Nicci French: Killing Me Softly

I snapped the book shut and put it back on the shelf. I took out another book and again looked in the index. There were no Tallises there.

‘I’m sorry, we’re closing now.’ The young man was back again. ‘Do you want to buy anything?’

‘Sorry, I didn’t realize. No, I don’t think so.’

I made it to the door. But I couldn’t do it. I turned back again, snatched up On Top of the World and took it over to the till. ‘Am I in time to buy this?’

‘Of course.’

I paid and put it in my bag. I wrapped it in my new blue shirt, so that it was quite hidden.

‘That’s it, pull the left string down a bit, careful not to collide with that other one. There, isn’t that satisfying?’

In each hand, I held a spool of string that twitched and snagged in the gusts of wind. The kite – Jake’s present to me from Edinburgh – swooped above us. It was a rather swanky red and yellow stunt kite, with a long ribbon that slapped when the wind changed.

‘Careful now, Alice, it’s going to crash. Pull.’

Jake had an absurd bobble hat on his head. His nose was red in the chill. He looked about sixteen, happy as a boy on an outing. I tugged on both strings randomly, and the kite veered and plummeted. The strings went slack and it accelerated into the ground.

‘Don’t move. I’ll get it,’ yelled Jake.

He went running off down the hill, picked up the kite, walked with it until the strings were taut again, then sailed it up into the low white sky once more, where it pulled at its reins. I thought of trying to explain to Jake that the good bits of kite-flying – that is, when it was briefly airborne – didn’t, as far as I was concerned, compensate for the bits where it was lying on the grass with the line having to be untangled by clumsy numb fingers. I decided not to.

‘If it snows,’ said Jake, back beside me and panting, ‘let’s go tobogganing.’

‘What’s got into you? You’re a bit energetic, aren’t you?’

He stood behind me and slid his arms around me. I concentrated on steering the kite.

‘We could use that big kitchen tray,’ he said, ‘or just some large bin bags. Or maybe we should buy a toboggan. They don’t cost much and it would last us years.’

‘In the meantime,’ I said, ‘I’m starving. And I can’t feel my fingers.’

‘Here.’ He took the kite from me. ‘There are gloves in my pocket. Put them on. What time is it?’

I looked at my watch. ‘Nearly three. It’ll be getting dark.’

‘Let’s buy some crumpets. I love crumpets.’

‘Do you?’

‘There’s lots you don’t know about me.’ He started reeling in the kite. ‘Did you know, for instance, that when I was fifteen I had a crush on a girl called Alice? She was in the year above me at school. I was just a spotty little boy to her, of course. It was agony.’ He laughed. ‘I wouldn’t be young again for anything. All that worry. I couldn’t wait to grow up.’

He knelt on the ground, carefully folded the kite and put it away in its narrow nylon bag. I didn’t say anything. He looked up and smiled. ‘Of course, being grown-up has its problems too. But at least you don’t feel so awkward and self-conscious all the time.’

I squatted down beside him. ‘What are your problems now, then, Jake?’

‘Now?’ He frowned then looked surprised. ‘Nothing, really.’ He put his arms on my shoulders, nearly unbalancing me. I kissed the tip of his nose. ‘When I was with Ari I felt I was always on trial, and was never quite coming up to scratch. I’ve never felt that with you. You say what you mean. You can be cross, but you’re never manipulative. I know where I am.’ Ari was his previous girlfriend, a tall, big-boned, beautiful woman with russet hair, who designed shoes that I had always thought looked like Cornish pasties, and who had left Jake for a man who worked for an oil company and was away for half the year.

‘What about you?’

‘What?’

‘What are your grown-up problems?’

I stood up and pulled him to his feet. ‘Let’s think. A job that’s driving me insane. A phobia about flies and ants and all creepy-crawly things. And bad circulation. Come on, I’m freezing.’

We really did have crumpets, horrid plasticky things with butter running through the holes making a mess. Then we went to see an early-evening film, and there was a sad bit at the end which allowed me to cry. For once, we didn’t join everybody for drinks at the Vine or a curry, but went to a cheap Italian restaurant near the flat, just the two of us, and ate spaghetti with clams and drank abrasive red wine. Jake was in a nostalgic mood. He talked some more about Ari, and about the women before her, and then we did the whole how-we-first-met routine again – which is every happy couple’s best story. Neither of us could remember when we had first set eyes on the other.

‘They say the first few seconds of a relationship are the most important ones,’ he said.

I remembered Adam, staring at me across a road, blue eyes holding me. ‘Let’s go home.’ I stood up abruptly.

‘Don’t you want coffee?’

‘We can make some at home.’

He took it as a sexual invitation, and in a way it was. I wanted to hide somewhere – and where better than in bed, in his arms, in the dark, eyes shut, no questions, no revelations? We knew each other’s bodies so well it almost felt anonymous: naked flesh against naked flesh.

‘What on earth is this?’ he said afterwards, as we lay sweatily against each other. He was holding On Top of the World. I’d pushed it under my pillow last night, when he was away in Edinburgh.

‘That?’ I tried to sound casual. ‘Someone at work lent it to me. They said it was brilliant.’

Jake was flicking through the pages. I held my breath. There. The photographs. He was looking at Adam in a photograph. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was your kind of thing.’

‘No, well, it’s not really, I probably won’t read it.’

‘People must be mad to climb mountains like that,’ said Jake. ‘Do you remember all those people dying in the Himalayas last year?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Just to stand on the top of a mountain and go down again.’

I didn’t reply.

The next morning, it had snowed, although not enough to go tobogganing. We turned up the heating, read Sunday newspapers and drank pots of coffee. I learned how to ask for a double room in French, and to say that ‘Janvier est le premier mois de l’année’, or ‘février est le deuxiéme mois’, and then I ploughed through some technical journals that I’d let pile up, and Jake went on with the climbing book. He was about half-way through.

‘You ought to read this, you know.’

‘I’m going to go to the shops to get something for lunch. Pasta?’

‘We had pasta last night. Let’s have a real greasy fry-up. I’ll cook and you wash up.’

‘But you never cook,’ I protested.

‘I’m changing my ways.’

Clive and Gail came round after lunch. They had obviously spent the morning in bed. They had a post-coital glow about them, and occasionally they would smile at each other as if they knew something we didn’t. They said they were going tenpin bowling and would we like to come too, and maybe we should ask Pauline and Tom.

So I spent the afternoon skidding a heavy black ball towards the skittles, and missing them every time. Everyone giggled a lot: Clive and Gail because they knew that as soon as this was over they would go straight back to bed, Pauline because she was planning to have a baby and couldn’t believe how her luck had changed, Tom and Jake because they were nice men, and it’s easier to join in than not. I giggled because everyone expected me to. My chest hurt. My glands ached. The echoey, overlit bowling hall made my head spin. I giggled until my eyes watered.