The Next to Die, page 5
3
from Origami by Kim Tribbeck
Who remembers the unpainted wooden door with the silver handle, the one I mentioned a while ago and then never explained?
The police remember it, I’m sure—but then they know the whole story, and it’s not one you’d forget in a hurry.
The door is in my house. It divides the main part of the house from the cellar. (I never know whether to call it a cellar or a basement. There’s no wine in it, so “cellar” feels wrong. And “basement” sounds creepy. Let’s call it the lower-ground-floor flat beneath my house.)
You’re right: I’m putting off telling you my secret. What if you hate me once you know? Actually, I’ve just remembered: I only care about your opinion because I know you all like me. You’re my select few. You’ve paid to come and see me or to buy my book. That’s something I wish I could make people in my personal life do, to prove they’re really keen. Let them put their money where their mouths are.
I’d make an excellent hooker, appreciating payment as I do. All the men who’ve had sex with me over the years and not paid—not a moment went by when I didn’t doubt their level of commitment.
Right, here goes. And if you stop liking me once you’ve heard my secret, I’ll stop giving a shit what you think, so that’ll be easy.
My new detective friends liked me more once I told them, but that’s because they can only hold in their minds two categories of person: Not a Murderer and A Murderer. As soon as I explained, they thought, “Ah, yes—an unscrupulous bitch but Not a Murderer.” I was flattered. It was like getting into the top stream for English all over again.
Okay, so before I start, you need to understand the layout of the building where I live. It’s four stories tall, two rooms wide—one on either side of the front door or the stairs—and only one room deep. They’re big rooms, but still, as houses go, it’s an oddity. Gabe and I nicknamed it Flat Stanley when we first bought it.
The part I inhabit, the main house, is three floors: ground, first and second. Then there’s the lower-ground-floor flat, which in the past has been part of the house, but it can also be self-contained. At the moment it’s rented out to a doctor from Copenhagen, Nils Danius. He and I hardly speak, though whenever we do, I wind him up by insisting his name means “Do not resuscitate” in Danish.
The lower-ground-floor flat has separate access from the street. It has its own front door, reached by descending ten or so steps from pavement level, so it can easily work as a separate residence, but only if the wooden door between the house and the cellar remains closed and locked.
You can lock it from either side. Since Nils Danius took up residence, there has been no key in the lock. He doesn’t have access to a key. I do. If I wanted to, I could open the door and invade his territory, but I don’t. I keep the key tactfully far away from the door, to remind myself that, for the time being, I mustn’t even think about going in there. Not that I want to.
I used to want to. Every night, toward the end of my relationship with Gabe. I suppose I should introduce him properly: Gabriel Kearns. On paper he’s still my husband, but we no longer live together. We’d been married for about nine years when we realized each of us was regularly disturbed in the night by the snoring or fidgeting of the other. Our guest room—the only other room in the house with a comfortable bed in it—was in the converted basement. Nils Danius now sleeps in that bed, but he didn’t then, and one day Gabe and I realized our marriage wouldn’t fall apart if we didn’t share a bed all night every night. (It would fall apart later for other reasons.) We could still have sex—on the sofa, usually, with Gogglebox on in the background—and then we could both get a decent night’s sleep in different rooms, two floors apart. This discovery thrilled us both.
(Enjoy your smug laughter while you can, youngsters. Sleep matters. You’ll realize that once you turn forty. This kind of thing will happen to you, too.)
The one who commuted to the lower ground floor was always me, since I’m capable of moving my brain cells and limbs after ten P.M. and Gabe isn’t. Our relationship improved once we were no longer exhausted all the time, but it still wasn’t perfect. It had never been perfect. That’s why I needed a lover, whose name was Liam.
Hands up all those who expected me to accept an imperfect husband and not defend myself with a lover? Nope. Sorry. I’ve always believed fidelity should be earned with good behavior, not taken as read. Demonstrate to me that you can load a dishwasher in a way that doesn’t make me want to start my next sentence with the words “Only a lunatic . . .” and then we’ll talk sexual exclusivity.
Liam was a fan, or so he said. He emailed me via my website to tell me that I was his favorite comedian. If this sounds as if I’m summarizing, I’m not. His message read, “You are my favorite comedian.” No “Dear Kim,” no “Warm Best Wishes” at the end. Still, this gave him the edge over Gabe, whose favorite comedian is Larry David.
I wrote back one of my standard “Thank you so much” emails, and Liam replied straightaway: “You’re not brilliant, but all the other stand-ups I’ve seen are dire.” I replied, “Actually, I am brilliant.” “Meet me for a drink, and I’ll explain why you’re not,” he fired back. “Be brilliant rather than dire at making me want to have a drink with you and maybe I will,” was my response.
We met for a drink, and it very soon turned into more. I found Liam incredibly attractive, partly because he was nothing like Gabe—he was blonder, bigger, stronger-looking—and partly because he hardly ever smiled or spoke. He was a mystery to me. He lived with his sister and refused to explain why, or admit that an explanation was required beyond, “Some people live with their siblings, just as others live with their spouses. What more is there to say?”
Sex with Liam always made me think, Yes, he’s worth bothering with and this is why—I must remember this, how I feel now. The nothingness around the sex, on the other hand, was perplexing. One evening the word “bored” came into my mind. I knew something more was needed or else I wouldn’t be able to make it last. That’s when I had a brilliant idea: a way to make an advantage out of Liam’s silence.
I invited him to my lower-ground-floor lair at midnight. It couldn’t have been more straightforward. I knew Gabe never fell asleep later than eleven. Barring an emergency, he’d be dead to the world until his alarm went off at seven the next morning.
On the agreed night, I did something I’d never done before when I reached the lower ground floor. I moved the key from the house side of the door to the cellar side, and I turned it in the lock. Now Gabe couldn’t get in even if he wanted to. Now my underground lair was mine alone, to do with as I liked. Then I unlocked the door to the outside and waited for Liam to arrive.
He turned up at midnight as arranged, and we spent our first whole night together. It was amazing in a way that defies description, partly—no, mainly—because of that locked door, Gabe’s proximity, the whole secret-cellar thing. Do with that gory psychological detail what you will.
I caught up on sleep between seven thirty A.M. and two P.M., while Gabe was out at work. Thank God for the schedule of a stand-up comedian, I thought to myself; it’s lucky I’m not an accountant or a podiatrist, or almost anything else. (Also lucky for people with money and feet, not only for me.)
It turned into a regular thing. Not every night, but two or three times a week. Sometimes four. Liam would arrive at midnight, spend the night with me in the basement and leave at six A.M., a safe hour before Gabe’s alarm was due to go off. Liam’s sister worked nights, so she never knew what was going on. “She wouldn’t like it,” was the most Liam would say on the subject. “She’s a worrier.”
I never worried. I loved living two lives, one on either side of the wooden door. For those of you hoping for drama and retribution, I’m going to disappoint you. Nothing went wrong. No nosy insomniac neighbor stuck his oar in to ruin everything; Gabe never heard any suspicious noises. If someone had walked into our house at night through the main front door, he might have heard them and thought, even in his sleep, “Wrong sound to be hearing now,” but from the master bedroom it’s impossible to hear a person entering the building on the lower ground floor.
I had a plan in case of emergencies. In the incredibly unlikely event of Gabe waking up at two A.M. and coming to seek me out—which I figured would only happen if he was ill, otherwise even if he were awake he wouldn’t want to disturb me—he’d find the wooden door at the top of the stairs to the basement locked. He’d be puzzled, and probably start knocking and calling my name. “What? I’m asleep!” I’d yell in a fake sleep-fogged voice, while Liam quickly dressed. “Hang on a minute, Gabe, for Christ’s sake! Give me a chance!”
Would Gabe, at that point, think, “Hm, this is suspicious. I can’t get into my cellar the usual way, so I’ll run outside, down the steps, and get in through the other door?” I didn’t think he’d ever do that. He’d wait there, wondering what the hell was happening, until I came to let him in.
While he waited, Liam and I would proceed on tiptoes to the other door, the one to the street. I’d unlock it, Liam would slip out into the darkness, and I’d call out, “Gabe? Gabe?” Then I’d say, loudly, “Fuck! I’m an idiot!” I’d then lock that door and hurry to unlock the other one. “I went to the wrong door,” I’d tell Gabe. “I was half asleep and thought you were outside, knocking to get in—silly me!” There’s no way Gabe would have suspected me of secretly letting my lover out of the house. He’d probably have asked why I’d locked the door, and I would have said, “I don’t know—I always lock both doors before I go to sleep as a matter of course, for security.”
None of this ever happened. I successfully deceived my husband. Past tense. My two-year cellar adventure with Liam is over, as is my marriage to Gabe.
When I told the police, the part they found hardest to believe was that I got away with such a close-quarters deception for so long. I assured them that I did, that Gabe, Liam and I had all survived unscathed—because in real life, contrary to every book and movie and Netflix drama you can think of, the loved ones of depraved adulteresses sometimes don’t die in tragic accidents or come down with fatal illnesses. I know! Pretty surprising, isn’t it, after what we’ve been led to believe? You really can have sex with a man who isn’t your husband without prompting a victim-blaming deity to have him clipped purely to spite you.
Still, maybe the reason Gabe’s still alive is because I mainly only cheated on him while he was asleep. When he was awake, I was faithful to him. That ought to count for something. That’s a reasonable compromise. I said all this to the police, who couldn’t tell if I was joking.
* * *
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
I return from the hospital to an empty house; hardly surprising since I live alone. It feels strange and predictable at the same time. Normally I love turning my key in the front door and knowing that everything will be exactly as I left it. I used to dread coming home when I lived with Gabe, and not only because of Gabe himself. There were all the tiny irritations to contend with: the bin liner attached only to one side of the kitchen bin, drooping down low on the other; the jar of Nescafé with the gold foil seal only half torn away, because why waste time tearing off the whole thing when you can shake the coffee powder out of one side of the jar forever?
Today, because I am now officially someone with No-Grandmother-Not-Even-a-Shit-Grandmother, the emptiness feels too much. I would quite like, I think, to walk into the kitchen and see two discarded pairs of shoes under the table and a pair of balled-up socks on the dresser shelf, stuffed between the cereal bowls and the dinner plates.
There are other men. Perhaps I could get the strewn shoes and the balled-up socks without the accompaniment of a drug addict—that would be good.
I make myself a coffee, trying not to notice the Nescafé jar’s clean circumference, absent of all foil, and take it through to the lounge. I turn on the TV to break the silence and sit down on the sofa, aware of myself doing both. This is what a pretentious art-house film about a lonely woman would look like.
Aimlessly, I flick through the channels. Everything looks unappealing, but anything’s better than thinking. As of today, my brother, Drew, is the only family I have. I’d be better off with no one at all.
Eventually I settle for one of those endless news channels, the kind with a ticker moving along the bottom of the frame: “Aston Villa signs Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber to be its new chairman,” “Bus crash in Eastbourne kills nineteen people, seven of them trombone players.” The headlines are so dull, you’re forced to alter them to keep yourself awake.
Dull is good, though. Hypnotically tedious. Maybe if I fix my eyes on the screen, I’ll drift into a catatonic state and reemerge a month or two from now, when hopefully I’ll know what to do again and how to get on with the rest of my life.
I wish I liked alcohol more, or cigarettes. Instead, my favorite things are weak instant coffee and cheese and crackers. If only my tastes were different, I could be well on course for an early death by now—not in a depressing suicidal way but in a way that would be indistinguishable from having too much fun. I’d like to die of Too Much Fun, if only to spite Drew. I don’t want to give the bastard any chance to feel sorry for me.
On the world’s dullest news channel, there’s a policeman talking about the Billy Dead Mates murders. He looks a bit like that newsreader Matthew Am-something-something. Coincidentally, this man also has an unpronounceable surname that has appeared in a box beneath his face: DS Sam Kombothekra of Culver Valley Police.
As someone who lives in Rawndesley, I probably ought to be more worried than I am about this serial killer on the loose. He’s killed twice so far in the Culver Valley. Selfishly, I allowed my concern to dissolve when I read an online news report saying that Billy Dead Mates was targeting pairs of best friends.
That rules me out as one of his victims, I thought, and lost interest immediately. The three best friends I’ve had in my life so far were all chronically disappointing. The first was loyal but so dull she made me want to scream. The second was unreliable—a shapeshifter; less a person in her own right than a series of complex calculations. She told me what I wanted to hear, then walked over to someone else and told them the opposite.
My third best friend was Sarah Durdy. Sarah was a high-status girl at our school: a Tier One. I was a middling Tier Two: I was clever, wore good clothes and had a healthy and fearless disrespect for authority; on the other hand, I was unpredictable and, because I didn’t care about anyone else’s status, I often mixed with the lowest-ranking people.
Sarah Durdy decided I was worth befriending at the beginning of sixth form because she wanted to go out with the boy whose best mate was my boyfriend at the time. She thought I could help her to achieve this, and I did. We remained friends after we’d dumped them. Sarah decided we needed to look further afield; the boys at our school were immature creeps, she said. We needed real men. Her solution was for us to join a tennis club.
I’d never been remotely interested in tennis or any sport, but it didn’t occur to me to say no. I looked up to Sarah. She got what she wanted in all things; it never crossed her mind that there might be any other outcome. I admired that. And one of the things she wanted was full ownership of me. It occasionally felt stifling, but mainly I liked it. Sarah acted as if I belonged to her; meanwhile, chez Tribbeck, I continued to feel more like a visiting foreign exchange student who had overstayed her welcome than a member of the family.
Within a couple of weeks of us joining the tennis club, I’d met someone I fancied in a frenzied, out-of-proportion way. He wasn’t a grown man, but he wasn’t a boy from our school either. He went to a boarding school in Oxfordshire and was only around in the school holidays, he told me. His name was Dorian, and he was so gorgeous that it didn’t matter. He could have been called Toenail and I’d have felt the same.
Sarah said she thought he was aloof and superior, but she was encouraging nonetheless. She told me to go for it, ask him out, he might be less full of himself than he seemed; she’d never ask him out in a million years, but I definitely ought to.
So I did. And to my astonishment, he said yes.
Sarah turned away when I told her the amazing news, as if I’d slapped her across the face. I was scared. I’d seen her freeze others out before, but she’d never been like that with me. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she said angrily. “It’s just, I would have thought you’d have noticed, that’s all. Seeing as how you’re supposed to be my best friend.”
“Noticed what?” I asked, utterly bewildered.
“That I fancy Dorian, too!” she spat at me. Then she started to cry and said, “I’ve tried to keep it to myself because I could see how much you liked him. I did what a good friend does: I stood back, I supported you . . . And you didn’t even care that I liked him, too! All you cared about was your ugly selfish self.”
This was a lie. I have never been ugly and, although I am now arguably one of the most selfish people on the planet, I wasn’t as a teenager. Sarah produced, through her tears, some kind of psycho-verbal formula that I didn’t understand, involving sin debt and friendship severance packages. I was too upset to follow the details, but the gist was clear: I had to end my relationship with Dorian. Fast. And hand him on to Sarah.
All this I did without complaint. Sarah and Dorian went out together for two weeks before she dumped him for a friend of her older brother’s. I decided, after that experience, that the words “best friend” were meaningless; I had no interest in securing myself another one. Ever.
Now, listening to DS Sam Kombothekra tell the woman interviewing him that there are still no leads and police have decided it’s time to appeal to the public for help, I find myself thinking it’s a shame Billy didn’t start his killing spree while I was still at school. He could have identified Sarah Durdy—the worst best friend since records began—and done the world a favor by removing her. I like to think he’d have spared me, once I’d told him the Dorian story.
