Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 (13 page)

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She should have put it out with the rest, she sees that now. She hasn't worn it since. She will never wear it again, either, because it is the image of a woman with grey hair posing as a schoolgirl which has brought her to this state of mortification. Not just how she would look now if she was to wear it, but of the lie it has been on all those other occasions. Because she has been grey since she met him, and it is only that simple chemical artifice that has stopped them both from seeing the absurdity of it all along. It is the stuff of horror films, a man's worst nightmare, a piece of witchcraft that has made fools of them both with its spell.

She drops on to the bed, overwhelmed by a humiliation so deep and so bitter it feels like death. The final layer of her mask has been stripped away and all that is left is thirty years of unacknowledged exhaustion. No, not thirty. Forty. Because this act began way back then, when she was a teenager struggling to be accepted, and it has never once stopped since. She has worked on her mask with relentless energy, painting and powdering and dying, researching her materials, making it ever more sophisticated. And it is not just the make-up and colourants, not just the clothes and the boots and the earrings and the bags. She has masked her whole being for the benefit of how she appears to others. She has smiled and flirted and flattered and pampered and pleasured. She has prostituted herself for this fictional creation, the impossible person she has presented throughout her life. Now she has finally shaken it off, and it has taken her vitality with it and left her empty; the victim of vampires; bled dry.

She has no means left to combat this exhaustion. She claws her way beneath the duvet and falls into oblivion.

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His lights go out, and when they come back on again they aren't working properly. His head is full of bright darkness or black light. There is a weight on his back. He can't breathe. The sky has fallen on him. But it moves. It is someone's knees, and there are hands all over him, in his pockets, front and back.

His face is in gritty mud and his nose is blocked. He gasps through his mouth and says, ‘Don't take my cigarettes.'

One of the knees digs in and it feels as though it has found his heart and is squashing it against his breastbone. Fingers in his front trouser pocket are moving beside his balls, and he feels a momentary panic, but they close around his loose change and pull it free. Then the pressure lifts and they are gone, but not as silently as they came. He hears their running footsteps, two sets, hitting the tarmac hard, powering away like sprinters. The sound is full of youth and strength. He tries to lift his head, and is assailed by the sense that he is falling. He cannot be falling because he is flat on the ground, and yet he is, dropping from a height towards a hard, hard land- ing. He keeps still, terrified by the sensation, and he feels hot fluid running down the sides of his head and pooling around his ears. He knows what it is. It's a trick his father used to use to stop horses from rearing. A bottle filled with hot water, which the rider smashes between its ears as its front feet leave the ground. The blow shocks the horse. The hot liquid cures it of rearing forever because it thinks it's blood.

It is blood. It comes away hot and sticky on his hand. He sits up carefully, feels broken glass on the ground around him. He has been hit with a bottle. What is blocking his nose is blood as well; it has that metallic smell. He feels in his coat pocket for his handkerchief and finds his glasses in there. He puts them on, as though they could help him to see through the darkness, but he makes another discovery and it's the worst one yet. The central field of vision in his right eye has been closed down by the blow to the head. There is a black vacancy, a hole in his vision. He panics. It is a detached retina. It is brain damage. He must get help and quickly.

But he is still falling. He has to move carefully. He puts out both hands, feeling around for the shards of glass, trying to find a clear patch of ground to lean on while he pushes himself up. He feels a familiar shape, a cigarette lighter dis- carded or dropped by the muggers. His hand is sticky with blood but he gets it to light and is doubly panic-stricken by the discovery that the hole in his vision is blood-red. Something has spiked him in the eye. The eye is lost completely. He reaches up to examine it with his fingers, takes off the glasses and finds that it has miraculously healed. The flame blows out. He sparks it again and, with vision that is only normally deficient, sees the thick red bloody thumbprint on the lens. For an instant he can't imagine how it got there and he still thinks his eyes must be injured, but then he sees the state of his hands and he understands what has happened. As he looks at them and wonders how to clean them, a drop of blood from his nose splashes on to the other lens.

The lighter goes out again and he is totally blinded, deprived of even the limited night vision he had acquired before the attack. He is trembling as well, and still suffering from the vertiginous sensation of falling, which frightens him even more than the blood. He looks for his phone so that he can call an ambulance, but it isn't in the pocket where he normally keeps it and of course, he finally realises, they have taken everything. His wallet, his cash, his cigarettes, his phone. He is surprised they left him his glasses, for all the use the damn things are to him now.

He stands unsteadily and fingers the wound on his head. It is tender but not too painful, and it doesn't feel very big or deep. A bump is growing underneath it. The dramatic blood flow has slowed, leaving gouts and sticky trails across his smooth scalp. He looks around on the ground but there is no white splash which might be a handkerchief. Why would they take a handkerchief, the sadists?

He finds that he can walk, if he takes it carefully. The impression that he is falling is alarming, but it doesn't appear to affect his balance and it is the trembling and the weakness in his knees that keep his steps slow and small. He feels his way with his feet until he comes to the tarmac, and then he is more comfortable. The way is clear now and, provided he meets no unexpected obstacles, he can make it to the gates and find someone to help him.

Halfway down the hill he discovers there is something in his mouth. It feels like a piece of grit or a tiny, rough pebble, and although it doesn't surprise him that it could have got into his mouth while his face was pushed into the mud, he can't understand why he didn't feel it before now. It is during the act of spitting it out that he realises his front tooth is missing, and that the thing that has just vanished into the vast darkness of Hampstead Heath is a crown that cost him nearly seven hundred pounds.

By the time he emerges from the park he is walking almost normally, but he doesn't feel at all well. His head is beginning to ache and the wound is throbbing and he is unaccountably cold. His knees have regained their strength, and he no longer feels in danger of collapsing, but the falling thing is still there, and it worries him more than anything else, because it doesn't make any sense at all. It is not a feeling of dizziness, nor of light-headedness or nausea. It is like falling from a wall and being trapped in that midair point, with the support no longer there and the ground rushing up to meet him. Except that it isn't a wall he has fallen from. It is something else.

But he has made it to light and safety, that is the most important thing. Soon he will be looked after by someone who will be able to explain it to him, this strange sensation, and make it go away. A car approaches. He steps up to the kerb and tries to flag it down, but it goes straight past. He can make out the gist of everything around him without his glasses, but he can't see well enough to know whether the driver saw him or not. Another car comes, but it is speeding along and has a noisy, hot-rod engine, and he lets it go. He tries the third one and he hears the changes in the engine tone as the driver first takes their foot off the accelerator, then firmly presses it back down.

He stares at the car's tail-lights and notices, when they have gone, how quiet the road is. He has never seen it bumper-to-bumper, even in the rush hour. It's a road he has rarely had to wait long to cross. All the same, he is surprised now to see it so empty. He walks over to the other side, to the row of genteel houses that face the park. A car comes from the other direction, but it indicates and turns left before it reaches him. There is another one behind it, but he has by now settled upon a door to knock on, and he lets it go by.

The front garden of the house has been turned into a concrete pad with space for two cars, but there is only one on it now. It's a narrow house, only one room wide, but there are three floors and an attic, and all the windows at the front are lit. So is the shallow glass porch, outside which he pushes on the single doorbell. Almost immediately he hears the thunder of feet on the stairs within, and heavy, confident steps approaching the door. But it doesn't open, and he hears the footsteps recede again, less rapidly. He looks at the door in bewilderment and sees that it has a spy-hole in the middle, a tiny fish eye staring straight at him. Only then does it occur to him how he must look. A tall, bald man with his head, face and hands covered in blood. He doubts he would open the door himself to a man who looked like that. But he has no way to clean himself up, not even a handkerchief. That soft rain is still falling, or drifting, preventing the blood from drying, thinning it and making everything look worse.

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She wakes and lies still for a minute or two, remembering the horrors that preceded her sleep and expecting them to return. But they don't, and she is amazed to discover that her mind and her heart are both clear and unencumbered. She feels as though she has been dragged deep underwater, only to discover that she has gills. She is at home in this new element, and she is quite clear about what she has to do.

She gets up and straightens the bed and sits on the edge to put on her shoes. Then she opens the wardrobe and takes out the black skirt. She would like to burn it and leave no trace of its existence, but the fireplaces in the house are all dummies and the chimneys are blocked off. So she takes it out into the street and up to the litter bin beside the corner shop, and pushes it down as deep as it will go. While she is out she buys a litre of milk and a packet of a kind of stodgy marshmallow biscuit that she hasn't eaten since she was a child.

Back inside, she puts the kettle on and finds herself staring at the lilies. They are way beyond their best, and she wonders whether he has got them cheap somewhere or, even worse, picked them up from some street florist's discard pile. Their petals are splayed wide and there is something profoundly unsettling about that. They are spread-eagled, gaping, exposing their stamens in almost obscene invitation, craving the entry of fertilising insects that are never going to come. She is reminded of what the American author told her, about the body's desire, when it is approaching the end of its fertile years. The memory threatens to plunge her back into despair, and into the thoughts of children she never had, but she catches herself in time, and it is easy. All that is behind her now, along with the black skirt and all it represented.

She goes back upstairs. In the bathroom she washes the remains of yesterday's makeup from her face, then she returns to the bedroom and removes every stitch of clothing. She stands in front of the full-length mirror and looks at her body, really looks at if for the first time in years.

In terror of the effects of gravity upon her softening skin, she has emaciated herself. Her breasts have disappeared and her ribs and her collarbones protrude. She hears his voice inside her head.

‘You're all bones. It's like sleeping with Marilyn Monroe.'

‘Marilyn Monroe?' she said. ‘But she wasn't all bones.'

‘She is now, though,' he said.

She pushes the thoughts of him aside. This isn't about him. He has no part in these deliberations. She looks again, and sees that in an effort to hang on to youth she has made herself grotesque. It has to stop. It is time to let herself go.

She looks up at her face. She still doesn't quite recognise herself with her grey hair, and she is interested. This is a face that men will pass in the street without seeing. It's a backstage face, never seen in the spotlights but crucial to the production just the same. She pulls on a pair of white, Indian pyjamas that she once bought for him and that he never wears. She is top to bottom white, now, and she likes it. It makes her smile. She goes downstairs and makes her coffee. In the fridge she finds lasagne that he has cooked, and she cuts a small slice, then doubles it, and puts it in the oven. While she waits for it to cook, she boots up the computer. She has research to do, people and organisations to track down, lists to compile. She has some serious moving and shaking to be getting on with.

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There is no water lying in the street that he can see. There are puddles in the park, around old, makeshift goal mouths, but he is not going back in there under any circumstances. He steps away from the house, so as not to appear threatening if anyone is looking out at him. What would he do in their position? Call the police?

The thought fills him with guilt and dread, but when he turns back to the street and sees the embodiment of his thoughts appear, he realises that the police are exactly what he needs. This is not the nineteen-eighties, when every Irishman was an IRA suspect. He has not stayed too long in the pub and been forcibly removed. He doesn't even have a little silver twist of dope in his pocket tonight. He has been assaulted and robbed. The boot is on the other foot. He is a victim of crime and not a criminal, no matter what he might look like. So he leaves nothing to chance. He doesn't try to flag down the police car. He steps out in front of it instead. It isn't travelling fast, and it comes to a gentle standstill a few feet before it reaches him. Two officers emerge, both of them male.