Maxim Jakubowski - London Noir

‘Also, I made free with your phone. We’re meeting the others at the pub at seven, so dig out your gladrags, girl.’

‘No.’ That was too much.

‘Yes. No arguments. I’ll be with you on the way, and we’ll all walk you back.’

‘No, I said.’ She tried and failed to stare Paula down.

‘You were the one that wasn’t going to let this thing beat you.’ The words were as effective as a slap in the face. Jane went to find a fresh T-shirt. The night was cool enough that her jacket would not seem out of place; and Paula didn’t need to know that she had slipped the can of hairspray in her pocket.

At the pub, no one mentioned the man, not even Dave. Jane hardly spoke. She just sat sipping diet Coke. She wished it were whisky, but she knew if she started on alcohol she wouldn’t stop.

Half way through the evening he walked in. Jane noticed him immediately. She tracked him as he went up to the bar and ordered a pint. The barman obviously knew him. He picked up his bitter and turned to find a seat. Even in the dim pub lighting his eyes were clear blue; and yes, he had a mole on his cheek, just where she had dreamed it. He noticed her. Looking away was impossible.

‘Evening,’ he said, cool as you might like, and smiled. How could he smile at her, knowing what he knew? Then he disappeared off into the shadows around the pool table.

Jane sat, as if frozen. She wanted to tell them -to tell Paula – that he was there. But they would think she was being stupid. Besides, she might break down again, and that would be intolerable in public. But when it was time for the next round, she asked for a whisky, and got it. And a couple more after that, too.

They left the pub a little after last orders. She felt warm and cheerful, and though she knew it was the whisky, she didn’t care. It was a beautiful night, cool enough for comfort with a sickle moon riding high in a clear sky, and she was with her friends. Maybe there was a problem, but she could solve it. She said as much as they walked home, and was surprised when Kath shushed her, telling her it was late and people would be sleeping.

When they got to the flats Paula wanted to go upstairs with her, but that was just stupid. What could happen to her so close to home? Besides, they had left him behind at the pub. What did Paula think he was, a magician?

She shrugged Paula’s hand away from her arm and went inside. As she closed the double doors she could see them drifting slowly away down the road. They were probably waiting for her to start yelling for help. Damn them.

There was something odd about the inner stairs. Something about the moonlight. She heard the door bang outside. She paused. There were footsteps on the steps below. Instantly she was dead sober. An old statistic flashed through her mind: eighty per cent of all rape occurs close to the victims’ homes; she wondered what the rate for murder was and cursed herself for a fool all at the same time as her hand clutched the hairspray in her jacket pocket.

She started to run up the stairs, and as the footsteps came closer, began to take them two at a time.

‘Wait,’ a male voice called out. His voice. She would have known it anywhere.

She was out of breath. There were too many stairs. Maybe Paula was right, and she should have been eating better. She grabbed the bannister to try and haul herself up. He touched her. She thought he did.

She had to see. She turned, and he was right behind her, staring at her out of blue eyes made bright by moonlight. He stretched his hand towards her and said something. Then it was as if the world split in two. She was both herself, and a shadow-Jane. Shadow-Jane pulled a knife out of her pocket. Jane felt the textured plastic of the handle superimposed on the cold smoothness of the can of hairspray as she took it out of her pocket, felt her heart thunder in double time, shadow-heart and real-heart slightly syncopated. Two men stood before her now, both holding out her purse like a peace-offering, both plainly caught in that moment before understanding turns to terror. She saw her hand holding the can of hair-spray, and another, translucent as a ghost, holding the knife.

’Christ,’ she thought. ‘This is what was supposed to happen…’

But the man – the men – were speaking. ‘Please don’t -’

And Jane thought, He doesn’t want to hurt me. My dream – I’m supposed to kill him, not the other way around - She felt shadow-Jane lunge forward with the knife extended, felt her own finger press down on the button of the can, all in the same instant that she thought, I don’t have to do this -

She jerked the can up, away from the man’s eyes. Hairspray hissed harmlessly into the dark, leaving the air pungent behind it. But the shadow-knife slid into the man’s chest.

Blood spurted everywhere. Shadow blood. On her T-shirt, on her hands. She felt shadow-Jane bite back hysteria; staring down at his blue dying eyes with mingled terror and exultation -

But he’s dying Jane thought. No matter what he was going to do, that can’t please you.

– at what she had escaped. Jane felt her shadow think, You can’t hurt me now , felt the laughter that was beginning to bubble out of her throat. She felt herself beginning to laugh too. I don’t have to, she thought desperately. I don’t want to be a murderer -

But she could have been. She felt that darkness within herself, and she knew it. The man – the real man – was coming towards her, hands holding out her purse, saying words she couldn’t understand.

‘Don’t come near me,’ she said in panic. If he came near her, she would hurt him. Hadn’t all the others said she should hurt him? She could do it. Shadow-Jane had. Shadow-Jane was laughing in delight about it. But Shadow-Jane wasn’t there any more, she had slipped away into the darkness; the shadow-man too, and all his blood. Only the laughter remained, coming out of Jane’s throat, harsh and echoing, squeezing out sanity, leaving no room for thought.

Yet she thought, I could have done it I could I could I could. There was no way to deny it. She was still laughing as he came over to her. She looked at him, but it was the shadow-man’s blue, dying eyes that she saw. She knew that she would be seeing those eyes forever. And she laughed.

She was a beauty, all right, but that’s not what started it. It was the resemblance -wildly exact – to his long-imagined creature. He stopped cold the first time he saw her. She was fiddling with gew-gaws in a costume jewelry shop on Fulham Road. He stopped and gasped and stared through the window like some clown doing a pantomime of Cupid’s Target. Then he began to follow her. All the way home through the autumn evening. Through mist, past mansions, under haloed street lamps: the whole South Kensington shebang.

He’d done this maybe a dozen times over the past five years. More and more often during his dreamy, Luciferian tumble from station to station. At first, there had been no need for it. That first year in London, he had been someone, a recognizable member of the human race: Benjamin Westlake, an American art student finishing up his Grand Tour before returning to the States. He had had promise, and a certain frantic intensity that made his scrawny frame thrum. He could sit in pubs and cafes and talk to other students with a mesmerizing energy: about the Pre-Raphaelites in relation to the New Realism, about injecting realism with the Vital Romance of the Past. He could find models; he could find lovers too sometimes. At first – but somehow, he had stayed on, he had not gone home. And he had begun to paint less, hardly at all finally. Nothing he did was good enough for him, He had begun to theorize when he should have been working, and his cafe philosophies became charged with unappealing panic as he watched, in secret, the slow paralysis of his talent through fear. For a while, he managed to hold onto his few admirers. He lived off his sensitive appearance, his nervous charm and money from home. But they had all dried up eventually.