‘You seem a bit distracted.’
‘Sorry. Allow me to show how hard I’m concentrating.’
She laughed. I could see she was pleased with the repartee (if you could call it that), that she wanted to make something memorable of this encounter, and I played along because I couldn’t exactly announce that what I wanted was something utterly forgettable.
18
‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:19:13
Alison texted me on the Wednesday morning with a message that could not have been sent lightly:
- Do I tell you if I hear something about Bram?
- What kind of thing?
- Extra-curricular.
I didn’t pause.
- You tell me.
- Sure?
- Yes.
- Okay. He took someone home last night, or so Rog thinks. A woman in the pub.
I waited for the knife wound through the ribs but it didn’t come, or at least it hit the bone and bounced off again.
- Interesting.
- Don’t say anything or he’ll know where it came from.
I thought of the man at La Mouette.
- You wouldn’t tell R who *I’m* taking home, would you?
- No way. I’m not a double agent.
- Better not be, Mata Hari.
- She was a triple agent, actually, or so the French claimed.
Seeing Alison, as I usually did, wiping snot from a child’s nose or squirting antibiotic drops into a dog’s ears, I could forget how clever she was. Her history masters from Durham, her three days a week as a lecturer.
- Say if you’d rather not know this stuff.
- No, I want to know. Thank you.
She was a good friend, Alison. The best. When I think about my situation now, I see that I couldn’t have survived without her. Merle and her.
Bram, Word document
In the morning, after we’d had sex again, Wendy dressed quickly and accepted a coffee. This she drank standing, her phone in her other hand – I assumed she was checking the trains. This encouraged me to hope she’d leave before me, thus eliminating the awkwardness of walking through Alder Rise together or even bumping into Fi at the station. She and I took trains from opposite platforms and I could just picture her face across the tracks as she saw this woman canoodling with me, murmuring and giggling, making our intimacy clear.
I reminded myself that I was a free man, like I’d told Rog.
Free so long as I didn’t think about the thing (still the ‘thing’; it hadn’t reverted to the ‘horror’). As I perched there at the kitchen counter next to Wendy, it struck me as so simple I didn’t know how it hadn’t occurred before: just don’t think about it. Not so much denial as rejection. Selective amnesia.
‘You look very happy about something all of a sudden,’ Wendy said, amused. Placing the used mug in the sink, she added, very casually: ‘You have no idea, do you?’
‘No idea about what?’ I said.
‘That I saw you.’
‘What, at the farmers’ market? Of course I know. We discussed it last night, don’t you remember? How our eyes met over the artisanal scotch eggs.’ I marvelled at my own jocularity.
‘Not there,’ she said, watching me. ‘Silver Road.’
I went completely cold, as if I’d been shoved overboard into the Atlantic in December. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I said Silver Road.’ Her gaze over the top of her coffee mug was sly, nerveless. ‘I saw the crash, Bram.’
‘What crash?’ It was miraculous that I was still intelligible, when my internal organs were in seizure.
‘Come on, don’t give me that. They’re still in intensive care, I’m sure you’ve followed the news and heard about the police investigation.’ Then, in the same light tone, so light as to be sinister: ‘Actually, there was a detective there when I dropped by the hospital, but I don’t think they were in any state to be interviewed. Both on ventilators,’ she added, and the insincerity in her frown was unmissable. It bordered on glee.
Slow to recover, I sounded foolish when I asked, ‘I thought you said you lived in Beckenham?’
‘I do. I was at my cousin’s place. She lives about halfway down Silver Road. Her living room window is right on the street, so I had a front-row seat.’
There was the sensation of piranhas fighting in my Atlantic depths: it was all I could do not to double over. ‘And you thought you saw some sort of an incident, did you?’
She chuckled. ‘Nice phrasing. All right, I “thought” I heard crazy-loud accelerating and I looked out of the window and “thought” I saw two cars racing and then a Fiat plough into a parked car and smash into a house. Then I “thought” I saw you driving away in an Audi. A black A3. I didn’t catch the full registration but I got the first few letters.’ She moved to observe me from a side angle. ‘You’re a great-looking guy, Bram. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to recognize your profile in a line up.’
There was silence between us as I struggled to hear my own thoughts over the banging of my heart. ‘There’s no way you’d be able to recognize someone from the distance you’re describing,’ I said, finally, but I’d been well and truly trapped. Had she followed me home that evening? Studied my face as I exited the car and scurried to my front door? Taken photos of me like some sort of stalker? Clearly, our encounter in the pub had been no coincidence. The friend on Engleby Close she’d been with, did she even exist? ‘This cousin of yours on Silver Road, did she see this as well?’
‘No, she was in another room. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her I’d seen you.’
Don’t worry? ‘Why were you at the hospital?’
‘Just interested. You know how it is, you’re just drawn there.’
As I had been. ‘Did you . . . did you speak to the detective you saw?’
If she had, then there’d been a delay, possibly, in my having been apprehended because the car was registered to Trinity Avenue. The police had called there, perhaps, when no one was home. I had a very clear picture of myself fleeing, of leaving the flat right now and making my way to Heathrow.
When she shook her head, I relaxed a fraction, summoned the old Bram bravado. ‘Well, Wendy, then it sounds like we’re guilty of the same thing. Neither of us reported something we know we probably ought to have.’
There was a sudden sharpening of her features. ‘Oh, I don’t think we’re guilty of the same thing at all, Bram. It wasn’t my dangerous driving that put two people on life support.’
Her words rained on me as brutal as a rockfall and yet she was very cool, unnaturally so. If she really thought I was capable of a violent rampage like that, why wasn’t she frightened I’d attack her here? She must have texted someone the address, I thought.
I became aware of a wild, accelerating rage displacing the fear, a perilous leap in body temperature. ‘Since you seem so clear about what happened, why don’t you go after the other driver, the bastard who really caused the crash?’
‘Oh, come off it,’ she said, ‘you were the one in the wrong lane.’
‘Only because he wouldn’t let me back in the right one! If the Fiat hadn’t swerved, we’d have smashed headlong and we’d all be dead.’
‘You shouldn’t have been overtaking him. You were speeding when you tried to get around him, you can’t deny that.’
I said nothing.
‘So you did cause the crash? Come on, Bram, I was there.’
‘Of course I fucking did. I told you I had no choice! Because of him!’
It was an admission of guilt and I hastened to smother it with a show of aggression: ‘I’d like to know why you don’t find him and spring this shit on him ten minutes after getting out of his bed?’
‘Maybe I will,’ she said, agreeably, and put down her coffee mug.
Will, she said, not already have. It was all very well arguing that Toyota Man and I were equally at fault, but I was the one whose car had been semi-identified in the news reports.
It was clear she was preparing me for some sort of blackmail demand.