Another Justified Sinner Read online

  She was American. She spoke with disgust at the Americans, at the way they sucked the world dry, how they depleted everyone of everything. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was dressed top to toe in sweatshop clothes and eating pizza in a pizza chain and, besides, things weren’t really so different here. In fact, we were all the better for it. I loved all the chains, especially the coffee ones: their familiar muzak, so typically jazz, and the waft of over-extracted beans, the identikit chairs and unobtrusive wall panels. And, to tell you the truth, I’d never given any of it much thought. But I wanted to sleep with her, and her lips were all rouged, like they were ripe for clamping my dick. And it was making me hard just watching her, so casually slurping at her wine, like I knew she might later be slurping at me. And so I leaned forwards, I nodded sympathetically, and I said what a tragedy it was, what an absolute tragedy – or did I mean travesty? – and when I leaned forwards, she leaned forwards too, and her breasts were shoved up against the table, looking soft, round and fuckable. I pushed the dough balls to one side and I kissed her.

  I had more clout as a couple. I seemed to gather in weight and influence and sphere. Soon I had planets orbiting around me, all eager to be my friend because they were Nancy’s friends, too. We were like that star couple in the Hollywood films. The one that everyone stares at and whispers about, like they command some cosmic power. We balanced each other perfectly: there was something for everyone. We were the greatest accessory that anyone could have.

  I didn’t think it would last forever. I was very cold about it at first, and I bet I sound cold writing about it now. I was just a nineteen-year-old boy looking to get laid. And I got laid. Oh yes. But I also fell in love, pretty hard as it happens, and it seems utterly pointless denying that now. I guess love is interdependency; when you realise that being without the other leaves you shocked and wheezing, as if you’ve been chest-struck.

  I knew things must be pretty serious when I took her home to meet my mum, in the second year. I had never brought back any girl to meet my mum. OK, that was probably because there weren’t any other girls. But, if there had been, I wouldn’t have led them down that garden path, as it were.

  My mum was a frail, meagre, feeble woman who let everyone walk all over her. My brother wasn’t there that night, thank god; he was out with his friends. We conversed in unspoken words about how she would cope once he was gone, too. I could make out the conversation in her head by the way her eyebrows were dancing and the veins in her forehead throbbed. She seemed to have no eyelashes. She never laughed but only smiled, and even this looked an effort. It was a dinner of silence.

  Mum went to bed first, although Nancy and I were guests, of a sort, and when she had gone, there was such complete, impenetrable sadness that Nancy had an asthma attack. She blamed the cats, but I knew it wasn’t them, that it must be the sadness that clogged up the sink, that rattled the pans, that stuck tablecloths to the table and whistled the kettle. I felt contaminated by it, heady and gutted: and rather than stay the night, we decided to leave a note for my mum and left by the last train back. Nancy was sighing and yawning and looking confused, but I knew I couldn’t be there, I couldn’t bear to see those photos turned against the wall, I couldn’t bear to see his shoes still on the shoe rack.

  I saw that sadness in the mirror on the day Nancy died. I don’t know why, but I was trying to be sensible, I was trying to keep it together. My flatmates went out, they weren’t sure what to do, but I said I wanted to be on my own.

  I watched them walk out of the flat. They were walking so slowly, like they’d never be able to walk fast again. Their backs were cowed. They were grieving themselves, their eyes red and hollow, a realisation that this was the start of connections being eroded one by one; and they would never win this battle, for life and death are irreparably linked (in fact, the same thing), and the pair shall always prove victor.

  But I can bring her back to life just by telling you this. The happiest memory. God, that is hard – what’s the happiest memory? Our first holiday, together; yes, that must be it. When I worked in some office reception, and she waitressed a bit, and her folks clubbed together and sent a contribution from Seattle. We had never felt so giggly and grown up, so conspiratorial and free. An entire life of going on holidays with parents, with family, and now we were a unit of two, a little family of our own: booking tickets, taking planes, making decisions, snapping photos. She sat next to the pool, and her feet were swinging. Such colours in the sky. The sun set into an inscrutable horizon. The hotel lights stammered on, all twinkly and magical. The sound of people inside, a susurration of Spanish. The thick scent of jasmine and fried sardines.

  Chapter

  Two

  Here’s the thing: I always fail the psychometric tests that they give you in interviews. I say my favourite colour is white and my favourite number is zero. But they lap it up, dazzled. For now I represent a challenge; an affront. ‘We need a maverick,’ said Finnegan. ‘Someone who thinks outside the box,’ he said. But outside the box is space, nothingness, void. I got too far outside the box. I just floated from day to day.

  One day it was Sunday, and I went to work. I had no qualms about working on a Sunday; in fact, I relished it. I liked the way the streets were quiet and empty and there was only the occasional tourist or pissed-up reveller on the ‘walk of shame’ home. There was an eerie solace to everything, and you could even hear birdsong through the thrum of the buses. I listened to it as I made my way through meandering alleyways and passed quaint, dark pubs with panelled-wood rooms; then the tall, striking buildings; the modern and archaic; gargoyles and plinths peering up at one-hundred-metre daggers of glass.

  And I liked the way the smugness started from my belly and ended up in a zipper-like grin on my face. I liked how the boss looked up and assessed me, with a little flicker of surprise – the tremulous nod of approval. All the time I was there, even if I just wanked into a spreadsheet, I would feel virtuous and brilliant and top dog and top drawer.

  ‘It’s a fucking Sunday,’ I thought, as I stood in the office and surveyed my city. ‘It’s fucking Sunday and I’m here.’

  They’d only recently given me the job. Through a sheer fluke, as it happens. I had been at a party, full of dicks and whack jobs. One of Nancy’s friends had thrown it – someone who was born into money and would die out of money, probably a heart attack while reclining in a rooftop spa pool.

  Anyway, Nancy was desperate to get us talking; she was desperate to turn our luck around. I was just doing administrative temp stuff, then. So she wheeled and dealed and coquettishly teased him. There was lots of hair flicking and eye fluttering and laughing at miniscule jokes and softly wetting her lips. I could see it all happening, and I tried not to care, tried to see it as a compliment.

  ‘This is Matthew Rickshaw,’ she said, her pupils big and unfathomable. ‘He works in the city.’

  She made it sound like a magical city, like the Emerald City, come-meet-the-fucking-wizard city. It was a different city to my own; threadbare and worn, full of holes and impurities.

  But it turns out it really is who you know. Matt set me up with Finnegan Fishman, which led to my climb through the world of commodities exchange and dancing figures. But it also led to Matt kissing my girlfriend. It led to my girlfriend being dead. Life can be funny like that. It can go ahead and pass moral sentence all by itself.

  But it’s not all bad. Because I’ve excelled in this job. At work, I show guile. I am relaxed and extrovert, I have a spring in my step and a sparkle in my eye. To be a good commodities broker, you need zing, pizzazz, the gift of the gab. I have all this and more. ‘Ability to negotiate’ was on the job description. I thought about how the untruths just slip off my tongue, and I signed up straightaway. Lies can be a good thing. Lying can buy you snazzy clothes, a tropical beach, a pretty girl on your arm. Lies can give you success.

  It’s a shame that Nancy didn’t see it that way. When we left university, we struggled, but sh
e seemed to revel in it, at first – it conformed to the story in her head. She loved renting the tiny flat in zone 6, with slits for windows and a half-size bath. She loved eating beans on toast and watching box sets in pyjamas. She sometimes got a bit down that she couldn’t find work as an actress, but that wasn’t fuelled by a desire to pay bills, it was a desire to fan an inner flame. She’d come from auditions with her eyes sad and droopy and a kind of atrophy in her limbs. ‘I didn’t get it,’ she’d say, but even these four words were an effort. She never got it. She never got the parts and she never quite got that maybe she just didn’t have ‘it’. She skulked in corridors, waiting for auditions, refusing to give up her dream. There was the odd am-dram – sorry, ‘fringe’ – production, a photo shoot in a magazine (I think it was for shoes). She got some minor model work. At least I knew she wasn’t sucking cocks.

  The sad thing is that she was actually a brilliant actress. I would get tingles watching her practise her lines in the mirror. The way she looked at her reflection, the way she’d change the expression, even the animus in her eyes… I would see her and this reflection as two different people, and it made me panic. It worried me to see how she could inhabit these characters; the way her face could fall so easily into those feelings. It was the opposite to me: I’m a terrible actor with fiction, but a brilliant actor at real life. I always seem to get the best lines.

  So I thought she’d cheer up when I started trading – and, for a while, she did. But there were long hours to put in and parties to have and contacts to network. On her side, there were too many dinners for one and too many one-way conversations. I couldn’t buy her approval, although I tried hard. It was strange, sometimes, to come back very late and see her curled up asleep in one of my old sweaters. It was like she was cheating on me with an old version of myself, one that didn’t exist anymore. How can you not change, endlessly, countlessly, time and again? Every second, millions of cells in the body are replaced with new ones. Every little experience changes and adapts the brain. So how can we stay the same person? Why was the sweater scrunched up in her hands, why was she loving the form I had made a ghost? It had shrunk in the wash; it now fitted her, not me.

  But it’s me who sees ghosts, now. She always did laugh the loudest.

  You see, Nancy’s death left a missingness in the world: like the imprint of your shoe in mud or that rush of air as somebody passes. It feels like she should still be here, that maybe she might come back, that all the signs suggest it.

  Her cupboard, for example: in those early days, before the funeral. Her dresses and cardigans still messily lined up, belts heaped up on a shelf, shoes slotted in underneath, like mollusc shells: things that looked waiting, expectant, ready for the right-sized body to fill them. Looking through the clothes, I had memories of her wearing them: that one was Cornwall, this one was the National Gallery. That yellow dress she had teamed up with a straw hat, as we swept over Hyde Park, the sun beating down on our bodies, our noses getting pink, a lazy Sunday stretched before us. I saw there were still grass stains on the hem, and that is when I lost it.

  Everything was marked by absence. Everywhere were shapes and indentations. Intangibles turned tangible and spoken words slammed into walls; banged into cupboards like kinetic particles of heat. Mirrors reflected what wasn’t and rooms grew gaps – gaps grew on gaps – like cancer of the hole. The kettle shrieked her name, the curtains fell like hair. Silence clung to clothes and hissed in the ears like a body deflating. Numerous people called round to see me and, although sympathetic and cooing and making all the right noises, they didn’t seem to notice that anything was different in the flat. The paintings hung on the wall and there was this hint of perfume in the air and that coffee book was open on exactly the same page. They drank from glasses once held by presence, once bought by form: absence trapped between the fingers, a sniff of skin once kissed and held. Nobody noticed, nobody but me, who had to pick up that invisible body and hide it away.

  I did this by moving out. I did it very quickly, so I wouldn’t turn into a forever griever like my mum. I had a conversation with our flatmates Jamie and George about who might take over the room, how I might break out of the contract. They listened to what I had to say and nodded uneasily. Trying to smile but not smile too much. Unsure when to make a joke, whether they should speak softly around me. They were upset too, catastrophically upset (I heard them weeping sometimes through the walls); but they knew my grief must be worse and this frightened them. We were British, we were blokes, we were crap at this sort of thing. Nobody knew the codes, the etiquette, the conduct. Nobody teaches you that. Something had snapped between us. They would never treat me the same again.

  Jamie and George were friends from university. They were one of the first planets to orbit around me and Nancy. They were both in Nancy’s drama class. Jamie was gay and in love with George who was in love with Nancy, who had just fallen in love with me. It was complicated. But it worked. We existed in harmony through some crooked commensalism.

  What I’m saying is – the system worked fine. Nobody wanted to rock the boat and risk losing contact with the object of their desire. It must have been painful for Jamie and George at times, but they came to accept it. And, anyway, even they would admit that the cult of Marcus and Nancy was exhilarating. We just carried charisma, like a mist of cologne or the heat of fire. We went well together. We added up to more than the sum of our parts. But I’ve told you this already… I mustn’t keep saying it. It’s just that those were the happiest days of my life. You must have had them, too. They’re usually when you’re young. Proper young. You feel heady and invincible. All the songs sound louder, all the colours are brighter, and life is a list of ‘first things’ that you can’t wait to discover.

  #

  I wanted to punish God for Nancy’s death, so I decided to break the commandments in order. The first one is kind of lame, truth be told. ‘You shall have no other gods before Me.’ Well, this is the 21st century and I can fucking idolatrise until kingdom come. What don’t I label a god? I worship at the altars of naked women in magazines, of waitresses who bring me tasty food, of movie men who say all the best lines. Fuck it, I even made Nancy a goddess, for a bit, in those early days. I read between her lines and I genuflected at her breasts and I supped at her pussy until we transubstantiated into cum. You get the drift.

  The second one is ridiculous, something about making yourself a carved image, a likeness of heaven – idolatry, I guess. So, anyway, I went out to the shops and I bought anything I could lay my hands on: awful posters, crucifixes, some pisstake cartoons. And I bowed down to them in mock worship, I asked God to enter into my emptiness and fill it with something, anything, just fill it up and reseal it. Then I took everything into the side garden, and I struck a match on it all, and just watched it incinerate.

  I was trying to break a commandment a day, but some are too easy. So while I watched everything burn, I struck off number three, and I spat out God’s name and I cursed him or her or it or whatever the fuck is in heaven. I took his name in vain and I delighted in the old-fashioned thrill of retorting ‘Oh god’, ‘For heaven’s sake’: all of that. When the flames died down, I looked up into the stars and saw things twinkling down at me that were billions of years old, that were already dead. And I wanted to be up there, in the swirls and whirls of the outer galaxies. Perhaps up there is an advanced planet with an extraordinary telescope that you can point at Earth and you will see the past pulsing, your history reanimate, the lights of her eyes all still lit up and dancing.

  I remember they told me that in Physics GCSE. Fifteen years old. The teacher, Mr Lennon, jabbing furiously at the board, trying to whip us into a frenzy. He always tried so hard to excite us, to get us interested in the subject. How his heart must have sunk when he looked around the class and saw a boy yawning into his fist, a girl passing a note to her friend, the sound of bubblegum smacking against somebody’s chin, a glazed eye peering up at the time, willing it to strike lunch o
’clock. But there was also me in that class, and I sat up a bit straighter when he told me the bit about the stars. It was like fiction was fact and I didn’t know what to believe or disbelieve. My lies could be credible. My life was anything I said it was. The world was malleable and shifting.

  I saw that the note was passing over to me. ‘Marcus’, it said on the front. It was covered in hearts. I looked up and saw Charlotte winding her long blonde tresses around her finger. She blew me a kiss from sticky lipsticked lips.

  I could scarcely believe it. But then, the stars were actually dead and yet present, and time travel was possible, and reality was unreal. Maybe Charlotte fancied me. I had lost a little weight. I had stolen Jackson’s jacket. I unfolded the note and there was the punch line: ‘you thick ugly purvurt [sic]. I wouldn’t fancy you in a million years.’ Then half the class exploded into laughter and Mr Lennon stopped teaching us facts and started waving his arms about, trying to conduct our behaviour. It was atonal as fuck.

  Jackson had left school by then, but he had a girlfriend in my year. He was standing by the school gates when I left that day; smoking a cigarette, trying to look like Michael Hutchence before the sex noose stuff.

  I tried to shrink, to camouflage, to turn invisible, but he spotted me at once. ‘That’s my jacket!’ he barked, and pulled me by the collar. ‘That’s my fucking jacket!’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I stuttered. My policy was always to deny everything, even when all the evidence was stacked against me. Even if I could plant the tiniest seed of doubt in their minds, the possibility of my innocence, I called that a victory.

  ‘How could you not know? You little shit! I’ve been looking for that jacket everywhere.’

  ‘Mum put it in my bedroom,’ I lied. ‘I thought she’d gotten it for me or something. She must have mixed up the washing.’