Can't Let Go (11 page)

'Yeah,' she said, coming over to stand next to me. 'I
lived there for a couple of years. It's a beautiful city.
That's where I first started doing comedy.'

She was standing so close to me that I could smell the
red wine on her breath. I turned to look at her, at her
profile. And then she turned her head to look at me. Was
there a question in those searching green eyes?

'Do you know Rivers Carillo?' I blurted out those
words without thinking too hard. It had to be asked, but I
felt myself shaking as I waited for the answer. What
would it be? A sharp intake of breath, maybe. A shocked
'How did you guess?' A resigned, 'Okay, yeah, you got
me.' Or an evil laugh, like a villain in a melodrama: 'Yes,
I'm his daughter and now I'm going to take my revenge.'

I turned to face her, wondering what I'd see in her eyes.
And all that was there was an interested, enquiring look.
'Riva Scarillo? No, I've never heard of her. Is she good?
What kind of material does she do?'

'She's . . . no, it doesn't matter. Forget it.' Relief
flooded me like embarrassment. I smiled, looked at my
watch. 'Listen, I really should go.' I picked up my bag,
and I touched Zoey on the shoulder, and she followed me
down the long narrow hallway of mirrors. 'This was fun,'
she said.

'Yes, it was.' It had been, until I'd spoiled it by getting
scared and suspicious.

'Let's do it again sometime,' she said, and she kissed me
on the cheek.

I saw a lot of Zoey after that. I'd always been careful
not to let people into my life, but there was something
about her that felt familiar, safe. I recognised
her, in a way. She seemed to be the me that I could have
been. If Lizzie, that annoying, theatrical, attention grabbing
teenager, had been allowed to grow up
normally; if she had calmed down and found a focus, had
learned how to interact with other human beings; learned
some patience and some generosity, learned how to share
and make room for other people . . . if all those things had
happened, then maybe Zoey was the kind of person she
would have grown up to be.

I enjoyed spending time with Zoey. We got into the
habit of meeting up late afternoon or early evening. She
worked lunchtimes in a bar in the West End, and didn't
want to trek all the way home to Clapham on those long,
hot afternoons if she had a gig in central London; and
because she was preparing for her Edinburgh show she
had a gig almost every evening. I kept her company. It
was the school holidays, and I wanted to fill the time. We
found places to hang out where we could kill time and stay
cool. We'd go and see teatime screenings of films in air conditioned
cinemas – we didn't really care what we saw.
Or we'd drink iced coffee or herbal tea in cool, white
basement cafes in art galleries and museums. Sometimes
we'd go for an early meal, finding cheap deals in ethnic
restaurants – dim sum, cut-price Indian buffets, a little
Italian restaurant with Chianti bottles on the wall and an
early-bird set-price meal, an Ethiopian place where we ate
spicy meat stew with flatbread and our fingers. Zoey
always enthused over her food. Even in the worst
restaurants she would find something she liked. She liked
to share her food – holding bits out for me to try, or
picking things from my plate. I liked it. It made me feel
part of a proper friendship.

Sometimes I'd go to her gigs with her. I became a
comedy groupie, you might say. Zoey seemed as reluctant
as I was to have an empty diary, although presumably for
different reasons. 'I'd rather do an open ten than sit at
home doing nothing,' she told me. An 'open ten', I'd
learned, was an unpaid ten-minute spot that newer comics
did in the middle of a comedy bill, in order to get
experience and to showcase what they could do. A 'paid
twenty' was what she preferred, but she said, 'It's all stage
time. It's all good.'

I became interested in what Zoey called 'the room' –
not just what each venue looked like, but how it – or
rather the audience in that room – responded. There were
fascinating differences. One night there was a gig at a club
with an all-woman line-up, a glitzy room in Clerkenwell
with chandeliers and exposed pipes sprayed in gold paint.
The largely female audience was loudly enthusiastic,
particularly at anything remotely filthy. They whooped
and stamped their feet when Zoey did her oral-sex
material. Then there was a gig down in leafy Richmond in
a cramped room above a pub. It was an older audience, a
lot of couples in their thirties and forties, and they were
polite and supportive but much quieter. Zoey seemed to
struggle, the first time I'd ever seen her do less than
brilliantly. It was a tiny stage area, hemmed in by tables,
giving her less room to roam around than usual. She was
doing her tried and tested routine but it was clear to me
that she expected a more enthusiastic response. In the
middle of one bit of material, a woman sitting in the front
suddenly called out, 'I love your trousers. Where did you
get them?'

'Weirdest heckle ever,' said Zoey afterwards. 'And you
know what? I could have done something with it. I got
these pants at Fat Face. There's gotta be a line there. Some
kind of veiled insult . . .' She screwed up her face, trying
to work it out, and I wondered if next time I saw her live
there'd be a new joke about it.

With Zoey, the conversation was often about her
material, her jokes. She would try things out on me and
get me to respond, and we would free-associate. I liked it.
I felt that I was involved in her creative process, and it
gave me a buzz to listen to her on stage, making comedy
out of something that one of us had seen or mentioned
earlier in the week. And also, it was the kind of conversation
I could do. In a way, it was similar to listening to
Danny talk about music. Zoey didn't want to know
anything about me. She didn't want to hear deep stuff:
secrets and revelations and what I really thought about
things. She just needed to use me as a sounding board. We
kept it mostly shallow, and I found that comforting.

One evening, when Zoey didn't have a gig, we spent
another evening in her flat, that cosy little space
hidden high in the eaves of the big house in Clapham. She
cooked for me. She opened all the windows wide and
turned on a fan, and tried to get some air into the flat. The
smell of garlic, bacon and tomatoes wafted out of the
minuscule cupboard of a kitchen as she cooked spaghetti
sauce, which she pronounced the American way, with the
emphasis on the word 'spaghetti' rather than 'sauce'. I
sipped red wine and browsed the books on her shelves.

Her book collection looked like mine would have
done, had I not had several purges in my life. She had the
whole
Little House
series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, in well thumbed
paperbacks. I'd loved those books when I was a
child. I'd left my copies in a box in my parents' attic and
when they'd moved to the bungalow where they now
lived I'd told them to get rid of all my childhood stuff.
They sold all my books to a dealer for the grand sum of
thirty pounds. Zoey had a whole row of Dorothy L.
Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle; she had Jane Austen, the
Bronte sisters, a few Dickens. She had books by P.G. Wodehouse and Nancy Mitford. She had
Rebecca
and
The
Catcher in the Rye
and
To Kill a Mockingbird;
she had
Donna Tartt's
The Secret History
and
Scruples
by Judith
Krantz. I'd owned all of these at some point in my life, and
I'd jettisoned them all along the way. I had left many of
my books behind in a flat in Finsbury Park that I had
shared with three other people including a guy called
Julian. I walked away when things got uncomfortably
serious between Julian and me, and I hadn't had the time
or inclination to work out which books were mine. And
besides, they wouldn't have fitted in the boot of my car.

I pulled the copy of
Scruples
from Zoey's shelf and
flicked through it fondly. It was the book that taught me
everything I thought I needed to know about sex.
Something was scrawled inside the cover. 'Who's Judith
Spiegelman?' I asked as I deciphered the handwriting.

Zoey laughed from the kitchen. She came back into the
main room, drying her hands on a towel. 'Me, until the big
split. Zoey's my middle name. I figured it suited the new
me better.'

I looked at her, standing there, laughing, the light
catching the tips of her frizzy hair and making them glow
golden. Her green eyes held mine, unblinkingly, and I
came very close to telling her – not the whole story, but
about Lizzie, and about changing my name when I was
eighteen. It was something else we had in common. But
instead I turned away and pretended to be incredibly
interested in the postcards on the wall. I should have told
her. I wish I had. Things might have been so different if
we had shared our secrets.

I saw a lot of Danny, too. I'd spend the early part of
the evening with Zoey, and then, if I wasn't going to
her gig, I would go out later with Danny. I'd get
home and instead of my usual long nights with a book or
the television, I'd go round to Danny's flat and we'd do
something – anything – together. Two or three times a
week we went out or stayed in together. I'd never been so
busy, so in demand, in my life.

Danny took me to see some kind of folky American
band at the Barbican: lots of banjos and fiddles. I didn't
like it much. There was no atmosphere in that big
auditorium, and the audience seemed to be made up of
deeply serious people stroking their chins appreciatively.
Afterwards we went for a curry and Danny explained the
music to me. I loved it when he did that. His voice was
very soft and I could pick up the gist without having to
listen to every single word. But for as long as he talked,
that was a whole part of the conversation where I knew I
was safe from questions or from having to talk about
myself.

Then, another night, we went to see a friend of his who
played in a band. I enjoyed that a lot more. It was noisy,
dark, smoky and very hot, and I snuggled up to Danny
and got lost in the music. We stayed in together some
nights as well, round at his flat. He would cook me pasta
or we'd order a takeaway, and we watched D V D boxed
sets of intense American T V crime dramas, or listened to
some of his favourite music. And we talked. Not about
ourselves, but about things: films and T V and music and
books.

Neither Danny nor I were that good at normal conversation.
We exchanged facts and opinions and talked about
things – actual tangible things, not feelings – because that
felt safe. With Zoey, all I had to do was listen to her talk.
She made no conversational demands of me beyond the
occasional laugh or comment, or the odd interjection to
keep her on the subject in hand. With Danny, it was
different. We were both awkward, and it struck me that I
had no idea how to talk normally to a boyfriend. I had no
idea how to make normal conversation. I was so starved
of usual social intercourse that I found it easier to
substitute facts for social niceties. It was a form of shyness,
I guess, or maybe self-defence. Facts were good. Facts
were safe. They were a useful currency. I could tell
Danny something that he might not know and he could
tell me something in return. And it could almost pass for a
conversation, if we kept it up long enough.

It was amazing to me how good the sex could be
between two such awkward, inexpressive people. Or
maybe it was good because it was something else to do
that stopped us having to talk properly to each other;
something that filled the time when normal lovers would
be swapping endearments or discussing their feelings for
each other. Sex with Danny was tender and gentle, full of
kisses and stroking, and hair being pushed away from my
face. It was full of his mumblings – 'Is this okay? And
this?' There was usually music playing while we made
love. Afterwards, if we were at Danny's place (and we
usually were), he would get up and walk across the room
to change the C D , and then he'd get back into bed and
hold me, and stroke me some more, and he would tell me
something about the music on the stereo in his soft, gentle,
almost monotonous voice. And I wanted to cry, every
time, because I felt guilty about sleeping with such a sweet
and lovely man. I felt guilty about letting him stay in my
life. I felt guilty about taking advantage of him. I felt
guilty about not warning him about me.

We went for a picnic one Sunday. Danny had
surprised me mid-morning by knocking on my
door with a rolled blanket under his arm and a plastic
carrier bag in his hand. We lay on his itchy blanket in
Regent's Park, surrounded by hundreds of other people
doing the same thing. We ate slightly soft pork pies and
bags of crisps, washed down with lukewarm beer and cans
of Coke. 'Sorry, this is a bit of a shit picnic,' he said.

'No, it's nice.'

'I should have brought some salad. Maybe some
tomatoes or a tub of coleslaw. Or maybe some of those
leaves in a bag. All that posh stuff, like rocket.'

'Rocket. When did we all start eating rocket?'

'Or frisée.'

'Endive.'

'Radicchio.'

'Lollo rosso.'

'You win,' Danny said, turning to me and kissing me
on the forehead. 'Also, maybe some fancy sandwiches,
like brie and grape.'

'Stilton and banana.'

'Mozzarella and melon.'

'Camembert and castor oil.'

He laughed. We kissed again. We held hands and lay
there, side by side, in the sun, in companionable silence. It
was nice. And then it almost imperceptibly faded from
nice to not-so-nice. The silence went on. It went on too
long. It stopped being companionable and started being
awkward. My hand started to sweat in his, and my fingers
started to go numb. The silence hung over us. One of us
would have to say something soon, or else I could imagine
us lying there for the rest of our lives, neither of us ever
talking again. Danny squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.
He disentangled his fingers and shifted slightly onto his
side. He looked at me, and stroked the hair away from my
face. He leaned over me. He took a deep breath. I thought
he was about to say something dramatic about the state of
our relationship. But instead he asked me if I wanted an ice
cream.

I lay there on that blanket waiting for Danny to come
back, squinting at the hot summer sky, looking at the
other picnickers out of the corners of my eyes. It wasn't
even August yet and already we were taking it for
granted, that hot summer weather. Already we had the
Mediterranean mind set. Already the whole of Britain
woke up every day knowing it was going to be hot. We
were taking no precautions – taking no jumpers or
waterproofs or umbrellas with us when we set off for the
day. The whole country was making plans as if every day
for the foreseeable future was going to be hot and dry and
sunny.

No precautions. We'd been lulled into an unusual sense
of security about the weather. How quickly it had
happened. And then I thought about me, and the sense of
security I'd allowed myself to indulge in. I was doing
things I'd never done before. I was dating someone, I had
a friend. I was enjoying myself, doing what normal people
did. I had stopped taking precautions. That note had
scared me more than anything else had ever done, in my
whole life. And then I'd just thrown it away. I'd said that
it didn't matter; I'd allowed myself to assume it was a
practical joke. And somehow, because that note didn't
matter, because that one fear was false, I'd allowed myself
to relax, to drop my guard, as if I wasn't a killer but just a
normal person.

The sky was high and big and so pale it was almost
white. It was a huge hot blank space above me. It was a
huge blank sheet of paper. And that was when I realised
what I was doing, all the time I was with Zoey and Danny,
all that uncharacteristic social activity. Summer was
looming above me and ahead of me like a big blank sheet
of paper – hot and white and empty. I was trying to fill it.
I was trying to scribble all over its pages, like the pages in
a diary. I was trying to fill the space with people and
things. I was trying to keep my fear at bay.

Summer was the most dangerous season. It was big and
it was empty and it could seem endless, and it made me do
stupid, evil things. There was too much time and too
much light, and it had to be filled. That was what had gone
so horribly wrong in San Francisco. The summer had
stretched out ahead of me. The possibilities were endless
and overwhelming. I had felt tiny in that big city, like a
little ant scurrying around trying to impose order and
purpose on my life. Maybe that was why I clung to Rivers
Carillo like that. Knowing that I was going to see him
again helped me draw lines and margins on my blank
sheet of paper. It helped me fill my diary.

Hot summers like this summer were the worst. Not
only were they endless and empty but they were relentless
as well. The sun beat down every day on a mission to burn
and expose. It dried up ponds and puddles and killed
grass, leaving behind dust and faded litter and hard,
caked, cracked earth – soil burned and purified down to its
very essence. Day by day London was drying out, getting
dirtier, becoming more intense, revealing the cracks at the
heart. The days of intense heat were piling up behind us
and ahead of us. Travelling by Tube, it felt as if all the
days of progressively hotter weather were being stored
down there, in those tunnels, waiting to explode. The hot
sun had cracked and shrivelled the paintwork on my
windowsills, uncovering the rotten wood underneath.
Even the little bits of paper, the torn-up note that I threw
out of my window, were still there, in the gutter outside
my block of flats, drying out and fading but still winking
at me, mocking me, every time I left the building.

Danny and Zoey – all they were to me were frantic
scribbles in my diary. I lay there in Regent's Park under
the sun, surrounded by people and people and people, as
far as I could see, and I shivered with fear. Nothing had
changed. Nothing would ever change. This would never
get better. How could it? I would never stop being a killer.