Can't Let Go (18 page)

Rivers Carillo was always writing. He was a poet.
If you were to ask him what he did, that's what
he'd say. He carried with him a small black
hardback notebook, pocket-sized, with a piece of black
elastic that kept the book shut. I've seen notebooks like it
since, for sale in bookshops. They're called Moleskines.
They cost more than a notebook should, but people seem
to buy them anyway. Sometimes Rivers would take the
book out of his pocket and write in it, using a silver
propelling pencil that he held very close to the tip, which
made his writing tiny and square and almost illegible. I
know: I used to try to read it over his shoulder or upside down,
but he'd hide what he was writing, putting his arm
across it like a swotty kid in an exam.

I could picture him writing. There would be a look
into the middle distance, a narrowing of the eyes, a half smile,
sometimes a nod, and out would come the
notebook –
scribble scribble scribble
– and then he'd put it
away again, twist the pencil shut so the lead was hidden,
and look at me with a surprised expression, like he'd
forgotten I was ever there. Sometimes I'd ask him to
read me what he'd written but he never would. He
would just shake his head enigmatically and resume
whatever conversation we'd been having before the
muse struck.

I saw him give a poetry reading once. He hadn't invited
me. He didn't know I was going to be there. He hadn't
even told me about it. I saw his name, one on a list of
several poets, on a leaflet that was lying on Joanna's
kitchen table. I picked up the leaflet, was still holding it
when Joanna walked in. ' D o you want to come with me?'
she asked. 'It'll probably be a tremendous bore, but we
could always go for dinner afterwards.'

It
was
a bit of a bore, in fact. We sat on tiny stools in a
cramped room at the back of a second-hand bookshop in
North Beach. The whole room smelled of dust and
mouldy books. There were about twenty of us in the
audience, and various people read poems out loud, and I
struggled not to fidget while I forced my face into a
facsimile of Joanna's ethereal poetry-listening expression.
Rivers was on halfway through the proceedings. His
poems were short and full of hard consonants. He read out
loud quite well, full of fire and anger. He made eye contact
with me at one point, looked away, looked back at me
briefly and frowned, and then he ignored me for the rest
of the reading.

Afterwards there was red wine. I think it was bad red
wine, because it hurt my throat when I swallowed it. I
bought a pamphlet of some of Rivers's poems for a dollar.
He barely acknowledged me but later, when people
started to leave, he came up to me and whispered: 'Here.
Tomorrow. Midday. I'll make lunch.'

I returned to the bookshop the next day, promptly on
the dot of twelve. It was closed. The door was locked
and shuttered, there were no boxes of books outside, no
sign of life. It was on a steep side-street, and I sat on the
steps for a while and enjoyed the view. Houses clung to
the vertiginous slopes, and there were little patches of
green and pink and red from window boxes and roof
terraces. Down the hill, at the end of the street, I could see
a much bigger green patch – Washington Square, full of
people in small groups sitting on the grass and enjoying
the sun. It was a warm day with a bright blue sky and a
brisk breeze sending fluffy white clouds dancing across
the sun from time to time. Had anyone seen me waiting
there? Was anyone looking out of their window? Had
anyone seen the way I leaped up to kiss Rivers Carillo
when he toiled up the hill carrying a brown-paper grocery
bag about ten minutes later? Did someone see us
together? Had someone been bearing a grudge all that
time?

He had a key. The shop belonged to a friend of his. It
only opened at eccentric, occasional hours. Rivers had
borrowed it for the day, for this assignation. He ushered
me inside, into the smelly darkness, and pulled up the
dusty blinds.

Thinking back to that day, Rivers had every right to
call me a prick-tease. A deserted bookshop in a quiet street
on a Wednesday afternoon. A blanket on the floor of the
back room, the curtains drawn. A picnic – bread and pate
and cheese and red wine. Joni Mitchell on the stereo. The
archetypal seduction scene. It had probably worked for a
dozen other women. But I wasn't a woman. I was a girl, a
stupid little girl.

Rivers had a hand on my knee, and then the hand was
on my bare thigh, and then some of his fingers were
touching me through the gusset of my white cotton
knickers. I moved his hand, it moved back, I moved it
away again. I pressed into his kiss and our tongues got
tangled up together. My nose squashed against his. I
pressed my tits against his chest, trying to suggest an
alternative place for his wandering hands to go. He got the
message, ran his hands up my back, unhooked my bra –
he'd obviously had practice – and cupped my breasts in
his hands, teasing the nipples with his thumbs. He pushed
me down onto the blanket, firm hands on my shoulders,
but I wriggled away, pulled my skirt down, pulled my
blouse down. 'Not here,' I said, hoping to give the
impression that all I didn't like was the dust and the dirt
and the darkness, and the breadcrumbs all over the
blanket.

Maybe he enjoyed delayed gratification. He smiled at
me. He didn't get cross. He didn't call me 'Little Miss
Fucking Prick-tease', like he did later. He didn't seem in
the least bit surprised or annoyed. He smiled at me, as if to
say, 'How dare I presume that you'd want to have sex on
a blanket on the floor.'

'Sorry,' I said. And again, 'Not here.'

If I'd have said, 'No,' what would have happened? Or,
'Not now, not yet, not until . . .'

Until what? Some kind of declaration of love, or
commitment, or intent – or a marriage proposal, I guess. I
was an eighteen-year-old vicar's daughter from a small
Sussex seaside resort. I wasn't about to lose my virginity
without considerable justification.

That pamphlet of poems that I bought – I carried it
around with me and tried hard to like the poems. I
had, somewhere at home, a slim Faber paperback with
poems by Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. I thought that
maybe Rivers's poems would fit somewhere in that book,
if only in terms of the terse language and the metaphors. I
was good at metaphors. I knew how to explain them and
to write about them. I was less good at judging poetic
quality. I'm not sure I'd read enough bad poetry to be able
to identify it confidently at that stage. Or rather, not bad
poetry but mediocre poetry, average poetry. I can't
remember even one line of those poems now. I destroyed
that pamphlet. A while back I tried to see if any of his
poems had survived, had made it to the internet, but
they've disappeared as if they never existed in the first
place.

I had that pamphlet of poems in my bag on the day that
I killed Rivers Carillo. It was with me when I caught the
bus home afterwards, from the bus stop at the plaza at the
Presidio end of the Golden Gate Bridge. I could feel it
burning a hole in my bag. I got off the bus somewhere in
the Marina District, an area full of trendy bars and cafes
and yuppie shops. I bought a magazine –
People
or
Entertainment Weekly
or something equally brash – and I
sat in a coffee shop pretending to read. I sat in the window
of the shop, facing outwards, watching the fog descend
and the evening get darker, and as I pretended to read that
magazine my hands were in my lap, under the table,
shredding that pamphlet of poems, tearing and ripping as
if my future depended on it. I put all the shreds in between
the pages of the magazine, rolled it up tightly and threw it
into a street-corner trash can. Then I caught the bus back
to Joanna's house. I let myself into that big, empty house,
climbed the stairs to my bedroom and got on with my life.

My second-to-last day in San Francisco, the day
before I killed Rivers Carillo, he took me to
Sausalito. Sausalito: a jaunty name. I had a
picture in my head of brightly coloured sails snapping in
the breeze. Rivers had dangled the name in front of me
like a sparkling jewel when he'd whispered to me in the
hallway of Joanna's house, making our tryst for the
following day.

What was I expecting to happen? I was expecting
something, certainly. My second-to-last day. Something
needed to be said or done between us. It seemed
appropriate, touching, that he'd told me to meet him at the
ferry terminal, down near the sea lions, where we'd met
that first day when we went to Alcatraz together.

This could be my last day with Rivers Carillo, was all I
could think on the ferry on the way over to Sausalito. I
knew the script. He'd declare his love for me, tell me how
he couldn't live without me, beg me to stay, offer to
follow me back to London. He'd propose to me out of the
blue, as if he were Maxim de Winter and I was the naive
young girl he'd befriended on holiday. I got one aspect of
the casting right, at least.

Sausalito had a salty tang in the air. A fresh breeze, a
bright blue sky, the jangling masts and rigging of
sailing boats in the harbour. A picture-postcard park. A
street full of cafes and restaurants and shops. People were
sitting outside the restaurants eating big plates of food –
beautiful, shiny people. I wanted to sit there with Rivers
and have lunch, and then go and browse in the shops,
which were bound to be full of driftwood sculptures and
scented candles and quirky, artistic greetings cards.

Rivers had other plans. He produced a keyring from his
pocket and dangled it from his index fingers, so that the
two keys on it jangled and glinted in the sunlight. 'I've
borrowed a friend's houseboat,' he said, smiling at me.

'What for?' I said in all innocence, but as soon as I
finished speaking I realised how stupid I'd sounded.

'What for? Hey, way to make me feel like I'm
corrupting the innocent. The other day, in the bookstore,
you said, "Not here." So I thought, what could be more
romantic than a Sausalito houseboat?'

It's famous for them, apparently. Sausalito. Houseboats.
I know that now. I know lots of things now. Then,
I didn't. The biggest thing I didn't know was how to get
out of this. Somewhere along the line I guess I must have
agreed that I'd have sex with him. And this was the time
and the place. I felt like a sacrificial lamb.

You need to understand why this was such a big deal
for me. I was a vicar's daughter. I'd been a regular
churchgoer all my life. And while I didn't have the strong
happy-clappy Christian-commitment thing like my
parents and my older sister had, you can't escape the
principles of your upbringing that easily. Sex was something
sacred to marriage. And if not marriage, then at least
within a strong, committed, loving relationship. The truth
was that I was saving myself – if not for marriage, then at
least for 'the one'; for the someone special who loved me
as I loved him. As I walked up the street with Rivers
Carillo, holding his hand, dragging my feet slightly, I was
saying to myself:
It's okay. He's the one, the special one. He
loves me. He wouldn't have brought me here if he didn't.
And
also? I was too polite to say no after he'd gone to all this
trouble.

My spirits rose slightly when I caught sight of the
houseboats. They weren't really boats at all, more like a
little community of brightly painted houses, some with
several storeys, all higgledy-piggledy, piled up on top of
one another. The houseboats faced each other across
boardwalks that formed streets. The houses were pink and
blue and yellow and white, and there were window boxes
full of flowers, and little white picket fences with heart
shapes cut into the wood. Cute, pretty little gingerbread
houseboats. Except for the one near the end of the row –
silvery-grey wood with green mould growing on it;
cracked varnish on the window frames and doors; no
interesting extra storeys or dormer windows or window
boxes and picket fences – just a mouldy old houseboat,
smaller than the rest, that looked completely uncared-for.
And that was the houseboat that Rivers had borrowed.

That houseboat, and what happened on it, was awful.
Awful, in every way possible. I sat on the edge of the
unmade bed that appeared to double as a couch. The
atmosphere was cold, damp and clammy. The sheets on
the bed were greyish and all tangled up. There was an
orange blanket and I tried to arrange it so that it covered
the sheets, but then I noticed a big brown stain on the
blanket that I didn't want to look at, so I kicked it to the
end of the bed.

Rivers was in the kitchen – the galley, I guess – getting
drinks. 'Whisky or brandy?' he called.

I'd never had either. Brandy sounded nicer, so that was
what I chose. Rivers handed me a glass, a chunky tumbler
with white smears around the edges that might have been
toothpaste or paint or calcified water. He'd chosen an old
cracked teacup for himself. 'Cheers!' he said, in a mock-
English accent, and then he looked around. I think he was
embarrassed by the state of the place. 'Hey, we're here
now. Let's make the most of it.'

I tasted my brandy tentatively, grimaced, then
swallowed the rest down in one go. I didn't like the taste
but I loved the warm glow that lingered in my throat and
chest. Rivers put some music on – Bob Dylan, I think –
and then gestured for me to join him. I stood up, he took
me in his arms and we began to dance. Round and round,
clinging on to each other, in that tiny cabin, bashing our
shins on the edge of the bed. It felt safe, though, there in
his arms. It felt romantic, like a love scene should do. I
leaned towards him and kissed him on the mouth. That
was safe, too; that was something that felt good.

What happened then? There was more kissing, and
then Rivers pushed me onto the bed and undid my blouse
and ran his hands over my body. I kept my hands around
his neck or in his hair, places I was familiar with. He undid
my bra and began sucking my breasts, each one in turn.
That was okay. That felt okay. It felt quite nice. Then his
hands were running around the waistband of my pants.
He pushed my skirt up so the fabric covered my face, and
then there were those fingers on the gusset of my pants
again, rubbing and pushing at the fabric. 'No,' I said, and
wriggled away.

He laughed.

'No, really, please, no,' I said. It was all suddenly too
much.

'Oh, so now you're little Miss Fucking Prick-tease all
of a sudden.' Rivers was smiling as he said it. He seemed
more amused than angry. He played with my nipples a
little bit more, and then his insistent fingers were there
again, on the gusset of my pants. This time I let him. It
seemed the only thing I could do. I lay there, very still,
like a doll, waiting to see what he would do next.

The bed was uncomfortable. I could feel all the creases
in the sheets under me. It was a single bed with a wooden
surround, sort of in a box, and unless I kept my arms
pinned to the side my elbows kept knocking against the
wood. I didn't know what I was supposed to do – should
I be unbuttoning his shirt? Pulling his jeans down? Doing
something to
his
nipples? Instead I just lay there feeling
slightly sick.

Now his fingers were inside my knickers, inside me,
poking and probing. I guess I must have moved away,
because this time my head banged on the wooden headboard.
'Hey, come back,' he said, and pulled me back
towards him, my blouse creasing and rucking up under
my back. He pulled my knickers down and tossed them
onto the floor. He rubbed me some more with his thumb.
I felt something, a little bit like needing to have a wee.

Rivers stood up, kicked off his shoes and pulled his
jeans down. He didn't have any underpants on, and his
penis took me by surprise. My first sight of a man's erect
penis: purple and ugly. I hadn't expected it to point so
emphatically upwards. It was thick and solid and – I know
now, with more experience – quite short. I wondered if I
was supposed to reach out and touch it. He had something
in his hand – a condom – and he pulled it on, the little teat
at the end flopping comically. He climbed back onto the
bed, lay on top of me and asked, 'Ready?'

I murmured 'Yes'. I was too polite to say anything else,
after all the trouble he'd been to.

It was uncomfortable and it hurt, and I didn't seem to
have room for him. Rivers rocked backwards and
forwards on top of me, his face screwed up with the
intensity of it all. My head kept bashing the headboard and
I felt as if I had been split in half. I was cold and hungry
and I felt sick, and I closed my eyes, braced my hands on
the sides of the bed, arched my back, lifted my pelvis and
tried really hard not to cry.

He panted and panted and then I felt a sudden sharp
pain inside, worse than the worst period pain, and then he
stopped panting and instead lay his head on my stomach
and told me I was beautiful. I reached down and fondled
his sweaty head. Somehow, I felt both sore and numb.
There was a warm liquid sensation between my legs.
Rivers pulled his penis out of me and there was a sloshing
sound. I managed to prop myself up on my elbows. I
looked down. Blood. There was blood between my legs
and smeared down my thighs and all over the dirty grey
sheets.

'Christ,' said Rivers as he looked at the mess. 'Jesus
fucking Christ. Why the fuck didn't you tell me it was
your first time?'

I remember the tiny little shower room on that houseboat,
its walls lined with pine that had gone grey with
damp. I washed myself as well as I could in the tiny
hand basin, and I dried myself with the very edge of the
dirty towel that was hanging over the shower rail. I
bunched up almost a whole roll of toilet paper and stuck it
between my legs, and then I pulled on my knickers and
my skirt. I left my blouse untucked to try to hide the
padding between my legs. I looked at myself in the
mirror. Someone had once told me that when you have
sex for the first time, a new line forms under your eyes,
right below the lower lid, just a tiny line, but nonetheless
a sure sign that you're no longer a virgin. I peered at the
soft, fragile skin under my eyes. I thought there was a line
there but I couldn't be sure.

Rivers was in the galley, about to stuff the sheets in the
washing machine. 'You need to rinse them first,' I said. 'In
cold water. Otherwise, the hot water will fix the stain.'

Obediently he pulled the sheets out and started running
the cold tap. 'How do you know this stuff?'

I nearly said: Girl Guide Laundress badge. But I didn't
want to appear any younger or more callow than I already
had. Instead I said nothing. I found a dishcloth, rinsed it
off and started dabbing at the mattress. Rivers came in.
'Don't do that. We'll just turn it over. He'll never know.'

So we turned over that smelly, lumpy mattress and as
we did, Rivers caught my eye and gently said, 'I'm sorry.'

He was so nice about it. That's what did for him,
really. If he hadn't been so nice then I never would
have wanted to see him again, and none of the really awful
stuff would ever have happened. But Rivers was nice. He
held my hand as we walked back to the place where we
had to wait for the ferry. He bought me a hot dog from a
stand and made me eat it. He brushed my hair off my face.
He told me I was a beautiful woman. He tried to make me
laugh. From where we sat I could see San Francisco, all its
hills and dips intersected by the grid-straight lines of its
streets. Above the city sat a thick toupee of fog. It
obscured the top of the Transamerica Pyramid. It looked
like a dark thundercloud hovering over someone's head in
a comic strip. All of a sudden I didn't want this to be how
it ended, with Rivers and me.

I took hold of his hand. I started playing with his
fingers. I put one of them in my mouth, like I'd seen
people do in films, and I sucked it. I smiled at him, the
flirtiest smile I could manage. 'So anyway, tomorrow's
my last day in San Francisco. Do you want to get
together?'

Rivers laughed. Chuckled. Then a huge laugh. He
hugged me to him. 'Babe, you're a piece of work,' he said,
and I think he meant it in an admiring way.