Tangerine(64)

“It’s so dark,” I observed, realizing that the sun had begun to set, that the room had fallen into darkness since the departure of the police. I moved toward one of the lamps, desperate, suddenly, for the light.

“Don’t,” she instructed, her voice firm, resolute. “I want to watch the sun set.”

There was a challenge there, and I fought the urge to disregard her words, to flip the switch anyway, so that it would send us both, momentarily blind, into the light. I thought of Aunt Maude, now on her way to Tangier, and my fingers twitched again, eager for the moment she arrived.

“It’s unlike anything at home, isn’t it?” she asked then, not bothering to turn her head toward me.

I looked out of the window, the sky awash with stripes of pink and white and blue. Yes, it was different, I thought. Maybe even beautiful. But at that moment, I saw only something ominous and warning, a threat that I could never quite manage to elude. I had promised my aunt that I would not involve the police, and yet somehow they had turned up on my doorstep. And even though I was certain that I had not called them, that I had not been the one to summon them, my mind sought and failed to remember those moments after I had hung up the telephone with Maude with any sort of precision. I had been overwrought, surrounded by this place that was entirely John’s, the apartment and the city belonging to him in a way that I could not understand. I would have given anything, in that moment, to return to the dark, rainy skies of my childhood.

She turned to me. “You never go out.”

There was no accusation in her voice. She spoke as one did when reciting facts—and it was a fact, I thought. Once, I had never gone out. Once, I had been so afraid of what might lurk in the corners of the alleyways, in the back rooms of bars and cafés. But that was before, I wanted to tell her. Before she had arrived, before John had disappeared, before everything had changed and I had begun to suspect, begun to remember, that the true danger did not lie entirely within my own mind.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

I watched the plume of her cigarette smoke as it crowded her features, and I wondered whether she might know and whether it was possible that she was asking only in order to see if I would be truthful. “To the market,” I lied.

She looked around the flat. “And what did you buy?”

“Nothing.” I shrugged, although I was unable to determine whether she could see the gesture in the darkness that shrouded us. “I only wanted to look.”

“It’s quite late for the market.”

My voice was too insistent as I replied, “I went there first, and then out for a walk.”

She nodded, and then said, her eyes boring into my own, “I was surprised that you didn’t tell me. About John’s disappearance, I mean.”

I held her gaze, and though my voice trembled, I asked, “Did I need to?”

The question, the implication, hung between us, unanswered.

She turned to the window and said, “We could still leave, you know. The two of us, together. We could go to Spain. To Paris.” She paused, turning to look at me slowly, so that I could hear the rustle of her trousers as she moved. “It’s not too late. This doesn’t have to be the end.”

I could see it—the desperation glinting in her eyes. And part of me, though I knew it was absurd, that it was wrong, wanted to say yes. It would be easier to close my eyes and give in, to close the distance between us and leave this nightmare behind. And perhaps she sensed it too, this relenting, for she reached out, as if to touch me. But then I thought of Tom, of John, of what she had most likely—No, I whispered fiercely to myself, had absolutely done—and I felt myself pale. I knocked her hand away with a force that surprised us both. I could see it—the shock, the disappointment, and yes, the anger. “You can’t blackmail me into loving you, Lucy,” I spat, unable to stop myself. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Her face froze, so that it seemed as though her features were contracting, shrinking. And then, through the darkness, I saw the start of a smile beginning at one corner of her mouth. It seemed like her lips were tilted, jerked upward. The look of a cat toying with a mouse.

My skin began to itch, knowing that something was about to happen, sensing, already, the danger in her next words.

“When will you tell the police?” she asked.

I grew still.

“About what you know.”

“What do I know?” I whispered, trying to ignore the trembling of my body.

A smile now—a real, genuine one that could not be hidden. “About Sabine.”

I placed my arms around my waist. I did not want to be there any longer. Not in that room, not in Tangier, not anywhere on the continent of Africa. It was not my home. It had never been my home. All I had done was create an enclosure that I had trapped myself within. I had created the lock and I had given Lucy the key. My stomach lurched and I thought for a moment that I would be sick, there, in the living room, surrounded by John’s things and Lucy’s Cheshire grin.

“Sabine?” I repeated.

“Yes.” She turned. “The police will want to know about what happened that day, at Café Hafa.”

I could feel it then, could feel myself contracting, could feel myself stalling in terror—no, not terror, horror. I remembered that day, the woman, the shattered glass—the blood on the stairs glistening underneath the afternoon sun. The conviction that she was somehow familiar, though I could not place her, but then, of course, I could—the image of her face from that first night, those seconds before I had fainted, the truth of John, of our relationship, laid bare. I could not move, could not speak. I stood there, frozen.