Eve frowns, and looks uncertain.
“Who is Denise?”
52
BACKWATER BEAUTY
“Oh, for God’s sake, you’re fucking unbelievable. You know who I mean. Susannah. Susannah Fox, or whatever the hell her name really is.”
“Er…” says Eve, “I really don’t know who you mean.”
“Your sister. Or, at least, she said she was your sister. At the funeral.”
“We hired actors for the funeral, no one was told to play the part of my sister. I never had a sister.”
“I know!” I say.
“Susannah Fox,” she says, “was a made-up name for my fake will. It was a red herring.”
“No,” I say, “Denise was real. She lived with me. We were together after you died. She helped me through it.”
Frank is shaking his head and I want to punch him again.
“No one entered or left your house for the whole week after Eve’s funeral,” he says.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “I’m mind-fucked enough now, stop playing around. I thought I’d fucking killed her. Do you know what that does to someone?”
The room stares at me. Silence. Frank clears his throat.
“Did anyone else see her, speak to her?” Eve asks, looking around. Everyone stares blank-faced.
I rack my brain. She never seemed to be around for introductions. She wasn’t around for much. She never ate anything. She had no ID.
Frank steps forward. “She doesn’t exist, man. I have been following you every second and you haven’t killed anyone.”
“Have you checked your apartment?” I ask Eve. “Her body is there.”
“We checked it,” she says, “full of thinners and turpentine. No body. Certainly no dead body.”
“If I’m so deranged, then how do I know this is happening? How do I know I’m not lying somewhere, catatonic, dreaming all this up?”
“This is happening,” says Eve, touching my arm, looking into my eyes. “This is happening.”
I look around the room.
“What about Francina?” I say, “Was she in on this too?”
Eve shakes her head.
“I tried everything to get her to co-operate but she refused. Said it wasn’t right. She wouldn’t even give us your house key.” She pulls silver out of her pocket and jingles my spare keys at me. “Luckily I had my own.”
“What did you do with her?”
“Don’t say it like that,” she says, “don’t say it like I am some kind of Godfather who makes people disappear.”
“What did you do with her?”
“I sent her on a paid holiday. I told her she could choose her destination. She flew back from Mauritius yesterday.”
I take a deep breath.
“It was never meant to get so complicated,” she says.
“Famous last words.”
“I’m sorry. It spun out of control. It was a risk I took. I just thought, like you have often told me, that if you don’t risk anything, you risk everything.”
“Yes,” I say. “Although I didn’t quite mean for you to risk my life.”
She touches me again, I flinch. She bites a nail.
“I went too far.”
I take a breath, and look long and hard at Eve. Magic woman, witch, porcelain doll, back-from-the-dead. Stolen mantle of Master Puppeteer.
The real Backwater Beauty.
“Thank you for saving my life,” I say, “but I never want to see you again.”
Quote: Stephen King
“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
53
MORE TO LIFE
My father runs to catch up with me as a leave the police station.
“Slade,” he calls, and I ignore him, keep walking. He catches my arm. “Let me drive you home.”
I acquiesce. I don’t have a choice.
In the car, he says, “I take responsibility for the part I played in this. But I didn’t realise the extent of it. All Eve asked me to do was call her if you ever showed up, which I did. I knew you two were friends. She said it was to protect you. All the rest of it was nonsense.”
That may be the understatement of the year, but I take his point.
“But what happened between me and you today, that was real.”
I look at him; familiar hands gripping the steering wheel, flushed face concentrating on the road.
I realise in that moment that there is more to life than writing.
“Yes,” I say, “That was real.”
He drops me off outside my house and tosses me the house keys. It’s strange to be back. To be in such a familiar place, feeling so different. So altered. On the outside, everything looks almost the way I left it. The window has been replaced, the front wall bright with a fresh coat of paint. Again I am surprised that the roof is not missing, the walls are not knocked down. But inside: inside it has been Francinarised. I stand open-armed, breathing in the smell of furniture polish and bleach. There is a visitor on the couch, someone who took the liberty of moving in while I was away. Munchkin looks at me, bored, stretches, and goes back to sleep. I walk through to the kitchen. The place is spotless and shiny. The huge refrigerator is well-stocked and restored to its previous magnificence. There is a flower garland on the kitchen table, and a note written in Francina’s spidery scrawl. “Bless You, Mister Harris.”
I put the garland around my neck and glide through to my den. Everything is in its place. I take a new Moleskine off the bookshelf, sit down, and uncap my pen. I open the book up on the first blank page and I start writing.
54
INSIDE OUT
And then of course there could be a fourth ending. A real ending. How wonderful it would have been, how neat, if Eve were miraculously alive again and she loved me – enough to wreck my life, teach me meaning. To have the troops rallying around me, to have been willing to turn my life upside-down, like a game, like a too-clever film. In fact, I may well have seen the device used in a movie a long time ago, and it resurfaced while I was having my ‘episode’. It’s an ending only a smug writer could come up with. Too-tidy, contrived. Desperate: down to the repainted front wall, the cat, the flower garland. It would have been good for the old Slade, the pre-fucked, pre-confession, pre-jail Slade, but it won’t do for me now. I feel different, turned inside out. A neat ending will no longer do.
“Can I get more paper?” I ask the guard. I have used up the SAP issue notepad they gave me earlier – hours (days?) ago. Once he snorts and obliges I take a breath and begin again. The real ending isn’t as pretty and it’s the last thing I will ever write.
55
INVISIBLE LEASH
I hear the ghost’s high heels clacking towards me and I don’t look up until they stop outside my cell. I look up just enough to see a beautiful pair of shoes. Denise. The guard makes a show of taking out the keys and opening the heavy metal door. She strides in, bloodlipsticksmile.
“I thought you were a ghost,” I say, putting down my pen. “I thought you didn’t exist, that I had made you up.”
She runs a slow finger through my hair.
“You did make me up,” she says, “in a way.”
I shake my head. I want to dash my head against the bed frame, crack my skull, let the demons out.
“I strangled you. You stopped breathing.”