The Paris Apartment(91)

Finally, finally, the lock pops open and I wrench it off and push open the door. I close it again quickly behind me. The open padlock is the only thing to give me away; I’ll just have to pray they won’t immediately guess I’ve come in here.

My eyes start to adjust in the gloom. I’m looking into a cramped attic space, long and thin. The ceiling slopes down sharply above me. I have to crouch so I don’t knock my head on one of the big wooden beams.

It’s dark but there’s a dim glow which I realize is the full moon, filtering in through the small, smeared attic windows. It smells of old wood and trapped air up here and something animal: sweat or something worse, something decaying. Something that stops me from breathing in too deeply. The air feels thick, full of dust motes which float in front of me in the bars of moonlight. It feels as though I have just pushed open a door into another world, where time has been suspended for a hundred years.

I move forward, looking around for somewhere to hide.

Over in the dim far corner of the space I see what looks like an old mattress. There appears to be something on top of it.

I have that feeling again, like I did downstairs when I found the concierge. I don’t want to step any closer. I don’t want to look.

But I do, because I have to know. Now I can see what it is. Who it is. I see the blood. I understand.

He’s been up here all along. And I forget that I am meant to be hiding from them. I forget everything apart from the horror of what I’m looking at. I scream and scream and scream.





Mimi





Fourth floor



A scream tears through the apartment.

“He’s dead. He’s dead—you’ve fucking killed him.”

I let go of my mother’s arm.

The storm in my head is growing louder, louder. It’s a swarm of bees . . . then like being crashed underwater by the waves, now like standing in the middle of a hurricane. But it still isn’t loud enough to shut out the thoughts that are beginning to seep in. The memories.

I remember blood. So much blood.

You know how when you’re a kid you can’t sleep because you’re afraid of the monsters under the bed? What happens if you start to suspect that the monster might be you? Where do you hide?

It’s like the memories have been kept behind a locked door in my mind. I have been able to see the door. I have known it’s there, and I have known that there is something terrible behind it. Something I don’t want to see—ever. But now the door is opening, the memories flooding out.

The iron stink of the blood. The wooden floor slippery with it. And in my hand, my canvas-cutting knife.

I remember them pushing me into the shower. Maman . . . someone else, too, maybe. Washing me down. The blood running dilute and pink into the drain, swirling around my toes. I was shivering all over; I couldn’t stop. But not because the shower was cold; it was hot, scalding. There was a deep coldness inside me.

I remember Maman holding me like she did when I was a little girl. And even though I was so angry with her, so confused, all I wanted, suddenly, was to cling to her. To be that little girl again.

“Maman,” I said. “I’m frightened. What happened?”

“Shh.” She stroked my hair. “It’s OK,” she told me. “I’m not going to let anything happen. I’ll protect you. Just let me take care of all of this. You aren’t going to get into any trouble. It was his fault. You did what had to be done. What I wasn’t brave enough to do myself. We had to get rid of him.”

“What do you mean?” I searched her face, trying to understand. “Maman, what do you mean?”

She looked closely at me then. Stared hard into my eyes. Then she nodded, tightly. “You don’t remember. Yes, yes, it’s best like that.”

Later, there was something crusted under my fingernails, a reddish-brown rust color. I scrubbed at it with a toothbrush in the bathroom until my nail beds started bleeding. I didn’t care about the pain; I just wanted to be rid of whatever it was. But that was the only thing that seemed real. The rest of it was like a dream.

And then she arrived here. And the next morning she came to the door. She knocked and knocked until I had to open it. Then she said those terrible words:

“My brother—Ben . . . he’s . . . well, he’s kind of disappeared.”

That was when I realized it could have been real, after all.

I think it might have been me. I think I might have killed him.





Sophie





Penthouse



“He’s dead. He’s dead—you’ve fucking killed him.”

“I have to go, chérie,” I tell Mimi. “I have to go and deal with this.” I step onto the landing, leaving her in the apartment.

I look upward. It has happened. The girl is in the chambres de bonne. She’s found him.

I remember pushing open the door to his apartment that terrible night. My daughter, covered in blood. She opened her mouth as though to speak, or scream, but nothing came out.

The concierge was there, too, somehow. But then of course she was: she sees, knows, everything—moving around this apartment building like a specter. I stood looking at the scene before me in a state of utter shock. Then a strange sense of practicality took over.