Authors: Liza Cody
Lady Bag (5 page)
Leaving Harrison Mews
I
was looking for a backpack but I found a wheelie case in the bottom of a fitted wardrobe. I packed the crimson duvet, a pillow, three toilet rolls, the three remaining bottles of red, a corkscrew, the turkey baster, the Louis Whatsisname bag and all the pills.
I found a drawer full of exercise clothes—sweat pants, fleecy tops, t-shirts, socks and sports bras. Natalie and I weren’t the same size but it doesn’t show so much with sports clothes. I put on as much as I could. Layers are important. I took four large silk scarves and wound them, African style, around my head to hide the stitches and the bad haircut. I found a big loose Aquascutum raincoat in a downstairs cupboard. That only left the shoes, which are always a problem when you have feet the size of cocker spaniels. In the end I took her tennis shoes to the kitchen and cut the toecaps out with a carving knife. They wouldn’t be much good in the rain but they were better than nothing.
You think I’m stealing. So what? I have absolutely fuck-all and this woman had ten of everything. Besides, she was dead. I
need
a bedroll for sleeping outdoors. She barely needs a thin blanket, given all the central heating she’s got in her bedroom. Also, when my nose clears and I can smell something other than blood and Draino, I may be able to catch the scent of Gram Attwood on the pillow. Not his real scent, of course, because he’s the Devil and doesn’t have one. But that citrus aftershave and the almond-like shampoo that costs fifty quid a bottle. I used to buy it for him. Convincing Gram to love me wasn’t cheap.
I parked the wheelie case by the front door and noticed that in spite of the police tape the postman had delivered some letters. They were addressed to Miss N Munrow.
I noticed too that some of the bloody smears on the floor ended at the front door. I imagined Natalie dragging herself, bleeding and dying, out of the house, into the rain.
Then I remembered. I had dragged myself, bleeding,
into
the house. The blood didn’t end there—it began there. Maybe I had dragged myself past a dead body without noticing. I’d badly needed a drink, but all the same it was quite an omission.
I started remembering fragments of yesterday—or was it the day before? Or even the day before that? I was in a lovely hot jasmine-smelling bath to soothe my ribs and then somebody screamed. Someone had a key to my yellow door. Gram had a key. But Gram is a devil and a killer so he doesn’t scream at the sight of death. He smiles that vicious little smile that I once found so cute and turns his head away.
A simpler explanation might be that I didn’t close the yellow door after I dragged myself through it. A neighbour saw the open door and came in.
When pain begins to ebb away it leaves behind it a clean stretch of sand without footprints. In a sudden rush of clarity I picked up one of the letters from the doormat, the one from the National Bank. I opened it and saw that the woman whose handbag I’d been toting around had a healthy wedge of coin. If I was in charge of her handbag I was probably also in charge of her credit cards.
I used to know about that stuff. After all, I was a branch manager with access to customer accounts. I would have been an area manager if I hadn’t given someone who smells of citrus aftershave access to my access.
I sat for a moment at the bottom of the staircase and looked around. It was a small living room with an even smaller kitchen and dining area leading off it. There were original oil paintings in curly gold frames on the walls, and blood-stained damask on the sofa and armchairs. From the look of her bank statement and her expensive but bloody Persian rug, Natalie Munrow was loaded.
Now that I was looking properly I could see that her CD player and some other electrical goods were missing because there were three plugs in wall sockets from which the wires had been cut. Her CDs were in a mess, as if someone had grabbed a handful without looking. The same was true of her DVDs. CDs and DVDs represent quick cash and they are portable. It looked to me as if everything that had been stolen would fit in carrier bags. The big flat-screen TV and state-of-the-art DVD player were smashed but unstolen.
‘Phorgey ‘n’ Foss,’ I said out loud, remembering the clanking plastic bags Georgie had been carrying. Georgie was inside ripping stuff off while Joss was outside keeping watch. Georgie wasn’t the violent one. That was Joss. He’d nearly killed me.
Everyone
said he was one mean, mad dude. We got along because I’m a woman and women don’t count in his testosterone-fuelled world. Until they cross him or get in the way. What could be more in the way than knowing about theft and murder? If he realised I was still alive I’d be a threat to him. I moaned.
Wouldn’t I be safer staying here in the mews behind the double locked, double bolted yellow door? Surely this was the last place Joss would come back to.
But it was the first place my, sorry, her brother would come to. He might be on his way right now, with the cops. I had to go. Quickly.
Where? There are no limitless possibilities for the homeless. And the places we can go are well known to all of us. Joss would track me down easily unless I left town. But London’s the only town I know. And I couldn’t leave without Electra.
Then I realised I could use one of the credit cards to get a hotel room. Joss would never look for me in a hotel. It’d been a long time since I’d had a credit card but I still knew I’d need a Personal Identity Number. When I was a real person I used to keep mine disguised as the last four digits of false telephone numbers under the entry ‘Pine Furniture’ in my phone book. Pine, PIN, gettit? Well, so did Gram Attwood, damn his lovely blue eyes.
I unpacked the Louis Whosit hand bag and found a mobile phone with more gadgets, buttons and symbols than the flight deck of a jet fighter. I couldn’t deal with it. Instead I looked round the room and saw that a cupboard close to the fireplace was in fact a cubby-hole containing a whiz-bang, space age computer and, oh thank the lord for little favours, an old fashioned Rolodex.
I stared at the tiny desk packed with computer, scanner, printer and something scary that was probably a hands-free phone set. And it made me cry. Life on the street had turned me into prehistoric woman. I couldn’t imagine my swollen, bruised hands with their torn yellow fingernails playing arpeggios on the clean cream keyboard.
‘Phawful,’ I whispered and went straight upstairs to the bedroom where Natalie kept a little woven basket full of luscious, subtle nail varnishes. I sat on the antique chair in front of her make-up mirror and began to paint my nails the colour of unripe blackberries. They looked alien, like a frog’s hands. I stopped. A frog’s hand trailed, clammy, down Gram’s hairless, scentless chest towards his lean, clean belly.
I squirted myself with her Issy Miyake perfume but it made me gag so I went down again to the Rolodex. I looked up P for PIN and pine. Nothing made sense. I was losing focus. I crammed the whole damn thing into my suitcase. I hadn’t achieved anything but a waste of time. Every second brought my brother’s taxi closer.
Even so, my good eye stung with tears when I closed my yellow door and hauled the wheelie case onto the cobbles. I wore the Aquascutum raincoat and a large pair of Ava Gardner sun-glasses I’d found in the pocket. Expensive eyewear, I reasoned, would distract attention from the mutilated tennis shoes and buggerised face.
I struggled down the mews with my case hip-hopping, tip-toppling behind me.
I wanted a taxi to take me to Battersea, to the dog’s home where Electra came from in the first place and where lost dogs go. It’s where I’d find her, looking sad and anxious. I could imagine her expression when she saw me: she’d grin with relief and if I’d had a drink or two she’d say, ‘You took your time.’ She wouldn’t turn her back and walk away.
But astonishingly, I could see her in the distance,
walking away
. Her brindle flanks just a little lop-sided as she favoured her right hind leg because of the arthritis.
That’s what too much co-codamol does, I thought. It makes your dog appear in front of you, walking away, wearing a lemon-yellow chiffon scarf.
She looked so very real… but a chiffon scarf?
‘Phlectra?’ I called.
Electra stopped and turned her head towards me. Lemon-yellow was
not
her colour. And the nun who held the other end of the scarf was not her owner. A nun or a non-nun?
I took off the sun-glasses to get a better look at my analgesic dream. Electra
was
there, waiting for me. The lemon chiffon scarf was there. The nun looked annoyed. She tugged at the yellow scarf.
‘Phlectra!’ I shouted and started across the road, the wheelie case lurching dangerously behind me. Electra obligingly sat down and waited.
A Dodgy Nun And Electra
‘F
uck off, freak,’ growled the nun through gritted teeth. She smelled of tobacco. I was elated—something had bypassed the blood and Draino in my nose. It was a breakthrough. I
would
survive and recover.
I squatted painfully and threw my arms round Electra’s neck. I was too choked up with tears to speak, but Electra said, ‘I might’ve known—you go missing for three whole days and then you turn up wrecked.’
‘Foo phays.’
‘Three. I should know. You abandoned me.’
‘Bugger off, tit head,’ the nun said. ‘What the fuck d’you think you’re doing, slobbering all over my dog?’
‘Fmy fog,’ I said, standing up and grabbing for the chiffon scarf.
The nun gave up so suddenly that I tipped over onto my arse. ‘Okay, okay. But shut the fuck up shouting.’
‘You’re making a
scene
,’ whispered Electra, her warm breath tickling my ear.
Over her shoulder I saw a police car draw up to the entrance to the mews. A fair-haired cop with no arse at all got out. I couldn’t remember her name but I had her card in the pocket of my bathrobe. I buried my face in Electra’s neck. The nun saw the police car too and crouched down beside us.
A man got out of the passenger side. He was balding, bespectacled and paunchy. He was my, no, Natalie’s brother.
A cold sharp point poked me under my chin. The nun said, ‘Shout and I’ll stick this screwdriver in your throat.’
The cop glanced in our direction and said something to my brother. He was standing there with blame flames bursting out of his bald head and rage glinting off his bifocals.
The nun waved her hand at the lady cop. The lady cop was too far away to see the nicotine stains. She raised her hand too and set off down the mews. She and my furious brother disappeared.
I knocked the screwdriver away from my neck. ‘Phgerroffme,’ I muttered. Suddenly I felt quite comfortable on the ground with Electra in my arms. I could sleep now, I thought, I’m used to sleeping on the ground. It doesn’t smell of blood and Draino in the gutter.
‘You’re stoned,’ the nun said, ‘you’re abso-fucking-lutely arseholed. What you on, you battered old tart? Eh? C’mon now—share.’
‘Need a hand, sister?’ A passer-by with two Airedale terriers stopped a few feet away.
‘How kind,’ the nun murmured in tones that were suddenly light and refined with a trace of an Irish accent. ‘But we’re quite alright—just a stumble. We’re on our way to the doctor’s right now.’
‘Phelp!’ I cried, but I could only watch the retreating backsides of one passer-by and two Airedales.
‘Oh give your hole a holiday,’ the nun said. ‘You’re coming with me.’ She grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet.
‘Ow-ow-ow,’ I shrieked. My fine Aquascutum raincoat and trendy dark glasses weren’t saving me. The nun could see my tattered vagabond soul. There was no hiding place. She’d pull my arms off like butterfly wings if I didn’t go with her.
‘Don’t make such a fuss,’ Electra said. ‘Where were you going anyway?’
‘Phoo fie phoo.’
‘Well
I
found
you
, so come along. It isn’t that bad.’
‘It is.’ And to prove it the clouds burst open with a crack and a screech, and rain came tumbling down, slapping my bruises with tiny wet fists. Electra started to shiver.
‘Oh crap,’ said the nun. She grabbed my wheelie case and started off down Harrison Road. But I caught up and grabbed the handle too. I had Electra’s chiffon scarf in one hand and the handle in the other—all my worldly goods and chattels. I wasn’t going to let go of either one. You’d have to kill me first. Which is exactly what the nun looked as if she wanted to do. But now we were on the Cromwell Road and there were hundreds of people hurrying past with umbrellas or in tourist busses watching the Natural History Museum get wet. The nun knew she’d attract attention if she was violent, so we trundled through the rain, an undignified trio, heading west.
We came to rest nearly an hour later in a tiny room in a boarded up, fire-damaged house. I was too tired and hurt to stand so I sank down to my knees, huddled over to protect the wheelie case. Oddly enough I felt nearly safe. The cops wouldn’t find me here; or my brother; or Joss and Georgie. All I had to worry about was the nun. All the nun seemed to be worrying about was drugs.
‘C’mon butt-brain,’ she said. ‘Whachoo got? You screwed up my evening so you bleeding owe me.’ She tore off her wimple and revealed bleached blonde hair with sky blue and violet streaks in it.
I had to turn away. I was experiencing one of those crumples in the material of reality—I didn’t know if the nun was a boy or a girl. Hanging from the fire-scarred picture rails were nine or ten pretty dresses. But unless my undamaged eye was telling mighty white lies the nun had an Adam’s apple and a shaving rash.
I wanted to tell Electra that I couldn’t cope, but she said, ‘Oh for goodness sake, just share. Then we can all get some sleep.’
So I rummaged in the case until my hand hit my purloined pharmacy. I snatched up zopiclone and co-codamol.
‘Goody, goody, goodies,’ the nun said. He brought over a bottle of water.
I took two of each. I didn’t see what the nun took because I was too busy unpacking the scarlet duvet and making a nest for Electra inside the case. She could curl up on the towelling bathrobe and be protected from draughts.
I struggled out of the soaking raincoat and wrapped myself in the duvet. I lay down with my head on the handbag. I was hurting so much I couldn’t have cared less about being ripped off. All I wanted was a way out of the pain. I wanted blankness, nothingness, and to pass many hours without having to feel anything.