I walked a little faster, but I tripped and my feet slithered when I came to a pile of rubbish and broken bricks that spanned the path. As I picked my way over them, the steps behind mine slowed. I glanced back. I could only make out a shambling figure close to the wall. Hurrying now, I squeezed past a dumped bedframe lying on its side, only to stumble on something that spun out from under my foot, making me drop my bag in the gloom. I wanted to leave it and bolt away, but it held my purse, so I had to nervously scrabble about for it. The figure stopped. I heard his silence.
28
Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven lives have been lost this year as our countrymen have tried to escape that prison colony that calls itself a republic. Twenty-seven families marking Christmas with an empty chair at the table. Twenty-seven diaries that will never be filled. The number lies heavy in my heart.
‘Who’s that?’ I called out. There was no sound but the wind whipping down the alley like a spear. ‘I can see you.’ I raised my voice, hoping someone in the houses on either side would look out, but they remained lifeless. My searching hands found my bag and drew it to me. Clutching it, I stood up, spun on my heels and ran for safety. But as I rounded the corner I saw that the alley ended not in an open path to the next road, but in a high wooden gate topped with barbed wire.
The man hadn’t come around the corner yet, but I could hear the shuffling of his feet, a snap and a metallic sound as he kicked a can. I pressed myself into the corner. The footsteps came closer. As he stepped out of the smog I recognized the rough green tattoos on his neck even before his face.
‘What do you want?’ I asked, holding my handbag to me as if it would offer protection.
The printer put his face right up to mine before grabbing hold of the bag. I tried to keep it from him, but he was too strong and threw me off. He searched inside and pulled out the paper package that contained the negative and print.
‘Give that to me!’ I shouted, snatching for it and hoping someone would hear. He pushed me away again and held me off as he fumbled inside his pockets, drawing out a lighter with no cap. He flicked the wheel and a spark flew up but no flame. He tried again, this time shooting up a bright jet. I didn’t know what the purpose of those images had once been, but I knew they were important enough for him to tear them from me. He put the flame to the corner of the paper bag and I clutched for it again, but he dropped it into a metal tray that someone had discarded on the ground and I had to watch as the paper burned away, briefly leaving the print and the negative. I didn’t understand why he had given me the print, and then followed me to rip it away. The plastic of the negative melted and shrivelled into a black mass before the print caught too. For a second by the light of the flame I saw Lorelei’s face before it turned to ash.
He kicked the tray to shake apart the remains before picking up my handbag and pulling out my identity card. I felt too defeated to attempt to stop him. ‘“Jane Cawson,”’ he read from it. ‘Right. I know who you are now. So stay the fuck away from the shop. And if I was you I would forget that name you heard.’
So that was it. That was why he had given me the print – it was only when I had subsequently mentioned Crispin that he had felt danger. There was something threatening about that name, or the man who bore it.
I felt angry afterwards that I had let that happen but still had to find my way to the theatre for Noël Coward’s new play, Three Days Without Wine. Nick might know who Crispin was – one of Lorelei’s friends, possibly. I would have to be subtle about asking him, though.
I passed a squad of young male soldiers dressed up for one of the dances that the state organized with the healthier girls – as chosen by their Pioneers COs or college political officers – in the hope that they would marry and soon have children to add to the strength of the state. Sexual desire and energy were to be harnessed for the march of the Soviet ideal by breeding a little army, we understood. I received a couple of wolf-whistles from the oily-haired young men, but the walk did me good, and I felt better by the time I saw Wyndham’s Theatre’s grand Victorian façade of patchwork bricks and intricate moulding.
Nick was in the lobby, buying tickets from the window with Charles beside him – I had forgotten Charles was coming. The ticket-seller held Nick’s five-pound note up to the light and rubbed its paper between her fingers, eventually accepting it was real and not something he had knocked up in our shed. I thought it would be fun to surprise Nick with my dolled-up image so I put my coat in the cloakroom, positioned myself behind him and waited for him to turn around. But it was Charles who caught sight of me first. He seemed to halt midway through blowing a stream of smoke to the ceiling and stared. Then Nick himself turned. His eyes widened, then narrowed, and the tickets fluttered out of his grasp to the floor. I glanced about, to see what it was that had fixed his gaze, and that had made Charles stop too, but behind me there was only a fat old woman being helped to the door by an obsequious younger man. Something was very wrong.
Nick’s voice was colder and harder than I had ever heard it. ‘Why did you do that?’ he demanded.
I looked desperately around again. I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘What… what have I done?’
‘You must know.’ His jaw clamped down on the words.
I looked to Charles, hoping he would tell me what had made Nick so angry. But he simply looked back at me. ‘I don’t,’ I said.
Nick lifted his hand. ‘Are you saying this was an accident?’
‘What is?’ I was becoming frantic, checking again over my shoulder in case there was some clue.
He looked grim. ‘Your hair. You dyed your hair red. Like Lorelei’s. And you’re wearing it like she used to.’
‘It’s just the same,’ Charles said. ‘You look just like her.’
The chatter around us seemed to die away. ‘No,’ I said, dragging a curled lock out of the French twist that Stephanie had created for me. ‘But it’s not. It’s not like hers.’ I turned to look at my reflection in a glass panel on the wall. I had thought it would be coloured like Stephanie’s strawberry-blond hair. As I stared at it, I saw that it had, indeed, turned out darker. And it did look just like Lorelei’s had at the party. I hadn’t realized when I was sitting in the chair and Stephanie was teasing it into curls. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘So much like her,’ Charles said, reaching his hand up to touch it.
Nick’s anger was growing. ‘You’re telling me this was just coincidence? You had your hair cut and dyed just like my former wife’s purely by chance.’ He seized me by the arm, led me to one side and shoved open a door to what must have been a fire exit. We were in a freezing, uncarpeted stairwell. ‘What’s this about?’ he demanded. ‘What on earth are you trying to do?’
I too felt a wave of anger, at the way he was treating me. Until then I had managed to suppress my frustration that he was hiding from me what had secretly been between him and Lorelei; but with his apparent accusation it all started to come out. ‘Are you saying I can’t even cut my hair how I want without your permission?’ I replied.
‘You’re just like her.’ He was speaking to himself, not me.
‘No.’
‘Yes, you are.’
I thought back to the party. How she had looked, how she had stood and moved. And just now, when he saw me, Nick had dropped the tickets out of shock. A thought crept into my mind: what if it wasn’t shock or anger? What if, just for a moment, it had been hope?