Watching You (23 page)

Z
oe dodges the cracks on the pavement by elongating her stride or doing a quick shuffle. Cranes are silhouetted against the sky and look like stairways to unfinished buildings or extension ladders to the clouds. Zoe can still feel Ryan’s tongue against hers. Taste it. Nothing her mother can do or say could possibly spoil that memory or take it away from her.

Climbing the front steps, she searches for her keys. She finds the gold one and slides it into the lock. Turning her head, she gazes along the street. Something caught her eye, but it’s gone now. Inside, she glances at the mailbox and takes the first two steps. Stops. On the far side of the entrance hall Trevor’s door is slightly ajar. She half expects him to be watching her but there’s nobody peering through the opening.

She continues climbing, reaching the flat, kicking off her shoes and dumping her schoolbag. Normally Elijah hears her coming and barrels down the hallway. This time she doesn’t get a welcome.

“Mum?”

She walks to the kitchen.

“Elijah?”

Bolognese sauce is bubbling on the stove. It’s almost boiled dry, sticking to the bottom of the pan. She turns off the burner. Lasagna sheets are on the bench. The cheese sauce has solidified. Where are they? She stayed out late to punish her mother and now she’s not even here.

Zoe wanders through the flat to the darkened living room. Before she can flick on the lamp switch, she notices something—a tiny pinprick of light on the ceiling that looks like a lone star on a dark night. She turns on a lamp and the “star” disappears. Curling up on the sofa, she checks her mobile. There are two texts and a voicemail message from her mother, nagging her to come home. She spells out a reply.

Waits.

Nothing.

Maybe she’s downstairs at the Brummers or with Trevor. No, she wouldn’t talk to Trevor. Zoe slips on her shoes and goes downstairs. She reaches the second floor landing when a voice makes her jump. Mrs. Brummer peers from her door. Her eyes are so pale they look like white marbles and her skin is wrinkled and pitted like the bark of a tree.

“Zoe dear, I thought you were Trevor. His door is open.”

“Have you knocked?”

“He didn’t answer.”

“Did you go inside?”

The old woman shakes her head. “I didn’t think it was right. Trevor promised to unblock my sink.”

“I’m not very good with sinks,” says Zoe. “Have you seen my mum?”

“No, dear.”

Why do old people’s mouths always hang open? thinks Zoe. It’s like they can’t hear without gaping. She continues downstairs, knocking on Trevor’s door. Listening. Crossing the threshold, she calls the caretaker’s name, hugging her arms to her chest. The small living room is crammed with odd furniture and jumbled shelving. An old navy locker doubles as a coffee table. DVDs are stacked in haphazard piles against the walls. She notices naked women on some of the covers.

“Trevor? Can you hear me?”

Her voice catches in her throat. Somewhere inside her head, Zoe hears a rumbling sound like a bowling ball spinning down a lane. She moves along the hall and stops outside a bedroom. Big dark pieces of furniture are huddled in the gloom.

She can see the outline of a person, sitting upright in an armchair, staring at the wall.

“Trevor? Are you OK?”

Silence.

“Your front door was open. Mrs. Brummer was worried.”

Zoe steps into the room. She reaches for the light switch and turns back toward the seated figure. Trevor has tape wrapped around his chest and forearms. His mouth is stretched out of shape by a gag, which is darkened by the blood that has seeped past the corners of his lips and down his chin. His bowels have emptied, the smell insulting the air.

Zoe takes a moment to comprehend the scene because there’s so much to digest and so little she wants to. Her eyes move downwards, looking for Trevor’s hands…not finding them. Then she sees them, palms open, facing upwards, pinkies touching, lying on the floor between his feet.

Holding her mouth, she reels away, her stomach sliding, cramping. Stumbling into the bathroom she vomits into a stained bowl. Once. Twice. Nothing left. She scoops water into her mouth. Blinks tears.

What to do? Not touch anything. Call the police. Maybe he’s still alive. She punches 999.

“There’s been a murder,” she whispers, glancing over her shoulder. What if she’s not alone?

An operator wants her name and address. She has to describe the scene.

“Is he breathing?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are his injuries?”

“He doesn’t have any hands.”

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody cut them off.”

“How old are you, Zoe?”

“Fifteen.”

“Where is your mother?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know the man in the chair?”

“He’s our caretaker, Trevor.”

“You should check if he’s breathing, Zoe. Can you do that?”

“OK.”

“If he’s not, then leave the flat. Don’t touch anything. Is it safe outside?”

“I don’t know. Mrs. Brummer is there.”

“Who is Mrs. Brummer?”

“Our landlady.”

“You stay with Mrs. Brummer. The police and paramedics are coming.”

Zoe glances at Trevor. He looks almost mummified, like something has sucked the moisture from him and left him desiccated and crumbling. His mouth has been pried apart by the gag and blood crusts his nostrils. A low moan escapes from his chest. Air escaping. Maybe he’s alive. Zoe moves behind him and loosens the knot, pulling the gag away. Trevor’s eyes are wide with terror and he’s staring at her as though pleading for help, but he’s not breathing.

Zoe hears a sound behind her. Mrs. Brummer is standing in the doorway with her hand halfway to her gaping mouth.

“Oh, dear, what have you done?”

P
lease don’t hurt him,” says Marnie, hearing her voice echo through the empty ceiling.

The man has one hand cupped on Elijah’s neck and the other resting on his shoulder where the blade is pointed toward the young boy’s right ear. Marnie isn’t looking at the knife, but at the man’s face. It’s not that he’s particularly memorable, yet she remembers. He said his mother had died. He had her funeral the next day. He had a suicide note and a will. Marnie talked him out of it. He called her the next day to say thanks.

Owen looks up at her now, acknowledging her concern. He sets the blade down on the kitchen table and drops his chin, placing a kiss on the top of Elijah’s head. He’s dressed differently, wearing a tight sweater, dark jeans, and needlepoint boots. His skull is clean-shaven and oiled. He must have been wearing a wig when she first met him.

“Come down the ladder. Nothing in your hands.”

Marnie has to turn around. Descending the ladder, she tries to hold down her skirt against her legs. She glances at the table and the knife.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he warns.

She looks along the hallway to the spare room; the wardrobe; the hole in the wall.

“I’ve sealed it off,” he says, as though reading her mind.

“Who are you?”

“Surely you remember me?”

“Why have you been watching us?”

“I’ve been looking after you.”

Elijah looks up at her excitedly. “This is my friend, Malcolm.”

Marnie shakes her head, struggling to fathom the circumstances as much as the name.

Owen is still holding the boy. “I didn’t want this to happen…not yet.”

Marnie doesn’t understand.

“Now we’ll have to go.”

“Go where?”

“Somewhere safe.”

She can hear sirens in the distance. The police. They’re coming. Thank God!

“They’re not coming to rescue you,” he says, studying her closely. “There’s been an accident downstairs.”

“What sort of accident?”

“Perhaps I should use another word.”

The man has a strange light in his eyes, almost trembling with excitement, soaking up every detail.

“What are you staring at?” asks Marnie.

“You.”

J
oe has almost reached his flat when he gets Marnie’s message. He tries to call her but she’s not answering her mobile. There are police sirens in the distance. They sound like bleating lambs from this far away. Retracing his steps, Joe turns into Elgin Avenue, making sure his arms are swinging naturally in the same direction as the opposite foot.

Police cars come hurtling past, skidding to a halt. Blocking the street. Officers burst from the doors and mount the stairs. Moments later Zoe emerges, escorted down the steps by a constable. A foil blanket is wrapped around her shoulders.

Joe has reached the mansion block. From across the road, he makes eye contact with Zoe. Something in her gaze is greater than fear.

“Where’s your mother?” he asks.

“She’s not home.”

“Elijah?”

She shakes her head.

“Who then…?”

“The caretaker.”

A policeman confronts Joe, demanding to know what he’s doing.

“I’m a friend of the family,” he says, looking at Zoe for confirmation. She nods. “I had a message from Zoe’s mother.”

“What message?”

“She said she needed help.”

The detective glances back at the mansion block. “Stay here.”

Joe takes a moment to realize that the orders are directed at him. More officers have arrived, along with paramedics. The entrance hall is crowded. People have begun spilling out of surrounding buildings. There are faces pressed to windows and peering from doors.

He calls Ruiz.

“You’d better get here quickly.”

“What’s she done?”

“I don’t know.”

The back of the patrol car smells of hamburgers and disinfectant. Zoe is huddled in the foil blanket, shivering, but not cold.

“What happened?” Joe asks.

She shakes her head and tries to get her tongue to work, forming words and sentences. She describes coming home to the empty flat…looking for her mother…finding Trevor. Joe wants her to describe the caretaker’s injuries.

“Who would do something like that?” Zoe asks.

Joe doesn’t answer. In some cultures cutting off a man’s hands is punishment for theft or rape—an archaic ritual like stoning and crucifixion, but nothing else about the scene that Zoe had described would indicate a ritualistic killing.

“Did you see your mother?”

Zoe shakes her head. “She’s not answering her phone.”

Joe remembers the text message. Marnie needed help. He also recalls the last words she spoke to him, her eyes glistening, protesting her innocence.

Zoe exhales and Joe feels her breath against his skin and sees the tremor in her eyes. She’s looking at him expectantly, craving reassurance and answers, but more importantly a happy ending.

T
here was always a possibility that Marnie would find me. Despite the precautions I took and my efforts to disguise my presence, I knew that one day she would see my fingerprints on her life. I can pinpoint my errors, but it makes no difference. I was careless and let her cross the divide. Now she’s here next to me. I can smell her. I can touch her if I want. My face is no longer pressed to the glass or watching her from the ceiling.

Marnie wasn’t the first. There was another before her. One day I’ll tell her the whole story and she’ll get to appreciate the synchronicity of our lives; our one degree of separation. My first real love was the woman who lived next door to me—not the horrid Fariba but the one who came after, when the Khans had moved out.

Christina was the first real hippy I’d ever met. She wore translucent cheesecloth tops without a bra and sometimes sunbathed topless in the garden. Her husband was a little older with long hair and a beard. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to be Jesus Christ or Charles Manson. Their house was always full of people: dropouts, acidheads, and new-agers; girls in printed kaftans whose arms jangled with bangles; guys with long hair and sideburns. They drove around in brightly painted Combis and grew dope in the back garden, telling neighbors they were tomato plants. And they talked about wandering the world, visiting communes and ashrams, discovering the true meaning of life, as though life had a true meaning.

Over the months, the drifters drifted away. They went traveling or found somewhere else to squat or went corporate and “sold out to the man.” The seventies were disappearing like an outgoing tide, leaving some of them washed up on the beach, rotting like dead fish.

Eventually, Christina was alone most days. I would lie in bed and hear her singing along to the radio or her record player while she made beaded wall hangings and sewed lace hems on dresses to sell at the markets. She was also making money as an artist’s model, taking her clothes off for art students at the university.

Her husband was away most weeks. I figured he worked on the trains or in the Gulf. When he was home I could smell dope drifting from the garden and parrot their arguments, listening to them in bed or having breakfast. Sometimes I would sneak into their garden and through the laundry door into the basement, which ran the full length of the house, with varying headroom. I could stand upright and look into the kitchen, but had to crawl on my stomach to reach the living room. Some of the floorboards were so old and bowed that the gaps were wide enough for crumbs and keys to drop through. I could look right up through them and see Christina, who often wore no underwear beneath dresses that floated around her thighs.

The basement was full of old furniture, including an armchair with lion’s paws as feet. I could sit down and lean back, watching Christina as she cooked. This one day—it was my fifteenth birthday—she collected her dirty washing and carried the basket on her hip to the back door and down the side steps to the laundry. I hid behind the old boiler as she sorted the clothes. She must have noticed a movement or heard me breathing because she knew I was there. She didn’t call the police or march me back home to my mother. Instead she carried on loading the machine, bending lower and showing me the full majesty of her posterior. What dreams I had of holding those hips in my hands; touching places in between them.

“How long have you been spying on me?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

“I’m going upstairs now. Would you like to come?”

I followed her to the kitchen. She pulled out a chair. She talked to me as she did her chores. It wasn’t a conversation. I hardly said a word.

“I’m going upstairs to vacuum. You can come and watch me, if you want.”

I hesitated.

“It’s not the same is it?” she asked. “Now that I know you’re there.”

I shook my head.

“I can’t change that.”

She went upstairs. I sat in the kitchen, listening to the clock ticking and the fridge rattling and music playing. I climbed after her. I sat on the bed and watched her vacuuming. I listened to her talk about how the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had sold out their principles. She liked Dylan and Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez. She said the secret to happiness was to share what you have and build a community spirit. She talked about Buddhism and enlightenment, most of which I didn’t understand.

She didn’t eat meat, but she didn’t call herself a vegetarian. She had another word that I can’t remember. She said she made her own soap and candles and grew vegetables in the summer, but wouldn’t use insecticides, which were poisoning the planet and giving everyone cancer.

I listened and watched.

The next day when she came to the laundry she didn’t bother looking for me. She went about her work, knowing I was there. She didn’t wear a bra or cover herself when she walked about the house after a shower. And she didn’t stop wearing dresses or start wearing underwear.

I was nervous around her. I had never really had a woman friend. The girls at school were more interested in shopping and older boys and I was an outsider because I rarely stayed long enough in any school to make friends or become a fixture.

The first time she took me to her bed, I was terrified.

“We’re just going to hold each other,” she said, but I wasn’t used to being held. I tried to shut down my mind, but her hands made that impossible and I was amazed at how different it felt when someone else’s hands were doing the touching.

“You’ve had an accident,” she said, mopping up the discharge. “No use crying over spilled milk, but it really shouldn’t be wasted.”

I didn’t know what she meant. I thought she was giving me a gift, but she was taking from me as well. She locked my fingers over hers and rolled onto her knees, wanting me to slip into her from behind so she could watch us in the mirrored door of the wardrobe. My legs were spread, my stomach distended, as my back arched and I drove into her. I thought I was being violent, but she told me to do it harder.

She explained things to me. Why her nipples hardened and what parts I should stroke, whispering the words softer, or harder.

She seemed to concentrate, searching for the pleasure as though we had dropped a needle on a carpet. There it is! Just there! Yes!

I had never kissed a girl before then, but I knew all about the dynamics of sex. My mother was a prostitute. I spent my first four years, locked in a cupboard, daring not to breathe, peering through a crack in the door and listening to flesh slap against flesh. But this was different. Christina pushed me back on the bed. She swung her hips over my head and pressed her sex against my mouth.

I didn’t hear her orgasm because her thighs were covering my ears, but I felt her body shudder and roll and vibrate against my tongue. Afterwards, she arranged herself beneath me, pulling me inside her, urging me on until I was done.

The first time was in her bedroom. Later we used other rooms in the house and once we did it on the armchair in the basement as the tumble drier rumbled out the tempo.

This happened when her husband was home. He called out for her.

“Where are you?”

“In the basement,” she answered.

“What are you doing?”

“Laundry.”

I thought I was going to go soft inside her, but stayed hard. She kept moving her hips, smiling to herself.

This is her legacy. This is the moment I return to again and again when I try to remember the first time I was truly happy. I can summon up the darkness of the basement, the warmth of her body, ejaculating deep inside her, as I looked up through the gaps in the floorboards and watched her husband move around the kitchen. The affair (can I call it that?) went on for six months and I remember every assignation. My urgency. Her ambivalence, until I entered her. Redoubling my efforts. Fastening onto her breast. I would glance up and catch her smiling at me with a fond benevolence rather than lust. When I came she would push me away, grunting for me to “Get off!”

She would straighten her dress. I would try to pull her close, walking my fingers up her thighs, kissing the heart-shaped mole above her right breast. And she would close her eyes and moan helplessly, offering her lips to me.

How did it end? She was twenty-nine. I was fifteen. For me it was love. I liked to imagine that Christina was in love with me, but in reality I sensed she was bored and seeking pleasure and it suited the times.

Her husband found me in the basement one Sunday morning. He thought I was stealing her underwear. I was hauled down to the police station. They read my file and sent me to see a psychiatrist—a woman with a shrink-sounding name like Dr. Weiss. She had a hot-looking receptionist called Nigella, who talked in this up-speak voice like everything was exciting and unbelievable and amazing.

Dr. Weiss told me to be candid, to open myself up. She wanted to know if I liked girls.

“Sure.”

“What do you like about them?”

“Their smell.”

“What else?”

“Watching them.”

“What about touching them?”

“I guess.”

Dr. Weiss asked about my relationship with my mother, angling to get my whole fucked-up family life on the table. I told her I didn’t want to go there, so she accused me of being emotionally stunted, whatever that meant. By then I was almost sixteen: old enough to join the army.

The recruitment officer had a scar on his top lip that made him look like he was permanently sneering. He told me that girls would “drop their knickers” when they saw me in uniform. Then he slapped me so hard on the back that I spat my chewing gum onto the floor.

“Pick that up, soldier,” he said.

It was my first order.