The Apartment (20 page)

When he joined me a few minutes later, he was dressed in a suit—the one he'd worn at our wedding and his father's funeral. He read my dubious look. “All of my other clothes are dirty.”

I searched his face for a sign that he was pissed off at me for not bothering to do the washing. It would almost have been a relief to see such a normal emotion. “I've been busy.”

“Doing
what
exactly?”

Since Hayden was born, we'd both avoided arguing about domestic niggles. He told me he'd had his fill of them with Odette; it was too easy to allow them to slide into fighting and resentment:
What do you mean we don't have any milk? Haven't you been at home all fucking day while I've been working?
The least you could have done was empty the dishwasher before you left the house, blah blah.
I knew I should have let his sideswipe go, but instead I snapped: “Looking after your fucking daughter.”

“My daughter is…my daughter is…”

“Your daughter is what, Mark?” Seconds passed without him responding. The coffee machine blipped and sizzled. “Mark? Hayden is
what
?”

“She's just sleeping, isn't she, Steph?” His voice was high and whiny, as if he was pleading with me.

Oh Jesus.
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “You want some coffee?”

“No. I have to go.”

“I thought we were going to talk.”

“We will. Just not now.”

It was five to seven. His classes didn't start before ten most days. With a small nod, he turned and walked into the hallway, grabbing his car keys from the hall table. He hesitated, returned to the kitchen, and pushed past me to enter the pantry. I didn't ask him what he was doing, nor did I ask what was in the battered shoe box he was now carrying under his arm. Without acknowledging me, he left the house, slamming the door behind him.

Refusing to allow myself to get upset, I went to rouse Hayden. She was groggy and complained of a sore throat. Her forehead was warm, but I wasn't too concerned—she often had colds. I settled her on the couch and let her play with the iPad. I filled time by taking a shower and spring-cleaning the kitchen with disinfectant. Its sharp odor made me think of sickness and hospitals, but at least it erased the stale, smoky stench. Next, I gathered up our dirty clothes and used the washer's sanitize cycle. I didn't want to dwell on Mark. More than one line had been crossed since we'd returned from Paris. Everything was out of synch. Instead, I thought about Karim. I thought about his skin, his hair, the small black tattoo that emerged out of the sleeve of his T-shirt (I didn't know what it was—I still don't know). He was everything that Mark wasn't. I admit it: I'd been thinking about him more than I should. It didn't occur to me then that maybe he'd been thinking about me too.

At two thirty I raced upstairs to get changed and hastily slapped on a layer of foundation, which wouldn't last in the heat. My fingers trembled as I tried to apply eyeliner. I wiped it off and started again.

The door buzzed at exactly three. Karim smelled of soap and shaving foam, as if he'd showered minutes earlier. The second Hayden saw him, she stretched out her arms for a hug, and he was forced to get to his knees next to the couch to greet her. I put
Frozen
on for her, which I knew would distract her for at least an hour, and Karim followed me into the kitchen. I was sweaty and self-conscious. Neither of us spoke while I readied the coffee things. Impulsively I said, “It's too hot for coffee. How about a beer?”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Why not?” I said, regretting the suggestion—what if he thought I was an alcoholic?

Then he smiled. “Yeah. Why not? One won't hurt.”

This time the fridge door behaved. I dug out a couple of bottles left over from the night Carla and her friend came over for supper, and handed one to Karim. As we clinked, glancing into each other's eyes, I said, “Can I ask you a question? It's going to sound stupid.”

“Go for it.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Why?”

“It's just…” And then I told him about the thing under Hayden's bed. It all tumbled out: the sense I'd had in the Paris apartment that we weren't alone; the feeling that Mireille was there when I was back in the apartment after our night at the police station.

He listened carefully, like he had last time. I expected him to say something about trauma and imagination—he was a psychology student, after all—but instead he said, “There're lots of rational reasons people see ghosts. You know, stuff like infrasound, carbon monoxide poisoning. There's even a mold that people think might be the cause of hallucinations.”

“A mold?” I looked down at my beer. It was empty. I didn't remember drinking it, but I didn't feel even slightly tipsy.

“Look here.” He pulled out his phone and tapped something into it. He passed it to me. He'd downloaded an article about a group of scientists who'd discovered a link between hallucinations and toxic spores from mold found in old buildings. There was no concrete proof of their theory, and I didn't miss that the article was published in a British tabloid not known for its fact-checking.

I handed his phone back to him. “Interesting.”
Could
we have brought something back from Paris? I shuddered at the thought of mold spores growing in my brain, infecting the neural pathways or whatever they're called. Perhaps that explained Mark's bizarre behavior as well. And that Mrbaker9981 review had mentioned something about the place being haunted. The theory was far-fetched and unproven, but it was better than the alternative: that Mark and I were basically going insane.

“Was there any mold in that apartment where you guys stayed?”

“Actually, yes. And it stank. What was that other thing you mentioned? Infrasound?”

“Yes. It causes a vibration that can make some people feel uneasy, or something like that.” He grinned at me again and held up his phone. “Let me look for you.”

I moved closer to him so that I could read what he'd called up on the screen. My shoulder brushed his arm. I don't know who started it—I'm being honest about this—but suddenly, I was in his arms, kissing him. I could taste the malty beer on his tongue and feel the solid weight of his muscled back under the shirt, so different from Mark's. His hands snuck under my shirt, and then I heard Hayden calling me. I jumped away from him. “Shit. You'd better go.”

“Yeah.” He shoved his phone into his pocket and followed me to the front door. We were both avoiding each other's eyes, and there was a moment of supreme awkwardness as I unlocked the gate and let him out of Alcatraz. My face was burning, not with shame exactly, but mortification at the thought that Hayden could have walked in on us. I hurried into the living room.

“Mumma, I'm hurty.”

She was still warm, but not terribly, and I gave her some cold medicine just in case. I settled her back on the couch where I could keep an eye on her and returned to the kitchen. I stashed the beer evidence in the recycling bin, and while Hayden dozed, I turned back to the computer, intending to google the article about the ghost-inducing mold to distract myself from the guilt of what had just happened with Karim. I couldn't blame it on the booze.

My spam folder was heaving with messages from the dating site. I'd written only the sketchiest of profiles and hadn't uploaded a pic, but this hadn't deterred the site's members. I was about to delete the messages unread when I realized that one was from Mrbaker9981:

Dear Stephanie,

My name is Ellie Baker. You left a message on this site for my dad. I am ashamed that my dad was part of this site but he had a lot of troubles in his life on account of an abusive childhood and other things that I won't go into so I know he was looking for outlets & it's not his fault. I keep an eye on his emails & I forgot to cancel the debit order for the subscription which is how I was alerted to your message. Usually I would have ignored it but you seem like a nice lady so I thought I would reply to you. I have to tell you that he cannot help you with your inquiries about the apartment he stayed at with my mum in August last year in France. He and my mum died in October in an accident.

Regards,

Ellie

At the bottom of the email there was a link to an article. I didn't need to click on it to make out the headline: “Two Die in Possible Murder/Suicide Crash.”

The wind hisses through the pines in Plumstead Cemetery, and the children's graves are making me cry again. The cracked-faced dolls and dead flowers, the yellowed cellophane around limp balloons, make this section look like a birthday party abandoned because of sudden tragedy. I know the pain of those families as they've laid their angels to rest. Nothing will make them feel better; they will never be whole again. I look over at the overblown Barney mausoleum and it reminds me of the excesses of grief; it makes me self-conscious; it stops my tears. You could paint the whole earth purple, you could tear it all up in your despair, but nothing will bring her back to you.

I wouldn't know how to explain to Steph what I've been doing here. Why now, why after all this time. She'd just imply that I should have got over it and that I should worry about Hayden instead. She's done with my grief.

I can't really explain it to myself. Sure, Zoë's always been with me in one way or another, but since Paris, she's with me much more viscerally. I can't explain that to Steph, or why I'm making my collection for Zoë—she'll just think I'm mad. She already does.

A flurry of guinea fowls traipse across the row of graves, absurd and precise in their spotted suits. I briefly consider them, but, no, feathers won't do.

Why should death provoke a normal response? Why should I be sane and measured, coldhearted in reaction to my loss? That's why Zoë's haunting me now: because I've tried so hard to tamp her down, to carry on with my life as if it could ever be normal again. I must not allow my scars to heal; I must not allow Steph to pressure me into forgetting her. My life is defined by my scars, and to deny that is to deny that I ever loved Zoë. I've been depriving Zoë of her voice, of an effect on me; I've been depriving myself of my scars. More than anything, the home invasion brought that into focus for me: I am nothing without my pain; I am nothing without my rage and my fear.

I squat down by her gravestone, squeezed into Odette's father's family plot, between her grandmother and an uncle.

ZOË SEBASTIAN

the stone says, and the seven years, three months, and one day she lived with us.

MOURNED BY MARK AND ODETTE

WE WILL MISS YOU FOREVER

Those words are not enough to honor her, I know now, and what we wrote there, Odette and I, is a promise never to forget.

I didn't plan it, but that afternoon when I left my first session with Santé, I spotted something dark on the side of the dirt road, knotted into the veldtgrass and rubble mounded along the drainage ditch. I knew it was some sort of animal and I stopped the car in case it had been run over and was still alive. Perhaps I could do something for it. I got out, approached slowly, careful not to frighten it. It was fairly large—bigger than a rat and smaller than a dog. Perhaps a ferret or an otter or something wild. I can't say how, but it
felt
wild—I had a distinct sense of its life-force and its desperation to live.

But when I got there, I saw that it was a domestic cat, and it was dead, ripped open. It must have been hit by a car going very fast. It must have died instantly. Fascinated by its body, I squatted down to take a closer look. The skin on one side of the wound was peeled back off the muscle, just like I've seen rabbits skinned on a cooking show.

My mind turned to those buckets of hair in the Petits' apartment, and suddenly I understood. I felt a sense of clear direction that I haven't felt for as long as I can remember. Hair is an archetypal symbol of vitality, sexual vigor, life-force. Think of Samson and Delilah, Rapunzel, Ophelia, the hair-cutting shame rituals practiced the world over. That's what they were doing: it wasn't just filth, a sign of their perverse degradation; the Petits (or whoever they were) were collecting life, distilling vitality, a talisman against the cold, life-sucking mood in that building. I felt guided; I finally felt some compelling purpose in my drifting life. Zoë knew the answer all along. Her hair collection succeeded—she healed Odette, after all. Perhaps it was too late, but Zoë was asking me to try. When I decided what to do, the raw-burned Zoë-shaped hole in me soothed, the hook in my heart eased for just a moment, and I knew that she'd approve.

I know it's not normal to remove a dead cat's pelt and keep it, unless you're a biologist or taxidermist, but that's what I did. It made complete sense to me at that time. Hair was life-force distilled, even after death—it never rots away with the body. A little collection of hair would be my talisman against the death all around me. It might even help me start to live again.

Now I stand up from my daughter's graveside and turn my hands over, run my finger over the cuts and bites and gashes from the last few days. They sting, even though I've been disinfecting them. I must have scraped my hands on the weeds or perhaps there was some barbed wire hidden in the grass.

I only intended it as a memorial for her; I didn't expect Zoë to get involved. But when she came to me in class the next day and gave me some of her own hair, I knew I had done the right thing. After my session with Santé that next afternoon, I found more roadkill. I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I'm unsure. Yesterday, when the sangoma came, Zoë told me it had to be alive to work.

Along the peripheral road, a funeral cortège arrives. I brace myself to leave in case they come this way, but the cars move on up to the far corner of the cemetery where the newer plots are laid. A scattered group of mourners walks up behind the cars, carrying bouquets and gaudy framed pictures of the deceased, some glancing over at me as they pass, and I see myself as I am: a sad, folded man in a suit, squatting over a weathered grave with an old shoe box.

What's wrong with me? I should have brought flowers for Zoë's grave, not a box of hair.

I sit on the grave's edge and lift the lid of the box. Here's the twist of blond hair to one side. I've tried to keep it separate from the pelts, which are starting to smell.

It has to be alive,
she said to me.

I know it was just a message from my own mind. I know as well as Steph knows that Zoë doesn't exist in a physical sense—she's dead. All I'm experiencing is a particularly vivid set of symbolic images that's finally helping me process Zoë's death. It's been brought on by the psychotherapy, I'm sure, dislodging the symbolic patterns of my thought and rendering them concrete. But that doesn't mean I should discount what my unconscious is telling me.

Squirrels scurry up and down the pines and dart between the headstones. Zoë used to call them squillos; Odette and I didn't have the heart to correct her—it was just too cute. I take out the bag of peanuts, rip it open, and toss one on the pathway a few yards ahead of me. It's not long before a squirrel approaches, grabs up the nut, and stands staring at me, quivering on its back legs, sniffing for more. They're obviously used to being fed here and are almost as tame as the brazen squirrel gangs in the gardens in the city.

I chuck another peanut, halfway between it and me. The squirrel darts closer. Then another, only a foot away. Now I glance around me to see that nobody's watching, place a nut in my palm, and wait.

The squirrel hesitates to come within an arm's length; it's jittery, keeps darting looks back toward its cohorts. But it can't resist. It goes for the nut and I close my left hand over its shoulders. It squirms and scratches and tries to bite, but I have it in a tight hold, pinning its legs to its body.

The creature's heart is rattling so fast I think it'll pop. Its fur is warm and soft; a second ago, it trusted me.

“Sorry, squillo,” I say, and let it go, tossing a handful of nuts far down the path for it to collect. The real Zoë, my living daughter who died irretrievably seven years ago, would never want me to kill an animal for her. I look back down at the box, the brown blood and shiny bits of flesh blooming damply against the cardboard. She wouldn't want this either. I pick out the skein of blond hair from the box and put it in my pocket. On my way out, I find a trash can and throw the stinky box away. It's too late to save her, I realize at last. I was never going to save her.

As I drive away, southward, not back home, I think of that headstone, the only place in the world that our names are set in stone together: Zoë, Odette, me. I park outside a little shopping center in Bergvliet, halfway to the sea, and dial.

“Hi, Odette.”

A silence, a bracing, a gathering, the whole length from Bristol to Cape Town. “Mark. Hello.”

“I'm disturbing you, aren't I?”

“No, not really. Same old.” Sounds of children in the background. She has two, I think. She never got remarried. The last I heard, she was living with another guy, not their father. “Saturday morning, you know. Football, shopping.”

“How are you?”

“Okay. And you?”

“Okay, thanks.” Then I realize I didn't call Odette to swap pleasant lies. “I've been going to therapy.”

“Oh?” Instantly wary.

“Yes. It's been bringing back a lot of”—
ghosts?
—“memories.”

“Sure. I suppose it would.” I can hear the effort she's making to sound civil.

“I didn't want to disturb you. I was trying to remember. It's horrible how things get blurred. Funny question, I suppose, but was Zoë a cat person or a dog person?”

“You called to ask me that?”

“I don't know. Something's come up. She always hated cats, didn't she?”

“Hated cats? No. She loved them. Remember—you even got her those Hello Kitty sneakers for her seventh birthday.”

“Hello Kitty? I don't think so.”

“You
did,
Mark.”

“Nah. I got her those little black high-tops with Scooby-Doo on them.”

“Uh-uh. Why on earth would she want those? She hated that cartoon. It freaked her out. She got scared easily. You seriously don't remember?”

Her tone is fraying around the edges. She's still angry with me. She'll never forgive me, and I don't see any reason why she should. “Okay, thanks. Sorry to disturb you.”

Hearing my discomfort, she relents and babbles on a little to comfort me. “It was definitely Hello Kitty. I remember thinking it was odd of you to go in for something so gendered. In fact, I've got the picture on my computer; I'm sure of it. I'm going to find it and email it to you.” She was always kind like that. We loved each other.

“Thanks.” I hang up and notice the sign for a little pub in the center: one of those cheap steel signs sponsored by Castle Lager,
WALTER'S BARREL
. Why not? Steph only expects me back at four.

Locking the car, it strikes me that my suit is going to look odd in a place like this. But I have no choice; there's blood on my shirt. I check myself in the side mirror, button my jacket tightly, and push my way inside. It's only noon, but the bar's pretty full and stinks of yesterday's sweat and smoke and grease and today's beer. The front window is completely painted over by an advertisement, so I can barely make out anything in the gloom apart from clusters of men, maybe a couple of women, staring up at the TV screens, which are showing a rugby match.

I sit down at the bar, as the man behind the counter eyes me as if I'm taking a regular's seat. Normally this would be enough to send me back outside and home to my local, familiar, safe café, but not today. I sit up straight and order a draft. The barman gets pouring without a word.

“Getting married?” A man, two seats away, has turned to me with a friendly, toothless smile. He's eyeing my suit, wearing tracksuit trousers and a stained T-shirt himself. “A last dop as a free man?”

“Uh, no. Meeting,” I say. “That sort of client.”

“Sure,” he says, looking back up at the screen above the bar.

“Who's playing?” I say.

“Stormers and Force.”

“It's a bit early for rugby, isn't it?”

“It's in Perth,” he says. “Australia.” He shifts his body away from me, turning his face back to the screen. “Ja, you know. Super-rugby what-what.”

I can't help feeling like I've disappointed him. For a minute, I wish I could have come in here with an interesting story—a story of altar shirking or last-night prostitutes—one that would help him escape for a minute.

I take a deep pull from my tasteless beer and look around the space. Now that my eyes are accustomed to the gloom, I notice the mismatched, stained, and scratched dark-wood furnishings, the quiet drinkers looking up at the screens as if they're portals away from their lives and they've just closed forever. It's not the time of day for jolly drunks, and it's too early in the season for anyone to get excited about the game. There's a step up to a room with a few pool tables, where music is playing from a fake jukebox, a molded plastic front with a satellite station playing obligatory radio pop from a speaker inside. A couple of young women move listlessly to the music. I can't tell if they're drunk or stoned or just tired, but it's wrong to see people moving like that at noon.

I stare up at the TV and it seems just a couple of moments later when my phone buzzes, but when I look in front of me, my glass is empty and the first half of the game is done and there's an advert for a car playing. My phone's beeping in my jacket pocket. The barman juts his chin at my beer glass and I nod and check the message on my phone.

Nice, if a bit weird, to hear from you. You sounded strange. Hope all's okay with you?

Here's the picture.

x

I push back from the bar, vaguely aware of the patrons looking at me as I stumble over the worn wooden floor, following my instinct to the bathroom, through the pool room, through the arched hallway toward the smell of piss and pink freshener blocks and finally get to slam a door behind me and gasp at the pain of my shock.