Nicci French: Killing Me Softly

‘I must go back to work,’ I said at last. He dressed me, picking up my clothes from the floor, threading my earrings through my lobes, brushing my wet hair back from my face.

‘When do you finish work?’ he asked. I thought of Jake waiting at home.

‘Six.’

‘I’ll be there,’ he said. I should have told him then that I had a partner, a home, a whole other life. Instead I pulled his face towards mine and kissed his bruised lips. I could hardly bring myself to pull my body away from his.

In the taxi, alone, I pictured him, remembered his touch, his taste, his smell. I didn’t know his name.

I arrived back at my office out of breath. I grabbed some messages from Claudia’s outstretched hand and went into my office. I flicked through them. Nothing that couldn’t be put off. It was already twilight outside and I tried to catch my reflection in the window. I felt self-conscious about my clothes. They seemed strange on me because they had been taken off and put back on again by a stranger. I worried that it would seem as obvious to other people as it seemed to me. Had he fastened some button wrongly? Or maybe some bit of clothing had been put on over some other bit. It all seemed fine, but I wasn’t sure enough. I rushed to the lavatory with some makeup. In the unforgiving bright light I checked in the mirror for puffy lips or visible bruises. I did some remedial work with lipstick and eye-liner. My hand was trembling. I had to bang it against a sink to steady it.

I rang Jake’s mobile. He sounded as if he was in the middle of something. I said that I had a meeting and I might be late home. How late? I didn’t know, it was completely unpredictable. Would I be back for supper? I told him to go ahead without me. I replaced the phone, telling myself that I was just trying to make things neat. I would probably be home before Jake was. Then I sat and thought about what I had done. I remembered his face. I sniffed at my wrist and smelt the soap. His soap. It made me shudder and when I closed my eyes I could feel the tiles under my feet and hear the shower pattering on the curtain. His hands.

There was one of two things that could happen, by which I meant that there was one of two things that should happen. I didn’t know his name or address. I wasn’t sure that I would be able to find his flat even if I wanted to. So if I came out at six and he wasn’t there, it would be finished with in any case. If he was there, then I would have to tell him firmly and clearly the same thing. That was that. It was a mad thing to have done and the best thing to do was to pretend that it hadn’t happened. It was the only sane course.

I had been dazed when I had returned to the office, but now I felt clearer-headed than I had for weeks, full of a new kinetic energy. Over the next hour I had a brief chat with Giovanna and then made a dozen phone calls with no small-talk. I got back to people, made arrangements, queried figures. Sylvie rang and wanted to chat but I told her I would see her tomorrow or the next day. Was I doing anything this evening? Yes. A meeting. I sent some messages, disposed of the papers on my desk. One day I wouldn’t have a desk at all and I’d get twice as much done.

I looked across at the clock. It was five to six. As I was searching around for my bag, Mike came in. He was taking a conference call before breakfast on the next day and he needed to go over things.

‘I’m in a bit of a hurry, Mike. I’ve got a meeting.’

‘Who with?’

For a moment I thought of pretending I was meeting someone from the lab but some flicker of a survival instinct prompted me not to. ‘It’s something private.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Job interview?’

‘Dressed like this?’

‘You do look a bit rumpled.’ He didn’t say any more. He probably assumed that it was something female, gynaecological. But he didn’t go away either. ‘It’ll just take a second.’ He sat down with his notes, which we had to go through point by point. I had to check one or two of them and phone somebody about another. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t look at the clock a single time. What did it matter anyway? Finally there was a pause and I said that I really had to go. Mike nodded. I looked at my watch. Twenty-four minutes past six. Twenty-five past. I didn’t hurry, even after Mike had gone. I went to the lift feeling relieved that events had sorted themselves out. It was best this way, all forgotten.

I lay at an angle across the bed with my head on Adam’s stomach. His name was Adam. He had told me that in the cab on the way over. It was almost the only thing he had said. Sweat was running down my face. I could feel it everywhere: on my back, on my legs. My hair was wet. And I could feel the sweat on his skin. It was so hot in this flat. How could anywhere be so hot in January? The chalky taste in my mouth wouldn’t go away. I raised myself up and looked at him. His eyes were half closed.

‘Is there anything to drink?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said sleepily. ‘Why don’t you go and look?’

I stood up and looked for something to put around me and then thought: why? There was almost nothing else to the flat. There was this room, which had a bed and lots of floor space, and there was the bathroom, where I had had my shower earlier, and there was a tiny kitchen. I opened the fridge: a couple of half-squeezed tubes, some jars, a carton of milk. Nothing to drink. I was feeling the chill now. There was a bottle of some kind of orange juice on a shelf. I hadn’t drunk diluted orange squash since I was a child. I found a tumbler and mixed some, drank it in a couple of gulps, mixed some more and took it back into the bedroom, living room, whatever it was. Adam was sitting up, leaning against the bedhead. Briefly, I allowed myself to remember Jake’s bonier, whiter shape, the jutting collar-bone and knobbly spine. Adam was looking at me as I came in. He must have been watching the doorway, waiting for me. He didn’t smile, just gazed intently at my naked body, as if he were committing it to memory. I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back and a feeling of intense joy rose up in me.

I walked across and offered the glass to him. He took a small sip and handed the glass to me. I took a small sip and passed it back to him. We emptied the glass like that, together, and then he leaned across me and placed the glass on the rug. The duvet had been kicked off on to the floor. I pulled it up over us. I looked around the room. The photographs on the chest and the mantelpiece were all of landscapes. There were some books on the shelf and I examined them one by one: several cookery books, a large coffee-table book about Hogarth, the collected works of W. H. Auden and of Sylvia Plath. A Bible. Wuthering Heights, some D. H. Lawrence travel books. Two guides to British wild flowers. A book of walks in and around London. Dozens of guidebooks in a row and in piles. A few clothes were hanging on the metal runner or neatly folded on the wicker chair by the bed: jeans, a silk shirt, another leather jacket, T-shirts.

‘I’m trying to work out who you are,’ I said, ‘by looking at your things.’

‘None of it’s mine. This place belongs to a friend.’

‘Oh.’

I looked round at him. He still wasn’t smiling. I found it unsettling. I started to speak and then he did give a slight smile, shook his head and touched my lips with one finger. Our bodies were close together anyway and he moved forward a couple of inches and kissed me.

‘What are you thinking?’ I said, running the fingers of one hand through his soft, long hair. ‘Talk to me. Tell me something.’

He didn’t answer immediately. He slid the duvet off my body and moved me on to my back. He took my hands in his and raised them above my head on the sheet as if they were pinioned. I felt exposed like a specimen on a slide. He gently touched my forehead and then ran his fingers down over my face, my neck, down my body and they came to rest in my belly-button. I shivered and wriggled. ‘Sorry,’ I said.