It Knows Where You Live (26 page)

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Later that night, when Ben was in bed, I opened a bottle of wine.

“Thanks,” said Emma as I poured her a glass. Her hand was like a big albino spider clutching the glass.
 

I poured myself a drink and sat down next to her on the sofa, pretending not to notice when she moved fractionally away from me. The television was on. Some film was playing—I didn’t recognise any of the actors. I sipped my wine, tried not to think about anything.
 

“You knew her, didn’t you?”

I felt like I’d been caught out. It was as if some great and terrible secret had been revealed, one I hadn’t even known. “Who do you mean?”

“Dead Girl. Alice. Whatever she’s called... You knew her when she was alive.”

I took another sip of my wine, ostensibly to buy some time. I had no idea what I was going to say next.

“Don’t bother lying.”

I held my breath. “Yes, I knew her.”
 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How long have you known?”

She smiled. “I’ve always known. I’ve been waiting for you to say something.”

I exhaled through stiff lips. My face felt like it was made out of stone. “When they found her like that, I thought the police might come by if they figured out I knew her. I didn’t want to get involved.”

“How did you meet her?”

I sighed. “She attended a couple of classes, dropped out after a few weeks. She wasn’t cut out for creative writing.”

“How come the police didn’t know about that? Surely her name would be on the college records.”

“Night classes are different. We just rent the room from the college. They have no involvement other than that. She turned up to try out the class, didn’t enjoy it, and failed to return. It happens all the time. I don’t usually ask people to sign on officially until a month or so into the course. It frightens some of them off.”

She stared at me with her unnerving, slightly hostile gaze. I knew most men thought her desirable, but these days she left me feeling cold. I couldn’t even remember what initially drew me to her, why we had ended up getting married in the first place. Then Ben came along and it didn’t matter. None of it mattered any more. We had a child. Everything else was shaped around that one thing. We were already trapped.

“What?” I felt my face turning red. My cheeks were hot.

“Nothing...I’m just checking if you’re telling me the truth.”

“What, with your X-ray vision?”

“Yes, with my patented X-ray vision.” She smiled. “If I thought you were lying to me...well, just don’t be. You don’t want to know what would happen if you are.”

“I’m not lying. I have nothing to lie about.”

But I did. I was. I was lying through my teeth.

Before:

I met Alice, as I’d told Emma, through my twice-weekly evening class in creative writing. She came along once, stayed behind after the lesson, and told me I was talking crap. I asked her to explain, and she said she’d tell me everything over a drink in the pub down the road.

I didn’t hesitate.

“You’re not even a published author,” she said, gripping a glass of cider. Her eyes were big and dark. Her face was oval-shaped. She was wearing fingerless gloves; she’d refused to take them off, even indoors. The pub was quiet. It was a week night; the weather was bad; there was a good film on television. Something like that.

“I had a book published several years ago.”

“It was eleven years ago,” she said. “I Googled you. And it was a book on mountain biking. You’re teaching creative writing. How can you justify that when you aren’t even qualified?”

I shook my head and smiled. “Okay, you got me. Guilty as charged. Cuff me and read me my rights.”

A little over an hour later we were fucking in my car.
 

I drove to a secluded lane on the outskirts of town and we started necking like teenagers. She grabbed my cock through my trousers. I moaned; the pressure was unbearable, as if my pocket was full of ball bearings. She laughed into my mouth as we kissed. Then she unzipped me and stuck her hand inside my pants.

The car seats didn’t recline far enough, so it was awkward, but we managed to locate a rhythm. She straddled me, and as we worked at it I stared over her shoulder at the darkness beyond the windscreen, holding on for dear life. I saw the spindly limbs of autumn trees twitching towards us, small, singular clouds scudding across the dark sky, the lights of an aircraft as it flew overhead. Then I experienced the strange sensation I was looking in at myself looking out. It only lasted a moment, but it was a strange moment, and not at all unpleasant.

As she approached an orgasm, I noticed the thick layer of dust on the dashboard. The car could do with a clean. Finally I let myself go; my own orgasm came seconds before hers did, but I kept on pumping anyway in the hope that she wouldn’t lose a grip on it.

Afterwards, she sat in the passenger seat with her head resting on my shoulder. It wasn’t a comfortable position, but I didn’t want to offend her by moving away. My leg started to itch, just above the knee. I concentrated on not moving. I wanted to see how long I could last before I was forced to scratch.

She lit up a cigarette. I opened the window, scratching my leg.

“Sorry,” she said. But she wasn’t. She continued to smoke, blowing it into the car.

“It’s okay.” I tried not to breathe in the smoke.
 

I didn’t even find her attractive. She wasn’t my type at all, and way too young to be messing with. My sleeping with her was nothing but another indication of how bad my marriage was. I didn’t want to do it again.

We met the following week, after class. Then it became a regular thing.
 

After a while she didn’t even pretend she was interested in what I had to say. We drove to the same lonely spot, had sex in the same clumsy position, and she smoked the same brand of cigarettes afterwards. I usually experienced that same vaguely out-of-body experience just before I came, but it was never as intense as the first time.
 

We never spoke once we’d done it. She smoked a couple of cigarettes. I opened the window. Then I drove her home.

One time I didn’t turn up for my own class. I wanted to end the thing with Alice but wasn’t brave enough to tell her to her face.

Two weeks later she was dead in the skate park.

Now:

When the police came round I was too shocked to say anything.
 

I let the officers in—there were two of them, a man and a woman—and sat down on the sofa. Emma was out at her yoga class. She wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours. I wondered if it was her who’d told the police, or one of her friends. Not that it mattered. I’d always known they’d work it out eventually.

“Do you know why we’re here?”

I nodded. “Alice...it’s her, isn’t it?”

“Did you know her?” The male officer started writing something down in his notebook while the female asked me a lot of questions.

I told them everything I’d already said to Emma. I told them nothing at all.
 

They went away and promised they’d be in touch. They didn’t arrest me. I thought they believed me, but I wasn’t sure how long my story would hold up to close scrutiny. If Alice had told anyone about our trysts, I was in big trouble. They’d think I’d murdered her. They’d arrest me and my whole life would fall apart.

I paused at that thought. Would it be such a bad thing? The only negative I could think of would be the effect it might have on Ben. I didn’t want him to get hurt. I didn’t want him to grow up knowing I’d been fucking an eighteen year-old girl in my car while his mother was at home taking care of him.

When Emma came home I told her about the visit from the police.

“Shit,” she said. “What will people think?”

There was no concern for me, nothing about the murdered girl. All that mattered was what her gaggle of yoga chums might make of it all.

Later, I went out and walked along to the park. She was there. She was always there. The red and white tape fencing her off from the public was loose. One of the metal poles was leaning over as if someone had pushed it. The tape flickered like a torn flag in the breeze. I went over there and put it right, straightening the post and leaning my weight against the top of it so it slid into its little hole in the concrete. I tied the tape around the pole and stepped away.

There was no one else around. She tended to draw a small crowd in daylight, but nobody came here after dark.
 

Occasionally busloads of tourists came to see her, mostly at weekends. They got off the bus, stood staring at her for a while, took a few photographs, bought some ice cream, and then went to a nearby pub for lunch. They usually got on the coach half-drunk and laughing about Dead Girl, barely even wondering what her constant reappearance might mean. To them, it was just a nice day out, a short trip to the dark side.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I didn’t know why. There was nothing to apologise for. All I’d done was have sex with her. She’d seduced me, and I’d gone along with it in the hope it would make me feel less empty. But instead, it opened up the void at the centre of my life even wider. It was a harsh lesson. There was no sense of the numinous in adultery. Casual sex held no hidden spiritual significance, not to me.

Everything had stopped for her, but for me it just kept on changing.

I turned around and walked away, past the shut-up ice cream stand, the empty grassed areas, and towards the park entrance. I stood outside watching the main road. There wasn’t much traffic. It would be difficult to get knocked down by a passing car at this time of the evening, when the after-work rush had died down. Not that I wanted to be run over, but it was something to think about before I went home.

I thought about killing Alice. If I had done it, would I have picked the same method as whoever had taken her as their victim? I didn’t think so. It was too intimate; there was too much touching involved. I’d use a knife, or, better still, a gun. I had no idea where to get a gun, but that’s what I’d choose. All you had to touch was the bullet. You could do it from yards away and pretend it was nothing to do with you.

And why did she keep on coming back? It felt like it might have something to do with me, but surely it was meant for her killer. Was she haunting him? Did she even know who he was? Or was she haunting the entire town, reminding us all of how frail everything is, how we should never forget we are rushing towards our own endings?

I crossed the road, walked along towards my street, and turned to face the park entrance. There was a figure standing there, outside the open gates, staring at me: a man, average height and build, wearing a pair of dark trousers and a lighter-coloured sports jacket. I raised a hand and waved at him.
 

He didn’t wave back...
 

...I didn’t wave back.
 

I stood outside the park gates watching the man who was standing at the end of my street, dressed exactly the same as me, and felt a massive sense of dislocation, as if time and space had stuttered for a second and I’d come loose from my own existence. I wasn’t even sure where I was meant to be, here outside the park or over there at the end of my street. Or was I supposed to be in both places at once?

The man turned and walked away, along my street. I crossed the road and followed him. By the time I reached my front door, he was out of sight. I hadn’t even seen him. He was a ghost of a ghost of me, lost for a moment on the treadmill of memory. He was something I wasn’t meant to see.

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“Did you ever really love me?” Emma was staring at me, her eyes blazing. We were in the kitchen. The air felt warm, as if someone was cooking. I had no idea how we’d got here, to this point. I couldn’t remember the argument that had led to this accusation. It felt as if time were slipping, I was losing track. Lacunae were opening up in my consciousness and I kept falling through, finding myself somewhere else.

“Of course I did...I do. I love you. I love both of you.” Did I mean her and Ben, or her and Alice—her and Dead Girl?
 

She threw her wine glass at the wall. The glass shattered; red wine spattered across the wallpaper, making a Rorschach ink blot pattern reminding me of something from my childhood, a dream, a memory, a small toy I’d once owned: perhaps a doll or a puppet. There was so much that I couldn’t grasp. My past slipped away from me, skidding across the thin ice on the surface of my mind.

“I can’t even reach you anymore. There’s nobody there, nobody left inside you.” I thought she might be about to cry.

I thought about the man I’d seen earlier that evening, the one who looked just like me. I wondered where he was now. Or was he actually here, going through this with me? What if I couldn’t see him? Is your own ghost invisible to you most of the time? Is it even possible to haunt yourself?

“I’m sorry.” I sat down at the table and clutched my hands, wringing them out as if they were wet. “I don’t know anything anymore. Nothing makes sense. I don’t know what to do.” I pressed my hands down onto the table, wishing the wood or the bones would break. I didn’t care which.

She started to pace, long strides across the kitchen. “You know what they’re saying about you, don’t you?”

“Who?”

She stopped pacing. “Everyone.”

“No. I have no idea. What are they saying?”

Her smile was horrible, a wound put on display. “They say you were having an affair. That you were fucking her. Is that true? Were you
fucking
her?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“What the hell do you mean? How can you not know?” She stalked towards me on the other side of the table, clenching her fists. She was so angry spittle was gathering at the sides of her mouth.

“I don’t think it was me. It was
him
...the other one. I think
he
was fucking her, but
I
can remember it. I was watching them.”