The Book of You. Claire Kendal

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СКАЧАТЬ bed early, taking her hearing aids out before sleep. I am grateful that I’m not in a public place where you can ambush me like you did with Rowena.

      I swaddle myself in towels and go into my bedroom. Again I shut the door and again it does almost nothing to muzzle the screech of the bell. I turn on the radio. They’re playing a Chopin Prelude. I turn up the volume and you’re seriously muffled but for the pauses between the piano’s notes. It’s only when I crawl under the bedclothes and pull them over my head that you entirely disappear.

      Soon though, my ears are hurting in a different way. This music was not meant to be blasted. You have ruined the Chopin for me for ever. To have it at such a high decibel level, competing absurdly with your finger on the buzzer, makes it ugly and uncivilised – it was never meant to be used as a weapon. I’m suffocating again, unable to get enough air into my lungs with the comforter over my nose, and I must quickly abandon this homemade sensory deprivation unit too. Once more, there is the stab of you in my eardrums.

      By ten I cannot endure another minute. I grab the intercom phone. You win again. It is impossible to stay silent.

      ‘I will never let you in. I don’t want to go out with you; I never asked for that ticket; I’d never have shown up at that restaurant last night if I’d known you’d be there.’

      You say, ‘I don’t want to upset you, Clarissa.’ You say, ‘I’m just trying to make you happy, Clarissa.’ You say, ‘That’s all I want. But you’ve hurt me, Clarissa.’ You say, ‘I know you’re lonely, Clarissa. I’m lonely too.’ You say, ‘I’m just trying to help us both, Clarissa.’ You say, ‘I know your heart’s been broken, Clarissa. Mine’s been broken too. Again and again by you.’ You say, ‘I’m going now, Clarissa.’

      I jerk the handset onto its cradle in such distress it falls off and dangles and I have to put it back. The new noiselessness is so quiet it makes a low hum in my ears. But I can’t get rid of my anxiety that you are still standing there.

       Friday

      It was difficult to focus on Azarola’s barrister after barely sleeping the night before.

      ‘Please confirm your description of the man you said they picked up en route to London.’ Mr Williams made Clarissa think of an actor in a legal drama who’d mastered his lines and moves. ‘You said “About five foot nine, mixed race, slight build, with long plaits”.’

      Azarola leaned forward. He was well over six feet. His skin was golden, his eyes were hazel, and his hair was straight and short and thick and medium brown. His shoulders and chest were broad, like Robert’s, beneath his fitted black sweater, which she thought looked expensive and fine, and was probably cashmere. He made her think of a Spanish pop star.

      ‘Yes. That was my description,’ Miss Lockyer said.

      There was no way that description matched. Could Clarissa herself make such a mistake, if she were in too much fear to look? Or had the police got the wrong man?

      Tomlinson’s barrister looked like a seasoned Shakespearean actor. ‘Mr Tomlinson had consensual sex with you. It was not the violent encounter you portrayed. It was a cold-blooded commercial transaction for drugs. You are a professional, Miss Lockyer. You even gave Mr Tomlinson a condom.’

      Clarissa shuddered. She hadn’t been able to remember enough of that November night to know if Rafe had worn a condom. Knowing him, he probably hadn’t. She’d been inexpressibly relieved when her period had started a week later, as expected: a novel experience for her to wish not to be pregnant. What would Mr Belford make of her, if she were sitting in that witness chair?

      Clarissa spoke quietly to Annie as they got their coats and slowly made their way out of the building. ‘That’s what happens when you press charges, when you complain. They just rape you up there all over again and say you’re a prostitute.’

      ‘But she was a prostitute, Clarissa,’ Annie said. ‘Nobody could possibly believe her when she says she wasn’t.’

      Clarissa stuffed her tattered copy of Keats’s Collected Poems into her bag. The book was a relic of her abandoned PhD, and something she always reached for when the world around her seemed especially dark and uncivilised. She glanced out the train window. Robert strode assuredly along the platform and disappeared down the stairs. She hadn’t realised he’d been on the train; it hadn’t occurred to her that he might live in Bath too. Somehow he’d climbed off and got himself almost out of the station before the other passengers had even begun to alight.

      She surveyed the platform for Rafe, peering into the crowd that was pressing her towards the stairs. Her body was aching from sitting all day. She wanted fresh air. She wanted to move. She’d already had to give up her morning walks. She didn’t want to lose the walk home, too. The fact that the taxi-queue was so impossibly long helped her to make up her mind, but she was glad there were so many people about.

      Still, she was nervous when she stepped into the railway arch behind the station. She paused to look inside the tunnel: no Rafe. And on the bridge, before she stepped onto it to cross the river: again he wasn’t there.

      But there was someone, in the middle of the bridge, crumpled inside a heap of shabby blankets and encircled by empty beer cans, clutching a bottle of cheap spirits. There were several plastic bags around her, with her meagre belongings.

      Normally, Clarissa would keep as much distance between them as she could. This time, she approached the woman, though she fought a stab of the same mixture of fear and pity that Miss Lockyer made her feel. She gripped her bag more tightly.

      The woman’s hair was so greasy and matted Clarissa couldn’t tell what colour it was. Her flimsy shell jacket was torn and filthy on her skeleton frame. Her wrinkled skin was so rough and red and flaky it must have hurt; she appeared at first glance to be an old woman, but probably wasn’t more than forty. Would this be Miss Lockyer, some day? There was a stench of sour flesh – an unmistakable mix of unwashed genitals and anus and armpit sweat – that made Clarissa gag and try to breathe through her mouth, hoping the woman didn’t notice.

      ‘Money for the shelter?’ The woman held out a hand that was almost blue with cold. Clarissa took off a mitten and drew out a twenty-pound note, knowing it would probably be used to purchase a wrap of crack cocaine and a wrap of heroin. ‘Bless you,’ the woman said.

      Clarissa peeled off her other mitten and offered the pair, uncertain if her mother’s knitting would be wanted. The woman hesitated, then took them and put them on, slowly and clumsily. ‘Bless you,’ she said again, not meeting Clarissa’s eye, and Clarissa moved forward, pressing her now frozen fists deeply into the pockets of the warm coat she’d cut out when Henry had still been there.

      Henry, smiling faintly then, a glass of wine and the paper in his hands as she kneeled on the living-room floor, bending over the indigo wool she’d quilted into diamonds, immersed in her plans for it. Henry, crackling with energy even when he was still. Henry, shaving the few hairs he had left in the shower each morning, so he was entirely bald – a style choice rather than unwanted fate, and yet more evidence of his infallible aesthetic judgement. Henry, in Cambridge now, a world away from this woman and from Clarissa.

      Clarissa hurried on, wanting to get home as fast as she could. She reached the old churchyard within minutes. Miss Lockyer must have passed it countless times, including the day they took her. Had she ever noticed the СКАЧАТЬ