She didn’t look all that much older than me. Early thirties maybe.

“Miss Haratounian, this is Dr. Schilling,” Aldham said.

We shook hands. She looked at me with narrowed eyes, as if I were an unusual specimen that had been brought in for examination.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I’m already late for a meeting, but I wanted a quick word.”

I suddenly felt crushed. I’d been driven across London to talk to a woman as she accelerated past me on the steps of a clinic.

“So what do you think?”

“I think this should be taken seriously.” She gave a sharp look across at Aldham. “Maybe it should have been taken seriously a bit more quickly.”

“But it could be a joke, couldn’t it?”

“It is a joke,” she said, and looked troubled.

“But he hasn’t done anything. I mean, he hasn’t done anything to hurt me physically.” In the face of her grave attention, I wanted to turn the whole thing back into a stupid prank.

“Exactly,” said Aldham, a bit too enthusiastically.

“The problem with that argument,” Schilling said, more to Aldham than to me, “is that…” She paused and collected herself. What had she been going to say? She swallowed. “It’s not much protection for Miss Haratounian.”

“Call me Zoe,” I said. “It’s less of a mouthful.”

“Zoe,” she said. “I want us to have a proper meeting on Monday morning to go over this in considerable detail. I’d like to see you here at nine o’clock.”

“I’ve got a job.”

“This is your job,” she said. “For the moment. I’ve got to go now but… That drawing, that really is your bedroom?”

“I’ve already said that.”

Dr. Schilling was fidgeting, moving from one foot to the other. If she had been a child in my class, I would have sent her to the lavatory.

“You’ve got a boyfriend, right?” she asked.

“Yes, Fred.”

“Do you live together?”

I forced a half smile. “He doesn’t spend the night.”

“What, never?”

“No.”

“This is a sexual relationship?”

“Yeah, we’ve gone all the way to ten or whatever it is, if that’s what you mean.”

She looked at Aldham.

“Talk to him.”

“If you’re thinking it might be Fred,” I said, “you can stop right now. Apart from the fact that it can’t be him, because, oh well, just because, you know.” She nodded, kind but quite unconvinced. “Well, he was away the night it must have happened. He was in the Dales, digging a garden with several other people. He didn’t come back till the following evening. I think you’ll find he’s even caught on camera by Yorkshire TV to prove it.”

“You’re quite sure?”

“Yeah. One hundred percent.”

“Talk to him anyway,” she said to Aldham. Then to me: “I’ll see you on Monday, Zoe. I don’t want to panic you and it may well be nothing. But I think it would be a good idea if you didn’t spend the night alone at your flat for a while. Doug”-that must be Aldham-“look at her locks, all right? Bye, see you Monday.”

Aldham and I walked back to his car.

“That was… er, quick,” I said.

“Don’t worry about her,” Aldham said. “She’s ten percent bullshit and ninety percent covering her arse.”

“She said you should talk to Fred. You don’t want to do that, do you?”

“We’ve got to start somewhere.”

“Now?”

“Do you know where he is?”

“He’s working on a garden.”

“In a garden, you mean.”

“No, Fred says he’s working on a garden. I think it’s meant to sound more artistic. Where are we now?”

“Hampstead.”

“I think he’s fairly nearby. He said north London.”

“Good. Do you know the address?”

“I could ring him on his mobile. But can’t it wait?”

“Please,” said Aldham, offering me his phone.

I found the number in my appointment book and started to dial.

“If you go and see him, can I talk to him first?”

Aldham looked disconcerted.

“What for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Out of politeness maybe.”

I saw Fred before he saw me. He was at the far end of the long back garden of an amazingly grand house. He was moving sideways along a border with a trimmer that was suspended from his shoulders by straps. He was wearing a baseball cap with the peak backward, torn jeans, a white T-shirt, heavy work boots. He also had an eye visor and ear protectors, so that the only way I could make myself known to him was to tap him on the shoulder. He started slightly, even though I had rung ahead to warn him I was coming. He switched off the machine and unclipped the straps. He pulled off the visor and the ear protectors. He seemed dazed by the noise, even though it had stopped, and by the bright light. We were standing in bright sunshine by a border of lilies. Fred was soaked in sweat.

He stood back and stared at me in surprise and even anger. He’s one of those people, I thought, who like to keep everything in their separate compartments: Work and relationships were absolutely separate, like sex and sleep were. I’d leaked over. He wasn’t pleased.

“Hello,” he said, making the greeting into a question.

“Hello,” I said, kissing him, touching his wet cheek. “Sorry. They said they wanted to talk to you. I told them it wasn’t necessary.”

“Now?” he said warily. “We’re in the middle of a job. I can’t just stop.”

“That’s nothing to do with me,” I said. “I just wanted to say to you face-to-face that I was sorry you’re being dragged in.”

He seemed suddenly unyielding.

“What’s all the fuss about?”

I gave him a potted version of what had happened at school, but he didn’t seem to be taking it in. He was like one of those awful people at parties who glance over your shoulder at a better-looking girl over by the drinks. In this case Fred kept looking at Aldham, who was hovering over at the other end of the garden by the door into the house.

“And so she said I should stay away from my flat for the next few days.”

There was a pause and I looked at Fred. I waited for him to speak, to commiserate, to say that of course I could stay with him until all of this had been sorted out, if I would like to. I waited for him to put his arms round me and tell me everything was going to be all right and he was here for me. His face, under the sheen of his sweat, was like a mask. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking at all.

Then his eyes dropped to my breasts. I felt myself beginning to flush with humiliation and the first stirrings of a hot anger.

“I…” he began and then stopped, looking around. “All right. I’ll talk to them for a minute. Nothing to say, though.”

“Another thing,” I said, without even knowing I was going to. “I think we should stop seeing each other.”

That stopped his wandering, mildly lecherous eyes; his vague and disconnected air. He stared at me. I could see a vein throbbing in his temple, the muscles of his jaw clenching and unclenching.

“And why would that be, Zoe?” he said at last. His voice was icy.

“Maybe it’s not a good time,” I said.

He unstrapped the huge trimmer and laid it on the grass.

“Are you breaking off with me?”

“Yes.”

A flush spread over his handsome face. His eyes were completely cold. He looked me up and down, as if I were on display in a shop window and he was deciding whether he wanted to buy me or not. Then he allowed a little sneer to twitch at his mouth.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” he said.

I looked at him, his sweaty face and bulging eyes.

“I’m scared,” I replied. “And I need help, and I’m not going to get it from you, am I?”

“You cunt,” he said. “You stuck-up cunt.”

I turned and walked away. I just wanted to get out of here, to be somewhere safe.

Her hair is hanging loose on her shoulders. It needs washing. The parting is dark, a bit greasy. She has aged in the past week. There are lines running from the wings of her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, dark shadows under her eyes, a faint crease in her brow as if she has been frowning for hours on end. Her skin is looking slightly unhealthy, pale and a bit grubby underneath the tan. No earrings today. She wears an old pair of cotton trousers, oatmeal I think you would call the color, and a white short-sleeved shirt. The trousers are loose on her and they need pressing. There is a button missing on the shirt. She chews the side of her middle finger on her right hand without realizing. She looks around a lot, eyes never resting on one person for more than a second. Sometimes she blinks, as if she is having trouble focusing. She smokes all the time, lighting one cigarette from another.

The feeling inside me is growing. When I am ready, I will know. I will know when she is ready. It is like love; you just know. There is nothing more certain. Certainty fills me up, it makes me strong and purposeful. She gets weaker and smaller. I look at her and I think to myself, I did this.

TWELVE

I banged at the door. Why didn’t she come? Oh please come quickly, now. I couldn’t breathe. I knew I had to, everyone had to breathe, but when I tried, I couldn’t, not properly, though an unbearable pressure was growing in my chest. I took some shallow gasps, sounding as if I had been on a desperate crying jag. There was a tight band of pain round my head and everything was out of focus. Please help me, I couldn’t say, couldn’t shout. There was a boulder in my throat, in my lungs, stopping me from taking a breath. I couldn’t stand up any longer; everything was going blurred and gray-black. So I sank to my knees at the door.

“Zoe? Zoe! For chrissakes, Zoe, what’s happened?” Louise was on her knees beside me, wrapped in a towel and with wet hair. She had her arm around my shoulder and the towel was slipping away but she didn’t mind, darling Louise, and she didn’t mind that people were passing and giving us very strange looks and probably crossing the road to avoid us. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t get any words out, just a strange, stuttering sound.

She took me in her arms and rocked me. Nobody had done that to me since Mum had died. I was like a little girl again, and someone else was taking care of me at last. Oh, how I’d missed that; how I’d missed having a mother. She was whispering things that didn’t make sense, and telling me that everything was going to be all right, everything was going to be just fine, there, there, sssh, that’s right. She was telling me to breathe in and out, calmly. In and out. Gradually I started to be able to breathe once more. But I couldn’t talk yet. Just whimper, like a baby. I felt warm tears slide under my closed lids, onto my hot cheeks. I never wanted to move, not ever again. My limbs felt heavy, too heavy to stir. I could sleep now.

Louise lifted me to my feet, holding her towel round her with one hand. She led me up the stairs into her flat and sat me on the sofa and sat beside me.

“It was a panic attack,” she said. “That’s all, Zoe.”

The panic was gone, but I was left with the fear. It was like being in a cold shadow, I said to Louise. It was like looking off the edge of a tall building, so tall that I couldn’t see the bottom.

I wanted to curl up, sleep until it was over. I wanted someone else to take charge and make everything all right again. I wanted to go put my hands over my ears and close my eyes and it would all go away.

One day, said Louise, trying to be reassuring, you’ll look back on all this and it will be something horrible that happened and went away. You’ll be able to turn it into a story that you tell people about yourself. I didn’t believe her; I didn’t believe it would ever go away. The world had become a different place for me.

I stayed with Louise at her flat in Dalston, near the market. There was nowhere else for me to go. She was my friend and I trusted her and while she was around, small and sturdy and kind, I felt less scared. Nothing would happen to me while Louise was with me.

First I had a bath, much better than if I had taken it in the bathroom in my flat. I lay in the hot water and Louise sat on the toilet seat and drank tea and washed my back for me. She told me about her childhood in Swansea, her single mother and her grandmother, who was still alive; rain, gray slates, massed clouds, hills. She always knew she’d come and live in London, she said.

And I told her about the village I came from, which was more a straggle of houses with a post office. About my father driving cabs at night, sleeping in the day, dying in a quiet, modest kind of way, never wanting to draw attention to himself. And then I told her about my mother dying when I was twelve; how for the two years before she died she had drifted farther and farther away from me, in her own land of pain and fear. I used to stand by her bed and hold her cold, bony hand and feel that she’d become a stranger to me. I would tell her about the things I’d done during the day, or give her messages from friends, and all the time I’d be wanting to be out with my friends, or in my room reading and listening to music-or anywhere that wasn’t here, in this sick room that smelled odd, with this woman whose skull poked through her skin and whose eyes stared at me. But as soon as I’d left her I’d feel guilty and odd and dislocated. And then, when she died, all I wanted was to be back in her bedroom, holding her thin hand and telling her about my day. Sometimes, I said, I still couldn’t believe I would never see her again.

I said that after that I’d never really known what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be. Everything became vague, purposeless. I’d just ended up as a teacher in Hackney. But one day I’d leave, do something else. One day I’d have children of my own.

Louise phoned out for a pizza to be delivered. I borrowed her bright red dressing gown, and we sat on the sofa and ate dripping slices of pizza and drank cheap red wine and watched Groundhog Day on video. We’d both seen it before, of course, but it seemed a safe choice.

A couple of times, her phone rang and she answered it and spoke in a low voice, hand over the receiver, glancing at me occasionally. Once, it was for me: Detective Sergeant Aldham. For a stupid moment, I thought perhaps he was going to say that they had caught him. Desperate hope. He was just checking up on me. He reiterated that I shouldn’t go back to the flat unaccompanied, that I shouldn’t be on my own with any man I didn’t know well, and he told me that they would want to talk to me again on Monday, with Dr. Schilling. Extensive interviews, he said.

“Be alert, Miss Haratounian,” he said, and the fact that he’d managed to get my name right scared me almost as much as his earnest and respectful tone. I’d wanted them to take me seriously. Now they were serious.

Louise insisted on giving me her bed, while she rolled herself up in a sheet on the sofa. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and it is true that I lay for a while with thoughts whirring like bats that had lost their radar in my head. The night was hot and heavy and I couldn’t find a cool patch on the pillow. Louise’s flat was on a quiet street. There was a cat fight, a dustbin lid clanged, a solitary man went down the street singing “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.” But I must have gone to sleep quite soon, and the next thing I remember is the smell of burned toast, and day flooding in through the striped blue curtains, dust motes shimmying in the rays of light. The phone rang in the living room and then Louise poked her head round the bedroom door.

“Tea or coffee?”

“Coffee, please.”

“Toast or toast?”

“Nothing.”

“Toast then.”

She disappeared and I struggled out of bed. I didn’t feel too bad. I didn’t have anything to wear except for the clothes I’d taken off last night, so I pulled them on, feeling a bit grubby.

After I’d eaten toast and drunk coffee, I phoned Guy to find out if anything was happening with the flat. He sounded self-conscious and warily solicitous, not a bit like his usual chirpily ingratiating self.

“I hear you’ve been having a bad time,” he said. Of course, the police would have interviewed him by now.

“Not brilliant. Any news on the sale?”

“Mr. Shale wants to see the house again. Definitely serious. I think we’ve got him sniffing our hook. It’s just a matter of landing him.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked wearily.

“I think he’s ready to make an offer,” Guy said. “The point is, he wonders if today, midday, would be at all convenient.”

“Couldn’t you just show him round yourself?”

The irritating laugh again.

“I could, but there are some questions. I’ll be there as well.”

“Yes. No more strange men.”

So we arranged to meet at the real estate agent’s office at midday, Guy and me and Nick Shale. Safety in numbers. Then the three of us could walk up the road to my flat, whiz round it, and be gone in minutes. Louise insisted on calling a cab to take me there, and we sat for half an hour in traffic, cursing the heat, and arrived late. Both men were waiting for me, Guy in a thin blue suit and Nick in a white T-shirt and jeans. We shook hands formally.

When we reached the flat, Guy opened the door with his set of keys and went in first. Nick stood back to let me enter. There was a funny smell. Sweet but with just a touch of something unwholesome underneath it. Nick wrinkled up his nose and looked at me questioningly.

“I must have left something out,” I said. “I haven’t been here for a bit.”

It was coming from the kitchen. I pushed open the door. The smell was stronger but still nothing I could identify. I looked on the surfaces. Nothing. I looked in the bin but it was empty. I opened the fridge.

“Oh, God,” I said.

The light didn’t come on. It was warm. But it wasn’t too bad. The milk was sour but there wasn’t much else the matter. But I knew where the bad bit would be. I opened the small freezer on top of the fridge. All I could do was groan. It looked as if everything had got mixed with everything else. A tub of coffee ice cream lying on its side had spewed its contents out over an opened packet of prawns. The smell and sight of day-old prawns and melted ice cream in my hot kitchen almost made me gag.

“Fucking hell,” I said.

“Zoe.” Guy put his hand lightly on my shoulder and I jumped back from him. “It was just a stupid accident, Zoe.”

“Wait,” I said. “I’ve got to call the police.”

“What?” he asked, his expression puzzled, almost embarrassed.

I turned on him.

“Shut the fuck up. Just shut up. Don’t come near me, keep off.”

“Zoe-”

“Shut up.”

I was practically screaming at him now. He started to speak and then put up his hands in surrender.

“All right, all right.”

He glanced across at Nick with the apprehensive expression of a man watching a sale ooze away between the floorboards. It didn’t matter. All I cared about now was staying alive. I knew the number by heart. I dialed and asked for Carthy, and this time he came to the phone. No more messing about. He said he would be over right away. And he was there in less than ten minutes, with Aldham and another man who was carrying a large leather bag, and started pulling on thin gloves as soon as he got through the door. They stared at the mess, muttered things to each other in the corner. Carthy was asking me questions, but I couldn’t seem to understand them. He said something about police protection. The other two were in the kitchen. Guy said that they ought to leave and Carthy said no, could they wait out on the stairs.

“He’s been here again. I can’t bear it.”

Aldham came back into the room and looked over at me with concern.

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

Aldham walked over to Carthy and muttered something in his ear. He looked a little shaken. Then he walked over to me, and when he spoke it was very calmly and quietly.

“Zoe,” he said. “There was no note, was there?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see one, but I didn’t look.”

“We’ve looked. We haven’t found one.”

“So?”

“We checked the fridge. It had been unplugged and the kettle had been plugged into the socket.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I think it was a mistake. It’s easy to do.”

“But I wouldn’t-” And then I stopped myself and remembered Louise making me tea, pulling out a cord to plug in the kettle. Oh fuck. I felt my face going red.

There was a silence. Aldham looked at the carpet, Carthy looked at me. I stared back.

“You told me to be alert,” I said eventually.

“Of course,” Aldham said gently.

“It’s easy for you,” I said. “I keep thinking I’m going to die.”

“I know,” said Aldham, his voice almost a whisper now. He put his hand tentatively on my shoulder.

I shook myself free.

“You… you…”

But I couldn’t think of anything rude enough. I turned and ran out, weirdly conscious as I did so that I was leaving them all in my flat.

THIRTEEN

Louise was waiting for me when I got back to her flat. She had a face pack on, so her skin was dead white, except for a naked pink ring round each eye, which gave her a surprised look. As I was telling her what had happened, I realized I was assuming she would let me stay with her. But she made it easy for me.

“Stay as long as you like.”

“I’m taking the sofa, though.”

“Whatever.”

“And paying rent.”

She raised her eyebrows at me, so the wrinkles on her forehead cracked the mask.

“If it makes you feel better. You don’t need to, though. Just water my plants. I always forget.”

I was feeling better. The gripping fear of yesterday was loosening. I never needed to sleep in my flat again, never needed to set eyes on Guy again or show strange men round the rooms, letting them poke in my drawers and stare at my breasts; never needed to lie there in the darkness, listening, waiting, trying to breathe normally. I never needed to see Fred again, either, or his laddish friends. I felt as if I’d shed a dirty, suffocating skin. I’d stay with Louise; we’d eat supper in front of the TV in the evening, paint each other’s toenails. On Monday, I’d see Dr. Schilling. She’d know what to do. She was an expert.

Louise insisted that she had no plans for the weekend, and although I suspected that she had actually canceled everything for me, I was too relieved to make any but the feeblest protest. We bought French baguettes filled with cheese and tomato and walked to the nearby park, where we sat on the dry, baked-yellow grass. The sun was fierce, the air hot and heavy, and the park was crowded. Groups of teenagers playing Frisbee or snuggling in the shade of the trees; families with picnic hampers and balls and skipping ropes; girls in halter tops sunbathing, people with cans of beer, dogs, cameras, kites, bikes, bread for the ducks. They all wore bright, light clothes, had smiles on their faces.

Louise tucked her shirt into her bra and lay back, arms pillowing her head. I sat beside her, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and watched the streams of people as they passed. I waited to glimpse a face I knew, or a face that was looking at me as if it knew me. But I saw no one like that.

“You know what?” I said.

“What?” she said dreamily.

“I’ve been passive,” I said.

“No you haven’t.”

“I have,” I said. “I’ve wanted other people to sort this out for me. I couldn’t be bothered.”

“Don’t be silly, Zoe.”

“It’s true. I think it was to do with being in London. I wanted to be lost. I didn’t want anyone to notice me. I’ve got to look at myself. That’s what I’ve got to do. I’ve got to look at myself and think why somebody would pick on me. Who would do it.”

“Tomorrow,” said Louise. “Look at yourself tomorrow. Today just look after yourself.”

I let the sun soak into my skin, under my grubby clothes. I was tired. More tired than I had ever been, with gritty, aching eyes, limbs that felt too heavy to move. I wanted to have deep baths, sleep for hours on clean sheets, eat healthy food, raw carrots, green apples, drink orange juice and herbal tea. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever want to go to a club again, get drunk or stoned again, be touched by a man again. The hot, sweaty, frantic life I had led in London filled me with vague, pervasive horror. All that noise and effort. Maybe, I thought, I’d even give up cigarettes. Not yet.

We passed a cheery shop selling things for children-bright cotton dungarees and stripy tops, bomber jackets in red and pink and yellow-and Louise dragged me in.

“You’re a child size,” she said, looking at me. “You’ve lost too much weight; we’ve got to fatten you up again. But in the meantime, let’s buy you a couple of things.” So, while the salesgirl looked on rather disapprovingly, I selected a few objects off the rack and took them into the changing room. I pulled the ribbed gray shift, aged thirteen, over my head and examined myself in the mirror. Fine. It made me look flat-chested and sexless. That would do me. Then I took it off and put on a lovely white T-shirt, decorated with tiny stitched flowers.

“Let’s have a look,” shouted Louise. “Come on, you can’t go shopping with a friend if you don’t make it into a fashion show.”

I pulled the curtains open, giggling, doing a turn for her.

“What do you think?”

“Take it,” she ordered me.

“Isn’t it too small for me?”

“It will be after you’ve been staying with me for a few days, and sharing my slobby habits. But now, no, it looks lovely on you.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “Like a flower, sweetheart.”

Later, Louise and I went in her rattling car to the supermarket to stock up. I had gone for a long time living hand to mouth, chips here, a bar of chocolate there, ready-made sandwiches in the smoke-filled staff room. It had certainly been weeks, probably months, since I had actually cooked anything, with a recipe and real ingredients that you have to put together.

“I’ll make us a meal tonight,” I said boldly. I felt as if I was playing at domesticity. I put fresh pasta into our trolley, Spanish onions, large garlics and Italian plum tomatoes, a little screw-top jar of dried mixed herbs; lettuce hearts, cucumber, mangoes, and strawberries. A tub of single cream. A bottle of Chianti. I bought an economy pack of knickers, some deodorant, a washcloth, a toothbrush and toothpaste. I hadn’t cleaned my teeth since yesterday morning. I’d have to collect stuff from the flat.

“Tomorrow,” said Louise decisively. “Leave it for now. We’ll go together tomorrow morning, in my car. You’ve got your children’s clothes till then.”

I picked up some cellophane-wrapped yellow roses from the checkout area, which I added to our trolley.

“I don’t know how to thank you, Louise.”

“Then don’t.”

A friend of Louise’s, called Cathy, came round for supper. She was extraordinarily tall and thin, with an aquiline nose and tiny ears. Louise had obviously told her about me, for she treated me very carefully, kindly, as if I were an invalid. I overcooked the pasta but the tomato sauce was fine, and anyone can chop up mangoes and strawberries and mix them together in a bowl. Louise lit candles and melted them onto old saucers. I sat at the kitchen table, in my new gray shift, light-headed, unreal. There was a hollow feeling in my stomach, but I couldn’t eat very much. I couldn’t speak very much, either. It was enough to sit there, listening to them; words buzzing lightly over the surface of my mind. We drank my Chianti, then most of the white wine that Cathy had brought, and watched an old film on TV. A thriller of some kind but I wasn’t able to concentrate on the details of the plot. My mind would drift away in one scene so in the next scene I didn’t know why the hero was breaking into that warehouse, what he was planning or what he was hoping to find. Outside, it started to rain, and the rain clattered on the roof and rattled on the window. I went to bed before Cathy left. Lying curled up on the sofa in the tiny sitting room, wearing Louise’s skimpy nightdress, I could hear them talking in the kitchen, the comforting hum of conversation, occasionally a peal of laughter, and I drifted off to sleep feeling safe.

The next morning, after breakfast, we went to my flat to collect a few clothes. I wasn’t going to pack everything just yet, although I had no intention of ever living in the flat again, just some basic essentials. It was still raining steadily. Louise couldn’t find anywhere to park near the flat so she stopped on a double yellow line a few yards down from the front door and I said I’d run up.

“I won’t be more than a couple of minutes,” I said.

“Sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

I shook my head and smiled.

“I’m just going to say good-bye.”

There was an air of general squalor and neglect about the place, though I’d only been gone one day, as if the flat knew that nobody cared about it. I went into my bedroom and gathered a few dresses from the wardrobe. Two pairs of trousers, four T-shirts, several knickers, bras, and pairs of socks. Some trainers. That would do for now. I shoved them all in a large hold-all. Then I went into the bathroom, took off the dirty clothes I was wearing, and threw them into a corner. I would collect all my laundry later. Another time.

I heard a click, like a cupboard door closing. It’s nothing, I said to myself. Imagination plays nasty tricks. Back in the bedroom I found some clean underwear. I closed the curtains and stood in front of the mirror to put them on. I saw my face reflected there, smudges under my eyes. My naked body, tanned arms and legs, white belly. I pulled my knickers on and took my new T-shirt-the one Louise said made me look like a flower-out of the bag I had brought with me and pulled it over my head. It was stupid, but I couldn’t quite face wearing anything that smelled of the flat, of my old life. I wanted to be clean and new.

As I pulled the shirt over my breasts, without any warning at all, I felt a grasp around my neck, around my body, and a weight on my back, someone on me. I lost my balance and fell hard with the weight on me, pushing my covered face hard into the carpet. I was stunned, in pain. I felt the hand through the shirt holding my mouth, a warm hand smelling of soap, apple soap from my bathroom. An arm wrapped round my rib cage, just under my breasts.

“Bitch, you bitch.”

I started to writhe, twisting my limbs this way and that, trying to scream, to howl. I couldn’t reach anything-my arms were held-couldn’t do anything. He made no sound, just breathed his hot soft breath into my ear. At last I stopped struggling. Outside someone shouted, the wail of a siren came closer, then faded away. Going somewhere else.

The grip on my neck slackened, I tried to move and to scream, but then it was on my throat. There was nothing I could do. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t fight. Couldn’t scream. I thought about Louise sitting in the car outside, waiting for me, though she didn’t seem near to me now; she seemed a long long way off. Soon maybe she would come to find me. Not soon enough. How stupid, to die like this, before I’d even begun. Before I had had a life. How stupid.

Very slowly, the floor came up to meet me. I felt my head bounce on floorboards, my feet slide across the wood. I heard the rain on the window, pattering gently. I couldn’t speak, no words left to be said now, no time to say them anymore, but somewhere deep inside a voice that was saying: No, please no. Please.