Burial

14

He coped well enough until Tuesday. But on Wednesday he couldn't go to work. He lay in bed as the sun curved and dipped across the sky.

But when he eventually rose at 3 p.m. it still seemed too soon.

He couldn't even drive. He sat at the wheel of his BMW, holding the cold steering wheel. The last parents, ruddy-faced with cold, were collecting their children from the nursery: tottering bundles in big winter coats and hats and colourful Wellingtons.

He called a minicab and waited in the cold, propped against the BMW, until it arrived at the gate. If he sat in the car or went back inside, he knew he would not be able to go through with it.

The minicab was ten minutes late. By then all the children had gone. Through the bright-lit, curtain-less bay windows he watched the nursery workers talking and laughing and tidying up.

The cab driver seemed to pick up on Nathan's mood and didn't talk.

Nathan asked to be dropped at the top of Blackstock Road; he needed the walk. He paid the driver and lit a cigarette and buried his hands deep in the warm pockets of his overcoat. People huddled at bus stops.

It took him another ten minutes to get there.

The estate agent's interior was obscured by cards in the window advertising houses and flats for sale and rent.

He walked in to a blast of central-heating warmth. The office was subdued; young men and women in dark suits sat behind their computers.

There was a waiting area: a low coffee table with property magazines scattered on it, a couple of cheese plants, a water cooler.

Now and again the phones rang, trilling like distant birds.

Nathan opened a magazine and pretended to read.

Then a woman said his name and he looked up and there she was.

She smiled and held out a hand.

'You must be Nathan.'

He'd forgotten how to move. He put down the magazine and coughed and offered his hand and smiled.

'Sorry I was late.'

Up close, she was unmistakably Elise's sister. There was something about the angle at which she held her head, slightly tilted. She was probably in her late twenties. Shorter than Elise, softer. Hair much longer; it was corkscrew curly and red and fell over her shoulders.

She blew a strand of fringe from her brow. She wore a charcoal-grey suit and a crisp white shirt with a large collar, worn over the lapels of her jacket. She seemed harried, busy, happy, clever.

He followed her to her desk. Her screen saver read HOLLY FOX

and gave her mobile phone number.

She offered him a cup of tea. He thanked her.

She had an assistant to make the tea. Nathan had reached a point in his life when there always seemed to be an assistant to make the tea. This particular assistant was an Indian kid in a suit and tie. He couldn't be older than eighteen.

Holly Fox asked Nathan some questions. He coughed into his fist before answering. His throat was so dry.

He croaked, 'I'm sorry.' And she waved, as if his cough was both a trifle and a pleasure. Nathan knew she did this because she was keen to get his details on to her customer database, after which she could sell him a house at the highest possible price. If her earnings were commission-based, she probably needed it.

Nathan wasn't paid on commission, but a proportion of the reps'

salary was, and he knew well what kind of anxiety it could cause especially in the slow, dead months after Christmas. (That's why the reps loved Valentine's Day, and were beginning to like Easter, too.) The tea arrived. It came in a bone-china cup and saucer, which Nathan thought a nice touch, except the saucer was chipped.

Nathan felt it coming back - the ability to do this.

He smiled at her. The smile ignited something inside him, some kind of reserve.

Holly produced an A4 file. His name was clipped to it with a giant paper clip. It contained about thirty sheets of A4, which she flicked through. She removed one or two pages from the sheaf, frowning as if in profound concentration. Then she scrunched the pages into a ball and dumped them in the waste-paper basket.

By such demonstration of mental effort was created the sense of a 'fully bespoke service' as promised in the firm's advertisement.

She showed him the details of three Victorian houses, two flats in Victorian conversions and one loft-style apartment in an area of town he would have feared to visit, let alone live in. The asking price for each property was just slightly above the absolute maximum Nathan had given - this was a trick he hadn't anticipated but which in retrospect looked obvious.

He told her he wasn't really interested in loft style apartment living, and he told her that - although the brushed-metal door handles were very alluring - the flats did seem rather overpriced. That left the three houses. All of them were on different streets in the same estate, all of them were owned by the same property developer.

'Would you like to view them?'

'That would be great. If you don't mind.'

'Not at all. Excuse me, just for a moment.'

She came back with a butterscotch mac slung over her forearm and a small, expensive-looking handbag in her hand. She wore a ring on the third finger of her right hand (a solitaire diamond set in platinum) and a fine chain round her neck, but no other jewellery. She wore good perfume. Nathan thought of a department store.

He followed her through the back of the office, past the tiny, rather grubby kitchen where his tea had been made, and through a rear door that opened on to a muddy yard in which were parked a number of cars. Holly skipped along the edges of shallow puddles, making a disgusted face, saying, 'Icf'

Then she unlocked a black Volkswagen Golf and sat at the wheel.

Nathan buckled himself in the front passenger seat, saying, 'Nice car.'

Holly was looking over her shoulder, reversing into the road.

Concentrating, she said, 'It's a bit of an estate agent's car, really.'

'Isn't that what you are?'

With a few aggressive manoeuvres, passing the wheel through her hands like a rally driver, she nudged and lurched and then sped into the traffic. She held up a practised, dismissively regal hand to thank the van driver who'd been forced on pain of sudden death to let her in.

She turned on the radio. Nathan seldom listened to the radio any more - being able to imagine the psychopathology of the DJ always spoiled it for him. Then Holly's mobile phone went and she took the call - which consisted mainly of her saying: Yes. Yes. When? Not really.

Okay. Well, see if you can - while driving with one hand as speedily as the laws of physics, rather than the laws of the land, permitted.

Exactly as the details suggested, the first house fronted on to a 'quiet, tree-lined street'. But the details had neglected to mention that it stood next to an electricity substation that hummed in a feline and sinister fashion. Its garden backed, via a decrepit wooden fence, directly on to a railway line.

Holly led him through the front door. The house was dark. There was darkness at the top of the stairs, and darkness at the end of the hall. He pretended to examine the external door frame while she turned on the lights, saying: 'Those are new doors. Very solid. Very secure.'

'Right,' said Nathan, as if he cared, then stepped over the threshold.

The

empty house echoed with their footsteps. She led him to the through-lounge: a back and front parlour knocked into one long room, and into the galley kitchen. Its UPVC window overlooked the rear garden, which the developer hadn't got around to cleaning up; there was a rusty old wheelbarrow parked by a pile of bricks; a pile of wet sand on the patio.

The kitchen was newly fitted with cheap materials: maple-look veneer on chipboard. He opened a few cupboards, looked inside the oven. (An instruction booklet, still wrapped in plastic, lay in the spotless grill pan.) Even Nathan could tell this kitchen would begin to fall apart in a matter of months, if not weeks. But he stood and dusted sawdust from his trousers, saying, 'Yeah, I like it.'

He followed her upstairs.

The second house was similar but smaller; the 'office' was barely large enough to accommodate a small table and a laptop. But it stood on a nicer street, with better access to public transport and the local shops. The third house was the biggest of the three, but in spitting distance of a forbiddingly brutal-looking housing estate with whose reputation Nathan was well acquainted.

Outside the third house, they sat in her car. She put the heater on.

She said, 'No pressure. But what do you think? Are we on the right track ?'

'Oh, definitely. You've definitely given me a lot to think about.'

'I'm sure Mr Hinsliffe would take an offer,' said Holly. Mr Hinsliffe was the developer. 'Things are quite slow at the moment.'

'Okay,' said Nathan. 'I'll bear that in mind. Let me think about it.'

'Okay. What I'll do is this - I'll give you a call when a property comes on the market that you might be interested in. Things are coming in and going out all the time -- weekends, especially.

Something good can come on at nine and be sold by lunchtime.

Happens all the time. It's a solid market. But you're in a strong position to buy, mortgage agreed, no chain, so I can afford to give you priority treatment. How does that sound?'

He nodded, as if she had spoken with great wisdom and kindness and had not flatly contradicted her earlier claim that things were slow at the moment.

He thought, I left your sister alone in the dark.

He said, 'That sounds great.'

'Great.'

She dropped him off at the high street.

In no rush, he caught the bus home.

He got back to discover his flat had changed. The interior angles seemed more acute. The walls seemed to huddle over him.

He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. In feverish half-dreams, it seemed the flat was two dimensional - a drawing on a scrap of paper that, with him still scribbled on it, was about to be squeezed into a ball by a giant hand, and thrown away.