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Bram, Word document
I was starting to loathe my time at the flat, to associate it with booze-drenched, dread-filled solitude and with ugly, inescapable meetings – not all of them with Mike and Wendy. There was also one other, a few days after the open day, that I would have preferred to shirk.
When the buzzer went at about 8 p.m., my natural thought was that it was the police.
This is it, Bram, you knew it was coming.
There was a shocking moment of regression to childhood, a flood of that half-resentful, half-grateful feeling you get when a parent collars you for some dishonesty. At least I don’t have to lie any more, you think. At least I don’t have to hide.
Before I went to answer, I turned down the volume of the music, too sorry to interrupt my task to turn it off completely. I know it will sound crazy, but I’d been compiling the playlists I would take when I had to disappear. Yes, I know I should have been devoting my time to strategizing some twist-in-the-tale defeat of Mike and Wendy, but I’d found that small, mechanical jobs, especially those that allowed me to sink into memory, were the only way my sanity could be salvaged from one day to the next.
‘Hello,’ I said into the intercom. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Bram?’ The voice was female, low and indignant.
An arresting officer wouldn’t call me Bram, I reasoned. It must be Wendy, she and Mike come to harass me about the second viewings of the house on Saturday. Slightly, marginally, better than the police.
‘Bram? What’s the matter? Buzz me in!’
Not Wendy, I realized. Saskia? The absence of any follow-up text or visit to my desk since our weekend liaison had encouraged me to assume she’d done the sensible thing and quit while she was ahead.
Then I registered who this actually was. ‘Ah. Come up.’
I waited at the door, exhausted and confused. Constance from the playhouse. Her arrival reminded me that I’d not responded to a voicemail from her some time earlier – when? Last week, perhaps. I admit I considered her small fry in the context of the circling sharks, our original encounter, so catastrophic at the time, now almost quaintly sinful in the light of intervening events.
‘Sorry about the delay,’ I said from the doorway, when she appeared from the lift. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
‘How many of us are there? Don’t answer that, I’m not interested.’ There was no kiss or touch, of course, I wouldn’t have expected that, but nor did I expect the current of hostility flowing from her. My brain was too bruised to register a reaction either way. If my night with Saskia had proved anything, it was that consolation and indifference were the same to me now.
‘We need to talk.’ Reading reluctance in my frown, she snapped, ‘If you can spare me the time?’
‘Of course I can.’ I paused the music, then immediately wished I hadn’t. Silence, unbearable to me at the best of times these days, felt dangerously exposing. It was going to be a strain to focus on this.
‘What was that song you were just playing?’ she asked.
‘Portishead. You remember, “Sour Times”?’
‘How appropriate.’ Her hair was pulled tightly back, her skin glowing in a faintly sickly way, as if she was being overtaken by fever right in front of me. ‘Is it all right if I sit down?’
‘Sorry. Over here.’ I cleared one of the chairs of its jumble of dry cleaning. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘Water, please.’
I got myself a beer, delivered her glass of water, and waited. I noticed she was wearing the same dress she’d worn that evening in the playhouse, this time with opaque black tights and high-heeled ankle boots. I didn’t know her well enough to know if that was a deliberate allusion; all I knew was that if I never had any dealings with women again it would be a good thing. For me and them.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll get straight to the point. I’m pregnant, Bram.’
I stared, appalled.
‘It’s not yours.’ She raised her chin, gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘That’s not what this is about, don’t worry.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ My skull ached terribly; I tried to think if there were any Nurofen in the flat. ‘What is this about then?’
She took a sip of her water, her hand trembling. ‘It’s about the fact that I’ll start to show soon and I don’t need you putting two and two together and making five. Or anyone else.’
Her husband, she meant.
‘He still doesn’t know about us?’ I said.
‘No. It was a mistake, a one-off act of insanity. There’s nothing to be gained from telling him now.’ She eyed the four walls, her expression dismal. ‘I don’t need to tell you that.’
There was a damning edge to this last comment reminiscent of nobody so much as Fi, and I felt annoyance rise. I wanted to hiss at her, Is this really your biggest problem? Try being blackmailed. Try facing a death by dangerous driving charge. Try losing your partner and children and everything you love . . .
But maybe she thought she was – if I were to get it into my head to challenge the new baby’s paternity. To her, I was a threat. I was her Mike.
‘So I can count on you to keep quiet?’ she demanded.
‘I’ve kept quiet this long. There’s no reason for that to change.’
‘And to deal with any questions?’
I caught something then and looked more searchingly at her. If not from her husband, she could only mean from Fi. Was she saying . . .? There was a silence, a suspended moment that emitted its own energy, caused her eyes to meet mine with new pleading.
‘When is it due?’ I asked, quietly.
‘May. Don’t insult me by counting the months.’
Of course I did count, in silent torment. It was only one month out. But I couldn’t allow myself to think about another man raising my child, unaware of the true paternity or of the existence of two half-brothers. I couldn’t allow it to be true. And, terrible as it sounds, it paled into insignificance now. A child had died at my hand and there wasn’t space in my head to think about an unborn one.
‘Well, congratulations, then,’ I said, at last, and watched as tension left her chest. I resisted the urge to touch her hot face, to take her restless hands in mine. ‘That’s great news.’
‘Thank you.’ She stood, cast another glance around the bland, claustrophobic space. ‘You need to sort yourself out, Bram. You’re obviously in a bad way.’
‘Am I? Wow, I had no idea.’
Like Fi, she reacted spikily to sarcasm, lecturing me even as she made for the door. ‘Seriously, you don’t want to be one of those sad ageing leopards who can never change their spots, do you? People run out of forgiveness, you know, and then you’re just another unforgivable man.’
These last words sounded scripted, but that wasn’t to say they didn’t ring true. That wasn’t to say they didn’t burn. I closed my eyes, no longer able to cope with her, and when I opened them she was gone, the door closing behind her.
‘Thanks for the advice,’ I said.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:05:03
What with everything going on at Trinity Avenue – not just the Ropers’ burglary and our car theft, the yellow police signs everywhere, but also the interactions with Bram that were about to come to a head – the flat was becoming a bit of a sanctuary.
There was time to breathe there, to relax. I’d got into the habit of lighting a scented candle the moment I walked through the door, putting on Classic FM or the sort of arts documentary I couldn’t hope to follow with the kids running in and out yelling about Pokémon and Chelsea FC and whatever the latest grievance was between the two of them. Unless I had a guest, I aimed for no alcohol, brewing a herbal tea and treating myself to a bar of chocolate with some witty artisanal twist, like cardamom or sea salt or lavender. Maybe sanctuary isn’t the right word. Maybe it was more of a retreat.
Once or twice, I even caught myself thinking I should bring the boys here for a sleepover, but of course I was only here so that they could be there.
As for Bram, what few traces he left of himself, none pointed to any female guest – or friendship of any kind, actually.