Watch her fall, p.14
Watch Her Fall, page 14
‘No!’ I cry. Although it was, the hurt on his face is enough to convince me otherwise: that I am not the sort of person who could be this manipulative. ‘Hear me out—’ I begin, but he’s gone, slamming the bedroom door behind him so hard the art on the wall shakes. In the time it takes me to get up, dress, find my crutches, he has gone.
‘Max?’ My voice bounces along the empty corridor. I drag myself from room to room looking for him. A movement at the end of the garden snags my vision; I shield my eyes and screw my face up against the sun until I can make him out, pacing up and down the patch of green grass. He might be talking to himself. He presses his hands into the small of his back, as though he’s been carrying an unbearable weight for years and he hasn’t got much left in him.
Guilt sinks its teeth into my heart. My certainty that this is harmless, for the best, no big deal, wavers, then topples.
I need the money, but I need him more.
The contents of Ava Kirilova’s safe are not worth losing Max over. Why did I have to hurt him to see that?
I give myself time for everything in my head to percolate and settle. I’ll wait for him to calm down and when he comes back I’ll apologise. I will lie through my teeth, say it was a spur-of-the-moment idea, a bad joke.
It feels like an hour until he walks back to the house, a three-dimensional shadow emerging from the low-slung sun. With the light behind him, I can’t see his expression. His steps are slow and hesitant, as though he still hasn’t made up his mind. When he’s close enough to touch, my hand flutters towards his chest; when he shrinks away, it falls like a dead weight.
‘Instead of this crazy idea of breaking open the safe, why don’t you ask her to lend you the money?’ he says. ‘Would she not want to help you? One dancer to another? You bypass your strict Mr K and just ask her?’
I think of Ava Kirilova, isolating herself in her dressing room, refusing to make eye contact with anyone lower than the rank of soloist. Pulling up the ladder behind her. I could almost laugh at the idea. ‘Yes,’ I lie. ‘Yes, I think she would lend me the money. If she knew what trouble we were in. But, as I said, she’s on tour. You can’t disturb a dancer on tour. It’s not as if I’m going to fritter it on designer shoes. I need to get a flat, I need to get a job, and I can’t do either on an empty stomach.’
His hand goes to his own belly; he’s thinking about it.
‘You are asking a big thing,’ he says. ‘We don’t know each other.’
‘An hour ago, you said you knew me all over.’
He winces at the reminder of this morning’s intimacy. ‘We don’t know each other out of that bed. We have never left this house together. And you ask me to risk my job, my status, for a game of Bonnie and Clyde?’
‘It’s not a game. We both need money. In some ways you need it more than me.’ He knows what I mean: I have nothing, but he has debt. I lace my fingers through his. He resists, then slackens. I am so close. ‘And you should move in. Properly,’ I decide out loud. ‘Live here with me, for as long as I’m here.’
I find that I mean it, and it also seems that I am the incentive, because everything about him loosens and opens, as though a pin that’s been holding him rigid has been pulled out.
‘Give me time to think of any extra risks that maybe do not come to me yet.’
‘There is a risk,’ I say, to hasten his decision as well as for full disclosure. ‘There might not be any money in the safe. We don’t know when she wrote those numbers down; we’ve got no proof there’s anything even in there.’ We both look at the blue painting. ‘Then we’ve got nothing, we’re back to square one.’
His smile is bittersweet. ‘Whatever else happens, I don’t think we can ever go back to square one, you and me.’
‘So – is that a yes?’ It’s just as well I can’t drop to my knees, because I might.
‘I said give me time to think,’ he says, but gently. He sinks on to the sofa, picks up the paperback he left splayed across the arm and starts to read, shutting down the discussion.
An hour later, he closes the book without having turned a single page.
‘Jyulyit. I think I have a way.’
My belly is pulled in two different directions: as if I am rising and falling at the same time.
‘When?’ It takes all my composure not to cheer. ‘Tonight?’
‘No. My next shift here isn’t for another two days. I’m at Millbrook Green tomorrow. I can’t change my shift pattern, just in case.’
‘Just in case?’
‘I think it is foolproof. But in case it is not – it looks suspicious if I ask to work in Gabriel’s Hill, and then I am found near an open safe.’
The night seems to hold its breath, as though I’m being given one last chance to release him. But we have come so far, now: and we have arrived here together. Whatever happens on the other side of tonight, good or bad, I will make sure it happens to both of us.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘You don’t know what it means.’
My eyes are drawn suddenly to Ava Kirilova’s poster, almost as if she has moved in my peripheral vision, lifted her head, or shaken a feather. Of course she hasn’t; it’s just a picture, perfection preserved in black and white while the flesh-and-blood dancer twirls around the globe. I appeal to it anyway, as though praying to an icon. Let me have this, Ava Kirilova. You have so much. You have everything I ever wanted. You can spare me this.
Chapter 29
The front door is open wide. The air outside is black and hot and the dancer on the lawn is a dull pewter in the dark. I hover on the threshold, waiting for Max to drive past. It’s the end of the late shift. In ten minutes he will take his car to the gate and hand it over to a colleague.
The ceiling lights in the hallway are halogen and it’s too hot to have them on. A single lamp glows on the telephone table, casting concentric circles of light and shade on the floor and walls. I tap Force Patrol’s number, all zeroes and threes, into the phone and let it ring out. Sweat from my hairline slides down my brow, slips sideways into a tear duct.
‘Good evening, Force Patrol?’ The woman has the kind of voice you only ever hear on the telephone. She reminds me of Lizanne.
‘Hello, hi. This is Ava Kirilova at Number 36 Gabriel’s Hill.’ I take a breath, give her a chance to challenge me.
‘Thank you, Ms Kirilova. I can see that you’re calling from the house. How can I help you this evening?’
Only a tug in my chest prompts me to breathe. ‘I need to access the safe but I can’t remember the combination. You know how it is. Written it down somewhere so secure I can’t even find it myself. Please can you send someone round to reset it?’
‘I’ll just see if we’ve got someone local.’ I hear long fingernails click against computer keys. ‘You know what, you’re in luck, he’s virtually on top of you,’ she says. Max is already here, headlights blinding as the car pulls up outside the front door. ‘Obviously he’ll need to see some ID from yourself,’ she continues. I see him take her call before slamming the car door behind him.
‘He’s here now, thank you so much,’ I say.
Changing the code is the work of a moment: some back-and-forth on his hand-held tablet, some kind of master code sent back.
‘I’m scared to open it,’ I confess.
‘Me too.’ He moves quickly, as though he’s trying to overtake the thinking part of himself. He pulls the handle and we squint inside.
It’s a tiny recess, a fraction of the size of the door. A bulging black box file takes up most of the space. Wedged beside it are three fat envelopes to match the three sets of tallies in the notebook. I can tell as Max piles them in my arms that they contain money.
He sets the file on the floor.
‘Choose a new combination,’ he says.
My mind goes blank. I’m so stressed, I couldn’t tell you my own birth date. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘You choose.’
He shrugs, searches the air in front of his eyes before coming up with, ‘959595.’
‘What’s it mean?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything. It is just easy to remember.’
He enters the code again to confirm it, then takes the Force Patrol car keys out of his pocket and jitters them in his hand. ‘I go and hand over the car.’
‘I’ll make a start on these.’ I nod at the envelopes in my hand. ‘Better shut that back door.’
‘Sure.’ He pulls the door closed and turns the key so a wall of glass seals us off from the garden. We see fear and disbelief in our reflections’ eyes. It’s not too late, I tell myself. We can back out of this right up until the moment we spend the first penny of this cash.
All we have done so far is change the code on a safe. That’s all we have done.
‘And can you shut the front door behind you when you go?’ I say.
He turns away from my reflection to me. He looks hurt – the pinched brow, the way he leans back from me – and it takes me a moment to understand why. If I was using him, as he is right and also wrong to fear, of course I’d want him locked out of the house. He still doesn’t trust me completely.
‘Take the key?’ I say, and instantly he is reassured.
‘I will be five minutes.’
With all the exits sealed, the heat builds. There’s no breeze to displace the piles of money I make here. Each envelope contains notes in various denominations. In the first cache alone, there is at least twenty thousand in sterling and more in euros. It’s all loose, new and used notes tossed together, but dozens and dozens of them are fifties. I’m looking at far more than the thirty-five thousand totted up in the notebook.
A weird sound spins up and out of my throat. I find that I’m scared of it, all this money, the chaos it’s in, the possibilities this blows open. What the hell, Ava Kirilova? How can one person have this much cash swilling around? How can Mr K pay his dancers minimum wage while his daughter stuffs money in a safe? The three thousand pounds they gave me is nothing to them.
Five minutes pass and, just as it occurs to me to get nervous about Max returning, he’s here again, flushed and breathless as if he ran all the way back. Is the glow on his face exercise, or relief that I’m still here?
He drops to his knees beside me. He smells of himself and the lemon soap he uses. ‘Is there as much as it said in the book?’ he asks.
‘There’s more. There’s tens of thousands more. It’s a mess. I don’t think she can know how much is even here.’
‘Khuy.’ He exhales his favourite swear word. ‘Is she making tax fraud? Trust me, I work in security. No one has this amount of paper money unless it is dirty.’ He leans forward very slightly, as though he is on the brink of something, then tips out his next words. ‘You can’t report something stolen if you weren’t supposed to have it.’
I recognise the coded dare. ‘So are we still talking about borrowing from her, or . . . ?’
The look that passes between us: I will if you will.
Outside, the moon climbs. I swear I can hear his heart beating.
‘Maybe there’s a paper trail in here that explains all the money?’ He lifts the black file on to the kitchen island, starts digging through the compartments. ‘But I do not think it is right that you should struggle, after everything you gave to your ballet company. I think they owe you a better living than they have given you.’
I start to sort the money but my hands are shaking and I seem to have forgotten how to add up. I pause to watch Max work his way through documents, smoothing them, putting them down in different piles. I imagine myself doing the reverse, scanning effortlessly through documents in the Cyrillic alphabet, and feel a flutter of admiration for him.
The paperwork keeps on coming.
‘Is there any more cash in there?’
He shakes his head.
‘What are you even looking for?’ I ask him.
‘I don’t know,’ he confesses. Under the spotlight, he looks different: older, darker. His hair and beard are growing out, the hairline – not receding, as I’d assumed – visible for the first time. He skim-reads papers then sets them down. He takes out a silver key, turns it over in his hands then lets it go. It hits the marble worktop with a flat chime.
I scale back my task, concentrating on arranging the notes into denominations rather than counting.
Outside, the water is still as glass. Occasionally a bird caws in the garden. The only other sounds are shuffling paper, my breath and his.
Max gasps, so loud and so sharp I swear his breath has a Ukrainian accent. His hands are hidden behind the box file, but whatever he’s holding in them has made his face fold in on itself.
‘What’ve you got?’
‘It’s a passport.’ He looks at me, at the passport, at me again. ‘It’s Ava Kirilova’s passport.’
‘An old passport. So what?’ But I stop stacking the money. A cold dread starts at my toes and creeps up my body, like lowering myself into an ice bath.
‘No,’ he says flatly. ‘It’s not expired, it’s only two years old.’ He holds it out: the maroon cover with the gold lion and unicorn on the front. ‘When it is finished they cut the corner off. There are visas in here for India, Cuba, China; they are all in date. And look, Jyulyit. What can you tell me about this?’
His brow creases deeper than ever as he hands me a printout from a computer. It’s an airline ticket, mailed to an address at the London Russian Ballet Company, in Ava Kirilova’s name, for a flight to Madrid that left weeks ago.
‘Why would she change her flight?’ I say, and then, my brain ticking faster, ‘Also, if her passport’s here, where’s she?’
He makes the same face he did when I asked him to open the safe. Incomprehension, hurt, anger. He is searching my face. I’m as in the dark as he is.
‘Do not lie to me.’ He is shaking, as though resisting some primal reflex. ‘Especially not after everything I have just done for you!’
What? ‘Max, don’t be weird. You’re scaring me. Let me see it.’
My arms strain as I push myself up to standing. As I step towards him a breeze strokes my back; it’s coming down the corridor, which means it must be coming from— ‘Didn’t you lock the door behind you?’ I ask Max. His hands go to his hip pocket, where the key should be. ‘For God’s sake, of all the times to leave it in the door,’ I begin, but he barely hears me. His blue eyes are wide and his mouth is a perfect circle of fear as he looks not at me but over my shoulder. In the window, I see my reflection.
Not my reflection.
For the woman in the glass is moving while I remain perfectly still. The kind of play-dead stillness born of terror: some deep animal part of me that knows that something is very, very wrong.
‘Jyulyit!’ he cries, but before I can answer him there’s an explosion in my head. Something hard rams the back of my skull, sending me face-first into the sofa. I scream Max’s name into the leather as what feels like a baseball bat hits my legs and back again and again. There’s screaming behind me, two voices in a panicked, rapid-fire foreign language.
The blows stop as abruptly as they began. As I roll slowly and painfully on to my back, the voices cease.
Max towers above me. Next to him, holding his wrist in one hand and gripping one of my crutches in the other, is someone I’ve seen before. The kind of face you don’t forget. A ballerina at first glance, but no, she’s too tall, too curvy. She is the illusion created by a face made up for the stage: the pedicure girl.
Chapter 30
They are standing close enough to kiss. I press my bruised back against the sofa as Max and the pedicure girl resume screaming at each other in Ukrainian. You have to know someone very well to argue that way. He shouts something that makes her turn slowly and look at me, then she places her hand, with its long purple fingernails, on his fly and cups his balls. He’s mine, says the gesture, and her narrowed eyes add: he was never yours. As if he ever could be.
You don’t have to understand something for it to hurt. My head thuds like a bass drum.
‘Max?’ I don’t realise until I speak that my lip is split. Melted pennies flood my mouth. ‘What’s happening? Who is this?’
She removes her hand from his crotch but her focus stays on his face. As though at some unseen signal, they both start shouting again, streams of foreign words tumbling over rocks of my confusion. Only one word stands out: her name. Katya, he repeats, Katya, Katya!
He can’t meet my eye. His hand is in his back pocket, mockingly casual. He says something to her, clearly an instruction; she trains my crutches on me like a double-barrelled shotgun.
‘Max!’ I use the full force of my voice but still he doesn’t look at me. Am I going mad? Can anyone even hear me? For a crazy second I wonder if I am dead. ‘Show me that passport and tell me who the hell this person is!’
The woman tells me to shut up. Max doesn’t even turn his head my way. They talk over each other, their voices rising and falling passionately. Heathrow, I pick out, and Kirilova. ‘Please, talk to me,’ I beg Max, but he only has eyes for the money. He picks up a bundle of euros from the floor and shoves them in Katya’s face, then nods at the rest of the scattered cash. There’s a flash of confusion, where she seems not to understand his instruction, but then she’s off: gathering money, stuffing it into the black bag. It’s as though they’re in a cheap game show, trying to catch as much cash as they can within their time limit.
I was wrong, it seems, when I told Max it was impossible to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head the same time. I know that money doesn’t belong to me and I also know that it is mine and I deserve it. He wouldn’t know about it if not for me. It comes from my ballet company. I need it.
I pull myself up on a chair and reach for the bag in Katya’s hand. I move quickly but she is faster: before my arm is straight, the rubber end of my crutches hits the bone between my breast, shoving me back to sitting. A hot pink circle throbs on my sternum. Katya uses the crutch to slide the bag beyond my grasp. It spins on its base and in a side pocket I see – I’m sure I see – I think I see – a single black feather with violet glitter on its tip.
