2000 - Thirtynothing Read online

  She sighed and gave in to the guilt. It couldn’t hurt, could it? To leave Phil here in her flat. I mean—what could he actually do, when you thought about it?

  Make a mess? Big deal.

  Snoop through her things? He wouldn’t find anything very interesting.

  Eat all her food? He was welcome to it, it was only going to go off otherwise.

  Invite his young student friends over? Where was the harm in that?

  Still be here when she got back? She shuddered. No—that wasn’t going to happen. No way.

  Oh God, she wailed silently, why is this happening? Why is this happening?

  ‘OK,’ she said, firmly, ‘you can stay. But promise you’ll get some help. Promise you’ll call Jo a bit later. Yes?’

  Phil did that awful little-boy thing again, pouting ever so slightly and nodding chastely. ‘I pwomise,’ he said, and Nadine had to fight back a burst of nausea.

  ‘Right,’ she said, backing uncertainly out of the room, ‘I’m just going to load up the car. I’ll be back in a second.’

  She felt vaguely sick as she lugged boxes and boxes of aluminium-clad photographic equipment down her front steps and out to her Spider. It was still dark outside, and invisible birds chattered happily from shrouded tree tops. Jesus, she thought, am I mad? I’m leaving my flat, my beautiful flat, my refuge from the world, in the hands of Philip Rich, a man I was hoping just yesterday that I would never, ever see again as long as I lived. He’s lying in my bed, in his foul underpants, on my lovely Indian-cotton sheets, under my Bollywood duvet cover that I made with my own hands, and I don’t want him to be there, but there’s nothing I can do about it because my flight to Barcelona leaves in two and a half hours and there’s a whole team of models, hairdressers and stylists expecting to meet me in an hour, and if I’m not there I’ll get sacked, and it’s five thirty in the morning and I don’t want him to be there, I just really, really don’t want him to be there.

  She threw her coat over the boxes in the boot to stop them being bounced about, slammed down the door and locked it, taking a deep breath to try to calm her nerves.

  Back indoors, she performed a last–minute check of the flat, making sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. In the kitchen she stopped for a second, noticing the yellow plastic bucket sitting by the back door, and picked it up. Well—it wouldn’t hurt, would it—you never know—he might be telling the truth. And then she opened the door to her bedroom, warily and heavily.

  ‘Right,’ she said, over-brightly, a spare set of keys clutched in one hand, the plastic bucket in the other and her bag slung over her shoulder, ‘I’m off.’ She walked briskly towards the bedside table and dropped the keys. ‘Spare set of keys for you,’ she said, twirling a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Just drop them back through the letter box when you go. I’ve…er…left tea and coffee stuff out for you but I don’t suppose you’ll be able to get to it, will you?’

  He looked at her and shrugged sadly, as if he was growing used to the idea of life as a helpless cripple.

  ‘Make any phone calls you need and—um’—she glanced down at the bucket and put it down next to the bed—‘I thought you’d probably need this. You know, seeing as you can’t get to the toilet.’

  He smiled at her warmly.

  ‘So, good luck. Hope everything works out with the leg. And, Phil…I’m so sorry. So, so sorry for what happened last night. I hope you can forgive me.’ She forced a smile and Phil picked her hand up from where it hung at her side. She looked at him awkwardly and he smiled at her gratefully. Very slowly and very measuredly he brought her hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it, deeply, passionately and intensely, breathing the scent of her skin into the depths of his lungs and letting his lips moisten her skin. She looked down at him, willing him to stop, resisting the urge to pull her hand away from his mouth. She attempted a smile and failed.

  ‘Nadine Kite,’ he drawled, letting her hand drop from his lips but not letting go of it, ‘you’re the best. The best girl ever. Look at you—bringing me buckets, worrying about me, looking after me. I could so easily fall in love with you all over again, you know. In fact’—he smiled and squeezed her hand—‘I think I might already have done.’

  Nadine managed to extricate her hand from his without seeming rude and began backing away from him. Her face was flaming red, which was annoying, because Phil was arrogant enough to presume that she was blushing with desire and pleasure rather than the all-consuming revulsion and horror she was feeling.

  ‘I really have got to go now, Phil,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘I’ll try calling later, from the airport, or something. Good luck.’

  Phil stuck one hand in the air and smiled again. ‘Farewell, lovely lady,’ he said, in a pretend Shakespearean tone, and then performed a ridiculous little twiddle of his hand and the mock-bow of a courtesan.

  Nadine smiled stiffly, found the door handle and left the room.

  She felt horribly sad as she closed the door on her lovely little flat, like a mother forced to leave her beautiful daughter alone with a lecherous baby-sitter.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mouthed to her front door as she made her way towards the car. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She flopped down into the driving seat and locked the door. Her heart was heavy and full of dread as she switched on the ignition and began the drive out west to Heathrow.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Who was that? Up ahead?

  Dig slunk down in the back seat as he recognized the shape of Delilah’s head in the cab in front, leaving just his eyebrow visible above the partition. His driver had certainly made up time, flying through the streets of north London, and now Dig’s cab was sitting directly behind Delilah’s at the traffic lights on the Strand, about to turn left on to Waterloo Bridge.

  Dig glanced at his watch. It was twenty past nine. The lights changed and Dig grabbed the armrest as the cab took the corner a little too fast. He wanted to tell the driver that he could slow down now, but realized how silly that would sound. He just hoped that they wouldn’t overtake Delilah’s cab.

  Dig stared in disbelief at the top deck of a tourist bus, which had pulled over in the bus lane on the bridge and was packed full of cagouled tourists listening raptly to a man in a blue-nylon blazer with a microphone. It was nearly December, for Christ’s sake, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. If Dig was a tourist in London, he would be making his second visit to the breakfast buffet bar right now, buttering his croissant, slicing the top off his hard-boiled egg and hatching gentle plans for a trip to the Royal Academy or Fortnum and Mason’s later in the day, maybe. He would not be sitting on an open-topped bus, on the windiest bridge in London, in a day-glo cagoule with some bloke from Kidderminster shouting in his ear.

  ‘Which entrance do you want?’ came the tinny, disembodied voice of the driver as they approached the Imax cinema on Waterloo roundabout.

  Dig sat up straight and tried to look like he knew where he was going. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the main one, please.’ He realized instantly that this was the wrong answer when he heard the driver sighing wearily through the intercom.

  ‘Eurostar? Mainline? The Underground? Which one, mate?’

  Oh God. He was going to have to say it, wasn’t he? Ten years ago he’d have been excited at the prospect, but now—well, it was a bit embarrassing, really.

  ‘Can you just, um’—he cleared his throat—‘would you mind just following that cab?’ He cringed a little as he heard the words leave his lips and saw the driver’s eyebrows arch sceptically.

  ‘Bet you’ve wanted to say that all your life, ’ he chuckled happily.

  Delilah’s cab pulled up in front of the creamy stone steps leading towards the main concourse of the station and Dig watched her extricating herself from the vehicle—one long, trousered, heeled leg followed by another, and then the Hamley’s bag with the rabbit in it.

  His cab squeaked to a halt behind hers and the driver eyed Dig as he attempted to pay the fare from an almo
st entirely prone position in the back seat, sliding a ten-pound note through the crack in the window and crouching down to open the door only once he was sure that Delilah had fully disembarked and was half-way up the steps.

  As Dig picked his way carefully up the magnificent stairway, Digby started quivering with excitement in his arms, his little suede nose exploring the air. He could smell her—Delilah. He let out an excited, high-pitched groan and tried to wriggle his way out of Dig’s arms, towards his mistress. ‘Shhhh,’ said Dig, clamping his hand over the dog’s tiny, damp snout. ‘Shhhh.’

  On the concourse Dig hid behind a row of phone booths to watch Delilah’s movements. She was striding towards the ticket office, her heels clicking against the marble flooring, the rabbit ear flopping up and down as she walked.

  Dig waited until Delilah was firmly ensconced in a queue and then dashed furtively to a leaflet stand offering colourful information about day trips to Hampton Court and Loseley Park. He dropped his head and pretended to study the leaflets, scooting quickly to the other side of the stand as Delilah picked up her change and turned to leave the ticket office.

  He had no idea where she was going. According to the clattering arrival boards set high above the platform entrances, she could be going anywhere from Basingstoke to Bagshot, from Exeter to Epsom. She could be going to Hook, Fleet, Liss or Wool, not to mention Surbiton, Staines or Sunningdale.

  Dig’s heart was starting to race now. This really was primeval, bringing out deeply buried instincts and emotions, stalking his prey, hiding in the undergrowth, using the pillars and phone booths of Waterloo station as trees and bushes.

  Delilah was walking slowly now, heading back towards the far end of the station, past platform nine, eight, seven, six—stopping at the Accessorize shop, feeling up some fur wraps, leather gloves, fake pash-minas, beaded handbags, before wandering past platform five, four, three, popping into Knickerbox, fingering bits of silk and satin, lime-green G-strings, gingham bras and tiny jersey vest tops printed with rosebuds. Did women have any idea how absolutely devastating they looked browsing in lingerie shops?

  As she emerged she glanced up at the arrival board above platform one. Dig followed her gaze from where he stood in the doorway of a closed pub, on the other side of the concourse. He squinted to make out the words.

  52 to GUILDFORD via CLAPHAM JUNCTION

  OK, he thought, Guildford here I come.

  Dig moved stealthily down the platform, following Delilah’s swaying hips and floppy bunny ear. Digby was still frantically trying to liberate himself from Dig’s arms, squeaking every time he saw Delilah’s form in the distance, and Dig was starting to wish he’d brought a lead or a harness to restrain the creature. The mutt was jeopardizing the whole operation.

  When Delilah stopped midway down the platform and mounted the train, Dig increased his pace. He got into the carriage one down from her, so that he could keep an eye on her through the adjoining windows. There she was, sitting with her back to his carriage, thankfully, and flipping through a sheaf of paper. Yet another blessed sheaf of paper. What was it with all that paper? Maybe she was practising to be a newsreader…

  Between stations, Dig cupped his chin in his hand and stared through the window, watching the grey, grimy backside of inner London morph into the shampoo and set of suburbia.

  He watched as the tiny, rust-filled, overgrown gardens of Battersea, Clapham and Streatham gave way to the conservatories and aluminium-framed windows of Wimbledon, Kingston and New Malden, where the gardens sprouted bright plastic swings and slides, shiny barbecues and pristine sheds, and where Dig felt entirely alien. Suburbia, he considered, might well be a hotbed of creativity and inspiration, its very blandness acting as an inducement to escape and achieve, but he hated it. It made him feel trapped and suffocated, as if he were entering a big, green plastic bag that someone was about to tie a knot in.

  As the train slunk through Surbiton—the fatherland, Dig had always thought, of suburbia—Dig threw a furtive glance towards the next carriage. Delilah had stopped flicking through papers now and was staring out of the window, nervously nibbling at the skin around her fingernails. God, thought Dig, as inappropriately as ever, she really is so shockingly beautiful.

  Nondescript office building followed nondescript shopping parade followed nondescript garden; anonymous station after anonymous station zipped by in little flashes of red, white and blue Network Southeast insignia, and within twenty minutes Dig found himself being deposited somewhere called Walton-on-Thames.

  Delilah dismounted and turned left, leaving Dig in a perfect position to follow her unseen. His heart, which had slowed down while sitting on the train, resumed its frenetic tattoo as he pulled his sunglasses from his coat pocket and slipped them on. Not, he hastened to reassure himself, in a sad attempt at subterfuge but because the sun was quite blindingly bright.

  He held back as he made his way down the platform—only a handful of people had dismounted the train and he was highly visible—and then had hurriedly to throw himself behind a pillar when an increasingly anxious Digby spotted Delilah in the distance and emitted a high-pitched yap. Dig saw Delilah slow down like a suspicious cat when she heard the yap, and his breathing stopped momentarily as he held his hand over Digby’s muzzle and waited for her to continue on her way.

  This rat was a fucking liability. Dig should have left him at home and, besides, he thought with a growing sense of horror, he probably looked like a sad homosexual walking around with this ugly thing under his arm like an Alexander McQueen clutch-bag. Why, he wondered, not for the first time, had Delilah chosen this dog from among the packs of puppies she would have had access to, the spaniels and the collies, the sheepdogs and the retrievers? What was it about this greasy, quivering little bag of bones that had appealed to her? It was a mystery to him, a complete mystery.

  Delilah disappeared into the ticket hall up ahead, and Dig quickened his pace, narrowing the gap between them. He rounded the corner into the ticket hall and leaped ahead when he saw Delilah crossing the road outside the station, striding purposefully away from him.

  He headed briskly through the chilly hall and nearly jumped out of his skin when a man with a big scar on his cheek, a broken nose and a cauliflower ear suddenly bellowed into his face, ‘Can I see your ticket please, sir?’

  Oh fuck. Dig glanced at the man and then at the road opposite, where he could see Delilah shrinking to doll-sized proportions. Oh bloody hell. He stepped from foot to foot as he desperately tried to think of what to do next. He could stay here and waste five minutes trying to sweet-talk this unfortunate-looking fellow into letting him off with a fine or a telling-off or he could just make a run for it.

  ‘Sir, I need to see your ticket.’

  Oh sod it. He clutched Digby tightly to him, threw the man a deeply apologetic look which he hoped conveyed within it every nuance of the story that had brought him to Walton-on-Thames without a ticket, and legged it. It was a risk—the guy looked like an ex-bare-knuckle fighter, but he might be a bit slow now in his middle age. The risk paid off. The mashed-up ticket collector sighed deeply and returned to his newspaper, tired beyond words, apparently, of breathless homosexuals with greasy terriers arriving at his barrier without the required piece of cardboard.

  Dig stood impatiently at the edge of the road, waiting for a bus to complete its U-turn before dashing across the road towards the now empty street he’d last seen Delilah disappearing up. He looked around very quickly and was startled to notice that he was in the middle of nowhere—literally—but not in the good sense of the phrase, not in the way of endless meadows and wide horizons and featureless panoramas, not in the way that suggested solitude and space and mind-expansion, just…nowhere…nowhere at all. Apart from the station, all that existed in this silent and eerily uninhabited junction of two slumbering roads was an estate agents’ office and a bus stop.

  The heaving, creaking bus disappeared up the road in a miasma of grey smoke, leaving the area feeli
ng even more abandoned, Dig’s T–shirt was sticking to his back with the layer of viscous sweat that had broken out all over his body. He was operating on more than just conscious thought, his body was producing all sorts of reactions, effluents and chemicals as he hunted his prey. He was feeling curiously stimulated.

  Dig breathed in sharply and slowed down when he heard Delilah’s heels echoing around the next corner—thank God, he’d been worried that she might have disappeared into one of the overgrown Wendy houses that lined this meandering avenue and that he would be left stranded in Walton-on-Thames for the rest of his life.

  Finally, the interminable road gave way to a fork, and signs of civilization and human life began to appear: a school, a church, a low-level office block, people. Within a few seconds a busy high street emerged, and Dig found himself jostling for space on the pavement with large, meaty-armed families, with nervously shuffling pensioners and pushchairs, prams and double buggies. Delilah kept striding.

  Robert Dyas, Dorothy Perkins, Boots, Fads, Smiths and Marks.

  Dig mopped his brow.

  He ducked into a doorway when Delilah stopped in her tracks ahead of him. What must he look like, he wondered to himself, all sweaty and unkempt, with uncombed hair and a weird dog, dashing around furtively and hiding in doorways? If he could see himself in the street today, he would be able to reach only one conclusion: Care in the Community.

  Delilah was consulting one of her bits of paper, turning it round and viewing it from all angles in a manner that suggested she was looking at a map. Dig looked at his watch: 10.51 a.m. They’d been walking for bloody ages. He hoped they were nearly there—wherever the hell ‘there’ was. He didn’t think he could stand the suspense for much longer.

  Delilah slid the piece of paper back into her doeskin attaché and continued on her way, her heels beginning to echo again as the pedestrian population thinned out once more.