‘What happened when?’
‘Last night.’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Yes. No.’
Connie walked round and perched herself on the end of the bed, facing Elise. ‘We went to dinner. We drank too much, came back here, and you passed out on the sofa.’
‘I passed out on the sofa?’
‘Yes. And I carried you up here.’
‘You carried me?’
They gazed at each other. Connie smiled.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Elise. ‘I should have gone home.’
Connie reached out and put her hand on Elise’s forehead. ‘I would never have allowed it. Not in the state you were in. Were you comfortable enough?’
‘What time is it?’
Connie looked at her watch. ‘Eleven-twenty.’
Elise closed her eyes. There was something wrong with the fact that eleven-twenty was the time, but she was lying here. ‘Oh, fuck. Fuck. I’ve got work today.’
‘Surely not. What’s open on a Sunday? Don’t go.’
‘I have to. The cafe.’
‘What if I do pay you that fifty pounds?’
‘What fifty pounds?’
‘Ah, you were drunk. Never mind.’
Elise felt uneasy.
‘Forget the cafe,’ Connie said.
All right for you, Elise thought. ‘I have to go,’ she said, struggling upright like a geriatric.
‘Elise, darling, lie down.’
‘Connie—’
‘You’re in no fit state to do anything. Just lie down.’
Elise lay down. She thought she might weep. ‘I’m going to hypnotize you to not go to work,’ Connie said.
Elise scrunched her eyes. ‘Are you joking?’
‘Yes. I never did get my O-level in hypnotism.’
Elise felt revolting but she laughed anyway. Connie was looking at her gently. ‘Would you like me to make you a bacon sandwich?’ she said.
‘Please,’ Elise whimpered.
Elise watched Connie disappear, and heard her speaking on the telephone. Soon the smell of frying bacon wafted up the stairs, along the corridor, under the door crack, into Elise’s nose. She closed her eyes and wished for a new body. She really wanted a hot bath.
*
Connie returned with a bacon sandwich and two mugs of tea on a tray. ‘There,’ she said. ‘My finest work.’
Elise had managed to sit up. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘How long to Pimlico from here?’
‘You don’t need to worry,’ said Connie. ‘I called them.’
‘You what?’
‘Seedling. What a name! Told them I was your flatmate and that you had a virus.’
‘They believed you?’
‘Of course they did.’
‘Was it Gabe?’
‘It was a man. I don’t know if it was Gabe. But he said for you to get well. I said it would take a few days and the doctor said you shouldn’t over-exert yourself.’
Elise stared at the sandwich. It was an alien feeling, to have someone else work your life out for you. ‘Right. Thank you.’
Connie sipped her mug of tea. Elise read the words round it: I ♥ BIRDWORLD. ‘Should I not have done it?’ Connie said. ‘Sometimes I can cross a line—’
‘No. There’s no line. Work would have been nearly impos-sible. I just – I wasn’t expecting you to call them.’
‘I think I did you a favour.’
Elise wondered if she still had a job. She wondered if she really cared. She reached towards Connie’s mug and their fingers brushed. ‘Did you really go to Birdworld?’
‘With my friend and her son. It was for the boy. But I ended up really enjoying myself. Flamingos, penguins, tits. The works.’
‘I’m trying to imagine you at Birdworld.’
‘I was perfectly at home at Birdworld.’
‘You’re too glamorous.’
‘Elise, no one is more glamorous than a flamingo.’
They laughed. This was flirtation, Elise knew – wired, worried, hungover flirtation. What step to take next, what to do. Did anything happen last night? It didn’t feel like it did. ‘Would you like a bath?’ Connie asked, as if she knew.
‘I would,’ she said, so quickly the two of them laughed again. ‘I just feel so awful,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh, god. You look absolutely fine.’
‘You’re lying. My skin!’
‘You’re beautiful. Don’t worry. I’ll run you one.’
Connie left Elise alone, eating the bacon sandwich. John’s flat didn’t have a bath and the front door to Connie’s house felt so far away. The greasy bread was manna, a restoration of some sense of flesh to Elise’s bones, but she knew the day was unwinding beyond her control.
Suddenly, she thought: Connie’s going to keep me prisoner. The paranoia of her hangover almost fed this quasi-wish to be absolved of any self-dominion, a little girl in the bosom of this powerful, talented person who didn’t let stupid things like dehydration prevent her ability to impersonate someone else and get Elise off work, to keep her warm in the house on a cold November morning, to run her a bath, to give her a fresh, clean bed.
When the bath was run, Elise slid into it and thought she might cry with the purity of the hot water.
‘Going to clear my head on the Heath!’ Connie called.
Elise was astonished that Connie trusted her enough to just leave her in her house. I could be a thief! she thought. I could have weaselled my way in here to nick some ornaments and her handbag. But then again, look at me. I can’t even string a sentence together.
She thought of Connie like a witch in the wood, going to look for more Gretels to bring back home, luring them with gingerbread and sweets. But an hour later Connie was back, pink-cheeked, the Sunday paper under her arm, saying, ‘If there’s one group I would happily see massacred, it’s the people who let their dogs shit anywhere and never pick it up.’
Connie was fizzing with something that day – she was softer, more open than she’d been in the restaurant in Soho – and she was gentler with Elise. She sat on the sofa with her in the front living room, and as November’s early darkness fell, Elise still didn’t leave the house. They watched an episode of We, the Accused on BBC2, because Connie liked the 1935 novel and wanted to see what they’d done with it. Elise drifted, her head in Connie’s lap, and eventually she fell asleep with Connie’s fingers stroking her temples with a tenderness that she could not, in her adult life, recall.
2017
2
I was fourteen when I killed my mother. Before that, I’d always kept her in the wings, where she was doing something more interesting than everybody else’s mum, only waiting for me to send her the cue to walk into my life. But she was never ready, she never appeared. Between the ages of ten and eleven, I told my classmates that she’d run off with a Russian circus, and was living in a tent made of yak pelts. I wrote postcards of mountain scenes in her handwriting and brought them into school. ‘See? She’s there. I told you!’
‘The cards don’t have stamps,’ said a child called Hamilton Tanner. I hated him.