Falling down the stairs

“That’s all there is to the story.” A pause. A prick of the ears from me. All that there was to the story. And yet not. “I’ll tell you this for nothing, though. Nobody else has a key to that room. Those cat rugs are heavy, and they were FLUNG across the room. Plus, the dustpan and brush that hangs on the wall? They – were – in – the – cat – basket…”

His listener was silent, struck dumb by this revelation. With my back to them, I couldn’t see if this was because he’d been gripped by the story the same way I, as a disinterested listener, had been. A tale ideal for Hallowe’en. The mysterious movement of heavy rugs across a cellar room. The swapping of position with a dustpan and brush.

The speaker hadn’t finished, though.

“That was to draw my attention, when I went in. Nobody else could have gone in. Only I have a key. And even if a cat had got in there and I’d not noticed, it’s not the sort of thing a cat would do. A dog, maybe. But not a cat.”

Another pause. I found that I was waiting with bated breath. What would come next?

A reiteration. “That dustpan and brush was moved to draw my attention to it.”

That’s where his story ended. His companion went to the gents. He waited a couple of minutes, long enough to finish his coffee that must have cooled enough to drink down in one go. Then he made his own way to the gents, crossing paths with his friend.

I paid and left the café. Outside, it was drizzling and I regretted not having brought an umbrella. I hurried back to the car, abandoning my plan to wander around this small Yorkshire town made famous by a tv show. For a moment, I wondered if the two men talking in the ice cream parlour were from that show. They were the right age. But they were too real and besides, there hadn’t been any cameras in sight. Nobody was filming them.

I drove back over the moors, enjoying the autumn colours of the trees and the bracken, gold and orange against the green of the grass. Sheep were wandering freely across the trunk road that takes you across the back of Saddleworth, past the derelict Horse and Jockey pub and down a steep hill into Delph.

I am another year older now. I have carried my bones through twelve more months. And I am alone again.

No amount of trying can bridge the gap that has grown up between us. People do what they have to do. He does what he must and now so do I. It was never the same thing, and contortions of will could never make it so. It never even came close.

When I was younger, I would dream about falling down the stairs. When awake, I would fantasise about it, wondering how it would feel, wondering if I would die. I considered how each step would feel, banging into neck, into spine, into legs and skull as I fell. I would wake up from dreams where I was tangled in a heap, twisted and confused, looking up at the place where I had started.

When I was with him, the daydreams and the nightmares stopped.

Last night I dreamed of stairs again. I dreamed that we lived in a mansion and there were staircases everywhere, hidden ones and open ones, leading from one room to another in a labyrinth of ascension and descent. I was rushing from room to room so that he wouldn’t find me. And suddenly I broke free of the house and into a field that was full of rotting carcasses being pecked at by magpies. I was in a village populated by brothers married to sisters and where I knew that, if I stayed, I would be killed.

No falling down the stairs, but no comfort or cheer either.

Today, I drove and missed his voice. I didn’t miss anything else. I might have felt sorrow that we were so different in the end, too different, but it didn’t last long. When a decision is made, you must stick to it, no matter how sad, no matter how hollow it makes you feel.

From racing through midnight streets with only the moon as your witness, to driving across moors knowing there will be no more. It only takes a short time to move a million miles like that. Less time than it takes to fall down the stairs.

There’s a cure for everything.

This cure comes from within. It tells me that everything will be alright. I trust myself on this.

In silence, then, I listen to the words of others. I hear the echoes from their hidden cellars; the places where things move without assistance, to draw their attention to some mysterious fact. No mystery at all, if they just think about it. Nothing strange, just something to learn.

A jolt of recognition, maybe. A jolt that jars the spine and bangs the head, that feels like the edges of steps biting into your body as you fall, and at the bottom you look up and see the place you once were standing. The place you threw yourself off from, trusting yourself to the fall, trusting yourself to the landing, not caring if it snapped your neck, but knowing that it wouldn’t.

He’s a stranger to me. More than he ever was before. In suddenly recognising that all the things I’d told myself were true were lies, he became unknown. He turned into someone I don’t want to know. Face and hands and body all familiar to me. Everything I loved burnt into the core of me. And one sour conversation. One weary admission of defeat.

“Find someone else,” he said. “Find someone else to play this part. I’m tired of this shit.”

Freedom is found in the strangest of places. I was set free not, as I thought, from falling down the stairs, but from one man’s weariness of everything this had become. Not even that. Everything it had always been, by his destructive will.

Nobody else has a key to that room. Nobody else could get in to move things around, and yet suddenly the whole world was rearranged. Turned upside down; things on the inside now the outer layer.

I drove back to the place I used to call home. I collected belongings I’d forgotten were in my possession. I packed them into my car and drove to the place I now call home, with its warm painted walls lined with books that stand upright and lie across the tops of each other. Six rooms, all mine. Doors front and rear with locks to which only I have the keys. Nobody else. Just me.

Twelve more months added to my bones. Twelve more months of filth and dreams, everything I feel locked inside where nobody can touch it.

He smiled so sweetly. I don’t need to remember or forget.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006

Everything All At Once

Her eyes go around the room. She’s looking for something. Searching. Her eyes move everywhere but never come to rest on him. She rubs distractedly at her breast bone.

“Heartburn?” he asks her.

She still doesn’t look at him, but nods.

There’s a pair of red shoes left where someone stepped out of them on the burnt-orange rug. The left shoe is slightly in front of the other, and the toe of the right shoe nudges shyly into the left. He pictures the one that the shoes belong to. He can imagine her standing, slightly knock-kneed like a child as she hooks one shoe off the back of her foot with the toe of the other. He thinks of her standing there, back from work, ready to kick off her shoes; ready to take off her business clothes; ready to switch off from the world outside.

She speaks. “I feel nothing,” she says. Her face screws up in confusion. “Nothing.” She looks at him at last and asks, “Is that strange?”

He doesn’t know. He is still thinking about a pair of legs coming out from under a skirt, ending in a pair of red shoes. The shoes kicked off, landing where they still lie now, and her walking in stockinged feet into the kitchen.

He thinks of her laughing at the advert on the front of the free newspaper, proclaiming that their local music shop was the home of “Sax, Drums & Rock ‘n’ Roll”. Laughing and groaning and rolling her eyes. He remembers her in all her radiant beauty as she left the newspaper lying on the table and took the loaf and the butter from the fridge.

He remembers her beginning to butter the bread, spreading the butter on too thickly. He had told her off, he had made her laugh again by telling her it wasn’t healthy. She had wrinkled her nose at him in laughing protest.

He remembers the shine in her grey-green eyes. He remembers the laughter in them.

He’s aware suddenly that the room is silent. They are sitting there together, saying nothing. Neither of them can think of anything. He has run out of conversation. There are only so many ways you can say things. There are only so many things you can say in a situation like this.

His finger nails are shiny. He looks at them. Neatly manicured, polished. Clean square fingernails on a pair of manly hands. He wonders whether another pair of hands is touching her now. It’s hard not to wonder. It seems so final, and yet unfinished.

He thinks about another pair of hands. They could be hands that she has chosen. They could be hands that are touching her against her wishes.

His own hands ball into fists.

“It’s the not knowing,” he says.

“The what?” comes the reply.

He looks at her mother. “Why are you here?” he asks her.

Why is she here? He doesn’t understand her presence here, in their house, in his life.

“What do you mean, it’s the not knowing?” her mother asks him, ignoring his question.

“Just that,” he says, looking down at his hands again, held palm to palm now between his legs. “It’s the not knowing where she’s gone, whether she chose to go, who she’s with, if she’s on her own.” He looks up at her again. “It’s the not fucking knowing,” he tells her.

He remembers a story she wrote once. It was about a man. A husband. Maybe a father; he doesn’t remember. All he can recall is that the man disappeared, walking from a railway station in the city centre to a pub around the corner. Being there on the cctv and then disappearing forever.

He remembers that it sent a shiver up his spine; the way she wrote about it. He never asked her what it meant, where she had come up with the idea. He didn’t want to know. He was scared that the answer would be more than he could take.

“Why are you here?” he asks again, looking at her; suddenly seeing her clearly.

She looks back at him. “Peter, I’m here to be of help. I’m here to wait for news.” She looks away again, out towards the window, gazing at the curtain misted street beyond it. “Where else am I supposed to go?” she asks. Not particularly of him. “I’m her mother.”

Silence falls between them again, cold and uncomfortable; thin, like the air on the first frosty day of winter. He thinks about getting up and doing something. He wonders about a cup of tea. He draws breath, about to ask, but she speaks first.

“What did she say to you?” she asks again, still looking away from him, towards the window. He has lost count of the times he has been asked this now. Not just by her. By others, too. The police. Friends ringing to offer support; wanting to know the full story as quickly as possible.

He doesn’t condemn them. He knows that she would have been the same if any of their friends had disappeared. Wanting to know the story behind the tragedy, so that the ones left behind could build it higher and more ornate than it actually was. Bare facts provide the starched canvas for a more detailed needlepoint of guesses and supposition.

He thinks of her impish face behind a cheese sandwich, sitting with her knees up close on one of the dining chairs, watching him as he grilled the sausages and boiled the potatoes for his signature dish, her eyes peeping over the sandwich that was squeeed between the fingers of both hands, held in front of her face like a harmonica.

The question hangs in the air.

Just off to get some milk, was what she had said to him. She’d finished the sandwich and he was cursing at the fridge door as he realised that they didn’t have enough milk in, even for him to mash the potatoes.

She had stood up and wiped her sandwichy hands on the legs of her jeans. She had pulled on his old Police issue hoodie; the one that drowned her and would have made her look like a teenage skater boy, except she was to pretty.

She had grabbed some change off the side and headed for the front door, calling out “Just off to get some milk, then!” as though he might have forgotten.

He smiles at the memory and catches himself just as her mother looks across and sees the smile, too.

“It’s been over 36 hours,” she says to him.

“I know,” he replies. “I’m waiting for her too.”

It has been forty three hours. Only five away from her having been gone for two days.

All those numbers. Fours and threes, and fives and sixes. He adds everything together and together and together again, coming to rest at the single digit nine.

They had been out together the weekend before. They had gone for a meal, she had taken him to her favourite club, where you sat at tables, ate pizza and tapas, drank expensive cocktails, and listened to cool jazz. She had worn a dress. She had worn heels. Her legs had been masked behind a sheen of gossamer thin black nylon. The hem of the dress had floated in the breeze, had bounced slightly with the rhythm of her hips as she walked.

Walking behind her, down the street, after they left the club, he had placed his hands over her eyes, daring her to walk blind in front of him. She had laughed and walked on fearlessly, trusting him to hold her back from any danger.

She hadn’t even had to ask. He had steered her past lamp posts, had held her back at the edge of kerbs, and helped her weave her way past couples walking arm in arm along the street.

She had laughed the whole time, and when they got into the cab, when her eyes were no longer blindfolded by his hands, he had lifted the skirt of her dress slightly and pushed aside underwear so that he could touch her. Looking into her eyes he had moved his fingers slowly and tenderly against her flesh. She held his gaze and dared him to move his fingers harder and faster. She had bitten her bottom lip, closed her eyes, released the tiniest gasp of air and sunk back into the seat of the cab.

He wonders now if someone else is touching her, making her gasp, making her chest heave and swell with the pleasure.

He wonders if someone is doing worse.

He remembers her reaction when they had watched Se7en together. He remembers the intensity with which she watched when Gwyneth was stolen away from Brad. She had sat forward in her seat. Her eyes had been fixed to the screen, watching how Pitt’s character reacted.

She hadn’t ever said anything to him in relation to the scene. She didn’t know that he had read the story that she wrote about the disappearing husband.

He wonders if this disappearance is premeditated; if she was just waiting for a chance to walk out. It was like her. A silent leaving. They had never rowed very much. Arguing was never her style. She avoided confrontation. She only wanted fun. She wanted to feel safe, enclosed. She didn’t want to feel ripped apart.

He would have chosen a blazing row to go out on. He would have gone for the full scale melodrama of raised voices, vicious words, shaken fists. He would have taken his coat and his door keys and stormed out of the house.

But he would also have calmed down in the cool of the air outside the house, in the silence that allowed him to collect his thoughts. He would have come back and carried on as though nothing had been said.

He wonders if she still loves him; if she still cares. He wonders if she has just had enough and wants something else, something newer and fresher. Something not him. Something that doesn’t threaten her with its closeness.

She wants security, but she hates it too.

He frowns. His thoughts are circling around the belief that she has chosen to do this. That nobody snatched her away. He understands it as fact somewhere deep and silent inside him. He can picture her, in his hoodie, wearing her trainers, walking to the corner shop but not going in. Never going in. Walking past it and up along the main road, away from him and their life together.

No change of clothes. No make up. No toothbrush. Just her purse and her mobile phone, which isn’t accepting incoming calls. Not even her house keys. She was going to the shop. He was cooking their tea. She didn’t need her keys.

Her mother sighs. “I wish someone would let us know what’s going on,” she says.

“Why don’t you go home, Dilys,” he asks her. “I’ll ring you as soon as I hear something.”

She looks at him. “I want to help,” she tells him. “I want to be here with you. I need to be here when she calls.”

He can’t look at her. He looks at his hands.

“Dilys,” he says, summoning up all the patience he has left in his body. “I need to wait alone. I need to be on my own.”

He looks up at her then; sees her looking at him, a confused expression floating across her face, moving muscles into tiny frowns and flickers of tension.

“She isn’t going to call, Dilys. It will be the Police who call.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s a fact, Dilys. Trust me.” He remembers the days he spent liaising with families. He remembers the phone calls and the visits, the despair on people’s faces. He wonders whether his face carries those same traces of despair.

He rubs his face with his hands, then addresses Dilys firmly.

“If Kathy has decided to leave, then she isn’t going to call. She’s decided to go for a reason. She won’t want to discuss it with any of us.” Least of all you, was what he thought. Least of all the woman who bore her and brought her into the world. “And if she hasn’t decided to leave. If someone has taken her, then the chances are that she’s dead by now.”

“You can’t say that,” Kathy’s mother says. “You can’t say that.”

Peter looks at her. There is no point in trying to reason with her, so he doesn’t even try.

“Just go home, Dilys,” he says. “Please.”

She sits on for a while longer, not looking at him, unwilling to move. She has the same jawline as Kathy. Stubborn and fixed.

He remembers them coming home, leaving the taxi. She had put some Latin groove on when they got into the house, some Salsa. She had started to mambo, lost in the music, not even acknowledging his presence in the room. He had stood in the doorway from the hall, leaning against the doorframe, watching the way her body moved. He watched the sway of her hips, the movements of her arms, her legs.

He thinks now that he knew then that she was leaving.

The phone rings. Dilys looks at him.

He answers it and her voice fills the earpiece, fills his head.

“I thought I should let you know,” her voice says. “I’m alive, I’m okay. All those things.”

“It’s her, isn’t it?” Dilys asks, standing up, moving over towards him.

He holds out a hand, tries to ward her off, wishes for an evil eye painted in the centre of his palm to keep the witch at bay.

“Thanks,” he says to her, on the other end of this phone call.

“No point in wasting Police time,” she says. “I won’t ask how you are. I can probably guess.”

He can’t think of anything to say to her.

“Have I wrong-footed you?” she laughs. “You didn’t think I would call, did you?”

He is listening to the noises in the background. He is hearing silence. No traffic. No tv. No other voices. She is in a building somewhere. She is on her own.

“I couldn’t do it any more, Pete,” she says. “I just couldn’t live with you. I can’t live that way.”

He listens to her voice, to her words, and to the silence that follows them. Dilys is in the background, demanding to be allowed to speak to her daughter; demanding to know that she is alive and well and safe. He knows that Kathy can hear all this.

“I told her to go home,” he says to her. She laughs. He turns towards Dilys, holding the phone away from his mouth. “She’s fine, Dilys. Go home,” he says.

Kathy laughs again. She is just the same, she just isn’t here with him.

“I miss you,” he says, and it is her turn to be silent.

“Then stop,” she says eventually, and there is a hardness in her voice that he recognises as hate. It shocks him into reality.

The silence stretches out. Even her mother is silent behind him. Even she has sensed that something important has just happened. The absence of man-made noise lies heavy over the background hum of appliances and traffic.

The phone line goes dead. Peter hears the dial tone buzzing in his ear.

“Has she gone?” Dilys whispers.

“I’d better ring the Police,” he says. I’d better function, is what he means. Better to do something practical. Better not to dwell.

Dilys listens to him giving the information to the Family Liaison Officer over the phone. She absorbs the information. Pete lets her. He doesn’t care how she reinterprets it. He doesn’t want to discuss any of it with her. He just wants her to go.

When he comes off the phone, Dilys has already put her coat on and is halfway to the door. She looks at him before she leaves. They have nothing to say to each other.

He is left alone. He puts his phone onto the coffee table and sits back down on the sofa.

For the first time in forty three hours, he allows himself to weep. He doesn’t know what he’s weeping about, but he calls it loss just to keep his brain happy.

He stops trying to remember things about her. He has no need to wonder where she is, or who with, or why. He knows now. He knows part of it. He will never know it all. That much he understands.

There is beer in the fridge, and wine in the rack in the kitchen. There’s a bottle of red that they opened to drink with the Beef Wellington she had cooked on Tuesday. He decides to finish that.

He needs to think about food. He needs to think about sleeping in their bed instead of on the sofa. He needs to think about going back to work, because a missing wife is one thing, being left by her is another.

He needs to think about all these things, but first he needs to drink.

He pulls the cork from the bottle and pours out a large glass of the cabernet shiraz. He swigs a large mouthful, and then a second, clearing almost half the glass. He fills the glass up to the top again and takes the bottle through to the living room.

“Here’s to you,” he toasts the thin air, and he’s not sure if he means her or if he means himself. He drinks and savours the roundness of the wine in his mouth, the tingle of it at the back of his tongue, the gentle warmth as it passes down his throat.

It will be a long night. He switches off his phone. He unplugs the landline. He sits back on the sofa and swings his legs up onto the coffee table. He takes the remote control and switches on the tv.

Images dance and flicker in front of his eyes. Voices wash over each other, and over him.

He drinks.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006

Ceci n'est pas une histoire

I could see a spider making its way slowly and smoothly across the supermarket floor.

Standing there at the till, I watched it as it crossed from one checkout desk to the other either side of the aisle in which I was standing. Once it had disappeared, I looked up and to my left and saw a box filled with plastic wallets. The plastic wallets contained vampire capes. Forty-five inch vampire capes. Hallowe’en was just around the corner and the supermarket was confused about what to display more prominently; the tricks and the treats for the fake festival just around the corner, or the endless aisles of pointless food for the festival that was still two months away.

Selection boxes and outsized tins of Quality Street and Roses filled an entire aisle marked “Seasonal Goods”. Another was filled with those plastic trays of tiny biscuits and pretzels that only ever seem to be in the shops in the run up to Christmas. Tiny biscuits shaped like fish.

I looked at the vampire capes and I knew.

I paid for the few things I had put into my basket. Long days caused by late arrivals inevitably lead to impulse purchases of food packed with salt and sugar and bottles containing liquids that leave your head aching the next day.

I smiled at the cashier as I paid. He was tall and dark and bored. I handed over that small piece of plastic. I keyed in the four digit code. I took the card as he handed it back. I looked at him and I smiled, and he didn’t look back. He didn't smile.

My interior zeitgeist told me that everything was fine. Life smelled and tasted and felt as good as it ever should.

But the vampire capes in their plastic wallets had given me the nod.

I daydreamed, as I drove home, that everything was in its rightful place. All arguing had ceased. All striving to prove that I was the person that I should be. All fevered hope that despair was put far behind me in the past.

I knew this film, though. Like everyone. I knew the score, the script, the lighting and the direction. I knew to start counting; to hold those numbers firmly in my mind. I knew to start waiting for the delivery.

Fishermen place maggots into their mouths to warm them up before attaching them to a hook. Walking from the car to the back door of the house, I wondered whether the bait that was waiting for me was still warm from his mouth. The thing that the vampire capes had hinted at, as orange and synthetic as they were, folded tight inside their plastic wallets. I wondered if it was waiting for me inside. The house was in darkness, and opening the door onto silence was like holding a stopped watch, waiting for the moment when the hour has finally gone back and it’s alright to start ticking again.

I walked through the silence into the living room. I left the lights switched off. I walked through silence and the half light from the garden outside until I stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up.

There is always silence in this house. Even when it’s noisy, the silence never leaves. It simply allows the sounds and the vibrations to pass through. The silence is always there.

I waited at the bottom of the stairs for a while. I listened to the silence, which seemed to float half a metre from the ceiling, like thin fog above a culvert. When I was absolutely certain that no sound was interfering with the silence’s signal, I walked up the stairs.

At the top of the stairs, just outside the bathroom, is a tiny picture of the sea. A small square of glass covers over the image, which is no more than ten centimetres by ten more, if that. The sea is flat and cold and a silvered shade of palest purple. Like lilac.

I stopped at the top of the stairs and looked at the picture. It seems like a window at times. A peep-hole to a world that I once knew and can’t regain. A peep-hole or a porthole. I can’t decide which.

I paused in front of it for a couple of minutes, head craned forward, peering through the small glass square at the cold flat sea. I don’t know what I was hoping for. A ship, maybe.

But there was nothing there.

I walked into the bedroom. We have this competition, he and I. There has never been any formal declaration, but the competition still exists, nevertheless. We are building a tower of clothes. Clothes worn once. Clothes pulled from the bottom and worn a second time. Clothes from the middle worn three times. All returned to the top of the pile, along with new clothes pulled fresh from the wardrobe to start the process again.

I walked into the bedroom, and the tower of clothes had shrunk. That meant that there would be a tangle of damp items in the washing machine downstairs. That, in turn, meant that I had won the competition this time.

I pulled off each of the things that I was wearing and began to build a new layer on the dishevelled pile that remained. Everything except for my underwear went onto the pile.

The silence seemed to hiss in my ears.

In the bathroom, the bath bore the marks of the cat’s paws around its rim. I wiped them away with a damp cloth. I used the shower to rinse away hairs from the bottom of the bath. I put the plug into the plughole. I turned on the taps.

I stood in front of the mirror and gave myself a good, hard stare. That morning a colleague had said that I had good skin. I looked. I didn’t know what I was comparing it with, though. It looked like skin to me. Freckled in places, with spots in others and downy hairs on the cheeks and jawline. I looked at myself and my eyes reflected in the glass looked back at me with frankness.

I listened to the water filling up the bath, with the silence waiting to fill the space when the bath was full.

I stepped into the bath still wearing my underwear. I have never wanted to be found naked. There is something shameful about your body exposed to strangers and you unable to do anything about it.

I lay half submerged with my knees raised so that I could get more of my torso under the water. Our bath is white plastic and small. Our bath is designed for people a good foot shorter than me.

The water was hot and soothed me. I drew a thin line across each wrist with the vegetable knife I had brought up from the kitchen. I allowed my hands to slip under the warm and soothing water.

I didn’t want to watch the water turn pink, so I closed my eyes and began to drift. Aspirin helps to keep the blood flowing. Aspirin also helps to absorb the pain.

Warm water around me, soothing and holding my body.

He must have found me. I don’t know. I was elsewhere for a while, neglecting my duties of observation.

The bridge that I crossed between then and now is white and curved with lattice-work railings, carved from soap. It smells clean as you cross it; as though the soap is rubbing off on you as you pass over it.

The bait was warm. The smell of her still fresh on the air. The bait pulled from his mouth, lingering with the silence half a metre from the ceiling. Like a fish, I leapt to take the bait in my own mouth. Barbed hook pulled me clear.

So I don’t know if he found me. But I presume that he did. My hands lie on the cover before me, my wrists bound in comedy bandages. Not as funny as if I had set my hands on fire. But comical enough.

Wisdom tells me not to ask whether it was him who pulled me out of that cooling water. I don’t want to know who else it could have been. I don’t want to know who saw me there.

I’m waiting now to be asked. The whys and the whys and the whys. Y is his symbol and X is mine. Why is the question, and my mouth is stitched closed like I’m Miffy the rabbit.

I sit and I wait. The silence hides in corners here, as though it’s scared to venture any further out than that. Like the spider crossing the wide and shiny aisle between the two checkout desks.

When I leave this place, I shall take some of the silence with me.

When I leave this place I'll hold my scars face out to the world.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006

Something Is

Alice wanted out. The room was hot. She felt as though she couldn’t breathe; that there wasn’t enough oxygen in there for the number of people the organisers had crammed in. She hated launches. She hated the poseurs, the liggers, the bullshitters.

She looked at them all, milling around with their glasses of wine, taking canapés from the dishes carried by circulating catering staff, swapping empty glasses for full ones.

Alice tried to maintain a bland expression on her face as yet another sweaty-faced art appreciator talked to her chest. He was incapable of getting her name right, even though it was there, emblazoned on her badge. He kept on calling her Alicia. As though Alice was too mundane, or lacked a certain something.

Magda was watching her from the other side of the room. Magda was desperate for a reason to fire her. Hence the importance of maintaining her composure as this damp individual with the face like bread pudding talked on at her chest and called her Alicia.

Suddenly, Alice was swept into another conversation with one of the Trustees. This Trustee was the current head of the Board. Perma-tanned to an almost radioactive shade of orange, she was currently trying too hard with a man half her age. He was still older than Alice, though, and uncomfortable in his suit. He kept pushing one hand through his hair, as though he couldn’t quite understand what he was doing there.

The Trustee was pronouncing Alice’s name wrong at the same time as she was singing Alice’s praises to the man who had accompanied her and helped to rid Alice of the sweaty doughboy. Alice, according to the Trustee, was the gallery’s most prized possession.

“Other than the works of art, of course,” she laughed, clearly believing that the sound coming from her mouth could be considered tinkling and delightful.

Alice smiled politely. The man looked at her and smiled apologetically. The Trustee caught sight of Magda across the room and waved.

“I must just have a word with Magda,” she said to Alice and the man.

When she was gone, Alice looked at the man properly. His face was soft, clean shaven. Most importantly, it was dry. Even in the heat of this room, even in the discomfort of wearing a suit, he hadn’t broken into a sweat. Alice smiled at him.

“I didn’t catch your name,” she said.

“We weren’t really introduced,” he replied. He held out a hand, into which Alice put her own and felt it grasped, firmly. His hand was dry and warm. “I’m James,” he said.

“I’m Alice,” Alice told him.

James raised his eyebrows. “Alice? I thought – “

Alice cut him off. “No, my name is Alice. Really.”

He smiled. “Sore point?”

She smiled back. “You could say that. Most of the people I work with or have to deal with can’t seem to believe that I have such a utilitarian name. It’s almost as though they need more vowels, or syllables, or at least for it to sound Germanic if it’s going to be short.”

“You think Alice is a utilitarian name?” he asked her.

Alice blushed. She didn’t know why, but she thought it might have something to do with the way he raised his eyebrows at her. His surprise at her opinion seemed genuine. Alice wasn’t used to people being guileless at events such as this one.

“My grandmother was called Alice,” James continued. “It makes me think of rosewater and peppermints.”

“You’re an artist, aren’t you?” Alice asked him.

He laughed. “You can tell that just from my description of my grandmother?”

“No,” said Alice. “From the way you went a bit misty as you were saying it.”

He laughed again. “You’re very blunt, you know,” he said.

“It’s a quality that goes with my utilitarian name,” Alice replied. “I don’t smell of rosewater or peppermints.”

“You’re right,” said James. “You smell of lily of the valley and jasmine.”

Alice had no comeback. She hated it when she was stumped for a response. She looked away from him, as though she was looking around the room to check if someone else was there.

“Who are you looking for?” he asked her.

She turned back to him. “Nobody,” she said.

“Oh. It just seemed like – never mind.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like you were hoping someone would come to your rescue, or something.”

“Oh.” Alice looked away again. Her eyes landed on David. “Shit,” she said. “Oh fucking shit.”

James followed her line of sight, looking across the room at David himself.

“Do you know David?” he asked.

Alice stood stock still, rooted to the spot, oblivious to everything going on around her. She didn’t even hear James’ question. Everything was moving slowly. Even sound was travelling slowly. The edges of her vision started to crowd in on her, reducing her world to a small square in front of her eyes; a small square that was filled by David. The square drew in on itself, and soon Alice couldn’t see anything. The room was black and she had the sensation of falling. It seemed to take forever, this fall through the blackness, but eventually she landed and opened her eyes to find herself crumpled in a heap on the floor.

James was crouched beside her and a circle of art critics, buyers and blaggers had formed itself around her.

“Are you okay?” James asked her. “I think you fainted.”

“It happens,” Alice said, trying to sit up. It seemed such a long way from the floor to an upright position, but she managed it.

“You really banged your head when you went down,” James told her. “Can you feel it?”

Alice put a hand to the back of her head. It was tender and she could already feel a lump beginning to form.

James started to help her up. He placed one hand under her elbow and the other around her waist, and pulled her to a standing position.

“Come on,” he said. “Come outside for some air. It’s far too hot in here.”

He walked her across the room. As they passed her, Magda said, “Don’t be so bloody melodramatic, Alicia.” She looked at James. “I’m so sorry about my assistant, Mr. McGuire.”

“It isn’t a problem, Ms. Halarewicz, really.”

Once they were outside and James had Alice safely propped up against the low wall in front of the gallery, Alice looked at him.

“You’re The artist,” she said. “This is your launch.”

He laughed. “I’m exhibiting, yes.”

Alice blushed again. “Shit,” she said. “I didn’t realise.”

“You didn’t realise or you’d have fainted sooner?” James asked.

Alice closed her eyes, feeling dizzy again. “Something like that,” she said.

James rested against the wall, next to her, mirroring her body position. They leaned there for a while in silence, bottoms against the top edge of the wall; hands either side of their hips, gripping the wall edge; legs stretched out in front of them.

“Don’t you have to be in there, meeting people?” Alice asked, nodding her head in the direction of the building behind them.

“I expect so,” James said. “I think I’m expected to give a short speech about the work in the exhibition as well.”

“You should go back in, then,” Alice told him.

He didn’t reply. He just carried on leaning against the wall, staring down at his feet, which were crossed over each other at the ankle.

His shoes were dark brown leather. It was a light summer evening, and Alice could see that they went well with his dark brown suit.

“You don’t see many men wearing dark brown suits,” she said.

“You don’t see me wearing any suit that often,” he replied.

Alice reached out a hand and touched the fabric at the cuff of his jacket sleeve. It was a light wool, soft under her fingers. There were four buttons running along the fake slit.

“I’ve never understood what this was about,” she said, holding the fake slit by its edge.

She looked up to find James looking at her. She smiled and tugged his sleeve slightly before relinquishing her grip.

“Sorry,” she said. “Force of habit. I have this need to touch fabrics, to find out what they feel like.”

“I see,” was all he said, still looking at her.

Magda came out of the gallery behind them. “Are you feeling okay now, Alicia? We need Mr. McGuire back. He has an exhibition to open, in case it had slipped your mind.”

“Are you feeling alright?” James asked her.

Alice nodded. She stood up. “Come on,” she said. “I’d better let you get back to your adoring public.”

He led the way up the steps to the door and joined Magda there. Magda glared at Alice and swept James McGuire away into the building. Alice took her time in following them.

She took a position at the back of the main exhibition room, near the door. It was cooler there, and she was out of sight of most of the people in attendance.

“That was very dramatic,” said a voice in her ear. She didn’t have to look to know that it was David.

“Shock at seeing you again,” she said under her breath and over her shoulder.

“How gratifying,” he murmured back at her. “And how expert of you to get the artist’s attention.”

“Fuck off, David,” she whispered. It came out almost hisslike, except none of the letters were right for sibilance.

“Steady on, love, or I’ll think you still care.”

David moved off somewhere else, further away from the door, but still behind her, still out of her line of vision.

James had just finished speaking. She hadn’t paid any attention to what he had said. She didn’t expect they would be conversing again. Magda would see to that.

Instead, Alice busied herself with directing people around the gallery, answering questions about their summer programme of events based on the exhibition of the artist’s work. She managed to avoid David. As the evening drew to a close, she realised that he had left.

“So how do you know him?” a voice said, as she was shaking hands with someone on their way out.

“How do I know who?” she replied without turning to see who had spoken.

“Goodnight, thank you for coming,” she said to a couple as they passed through the door beside her and on out into the night.

“David. The man who made you faint. The man who was winding you up while I was giving my little speech.”

“Oh,” she said. “David. I just – know him.”

“Good to see you tonight,” she said to the Trustee, who gripped her hand and questioned her on her health before effusively thanking James for everything.

Magda walked over to them. “Thanks, Alicia, you can go now. I’ll finish up here.” She paused and looked Alice up and down. “You should probably get your head looked at, or something.”

Alice laughed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she said to Magda. “Nice to meet you,” she said to James as she headed through the door.

“My pleasure,” he replied. “I’m sure I’ll see you again, sometime.” But Alice was gone, without hearing his goodbye. She wanted to get out of that place and back to the house. She wanted a cool drink, sitting on the back doorstep, barefoot and with her skirt hitched up around her knees, feeling the breeze against her legs.

The phone rang as she let herself into the house. She let the answering machine get it, while she kicked her shoes off and looked through her mail from that morning.

“Alice, it’s David. Call me when you get this.”

The phone clicked off, and the answering machine thanked the dead air for calling. To get rid of the five second beep which let her know she had a message, Alice went through the rigmarole of pretending she wanted to listen to the message in order to delete it.

She picked up the phone handset and carried it through to the kitchen. She unlocked the back door and opened it to let some air into the house.

She fixed herself a drink and took it and the phone to the doorstep. Once she was settled, with her skirt hitched up, she dialled the familiar number.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“To talk to you,” David said.

“What about?” Alice asked.

“Art,” David said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Is he good? Anything of any worth? Is that space still as insecure as it always was? The usual.”

“I thought I told you last time that I’m not doing this any more.”

“Alice. Dear. I know what you said. And I’ve left you alone for five years. I think it’s time again, don’t you?”

Alice let the question hang in the air. She counted to fifteen and, as she heard him draw breath to ask her another question, she hung up on him.

She placed the phone down on the kitchen floor beside her and took a couple of sips of her drink. The night air was quite still and there wasn’t as much of a breeze against her legs as she would have liked. She took another couple of sips of her drink.

The phone beside her began to ring. She picked it up from the floor, putting her drink down in the space it vacated.

She pressed the talk button and waited for him to speak.

“Alice. Can’t we just discuss the possibilities? It needn’t be anything too large. Just something that you think will appreciate enough over time to make the effort worthwhile.”

Alice let the silence from her end continue.

“You do think he’s good enough, don’t you?”

Alice picked up her drink again and put the phone back on the floor. She heard David’s voice say something else. It sounded tinny and remote.

She felt a sudden desire for a cigarette. She didn’t know if she had any in the house. It had been a couple of years since she had smoked, and anything that had managed to hide itself and survive the purge would be disgustingly stale by now. She toyed with the idea of leaving the phone connected for David to burble on into the silence of the house, while she nipped to the corner shop for a packet of 20 Marlboro Lights.

She’d fainted once tonight, though. She didn’t want to add insult to injury by having a whitey on the doorstep because it was so long since she’d smoked anything.

She heard David’s tinny voice say, “Are you there?” so she picked up the phone again.

“Yes, I’m here,” she said. “But I’m not listening.”

“You’re not going to help?”

“Nope.” She drank from her glass and swallowed. “Like I told you last time, I’m not interested in this any more. It’s not worth it. It bores me.”

On the other end of the phone, it was David’s turn to be silent. She let the silence ride until she heard the click of David’s receiver going down and the buzz of a disconnected line.

She was done with that business now. If anyone was going to benefit from the acquisition of work by a little known artist, it was going to be her, and she had better ways of doing it now than by outright theft.

David’s presence that night had been an unexpected boon. She had no doubt at all now that there would be a follow up meeting between her and Mr. James McGuire; or that there would be more meetings after that, until the painting she knew he was going to make his money off was eventually in her possession.

She pressed the talk button again to disconnect the call completely and finished her drink. She needed to be clear headed in the morning. There was a chance that James McGuire might not even stay away for a day.

The phone rang again at four in the morning. It was Magda. Alice knew instantly what David had done. Impatient and dissatisfied with her response, he had broken into the gallery that night and taken as many of the paintings as he could get away with before the police arrived.

Magda wanted Alice to go straight to the gallery and help to identify which of the paintings were missing.

“Have you told the artist?” Alice asked.

“Don’t be so fucking stupid, Alicia. Of course I fucking well haven’t told him.”

Magda hung up and Alice dressed. When she reached the gallery she was surprised to see James was present.

“Hi,” he said. “I had this feeling we’d see each other again soon.” He laughed. “I didn’t think it would be because someone pinched some of my work, though.”

“You’re very chipper about it,” Alice said.

He winked at Alice and patted her on the hip. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” he said.

Alice frowned at him, and then went to find Magda.

She was in the main exhibition room with two police officers. “There was no damage,” she was explaining. “No broken window, no smashed in door. Nothing.”

“So someone must have got in with a key,” suggested one of the officers.

“It would seem that way,” Magda said.

“We’ll need to question all the key holders, just as part of the procedure. And take finger prints from everyone who works here,” said the same officer, the older of the two.

“Fine, fine, yes. Whatever you need to do,” said Magda, waving a hand dismissively as she caught sight of Alice and started in her direction.

“We’ll probably start with you, Ms. Hararawich,” said the younger officer.

“Halarewicz,” said Magda. “Fine. This is my assistant, Alicia Home.”

“Alice Hulme,” corrected Alice, in the direction of the police. To Magda she said, “Do you know that James McGuire is out there?”

“Yes,” said Magda, impatiently. “The police contacted him.”

“He doesn’t seem that concerned,” said Alice.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Magda. “Some people take bad news differently to others, Alicia. We’re not all the type who faint at the sight of an ex-boyfriend.”

With that Magda whisked off into the other room to talk to James and try to limit the damage from the point of view of the gallery.

Alice smiled at the police officers. “I suppose you’d like to interview me,” she said.

It didn’t take long, and Alice made a promise to go to the station later in the day and have her prints taken, so that they could be eliminated from among those that were bound to be found on the remaining paintings and around the gallery.

It was almost time to start work and Alice felt as though she’d had no sleep at all.

“Go home,” Magda said. “We’ll count it as lieu time. Both of us. You’ll be next to useless if you stay.”

James was still there.

“Can I give you a lift home?” he asked, seeing her yawn.

“Oh, thanks, but I’m in my car.”

“Yes, but you’ve had next to no sleep, I imagine. It can’t be safe for you to drive.”

“I think I’ll manage,” Alice told him. “It’s not too far. Thanks for the offer, though.”

“Maybe we could go for a drink later, or something,” James said to her, walking with her from the gallery to where her car was parked on the street outside.

“Oh,” Alice said. “Well, that’s sweet of you, but I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Are you sure?” James asked, good naturedly, holding open her car door for her as she got into the car.

Alice smiled up at him from the driver’s seat. “Yes, I’m sure,” she said.

“Okay, then,” he replied cheerily and shut the door of the car, just as she started the engine.

He waved as she drove off, and Alice thought that he was far too happy for a man who had just had a fair proportion of his work stolen from his first large scale exhibition.

Alice had got out of the car and was looking for her house keys when her mobile phone began to ring.

“Hello?” she said.

“Alice, it’s James. I got your number from David. I hope you don’t mind.”

Alice didn’t say anything, but she thought plenty.

“Listen, you seem like the decent sort, so I hope you don’t go all silly on me now.”

Alice maintained her silence.

“If you open the boot of your car, you’ll find all of the stolen paintings. David said that you’ve done this sort of thing before.”

Alice’s silence changed from suspicious to incredulous in a split second.

“He’s coming round later to collect them. I was supposed to get you out of the way by taking you for a drink, but clearly you’re more than able to resist my charms.” He laughed. “Anyway. If you leave them where they are, then David can just pick them up as planned, and you don’t need to worry about any of this. Is that okay?”

Alice still didn’t speak. Incredulous was changing to resignation. No matter what she did or said, she was beginning to realise that she would never be rid of David now. He had got his claws into her life and, save for moving away, changing career, changing her name, there was little she could do about it.

“Alice? Are you still there?”

“Yes, James. I’m still here.” She paused. “Since it seems I don’t have any choice in the matter, and since it will probably make life easier for all of us if I’m not here when David comes round, what time do you want to go for that drink?”

© J R Hargreaves October 2006