Nicci French: Killing Me Softly

Phones were ringing around us and conversation hummed in the air, like static. There were people in the background, men and women in their uniforms passing busily by. Occasionally they would look towards us, but they didn’t seem curious. Why should they be? They saw so many things in here, and I was just an ordinary woman, with a flush in her cheeks and a ladder running up her tights. Who could tell? My feet ached inside their ridiculous ankle boots. I didn’t want to die.

Detective Inspector Byrne picked up a pen. I tried to smile at him with all of my last hope. He looked across at me patiently, eyebrows bunched, and I wanted to cry and ask him to save me, oh, please. It had been such a long time since I had cried properly. If I started now, then why should I ever stop?

‘Where were we, do you remember?’ he asked.

Oh, yes, I remembered. I remembered it all.

‘Alice! Alice! You’re late. Come on.’

I heard a soft resistant grunt and realized it was coming from me. Outside it was cold and dark. I wriggled deeper into the bunched-up duvet, closed my eyes in a squint against the dim glimmers of winter light.

‘Up, Alice.’

Jake smelt of shaving foam. A tie hung loose from his collar. Another day. It’s the little habits rather than the big decisions that make you into a real couple. You drift into routines, inhabit complementary domestic roles without deciding to. Jake and I were the world trivia experts on each other. I knew that he liked more milk in coffee than in tea, he knew that I liked just a drop of milk in tea and none at all in coffee. He could locate the hard knot that formed near my left shoulder-blade after hard days in the office. I didn’t put fruit in salads because of him and he didn’t put cheese in salads because of me. What more could you want from a relationship? We were shaking down into a couple.

I’d never lived with a man before – I mean, a man with whom I was in a relationship – and I found the experience of assuming household roles interesting. Jake was an engineer and was limitlessly capable with all the wires and pipes behind our walls and under our floors. I once said to him that the one thing he resented about our flat was that he hadn’t actually built it himself on a greenfield site, and he didn’t take it as an insult. My degree was in biochemistry, which meant that I changed the sheets on the bed and emptied the swing-bin in the kitchen. He fixed the vacuum cleaner but I used it. I washed the bath, except if he had shaved in it. I drew the line there.

The odd thing was that Jake did all the ironing. He said that people didn’t know how to iron shirts any more. I thought that was deeply stupid and I would have got offended except that it’s hard to stay offended as you lie watching TV with a drink while somebody else does the ironing. He bought the paper and I read it over his shoulder and he got irritated. We both shopped, although I always took a list and ticked everything off, and he was haphazard and far more extravagant than me. He defrosted the fridge. I watered the plants. And he brought me a cup of tea in bed every morning.

‘You’re late,’ he said. ‘Here’s your tea and I’m leaving in exactly three minutes.’

‘I hate January,’ I said.

‘You said that about December.’

‘January’s like December. But without Christmas.’

But he’d left the room. I showered hurriedly and put on an oatmeal-coloured trouser suit, with a jacket that came to my knees. I brushed my hair and coiled it into a loose bun.

‘You look smart,’ said Jake, as I came into the kitchen. ‘Is that new?’

‘I’ve had it for ages,’ I lied, pouring myself another cup of tea, tepid this time.

We walked to the underground together, sharing an umbrella and dodging puddles. He kissed me at the turnstile, putting the umbrella under his arm and holding my shoulders firmly.

‘Goodbye, darling,’ he said, and I thought at that moment, He wants to be married. He wants us to be a married couple. With my mind on that arresting idea, I forgot to say anything back. He didn’t notice and stepped on to the escalator, joining the descending crowd of men in raincoats. He didn’t look back. It was almost as if we were married already.

I didn’t want to go to the meeting. I felt almost physically incapable of it. The previous evening, I’d been out late with Jake for a meal. We hadn’t got in until after midnight and hadn’t got to bed until one and then hadn’t actually got to sleep until maybe two thirty. It had been an anniversary – our first. It wasn’t much of an anniversary but Jake and I are short of them. Occasionally we’ve tried, but we’ve always been unable to remember our first meeting. We were around each other in the same environment for such a long time, like bees hovering around the same hive. We can’t remember when we became friends. We were in a fluctuating group of people, and after a bit of time we had reached a stage where if somebody had asked me to write a list of my three or four, or four or five closest friends, Jake would have been on it. But nobody ever asked me. We knew all about each other’s parents, schooldays, love lives. Once we got horrendously drunk together when his girlfriend left him, sitting under a tree in Regent’s Park and finishing off half a bottle of whisky between us, half weepy, half giggly, generally maudlin. I told him that she was the one who was losing out, and he hiccuped and stroked my cheek. We laughed at each other’s jokes, danced with each other at parties, but not when the music was slow, cadged money and lifts and advice. We were mates.

We both remembered the first time we slept together. That was on 17 January last year. A Wednesday. A group of us were going to see a late-night movie, but various people couldn’t go and by the time we were at the cinema it was just Jake and me, and at one point during the film we looked at each other and smiled rather sheepishly and I guessed that we were both realizing that we were on a sort of date, and maybe we were both wondering if this was such a good idea.

Afterwards he asked me back to his flat for a drink. It was about one in the morning. He had a packet of smoked salmon in the fridge and – this was the bit that made me laugh – bread he had baked himself. At least, it made me laugh in retrospect, because he has never baked a loaf or anything else since. We are a takeaway-and-convenience-food couple. However, I did very nearly laugh then, at the moment when I first kissed him, because it seemed odd, almost incestuous, being such good ordinary friends already. I saw his face getting closer to mine, his familiar features blurring into strangeness, and I wanted to giggle or pull away, anything to break the sudden seriousness, the different kind of quietness between us. But it immediately felt right, like coming home. If there were times when I didn’t want that sense of settledness (what about all my plans to work abroad, to have adventures, to be a different kind of person?), or worried that I was nearly thirty and was this, then, my life?, well, I shook them off.

I know that couples are meant to make a specific decision to live together. It’s a stage in your life, like exchanging a ring or dying. We never did. I started staying over. Jake allocated me a drawer for knickers and tights. Then there was the odd dress. I started leaving conditioner and eyeliner pencils in the bathroom. After a few weeks of that I noticed one day that about half of the videos had my handwriting on the labels. It’s just that if you don’t write down programmes you’ve taped, even in very small writing, then you can never find them when you want to watch them.

One day Jake asked me if there was any point in my paying rent for my room, since I was never there. I hemmed and hawed, worried, and didn’t come to any firm decision. My cousin, Julie, came down for the summer to work before starting college and I suggested that she could park in my place. I had to move more of my stuff out to give her room. Then at the end of August – it was a hot early Sunday evening and we were at a pub looking over the river at St Paul’s – Julie talked and talked and talked about looking for somewhere permanent, and I suggested she stay there permanently. So Jake and I were together and the only anniversary we had was the first sexual encounter.