What are you afraid of? Ghosts.
What’s the last thing you bought? Mimosa. It’s my favourite flower.
What’s the last thing you ate? Toast.
Favourite sound? Yo-Yo Ma playing Saint-Saëns.
What do you wear in bed? An old shirt that belonged to my boyfriend.
What’s your pet hate? Being patronized.Your worst trait? Evasiveness.
Any scars or tattoos? More than I want to remember.
Any recurring dreams? No.
There’s a fire in your house. What would you save? My computer.
When did you last cry?
Well — I’d like to say it was when Nigel died. But both of us know that isn’t true. And how could I explain to him that sly, irrational surge of joy that overshadows the bulk of my grief, this knowledge that something is missing in me, some sense that has nothing to do with my eyes?
You see, I am a bad person. I don’t know how to cope with loss. Death is a heady cocktail of one part sorrow to three parts relief — I felt it with Daddy, with Mother, with Nigel — even with poor Dr Peacock . . .
Blueeyedboy knew — we both knew — that I was just deluding myself. Nigel never stood a chance. Even our love was a lie from the start, sending out its green shoots like those of a cut branch in a vase; shoots, not of recovery, but of desperation.
Yes, I was selfish. Yes, I was wrong. Even from the start I knew that Nigel belonged to someone else. Someone who never existed. But after years of running away, part of me wanted to be that girl; to sink into her like a child into a feather pillow; to forget myself — and everything — in the circle of Nigel’s arms. Online friendships were no longer enough. All of a sudden I wanted more. I wanted to be normaclass="underline" to encounter the world, not through a glass, but through my lips and my fingers. I wanted more than the world online; more than a name at my fingertips. I wanted to be understood, not by someone at a keyboard far away, but by someone I could touch . . .
But sometimes a touch can be fatal. I should know; it’s happened before. Less than a year later, Nigel was dead, poisoned by proximity. Nigel’s girl has proved herself just as toxic as Emily White, sending out death with a single word.
Or, in this case, a letter.
15
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.
Posted at: 15.44 on Tuesday, February 5
Status: restricted
Mood: apprehensive
The letter arrived on a Saturday, as we were having breakfast. By then Nigel was more or less living here, though he still kept his flat in Malbry, and we had established a kind of routine that almost suited both of us. He and I were nocturnal creatures, happiest at night. Thus Nigel came over at ten o’clock; shared a bottle, talked, made love, slept over and left by nine in the morning. At weekends he stayed longer, sometimes till ten or eleven o’clock, which was why he was there in the first place, and why the letter came to him. On a weekday he wouldn’t have opened it, and I could have dealt with it privately. I suppose that, too, was part of the plan. But right then I had no idea of the letter bomb about to explode in our unsuspecting faces —
That morning I was eating cereal, which ticked and popped as the milk sank in. Nigel wasn’t eating, or even speaking to me much. Nigel hardly ever ate breakfast, and his silences were ominous, especially in the mornings. Sounds orbiting a central silence like satellites around a baleful planet; the creak of the pantry door; the clatter of spoon against coffee jar; the chink of mugs. A second later, the fridge door opened; rattled; slammed. The kettle boiled; a brief eruption followed by a click of military finality. Then, the clack of the letter box and the stolid double-thump of the post.
Most of my mail is junk mail, though I rarely get mail of any kind. My bills are paid by direct debit. Letters? Why bother. Greetings cards? Forget it.
‘Anything interesting?’ I said.
For a moment Nigel said nothing at all. I heard the unfolding of paper. A single sheet, unfurled with a dry rasp, like the unsheathing of a sharpened knife.
‘Nigel?’
‘What?’
He jiggled his foot when he was annoyed; I could hear it against the table leg. And now there was something in his voice; something flat and hard, like an obstacle. He tore the used envelope into halves, then he fingered the single sheet. Stropped it on his thumb, like a blade —
‘It isn’t bad news, or anything?’ I did not speak of what I dreaded most, though I could feel it hanging over me.
‘For fuck’s sake. Let me read,’ he said. Now the obstacle was within my reach; like a sharp-edged table-top in an unexpected place. Those sharp edges never miss; they have a gravity all of their own, pulling me every time into their orbit. And there were so many sharp edges in Nigel; so many zones of restricted access.
It wasn’t his fault, I told myself; I would not have had him otherwise. We completed each other in some strange way: his dark moods and my lack of temperament. I am wide open, as he used to say; there are no hidden places in me, no unpleasant secrets. All the better; because deceit, that essentially female trait, is the thing that Nigel despised most of all. Deceit and lies, so alien to him — so alien, he thought, to me.
‘I have to go out for an hour or so.’ His voice sounded oddly defensive. ‘Will you be OK for a while? I have to go to Ma’s house.’
Gloria Winter, née Gloria Green, sixty-nine years old and still clutching at the remains of her family with the tenacity of a hungry remora. I knew her as a voice on the line; a rimshot Northern accent; an impatient drumming on the receiver; an imperious way of cutting you off like a gardener pruning roses.
Not that we’ve ever been introduced. Not officially, anyway. But I know her from Nigel; I know her ways; I know her voice on the telephone and her ominous range of silences. There are other things, too, that he never told me, but that I know only too well. The jealousy; the rancour; the rage; the hatred mixed with helplessness.
He rarely spoke of her to me. He rarely even mentioned her name. Living with Nigel, I soon understood that some subjects were best left alone, and this included his childhood, his father, his brothers, his past and most especially Gloria, who shared, along with her other son, a talent for bringing out the worst in Nigel.
‘Can’t your brother deal with this?’
I heard him stop on the way to the door. I wondered if he were turning round, fixing me with his dark eyes. Nigel rarely mentioned his brother, and when he did it was all bad. Twisted little bastard was about the best I’d heard so far — Nigel never had much objectivity when it came to discussing his family.
‘My brother? Why? Has he spoken to you?’
‘Of course not. Why would he?’
Another pause. I felt his eyes on the top of my head.
‘Graham Peacock’s dead,’ he said. His voice was curiously flat. ‘An accident, by the sound of it. Fell out of his wheelchair during the night. They found him dead in the morning.’
I didn’t look up. I didn’t dare. Suddenly everything seemed enhanced; the taste of coffee in my mouth; the sound of the birds; the beat of my heart; the table at my fingertips with all its scars and scratches.
‘This letter’s from your brother?’ I said.
Nigel ignored the question: ‘It says that the bulk of Peacock’s estate — valued at something like three million pounds—’