Shatter - v4, page 33
A crowd is being sucked inwards, unable to resist a playground fight where someone has taken on the school bully. Julianne comes rushing back, pushing through onlookers, knowing something terrible is afoot. She says my name. She begs me to shut up and tugs at my arm, but it’s too late.
‘You see, I know your type, Dirk. I know your shabby superior smile and condescending attitude towards waiters and tradesmen and shopgirls. You use sarcasm and overweening formality to gloss over the fact that you have no real influence or power.
‘So you try to make up for this by taking away what other men have. You tell yourself it’s the challenge that excites you; the chase, but the truth is you can’t hold onto a woman for more than a few weeks because pretty quickly they work out that you’re a pretentious, stuck-up, self-centred bastard and then you’re fucked.’
‘Please, Joe, don’t say any more. Please shut up.’
‘I notice things, Dirk, little details about people. Take you, for example. Your fingernails are flat and yellowing. It’s a sign of an iron deficiency. Maybe your kidneys aren’t working properly. If I were you I’d go easy on the Viagra for a while until I got myself checked out.’
52
By the time I reach the hotel room Julianne has locked herself in the bathroom. I tap on the door.
‘Go away.’
‘Please open up.’
‘No.’
I press my ear to a wooden panel and imagine I hear the faint silky slithering of her gown. She might be kneeling, pressing her ear against the door, opposite mine.
‘Why do you do it, Joe? Whenever I’m happy you do something to mess it up.’
I take a deep breath. ‘I found a receipt from Italy. You threw it away.’
She doesn’t respond.
‘It was for room service. Breakfast. Champagne, bacon, eggs, pancakes… more food than you could ever eat.’
‘You went through my receipts?’
‘I found it.’
‘You went through the rubbish— spying on me.’
‘I wasn’t spying. I know what you normally have for breakfast. Fresh fruit. Yoghurt. Bircher muesli…’
My certainty and loneliness are now so intense they seem perfectly matched. I’m drunk. I’m trembling. I’m remembering the events of the night.
‘I saw the way Dirk looked at you. He couldn’t keep his hands off you. And I heard the snide comments and the whispers. Everyone in that room thinks he’s sleeping with you.’
‘And you do too! You think I’m fucking Dirk. You think I ordered breakfast after we fucked all night?’
She hasn’t denied it yet. She hasn’t explained.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the dress?’
‘He only gave it to me yesterday.’
‘Was the lingerie also a bonus… a present from him?’
She doesn’t answer. I press my ear harder to the door and wait. I hear her sigh and move away. A tap is turned on. I wait. My knees are stiff. I feel a coppery taste in my mouth, a hangover in the making.
Finally she speaks, ‘I want you to think very carefully before you ask me the question, Joe.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You want to know if I fucked Dirk? Ask me. But when you do, remember what’s going to die. Trust. Nothing can bring it back, Joe. I want you to understand that.’
The door opens. I step back. Julianne has wrapped a white towelling robe around her and cinched it tightly at the waist. Without meeting my eyes, she walks to the bed and lies down, facing away from me. The mattress springs barely move under her weight.
Her dress is lying on the bathroom floor. I fight the urge to pick it up and run it through my fingers, to rip it into shreds and flush it away.
‘I’m not going to ask,’ I say.
‘But you still think it. You think I’ve been unfaithful.’
‘I’m not sure.’
She falls silent. The sadness is suffocating.
‘It was a joke,’ she whispers. ‘We worked really late to close the deal, tying up the loose ends. I crashed. Exhausted. It was too late to call London so I emailed Eugene with the news. He didn’t get the message until he arrived at the office. He told his secretary to call my hotel and order me a champagne breakfast. She didn’t know what to order so he said: “Order the whole damn menu”.
‘I was asleep. Room service knocked on my door. There were three trolleys of food. I rang the kitchen and said there must be a mistake. They told me my company had ordered me breakfast.
‘Dirk phoned from his room. Eugene had done the same thing to him. I was too tired to eat. I rolled over and went back to sleep.’
My left hand is shaking in my lap. ‘Why didn’t you mention it? I picked you up at the station and you didn’t tell me.’
‘You’d just watched a woman jump off a bridge, Joe.’
‘You could have told me later.’
‘It was Eugene’s idea of a joke. I didn’t think it was very funny. I hate seeing food go to waste.’
My tuxedo feels like a straightjacket. I look around the hotel room with its pseudo luxuries and generic furnishings. It’s the sort of place that Dirk would bring another man’s wife.
‘I saw the way he looked at you… staring at your breasts, putting his hand on your back, sliding it lower. I didn’t imagine that. I didn’t imagine the whispers and innuendos.’
‘I heard them too,’ she replies. ‘And I ignored them.’
‘He bought you lingerie… and that dress.’
‘So what! You think I sleep with men who buy me things. What does that make me, Joe? Is that what you think of me?’
‘No.’
I sit on the bed next to her. She seems to flinch and move further away. The alcohol has hit my head, which is pounding. Through the open bathroom door, I barely recognise my own reflection.
Julianne speaks.
‘Everyone knows Dirk is a sleaze. You should hear the jokes in the secretarial pool. The man puts his business card in the women’s toilets like he’s touting for clients. Eugene’s secretary, Sally, called his bluff in the summer. In the middle of the office she unzipped Dirk’s fly, grabbed his penis and said, “Is that all you’ve got? For someone who talks about it so much, Dirk, I thought you’d have something more substantial to back it up.” You should have seen Dirk. I thought he’d swallowed his tongue.’
Devoid of emotion, her voice is a monotone, unable to raise itself an octave above disappointment or sadness.
‘In the old days you would never have let a man get away with touching you like Dirk did tonight.’
‘In the old days I didn’t need this job.’
‘He wants people to think he’s sleeping with you.’
‘Which is only a problem if people believe him.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about him?’
‘I did. You were never listening. Every time I mention work, you turn off. You don’t care, Joe. My career isn’t important to you.’
I want to deny it. I want to accuse her of changing the subject and trying to deflect blame.
‘You think I choose to be away from you and the girls?’ she says. ‘Every night I’m away, I go to bed thinking about you. I wake up thinking about you. The only reason I don’t think about you all the time is that I have a job to do. I have to work. We decided that. We chose to move out of London for the sake of the girls and for your health.’
I’m about to argue but Julianne hasn’t finished.
‘You don’t know hard it is… being away from home.’ She says.’ Missing things. Calling and finding out that Emma has learned a skip or hop on one leg or to ride her tricycle. Finding out that Charlie has had her first period or is being bullied at school. But do you know what hurts the most? When Emma fell over the other day, when she was hurt and scared, she called for you. She wanted your words, your hugs. What sort of mother can’t comfort her own child?’
‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’ I say, reaching across the bed to hold her. She shrugs my hands away. I have lost that privilege. I must gain it back. I’m normally so good with words, but now I can’t think of anything to free her from her disappointment in me, to win her heart, to be her boy.
Countless times I told myself there had to be an innocent explanation for the hotel receipt and the lingerie and the phone calls, but instead of believing this, I spent weeks trying to prove Julianne’s guilt.
I stand, swaying. The curtains are open. A cold stream of headlights is edging along Kensington High Street. Above the opposite rooftops I see the glowing dome of the Royal Albert Hall.
Julianne whispers, ‘I don’t know you any more, Joe. You’re sad. You’re so, so sad. And you carry it around with you or it hangs over you like a cloud, infecting everyone around you.’
‘I’m not sad.’
‘You are. You worry about your disease. You worry about me. You worry about the girls. That’s why you’re sad. You think you’re the same man, Joe, but it’s not true. You don’t trust people any more. You don’t warm to them or go out of your way to meet them. You don’t have any friends.’
‘Yes I do. What about Ruiz?’
‘The man who once arrested you for murder.’
‘Jock, then.’
‘Jock wants to sleep with me.’
‘Every man I know wants to sleep with you.’
She turns and gives me a look of pity.
‘For such a clever man, how do you manage to be so stupid and self-absorbed? I’ve seen what you do, Joe. I’ve seen how you study yourself every day, looking for signs, imagining them. You want to blame someone for your Parkinson’s, but there’s nobody to blame. It just happened.’
I have to defend myself.
‘I am the same man. You’re the one who looks at me differently. I don’t make you laugh because when you look at me, you see this disease. And you’re the one who’s distant and distracted. You’re always thinking about work or London. Even when you are at home, your mind is somewhere else.’
Julianne snaps back, ‘Try psychoanalysing yourself, Joe. When did you last truly laugh? Laugh until your stomach hurt and you got tears in your eyes.’
‘What sort of question is that?’
‘You’re terrified of embarrassing yourself. You panic about falling over in public or drawing attention to yourself but you don’t mind embarrassing me. What you did tonight— in front of my friends— I’ve never been so ashamed… I… I…’ She can’t think of the words. She starts again.
‘I know you’re clever, Joe. I know you can read these people; you can rip apart their psyches and target their weaknesses, but these are good people— even Dirk— and they don’t deserve to be ridiculed and humiliated.’
She squeezes her hands between her knees. I have to win something back. Even the worst reconciliation with Julianne will be better than the best pact I could make with myself.
‘I thought I was losing you,’ I say, plaintively.
‘Oh, you have a bigger problem than that, Joe,’ she says. ‘I may already be lost.’
53
The minute hand has clicked past midnight and the second hand is racing away into a new day. The house is dark. The street is silent. For the past hour I have watched the moon rising above the slate rooftops and the latticed branches, creating shadows in the garden and beneath the eaves.
The sky has a sickly yellow glow from the lights of Bath and the smell of compost adds to the sense of decay and foulness. The mixture is too wet. Good compost is a combination of wet and dry: kitchen scraps, leaves, coffee grounds, eggshells and shredded paper. Too wet and it smells. Too dry and it doesn’t break down.
I know these things because my pop had an allotment for thirty years on waste ground behind the railway yards at Abbey Wood. He had a shed and I remember standing among the tools and flowerpots and seed packets, my shoes cloyed with soil.
Pop looked like a scarecrow in the garden, dressed in rags and an old hat. He grew potatoes mainly and brought them home in a Hessian sack stiff with dried mud. I was made to wash them in the sink with a scrubbing brush. I remember him telling me a story of someone who dug up an old World War II hand grenade among their potatoes and didn’t discover it until they were scrubbing the spuds. It blew them into the garden. I was always careful after that.
I look at my watch again. It’s time.
Keeping low, I follow a grey stone fence along the right side of the garden until I reach the corner of the house. I push through the shrubs. Peer through the window. There are no alarms. No dogs. A forgotten towel flaps on the clothesline, waving to nobody.
Crouching at the back door, I unroll the fabric pouch, laying out my tools: the diamond picks, rakes, combs, snakes, shallow picks and a hand-made tension wrench of black sprung steel fashioned from a small allen key that I flattened at one end with a grinder.
I link my fingers and push them away until tiny bubbles of gas trapped in the fluid between the joints expand and burst making a cracking sound.
The lock is a double plug Yale cylinder. The plug will open clockwise, away from the doorframe. I slide a snake pick into the keyway, feeling it bounce over the pins and increase the torque on the tension wrench. Minutes pass. It’s not an easy lock. I try and fail. One of the middle pins won’t lift up far enough as the pick passes over it.
I reduce the torque on the wrench and start over, concentrating on the back pins. First I try a light torque and moderate pressure, trying to feel for the click when a pin reaches the sheer line and the plug rotates ever so slightly.
The last of the pins is down. The plug rotates completely. The latch turns. The door opens. I step inside quickly and close it behind me, taking a pencil torch from my shirt pocket. The narrow beam of light sweeps over a laundry and the kitchen beyond it. I edge forward, easing my weight on the floorboards, listening for creaks.
The kitchen benches are clear apart from a glass jar of teabags and a bowl of sugar. The electric kettle is still warm. The torch beam picks out labels on metal tins: flour, rice and pasta. There is a drawer for cutlery, another for linen tea towels and a third for odds and ends like hairgrips, pencils, rubber bands and batteries.
It’s a nice house. Neat. A central hallway joins the front and rear. There’s a lounge on my left.
The blue upholstered sofa has large cushions. It faces a coffee table and a TV on a stand. Small brass animals line the mantelpiece next to a wedding photograph and a craft project, homemade candles, a porcelain horse, a mirror surrounded by seashells. I catch sight of my reflection. I look like a long-legged black insect, a night creature hunting its prey.
They’re sleeping upstairs. I am drawn towards them, testing the weight of each step. There are four doors. One must be a bathroom. The others are bedrooms.
There is a sound like an insect trapped against glass. It is a portable music player. Snowflake must have fallen asleep with it plugged into her ears. Her bedroom door is open. Her bed is beneath the window. The curtains only half-closed. A single square of moonlight paints the floor. I cross the room and kneel next to her, listening to her soft sweet breath. She looks like her mother, with the same oval-shaped face and dark hair.
I lean close to her face, breathing as she breathes. Her stuffed animals have been relegated to a box in the corner. Pooh has been usurped by Harry Potter and overpaid football stars.
I used to live in a house like this. My daughter slept down the hall from me. I wonder what she’s doing now? I wonder if she bites her nails; does she sleep on her side; has she grown her hair long; does she wear it out; I wonder if she’s bright, if she’s courageous, if she thinks of me?
Backing away, I gently close her door and turn to other rooms, pressing my ear against the panelled wood, listening for the sounds of sleep or silence. Easing open another door, I find it empty. The queen-sized bed has a patchwork quilt, topped with throw pillows. I run my hands beneath them, looking for a nightdress. Nothing.
I turn to the wardrobe, a hand on the brass handle, my face in the mirrored door and listen to the house again. Nothing. Pushing through the clothes, I find her smell, the one I want, her deodorant and perfume. Fake smells. During my jungle training we were taught never to use soap, or shaving foam, or deodorant. Artificial smells can give a soldier away to the enemy. To survive in the jungle you must become one with the jungle, like the animals.
Women don’t smell like women are supposed to. It comes from a bottle. Manufactured. Deodorised. This one has some nice clothes, but there is a curious formality about her: the mid-length skirts, dark tights and cardigans. She’s as formal as a flight attendant but not so glossy. I’m going enjoy breaking her.
There are boxes of shoes at the base of the wardrobe. Flipping open the lids, I sort through them. Slingback sandals. Peep-toe mules. Court shoes. Flats. Wedges. She likes boots. There are four pairs, two of them with pointy toes and fuck-me heels. Soft leather. Italian. Expensive. I put my nose inside and inhale.
I sit at her dressing table and sort through her lipsticks. The dark vermilion is best; it complements her skin colour. And the malachite necklace in the velvet box will look very pretty on her naked skin.
Stretching out on the bed, I gaze at the ceiling. A square hatch in the corner leads to the attic. I could hide there. I could watch over her like an angel. An avenging one.
There are footsteps on the landing. Someone is awake. A woman. I wait, wondering if I will have to kill her. A toilet flushes across the landing. Pipes rumble and the cistern refills. Whoever it is, has gone back to bed, with her foul breath and bleary eyes. She won’t find me.
Rising from the bed, I close the wardrobe door, making sure everything is back in its place. Returning to the landing, I retrace my steps downstairs, along the hallway, into the kitchen, out the back door.
Pausing at the end of the garden, I watch the wind testing the pines and feel the first drops of icy rain. I have marked my territory and drawn invisible battlelines. Hurry morning.
