Boy on the Wire (2 page)

2

Rachel was twenty-six when they met. She did not want to be there that evening. Too many bankers, she told him later. She only came to meet a friend who worked in the city.

John Hyde saw her from across the bar. He stopped talking to his friends. He was with a woman – he forgot her name soon after – who caught him staring and shook him by the arm. He barely noticed and did not even glance at her as she left.

As she was leaving, the woman caught Rachel with her elbow, spilling her drink. Rachel looked at her friends, then at the woman now walking out of the door, then shrugged. Forgotten. Never one to brood. Still, this was not where she wanted to be. She picked up her coat, spoke in her friend’s ear, and started towards the door.

Her friend grabbed her arm, begging her to stay. Rachel sighed and her eyes drifted over the bar, not looking at anyone in particular. They caught his, caught him staring at her. He smiled. She stared back. She put her coat down, but turned away from John.

He went to the bar and then came and stood behind her, champagne and glasses in hand. Rachel’s friend saw him before she did and stopped talking. Rachel followed her gaze and turned around. John did not say anything, just held out a glass. He was surprised when she took it, but did not let on. He gave her friend a glass too and poured for Rachel. She held out a hand while he poured. He pretended to concentrate on the champagne but he looked at the hand too – its pale skin, the unvarnished nails. She did not smile. It was as if she was challenging him, as if she scorned him. He felt this too but kept his hand steady. He poured for her friend, placed the bottle on the table and then went back to his friends. He and Rachel had not exchanged a word. When he got back to his circle he could sense her looking at him. He looked back and smiled. Then he turned his back on her.

She liked his arrogance, she told him a few months later. It annoyed her and attracted her at the same time.

It was an act. He had done it before, though he never told her that. He found it worked. It was a means to an end. She came over to him. It was expected.

Yet, when she did approach and he turned and saw her standing there, and the look on her face, biting her lip, everything went quiet for him. She was standing in front of him and he might as well have been in Antarctica. Around them nothing. He stopped pretending then. She could tell by the look in his eyes, that the pretence, the games were gone.

He did not ask her to go home with him that night – a delicacy in himself that surprised him. He walked to the bus stop with her. He stood close to her, the heat of her body, the scent of her hair. He wanted to put his arms around her. He remembers the gooseflesh, the coldness of her arm beneath his hand.

He watched her get on the bus. She went up to the top and sat on the side of the bus closest to the pavement. She held up her hand to the window, a smile on her face.

He, too, was smiling as he sat in the cab on the way home.

The kiss at the bus stop, the touch of their fingertips. If there was a moment to choose, a moment to fix in time, to nail down so that it didn’t get away, that would be the moment for him: the moment that would fix all the others.

They married in Richmond in the summer of 2009. She was twenty-nine, he thirty-four. From the reception, across the white tablecloths and lace, the view was of the expanse of Richmond Park and beyond that the Thames. After a honeymoon in Tanzania, they returned to their flat a few miles further downstream in Battersea.

A day in summer, a Sunday, mid-afternoon. She lies naked on the bed, he next to her. He traces a finger down her spine. Her skin glistens in the sunlight from the open window. His finger runs over the faint white hairs in the small of her back. She turns her head to look at him. Her hair is ruffled, her cheeks pink. They lie like that – she on her stomach, he on his side, his arm supporting his head.

She wants to spend a couple of years establishing herself as a journalist before having children. There is time: they are still young. On this Sunday, they are still young.

A year after their wedding, she had a regular column in
The Times
and was receiving more commissions than she could accept. He was proud of her. Her column had a byline photograph. In the photograph she wore half a smile. She looked sad somehow, even with that smile, distant. As if she knew all about you but not enough at the same time. It was how she had looked on the first night they met. He kept a copy of the photograph in his wallet.

He never thought it ironic, never thought why he liked that photograph so much, the one that made her look as if she knew everything about you, when really she knew next to nothing about him.

She told him stories of her childhood in the Chilterns. She told them in such a way that, when he closed his eyes, he could picture it. He could see her running down a hill, over the rabbit warrens and the chalk flint, arms held out to the side. Flying. Her screams and laughter fill the air. Across twenty years he can hear them. They hang in the air. He feels if he moves his fingers through them, they will waft and disappear.

He feels, when she tells him these stories, that he wants them to hang in the air, does not want them to go, does not want to disturb them. If they stay long enough, then perhaps they will become his too, part of his story.

He tells her stories in turn. He feels he has to offer something. But they are not the truth. He says he is an only child and that his parents died when he was in his early twenties. It might as well be the truth, he tells himself. He makes up stories about a childhood in South Africa. He is good at it. Rather, he takes the story of his childhood and leaves out parts of it. In fact, he leaves out most of it.

Rachel feels there is more. She wants to know why there are no photographs of his parents, why no photographs of him as a boy, why he won’t take her to Port Elizabeth where he grew up.

She does not believe the excuses – the story of the fire, always coming up with somewhere else to go on holiday – and feels something is wrong. In fact, she will realise later, it frightens her. Not enough for her to stop loving him, not enough for her to leave, but a little. She has looked him up on the internet of course, but there was not much there and all of it about his career in the city. There is more she could do. She could hire a detective or pay a company that does family trees to research his. But she has promised herself she will wait, will wait for him to tell her.

The first letter arrived on a Saturday morning in March 2011. John went downstairs to get the post, but he did not see it until he was back in the flat, flicking through the envelopes. He stood in the corridor and opened it because she was still getting ready.

It had been snowing. The snow fell late that year. They were about to go to Battersea Park for a walk. The sun was out and it streamed through the window and into the hall. He opened the letter and he stood there in the hall for some time, staring at it. It was a matter of a few lines, but it took a long time before he could take his eyes off it.

He heard Rachel coming out of the bathroom and put the letter in his pocket before she could see it. She came up to him, placed her hand on his arm, and up on tiptoes kissed him. ‘Ready?’ She smiled up at him. He wanted her then, wanted to be with her, though deep down he knew it was not sex he really wanted. He put his fingers into the top of her jeans and pulled her towards him, put his arms around her and one hand on the top of her leg.

‘Let’s go back to bed.’

‘No, silly. Snowmen.’ She laughed and ran through the door, leaving him to lock up.

There was no jump in his heart, no catching of breath when he read the letter. Perhaps some part of him had been expecting it. He read it, but still it did not break down the façade he had built up over the eighteen years since he had left South Africa, and had been building for years before. Not immediately. He did not notice that that was the start of it. He did not show Rachel the letter, not then and not later. Though he did not react to it, he knew it was not for her. Not for her eyes.

It could have changed things if he had, could have changed everything that was to follow.

He had almost forgotten his brother. Or, he had almost managed to stop thinking about his brother.

They throw snowballs at each other. He runs towards her, through her attack, and grabs her around the waist. They fall to the ground, laughing, and lie side by side for a few minutes. Then he gets to his feet and holds out a hand to her. As he leans down, at the edge of his vision, he sees a man watching them. When Rachel takes his arms and he bends a little further, he loses sight of him. And when he looks again, the man is gone. He is quiet as they walk home. But she is too, and does not notice his silence. She is thinking about something else. About the pill she has not taken that morning. She must remember to take it. It is not yet the time. Soon, but not now.

He forgets the man in the distance. Briefly, he wonders if he made him up, imagined him.

He sees him again, months later. Through the window of their flat, John sees a man standing in Battersea Park amidst the trees that line Albert Bridge Road. He does not see him clearly. The rain on the window, the dark. Only the wind moving the branches of the trees and the light from the streetlamps on the man’s face, allow him to see him at all. John stands behind the window in the dark of the room and looks across the street and into the park. When the light comes on him he can see that the man is not looking at him. He looks instead at the window two along, the room in which Rachel is watching television.

She comes into the room now, though, and sees John at the window.

John tracks the man’s head moving as it follows her. He still cannot see his face.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Peeping Tom.’

She comes towards him, trying to see out of the window, but he stops her and puts his hand on her arm. She is surprised by the force of it, the look on his face. He is too.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing, John, just some homeless person. Leave it. If he comes back you can call the police.’

When he looks again later that night, he does not see him.

He almost forgets about the man again. He and Rachel talk about coming off the pill. She is happy. She curls into him. He likes sitting like that. She is small and fits into the crook of his arm. His hand rests on her thigh, her hand on top of his. He folds her into him. He is happy too. He tells himself he is happy. He talks about wanting to have children. He does not think about family. The thought of it would frighten him too much. It is normal, this feeling, he tells himself.

When they sit there on the couch, she says to him, ‘If we have a child I would like to name him or her after your parents.’

He looks away from her. He tries to maintain his smile but he feels it going.

‘Of course.’ He can make something up. There is time. He can lie. ‘Of course.’

He thinks about these words. He finds them inadequate. He glances at her quickly and catches her looking at him. He knows what the expression means. He gets up and goes over to the window.

He jumps, visibly he thinks, when he sees the man. Rachel gets up and starts to come over.

He turns to her and holds out his arms. He talks, says the first thing that comes into his head. ‘Peter. They would have liked that.’ He takes hold of her and draws her in close. His hands are gripping her arms. When she is close to him and cannot see his face, he closes his eyes and softly shakes his head. He did not mean to say that name. Not that name out of all those he could have said.

He cannot keep it up any more. He has to move away. He goes out of the room and leaves her in the middle of it.

She looks after him, then walks over to the window and looks down at the trees in the park. She sees nothing.

The man starts coming every night. John tries to keep it from his wife. At first he succeeds. He walks past the window and glances at the trees. Sometimes he will see him, sometimes not. He does this several times a night.

Rachel notices. She asks him what he is doing. John says it is nothing, that he is just looking at the view, but he knows she knows it is not true. It is a dance they come to share.

She asks him if he thinks someone is watching them. She wants to call the police. John does not want that. He says it is nothing. He cannot say more than that, cannot give an explanation. He tries, he does try. He finds himself standing at the window, but instead of staring out of it he is lost in thought, trying to think of what to say to her, what she would believe. But he cannot think of anything, and he turns and sees her staring at him and of course he cannot say anything then. He just smiles and walks off.

She has not felt like this before. Though she sensed there were secrets, they have always been in the background, not, somehow, part of the here and now. But this feeling, it is like she sees something approaching in the distance, a faded image of a thing. She looks at their wedding picture. In the background a darkened smudge. It was not there before. It grows bigger every day.

That evening she finds him and tells him she wants to know what is going on, and if he will not call the police next time then she will. He stops looking then. At least, he stops looking while she is awake.

He waits until she is asleep, listening to her breathing. Then he gets out of bed. He stands in the window and looks out and watches the man watching him.

Of course he recognises him now. He has not yet seen his face completely. But, even when you have not seen him for eighteen years, it is hard not to recognise your brother, especially when you look almost identical.

Peter Hyde comes every night. John stands at his window and sees him, sees his shadow beneath the trees, sees his brother watching the flat.

Once, John runs out of the flat. He tries to be as quiet as possible, but he hurries, knowing that if he cannot be seen at the window his brother might go.

He gets outside but Peter is no longer there. John looks behind the trees, walks up and down the path, but nothing.