The Life of Death Read online

  ‘Mate,’ he mutters at his reflection. ‘Pull yourself together.’

  I release my arm from around his waist. Trace the line between my lips and his skin with light fingers. He reaches up. Rubs that very spot on his neck with a warm hand.

  He has me trapped. And he has no idea. In the mirror we’re entwined, fingers threaded together, eyes locked. And he has no idea.

  Back in the office, he passes behind Emma’s desk and pauses. She keeps her head turned to the computer screen, studiously not noticing the shape hovering behind her desk. ‘Emma …’

  She turns. ‘Tom, I’m sorry, I just …’

  He waves her words away. Looks down at his feet. ‘Don’t. Please. I’m sorry. It’s not you … It’s …’ He trails off, winces at the cliché. Squeezes past the back of her chair to grab his jacket from the back of his own, pulling his stomach in and chest up to avoid any part of his body touching hers. Head down, through the maze of desks, past colleagues with their eyes fixed to flickering screens, resolutely not watching him go. Through the maze and out into the cold.

  And so we walk home together through the streets, Tom and I. Kicking leaves that gather soggily on the pavements as breath blooms in dewy clouds in front of us. Despite the aimless appearance of this stroll, despite the wandering pace, it is anything but. Every junction presents a decision. Every junction warrants an evaluation of which direction offers the lesser of two evils. Turn left here and we pass the school where she taught, eager hands held in the air through windows bright and shiny in the fading afternoon light. Continue ahead and eventually we will pass the restaurant where he asked her to marry him.

  It doesn’t matter though. Doesn’t matter how circuitous a route we take. How many landmarks we bypass, how many streets we determinedly avoid. Because the end point is always the same. On this street corner I’ll leave him. Here, by the red postbox shifted away from the upright by roots buckling the pavement below. I’ll leave him here to walk the final stretch alone. To an empty flat on a tree-lined street. An empty flat that echoes with the sound of her silence.

  11

  AND NOW, IT’S TIME. ROSE’S FINAL DAY HAS arrived. I loiter in the dark garden, peeping in through a condensation-fogged window to the warmth within.

  They’re both there, Rose and Dom. Pottering around in the kitchen. She’s standing by the hob frying onions and mince while he opens a bottle of wine, twisting screw into cork. He mutters something under his breath – makes her laugh as fat spits out of the pan, sending her backwards into him. He wraps her in a hug, kisses the top of her head. Tugs on her ponytail to pull her face to his.

  She’s thirty-two today. Thirty-two for ever. Not that either of them knows that yet. Fine features, blonde hair always hastily pulled together in a ponytail, a laugh always on the verge of bursting over and out.

  Dom is three years older. Altogether more serious, his brow has a permanent furrow – a slight frown where he parcels up his innermost thoughts and worries. She lightens his darkest thoughts and he is there to ensure she doesn’t waste her entire life on reality shows and red wine. They’ve been together for three years and I find them today in their basement flat in Highgate, a huge, ginger cat weaving around their feet.

  There’s a knock at the door backed up by a ring on the bell. An identical blonde enters the room – hair plaited into a floral scarf, nose ring glinting, lips a blur of constant chatter. Hands animated into a whirl to emphasise points made and moved on from. Hannah has come over for dinner, as she does three, even four times a week. Left to her own devices she survives on a diet of take-aways and ready meals. It’s not unusual for a pint and a packet of cheese and onion in front of the television to replace five a day and exercise. And so, the older sister by ten minutes looks after the younger. Cooking dinner and proffering words of wisdom as the latest crisis engulfs her twin. A cheating boyfriend, an amorous boss. A job that requires too much of her time, a job that asks too little of her talent. Life is never straightforward for Hannah.

  Three bodies bundle round the kitchen table. Red wine sloshed into beakers leaves ruby rings on a patterned tablecloth sprinkled with crusty crumbs from a baguette broken off and passed on. A vast lasagne bubbles and oozes in the middle of the table to be heaped on to mismatched plates and devoured between mouthfuls of chat and gulps of Merlot. Rose sits back cosy and content while Hannah and Dom spar and joke, both revelling in having found the older brother, the younger sister they never expected to have.

  Dinner eaten and they move through to the lounge. Feet curled onto sofas to delve into some reality show – the lives of a bunch of posh twenty-somethings conveniently packaged into half-hour bites of gossip and scandal. The girls love it, love the supposedly unscripted storylines engineered to astonish and delight, love to watch as loves and lives tangle and fuse. Dom, sitting on the old leather armchair in the corner, struggles to understand the fascination and buries his head in Private Eye for gossip and scandal of his own.

  The yawns set in and Hannah wraps up to head out into the cold. She grabs her sister in a hug and with a ‘I’ll give you a bell tomorrow’ and a wave goodbye, she heads off to the Tube and home. And so Dom and Rose head to bed. Grinning at each other in the mirror through toothpaste-foamed smiles. Tossing clothes onto the easy chair to scurry under the duvet and slot into place. Rose falls asleep with a heavy leg thrown over her hip and Dom’s gentle snores purring in her ear. Cosy. Cosy and content.

  In north-west London, John Barrow slumps in his armchair. Another long day at the wheel, another long evening to spend chasing the bottom of a bottle. He stares blankly at a muted TV in the corner of the lounge, seeing but not watching brightly lit contestants vie for the holiday of a lifetime. Since Sheila left last year the drinking has gone from bad to worse. A day at the wheel is torture while the cravings for a drink gnaw at his stomach and thoughts of her crowd into his head. A few more glasses before bed and the gnawing will dull and the chatter of what could have been will quieten. A few more glasses before bed and he can find solace in a deep and dreamless sleep. Without the booze she haunts his dreams – from a mundane nagging about the washing-up to bitter taunts about his failures. He drinks to obliterate the problems the drink has caused, sucked into a twisting downward spiral from which there is no escape.

  Eventually, in a darkened room lit only by the flickering television screen, with tears drying on his cheeks and Scotch wet on his lips, still in the clothes he’s been wearing all day, head bows on neck and John sleeps.

  It’s an early start for us the following morning. Got to be at the bus depot by five. Blearily wiping sleep from his eyes and shaking his head to try and clear the hangover fog, John and I make our way out of the front door into the pouring rain. Get to the yard to stand in the cold, hands wrapped round steaming mugs of tea to try and inject a little warmth against the damp seeping through to his core.

  He stands apart from the other drivers – men he’s known for years but who have given up trying to involve him after months of countless knockbacks. They worry about him. Go home and tell their wives about the help they think he should be getting. But it’s not so easy to bridge the gap when he’s lost in thought and any opening gambits are shut down to leave unfinished sentences hanging in the morning air. There are only so many times people will see their invites rejected before they’re no longer forthcoming. And John has long since passed that threshold.

  Together, we climb into the cab of the double decker, settling into the worn seat, adjusting mirrors. Preparing for a long day in the saddle. I perch on his lap like a child, feet resting lightly atop his. We lace our fingers together and wrap them around the steering wheel as the motor chug chug chugs into life with a cough and wheeze and a cloud of acrid smoke.

  Drops drip from amber leaves to swish under the tyres of passing cars on the Archway Road. Rose’s fingers are freezing, gripped around the handlebars of her trusty old bike. The morning commute. Back-to-back traffic for her to weave and dodge. Horns blaring, t
hick exhaust fumes billowing from buses choking the legions of cyclists. They wait at red lights in their droves, poised to leap out of the gates at the first opportunity.

  Down the Archway Road, under Suicide Bridge. Creeping and crawling slowly, slowly around Archway roundabout: cars, bikes, buses, trucks vying for a spot. I scan the road ahead of us, ahead of John and me. Tens of cyclists jostle in their neon jackets, balancing straight-legged on their pedals as they wait for lights to change, for gaps to emerge.

  Straight down onto Holloway Road. The packed bus groans under the weight of a Monday morning commute. Standing room only, steaming bodies pressed against fogged windows. The combined maraca shake beat of commuters’ headphones ticks and spits, punctuated by the rhythmic squeak-swoosh-thud of wiper rubbers against glass.

  I see her up ahead, head down, legs pumping. Caught in the stream of cyclists flowing into the turn of Highbury Corner. I have to be careful – to pick her out of the bunch, to separate her from the swarm. Split the prey from the pack. We stop at a red light, cyclists ahead poised for the jump. Rose on the extreme left, tight against the kerb and boxed in by a City type, grey flannel trousers tucked into luridly striped purple socks. The sun has broken through the dense blanket of cloud, casting Rose and her fellow drones into deep shadow.

  There’s a left turn ahead, for the bus anyway. Poor Rose will be continuing straight ahead. For a nanosecond longer than she really should.

  Together we accelerate, John and me. My foot presses down on his, our hands entwined at the wheel. We push forward, easing past Rose, trapping her against the kerb as she wobbles over a pothole. I yank the wheel, a lurching leap forward to take the corner too early. John tries to resist. I can smell his panic, the tang of sweat as he loses control and the wheel slips through his grasp. He’ll think there was a fault with the steering column. Think that something got trapped under the wheels. Think that tyres skidding on wet leaves have pulled this beast of a bus out of his control. He’ll think anything over the next weeks and months. Anything to avoid thinking that he did it. That a muddled mind and blood muddied with Scotch caused this to happen. That he killed her.

  It’s over in moments. A thud and a crunch as flesh and bone hit the side of the bus full on and fold to the floor. A bump as the back wheel drags body along asphalt and tries to roll over her inert frame before nonchalantly giving up and rolling backwards to rest. The half-hearted roll is the final insult. The final nail in a roadside coffin. Enough to finish the job. The spokes of her bike wheel glitter and glisten as it spins, unchecked, in the gutter. Drops of rainwater twinkle and shine like diamonds in the half-light.

  Silence on the bus, broken only by that tinny tick of commuting headphones. And then a groan, ripping through the air, dragged from the very gut of John. He fumbles with the cab door, nerves and fear numbing his fingers and making a simple task a mountain to climb. Silent, disbelieving faces watch him the length of the bus. Blank and uncomprehending. Upstairs passengers peer down the stairwell. He forces the doors open, falls into the gutter, grazes his hands on rough paving slabs. Runs to Rose. To the girl lying bent and broken under the wheels of his bus.

  But I’m there already, crawling under the hot chassis to take her hand in mine.

  She turns her head to see me. ‘Hann … ?’, breathed through bruised ribs and a lung filling with fluid. ‘What … ?’ Brows knitted, face creased in confusion.

  ‘Hang on, you’re not … Who are you?’ A shriek. Confusion morphs into panic morphs into fear. Eyes widen into dawning realisation. I don’t know how they know, but when the time comes they always recognise me.

  I reach forward to reassure. ‘Get AWAY from me!’ Feet scrabble against tarmac in a futile effort to move out of my reach. ‘Get OFF me! Get your hands OFF me!’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I whisper into hair matted with blood. ‘I’m here, I’m here. Shushushush.’ Lips pressed against her head. My hand reaches for her fist, twisted under her. Blood oozes from underneath her torso, trickles from her ear. Her face is unharmed – if it wasn’t for the mangled body below you’d never know that life was seeping away, minute by minute, second by second. She pulls back, body rigid in my arms.

  ‘No. No no no. No!’ Short, sharp punches aimed at my face punctuate her words. She pushes against my chest, straining with the effort. The harder she fights, the calmer I am. Wrapping her scraped and bloodied fists in mine. Stilling the fight. Waiting for the acceptance to come. It will come. It always does.

  Her hand works free and claws at my face, hooking fingers into my cheek in the scramble. ‘Get AWAY from me! I swear …’ Words choked out of a collapsing chest.

  ‘No.’ The shriek is now a whisper.

  She begins to cry. Softly, silently. Her chest heaves and gasps, judders and rasps as she battles against punctured lung to summon enough air. Tears run down the side of her face, pooling with rainwater on asphalt. She can no longer feel the damp and cold soaking through her clothes, no longer feel the dull pain threading through her core.

  The world around moves in slow motion, immersed in the thickest of treacle. Blue lights approaching. On … off … on … off … They come too late, the wailing sirens. Too late for Rose. Whooping and screaming as they get louder and louder and closer and closer. John’s face looms overhead, a picture of anguish that blurs in and out of focus. His lips are moving but we can’t hear the words. We lie together on that wet tarmac, bodies spooned as they were in the womb, my arm enveloping Rose in a protective hug.

  ‘Is this it? Am I …’ Disbelief.

  I nod silently. A choked cough of accession. I can’t speak. Can’t even begin to explain that I have done this. That if it wasn’t for me she’d be turning into the office courtyard round about now. Running up the metal steps to put the kettle on for a morning cup of tea. Laughing at the text from Dom that flashes, unread, on the phone lying in the road next to her.

  I start to hum. Songs they used to sing when they were kids, songs they used to hear on the radio in the car. Red, red robins bob bob bobbing while ‘Money for Nothing’ stirs a ‘Bat Out of Hell’. She joins me. We sing together, out of tune, out of time. Her on drums, me on lead guitar, arms flailing in the drizzled air. Talking over each other to laugh at the silliest things. Words flip and fly, dip and dance as we compete to remember the best bits – the ubiquitous reality-show montage at the end of a life well lived. As the end approaches, pain lessens and mangled limbs straighten and unfold. People work around us, lifting the bus out of the way, setting up screens to prevent the gawking of the passers-by, necks craning to see what they are so glad to have avoided. As the day passes, rescue crews finish their work and leave. Lift the shell of a body into the back of an ambulance, face covered in a sheet, before driving away, blue lights flashing silently in reverence. Screens are dismantled, police tape cut down. A plastic A-frame proclaiming an accident the only marker of a life cut short. So quick, so efficient. They don’t see us. Still there. Still singing. Hours pass on the wet tarmac as we watch day turn to night and the world carries on around us. But we can’t stay for ever.

  ‘I think it’s time.’ We’re lying on our backs watching the stars overhead. ‘Are you ready?’

  A squeak from the back of her throat the only sign that she’s heard me. Lips pressed together to hold back tears. A deep breath in to be blown out shakily. ‘I don’t have a choice really do I?’

  It doesn’t warrant an answer. ‘Tell Dom I love him.’

  And we lie hand in hand, and we watch the stars, and as Orion’s belt dips low above the mansion blocks, slowly, quietly, Rose Charlotte Harrison fades to black.

  12

  I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, IN THIS HIGH-CEILINGED room. Nineteen twenty … three. No, two … Nineteen twenty-two. Back when it wasn’t a living room. When this was the master bedroom of a masterful house, and Gordon Lyons, businessman and philanthropist lay in a huge bed swathed in red velvet and gold brocade. I came to him then as his first love – a young Indian girl from his early days
as an officer in the Raj. Wrapped in silks, jingling my way around his bedside. Smoothing hair from his fevered brow while his wife sat to one side of the bed, rigid with grief, forgotten.

  But now, the William Morris wallpaper and turn-of-the-century furniture are gone. The grand house has been converted into flats, the des-res of thirty-something locals. In floor-to-ceiling alcoves either side of a massive fireplace, books in their hundreds line the walls – contemporary blockbusters jostle with first editions dug out of antique book dealers on the Charing Cross Road. I slip one out from its nest, open it to bury my nose in lignin-scented pages yellowed by the years.

  And today, in this room that stands in darkness, lit only by the flickering blue of the TV screen and a shattered shard of orange light that jabs through the blinds from the street-lamp outside, I can’t sense the sniff, the whiff that usually accompanies my work. The hum, the breath that hangs in the air when death is so close. The air is still. Stale. Quiet. Discarded clothes dot the room – a T-shirt tossed over the back of an armchair, a hooded sweatshirt reaching its long arms to the floor from where it’s been chucked on the sofa. Empty cups and crumb-covered plates litter the floor and a regiment of mugs lines the edge of the sofa, milky films forming on the surface of undrunk tea.

  From the kitchen, a noise. Pans clattering in a sink already piled high with dirty dishes. A hissed ‘bugger’ as a lid falls to the floor with a clang. A soft sob of helplessness seeps through the crack in the door. A slump-shouldered figure pushes its way through into the living room. Dead eyes, red-rimmed and staring. He wants to cry, God knows he wants to cry. Wants to open the floodgates and release that pressure that sits at the base of his throat, behind his eyes. The pressure that strangles swallows in its vice-like grip. But the tears won’t come. His dark hair curls lankly, greasy with neglect. He’s empty – the living embodiment of heartbreak and loss. Tom. For this is the inside of that empty flat on that tree-lined street.