The Way Out Page 3

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ asked the fireman. Marvin nodded, although he wasn’t sure, not sure at all. ‘You can go home now. Get some rest.’ He patted Marvin on the shoulder and moved back to the business of clearing up. Marvin turned and walked, very slowly, back to his house.

  Climbing the step to his kitchen door forced him to lift his feet above the low shuffle that had got him this far. The movement dislodged the hand and it skidded down his leg, trailing fingernails down his thigh, fumbling over his kneecap and finally flopping out from the cuff of his pant leg and onto the floor with a slap. He stooped to pick it up, closed the door behind him and gazed around the room. He felt an obligation to the hand now, to protect it and see that it came to no harm. He would figure out what to do later. For now he laid the hand on the bottom shelf of the fridge and closed the door.

  He went to the sink, poured a cold cup of tea down the plug hole and set the kettle to boil. This was happening more often lately. It felt like he was forever making tea but hardly ever got to drink any. Through the window, he watched the morning dissolve the remains of the night while the wall clock ticked off another new start.

  Marvin sniffed. There was a strong smell of burning. He checked the toaster, the hob and the oven. Sometimes he forgot things so it was best to check. He didn’t want to wind up burning the house down. He sat at the table and picked up the letter from the Council, pausing to inspect a red mark on the back of his left hand. It was roughly the shape of India. How had that happened?

  There was a banging sound. He listened to it for a while before he realised someone was knocking at his front door. The knocking came again, louder this time. He opened the door. The woman on the doorstep beamed at him, grasped his hand and pumped it up and down.

  ‘You’ll be Marvin,’ she shouted. And before he could either agree or disagree, she was in his house, bustling down the hall towards the kitchen. ‘I’m Judith,’ she said, ‘the home help? Remember?’ She laughed. ‘Don’t you worry, Marvin, we’ll get you sorted out.’ She began unpacking a supermarket bag, laying bread, butter, tea and milk out on the worktop. ‘I’ve brought you a few basics. Let’s start with a nice cup of tea. Would you like a cup of tea, Marvin?’

  How to Not Get Eaten by Tigers

  Jack doesn’t look up when the fighting starts. A breeze ruffles the pages of his newspaper and sends the washing on the whirligig spinning. Carol tugs it back around to peg a sock beside its partner. The rusting metal protests with a hoarse squeal. She sighs and goes inside to arbitrate over whose turn it is to choose the cartoon this time, then returns to the garden.

  She watches Jack turn a page and give the newspaper a sharp shake, as if telling the stories to stand up straight while he’s reading them. Sunlight filters through the garden fence and falls in stripes across his face, which reminds her:

  ‘Molly said a funny thing yesterday.’

  There’s something about the way Jack doesn’t react that makes Carol want to snatch the paper from his hands and throw it over the fence. Instead, she puts her energy into telling him what their daughter said, whether he’s listening or not. Despite knowing that the more her words flood out, the more they wash right over him, she can’t stop. This is the way they are now. River and rock. She can’t be sure exactly when they turned each other into opposing forces.

  ‘She said there’s a city where the people all wear masks. Except they wear them on the backs of their heads. Because a tiger won’t attack you if it can see you have a face.’

  Jack still doesn’t look up.

  Carol hears herself becoming insistent, the river flowing higher, wilder.

  ‘The tigers come into this city all the time from the surrounding jungles, looking for people to catch and eat. So the clever residents wear masks on the backs of their heads so the tigers won’t sneak up on them from behind and devour them when they’re walking down the street, going about their daily lives.’

  ‘Where does she get this rubbish from?’ Jack scoffs into his newspaper.

  The whirligig creaks. Carol doesn’t reply, can’t get anything past the stone now lodged in her throat. She turns away towards the house, her face hardening, and sees Molly tiptoeing barefoot through sunlight and shade towards them. Her brother is presumably still inside, relishing control of the television. Molly is singing to herself, a song only she knows. Her buttercup dress and her fine blonde hair light up, luminous in each beam of light, and fall back into more subdued tones when she crosses a bar of shadow. As she travels, she appears to flash on and off like a warning signal, a tiny human lighthouse. Look out. Go no further. Steer clear of the rocks.

  Carol is mesmerized for a moment simply watching her approach. Her nimble feet on the paving stones, her fingertips trailing through the summer air, her beguiling other-worldly cleverness.

  Why doesn’t he look up? What can that newspaper possibly contain, what knowledge could he be gaining from it, that could be more urgent than this? Something fierce surges in Carol’s chest and she holds her breath, fearful of letting this wildness, this hunger, escape and consume them all. She counts – one tiger, two tiger, three tiger…

  Now Jack will look up and see her, really see his daughter, and marvel.

  Now.

  Now.

  Home Security 1

  He wants me to know he’s been here. The bathroom door is open wide, when I know I closed it before I left. I always keep it closed. There’s something distasteful about having the toilet opening off the kitchen. Makes me too aware of my own coiled intestines, like I’m part of the plumbing, a biological conduit for food being processed from one room to the next.

  I approach the open doorway and listen hard. No shuffling feet, no surreptitious breathing, only the white-noise whisper of empty space rubbing against cold tiles.

  You always said this was temporary. That we’d get somewhere better. I never suspected that your interpretation of ‘better’ meant you going back to live with your mother. Lucky you had that escape hatch when reality got too real. When I came back that day and found your keys on the table, weighing down a carefully folded sheet of the good writing paper I’d kept for years but seldom found a use for, I knew unfolding and reading the note was superfluous. The words didn’t tell me anything the arrangement of paper and keys hadn’t told me already.

  Gone back to Mum’s. Sorry.

  That was all. No name. No kisses. No strings attached. Completely free of charge or obligation.

  Our love, no matter what that old song says, did not keep us warm. In fact our love entirely failed, over the last long winter, to prevent the gas being cut off, or the rent running overdue.

  Through the first mild chills of autumn, you conjured a certain romance from our lurching from one month to the next, eating our way to the back of cupboards, to the super-noodles and sardines. The more vile and ill-assorted the remnants we fell back on, the greater your delight in serving dinner by candlelight, a dishtowel folded over your arm, a glass jar filled with weeds, charmingly dishevelled, on the kitchen table. It was all a game to you, and I loved you for that. By your rules, it was all a matter of perception. Part of me knew it was all rubbish, no better than a lie, but how seductive it was to believe that all our problems could evaporate if we simply behaved as though they weren’t there. In this game, the defining characteristic of a problem was only that it was perceived as such. There were no lies and no truths. In the game of perception, those concepts were meaningless. I was enlightened, raised to a new level of consciousness, and you were my guru. You showed me the way and I followed.

  But I still wanted to find another place to live.

  Peter Morgan bothered me, with his puffy black leather jacket, his gold link bracelet, sovereign rings and outsized watch.

  You thought he was funny.

  ‘Of course he has a key,’ you said. ‘It’s his flat after all. He’s not going to come in while we’re here. He’ll just pick up the rent and leave. I’m sure he’s got better things to do with his time than pervi
ng around his tenants’ stuff.’

  ‘But why does he have to come and collect it in cash every month? It’s dodgy.’

  You grinned and put your arms around me. ‘Maybe he’s a secret underworld boss running a ring of Romanian begging orphans and trafficking Latvian teenagers into prostitution in his seedy dens of crime and iniquity.’

  ‘That’s not funny.’

  I thought about Peter Morgan’s eyes, that sideways calculating look he had, the way he never looked at my face.

  ‘You worry too much,’ you said, and kissed the top of my head. ‘It’s not forever.’

  Even on my call centre wage, we might’ve managed if the game of perception had allowed for monthly budgeting but as soon as money came in, you’d burn it off, buying rounds at the union, everyone’s best friend. Carpe diem: seize the day and fuck tomorrow.

  We celebrated Christmas with a half bottle of whisky and a pack of value mince pies, huddled together, fully dressed under the duvet with only our woolly-hatted heads sticking out, our laughter climbing to the ceiling in clouds. But January was unforgiving and by February, instead of red hearts on Valentine’s day, final demands the colour of blood dripped through our letterbox and pooled on the mat.

  Believing in you became a physical effort. I had to concentrate so hard it gave me migraines. But I still tried, for you. I wanted to believe.

  I still do. I’d give anything to go back to that country where there were no consequences. Now I live in a place with harder edges, where things get left behind, where it hurts.

  I miss you.

  Of course I miss you.

  The game was over for you precisely because it could be. Anything can be a game when you know it’s going to end, the board folded up, pieces put back in the box. You took your stuff and more besides, although I can’t see why you need half of it back at your mother’s. She’s probably got spares of everything and another set for ‘best’.

  Peter Morgan will have noticed your stuff is missing from the bathroom, only one toothbrush and no shaver on the shelf, no stubble coating the basin. Has he gone through the rest of the flat and noted the other evidence of absence? That bleak matrix of order imposed by overlaying my possessions with the empty spaces left by yours.

  The possibility of him knowing you’re gone makes the fact of him having been here worse. Not just in the flat and in the toilet, but in my life, my head. His thick white fingers prying, his murky glance sliding under the sheets.

  I think of you, back at your mum’s. Is she tending to your hurts, wrapping you in kindness and unconditional love? I picture you back in your old room, preserved just as it was before you left. Does she knock before she comes in?

  The rent money never came from you but Peter Morgan wouldn’t know that. Perhaps he suspects today’s missing envelope is something to do with the missing person. I wish I’d thought to keep something of you, stashed something away that I could leave casually around the place. Your boots would’ve been perfect. They were so exclusively you. Only you could wear burgundy velvet Doc Martens, the soft, silly material torn and frayed, the canvas showing underneath.

  I should buy a second toothbrush to leave in the bathroom. Maybe some aggressively male toiletries in black and blue packaging. You never went in for any of that but if I’m going to have an imaginary boyfriend, he should have his own personality, don’t you think? Perhaps he could also replace some of the other items you found room for in your surprisingly spacious duffle bag.

  I keep finding things gone. The alarm clock, all the hand towels, the only sharp knife from the drawer, waking up happy, the pasta strainer, my faith in love. These are all things you took.

  And the sex. You took that with you too, and I miss it. Not the soft, cuddly stuff. I could get that from a teddy bear. What I miss is the fucking. The concentrated, sweat-plastered, visceral fucking. The hard stuff. Especially the last weeks, when I’d come home from work and you’d bury yourself inside me before I’d even got my coat off. All the stress and indignity of the day incinerated in the heat of it and we’d emerge, forged securely back together, stronger than anything the world could throw at us. I wonder now what that urgency meant. Were you trying to keep us together or saying goodbye?

  You left the red bills, the overdue rent, Peter Morgan and his key, and the Situations Vacant section of the local free paper.

  Part-time work, no experience needed, immediate start, excellent earning potential.

  I push my misgivings to the back of my mind, along with all the other thoughts I can’t afford, and make the call.

  Fitting

  I was looking for something for the office, something that implied control but not freak. Not that I believe a pair of shoes can reveal anything about anyone’s personality.

  To get by, especially at work, I have to play the game, or at least appear to. Mostly I order whatever I need for this charade on the internet, to save the hassle of physically shopping. Unfortunately my feet, although a perfectly standard size five, are difficult to please. They have exaggerated arches and uncooperative bones that provoke chafing and blisters if not suitably housed. I need to do this the old-fashioned way.

  Shoe shops used to be full of the scent of leather, and as hushed as a library. I’m not sure when this changed but when I entered Shoe You in the Tollgate Centre, it smelled of plastic, sweat, and fake lavender. I squashed my distaste down. I’m not old enough to believe that all the best things are already in the past. Not yet.

  I tried on a pair of black courts I suspected of being too high. Trying to move naturally, I took them for a walk over to the mirrors and circled the island of boxy seats. They looked smart enough but made me feel precarious, unbalanced.

  ‘They are so you,’ the assistant said, without inflection. Her elaborate eye make-up clashed with her grimy company shirt. The edge of a tattoo poked out from beneath her collar, a slender-tipped butterfly wing in dark cobalt. I checked her expression, hoping for sarcasm but detected only boredom. ‘Totally,’ she murmured, gazing into the middle distance and taking a nibble from the frayed skin around her thumbnail.

  Something felt wrong but it wasn’t only the shoes. I stared at the floor and the empty expanse of carpet. My shoes were gone; the shoes I’d walked in wearing, the ones I’d left right there, demurely drawn together next to the seats. Gone.

  Apart from the bored assistant, there were few other people in the shop: a man in a suit trying on a pair of fur-lined moccasin slippers, a toddler flailing on the floor while his mother risked a black eye attempting to grip one foot and push a tiny Nike trainer onto it, a woman standing by a full-length mirror on the far side. She looked unremarkable in every way: mid-length brown hair clipped back from her face, nondescript macintosh, black shoulder bag worn with the strap across her body, about my height and build. Just an ordinary everyday person, nothing special. I watched as she turned her back on the mirror to look over one shoulder then the other, twisting her calves this way and that. The shoes she had on were low and practical, a little worn, and unmistakably mine.

  At first it seemed funny, if a little awkward. I smiled and hesitated over how best to approach her without causing embarrassment. Surely she must have noticed the shoes weren’t new? Perhaps she thought they were made to look that way: distressed, like pre-faded denim. I tried to catch the eye of the assistant but she was talking on the phone behind the counter. I was still dithering, running over possible opening lines in my head, when the woman walked straight out of the shop.

  It was the calm way she did it that shocked me initially, left me gaping. I looked around, hoping for a witness, for corroboration, but it seemed nobody else had seen anything. I stood there, blinking in her wake for a couple of seconds before snapping to attention as if someone had shouted my name while I was half asleep. I crossed the threshold of the shop into the main concourse. ‘Oi! ’Scuse me!’ the assistant yelled, able to see me now I was leaving with goods I hadn’t paid for. Half a dozen heads turned in my direction. I kic
ked the shoes off and continued in my stockinged feet.

  Visible through the beige nylon of my tights, my toes were horribly defenceless: likely to be crushed under boots, run over by shopping trolleys, whacked with walking sticks, bitten by dogs. I felt stricken by a sensation I had only experienced in those sweaty, shameful dreams of public exposure. And it wasn’t only the physical vulnerability. I realised people were averting their eyes from me, tugging their children closer. I had become someone out of control, possibly dangerous. A crazy shoeless woman.

  The thief was almost out of sight, cutting through the crowd with long strides. I pursued her with a kind of skipping run which I hoped minimised the contact my feet had to make with the ground.

  I had to catch her before she left the shopping centre. As we neared the sliding doors to the outside world, I saw it was still raining. My embarrassment evaporated, burned off by the rising heat of indignation. But still I didn’t shout out. I knew that yelling, combined with my display of shoeless derangement, would only appear even crazier. No one would help and in any case the woman would not stop. I had enough money to let her go, turn back, and buy a replacement pair of shoes, but my sense of outrage pushed me forwards.

  The paved pathway around the side of the shopping centre was sheltered and dry but when she moved off across the car park, I paused. This was the point where I should turn back, I knew, but again dismissed the possibility. The wet pavement felt coldly intimate against my unprotected soles. The feet of my tights blackened as dirty water crept between my toes but by this stage nothing could have stopped me.

  I quickened my pace as she crossed the road but gained no ground on her. We continued, separate but together, joined by an invisible cord that neither lengthened nor shortened. I tried to picture her face, thinking that if I could remember what she looked like I would somehow understand her motives. But where her features should have been there was only a vague impression of a face – whatever it was that made her her was impossible to bring to mind. Whenever I came close, my recollection veered away as if repelled by an opposing magnetic charge.