'My purpose is to stay alive.'
He gave a sigh. 'Yeah, right. If you come across anything I can really deal with, call me.'
'I'm not mad,' I said. 'I might seem mad to you, but I'm not.'
'I'm not mad,' I said to myself, as I lay in the bath with a flannel over my face. 'I'm not mad.'
I put my baggy jeans and red T-shirt back on and wrapped my hair in a towel. I sat cross-legged on the sofa, with the television turned up loud. I hopped through channels. I didn't want silence this evening. I wanted other faces and other voices in the room with me friendly faces and voices, to make me feel I wasn't so all alone.
Then the doorbell rang again.
Thirteen
There was no need to be frightened. Nobody knew I was here except Cross. I opened the door.
Instantly I knew that I knew him and at the same time I just couldn't think where the hell I'd seen him before.
'Hi,' he said. 'Is Jo .. . ?' And then he recognized me and he saw that I recognized him and he looked completely baffled. 'What the fuck are you doing here?'
I responded by slamming the door. He made a feeble attempt to push against it but I pushed hard and it clicked shut. There was a shout from the other side. I put the chain across and leant against the door, panting. I remembered where I'd met him now. It was Ben Brody, the designer. How had he tracked me down? They only had my office number and my mobile. I'd told Carol definitely not to give out my address to anyone. Anyway, she didn't have this address. Terry didn't know either. Nobody knew. Could I have been followed? Could I have left something behind that gave a clue? He was knocking at the door. 'Abbie,' he said. 'Open up.'
'Go away,' I shouted. 'I'm going to call the police.'
'I want to talk to you.'
The chain looked solid enough. What could he do to me through the six-inch-wide gap? He was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and no tie. On top of that was a long grey coat that hung down below his knees.
'How did you find me?'
'What do you mean how did I find you? I came to see Jo.'
'Jo?' I said.
'I'm a friend of hers.'
'She's not here,' I said.
'Where is she?'
'I don't know.'
He looked more and more confused. 'Are you st&ying here?'
'Obviously.'
'So how come you don't know where she is?'
My mouth opened but I couldn't quite think of what to say. Then, 'It's a complicated story. You probably wouldn't believe it anyway. Did you have an appointment to meet Jo?'
He gave a short, snappy laugh, and looked to either side as if he couldn't quite believe that he was having this conversation. 'Are you her receptionist? I'm tempted to say that it's none of your business but.. .' He took a deep breath. 'A couple of days ago I was due to meet Jo for a drink and she never showed. I left a couple of messages and she never got back to me.'
'Exactly,' I said. 'That's what I told the police.'
'What?'
'I tried to report Jo missing but they didn't believe me.'
'What's going on here?'
'She might be on holiday,' I continued incoherently.
'Look, Abbie, I don't know what it is you think I'm going to do, but could you let me in?'
'Can't we talk like this?'
'I suppose we can. But why?'
'All right,' I said. 'But we'd better be quick. A detective is coming to see me in a few minutes.'
That was another of my feeble attempts at self-protection.
'What about?'
'To take a statement.'
I unfastened the chain and let him in. He seemed remarkably at home in Jo's flat. He took off his coat and tossed it on to a chair. I removed the towel from my head and rubbed my hair with it.
'Are you and Jo ... you know?' I said.
'What are you talking about?'
'You seem quite at home here,' I said.
'Not as at home as you are.'
'I just need somewhere to perch.'
He looked at me. 'Are you all right?'
I gave an inward silent groan.
'I know that the all-purpose answer to the question 'are you all right?' is 'I'm fine'. But the short answer is, no, I'm not all right. And the medium-length answer is, it's a long story that you don't want to bother about.'
Ben walked into the kitchen area, filled the kettle and plugged it in. He took two mugs out of the cupboard and placed them on the counter. 'I think I deserve to hear the long version,' he said.
'It's really long,' I said.
'Do you think you've got time?'
'What do you mean?'
'Before your detective gets here.'
I mumbled something unintelligible.
'Are you ill?' he said.
That reminded me. I extracted a couple of pills from the container in my pocket and swallowed them with a gulp of water from the tap. 'I get these headaches still,' I said. 'But that's not really it.'
'So what is really it?'
I sat at the table and put my head in my hands for a moment. Sometimes if I could find the right position for my head the throbbing eased a little. I heard a clattering sound. Ben was making tea. He brought the two mugs across to the table. He didn't sit down. He leant on the arm of Jo's big chair. I sipped at the tea.
'I've become this version of the Ancient Mariner. I trap people in corners and tell them my story. I've started to wonder whether there's really any point. The police didn't believe me. The more I tell it, the less I believe it myself.'
Ben didn't reply. He just looked at me.
'Don't you have a job to go to?' I said.
'I'm the boss,' he said. 'I can come and go when I want.'
So I gave him a faltering, fragmented version of my story. I talked to him about my problems with Jay and Joiner's, some of which he knew about because he had been on the edge of them. I told him about walking out on the job and walking out on Terry. Then I took a deep breath and told him about waking up in that cellar, wherever it was, and those days underground and the escape and the days in hospital and not being believed and being ejected back into the world.
'To anticipate your first question, the one thing I can be really sure about is the bang on my head.' I touched it, just above my ear, very delicately. It still made me flinch. 'So if the bang could erase bits of my life, maybe it could add bits as well. Do you know, I've never actually said that aloud before? I've thought it, late at night, when I wake up and my blood sugar is low and I think about dying. Maybe if you had an accident and banged your head badly, that might very well be the sort of hallucination you'd have. You might fantasize about being trapped underground and a voice talking to you out of the darkness. Don't you think?'
'I don't know,' said Ben. He looked dazed. 'What a nightmare.'
'Perhaps I was mugged somewhere or run over. I might have just been lying somewhere for a few hours. Have you ever had dreams like that? You seem to be living for years, you grow old and then you wake up and it's been a single night. Have you ever had dreams like that?'
'I don't remember my dreams.'
