Homing (18 page)

“I don’t think so, darling,” he’d said. “These animals, they are dirty things.”

She’d said nothing. He didn’t like her to argue or whine. The next day he gave her a toy rabbit made out of real fur. It was soft, but underneath she could feel the stiff skin of the dead creature. “One day, when you’re older, I’ll buy you a fur coat,” he’d promised with another calibrated smile as she held the toy’s glass eyes against her cheek. She’d put the thing away, never named it, never played with it; had told herself she didn’t really want to keep a dirty pet.

“I can’t take you with me, darling,” her mother, who was running off to live with another man, had said. “It wouldn’t be right. I’m not able to keep you like your father can.”

At eleven, Maja knew the term “kept woman”, and her cheeks burned with embarrassment. More than embarrassment: it was a deep sense of shame, of soiling, that the words provoked in her. She turned cold towards her mother. They did not talk to each other much, these days.

Thinking too much about either of her parents made Maja restive. Her father, at this moment, would be wondering where she was. She’d left her cellphone in the car, switched off.

She was startled by a knock on the outer bathroom door. There was a low murmur of voices – men speaking. She couldn’t make out their words, but she picked up their official tone. Security. Maja sat completely still, feet up on the toilet seat. The outer door opened and there was a moment’s silence. Then, through the crack of the swing door, she saw movement in the mirror: skin, hair, red collar. It was enough; she recognised the young security guard.

“Anybody in here?”

Maja said nothing. Then his head bobbed down out of the frame of the mirror; there was the squeak of a shoe on the tiles and a rustle of clothes. He was bending to look under the cubicle door, checking for feet. Too lazy to walk two steps across the floor and push the door open, Maja thought.

“No,” he said. “It’s empty.”

“Must’ve buggered off when I was busy with the other customer.” It was a different voice. “She was here though, for sure.”

Then the outside door closed. Maja couldn’t decide what to do, and so she did nothing. Fifteen minutes passed, half an hour – maybe longer. There were sounds of rattling and movement in the shop, followed by silence. Then, abruptly, the lights went out. The darkness was absolute. Startled, she got to her feet – pins and needles – and stood listening. Nothing.

The blackness pressed against her eyeballs, pushed into her ears, her nose. Impossible to breathe, to stand still; she shoved blindly through the swing door and fumbled her way to the outer bathroom door. She stood with her ear pressed to the wood for a moment, and then eased it open.

More darkness, more silence. For a moment she was frightened; it was as if a great catastrophe had occurred while she was in the bathroom, a silent earthquake or gas attack that had somehow left her untouched. But then she heard a texture in the silence – humming and muffled, a rustling undercurrent – and made out the few dim lights in the cages lining the walls. The fish tanks glowed. Nothing was wrong. It was after closing time, that was all. The place was shut.

“Hello?” she tried.

Maja headed towards the front of the shop, feeling her way with her hands. On the other side of the glass, a grille had been drawn down. She pushed her palms against the window – not cold glass, like it would be if the shop were in the open air, but slightly warm: mall temperature. She jiggled the doorknob. Locked up tight. She thought about shouting for help – but the voice died in her throat when she saw the dangerous rings on her fingers, and remembered.

At that moment, a person appeared in the corridor. Without a thought she pushed herself back from the glass, back into the jungly dark, and crouched down. He came towards the shop and for a moment she thought he’d seen her. It was the same guard, the young one with the well-tended hair. He stopped, and stared unseeing into the glass. The dim light in the corridor was stronger than in the shop – enough for him to see his own faint reflection, but not Maja inside.

Then he brought his hands up and she saw he held a familiar object: her hat, the red beret. As he pressed it to his head he seemed, from the quick movement of his Adam’s apple, to give a satisfied grunt. It should’ve looked ridiculous, but somehow the expensive hat, combined with the uniform, lent him a rakish elegance: Che Guevara. On Maja it had always looked like something chosen by a stylist for a photo shoot, to be worn once and then put away in tissue paper.

He seemed so free, standing there in the open space, on the right side of the glass. And as she stared at his face, so young and open, a part of her wanted to call out to him, bang on the window. But something held her back – not fear so much as embarrassment. She felt shamed, crouching in the dark with her wrists cuffed in stolen merchandise.

He gave his head a last little pat and moved on. Maja stayed where she was, locked in. For a long time she sat there, staring out, watchful, as the gloom of the shop settled and thickened behind her back. She did not want to turn around to face it.

When she did, she found that something had altered in the quality of the darkness, or her eyes had adjusted. Now she could make out the black wickerwork of cages, the huddled shapes within them. She could see the spinning wheels in the hamster cages, the hunched shape of the parrot tilting left and right on its perch … and she could hear them: stirring, scratching, soft peeps, something moving around and around in cramped circles.

Keeping to the walls, her fingers sliding over racks of packaging, flinching from bristles and recoiling from what felt like chunks of hide and bone, she made her way to the corner where the till was. She could see the glow of a computer screen. She kept her eyes fixed on the the multicoloured gyrations of the screensaver and away from the depths of the shop. Cautiously she slid into the swivel chair, pulling her feet up from the floor and tucking them under her in a habitual motion. The arcs of light silently rebounded off the edges of the screen, triggering a loop of panic. Would she have to stay here all night?

In front of her on the counter was a telephone. Maja regarded it for a long time, looking at how the numbers were arranged in rows of three, the spiralling cord coming out of the back, picturing herself lifting the receiver. After imagining this six or seven times, she put out a hand and did it. Mall-temperature plastic. She put the receiver to her ear and it made a broken sound. Then she remembered how her father’s office phone worked, and pressed zero. Out rolled the reassuring trill of the dial tone. The handset pressed the dangly earring into the flesh of her earlobe. She imagined the phone ringing in the dark of her father’s house, his heavy hand settling onto the receiver. She hung up.

With a deep sigh Maja rolled her head back on her shoulders. She breathed in, out. Above her was a small rectangle of brilliant deep blue, with the speck of one bright star in the corner. She stared for a moment at this Christmas card image floating at some uncertain distance, before realising what it was: a skylight, up high, set into the wall just below the ceiling. There were no bars across it; perhaps it would hinge open.

There were shelves against the wall behind the till. They seemed firm. She took off her lambswool coat and pointy shoes, bundling them up under the counter. She tested the first shelf, and the next. It was easy.

It was only once she was quite high, about a metre below the skylight, that the shelving began to wobble beneath her weight. The more she tried to counterbalance, the more she rocked – and before she could draw in breath, the whole unit came peeling off the wall in a heavy slab, falling faster, colliding into something soft on its way down. The back of her head smacked the floor and all around the shop erupted with jungle screeching and roaring and blackness, a thousand crystal cabinets smashing …

For a while she lay curled up on the wet floor, not passed out but rather unwilling to open her eyes to see. Small, sharp pains flickered all over her body and warmth soaked into her clothes – from water or from blood, she did not want to discover.

It was the feeling of something pulling at her rings that brought her fully awake. Then, unmistakeably, small furred hands touching her nose and eyelids and mouth … gently, gently, a nibbling on the side of her neck; and then, more insistent, a tugging at the jewels on her fingers and her ears.

And as the tiny fingers pulled and poked her, plucking the gold and diamonds away, Maja found herself relaxing. She unwound her body to give the hands access, stretching out, letting her head fall back against the vinyl floor. She even reached up to help, pulling out the pins of the earrings. There was pain in her head and in her wrist, and jagged pieces of what seemed to be glass digging into the skin of her arms and face. But she was soothed by the warm fur, the probing and caressing. And as the stolen jewellery was delicately, firmly removed from her body, she felt the justness of it. She felt clean. And then at last, in the musky, rustling dark, she slept.

Maja woke to drab light, cold and dampness. She was lying with her upper body propped against the plate-glass window of the shop, with a distant throbbing in her head that she knew would become pain if she moved a millimetre. Someone had put her there, had draped the lambswool coat over her front. Struggling to sit up, she winced as she put weight onto her wrist. Her wet blouse and jeans clung to her skin, and the coat was soaked through.

She assessed her surroundings, trying to separate the filaments of dream from the stranger wisps of memory. On the floor near the counter were pieces of broken glass, mixed up with damp gravel and green strands of waterweed, all lying in a large puddle. A mop stood against the wall in a bucket. Crouched next to it, shovelling up the mess with a broom and pan, was the guard in his uniform. The red hat was gone.

Something felt different. Cautiously, she examined herself, flexing her limbs. There were cuts and streaks of blood on her arms. But there was something else, something important … the jewellery. She confirmed it: her hands were bare. She touched her ears and felt their clean lobes. Gone, stripped. As if it had never happened. She surveyed the pet shop, calm and peaceful now. The parrot was asleep on its perch, balanced on one leg. And just a few metres away, the monkeys were huddled in a furry bundle in a corner of their overturned cage, small bodies heaving in and out in unison. The cage door was open and straw had spilled out onto the floor. There was no glint of gold or gemstones – but plenty of place to hide a trinket or two.

The guard tipped the contents of the dustpan into a black rubbish bag. Then he turned on his heels to look at her.

“Hi,” she said. She looked at the broken glass. “Was that a fish tank? The fish …?”

The guard stood, poked the black bag with the tip of his boot.

“Oh.”

His broad face, which had seemed open and friendly the night before, had closed up tight in the morning light. She felt a flicker of apprehension.

“Were they … precious fish?”

He laughed, spinning the neck of the bag and tying a knot.

She felt a kind of relief. There was a solution for this kind of problem. “I’m sorry. My father will pay for it.”

But the guard still stared at her with unkind eyes. Then he dumped the bag on the floor between them, like something filthy that belonged to her. “They’ll say it was my fault, that I didn’t find you here, yesterday,” he said. “Maybe I’ll lose my job.”

Suddenly she was simply exhausted, desiring to be home, bathed, in bed. She wanted to get it over with, to have the wrath of her father fall on her and pass over her and leave her chastened. The jewels were stripped away now; all she had to show were cuts and bruises. She felt impatient with this boy who wanted something more.

Seeing him reach for the walkie-talkie at his belt, she stood and pulled on her coat. “It’ll be fine,” she said, putting authority into her voice. “My father will speak to the boss. They know each other.”

She paused, watched these words take effect, halt his hand. “When you’ve finished with that, clean up the straw.” As she wriggled each foot into its delicate shoe, she looked him in the eye to make him pay attention. “Do it carefully. You might find something in there for you.”

Then she pushed open the glass door and walked out of the shop. Her footsteps echoed in the empty galleries of the mall as she made her way towards the car-park exit. Nobody followed. Her cuts and scratches stung her skin with diamond sharpness, as if the stones had scored her flesh. She did not slow down or look behind; nor did she run. She walked upright and confident. In her pocket she fingered the keys to the car. Soon she would be home.

The lambswool coat was ruined of course; she would have to ask her father for a new one. Perhaps a fur.

I haven’t changed much, over the years. When I look in the mirror, the experience is much the same as it was when I was a younger man. My teeth have not yellowed and my eyesight is remarkably good. Even my finger- and toenails, I suspect, do not edge out from my extremities as rapidly as other people’s do. Everyone assumes that I’m in my early forties, when in fact I’m fifty-four – a long way from retirement, but still significantly older than my colleagues at the ad agency. Of course I’m balding now, but even this has helped to freeze me in time. I used to style my hair differently, part it this way and that, grow it and trim it; but I am stuck now with this look, this length: a conservative short cut around the bald spot at the crown. Anything else looks foolish.

It is partially the adipose layer beneath the skin, I believe, that helps to preserve my looks. Slightly plump people, I’ve often noticed, seem to age better than the bony ones: the skin stays taut for longer, the skeletons submerged. Yes, I am a little overweight, as I have been since my early thirties. I’ve tried to lose the excess, but my body remains impervious. A few years back, I put myself through a stern fitness regime – low-fat foods, the gym. There was no observable impact on my weight or muscle tone. I have a metabolism in perfect equilibrium, it seems. Still, I exercise, frequently if moderately. Because what would happen if I stopped?