Killing Me Softly

Six

I was late for work because I had to wait for the art shop round the corner from the office to open. I stood for a while looking at the river, hypnotized by the surprising strength of its currents, spinning this way and that. Then I spent far too long choosing a postcard from the revolving racks. Nothing seemed right. Not the reproductions of old masters, nor the black-and-white photographs of urban streets and picturesque poor children, nor those expensive cards with collages of sequins and shells and feathers stuck decoratively in the middle. In the end I bought two: one a muted Japanese landscape of silver trees against a dark sky, and the other a Matisse-style cut-out, all joyful simple blues. I bought a fountain pen as well, although I had a whole drawer full of pens in my desk.

What should I say? I shut the door to my office, took out the two cards and laid them in front of me. I must have sat like that for several minutes, just staring at them. Every so often I would allow his face to drift across my consciousness. So beautiful. The way he looked into my eyes. Nobody had ever looked at me like that before. I hadn’t seen him all weekend, not since that Friday, and now…

Now I turned over the Japanese card and unscrewed my fountain pen. I didn’t know how to start. Not ‘dearest Adam’ or ‘darling Adam’ or ‘sweetest love’; not that any longer. Not ‘dear Adam’ – too cold. Not just ‘Adam’. Nothing then: just write.

‘I cannot see you any more,’ I wrote, careful not to smudge the black ink. I stopped. What else was there to say? ‘Please do not try to make me change my mind. It’s been –’ Been what? Fun? Tormenting? Stunning? Wrong? The most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me? It has turned my whole life upside down?

I tore up the picture of the Japanese trees and put it into the bin. I picked up the splashy cut-out. ‘I cannot see you again.’

Before I could add anything else, I slipped the card into an envelope and wrote Adam’s name and address on it in neat capitals. Then I walked out of the office holding it, and took the lift down to reception, where Derek sat with his security passes and his copy of the Sun.

‘You couldn’t do something for me, could you, Derek? This letter needs to go urgently and I wondered if you could send a bike for it. I would ask Claudia but…’ I let the sentence hang unfinished in the air. Derek took the envelope and looked at the address.

‘Soho. Business, is it?’

‘Yes.’

He put the envelope down beside him. ‘All right, then. Just this once, though.’

‘I really appreciate it. You’ll see it goes immediately?’

I told Claudia that I had a lot of work to catch up on and could she not put through telephone calls unless they were from Mike or Giovanna or Jake. She looked at me curiously, but said nothing. It was half past ten. He would still be thinking that at lunch-time I would be with him, in his darkened room, letting the world go hang. By eleven, he would have received the note. He would run down the stairs and pick up the envelope and slide his finger under the flap and read that one sentence. I should have told him I was sorry, at least. Or that I loved him. I closed my eyes. I felt like a fish on dry land. I was gasping, and every breath hurt.

When Jake had given up cigarettes a few months ago, he had told me that the trick was not to think about not smoking: what you are denying yourself, he’d said, becomes doubly desirable and then it’s like a kind of persecution. I touched my cheek with one finger and imagined it was Adam touching me. I mustn’t let myself picture him. I mustn’t talk to him on the telephone. I mustn’t see him. Cold turkey.

At eleven o’clock I closed the blinds against the grey, drizzly day, just in case he came to the office and stood outside waiting for me. I didn’t look down into the street. Claudia brought me a list of people who had called and left messages; Adam hadn’t tried to phone. Perhaps he was out, and still didn’t know. Perhaps he wouldn’t get the note until he came back to his flat to meet me.

I didn’t go out for lunch, but sat in my dimmed office staring at my computer screen. If anyone had come in, they would have assumed I was busy.

At three, Jake rang to say that on Friday he might have to go to Edinburgh for a couple of days, on business.

‘Can I come with you?’ I asked. But it was a stupid idea. He would be working all day; I couldn’t just take off from Drakon at the moment.

‘We’ll go away together soon,’ he promised. ‘Let’s plan it tonight. We can have an evening in, for a change. I’ll buy us a takeaway. Chinese or Indian?’

‘Indian,’ I said. I wanted to throw up.

I went to our weekly conference, where Claudia interrupted us to say there was a man who wouldn’t leave his name but urgently wanted to speak to me. I told her to say that I was unavailable. She went away, looking interested.

At five, I decided to go home early. I left the building by the back entrance, and got a cab home through the rush hour. I put my hands over my face and closed my eyes when we drove past the main entrance. I was first home, and I made it to my bedroom – our bedroom – and lay on the bed, where I curled up and waited for time to pass. The phone rang and I didn’t answer it. I heard the letterbox flap, something hit the mat and I struggled up. I had to get that before Jake did. But it was just junk mail. Did I want all my carpets specially cleaned? I went back and lay on the bed and tried to breathe calmly. Jake would be home soon. Jake. I thought about Jake. I pictured the way he frowned when he smiled. Or the way he poked his tongue out slightly when he was concentrating. Or the way he hooted when he laughed. Outside it was dark and the street lamps glowed orange. I could hear cars, voices, children chattering. At some point I fell asleep.

I pulled Jake down to me in the darkness. ‘The curry can wait,’ I said.

I told him I loved him, and he told me that he loved me too. I wanted to say it over and over, but I stopped myself. Outside it rained gently. Later, we ate the cool takeaway from the silver-foil containers or, rather, he ate and I picked, washing it down with large mouthfuls of cheap red wine. When the telephone rang I let Jake answer, although my heart pounded furiously in my chest.

‘Whoever it was put the phone down,’ he told me. ‘Probably some secret admirer.’

We laughed together merrily. I imagined him sitting on the bed in his empty flat, and took another gulp of wine. Jake suggested going to Paris for a weekend. You could get good deals on Eurostar at this time of year.

‘Another tunnel,’ I said. I waited for the phone to ring again. This time I would have to pick it up. What should I do? I tried to think of a way of saying, ‘Don’t call me,’ without Jake being suspicious about it. But it didn’t ring. Maybe I had just been a coward and should have told him to his face. I couldn’t have told him to his face. Every time I looked at his face I climbed into his arms.

I glanced across at Jake, who smiled at me and yawned. ‘Bed-time,’ he said.

I tried. Over the next few days, I really, really tried. I wouldn’t take any of his calls at the office. He sent me a letter there, too, and I didn’t open it but tore it into shreds and threw it into the tall metal refuse container by the coffee machine. A few hours later, when everyone else was at lunch, I went to retrieve it but it had been emptied. Only one little piece of paper was still there, with his slashing handwriting across it: ‘… for a few…’ it read. I stared at the pen strokes, touched the scrap of paper as if a bit of him was left on it, indelible him. I tried to construct whole sentences around the three neutral words.

I left work at odd times, and by the back entrance, sometimes in great protective crowds of people. I avoided central London, just in case. In fact, I avoided going out. I stayed at home with Jake, closing the curtains against the vile weather, and watched videos on TV and drank a bit too much, enough anyway to send me blundering to sleep each night. Jake was being very attentive. He told me that I had seemed more contented over the past few days, ‘not always rushing on to the next thing’. I told him that I felt good, great.

On Thursday evening, three days after the note, the Crew came round: Clive, Julie, Pauline and Tom and a friend of Tom’s called Duncan, Sylvie. Clive brought Gail with him, the woman who had grabbed his elbow at the party. She was still holding on to his elbow now, and looking a bit bemused, as well she might, since it was only their second date and it must have felt like being introduced to a whole extended family at once.

‘You all talk so much,’ she said to me, when I asked her if she was okay. I looked around. She was right: everyone in our living room seemed to be talking at once. All of a sudden I felt hot and claustrophobic. The room seemed too small, too full, too noisy. I put my hand up to my head. The phone was ringing.

‘Can you get that?’ called Jake, who was getting beer from the fridge. I picked up the receiver.

‘Hello.’

Silence.

I waited for his voice but there was nothing. I put the phone down and went dully back into the room. I looked around. These were my best and oldest friends. I had known them for ten years and in ten years’ time I would still know them. We would still meet up and tell each other the same old stories. I watched Pauline talking to Gail, she was explaining something. She put her hand on Gail’s arm. Clive approached them, looking nervously self-conscious, and the two women smiled up at him; kind. Jake came across and handed me a can of beer. He put his arm around my shoulder and hugged me. Tomorrow morning he was off to Edinburgh.

After all, I thought, it was beginning to get better. I could live without him. Days were going past. Soon it would be a week. Then a month…

We played poker: Gail won and Clive lost. He clowned around for her benefit and she giggled at him. She was nice, I thought. Better than Clive’s usual girlfriends. He would go off her because she wouldn’t be cruel enough to keep his adoration.

The next day I left work at the usual time, and by the main entrance. I couldn’t hide from him for the rest of my life. I pushed my way through the doors, feeling dizzy, and looked around. He wasn’t there. I had been sure he would be. Maybe all those times I had sneaked out of the back he hadn’t been there either. A terrible disappointment rose in me, which took me by surprise. After all, I had been going to avoid him if I saw him. Hadn’t I?

I didn’t want to go home, nor did I want to wander across to the Vine to meet everyone. I suddenly realized how tired I was. It took an effort to put one foot in front of the other. I had a dull thudding ache between my eyes. I drifted along the street, jostled by the rush-hour crowds. I peered into shop windows. It had been ages since I bought any new clothes. I made myself buy an electric-blue shirt that was in a sale, but it felt a bit like force-feeding myself. Then I dawdled along in the dwindling crowd, going nowhere in particular. A shoe shop. A stationer’s. A toy shop, where a giant pink teddy sat in the middle of the display. A wool shop. A book shop, although there were other objects that gleamed in the window, too: a small axe, a coil of thin rope. Warm air gusted from its open door, and I went in.

It wasn’t really a book shop, though it had books in it. It was a climbing shop. I must have known that all the time. Only a few other people were in there, all men. I gazed around, noting the nylon jackets, gauntlets made from mysterious modern fabrics, the sleeping bags stacked on a large shelf at the back. There were lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and small camping stoves. Tents. Vast, weighty boots, gleaming and hard. Backpacks with lots of side pockets. Sharp-looking knives. Mallets. A shelf full of adhesive bandages, iodine swabs, latex gloves. There were sachets of food, energy bars. It looked like equipment for people venturing into outer space.

‘Can I help you?’ A young man with bristly hair and a puggish nose stood by my side. He was probably a climber himself. I felt guilty, as if I were in the shop under false pretences.

‘Um, no, not really.’

I sidled across to the bookshelves and let my eyes slide over the titles: Everest without Oxygen, The Fierce Heights, Roped Together, The Third Pole, The A–Z of Mountaineering, First Aid for Climbers, Head in the Clouds, A Kind of Grace, On Top of the World, The Effects of Altitude, K2: a Tragedy, K2: the Terrible Summer, Climbing for their Lives, On the Edge, The Abyss…

I pulled out a couple of books at random and looked at their index under the Ts. There he was, in On Top of the World, a coffee-table book about Himalayan climbs. Just the sight of his name in type made me shiver and feel queasy. It was as if I had been able to pretend he didn’t exist outside that room in Soho, didn’t have a life except for the life he spent with me, on me. The fact that he was a climber, something I knew nothing about, had made it easier for me to treat him as some kind of fantasy figure; a pure object of desire, only there when I was there. But he was in this book, in black and white. Tallis, Adam, on pages 12–14, 89–92, 168.

I turned to the section of colour photographs in the middle of the book and stared at the third one, in which a group of men and a few women in nylon or fleece jackets, snow and rubble at their backs, smiled into the camera. Except he wasn’t smiling, he was gazing. He hadn’t known me then; he had a whole other life. He probably loved someone else then, though we had never talked about other women. He looked younger, less bleak. His hair was shorter and had more of a curl to it. I turned the pages and there he was, on his own and looking away from the camera. He was wearing sunglasses, so it was difficult to make out his expression or what he was looking at. Behind him, in the distance, there was a small green tent, and beyond that a swoop of mountain. He had thick boots on and there was wind in his hair. I thought he looked distressed, and although that was long ago, in another world and before me, I had an intense desire to comfort him. The agony of my renewed desire took my breath away.

I snapped the book shut and put it back on the shelf. I took out another book and again looked in the index. There were no Tallises there.

‘I’m sorry, we’re closing now.’ The young man was back again. ‘Do you want to buy anything?’

‘Sorry, I didn’t realize. No, I don’t think so.’

I made it to the door. But I couldn’t do it. I turned back again, snatched up On Top of the World and took it over to the till. ‘Am I in time to buy this?’

‘Of course.’

I paid and put it in my bag. I wrapped it in my new blue shirt, so that it was quite hidden.