‘You going to sit there all day?’
Laura jumps and turns round quickly. It’s David.
‘You going to be sitting in front of that thing all day?’ He resents the hours she spends in front of the screen.
‘I was just…’ She gestures towards the monitor where the screen saver dances in a pattern of butterflies. ‘It won’t come right. I need to…’ She can’t explain, but she knows she needs to keep on writing.
She must.
He is impatient. ‘It’s beautiful out there. I’m not going to be stuck in on a day like this. I’m going out. Are you coming?’
She looks round the room. Her study is stark with its north facing window and bare walls. Her desk is tucked away in a corner, quiet and secret. It used to be safe. ‘I have to go on. I can’t leave it now.’ And she can’t.
‘You aren’t doing anything. You’re just staring out of the window. Can’t you make an effort, pretend you want my company once in a while? I might as well be married to a machine.’ He’s angry and frustrated. It’s summer, a glorious summer’s day, and Laura just wants to sit in her study, staring at the white flicker of the screen, tap tapping her fantasy world into its electronic soul.
You married a writer, she wants to say. That was the deal. But there’s no point. He doesn’t want to hear it.
‘I’m going.’ He slams out of the room, out of the house, doors opening and closing with noisy violence. Laura lets the silence flow back, closing in on her, then turns to her desk. Her hand hovers over the mouse for a second, then she pushes it, and the flowers and butterflies fall apart, leaving just words.
Writing running down the screen. Just words on a page. And sometimes there’s a sound when the house is empty, a footstep in the corridor, the creak of a door.
It’s nothing. It’s imagination. He’s always been there, the monster under the bed, the ogre in the cellar. Just a shadow to frighten children in the night.
Only the footsteps are gone now, and there is no monster under the bed, no ogre in the cellar. She grew up and left him behind, only now… now there is something worse. Now he lives in Laura’s mind, on her screen, in the pages she writes. Now he hides behind the butterflies and the flowers that dance in front of the words. Or does he? She can’t find him. He’s gone. He’s somewhere else.
Outside her window, the butterflies used to dance on the buddleia, but now the flowers are dying and the butterflies have gone.
Laura is in the supermarket. She has decided to surprise David. Look, I did the shopping! He hates shopping. Mechanically, she takes stuff off the shelves, loads it into the trolley, a bag of salad, bread, eggs, milk, bacon.
The supermarket aisles are long and well-lit with rows of shiny tins and boxes reflecting the light into her eyes. Reds and yellows and greens, primary colours, nursery colours. The trolley has a red plastic handle and bars of aluminium and the boxes and bottles and tins on the shelves flicker as the bars run past them, like the flicker of the words on the screen. She can see the patterns on the screensaver moving and dancing.
Waiting.
She shouldn’t have left. She has to hurry; she has to get back.
The aisles are long and straight. Laura pushes the trolley faster and faster past each one. Biscuits and cakes. Tinned fruit and vegetables. Soaps and cleaning stuff.
And a movement at the far end of the aisle.
Who’s there?
She squints but the light reflects off the tins and the bottles, reflects off the shiny floor. She screws her eyes up, but she can’t see it properly. It was – just a flicker, a silhouette moving quickly round the corner, out of view, out of sight.
She pushes her trolley into the next aisle, and her foot slips in something sticky, something viscous, something that is spattered across the shelves and dripping on to the floor, red, dark, drip, drip, pooling round her feet in abstract patterns.
She stops, frozen, half-hearing the voices: ‘Look out, someone’s dropped a bottle of wine… better be careful… mind the glass… get a…’
She pushes past, the wheels of her trolley smearing through the red and leaving a trail on the floor behind her. ‘Hey!’ But the voices don’t matter. She has to get back.
The queue snakes away from the checkout. She pushes her trolley to the front. ‘Sorry, so sorry…’ as people step back, frowning, puzzled, too polite to object. She doesn’t have time to queue. She feeds her purchases through and digs in her bag for her purse as the checkout girl drums her fingers on the till and the queue stirs restlessly behind her.
‘…with a filleting knife.’
She blinks. It is the girl sitting at the till, her face hostile and blank. ‘What?’
‘Forty five. Forty five pounds… did he slash her?’
‘What?’
The eyes roll in exasperation. ‘D’you want any cash back?’
‘Oh. No.’
The car park dazzles in the sun, the concrete hot under her feet, the metallic paint of the cars sending shards of light into her eyes.
Night time. He walks the streets, he waits in the dark places. A silk scarf whispers between his fingers. It’s light and gauzy, patterned with flowers and butterflies. It’s smooth and strong. He has something else in his hand. It’s long and thin and sharp. It glints where the light catches it.
Someone is coming. The sound drifts around the roadway, loses itself in the darkness, in the wind that rustles the tops of the trees. It’s what he’s been waiting for, tap, tap the sound of heels on the pavement, like the sound of fingers on a keyboard, like the sound of knuckles against the door. Tap, tap, tap. And then there will be the other sound, the sound that only the two of them will hear, the sound behind her in the darkness… the soft fall of footsteps, almost silent, lifted and placed, carefully but quickly, moving through the night.
The heatwave breaks two days later. In the morning, the sky is cloudless, the shadows sharp as a knife on the walls and on the pavements. The buddleia, parched, droops down, the petals falling into the dust. Laura sits at the table crumbling a piece of toast between her fingers. The sun reflects off the polished surfaces, off the steel off the cutlery, the spoons, the knives.
David sits opposite her, immersed in the paper he holds up in front of his face. Laura stares at the print, black on white, words that blur and vanish behind the moving patterns of flowers and butterflies.
‘Maniac.’ David closes the paper and tosses it on to the table.
Laura looks at the crumpled sheets. WOMAN… KNIFE ATTACK. She grabs it and smooths the page out, her hands moving in frantic haste.
WOMAN KILLED IN KNIFE ATTACK. It was the previous night, in the car park, in the supermarket car park. The woman must have walked across the concrete that was still warm from the sun, her heels tapping briskly, the streetlights shining on her hair. Walking tap, tap, tap towards the shadows where the trees started, the trees that whispered in the night.
Laura runs to her room and switches on her machine. Her hands hover over the keyboard and then began to move. Tap, tap, tap. The words appear on the screen, fill it, scroll down and down as her hands fly over the keys. She writes and deletes, writes and deletes, but each time, a woman walks across the car park into the darkness where gauze and flowers and butterflies wait for her, fluttering in the breeze. And the light glints on something in the shadows, just for a moment.