One Day

CHAPTER NINE. Cigarettes and Alcohol

SATURDAY, 15 JULY 1995

Walthamstow and Soho

Portrait In Crimson

A novel

by Emma T. Wilde

Chapter 1

DCI Penny Something had seen some murder scenes in her time, but never one as as this.

‘Has the body been moved?’ she snapped

The words glowed in bilious green on the word-processor’s screen: the product of a whole morning’s work. She sat at the tiny school desk in the tiny back room of the tiny new flat, read the words, then read them again while behind her the immersion heater gurgled in derision.

At weekends, or in the evenings if she could find the energy, Emma wrote. She had made a start on two novels (one set in a gulag, the other in a post-apocalyptic future), a children’s picture book, with her own illustrations, about a giraffe with a short neck, a gritty, angry TV drama about social workers called ‘Tough Shit’, a fringe play about the complex emotional lives of twenty-somethings, a fantasy novel for teenagers featuring evil robot teachers, a stream-of-consciousness radio play about a dying Suffragette, a comic strip and a sonnet. None had been completed, not even the fourteen lines of sonnet.

These words on the screen represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven years old, and later lots of Chandler and James M. Cain too. There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn’t just soak it up then squeeze it out again. She found herself unable to think of a name for her detective, let alone a cohesive original plot, and even her pseudonym was poor: Emma T. Wilde? She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things. She had tried being in a band, writing plays and children’s books, she had tried acting and getting a job in publishing. Perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish. She used the computer’s word-count feature. Thirty-five words, including the title page and her rotten pseudonym. Emma groaned, released the hydraulic lever on the side of her office chair and sank a little closer to the carpet.

There was a knock on the plywood door. ‘How are things in the Anne Frank wing?’

That line again. For Ian, a joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hands like a cheap umbrella. When they had first started seeing each other, approximately ninety per cent of what Ian said came under the heading of ‘humour’ in that it involved a pun, a funny voice, some comic intent. Over time she had hoped to get this down to forty per cent, forty being a workable allowance, but nearly two years later the figure stood at seventy-five, and domestic life continued against this tinnitus of mirth. Was it really possible for someone to be ‘on’ for the best part of two years? She had got rid of his black bedsheets, the beer mats, secretly culled his underpants and there were fewer of his famous ‘Summer Roasts’, but even so she was reaching the limits of how much it’s possible to change a man.

‘Nice cup of tea for the lady?’ he said, in the voice of a cockney char.

‘No thanks, love.’

‘Eggy bread?’ Scottish now. ‘Can ae do you some eggy bread, ma wee snootch?’

Snootch was a recent development. When pressed to justify himself, Ian had explained that it was because she was just so snootchy, so very, very snootch. There’d been a suggestion that she might reciprocate by calling him skootch; skootch and snootch, snootchy and skootchy, but it hadn’t stuck.

‘. . wee slice of eggy bread? Line your stomach for tonight?’

Tonight. There it was. Often when Ian was working through his dialects it was because he had something on his mind that couldn’t be said in a natural voice.

‘Big night, tonight. Out on the town with Mike TV.’

She decided to ignore the remark, but he wasn’t making it easy. His chin resting on her head, he read the words on the screen.

‘Portrait in Crimson. .’

She covered the screen with her hand. ‘Don’t read over my shoulder, please.’

‘Emma T. Wilde. Who’s Emma T. Wilde?’

‘My pseudonym. Ian—’

‘You know what the T stands for?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Terrific. Tremendous.’

‘Tired, as in sick and—’

‘If you ever want me to read it—’

‘Why would you want to read it? It’s crap.’

‘Nothing you do is crap.’

‘Well this is.’ Twisting her head away, she clicked the monitor off and without turning round she knew he’d be doing his hangdog look. All too often this was how she found herself with Ian, switching back and forth between irritation and remorse. ‘Sorry!’ she said, taking his hand by the fingers and shaking it.

He kissed the top of her head, then spoke into her hair. ‘You know what I think it stands for? “The” as in “The Bollocks”. Emma T. B. Wilde.’

With that, he left; a classic technique, compliment and run. Keen not to cave in straightaway, Emma pushed the door to, turned the monitor back on, read the words there, shuddered visibly, closed the file and dragged it to the icon of the wastebasket. An electronic crumpling noise, the sound of writing.

The squeal of the smoke alarm indicated that Ian was cooking. She stood and followed the smell of burning butter down the hall into the kitchen/diner; not a separate room, just the greasiest quarter of the living room of the flat that they had bought together. Emma had been unsure about buying; it felt like the kind of place that the police get called to, she said, but Ian had worn her down. It was crazy to rent, they saw each other most nights anyway, it was near her school, a foot on the ladder etc. and so they had scraped together the deposit and bought some books on interior decoration, including one that told you how to paint plywood so that it looked like fine Italian marble. There had been inspirational talk of putting the fireplace back in, of bookshelves and fitted cupboards and storage solutions. Exposed floorboards! Ian would hire a sander and expose the floorboards as law demanded. On a wet Saturday in February they had lifted the carpet, peered despondently underneath at the mess of mouldering chipboard, disintegrating underlay and old news papers, then guiltily nailed it all back in place as if disposing of a corpse. There was something unpersuasive and impermanent about these attempts at home- making, as if they were children building a den, and despite the fresh paint, the prints on the walls, the new furniture, the flat retained its shabby, temporary air.

Now Ian stood in the kitchenette in a shaft of smoky sunlight with his broad back towards her. Emma watched him from the doorway, taking in the familiar old grey t-shirt with the holes in, an inch of his underpants visible above his track-suit bottoms, his ‘tracky botts’. She could see the words Calvin Klein against the brown hair on the small of his back and it occurred to her that this was probably not at all what Calvin Klein had in mind.

She spoke to break the silence. ‘Isn’t that getting a bit burnt?’

‘Not burnt, crispy.’

‘I say burnt, you say crispy.’

‘Let’s call the whole thing off!’

Silence.

‘I can see the top of your underpants,’ she said.

‘Yes, that’s deliberate.’ Lisping, effeminate voice. ‘It’s called fashion, sweetheart.’

‘Well it’s certainly very provocative.’

Nothing, just the sound of food burning.