Читать книгу Persons Unknown: A Richard and Judy Book Club Pick 2018 - Susie Steiner, Susie Steiner - Страница 16

—sting testing one two three.

Stop. Rewind. Record.

Right, my memo of evidence. Most people would record this on their phones but I can’t work mine. It’s an android and I’ve only just worked out how to find a number and dial it. Anyway, Sanjeev had one of these knock-off dictaphones on the market, so here we go. I am Birdie Fielding and this is a true and accurate account of everything that’s happened. I apologise now if I go off the point a bit.

I came out like anyone would – to see what all the tooting and commotion was about. I heaved out through the door of the Payless Food & Wine, could see them all gathering on the corner where Iceland is. I turned over the ‘Closed’ sign and locked up.

And out into the crowd – the rubberneckers eager for a glimpse of misfortune. Wheelie shoppers, niqabs, prams, hoop earrings. A whole mass on the pavement, spilling into the road. The air was soft outside Shoe Zone and Palace Amusements – this was back in November, ever so mild. I remember thinking, this is nice, should’ve got out sooner.

I pushed through to the centre. I’m not one to loiter at the back. I spotted Nasreen from the cash and carry, who smiled at me. Never liked Nasreen. Competitive. Always asking me how busy I am at Payless. I smiled back as if we were friends.

Now I saw what they were all staring at – a body on the ground, thrown there by a car I shouldn’t wonder, but she was coming round, squeezing her eyes as if she was in pain. Not dead then. And people were beginning to shuffle away with their disappointment at her being alive. She lay there, a mass of skirts like an upended toilet doll. Everything black: lace, broderie anglaise, in layers – and DM boots poking out. Her eyes were fluttering, black kohl pencil against porcelain skin, and she must’ve spotted the few remaining stragglers getting their mobiles out to call 999 because she shook her head saying, ‘No, no. I’m OK. I’ll get up in a minute.’ Then she opened her eyes fully – I could see it was a struggle – and her gaze fell upon me. I was bending right over her by this point. She signalled to me so I put my face next to hers. She didn’t smell how you expect Goths to smell – no cheapo joss sticks or Body Shop musk. She smelled expensive. Citrussy.

‘No cops,’ she whispered to me, ‘no ambulance. Can you get me into your shop?’

Why was she asking me? Well, it wasn’t the first time we’d met, was it?

It’s not at all like me to help somebody. My gut instinct is to keep out of the way of other people’s needs and wants. I live by a policy of non-intervention: I don’t want to send in ground troops and never be able to get them out. So I was already out of my comfort zone when Nasreen’s dad, Sathnam, helped me carry the Goth into Payless, depositing her at the foot of the stairs to my flat.

She was slumped and I wondered if she was losing consciousness. I put my arms around her neck and tried to hoist her up the stairs like a body in a life jacket – me being the life jacket.

She grimaced, pushed her head to one side. ‘I can’t breathe …’

‘You think you’ve got problems,’ I said, panting.

I was forced to change position. I tried the bridal lift and let me tell you, it required Herculean strength to get all 20 stone of me and all of her up those stairs. Each step was a heaving stomp, the kind Frankenstein’s monster would take. At the top, once the front door was flung open (and that was a world of pain, her propped against the wall while I fumbled for my keys), I pitched towards the sofa and deposited her down on it with some force.

I collapsed to my knees, panting, then looked up at Tony, there on the wall, and crossed myself – I don’t know why, I figured it’s what he would have wanted – and said, ‘Sweet Jesus, Tony, I hope she doesn’t die on me. Not in my flat.’

She didn’t die.

She slept. For a couple of hours, as it goes. Then she seemed to come round, though her eyes were still closed, and she shook her head from side to side, saying ‘They’re coming to get me. They’re going to get me.’

I gave Tony a look, which said, ‘We’ve got a right one here.’ Because there’s only one thing worse than a Goth, and that’s a paranoid Goth. A Goth with conspiracy theories.

Why did she pick me? Well, she’d been coming into my shop for a few months, since the heatwave last summer. I recognised a kindred spirit because despite it being 30 degrees, she wore a long-sleeve black T-shirt, black trousers with all manner of rips and rivets, and DM boots. I, too, was clad from my wrists to my ankles and nearly dying in the heat. Anyone who is fat will recognise the reluctance to bare flesh, even in tropical temperatures. Perhaps it wasn’t flab she was covering up – impossible to know the state of her physique under all that garb – and anyway, who knows why Goths keep it under wraps? But I nodded at her capacious sleevage and said, ‘Sweltering, isn’t it? Still, nice day for Lambrini, that’ll be £2.50 please,’ and handed her bottle of sweet pear wine back to her across the counter. It was to be a couple more weeks before she said a word to me.

At first it was just a faint, ‘Hiya,’ from under a canopy of kohl black eye pencil. Then, come September, she shivered, and said, ‘Season’s turning.’ Quite the poet.

She always bought Lambrini – the drunkard’s tipple of choice. Even the millionaire bloke who invented Lambrini drank himself to death, cheap and swift. I assumed she was taking it to a bench in Kilburn Grange, to join the other winos congregating there. They sit slumped, talking shite, seeping piss, and watching the ladies in hijabs on the outdoor gym equipment.

Then, about a month before the incident that flattened her in front of the Payless Food & Wine (so this would’ve been October), she came into the shop swaying, approached the counter with her bottle as usual, and promptly sank to the floor. I leaned over it, said, ‘Are you all right?’ but there was no response.

She was out cold.

I dragged her to the back of the shop, where there’s a frayed old armchair (which I’ll be honest, doesn’t smell too good) and allowed her to sober up out there. So by the time the accident happened in November, we were quite close really.

So, back to her being out cold on my sofa: she was sleeping and sleeping, perhaps working off months of the Lambrini in her system, perhaps recovering from whatever damage the car had done when it hit her. For a time, I moved around her laid-out body in the lounge, sort of wafting in and out, clattering a bit, washing things up, hanging some laundry in the box room – generalised fussing which got louder the more I wanted her to wake up. I began wondering if it would be all right to leave her on her own or if it was all a ruse and she’d leap up and steal all my stuff the minute my back was turned. The more time went on, the more unlikely this seemed – perhaps I got used to her and so feared the stranger in her less. I went downstairs and opened up the shop, thinking that she couldn’t leave the flat without passing me at the till. Things were pretty quiet. I popped up a few times to check on her, but nothing.

It was kind of boring waiting for her to wake up, so I had this idea that I should go and buy her a towelling robe for when she came round. She’d be wanting a bath, I reasoned, and you can’t step out of a nice hot bath and immediately Goth yourself up, can you? It’s quite mad what you think of when you’re out of your comfort zone, and someone being in my flat was way out of my comfort zone.

I could have gone to Primark which is right by the Payless on the Kilburn High Road, but I’m quite tight by nature, and what the fuck was I doing buying a complete stranger a bathrobe anyway? So I headed to the British Heart Foundation shop by Argos.

I’ll tell you the most annoying thing about being fat – the weight! No, I mean the actual weight: carrying it around. Walking anywhere does me in. If you’re not heavy, you cannot imagine what it feels like for your limbs to pull you down with every step. Imagine lifting pillars of concrete each time you place a step. Imagine gravity being such a force in your life that you’re pulling against it with every movement. That’s what it’s like being me. I’m lugging myself places. Before I’d even crossed the road outside Poundland, I was out of puff.

I got this bathrobe – pink, a bit scratchy but serviceable – in the British Heart Foundation shop. I know she would have liked a black one, being a Goth, but how many black towelling bathrobes do you see in the shops? I like looking in charity shops, browsing, but I can never find anything to fit – everything’s tiny. I see it as evidence that everyone else is expanding, too. I am not alone, if the charity shops are anything to go by – full of size 8s and 10s, but no lovely roomy upper sizes. No one’s shedding the size 20s as far as I can see, because taking weight off? It’s easier to broker peace in Syria or get to grips with quantitative easing.

Once I got into the flat, I was surprised to see the sofa empty and I looked at Tony, as if to say, ‘What’ve you done with her?’ I thought I was stuck with a size 10 towelling robe which I wouldn’t even be able to get one arm into, but then she appeared, her face seeming bruised from sleep, her hair matted to one side of her head.

‘How are you feeling?’ I said.

‘Better,’ she said, but she was walking gingerly, a hand to her side.

‘I think you should see a doctor,’ I said.

‘No.’

I could see she was in pain because of the way she was holding herself. Movement was causing her to wince. Perhaps she’s broken something, I thought. How could a car hit you and not cause a fair bit of damage? I’d want a doctor to look me over. I’m at an age where death is more a distinct possibility than a distant dream.

She sat slowly, lowering herself by increments down onto the sofa.

‘I’m Birdie, by the way,’ I said. ‘Bernadette, but everyone calls me Birdie.’ I don’t know why I said ‘everyone’ – not as if I’ve got an entourage.

‘Angel,’ she said, but I didn’t believe that was her name. I mean, who is called that in real life? Also, it was as if she was saying it for the first time.

‘Cup of tea?’ I said. ‘Or would you like a bath? I bought you a bathrobe.’ And I held out my charity shop plastic bag.

‘That was kind of you,’ said Angel, peering into the bag reluctantly, and I wished I hadn’t bothered.

Her black hair hung in wet rats’ tails. She was back on the sofa, with her feet up. The bathrobe, now I could see it in a better light, was more peach than pink and had an unfortunate Care Bear on the pocket.

I could examine her face, too, without all that black muck around her eyes. She was a corker – I mean, not mildly attractive. I mean a proper looker, top class. Pale skin without a single blemish, and gas-blue eyes that you couldn’t help doing a double take over. Black was definitely not her hair colour, not with eyes like that. I’d say she’d be auburn or maybe even redhead. Her peach-coloured lips were what the term ‘bee-stung’ was invented for – they gave her a slightly teary look. She was maybe not supermodel beautiful, but she could definitely get paid to do a catalogue or the Marks & Sparks website.

Another thing I knew for sure at that moment: she wasn’t a proper Goth. No offence to Goths, but they’re quite often minging.

She was looking around my living room – the velveteen sofa on which she was curled, tobacco-coloured with ruffled seams; the two recliners, facing the telly; the nets, which were not grey because I’d soaked them in Vanish only the day before; the swirly carpets, gas fire, knobbly Anaglypta on the walls. I’d not noticed before that my decor was rocking an elderly vibe, though I’m only in my fifties myself, which I had probably inhaled from Nanny Fielding. I love my lounge: it’s the perfect place to sit in front of the television and pop things in your gob.

‘Why’ve you got a picture of Tony Blair on your wall?’ Angel asked.

‘Because I love him,’ I said. ‘I’m the last person on earth who still thinks he’s marvellous.’

Oh he has his faults, it’s not that I don’t realise that. For example, although he’s even more handsome than he used to be, now that he’s grey and perma-tanned from the Middle East, he’s always travelling and that’d get me down, him being away all the time.

So I’m not blind, I know he’s not perfect. The God thing, that makes me uneasy, and towards the end he let it be known how irritated he was by the general public and that was probably a mistake. And he’s partial to making a bob or two, but which of us isn’t? The whole B-Liar thing, though: the epic righteousness of it would be enough to send anyone postal.

And in his heyday, my goodness! He united everyone. He didn’t make you hang your head in shame. All those years the Labour Party suffered with the bad comb-overs, the stumbling on the beach and then Tony came along, our shiny straight-talking saviour. We almost couldn’t believe he was left wing. He made me feel safe: I could sleep well knowing his hand was on the tiller. Three terms he gave us and now it’s as if that was a crime.

I got up and kissed my two fingers, then planted them on Tony’s lips. His cross/stern eyebrows seemed to raise at this and he appeared to smile, in that way that said, ‘Let’s not let this go too far.’ A bit Presbyterian, a bit hair shirt.

We sat in amiable silence, then I said, ‘I’m not being funny, but have you ever thought of modelling?’

She pushed some wet hair over her face and sucked on a strand. Perhaps she was embarrassed. ‘Yeah, I have. Ages ago. It’s not a good business for girls. Makes them vulnerable. You can get caught up in things.’

‘What things?’

‘Dodgy stuff. There are blokes who hang around models like, well, like hyenas round meat.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said. ‘The modelling scouts appear to have passed me by.’ The self-deprecating joke – safe haven to fatties everywhere.

‘Actually, plus size is a growing area,’ she said and I flushed. I wasn’t prepared for her to acknowledge the elephant in the room quite so readily. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean … You’re not big.’

‘Thanks,’ I said but the atmosphere had darkened and she got up off the sofa.

‘Better get dressed,’ she said.

‘Shouldn’t we talk about what happened?’ I said. ‘About the car accident. About going to the police?’

‘Nothing serious,’ she said. ‘Not worth making a fuss.’

Angel opened the bathrobe and showed me her torso – the left side. She had a huge bruise – deep red, black in places – from her bra strap down to the waistband of her knickers.

‘It’s feeling a lot better,’ she said.

‘I just don’t get it,’ I told her. Then I went to the kitchen to wash up our tea mugs. ‘You were hit by a car and you don’t want to tell the police about it?’

Angel moved to stand at my bathroom mirror, in order to re-Goth. My flat is tiny, so it’s easy to talk across rooms.

I said to her, ‘What if the bloke was drunk and he goes and hits a child next?’

‘It was probably my fault,’ she said. ‘Maybe I wasn’t looking where I was going. I think I stepped out without thinking.’

‘CCTV will show what happened,’ I said. I had come out into the hall, drying my hands on a tea towel and watching her layer awful black pencil all over her eyelids. Crying shame, shading over such a lovely face. ‘I don’t think there’s anywhere on earth with more CCTV than Kilburn High Road. And anyway, even if you did step out, it’s still an offence to drive away from an accident. He should’ve stopped at the very least to make sure he hadn’t killed you.’

‘Yeah, well, he didn’t, did he, so let’s just drop it, OK?’

She’d finished with the kohl pencil and mascara, and was zipping up her makeup bag. She came out of the bathroom and was peering in at my box room – it had a single mattress on the floor and one of those concertina laundry airers, hung with stiff tea towels.

‘You’ve got an extra room,’ she said.

‘Think calling it a room is stretching it.’

‘Can I ask a favour?’ she said. ‘It won’t be for long.’

She told me she wanted to stay a while, to get herself straight. I assumed she meant laying off the Lambrini, in which case I wasn’t too sure my flat was her best bet, it being above an entire shop full of cheap spirits and tins of super-strength lager – killing the poor quicker and younger. Carlsberg Special Brew, Tennent’s Super and Skol Super 9%. They used to die at 65, now they die at 45, even though they look 65. But I digress.

Angel walked to the window in the lounge and lifted the nets, peered out at the street as if she was George Smiley looking for shadowy figures in doorways.

‘Are you on the run from MI6?’ I said, as a joke obviously, trying to change the subject away from latent alcoholism. I didn’t actually think she was on the run. I don’t think anyone is on the run in real life, but she turned, sharply, and said, ‘Why d’you say that?’

‘You’re acting like you think you’re in The Bourne Supremacy instead of sitting in a flat above the Killy High Road.’ I was going to add, ‘wearing too much eyeliner’ but thought better of it.

‘Look,’ she said, still peering out from under the nets, ‘there are people who would like to know where I am, and who I’d rather keep away from. That’s all you need to know. I could do with a place to lie low. I could go, tonight, get a bag of stuff, if you don’t mind me kipping in your box room for a while?’

I thought about saying, ‘How long is a while?’ But instead, I said, ‘I’ll think about it. Now, I’ve got to open up downstairs or my lovely regulars will be wondering where to get their tramp juice.’

Downstairs, turning my keys in the lock to open up, I thought about what it would be like later on, watching telly with someone there to pass the odd comment to, making a plate of carbonara for two and not eating it all myself. Asking if she’d like a bag of Frazzles and popping down to the crisp aisle. The drinking worried me a bit. I don’t like drinkers, much as they are my core fan base. I don’t like the feelings of risk and uncertainty they create. That said, we’ve all got our thing, haven’t we – that zone where we’re not in control? I’m quite safe around a bottle of Chardonnay. I’ve been known to yawn in the face of pornography. Show me a shoe shop and I can walk on by. But salty snacks? I will MOW. YOU. DOWN.

This’ll shock you, but I own Payless. I don’t lease it; it’s not a franchise. About fifteen years ago, when I was in my mid-thirties, this lawyer managed to track me down and told me there was all this money held in trust for me and did I want to collect it, because I’d got to a responsible age when I wouldn’t squander it and he was retiring, so there would be no one left who knew the details of my legacy. I guessed it was money from Mum and Dad’s house, maybe from Nanny Fielding when she died. I didn’t really ask any questions – like why it had taken so long to come to me.

I was working in Payless at the time, just on Saturdays – the rest of the time I was on the till in Primark and doing the odd shift on a street stall which sold lighters and knock-off Dove shower gel and the like, and so the next time I was in I asked Majid, who I worked for, how much he wanted for the shop and he laughed and laughed and laughed. And then he spoke very quickly in Urdu to his wife, and she split her sides laughing as well.

Anyway, once they’d stopped laughing, I bought it off them.

In retrospect, I realise I should’ve bought myself a hairdressers. Firstly, because I’ve always thought I’d make quite a good hairdresser, and second because of all those surveys about professions and rates of happiness. Hairdressers are the happiest people: there’s creativity, but only up to a point (too much, I’ve read, can send you demented; just look at poets). There’s craic – plenty of chat, but not that much intimacy (intimacy being a most overrated aspect of human relationships). And hairdressing also garners a great deal of loyalty. I read that the average woman stays with her stylist for twelve years. The average marriage lasts eleven.

But primarily I should’ve bought myself a hairdressers because it would’ve limited my access to the crisp aisle.

Did you know Britain has been voted the loneliness capital of Europe? The Office for National Statistics found we have fewer friends and that we Britons don’t know our neighbours and it’s killing us. Loneliness is as big a health hazard as smoking fifteen fags a day, and not nearly as enjoyable.

I think it is the English way. We can’t stand too much contact. We don’t know where to look during intimate conversations. The web of connections, which is a comfort to southern nationalities, especially Latin people who love to hug and wail at funerals, pains the Englishman. I remember living with Nanny Fielding and all the kids at school were going on sleepovers or to each other’s houses, but I didn’t. I went home to my gran and we barely exchanged a word. She made baked apple with sultanas and custard and there were lace-edged antimacassars on the arms of her wing chairs. She used to smooth a tea towel across her knees, not sure why, as if she was about to dress a wounded foot or shell some peas. It was just a pointless act of fastidiousness, which annoyed me until I missed it so much. I think this is why I seem so much older than my years – the grannyish house and the solitary ways. I’ve taken in Nanny Fielding and I don’t know any other way to live.

Anyway, without us having a conversation about it as such, Angel fetched a bag of stuff and installed herself in the box room, which started to smell of Chanel Cristalle because she sprayed it about like it was Impulse. Low-level drinking – she wasn’t bladdered, but she was hugging the Lambrini pretty close. She spent a lot of time on the Internet, saving files and copying Wikipedia pages, and the rest of the time she was standing by the window, lifting the nets and watching the Killy High Road. She was furtive. When I said something, she jumped. And when I called her name, she didn’t turn around.

I said, from the kitchen, ‘Angel? Cup of tea?’ But I had to walk into the room before she realised I was talking to her. I took it as proof that Angel was a made-up name. The question was why?

And what was her real name? What was with all the curtain twitching and mystery? And also, if I was going to make up a name for myself, I don’t think I’d pick Angel, d’you know what I’m saying?

But she wasn’t totally self-absorbed. I could see she was trying to make herself a pleasant house guest. A couple of days later, for example, she stood in the doorway, holding aloft two Sainsbury’s bags and smiling. ‘Thought I’d make burgers,’ she said. ‘I’m assuming you’ve got ketchup.’

‘Do I look like the sort of person who wouldn’t have ketchup?’

‘You look like the sort of person who wouldn’t have vinaigrette,’ she said.

We decided to watch The Hotel on telly – one of those documentaries where people act like they’re not aware they’re being filmed, when in fact they’re completely aware but pretending, and the programme’s main aim is the Ring of Truth, as if you’re peeping in unseen. Fixed-rig cameras is how they’re made. Rigged and a fix, I call it. I love those shows. I love watching people without having to spend any time with them.

Angel and I had a recliner chair each, the sofa being too uncomfortable to spend an evening on. I keep it because it was Nanny Fielding’s. I have always had two recliners; I bought them as a pair from DFS. Don’t ask me why – I think it seemed too sad to buy one. But there’s never been anyone to sit in the second one. Talk about hopeful purchase.

In The Hotel, you are shown round the penthouse floor of the Carlton Mayfair, ‘London’s most exclusive establishment’, according to the breathy voiceover. The penthouse floor has three marble bathrooms, including a ‘rainforest showering experience’ which plays the sounds of tropical birds and other wildlife while dappling you in a moving light show so you think you’re in a glade. The penthouse floor has two grand living rooms, each with about six sofas; a cinema; a catering kitchen, should the restaurant not suit, and a treatment room for on-site massages and facials. The penthouse floor is home to Donald Trump when he visits, and the Sultan of Brunei. The King of Saudi Arabia books it for the entire month of August and installs his family, flying over his fleet of cars, which they park all over Knightsbridge and get parking tickets they’ll never pay. They spend the month shopping at Harrods.

Angel and I were watching all this, the smears of ketchup hardening on our discarded plates, our feet up as if our legs were paralysed – which they were, I suppose. There is little in modern life more paralysing than the recliner chair.

‘Been there,’ she said, nodding at the telly.

‘Yeah, right,’ I said. ‘Me too. Stay there all the time.’

‘No, really, I have.’

I looked at her. ‘You what?’

‘I can prove it,’ she said, pushing down with her ankles (you have to use some force, as if the recliner is unwilling to give you up) so that her chair moved into the upright mode. She left the room and came back with a bag full of Carlton Mayfair toiletries. Shampoo, conditioner, body wash. Even a pack of cotton pads and buds, which you’re not supposed to put into your ears. I find it almost impossible not to put them in my ears.

‘How come you’ve been to the Carlton Mayfair?’ I said.

‘On business,’ she said simply.

‘Right, yeah, business. What business would that be? Cleaning the rainforest experience?’

‘No!’ she scoffed, but she’d gone back to watching the telly and when I tried to ask another question, she shushed me.

Couple of days later, Angel went out – for longer this time than just to Sainsbury’s, which is about a hundred yards away – and I was relieved to have the place to myself without her loitering at the windows or jumping out of her skin every time I made a noise.

I’m not sure I’m built to live with anyone. It annoyed me when she was in the bathroom or in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea. The squeaky noise she made when she opened the door to the box room annoyed me, even though it was my door – my squeak. It annoyed me that she was hardly ever out, that she liked Laughing Cow cheese. It annoyed me that I couldn’t trump openly or walk from the bathroom in my pants. Sometimes the sound of her breathing was more than I could stand.

Anyway, I used the opportunity of her being out to go through her stuff.

Lots of things about this girl didn’t add up. Firstly, her holdall was Chanel – with the linked ring symbol. Now, I know a knock-off when I see one, I used to sell enough of them on the market, and this holdall, which was leather, with some animal-hide areas, like a furry cow’s back, was no knock-off.

Second, she had all these creams – Clarins, Crème de la Mer, Kérastase shampoo. Posh bottles and lotions. How did she afford them? So while she was out, I took the opportunity to have a try – washed my hair with the Kérastase, tried the Crème de la Mer. I didn’t use the Carlton Mayfair stuff because the size of the bottles would have made it obvious.

Third thing, I was patting through the pockets of her coat and I found there was something – the shape of a lighter but smaller – sewn into the lining at the hem. I felt around it and it was a neat rectangle. I pushed my fingers around the seam but there was no way in. Perhaps it was just a weight, to keep the fabric hanging nicely. But I doubted it.

Fourth thing (come to think of it, there was precious little about this girl that did add up): she had what can only be described as a stalker’s dossier. It was a brown folder, the type that’s open on two edges, and slipped inside were all these newspaper clippings, lots of them from the FT and the City pages of other papers. Pictures of Chinese blokes circled, names in the text highlighted. Printouts from the Forbes China Rich List.