Dying for Christmas (3 page)

‘Funny to think that a hundred years ago this place would have been used for storing and loading tea or tobacco,’ said Dominic. ‘They’d just have tipped the stuff out of here on to barges, and away they’d go.’

A pleasure boat came past, rocking from side to side on the choppy water, its doors firmly closed to the early evening chill. Inside, tourists in brightly coloured ski jackets held up iPhones to the windows to film their journey. What would they see, when they played it back, I wondered? A couple on a balcony, dwarfed by the building behind them. Would they imagine us to be married? Husband and wife?

‘Just down there is Execution Dock,’ Dominic said, pointing away from the bridge to where the river disappeared round a bend to the left. ‘It’s where they used to hang people accused of piracy. Apparently on hanging day the whole river would be awash with boats crammed with people craning to see.’

‘Oh,’ I said, suddenly aware of the voices clamouring to be heard over the roaring of the wind.

‘To make the spectacle more entertaining, they used a short rope which didn’t kill them instantly but left them to suffocate slowly, which made their arms and legs spasm so it looked like they were dancing. Afterwards they were covered in tar and their bodies were displayed in iron cages along the river as an example. One of them, Captain Kidd, was left in his cage for over twenty years. Can you imagine? The woman who lives on the first floor during the week insists it must have been hung right under our building here. She swears she can hear him crying on still nights. Come on. Let’s go in, you look frozen.’

We went back inside and left the clamouring voices swinging in the wind.

‘A drink,’ he said, when he’d taken my coat and handbag. ‘There’s some champagne in the fridge if you fancy it?’

He moved off to the kitchen and I sat down on the huge, charcoal-grey L-shaped sofa and was immediately swallowed up by its soft, yielding cushions. My whole body was alert to Dominic’s movements around the apartment. My mind was racing, the blood rushing in my ears, loud as the wind above the Thames itself.

I sat back and tried to focus on the painting on the exposed-brick wall directly in front of the sofa. The painting had to be at least ten foot by eight. It was all done in shades of orange, pink and yellow with a weird lumpy texture, so that it looked more or less like someone had vomited over a canvas. The picture depicted the head and torso of a naked woman merging with the back half of a puma or similar wild cat. The woman’s back was arched, pushing out her very pronounced breasts, on which the artist had detailed every blue vein and even the tiny bumps on her impressive areolae. Her luxuriant honey-blonde hair flowed out behind her, matching up with the end of the cat’s tail. Her face too was markedly feline, with striking green eyes ringed with yellow; a disturbing, unblinking stare.

‘Hideous, isn’t it?’

Dominic handed me a glass of champagne and dropped down on to the sofa beside me.

‘It’s … well … it’s very … big!’

He laughed, and I was acutely aware of the heat from his body just a few inches from mine.

‘It’s an abomination. But I needed something big enough to fill the space, and it’s someone I know.’

‘The artist?’

‘No, the artist was me, and I’ve never claimed to be Picasso. I mean the model.’

‘Oh.’ I gazed back again at those green, catlike eyes and a shiver fluttered through me on butterfly wings. ‘A friend?’

‘My wife.’

My hand froze in the act of bringing the glass down from my lips. ‘That’s funny. I thought you said I reminded you of your wife.’

He turned to face me then, and the dimple was a gaping hole in his face that a person could fall into and never be seen again.

‘Did I?’ he said.

Chapter Four

It was expensive champagne but I might as well have been drinking paint stripper. There could be lots of reasons I’d reminded him of his wife. He’d never actually said the resemblance was physical, had he? Maybe it was more of a general impression, some kind of aura we both shared.

‘You know, I ought to be getting home,’ I said in a voice scraped from the back of my throat. ‘I’m having drinks with friends. But please don’t worry about giving me a lift.’

‘Don’t be silly, Jessica Gold,’ he said, brushing his fingertips over my cheek so gently I fancied I could feel the individual whorls. ‘You’ve only just got here.’

I turned my eyes back to the painting as if it might yet reveal hidden depths.

‘Where is she?’ I asked, nodding towards the figure.

‘Natalie? Oh, off fucking some brainless cock, I expect.’ His tone was light but his fingers froze on my face. ‘I haven’t seen her for months.’

Even at this stage, even while the alarm klaxon was shrieking inside my head and my heart was beating out a rhythm that said, ‘Where is my bag? Where is my bag?’ I was still wondering what it would be like to kiss him.

‘Do you think it’s fair to say you struggle with boundaries?’ Sonia Rubenstein once asked me. ‘What I mean is, do you find it hard to draw the line between what’s appropriate and inappropriate?’

Sonia always wore black, but she accessorized it with a selection of brightly coloured silk scarves that she wore looped several times around her neck. I liked to imagine her opening a special drawer in her bedroom in the flat above her Hampstead consulting room, and picking out a scarf like she was selecting a bloom at an upmarket florist.

‘I really do need to go,’ I said again, putting down the champagne flute with unnecessary firmness on a thick-glass coffee table and rising to my feet. ‘If you’ll just tell me what you did with my bag …’

Dominic Lacey remained leaning back on the sofa and looking up at me with amusement.

‘Come back and sit down. We’ve only just started chatting.’

‘Yes, but I’m late. I really shouldn’t have come.’

‘So why did you?’

His arm was now lying along the back of the sofa, his fingers drumming slowly, and I focused on his wedding ring rising and falling because I was too scared of what I’d find in his eyes, or rather what he might find in mine.

‘A moment of Christmas madness,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t thinking things through. They’ll be trying to get hold of me. In fact, I must check my phone.’

‘Ah yes. In case they’ve replied to that text you sent them.’

I looked at him then. Just the most fleeting of glances. Enough to see the smile on his lips. Enough to know he knew there was no one looking for me.

‘I’ll just go and find it.’ I set out across the vast ocean of floorboards. ‘You put it somewhere behind here, didn’t you?’

Though he remained on the sofa, I was aware of his eyes tracking me. When I arrived at the kitchen, with its half-wall leading to god knows where, I hesitated. I followed the partition around, coming out into a square, dark hallway with three closed doors leading off it.

Two of them must be bedrooms, I guessed, with the other the bathroom. And yet, there’s always that fear, with unknown houses, that you might find something completely unexpected behind a closed door – a sauna or a darkroom or a temperature-controlled room for storing dead butterflies. One of my school friends once showed me her parents’ ‘sex dungeon’ in a windowless dressing room off their bedroom. I remember looking at the swing seat, covered in fake fur, and wondering how they washed it. If they washed it. The thing is, you never really know, when it comes to other people, what secret rooms they keep, and my hand, on the first doorknob, was unsteady, my breath too fast and too loud.

It was a bathroom, that first room. Compact, compared to the open-plan vastness of the living areas, but still big enough for a free-standing claw-foot bath. The back wall of the bathroom was entirely mirrored, and my own reflection – pale and wild-eyed – shocked me.

‘You are lovely.’ He’d appeared without warning and his eyes in the mirror seemed to be defying me to contradict him. ‘You know, I feel so comfortable with you, although we’ve only just met. Do you feel that too? That we’ve known each other for years, rather than just hours?’

I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak.

He put out a hand and pulled me towards him. I watched us in the mirror. When he pressed his lips to mine, I closed my eyes automatically. It felt so completely different to Travis’ absent-minded peck. He took his lips away abruptly and I was taken aback to feel his tongue probing the inner corner of my closed eyelid like the tip of a damp sponge.

He must have felt me stiffen because he said, ‘You don’t need to worry, you know, Jessica. I’m not about to take advantage of you. I don’t actually do sex.’

That made me open my eyes.

‘I don’t like losing control.’

Then he smiled as if he had just divulged an endearing character quirk, like being scared of spiders or only ever wearing navy. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said again. ‘I get my pleasure in other ways.’

I felt the capillaries in my face explode in unison and didn’t need the mirror to know that my cheeks were flaming.

‘Gosh,’ I said, using that word for the first time in my life. ‘I can’t imagine. Do you knit? Or make exact-scale models of famous landmarks out of matchsticks?’

‘Funny girl, Jessica Gold.’

Only now when he said my name, it no longer sounded like a caress.

‘Anyway,’ I said, glancing at my non-existent watch. ‘My bag? I’ve got to go.’

‘Come on, sweetheart,’ he said, very softly. ‘We both know that’s not going to happen.’

And there it was. The thing that had lurked beneath the perfect glass surface of our encounter. The thing I’d been trying not to face. The thing my mother always warned me against.

And it was all my own fault.

Chapter Five

When I was fourteen, a girl from my school disappeared. She was gone for two days and there was a massive fuss. Girls clung together in the corridors weeping, boys gathered in groups and muttered darkly about vigilante gangs. Her parents appeared on television with red-raw rings around their eyes, talking about how loved she was, how popular, how her smile could light up a room. Even after she was found shacked up with a twenty-six-year-old bus driver she described as her fiancé, a certain glamour still clung to her.

For months I dreamed of something similar happening to me. Not being abducted or ravaged, but just having people worry about me, and say lovely things about me. I’d imagine my two brothers on the telly, shoulders shaking with emotion, talking about me and how much they missed me. I imagined how contrite they’d feel about how they’d treated me over the years. How everyone would suddenly realize what a jewel they’d lost.

And now it was happening to me.

And I realized what a tit my fourteen-year-old self had been.

Dominic and I were back sitting on that charcoal sofa, facing the odious painting. I found myself looking at Natalie’s face in a different light now, examining her green eyes for clues. Did she look frightened? Was she trying to say something? How had she got away?

I tried to summon her up in my mind, fashioning her into a rope that I could wind around my thoughts. But she was too slippery. Sliding away through the gaps in my mind.

Dominic had positioned himself on the other arm of the L-shaped sofa. The intensity of his stare was unnerving. His eyes ran over me as if he was inventorying me.

When I first started seeing Sonia Rubenstein I’d been suffering from panic attacks – once I was carried out of Leicester Square Tube on a stretcher, hyperventilating with a tightness across the chest like cheese wire – and she’d tried to teach me techniques to corral my thoughts if they were getting out of control. Like I was to put one hand on my stomach and one on my chest, and breathe in and out from my belly, keeping my chest still. Or I could repeat over and over, ‘My heart will stop racing. I’m not going to die.’ ‘You control your fear,’ she said to me. ‘It doesn’t control you.’

I forced myself to breathe from my stomach, and repeated in my head, ‘I’m not going to die.’ But there was only one person listening, and she didn’t believe it.

Chapter Six

Kim was wrapping presents. All around her was a sea of plastic bags that she was slowly working her way through, trying to remember what she’d bought for whom, and feeling the usual creeping desolation, knowing that despite the mountains of stuff and the hundreds of pounds she’d spent, none of it was enough. Give it a few hours and someone would be crying because they didn’t get what they really wanted, and someone else would have decided that the thing they thought they really wanted wasn’t what they wanted after all, and everyone would be reaching that danger point where you could feel Christmas slipping away, together with all the hopes and expectations you’d pinned on to it over the year.

Downstairs, the television was on full blast. She could hear the sound of that film they seemed to show every Christmas. That grown man dressed up as a Christmas elf. Every now and then there was a shriek of laughter from Rory, followed by an echoing giggle from Katy who, at three years younger, couldn’t really understand the joke and took her cue entirely from her brother.

Listening to them, Kim’s heart contracted with love.

And guilt.

The bedroom door creaked open.

‘Don’t come in …’

Sean stood in the doorway, his arms folded, surveying the devastation.

‘God, how much did this lot cost then?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s Christmas.’

‘Oh, nice of you to remember.’

She turned back to her wrapping.

Sean remained in the doorway. His presence was like a black hole sucking all the joy from the room.

‘I do mean it, you know, Kim? I’m not just saying it.’

Kim folded paper around a plastic toy that had cost over ten pounds. And what did you get for it? Another thing to break after a few days, leaving behind a pile of oddly shaped plastic bits that lurked in corners and under sofa cushions. The gift wrap ripped over a sharp edge and Kim cursed herself for getting the cheap stuff.