Love Story, With Murders (18 page)

It takes me time to notice. I have to concentrate hard to figure it out. Put
my hand under the cold tap, the hot tap, and back into the bathwater. I used to think my senses just went numb, but
it’s not that. They’re still doing their job. Diligently reporting their information. Presenting their little manila packets of facts and data. But the management staff are all away on
leave somewhere. I’m like the last guy left in corporate HQ desperately trying all the phones
and getting no more than a fading crackle and an echo of laughter from somewhere sandy.

Anyway. I figure it out. The bath is cold. I ought to run it hot again to warm myself up, but I know that I won’t be able to tell the difference between warm and scalding, so I just get
out.

Towel dry.

Underwear on.

My hair. I know that hair can sometimes be wet, sometimes dry. If it’s wet,
you have to make it dry. I don’t know why that’s so important, I just try to follow the rules.
It’s quite hard to tell, though. I think my hair is dry, but maybe a bit steamed up, and I don’t know if that makes it wet or dry.

If Buzz were here, he could tell me. But if Buzz were here, he wouldn’t let me do what I’m about to do. And anyway, he’s not here.

I decide to dry my hair. I don’t
think you can make hair too dry.

A clock tells me the time. Upstairs, I only have analogue clocks, the sort with hands. I find those harder to read when I’m like, this, so I go downstairs where there is a friendly green
digital clock on my oven door. It says 19:15. I look at it for a while. It’s nice. Then it says 19:23. A bit after that it says 19:51.

Then I go upstairs.

Usually
I choose safe clothes when I’m in this place. Easy ones that aren’t complicated to understand or wear, but those won’t work now. I need a dress. I take three dresses
from Kay – her castoffs – and put them on the bed. I’ve never worn any of them.

I take the middle one and put it on. Look at myself in the mirror. No, that’s wrong. Not myself. I have to imagine the person in the mirror is someone
completely different. I don’t
quite manage that, but I can tell I look more normal than I feel.

I sit down on the bed and try to remember what happens next.

Shoes. I need shoes.

I don’t like putting them on, but I manage. I ought to put makeup on too, but all I have is a few disconnected words and phrases. ‘Eyeliner.’ ‘Lip gloss.’
‘Mascara.’ ‘Blusher.’ There are some things on
a bathroom shelf and there are some words in my head. I wait around to see if anything joins up, but it doesn’t. Then I
see a tube of lipstick and my mind goes ‘lipstick!’ and I know what I’m supposed to do with it, so I make my lips go red. I wait a bit more, but nothing else joins up, so I leave
all the rest.

The person-in-the-mirror still looks reasonably normal, I think, though I can’t
be too sure. Normal enough.

I still don’t like the shoes.

Downstairs, the clock on the oven says 21:38.

I spend some time looking for my car keys, then decide that maybe driving isn’t a brilliant idea. So I get the phone and a card with the number of a taxi firm on it. The number seems quite
long, but I manage it by dividing it up into slices of one number at a time. I’m quite pleased
with myself when a man answers. I ask for a taxi. He says, ‘Right away?’, and I say,
‘Oh no, in a minute will be fine,’ and hang up. Then the phone rings and it’s the man again, asking for an address. I give him my address and put the phone on the floor in the
corner, because it made me jump when it rang.

I sit there waiting. Watching the phone in case it rings, watching the nice green
clock on the oven door.

22:18.

I’m not frightened.

I don’t know why I’m like this.

I know that it’s a good idea to connect with people when I’m in this state, so I try to think of the people I love. I can only think of three. My dad, Buzz, and Mary Langton’s
head. I know that’s not a very good list, but it’s a start.

Dad. Buzz. Mary Langton.

I count them off, one after
the other. After a bit I manage to add Mam, Kay, and Ant. They’re blurry, but they’re there.

Outside, a car swings up in front of the house. Headlights on. The doorbell rings. There is a wooden knife rack on the counter containing six knives, at least four of which would make effective
weapons, but I decide the doorbell man is probably the same as the taxi man, so I decide it’s safe. I leave
the knives, answer the door. It is the taxi man.

I’m about to walk straight out, when he says, ‘Don’t you want a coat, love? It’s freezing.’

I go back and get a coat and also remember that I hadn’t got house keys, money, bank cards, phone, or bag, so I get those things too.

I get in the car, which is nice and warm. He asks me where I want to go and I tell him. The name of the street,
not the name of the place. He says, ‘Right you are,’ and off we
go.

His car seems very clean. It smells like bubble bath. The streets slide by very easily. Croescadarn. Pentwyn. Eastern Avenue. There is no noise except that his radio talks quietly all the
way.

The world outside looks like a film of itself.

When we arrive, the man says, ‘Have a good evening, okay?’ and I say, ‘I
will.’

I’m outside it now.

It
. The club. Dad’s beast. His first real step into the world of legitimate business.

I’ve been inside only three times in my life. The first time, when Dad first set it up, when it was still at the sawdust-and-paintbucket stage. The second time was when I had just passed
my driving test and I swung by to surprise
Dad with the news. I entered the club at around eight in the evening, well before the place was busy. I found Dad, told him my news, and we were out on
the street again within five minutes, maybe ten. The third time was the other night with Buzz, when again we arrived before the place had really started to fill up, and in any case, we spent almost
all our time buried in paperwork in a
back room. So in a way, tonight is the first time.

The Virgin & Unicorn.

Simpering pink. Fleshy red.

The neon glow lifts the street out of Cardiff and deposits it somewhere else altogether. New York. Tokyo. Bangkok. Montmartre.

I feel like a wooden toy.

I approach the club and the two black-suited, black-shirted doormen who stand guard outside.

‘Entry for one,’ I say. I’ve
no idea what you’re supposed to say.

‘You know what this is, darling?’

‘Yes. I’m joining friends.’

They exchange glances but don’t object. Just start running through the rules. No touching. No photographs. No videos. No fighting. No excessive drinking. No propositioning for sex. The
dancers are dancers, not prostitutes. Yadda yadda. It sounds like some dispatch from a foreign war
zone, infinitely alien. The doorman who is speaking has a head shaped like a bullet. There are
three gold rings on his right hand.

Whenever there’s a gap in what he’s saying, I say, ‘Okay.’ After a bit, I’m still saying okay and he’s not giving me more rules, so then I shut up and he
says, ‘You can go in.’

I thought there was an entry fee, but no one asks me for any money.

I go
inside. Tables with shiny black tops. Chrome seats with black leather seats and backs. Dark red walls. Low lighting. Framed pictures of art-house porn.

Which is just a way of saying porn.

I can’t feel anything at all.

Everything looks sleek and dark and glossy. Leering and acquisitive. Like the sort of men your mother warned you about.

I know there is music playing, because it
creates a pressure in my head, but I can’t tell if it’s loud or quiet, or what songs are being played. There are people in the room too, but
I can’t look at them yet. I have fragments – legs, shoes, a man’s wrist with intense black hairs and a Rolex-style watch – but I’m not yet ready to join the pieces.
There is a platform, strongly spotlit, at the end of the bar. I sense it the way I sense a
headache.

This is Khalifi’s place. I can feel the energy of it chiming with the energy of him. His apartment and this club: They’re the same thing. Different slices from the same loaf.

He feels more real to me already.

Purple silk. Black marble.

I go to the bar and order one of my non-drink drinks. Mineral water. A slice of lime. Ice. I don’t care about the lime or the ice, I just
don’t want to look like the out-of-place
person sipping a mineral water. I’m out of place enough as it is.

The barman gives me change. A man standing next to me leans in and says something. I don’t hear what he says over the music and the buzzing in my head, but it was a friendly thing. Not
hostile. A beery welcome.

And that’s all I need. Something alters in my head, as sudden and
complete as flicking a light switch. I’m still out of body. I still couldn’t feel a lighted cigarette butt
pressed up against my arm, but my other senses suddenly intensify.

There are about fifteen customers in the place, including one other woman. The men are dressed well enough. Jackets. Dark trousers. Shoes that aren’t awful. My newfound clarity allows me
to look at the pole-dancing
platform too. It’s got all the class of a Las Vegas casino personally styled by Donald Trump. There are three poles, three dancers. One of the girls is really
pretty, the other two just thin. They’re all either big-breasted or, as I assume, have had boob jobs. Also, big hair, lots of makeup, fake tan. The aesthetic is unashamedly
Playboy
.
It’s like these women have disassembled themselves
into their sexual parts only. Remove the brain, enlarge the tits.

I don’t have a moral reaction to this – not now, anyway. Those parts of me just aren’t available. I can dimly feel that the glass in my hand is cold, but only dimly. The music
remains just noise. It’s not just the Unicorn that has made me like this. It’s also Khalifi.

This thing I’m experiencing wasn’t the connection I
was seeking, but you can’t pick and choose. You take what you’re given and this is what he cares to give.

I’m confident now, know what I’m doing.

I walk to one of the best seats in the house. Close to the dancers. I’m aware for the first time of what I’m wearing. A gold beaded dress. It’s short enough on me, would have
been micro on Kay. My shoes don’t quite go, but almost do. Good enough.
I exchange glances with the other woman customer. The unity of the sisterhood, you’d say, except that, in here,
the sisterhood serves a pretty thin gruel.

When I turn my eyes back, there’s a girl in front of me. Blood-red shoes. A sequinned bikini. Nothing else. She wants to know if I want her to dance. It’s twenty quid. I say yes. The
current song is coming to an end. In the gap between
songs, she tells me that I can touch if I want to. ‘Supersexy,’ she says, in an accent that could be Polish or Slovenian or Finnish
or Dutch. Then the next song starts and she starts dancing, lips open, eyes half shut. I don’t touch her. A couple of times she tries to put my hands on her thighs, but I move them away.
Halfway through the song, she turns so that I have her bum in my face. She’s
not performing for me now, but for everyone else. A porno-pantomime. At the end of the song, she takes my twenty
quid but her eyes are already on the hunt. That’s why she wanted me to touch her. Get the guys so aroused they’d buy the next dance.

It’s not about the dancing, but about the hustle. That’s what the tits and the hair extensions are for. There’s an intensity to the sell I don’t
think I’ve
experienced before. Silent. Furious. Unrelenting.

I realise I’ve got Mary Langton wrong too. Not completely wrong, but enough. The core of her is what I’ve already seen: the hockey player, the English student, the girl with the
sensible mam. But no one works in a place like this just to earn some extra cash. To work here, you have to have something self-hating. The dancers in
front of me slide up and down their poles like
marionettes. Drug-fuelled. Drugs or drink.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
. The poem up in Langton’s room. How did she get from there to here? Why did she work here for one short year, then stop? What
brought her here? What drove her away?

I don’t know. My picture of her has just grown more complex, more ambiguous.

I think of her mother’s sobs, her father’s choked numbness. The grief that filled that house.

Because I am who I am, I tend to spend more time thinking about the dead than the living. I bond easily with Langton’s head, with Khalifi’s elusive shadow. But there are other
victims too. Living ones. Mary Langton’s parents. Her two siblings. Sophie Hinton: not my favourite person, but her life
was damaged too. Ayla and Theo: their worlds have never recovered from
their father’s death. Perhaps they never will.

And Khalifi. Who mourns him?

I don’t have an answer to that, but I do feel Khalifi now. Feel him strongly present in this room. There’s a lovely unity between his lonely corpse, shredded like some macabre
goulash on that empty reservoir, and this place now. Over to
my right, the dancer who almost gave me a mouthful of bottom is dancing with another girl right in the face of a guy in a black jacket
and dark navy shirt. A guy who looks to have all the charm of a car salesman just made Salesman of the Month. The two girls hardly make eye contact with each other. They happily stroke each
other’s breasts and mime oral sex, but their eyes are roving for the next
target. The next twenty quid.

No touching.

No photos.

No fighting.

There isn’t a difference here. No exploiter and exploited. The men are dragged here by their cocks. The women dragged by their self-destructive lives. The only person who is emphatically
not exploited is my father. The man who makes money from all of this. That’s the same man who put down a 30 percent deposit
on my house, who bought me my car, who paid the first year’s
insurance, who would pay for just about anything if I let him. So I’m an exploiter too.