'Shit.' He grabbed his neck, stunned by her sudden viciousness. 'Shit, what did you — what did you do that for?'
'You learn to take no for an answer.' She turned on her heel. 'Get it?'
'You!' he called after her, clutching his neck. 'You. Listen, little bitch. You're not welcome in this house. Understand?' But her soft black pumps retreated across the stone floor. Smug, self-fulfilled. 'You come here and take my hospitality, my wine, my drugs — and do this, you little cow. You are no longer welcome!'
But she was gone, and he knew, as he pulled his hands away and examined the dark streaks, that his control was slipping, that trouble was near the surface.
He didn't return to the party. The cleaner found him the next day, coiled on a sofa where he had dragged himself in the small hours, his hands folded crab-like over his head, tears on his face, blood crusted into his collar. She said nothing, flinging open the windows and noisily tidying away ashtrays.
Later she brought him coffee, sliced fruit and a glass of Perrier, setting the tray on the Carrara marble table and giving him a pitying look. Harteveld rolled away and sniffed the bright air coming in through the windows. There was a promise of winter in it, of cloud and snow. And something else. Something bad in the distance was coming to town. It smelled to him like crisis.
December the fourth, his thirty-seventh birthday. And it arrived.
He found the girl under the piano just before 3 a.m. when the party was beginning to break up. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, her arms hugging her shoulders. From time to time she moaned and wriggled gently like a fat cocoon. She was very plump, and wore a short baby-blue dress. There was a tattoo on her bicep which looked as if it had leaked through her skin and whitish strands of matter webbed her mouth.
Amused by her, he rested his elbow on the piano and leaned in to look at her. 'Hey, you. What's your name?'
Her eyes rolled back, trying to focus on the noise. Her mouth opened and closed twice before sound came out. 'Sharon Dawn McCabe.' In the three words she had identified herself as a child of the Gorbals.
'You know you're out of your head, don't you?'
She hiccoughed once and nodded, her eyes closed. 'Ah know ah am.'
So he carried poor, fat Sharon into his bedroom, undressed her in the dark and put her to bed. He fucked her very quickly and silently, dry-eyed, holding on to her cold breasts from behind. She didn't move or make a sound. Downstairs the party ended, he could hear the caterers clearing glasses. Outside snowflakes hurried past the dark window.
Next to him Sharon Dawn McCabe started to snore very loudly; he fucked her again — she was too drunk to know it had happened, he reasoned — and fell asleep.
He dreamed he was back in the anatomy lab at Guy's that winter afternoon, crouched on the floor, watching in horrified excitement as the fat security guard improved the thin stump of his erection with a soft white hand and, standing on tiptoe against a dissecting table, a look of intense concentration on his face, slid the hips of the lifeless woman to meet his.
Harteveld could bear it no longer; he let his breath out in a thin sigh.
The security guard stopped, frozen in the fading light, his eyes rolling as he tried to spy out who was watching him. He wasn't a tall man, but to Harteveld, crouched on the floor, he seemed to block the horizon. His eyes were wet and cold.
There should have been a chance to stand up, protest, disassociate himself from this tableau, but Harteveld was dead-locked with fear. And in the second he chose not to move, the security guard, sweat streaking his forehead, recognized that the thin med student in his scrubs had been waiting in here in the darkness for the privacy to do exactly what he was doing.
The moment shimmered a little. Then the guard smiled.
Harteveld woke, years later, in the Greenwich house, mewling like an animal, the image of the smile hot in his mind. It was still dark in the room, a thin crack of moonlight coming through the curtains. He lay in a deep sweat, staring at the ceiling, listening to the juices of his heart slowing, waiting for his thoughts to settle.
I understand, the smile had said. I am like you, the inhuman and sick cannot stay apart for long. They will collide.
Harteveld ran his hands through his hair and groaned. He rolled onto his side, saw what lay next to him on the pillow, and had to stuff fingers into his mouth to stop a cry coming out.
22
Sharon Dawn McCabe was less than ten inches away, on her back, her eyes open. A blood-tinted froth foamed out of the nose and mouth and trickled in mucousy tracks down her chin and neck.
'Oh — my — God,' Harteveld whispered in awe. 'Oh, sweet Jesus Christ, what the fuck have you done to yourself?' He shoved a hand under the sheets and felt for a pulse.
The clock on the bed table said 4.46 a.m.
Heart thumping, he hurried into the bathroom and filled the sink with cold water. He plunged his face in until the water lapped around his neck.
He counted to twenty.
Restraint, the long pull of desire, days becoming weeks becoming years, and now, after it all, this, this tripwire of fate lying still and white in his bed. Exactly what he had been wanting all these years, the one thing he couldn't get from the girls, no matter what he paid.
He straightened, gasping, dripping.
His face blinked out at him from the mirror. Haggard in the oblique light, his thirty-seven years showed; as if he had been sucked at from the inside, juiced dry by the strain. He pinched his cheeks hard, hoping pain would bring him clarity. But all he got back was the dull, familiar tug in his belly.
'Help me, help me, please.'
His voice was shallow, little more than a whisper. Nothing was going to help him. He knew that. He dried his face and went back into the bedroom.
The room was heaped with pre-dawn purples. She lay staring blankly at the ceiling, her mouth open, the sheets demurely pulled up to her collarbone as if she had wanted to die neatly. Shakily Harteveld crossed the room and opened the window. The night air was cold and sweet, stained with snow. The cedar of Lebanon brittle against the star-freckled sky.
If you wanted to, if you really wanted to — she couldn't tell you to stop. No-one would know. No-one has to know—
Trembling, he crossed to the bed and slowly unpeeled the sheet, stripping it from her torso, bunching it at her feet. Her arms were splayed wide; he rearranged them, resting them neatly beside her hips, her still-pink palms curling inwards. The snail's trail of mucus on her chin winked in the dull light. Oedema. From the lungs. He brought a damp towel from the bathroom and gently wiped the mess. Then he cleaned between her legs where her bowels had opened, changed the soiled sheets. Rigor hadn't started and she was easy to move, a calm mound of pliable white circles in the cyan light, round breasts, round stomach, thick, lapped knees, long oval thighs: all lines sliding gently to meet at the dark bruise of the pubis.
The inside of the right arm was traced with scabs. She'd probably taken some of the good-quality heroin that he supplied his guests, he told himself. She must have been used to Gorbals street scag, her body couldn't tolerate the pure stuff he served. Toppled by purity. Harteveld wasn't blind to the irony.
He squatted level with the small white feet. The skin, folded over the tendons of the instep, looked like salted fish. Her sightless eyes gleamed in the purple light. Carefully he ran fingers up over the ankles, the stubble of shaved hair abrading his fingertips, the coolness of the skin making his heart quicken. She was soft. Soft and cool. And still.