Girl A(55)

His clothes were on the floor: that was something. It was daytime: that was something else. He followed the cat into an empty hallway. Three doors were closed, but one was parted, and led to a dirty little kitchen. There was a half-eaten birthday cake on the side, and a few dying flies at the window. He drank water from his hands and tried to recall the evening. His mind usually teased him with disembodied memories, which would come into view days – sometimes weeks – later. An impromptu disclosure to a stranger, perhaps, about what his father had done to him, or a demonstration of generosity by Oliver at the bar which ended with his card declined, and Gabriel, feeling sorry for him, stepping in to pay. Today, though – nothing. He heard a shuffle behind one of the closed doors, and felt an urgent, nauseous terror. He hurried to the only door with a latch, and staggered down a dark stairwell and into the street.

He had a long shadow. It was probably the afternoon. There were Victorian houses – net curtains and chipped white fronts – and nobody around. The street signs said SW2. He didn’t have his wallet or his phone, but his keys were still jammed into his pocket, and he held them like a charm and began the long walk home.

He walked for nearly three hours, staving off tears and with his tongue dry and swelling in his throat. When he reached the flat in the hot summer dusk he started to cry and then to choke. He crouched against the door, his face turned away from the revellers making their way down to Camden, and tried to think of something to say to Oliver, who might be in any number of moods: furious, because Gabriel had been an embarrassment for the evening; nonchalant, because he was still in his dressing gown, coming to; or, as Gabriel had been picturing it over Lambeth Bridge and all the way up through Westminster, frightened, and quickly relieved: he took Gabriel into his arms and they napped together until it was time to go out again.

But the flat was quiet.

There were only three rooms – the bedroom, the bathroom, and the living area with its two rusted hobs – so it wasn’t difficult to see that Oliver wasn’t there. Gone were his clothes from the bedroom rail, and the toiletries which the two of them had started to share, and the last few rations from the kitchen cupboards. Gone, too, were the envelopes which Gabriel had prepared the day before, packed with the items from Moor Woods Road. He felt the first pulse of panic and tried to subdue it. They would be here, somewhere. He looked for them beneath the bed; he opened the oven; he even pulled back the shower curtain and stared haplessly at the blackening bathtub. He was talking to himself, making the sounds that a mother might make to a sick child. On the sofa, he found a note, written on the back of a receipt from Tesco Express: I’m sorry. I love you.

When the Rage came, he didn’t think about Mandy or the ocean mammals, or about his fucking tepee. He welcomed it like an old friend, the last one remaining, and he set about the absolute destruction of everything that he could reach. He tore up carpet and hammered his fists through plaster. He upended the bed, which they had slept in together. He smashed the solitary window to the street. When the flat was ruined, he took what Oliver had left in the kitchen – there were only scissors and a paring knife; the final insult, perhaps – and started on himself.

‘And now,’ I said, ‘he’s back.’

‘He came to apologize, Lex. He was in a bad place, then.’

‘But it’s a strange coincidence.’ I said. ‘Isn’t it? That he would turn up now – weeks after you were admitted – once he heard about Mother?’

He rolled his head away from me, across the pillow. ‘You don’t know him,’ he said. ‘You don’t know anything.’

‘It’s been in the papers,’ I said. ‘Online. He could have seen it anywhere.’

‘We could get better together. That’s what he said. He’s ready to try. And when we are – that money. That money could help us, Lex. We could get a place to stay. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere in the countryside, he said. Just the two of us.’

‘This one, Gabe – I think you may have to do this one alone.’

I took the documents from my bag and left them on his bedside table, so he could see them when he woke up.

‘I’ll leave these here,’ I said.

I waited.

I said: ‘Think about it.’

Oliver: waiting against a car, wearing yesterday’s clothes and the smile of somebody who was winning. He walked past me, making for the doors, and I thought of the train journey home; of the postponed burden of doing nothing. There was Delilah, thumping the Bible across the playground.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Hey—’

He paused, and walked back to me. This close, his body was scrawny, diminished inside his clothes. There was sweat on his forehead and at the ends of his hair. He looked like a nocturnal thing, which could only stand the sunlight for so long.

‘I’m Lex. Gabriel’s sister.’

‘I know who you are,’ he said.

He gave a long, theatrical sigh.

‘You all have that same look to you,’ he said. ‘Like some part of you’s still starving.’

‘How can you do this?’ I said.

‘Do what, now? Visit a troubled friend?’

He took a few steps away, back towards the hospital. ‘You used him,’ I said. ‘But I can be more specific. Specifically: you defrauded him. You’re defrauding him still.’