Robin didn’t actually see Mr. Magpie’s fist smash into his wife’s face, but she feels sick, reliving what she saw. Sick that he’d finally noticed what was happening under his nose, in his house. Sick that maybe he’d pulled Robin’s gift into the fray, that it might have been the tipping point. That Robin could very well have pulled a man’s fist back and driven it into another woman’s face with her meddling.
Robin hid under the bed, replaying the scene over and over in her head, which worked fairly well at blocking out the sound of the banging on the door.
She couldn’t see much when she resurfaced a few minutes later. As she stared into the empty kitchen, Mr. Magpie suddenly stormed out into the garden, sending the back door to the apartments flying so hard that Robin ducked again as if it might leap up and hit her.
She sat on the floor, catching her breath, trying to catch her imagination. Half an hour or so later, she heard the singsong giggles of the little boy outside, poked her head up and saw Mr. Magpie’s frown. The little boy seemed oblivious, scooting ahead toward home without his father pulling him back gently like he usually did. The little boy dropped his scooter on the ground and they disappeared into the back door, Mr. Magpie looking around anxiously before closing it.
—
It’s the evening now, but her heart had continued to beat frantically all day. Every little sound added to the groundswell of panic rising steadily inside her.
This person—the Knocker, as she’d started to call him—was coming again and again, trying different times of day, to trick her. It was affecting her routine, and she needed her routine to cope.
Music used to help. Before. When the panic came upon her, draping over her like a blanket, she could fill the house with sound and fury. Build a wall of drums and strings. But she can’t risk giving away her presence with sounds that might be heard from the street.
Who could want to talk to her this badly? Robin had an inkling but refused to follow that thread. Knowing would be worse—it always was.
And she couldn’t play any of her guitars to fill the wide-open silence, her own music poisoned with memories. She couldn’t even pick up the fifties-style Hayride Tupelo, its thin maple neck weeping to feel hands around it. Nor the old acoustic Eastman that for years she wrote the bulk of Working Wife’s songs on, only transferring the music to dirty electric when she’d got it sounding clear and sweet. Nor the gorgeous Duesenberg picked up in Berlin, “Caribou Narvik Blue,” a cross between a mad cowboy’s shirt and a tropical bird. Gathering dust painfully. Unfairly. And certainly not the Fender ’56 Strat. She certainly didn’t deserve to touch that sunburst body. Didn’t deserve to hear the precise wail of its notes, the grind of its chords. Or think about how he, the unmentionable he, would have loved to even touch it, let alone play it. How he deserved to, far more than she did. How cruel that something purchased on another continent, with a royalty check ten years after she last saw him, could make her miss him more.
Her guitars had been gathered from around the world the way some people collect postcards. Now guilt, fear and silence hold the poor, beautiful things hostage like animals in a zoo.
She especially missed music this evening. Rain lashed at the windows, the city outside irascible and jumpy. Drivers beeped, teenagers fought, kids screamed. And inside, the dishwasher beeped and imaginary clocks ticked. Everything was irritating. She misstepped on the stairs, stubbed her toe. She screwed up the order of her washing, doing dark day clothes when it was time for light nightclothes. She realized too late, the water rushing into the drum as she clawed at the door. Kicked it with her stubbed toe. Refused to cry. Cried.
She needed a blanket of sound to muffle the rush of dark feelings, but headphones weren’t the same, and with this Knocker, they weren’t safe either. A wide, deep bass line through a big dirty speaker, that’s what she needed. And guitars like claws on a blackboard. But that doesn’t scale down, it just withers.
And now she scratches herself seven times on the left arm, good satisfying scratches. Tries to do the same on the right, for balance, but her left hand is so much weaker that the scratches waver and her skin drags. By the time she gets seven good scratches, her right arm is pink and lined all over. The pain blocks the thoughts of what she saw in the Magpies’ kitchen, the image a constant ticker tape at the top of her mind. His fist. Her fear. Scratch. Scratch.
—
Robin looks in the mirror while she brushes her teeth.
She doesn’t look very different to the way she’s always looked. Dark curly hair, chopped and sitting around her ears. She has very dark eyebrows—like Elizabeth Taylor, her mum used to say, generously—and dark brown eyes. She has the palest skin she’s ever seen.
She’s wearing a dark gray Mot?rhead T-shirt with some black jersey shorts, no socks. Her left arm dangles while the right brushes. A tattoo peeks out of the short sleeve, a forties-style pinup girl with a rockabilly fringe and a guitar. The stockinged feet are all that’s visible.
On her right arm, her first tattoo is clearly visible. The one that really hurt. A quote from Labyrinth: “It’s only forever, not long at all.”
EIGHTEEN
SARAH|1992
My mother knew the call was going to come before Drew did. He’d been nervous—I’d never seen him nervous before—and was laying down the groundwork for a rebuttal. “I didn’t want the job anyway,” that kind of thing, but laid on thicker and polluted with business-speak.
When the “headhunter” had called him months before, he hadn’t stopped going on about it. It was a win in itself, it seemed, to be someone whose head was hunted. And by America, no less.
“The land of opportunity, Sarah,” he’d said the first time, his hand on the small of my back like he was going to swivel me somewhere and show me a chart of opportunities. It’s all they—we—talked about for weeks.
“But I’ve got a clear path where I am,” he said to Mum as he drove us around the M25 in the overtaking lane. “I’ve done all the groundwork for VP, so it would be reckless to start again somewhere else.”
“What if the Americans want to take you on as a VP now though?” Mum had said, a slight twitch of excitement in her eyebrows. Until moving in with Drew, she had no idea what a VP was, I’m sure. I’d never even heard of a director.
He seemed to like this idea. Pondered it awhile as he took the junction signposted LAKESIDE, a big out-of-town shopping center in Essex that Mum had wanted to visit ever since it opened a couple of years before. “Hmn,” he said again. “You’re a smart cookie, Angela. Your mum’s a smart cookie, Sarah. Okay, worth hearing them out, yes?”
“Yes,” Mum had said, a smug warmth in her voice.