He phoned Karen but got an answering machine message saying she was out of the country for a week.
Madeleine started in on Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Where did she get these records from?
There was a noise in the kitchen and he got there in time to wrestle the steak knife away from her. She inflicted a shallow cut through his shirt.
A week later, exhausted and bruised, he found she’d gotten up early and left the flat. He used the time to tidy a little, washing some of the long-neglected crockery and scraping at the stains on the carpet. The flat was musty and he opened all the windows to air it out.
He was beginning to recognize the cycle. It lasted almost precisely a week. Peter wondered if there was such a thing as a serial multiple personality.
Perhaps she might not come home?
At six-fifteen precisely, she let herself in, and put her briefcase down on the sofa. She was wearing one of Karen’s suits, severe but sexy, cut tight on the hips and high on the thighs, with prominent shoulders and a don’t-fuck-with-me-jack tie.
“I had to screw them until they bled, but Futura is coming through with your market value price for the next covers. They specified more maggots for the Hutson job.”
She stuck a cigarette in her mouth, and flipped a silver lighter open, sucking flame through the tobacco tube then exhaling a cloud.
“This place is a tip, Peter. I expect to come home to better than this.”
She pulled her tie off with an expert gesture, and began unbuttoning her blouse.
“I’ve set us up with a table at Alistair Little’s for eight with the commissioning guy from Harper-Collins. Try to make a good impression. There might be a dekalogy in it.”
She slipped her skirt over her legs, and stepped out of it. She wore no underwear.
“And I fired your accountant. Weldon’s been robbing you blind for years. There’s no room for that kind of wimpery in the business. Like your ‘friend’ Karen. She’s sweet and lovely, but sweet and lovely just doesn’t cut it anymore.”
She gave him fifteen minutes to bring her to orgasm, then criticized his broken doll covers until the minicab came.
A week later, she wanted a baby. She talked of nothing else, and even bought baby clothes in pink and blue, made a start on redecorating the spare room as a nursery, and worked out on the calendar which were the best days to try. By the time the days came around, she had changed her mind…
A week later, she stole his credit cards and ran up nearly a six figure bill on compulsive purchases. She bought more furniture than could fit into the flat, a car neither of them could drive, a complete wardrobe of flashy clothes not in his size, enough food to give Godzilla a three-day bellyache. And she discovered gambling.
A week later, she went into what he thought of as her Annie Hall phase, becoming at once terminally absent-minded and cuttingly witty. Of them all, this was the one he liked the most. When she was funny, they were better in bed. She would pull faces, and remind him of his mother’s old theme tune, “if the wind changes, it’ll stick like that.” That didn’t seem such an awful fate just now. The wind changed, but…
A week later, she brought home a Siamese kitten and lavished her entire attention on it twenty-four hours a day, reading books on cat-care and attending to Mitten’s every need. She treated Peter as if he were an intruder in her idyll with the pet. When Mitten put its claws through a half-finished Jeffrey Archer cover, Madeleine spent an hour cooing over it and spitting at him that her precious better not get blood-poisoning from the lead in the paint or else…
A week later…
A week later…
… and a week and a week and a week…
A week later, he got out of the flat while she was gorging herself on chocolates in front of Anne Diamond on the television. She was bulimic in this cycle, and would stuff herself until she was sick. That left him to look after Mitten, who was fast becoming as startled and neurotic as he was. Madeleine had been anorexic a few turns back, between her poetic consumptive week and her Australian soap opera phase.
They met in Capucetto’s. He could see Karen was shocked by the change in him. He’d clearly made up the two extra years, and was galloping into his biological future.
“I’ve seen Jeanne,” she said.
“And…”
“Your lesbian waited all afternoon and went home.”
“What?”
“Her name was Madeleine Keele.”
“Then who is she? Our Madeleine?”
“Your Madeleine, you mean. Ask her.”
“She doesn’t know. Karen, it’s even weirder than you think. She doesn’t just change her personality. Her hair changes, the shape of her face sometimes, her body…”
“You’ve been sleeping with her?”
He had to tell her. “Some of her.”
“Fuck you, Peter,” Karen said. “You can either live with it, or get a divorce and be deported to Warsaw. I don’t care any more.”
She left him to pay for the coffee and cheesecake.
A week later, he got back from a meeting at the new agency to find the flat filled with a burned stink. Mitten was in the microwave. Smoke filled the kitchen.
“Madeleine?”
There was one Sabatier missing from the magnetic rack. The world turned around again and Peter was filled with caution. He took a matching knife down and gripped it.
It had been inevitable. Sooner or later, Madeleine would turn dangerous.
He explored, cautiously.
The front room was anally perfect, cushions just so on the drum-tight sofa-bed, his framed Graham Greene Penguin covers neatly aligned on the walls, all the magazines tidied away and stacked up. The television was on, and one of a stack of videotapes was playing.
On the screen was a blotchy image of a razorblade sinking into a girl’s eyeball, ketchupy gore welling up around the halved olive as a synthesized drone rose in a shriek.
Peter held out his knife as if it could protect him from the picture.
There was a stack of cassette boxes on top of the television, neatly squared, photocopied covers yelling tides. The Cincinnati Flamethrower Holocaust, They Eat Your Eyes, Black and Decker Orgy, Rapist Cult.
He shut off the video, but the slasher music still came from his sound system.
He stepped into the bedroom and found it perfectly tidy. Except for the headless doll on the bedspread, its torso sawed open and stuffed with red rags. It was his much-used prop, even more abused than usual.
She came quietly out of his closet and got his arm up behind him, forcing him down on the floor. She wore a black leotard and an IRA ski mask, and her body was hard and skilled as she battered him against the carpet. He lost his knife with the first slam and yelped as she hauled him up.
She threw him onto the bed, then let him go and took the time to peel off her mask, shaking out her wing of night-black hair. He knew she was going to kill him. She put the Sabatier to his throat, and smiled. First, she was going to torture him. For a long time.
Pain had been constant for all his life. He wouldn’t have believed pain could be prolonged so long without the subject dying.
Madeleine worked efficiently, tirelessly, dispassionately. She hurt him. With her hands and household implements, she hurt him. She had been methodical about it, skinning the insulation from wires and using low-wattage electricity, wetting him down with water from the bathroom sink between each jolt.
As she worked, she played two singles over and over and over, Little Jimmy Osmond’s “Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool” and Aled Jones’ “The Snowman.”