Killing Me Softly

white stuccoed houses, all converted into hotels. I chose one at random, the Devonshire, and walked in.

Sitting at the desk was a very fat woman, who said something urgently to me that I couldn’t understand because of her accent. But I could see plenty of keys on the board behind her. This was not the tourist season. I pointed at the keys. ‘I want a room.’

She shook her head and carried on talking. I wasn’t even sure if she was talking to me or shouting at somebody in the room behind. I wondered if she thought I was a prostitute, but no prostitute could have been as badly, or at least as dully, dressed as I was. Yet I had no luggage. A little corner of my mind was amused by the thought of what kind of person she took me for. I extracted a credit card from my purse and put it on the desk. She took it and scanned it. I signed a piece of paper without looking at it. She handed me a key.

‘Can I get a drink?’ I asked. ‘Tea or something?’

‘No drink,’ she shouted.

I felt as if I had asked for a cup of meths. I considered whether to go outside for something but couldn’t face it. I took the key and went up two flights of stairs to my room. It wasn’t so bad. There was a wash-basin and a window looking down on a stone yard and across at the back of another house on the other side. I pulled the curtain shut. I was in a hotel room in London on my own with nothing. I stripped down to my underwear and got into bed. I got out of the bed and locked the door, then dived under the covers again. I didn’t cry. I didn’t lie awake all night pondering my life. I went to sleep straight away. But I left the light on.

I woke up late, dull-headed, but not suicidal. I got up, took my bra and knickers off and washed myself in the basin. Then I put them back on. I brushed my teeth without toothpaste. For breakfast I had a contraceptive pill washed down with a plastic beaker of water. I dressed and went downstairs. There seemed to be nobody around. I looked in at a dining room with a shiny marble-style floor where all the tables had plastic chairs around them. I heard voices from somewhere and I could smell frying bacon. I walked across the room and pushed open a curtain. Around a kitchen table were seated the woman I had met last night, a man of her own age and shape, evidently her husband, and several small fat children. They looked up at me.

‘I was leaving,’ I said.

‘You want breakfast?’ said the man, smiling. ‘We have eggs, meat, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, cereal.’

I shook my head weakly.

‘You paid already.’

I accepted some coffee and stood in the door of the kitchen watching as they got the children ready for school. Before I left, the man looked at me with a concerned expression. ‘You all right?’

‘All right.’

‘You stay another night?’

I shook my head again and left. It was cold outside but at least it was dry. I stopped and thought, orienting myself. I could walk from here. On my way down Edgware Road, I bought some lemon-scented wipes and toothpaste, mascara and lipstick from a chemist and then some simple white knickers. In Oxford Street I found a functional clothes shop. I took a black shirt and a simple jacket into the changing room. I put my new knickers on as well, wiped my face and neck with the wipes until my skin stung, then applied some makeup. It was just enough of an improvement. At least I didn’t look as if I was about to be sectioned. At just after ten, I rang Claudia. I had been intending to make up something about going through my papers but once I got her on the line, some odd impulse made me fall back on partial honesty. I told her that I was having a personal crisis that I was having to deal with and that I was in no condition to appear in the office. I could hardly get her off the line.

‘I’ll think of something to tell Mike,’ she concluded.

‘Just remember to tell me what it is before I see him.’

From Oxford Street it was only a few minutes’ walk to Adam’s flat. When I reached the street door I realized that I had almost no idea of what I was going to say to him. I stood there for several minutes but nothing occurred. The door was unlocked so I walked up the stairs and knocked on the flat door. It opened. I stepped forward, starting to speak, and then stopped. The person in the doorway was a woman. She was alarmingly attractive. She had dark hair that was probably long but was now fastened up unfussily. She was dressed in jeans and a checked shirt over a black T-shirt. She looked tired and preoccupied.

‘Yes?’ she said.

I felt a sick lurch in my stomach and a flush of hot embarrassment. I had the feeling that I had fucked up my entire life simply to make a fool of myself.

‘Is Adam there?’ I asked numbly.

‘No,’ she said briskly. ‘He’s moved on.’

She was American.

‘Do you know where?’

‘God, there’s a question now. Come in.’ I followed her inside because I didn’t know what else to do. Just inside the door were a very large battered rucksack and an open suitcase. Clothes were tossed on the floor.

‘Sorry,’ she said, gesturing at the mess. ‘I got in from Lima this morning. I feel like shit. I got some coffee in the pot.’ She held out her hand. ‘Deborah,’ she said.

‘Alice.’

I looked across at the bed. Deborah pulled out a familiar chair for me to sit on and poured coffee into a familiar mug for me and a familiar mug for herself. She offered me a cigarette. I refused it, and she lit it for herself.

‘You’re a friend of Adam’s,’ I ventured.

She blew out a thick cloud of smoke and shrugged. ‘I’ve climbed with him a couple of times. We’ve been on the same teams. Yeah, I’m a friend.’ She took another deep drag and grimaced. ‘Jesus. I’ve got jet-lag big league. And this air. I haven’t been below five thousand feet for a month and a half.

‘And you’re a friend of Adam’s?’ she continued.

‘Only for a bit,’ I said. ‘We just met recently. But yes, I am his friend.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, with what I took to be a knowing smile that embarrassed me greatly but I held her gaze until her smile softened into something more friendly and less mocking.

‘Were you on Chunga-whatever-it’s-called with him?’ Or: have you had an affair with him? Are you his lover too?

‘Chungawat. You mean last year? God, no. I don’t do things like that.’

‘Why not?’

She laughed. ‘If God had meant us to go above eight thousand metres, he’d have made us differently.’

‘I know that Adam was involved in that awful expedition last year.’ I was trying to speak calmly, as if I had come knocking on her door just to have this coffee and friendly chat. Where is he? I was screaming inside my head. I must see him now – before it’s too late, although perhaps it is already too late.

‘Involved? Don’t you know what happened?’

‘I know that some people were killed.’

Deborah lit another cigarette. ‘Five people. The expedition’s medical officer who was, uh…’ She looked across at me. ‘A close friend of Adam’s. Four clients.’

‘How awful.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ She took a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘You want to hear about it?’ I nodded. Where is he? She leaned back, all the time in the world. ‘When the storm broke, the leader, Greg McLaughlin, one of the top Himalayan guys in the world who thought he’d worked out a foolproof method for getting dorks up a mountain, was out of it. He was acutely hypoxic, whatever. Adam escorted him down and took over. The other professional guide, a French guy called Claude Bresson, a fantastic sport climber, he was fucked, hallucinating.’ Deborah rapped her chest. ‘He had a pulmonary oedema. Adam carried the bastard down to the camp. Then there were eleven clients out in the open. It was dark and over fifty below. Adam went back with oxygen, brought them down in groups. Kept going out. The man is a fucking bull. But one group got lost. He couldn’t find them. They didn’t stand a chance.’

‘Why do people do that?’

Deborah rubbed her eyes. She looked terribly tired. She gestured with her cigarette. ‘You mean why does Adam do it? I can tell you why I do it. When I was a med