The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

Eventually our lips were throbbing, raw, and we had to stop. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked Aidan.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Better. You?’

‘Still scared.’ Inspired by his bluntness, I thought I’d try the direct approach too. ‘I’m not sure how we get from here to… the next stage.’

‘Neither am I,’ he said.

‘How do other couples do it?’ I was thinking: how did I used to do it, with other people? Seventeen others, before Aidan. At one time it had seemed easy. The first time Aidan took me out for dinner, we’d talked about our previous relationships. He told me there had been nothing serious for him, only ‘a lot of futile one-night stands- non-starters, each and every one’.

‘There are no other couples like us,’ he said now. ‘We’ve both known what we’ve got in common from day one, haven’t we? I saw it in your eyes, when I found you on my doorstep last summer. You saw it in my eyes too.’

I nodded mutely. His new-found frankness was making me feel uncomfortable.

‘We’ve both been to Hell and managed to claw our way out. I’ve spent most of my life wanting nothing but to bury what I’ve been through-you seemed to need to do the same.’

‘Aidan, I can’t…’

‘We haven’t asked questions. We haven’t pushed it. I reckon we’ve respected each other’s privacy a bit too much.’

His words turned me back into a coward and I didn’t care. ‘Don’t ask me,’ I whispered. ‘I can’t.’

‘It’s not going to work,’ he said. I heard despair in his voice, as if something had torn inside him. It frightened me. ‘We can’t make it work, not like this, not if we’re both determined to hide everything that matters.’

‘We love each other.’ My voice shook. ‘That’s what matters most, and we haven’t hidden that.’

‘You know what I mean. I know you’re scared. I’m not exactly feeling calm about it myself, but I think we need to tell each other.’ Aidan cleared his throat. ‘I’m willing if you are.’

It’ll be easy from now on. That’s what he said, once I’d agreed. Once I’d said I was willing. If he meant the sex, he was right. It felt natural from the start, has ever since: passionate, intense, binding. It has become our refuge, the safe, dark place we escape to when the glaring brightness of everything that’s wrong between us shines in our eyes until we feel we’re going blind. Ironic that the one thing we lacked has become the only thing that sustains us.

In that hotel room, Aidan told me he’d killed someone years ago, a woman. As soon as he said her name, Mary Trelease, I felt a coldness clutch at my heart, a sense of something being off balance, in the wrong compartment.

Straight away, I knew I’d heard the name before, though I was certain Aidan couldn’t have mentioned it to me until now. There was no way he’d have casually dropped the name of a woman he’d killed into one of our previous conversations. Could I be imagining it? I wondered. Briefly, I considered telepathy as a possibility. If Aidan had killed a woman called Mary Trelease, as he claimed, her name would be imprinted on his consciousness for ever; could it have passed from his mind into mine, without being spoken aloud? I dismissed the idea within seconds. Was Mary Trelease famous? Was that why I’d heard her name before? Not knowing was the worst thing, the inexplicability of it. I couldn’t know the name, and yet I did. I sat motionless on the bed, bathed in dread. I wanted to ask Aidan who Mary Trelease was, but we’d agreed not to ask questions, and all the ones that occurred to me sounded frivolous and flippant when I rehearsed them silently.

Aidan was in a terrible state after he told me. I couldn’t look at him, but I could hear him. It sounded as if he was disintegrating, and all I could do was sit there with my hands clenched in my lap, staring at the floor. Aidan and extreme violence, life-threatening violence, did not go together. No, I thought. No. I pictured Him and Her, allowed myself to think of their names for the first time in years, and something flared in my mind as it never had before, making them real; it was as if I was in the hotel room with them instead of Aidan. The three seemed to merge, so that I couldn’t distinguish between them, and for a fleeting moment I hated them all equally.

Aidan kept saying my name-‘Ruth? Ruth? Say something! Tell me you love me, Ruth, please!’-but I couldn’t answer. He reached out to touch me and I flicked his hand away. I sat like a prim statue on the edge of the bed, doing and saying nothing, though I wanted to scream and hit him and call him a murderer. Eventually he stopped trying to get a response from me, and deafening silence engulfed us. I’d rejected him when he most needed love from me, and we both knew it.

That’s my biggest regret. Whatever Aidan has done or not done, I hate to think of how badly I let him down that night.

But of course, he hasn’t done anything. I’m not the only one convinced of this; the police agree with me.

I don’t know how long that awful silence lasted. All I know is, after a while, the horror-haze that had filled my head cleared. I remembered who Aidan was: the man I knew and loved. If he’d killed someone, it couldn’t have been murder. There had to be an acceptable explanation. I got up, put my arms round him, told him it didn’t matter-whatever he’d done, I still loved him. I would always love him. I hated myself for saying those words-‘it doesn’t matter’-about a woman’s life; I only said it to compensate for what I saw as my own treachery. How could I have felt hatred for him? How could I have believed him? Aidan wasn’t evil. I couldn’t imagine ever being able to think of him as a killer. He’s got it wrong, I thought. Even before I knew it wasn’t true, I didn’t believe it.

We made love for hours and hours, delaying the moment when words would once again become necessary. The morning sky was already breaking up the darkness by the time we finally fell asleep early the next morning. I woke up to the sound of Aidan saying my name. I opened my eyes. He wasn’t smiling. ‘It’s midday,’ he said. ‘We’ve missed half the day.’ His eyes were dull and hard. I’d never seen him look so out of reach before, and it scared me.

I said nothing as we got dressed. Aidan made it clear with his body language that he didn’t want to talk. He phoned reception and asked for a taxi to be ordered. I heard him say, ‘Straight away’ and ‘Alexandra Palace’.

‘We’re going back to the art fair?’ I said.

‘That’s why we came.’

‘We don’t have to go back,’ I told him. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted us to be alone, not in a hall full of people and noise. ‘We could go home. Let’s go home.’

‘We’re going to Alexandra Palace,’ he said tonelessly, as if a machine were speaking from inside him.

I knew then that something was badly wrong. I wanted to ask him what was the matter, but it would have sounded ridiculous. The night before, he’d confessed to a killing. That would be traumatic for anyone; today he had to live with the consequences. We both did. I wanted to ask who else knew about what he’d done. I’d only known him four months. He might have been in prison before I met him. Mainly I wanted to apologise for the way I’d frozen and shut him out when he’d first told me, but I was so afraid he wouldn’t forgive me that I didn’t dare.

When a receptionist phoned the room to say that our taxi was outside, I asked Aidan about the Gloria Stetbay picture-did he think it would be safe in the room? ‘No idea,’ he said, as if he couldn’t have cared less. He pretended not to notice that I started crying.

We arrived at the art fair and went through the motions, walking up and down the aisles. I looked at paintings without seeing them. Aidan didn’t even look. He kept his eyes straight ahead, glazed, and marched up and down as if he’d set himself a goal of a certain number of footsteps and was counting them off one by one.

Eventually I grabbed his arm and said, ‘I can’t stand this any more. Why are we like this? Why aren’t we talking?’

I saw him grit his teeth, as if he couldn’t bear my touch. Less than twelve hours ago we’d been having passionate sex. It made no sense. ‘I’ve already said too much,’ Aidan muttered, not looking at me. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. I’m sorry.’

‘Of course you should have told me.’ I made a mistake then. I said, ‘Was it an accident? Was it self- defence?’

He let out a harsh, contemptuous laugh. ‘Which would you prefer? Accident or self-defence?’

‘I… I didn’t mean…’

‘What if it was neither? What if I murdered someone in cold blood, a defenceless woman?’

I felt my face twist in pain. Defenceless. ‘You didn’t. You can’t have,’ I said faintly.

‘People change, Ruth. People become different people during the course of their lives. If you loved the person I