"Time will tell. Is that what the money was for, Mrs Trafford? Were you one of Mr Silvermann"s customers?"
She shook her head. You"re crazy was what she wanted to say, but she couldn"t wrap her tongue around the words. And was afraid, too, that it was she who was crazy.
"Because I"ve been doing a little digging since yesterday, Mrs Trafford. And it wouldn"t be the first time you"ve had trouble with drugs. Would it?"
Sarah felt her past open up and swallow her alive.
It was another bas.e.m.e.nt party. They were always popular. "Everybody has to go down, man. Now that"s what I call a party," some relict told her on the stairs: a relict in a T-shirt advocating the legalization and widespread use of soft drugs. A packet of Rothmans poked from his jeans pocket like an admission of defeat.
She pa.s.sed him again hours later, on her way up.
It was her first time on LSD. Dope had long been her drug of choice. Speed was okay. Sometimes she"d do a line before a party or a dance; it injected a little craziness into an ordinary dull event. But it had its downside; it wasn"t mood altering so much as mood magnifying, and once when she"d taken it feeling low, she"d wound up suicidal. Dope was safer. It made you hazy and stupid and friendly, none of which she was the rest of the time. It was a nice place to visit, though she wouldn"t want to live there.
But until this evening, she"d never tried LSD.
Like most events of its kind, the party segregated early: dancers, drinkers, snoggers. The previous week, she"d spent so long with the second group she"d ended up in the third, so avoided catching anybody"s eye as she collected an unattended bottle of wine and joined Jane in a corner of the drinkers" room. Jane was the only woman on her corridor she could stand. Malcolm, her boyfriend, supplied them both with dope.
"Guys."
"Cool," said Malcolm. He pa.s.sed his polystyrene cup. She filled it.
Jane, leaning against the wall, giggled. "h.e.l.lo, Sarah. Sarahsarah-sarah."
"G.o.d, what"s she on?"
He mouthed something she didn"t catch.
(There"d been warnings, of course, from various authorities; even a policeman once, who had held a seminar on drug abuse. Attendance, being voluntary, had been minimal. More useful were the snippets of etiquette you picked up at parties; for instance, that somebody always stayed straight, to look after the others. In case of a bad trip . . . What could put you off drugs faster than anything, Sarah thought, was the b.l.o.o.d.y hippiespeak you had to use.) "You what?"
"Acid."
The negotiations took forever. Throughout them, Jane planet-hopped without moving a step; transfixed on the dancers or on whatever it was she thought the dancers were she looked like she was approaching a state of transcendental calm from a particularly interesting direction. Malcolm, though, wasn"t selling Sarah any.
"It"s not the money, baby."
(Some people still thought you could still say baby then.) "I"ll be okay. She"s okay."
"Everyone takes it different."
"I can look after myself."
He shrugged.
"I"ll stick with you guys."
He shrugged again.
In the end, it was sheer persistence wore him down. Or so he"d have said. Sarah"s own take on Malcolm was, he didn"t have scruples as such, but he liked women begging him for favours. By rights, she should just kick him in the b.a.l.l.s; this evening, though, she was grateful for the acid. Which looked just like a sugar cube.
"It looks just like a "
"Christ, tell everybody. Just take it."
She took it.
Nothing happened.
He told her it could take half an hour or so; that for guaranteed instant results, she should drop a laxative. For the next thirty-six minutes she counted down time, watching utterly ordinary people dancing to the most ba.n.a.l music ever. Her pulse remained normal. Her senses worked to rule. She"d had more of a rush from neat orange juice.
"It was just a sugar cube."
He shrugged. "What can I say? Some people, it"s a trip to Lake Placid. Just be thankful you"re not in the Palace of the Zombies."
"What makes you so sure?"
"And you still owe me eight quid."
"You"ll get your money."
"G.o.d is in the details," Jane announced firmly.
They looked at her.
"G.o.d is in the sideboard."
"What colour is he?" Malcolm asked, with genuine curiosity.
"I"ll just p.i.s.s off, then," Sarah said. Neither of them paid attention.
She wandered off and found another drink. In the background, the music changed from a thud to a smooch; as reliable an indication of time"s pa.s.sage as the dropping of autumn leaves. She checked her watch anyway: it showed a quarter to eleven. The hands waved at her, then clenched into fists.
When your watch starts misbehaving, she realized, it is definitely time to go. More worrying was the floor. For some time it had been melting, and only a few chunks remained solid enough to stand on; it took great care to reach the staircase without mishap. The last crumb of floor hissed and sank behind her as she jumped. Everybody else was doomed. The stairs, however, were wonderful, and she determined to climb them to the top.
It was on the first landing she encountered the sad hippie again. "Hey, you shouldn"t be going up there, man. The party"s downstairs."
"f.u.c.k off."
"That"s cool. Hey, you, er, going to the roof or what? They got a roof up there. They keep it at the top." He tagged behind her while she fought her way up Emerald Mountain. On each landing a small sun burned overhead, circled by tiny pterodactyls, who ate each other then shat each other out again. Ice had formed on the walls. A girl could lose herself in a landscape like this. She could just keep going up and up, where no search party would ever find her.
"You ever make it on acid? It"s like f.u.c.king with angels, you know? King pleasure. You gotta do it once just so you don"t die never knowing about it."
Sarah put recent practice to good use, and ignored him.
There was, it turned out, a roof at the top. You reached it through a door marked FIRE ESCAPE in letters formed by serpents: before her eyes they rearranged themselves into IFOR OSTRAPE, which was a secret message meant only for her. She pushed on the bar and the door opened with a thud. Behind her, the hippie started re-evaluating his position vis-"a-vis property rights.
"Er, should you be doing that?"
The door led on to a fire escape; an actual ifor ostrape, which ran down the side of the house all the way to the ground and far beyond. Leaning over, Sarah could make out the dim lights of h.e.l.l winking miles below . . . It seemed sensible to continue onwards and upwards. The ostrape rattled and shook beneath her feet. As she climbed, the city lights grew brighter. It became apparent that this was the nub of the world; an undiscovered pole. The tragic hippie had sloped off, rattled too by her courage and daring. There was a mission awaiting her at the very top. Already it transmitted a sense of urgency, which in the dark glowed like powerful green beams.
At the very top, she found a playpen.
It was shaped like a playpen. In fact, it contained the whole world, each corner stretching far into s.p.a.ce: in one of them lurked Jesus. In another, the holy devil. Both called to her, and for a long moment of pure luxury, she knew that she alone had the choice on which the fate of the world depended, but the moment couldn"t last. It ended with her finding that she was not, in fact, alone, for beside her, the Other Sarah Tucker was baring teeth in a smile of pure benevolence. There was no doubt which choice she would make. The world was s.n.a.t.c.hed from Sarah"s hands.
From below came a growing uproar, as a.s.sorted humans bewailed her amazing escape.
It was futile to attempt to stop her. This was the thought that embraced Sarah now. Everything has to balance. This was a truth as deep as gravity. As the Other Sarah Tucker ran to her corner, the Real Sarah, the Only Sarah, took the sole choice available, and rushed for the crooning deity. Because she could float, she had to cling to the railing with both hands, to keep from blowing away.
The people from the party arrived at the top just in time not to save her. She had already remembered that here was a dream the Other Sarah Tucker had never had: the dream of wingless flight, and when she let go it was with a sense of being released; of submitting to a truth that was deep, inescapable and kind. The lights of the city cartwheeled for her, as if it were the landscape and not herself that was being sucked out of the picture. One by one they winked out, and as the last died she learned about pain, and the secret of staying alive.
Later, in her nightmares, she would never hit the ground.
They searched the house.
"You have a record of involvement with drugs," Ruskin said flatly. "And a connection with a dead man who turns out to be a dealer. Obviously we were given a warrant."
The female officer, who remained with Sarah throughout, kept asking if she was all right. But of course she wasn"t all right: what kind of idiot question was that? From the kitchen and the rooms upstairs, she heard thumps and scuffles as her home, her life, was ransacked by these ridiculous men, who had already gone rummaging through her history, as if that had anything to do with poor dead Joe. It was the absurdity of their reckoning as much as anything else which had produced this numb reaction; this inability to reach for the phone and call Mark, their lawyer, anyone.
"You"re very pale. Would you like a gla.s.s of water?"
But something in the voice persuaded Sarah not to respond. Something technical and efficient, reminding her that this was a cop doing a cop job, which would get a lot more awkward if Sarah were to faint.
Cop two appeared in the doorway. Ruskin came through from the kitchen.
"Well?"
Sarah saw a gloved hand; an arm sleeved in blue; and a policeman who wore a grim smile, as if his satisfaction were tinged with dirty thoughts. From his fingers dangled a polythene bag, packed with a powder so white Sarah knew it was anything but innocent.
Already, in her head, she felt the lights cartwheeling once more.
II.
That day, too, she fell off the edge of the world. They took her to the police station where they questioned her ceaselessly about drugs and Joe and drugs and Joe and drugs, until she was as convinced as they were that whatever she was hiding would come to light eventually, so she might as well make a clean breast of it now. Their words: a clean breast. So she told them about Dinah and the man in the car park and they gave her a cup of tea and asked about Joe again. So she mentioned the bomb in the house up the road, and they wondered what this had to do with the drugs. The name Lizbeth Moss was remembered. Did she know about Lizbeth Moss?
No.
They supposed Ecstasy meant nothing, either.
Foie gras to the sound of trumpets.
But Lizbeth Moss was a girl who had died; a thirteen-year-old girl who had died after taking E. And they were reasonably sure that what she"d taken would match what they"d found in Joe"s office. So would Sarah like to tell them again about Joe and drugs and Joe? She told them instead about the tie she thought he"d been wearing. She"d entered Joe"s office and Joe had been wearing a tie, a bright red tie. She hadn"t been fooled by the fact that his hand still held the razor. But when they asked why, she just stared at the ceiling.
They sighed, and wanted to talk about the money. Why had she given a man she said she"d never met so much money? If she hadn"t been buying drugs?
A few details slipped her way too. The razor, she learned, had been Joe"s own. As for the bag, the bag with the drugs, the bag had been behind a loose tile in the bathroom; Sarah had never noticed a loose tile there. It had, in turn, been inside a small purse, which she did remember: the purse she used for small change destined for the charity envelopes that dropped weekly through the letterbox. How it had ended up full of white powder, she didn"t know. She didn"t even know what the powder was. (Nor did they.) But if it"s talc.u.m powder, Ruskin said, why hide it away like that?
Eventually the questioning came to a close; a man in a uniform took her downstairs and spoke at her in a rather formal though meaningless manner, and this either meant she"d been charged or not charged: she wasn"t too sure about the details. Then they let her use the phone, and unable to remember Mark"s work number, she called home just to hear his voice on the answering machine. He cut in almost immediately.
"Where the h.e.l.l are you?"
She started to cry.
It was eight in the evening, this was what frightened her. They had kept her for hours, and she no longer knew where she was, or how to respond. It seemed like days since she"d slept. Everything that had happened before finding Joe had happened in another life. She dimly remembered a girl on a towpath, a girl who had not been Dinah: had there ever been a real Dinah? And remembered, too, the man in the car park, Michael Downey, the one with the hair. What was it he"d said? That he was a friend of the Singletons. All of them. Sarah wondered if he"d killed Joe.
This she brooded on through her tears: her tears were a mask so they"d leave her alone. Up to a point, that is. And up to a point, they worked. She was given a gla.s.s of cold water and tepid sympathy by an Asian policewoman who kept calling her Sally; kept asking, too, if it was c.o.ke she needed; if she was starting to get the shakes. Sarah cried some more to shut her up. And before these tears dried Mark arrived, together with a man she recognized, Simon Smith, who carried a black briefcase and spoke very loudly about lawsuits. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Mark, though, was livid.
"Who the f.u.c.k is in charge here?"
The Asian woman gave Sarah a look of shared citizenship. As if they had this in common: loud male voices which knew they were right.
What she remembered afterwards were harsh details: the lighting, the shabby paintwork; a voice in the corridor complaining about a database being down. But of the human contact, of Mark"s intercession, almost nothing remained. At one point he hugged her, it was true, but it was the smell of trains and smoky rooms on his jacket that stayed with her. It was the irritation in his voice as he spoke of how worried he"d been, as if everything that had happened to her had been just another way of something happening to him.
Later, he"d say, "It"s all that Jewish detective"s fault, isn"t it?"
"Why say that?"
"Well, if it hadn"t been for him "
"Why say Jewish?"
"Oh, Christ, don"t start playing PC games. I just meant he was Jewish, that"s all. He was, wasn"t he?"
He had been. That much was true.
But that was later, when they were home. Though in fact not much later, for Simon Smith"s talk of lawsuits, along with his lethally efficient briefcase, had them out on the pavement by nine. He could, he said, have got them a lift home in a cop car, but it didn"t always pay to be too pushy. He was of an age with Mark, but a savagely receding hairline gave him an authority Mark was still aiming at. He also had the smallest teeth Sarah had ever seen.
"But you should have called me yesterday," he said. "We could have nipped this in the bud."
"I didn"t know about it yesterday," Mark said, exasperated. He ran a hand through his own thick hair. He often did this in Simon"s company. "I mean, n.o.body tells me anything."
They both looked at Sarah. But she was transfixed by the pa.s.sing traffic; the bright headlights slicing up the evening.
Simon hailed a taxi. The way he climbed into it left no doubt that getting into taxis was a way of life with him; something he had aspired to, earned, and enjoyed demonstrating in public. "Call me later," he said to Mark. It was about half-way between advice and instruction.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, though the electricity generated by what Mark wasn"t saying buzzed in Sarah"s ears. She felt disoriented, out of it; the time she had spent in the police station already receding to the status of a bad dream, but one she had yet to wake from. She wanted Joe, that was the worst of it. She wanted Joe to tell her what was happening; more importantly, to tell her it would stop. But Joe was dead, and when alive his advice had never been top-notch. Already she was mythologizing. Pretty soon, Joe would be everything her father had never been. He"d be the husband her mother had wished for her.
Her own real husband had been that once, though he was falling down on the job badly now. "I have my keys," he said redundantly as they walked up the garden path, as if affirming a disputed claim to home-ownership; he opened the door and allowed her in first, the kind of gesture he insisted on when p.i.s.sed off. So she was waiting for the lecture; prolonged silence always led to the lecture. It was the last thing Sarah needed, and a list of the first things would have filled a book: a hug, a bath, an ear, some sympathy. But once inside Mark went straight to the phone: not the one in the living room, but the extension in what he claimed was his study, though had never been more than a den. It was where he read Q magazine and listened to Oasis on headphones. He had never really lost his youth; he just kept it in a small room off the landing.
In the kitchen, Sarah spent a short while picking things up and putting them down again. This was the room Ruskin had searched, and the effect now was of having endured an untidy guest. Small objects a sugar bowl, a mug holding pencils had been shifted from their accustomed positions, reminding Sarah of one of those magazine puzzles: what is wrong with this picture? But you had to have lived in it first. Upstairs, Mark hung up the phone, then dialled again. The phones, at his insistence, were the old-fashioned, alarm-bell kind. It had been a fad at the time; part of a trend that had done its best to suggest that adherence to tradition was a form of integrity.
She adjusted the calendar, which was hanging out of true. The rest of the month was a chequerboard of appointments and deadlines: visits to the dentist, bills to be paid; black scrawls noted weeks in advance, when there had still been a chance that they might be important. For Joe, there"d be no more of this. For Joe, the weeks and months ahead would remain blank; the calendars unbought. This was what death was. It was the point at which calendars were wiped clean, and all the pre-Raph ladies and Warhol etchings decorating them blurred into nonsense.
On the stairs, the thump of Mark"s feet. He entered the kitchen guns blazing. "You realize this couldn"t have happened at a worse time for me?"
"I didn"t have a great day either. Thanks."
"Oh, that"s right. Turn it into my fault. What got into you, Sarah? c.o.ke in the bathroom? For Christ"s sake!"
She did not need this argument now. On the other hand, it was all that was on offer. "I didn"t put it there."