Nicci French: Tuesday's Gone

‘How long have you been here, Michelle?’

The woman frowned. ‘Here?’ she said. ‘A few days.’

The discharge form had said the fifth of January and today was the first day of February. Still, that sort of vagueness wasn’t really surprising. As the two women stood there, Maggie became aware of a sound she couldn’t quite place. It might be the hum of traffic, or a vacuum cleaner on the floor above, or a plane. It depended on how far away it was. There was a smell also, like food that had been left out too long. She looked up: the electricity was working. She should check whether Michelle had a fridge. But, by the look of her, she’d be all right for the time being.

‘Can I have a look round, Michelle?’ she said. ‘Make sure everything’s OK?’

‘You want to meet him?’ said Michelle.

Maggie was puzzled. There hadn’t been anything on the form. ‘Have you got a friend?’ she said. ‘I’d be happy to meet him.’

Michelle stepped forward and opened the door to what would have been the house’s main back room, away from the street. Maggie followed her and immediately felt something on her face. At first she thought it was dust. She thought of an underground train coming, blowing the warm grit into her face. At the same time the sound got louder and she realized it wasn’t dust but flies, a thick cloud of flies blowing against her face.

For a few moments she was confused by the man sitting on the sofa. Her perceptions had slowed and become skewed, as if she were deep under water or in a dream. Crazily, she wondered if he was wearing some sort of diving suit, a blue, marbled, slightly ruptured and torn diving suit, and she wondered why his eyes were yellow and cloudy. And then she started to fumble for her phone and she dropped it, and suddenly she couldn’t make her fingers work, couldn’t get them to pick the phone up from the grimy carpet, as she saw that it wasn’t any kind of suit but his naked, swollen, rupturing flesh and that he was dead. Long dead.

‘February,’ said Sasha, sidestepping a puddle, ‘should be abolished.’

She was walking with Frieda along a street lined with modern office blocks, whose height blocked out the sky and made the dark day seem darker. Everything was black and grey and white, like an old photograph: the buildings were monochrome, the sky chilly and blank; all the men and women – but they were mostly men – walking past them, with their slim laptop cases and umbrellas at the ready, wore sober suits and coats. Only the red scarf around Frieda’s neck added a splash of colour to the scene.

Frieda was walking swiftly, and Sasha, although she was the taller, had to make an effort to keep up.

‘And Tuesdays,’ she went on. ‘February is the worst month of the year, much worse than January, and Tuesday is the worst day of the week.’

‘I thought that was supposed to be Monday.’

‘Tuesdays are worse. It’s like …’ Sasha paused, trying to think what it was like. ‘Monday’s like jumping into ice-cold water, but you get a shock of excitement. On Tuesday you’re still in the water but the shock has worn off and you’re just cold.’

Frieda looked round at her, noticing the winter pallor that made her seem frailer than usual, although there was no hiding her unusual beauty, even bundled up in a heavy coat, with her dark blonde hair tied severely back.

‘Bad morning?’

They turned past a wine bar and briefly out on to Cannon Street, into the blur of red buses and taxis. Rain started to spit.

‘Not really. Just a meeting that went on longer than necessary because some people love the sound of their own voices.’ Sasha suddenly stopped and looked around. ‘I hate this part of London,’ she said, not angrily, but as if she’d only just realized where she was. ‘When you suggested a walk, I thought you were going to take me along by the river or to a park. This is just unreal.’

Frieda slowed. They were walking past a tiny patch of fenced-in green, untended and full of nettles and overgrown shrubs.

‘There was a church here,’ she said. ‘It’s long gone, of course, and the graveyard as well. But this tiny bit survived, got forgotten about somehow, among all the offices. It’s a fragment of something.’

Sasha peered over the railings at the litter. ‘And now it’s where people come for a cigarette.’

‘When I was little, seven or eight, my father took me to London.’

Sasha looked at Frieda attentively: this was the first time she had ever mentioned any member of her family or brought up a memory from her childhood. In the year or so since they had known each other, she had told Frieda almost everything about her own life – her relationship with her parents and her feckless younger brother, her love affairs, her friendships, things she kept hidden from view suddenly exposed – but Frieda’s life remained a mystery to her.

The two of them had met just over a year ago. Sasha had gone to Frieda as a patient and she still remembered their single session, when she had told Frieda, in a whisper and barely lifting her eyes to meet Frieda’s steady gaze, how she had slept with her therapist. Her therapist had slept with her. It had been an act of confession: her dirty secret filling the quiet room and Frieda, leaning forward slightly in her red chair, taking away the sting and shame by the quality of her attention. Sasha had left feeling drained but cleansed. Only later had she learned that afterwards Frieda had gone straight from their session to the restaurant where the therapist was sitting with his wife and punched him, creating havoc, smashing glasses and plates. She had ended up in a police cell with a bandaged hand, but the therapist had declined to press charges and insisted on paying for all the damage at the restaurant. Later, Sasha – who was a geneticist by profession – had repaid the debt by surreptitiously arranging a DNA test on a piece of evidence Frieda had lifted from the police station. They had become friends, yet it was a friendship unlike any that Sasha had ever known. Frieda didn’t talk about feelings; she had never once mentioned her ex, Sandy, since he had gone to work in America, and the only time Sasha had asked her about it, Frieda had told her with terrifying politeness that she didn’t want to discuss it. Instead, Frieda talked about a piece of architecture, or a strange fact she had unearthed about London. Every so often she would invite Sasha to an exhibition and sometimes she would call and ask her if she was free for a walk. Sasha would always say yes. She would break a date or leave work in order to follow Frieda through the London streets. She felt that this was Frieda’s way of confiding in her, and that by accompanying her on her rambles, she was perhaps taking some of the edge off her friend’s solitude.

Now she waited for Frieda to continue, knowing better than to press her.

‘We went to Spitalfields Market and he suddenly said we were standing on top of a plague pit, that hundreds of people who had died from the Black Death were lying under our feet. They had done tests on the teeth of some of the corpses that had been excavated.’

‘Couldn’t he have taken you to the zoo?’ said Sasha.

Frieda shook her head. ‘I hate these buildings as well. We could be anywhere. But there are the tiny bits they’ve forgotten to get rid of, the odd space here and there, and the names of the roads: Threadneedle Street, Wardrobe Terrace, Cowcross Street. Memories and ghosts.’

‘It sounds just like therapy.’

Frieda smiled at her. ‘Doesn’t it? Here, there’s something I want to show you.’

They retraced their route to Cannon Street and stopped opposite the station, in front of an iron grid set into the wall.