CRIME FICTION

The Other Half Lives

Hardback February 2009, Paperback August 2009.

I didn’t want to go first.

Three seconds ago – four – I had said, ‘All right.’ Now Aidan was watching me. Waiting. I bit back the words Why me? You suggested it - why don’t you start? To ask would have made him think I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t want to sully the moment by saying something petty.

The air around us felt charged, taut with anticipation. Energy radiated from our clammy, clasped hands. ‘It doesn’t have to be everything,’ Aidan whispered. ‘Just…as much as we can…’ Unable to finish the sentence, he decided he already had. ‘As much as we can,’ he said again, stressing the last word. His warm breath settled on my skin every few seconds, like a tide of air that kept sucking out then blowing back in. We hadn’t moved from our spot at the foot of the bed, in front of the mirror, but it seemed suddenly as though everything was speeding up. Our faces gleamed with sweat, as if we’d run for miles, when in fact all our movements – through the hotel’s revolving glass door, towards reception, into and out of the lift, along the thin, spot-lit corridor to the closed door with a gold ‘436’ on it – had been slow and deliberate, a thousand heartbeats to the footstep. We both knew something was waiting for us inside the room, something that could only be put off for so long.

‘As much as we can,’ I echoed Aidan’s words. ‘And then no questions.’

He nodded. I saw his eyes shining in the dimness – we had switched no lights on – and knew how much it meant to him that I’d said yes. My fear was still there, sitting hunched inside me, but now I felt better able to manage it. I’d made a suggestion; I was in control, I told myself.

‘I did something stupid. More than stupid. Wrong.’ My voice sounded too loud, so I lowered it. ‘To two people.’ Saying their names would have been impossible. I didn’t try. Even in my thoughts I cannot name them; I make do with the labels ‘Him’ and ‘Her’.

I knew then that I was capable of giving Aidan no more than the bare bones, though every word of the whole of it glowed in my mind. Nobody would believe how often I tell myself the story, one unbearable detail after another. Like picking at a scab, except it’s not. It’s more like taking a sharp fingernail and gouging out raw, runny-pink flesh from a spot I’ve never left alone long enough for a scab to form.

I did something wrong. I keep hoping I’ll find a new way to start, at the same time as knowing there isn’t one. None of it would have happened if I’d been blameless.

‘It was a long time ago. I was punished.’ My head throbbed, as if a small, hard machine was rotating inside my brain. ‘Excessively. I never…I still haven’t got over it. The unfairness of it and…what happened to me. I thought I could escape by moving away, but…’ I shrugged, trying to affect an equanimity I did not feel.

‘The worst things stow away in the hold, follow you wherever you go,’ said Aidan.

His kindness made it harder. I shook my hands free from his and sat down on the edge of the bed. The room we’d booked was awful: it had the tall, narrow proportions of a telephone box, and there were green and blue checks everywhere – the curtains, the bedspread, the chairs – with a grid of red lines separating each square from its neighbours. When I stared at the pattern, it warped in front of my eyes. I didn’t need to see all the other rooms in the hotel to know they were identical. There were three pictures, one above the television and two on the thin, hollow wall that separated the bedroom from the bathroom; three insipid landscapes that begged to be ignored, with colours that were as close to colourless as it was possible to get. Outside, through the thick, rectangular slab of multi-layered glass that made up one side of the room, London was a restless yellow-streaked grey that I knew would keep me awake all night. I wanted to be in the pitch black, blind and unseen.

Why was I bothering with this pretence of a confession? What was the point of telling the only version of events that I could bear to utter out loud – an abstract shadow, a template that could have applied to any number of stories?

‘I’m sorry,’ I told Aidan. ‘It’s not that I don’t want you to know, it’s just…I can’t say it. I can’t say the words.’ A lie. I didn’t want him to know; I had wanted to please him by agreeing that we should tell one another, but that wasn’t the same thing. If I’d wanted him to know, I could have promised to show him the file under my bed at home: the trial transcript, the letters, the newspaper clippings.

‘I’m sorry I’ve told you so little,’ I said. I needed to cry. The tears were there; I could feel them inside me, blocking my throat and chest, but I couldn’t squeeze them out.

Aidan knelt down in front of me, rested his arms on my knees and looked at me hard, so that I couldn’t look away. ‘It isn’t so little,’ he said. ‘It’s a lot. To me, it’s a lot.’ That was when I realised that he wouldn’t go back on the deal we’d made. He wasn’t going to ask me any questions. My body sagged, limp with relief.

I showed no sign of wanting to say more. Aidan must have assumed I’d reached the end of the non-story I had not quite told him. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that the end might not have happened yet, or that it might involve him. For years I had nurtured a carefully constructed fantasy, deliberately leaving room in it for someone else: my perfect ally. The first time I saw Aidan, I knew he was the one I’d been waiting for. But I couldn’t explain that to him yet; I wasn’t sure I ever would be able to.

He kissed me and said, ‘Whatever you did, it makes no difference to how I feel about you. I’m really proud of you. It’ll be easy from now on.’ I tried to pull him up on to the bed. I wasn’t sure what the ‘it’ was that he thought would be easy; he might have meant making love for the first time, or the rest of our life together, all of it. I had left my last life behind, and now I had a new one with Aidan. Part of me – a big, loud, insistent part – couldn’t believe it.

I wasn’t nervous about the sex, not any more. Aidan’s idea had worked, though not in the way he’d hoped it would. I’d confided a little, and now I was desperate to do anything but talk. I wanted physical contact as a way of warding off words.

‘Wait,’ Aidan said. He stood up. It was his turn. I didn’t want to know. How can the things someone has done in the past make no difference to the way you feel about them in the present? I knew too much about the worst human beings can do to one another to be able to give Aidan the assurance he had given me.

‘Years ago, I killed someone.’ There was no emphasis, no tone to his voice; it was as if he was reading from an autocue, each word appearing on its own and out of context on a screen in front of him.

I had a terrible thought: a man. Please let it be a man.

‘I killed a woman,’ Aidan said, in response to my unasked question. His eyes were flooded. He sniffed, blinked.

I felt my body begin to fill up with a new sharp sadness, one I was sure I wouldn’t be able to stand for more than a few seconds. I was desperate, angry, disbelieving, but not frightened.

Not until Aidan said, ‘Her name was Mary. Mary Trelease.’

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