Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

Lately, though, coming back to London has filled me with a sense of doom. I thought about Liam less when I was away. In London, I followed the same routines and visited the same places as when we were together, so it was easy to think that everything was like before, except a little worse.

After Ealing Broadway, the landscape turns modern and industrial. People bundled into winter coats cross the bridges over the tracks. Moretti calls as the train plunges under the Westway flyover. “We have some news,” he says. “We located your father.”

My skull aches. I thought he was going to say they made an arrest.

“Do you want a number for him?” he asks.

“No. Did you get results back from the materials on the ridge?”

“They couldn’t retrieve any DNA evidence.”

I dig the heel of my hand into my eye. “None? How is that possible?”

“It’s rained quite a lot in the last few weeks.”

• • •

The train docks in Paddington. I step onto the platform, breathing in the sharp winter air and the familiar ashy, Victorian smell of the station. Patches of snow melt on the glass roof between the iron rafters, and light comes through the glass yellow.

The investigation will not be swift, I realize. The police don’t know who watched Rachel. They don’t know if Keith is lying. They don’t know who attacked her fifteen years ago.

London appears menacing and sinister. No one knows where I am, and anything could happen. I think uneasily of the canals and the basin. I always thought of myself as safer in London than anywhere else in the world. Each potential assailant was balanced by a potential defender. But horrible things still happen here, and now they might rise up and envelop me.

• • •

It begins to rain as I come up from the tube station in Maida Vale, and I shake open my umbrella, surprised to find it still at the bottom of my bag, where I put it when I left my flat nine days ago. I look at the concrete under the edge of my umbrella, then tilt its brim back so I can see down the road. For a moment as the brim rises, I am in the old London, mysterious and cinematic, the finials of umbrellas moving up and down around me, the rain dashing on the road.

The air is cool and fresh and tarry. My legs are already damp and my jeans cling to my skin. I turn to look in the window of a pie shop. Four and twenty blackbirds. Rachel had an enamel blackbird. I remember her sinking its pin into a pie crust. In Cornwall we saw pies with fish heads cooked in honor of the sailor Tom Bawcock. I wonder when Rachel and I will go back to Polperro, and then it strikes me again.

Rain drums on my umbrella. I wait to cross Greville Road under a sign for vodka that was a sign for cider when I left. I try to see what else has changed, which is impossible. Once the road crosses into Kilburn it is shingled with posters, hoardings, flyers. London’s visual tax on the poor. I pass the first of the four Carphone Warehouses on my walk home from the tube.

Inside my flat, I remove my coat, fold my umbrella. The flat seems uncanny. There is a coffee mug in the sink, rinsed but not washed, from before I went to work on Friday morning.

I walk to the window at the end of the living room and watch vapor spinning from the roofs. On clear days I can see south as far as Brixton, and east to the City. At dusk, the towers start to shimmer and haze, and by nightfall I can see a million windows.

Now, the falling rain blurs away the view somewhere around Bayswater. The white cornice roofs of houses fade under the mist, then disappear. We could have people there, said Moretti. Light a fire, make sure the boiler is on.

Rain spatters on the window. I start to move through the flat, but I can’t believe I’m here. I don’t know how to survive the hours until I can sleep.

I used to love coming home, fixing coffee or tea, shucking off my shoes and tights, rubbing at the red welts they left on my stomach and the ribbed lines from my socks. Now my movements are stiff as I change into a pair of leggings and a long-sleeved shirt from a race in Wandsworth that I didn’t run.

I was only gone for nine days. Most of the food in my fridge is still good. I take the rubbish to the chute in the corridor. In the shower I am transfixed by the smell of my shampoo, which after nine days away seems to belong to the distant past. The steam pools the scent of rosemary and juniper around me. I’ll have to buy a new kind.

When I come out of the shower, the rain has stopped and I dress and step onto the balcony, the wind in my face and whistling off the side of the building, the seagulls screaming and diving. Blood rises up my legs and the vertigo makes my head light. The fog has cleared and past the roofs of Bayswater I can see Hyde Park, which from here is a dark green stripe with silvery sheets of mist.

The air smells of paraffin. I study the skyline. The dark shape of the Lots Road power station. The Oxo Tower on the South Bank. I went to dinner there once. The restaurant at its top, the sound of the bartender pouring ice in a glass carrying across the room. Elderflower gin and tonics, I’d just met Liam and thought, I didn’t know things could be like this.

My legs shake. I am scared of heights but less than I am of other things. Last spring, I entered a lift with a stranger, and after we rose past the first few floors a surge of fear crashed over me, and I was sure that he wanted to hurt me. The man stared at the join in the doors. His arms hung at his sides and his fingers curled and uncurled.

I think both of us could have recovered from the shock of her assault, if we hadn’t spent months afterward learning about hundreds of other assaults and rapes and murders as part of our search for him. I wanted both of us to forget what we had learned. For the past five years, I’ve pretended that we did forget, and ignored any signs otherwise. That she got a German shepherd. That I never ride alone in a cab.

I don’t know if I was right about the stranger in the lift. We stopped on the eighth floor and another man came inside, so he couldn’t do anything even if he’d wanted to. When I told Rachel about it, arriving at her house to find her chopping coriander, a glowing blue sky over Oxfordshire, she said, “You have an overactive imagination.”

“Or I picked up on something,” I said, splashing white wine into a glass, remembering the man’s dangling arms, his curling fingers. I must have sounded like I wanted to be right, and she frowned at me.

Rachel knew I blamed myself for what happened to her in Snaith, and that I wanted things to be even. Whatever that meant. I wished I hadn’t told her. She pushed the pile of coriander against the knife blade and continued chopping.

The smell of paraffin still hangs in the air. One of the balconies below mine must be open to the flat and I can hear their music. Four on the floor. Patterns ripple across the muddy sky. I wonder if he is out there somewhere, celebrating. Rage lights through me and then, in a sea change, all my fury turns to Rachel.

I picture her leaning against the balcony with the skyline behind her. Her black jumper falls off her shoulder, showing the yellow strap of her bra. She starts to smile, her cheekbones lifting, eyes shining. If Keith watched her from the ridge, she probably encouraged him. She probably liked the attention.

The wind flattens my shirt to my chest. I cross my arms and start to go through our old fights. After the sodden misery of the past nine days, it is a joy to be spiteful, like I am swigging battery acid.

I build my case against her, based on every time she was thoughtless or nasty, like the time she called me lazy. “I’m just as ambitious as you are,” I said.

“For what?” she asked. “Toward what?”

She laughed, and I said, “Well, what about you? Do you think anyone will remember you when you’re dead? You’re a nurse, no one thinks about you twice after they leave hospital.”