I estimate that I was out of the apartment for between twenty minutes and half an hour. It could not have taken me any longer to get to the phone box, then to the store on Greenwich Avenue, then back to the phone box, and home again. Even with ten amphetamine-heads working at twice their normal pace, it would be impossible to fully furnish a completely empty apartment in less than half an hour.
I look around me.
There are two sofas, brown leather, at right angles to each other. I touch one of the sofas, just to make sure it’s really there. The leather is cold and clammy; it squeaks as I run my fingertip along it and I imagine that I am touching a dead body.
Behind one of the sofas there is an oil painting of a man sitting in the lotus position, on a beach.104
There is a flat-screen TV on a glass stand.
A matching glass coffee-table with a lamp and a stack of magazines on top of it.
Two bookshelves, black, that look like they were assembled from a flat pack. One unit bisects the room, separating the living area from the kitchen. The other is pushed up against the wall, to the right of the door.
There is a light brown rug in the centre of the wooden floor.
I press one of the light switches. Three of the spotlights in the ceiling light up. I press the other light switch. Now all lights are lit.
An electric Orion.
In the kitchen, a round glass-topped table with four high-backed chairs. A coffee-machine on the kitchen counter.
A mug in the sink.105
Two vodka bottles – one empty, the other half full.
A glass on the table filled with white wine. There is a lipstick mark on the glass. I pick it up. It’s dusty and it looks like it might have been there a long time. I
104 That’s a picture of Hunter S. Thompson, commissioned from an artist in Devon. I know because it’s hanging on the wall in my apartment.
knock back the wine anyway. It’s like drinking a cupful of vinegar. A Post-It note is attached to the fridge – Buy Milk scrawled in fat, rounded hand.106
It is like stepping into a snapshot of someone’s life. Now I can smell something and I think the smell is me.
But it might be something else. It might be what Jadee was referring to. I open the fridge and look inside it. There’s half a cucumber and a wilted lettuce. Three eggs. A tub of margarine. A bottle of tonic water and some
mayonnaise. A few dregs of milk, curdled in the bottom of the bottle. One week out of date.
The smell is getting stronger. I recognise the smell. It triggers a memory in me but I cannot remember what that memory is. Perhaps it has something to do with the accident. My head is spinning. I reach inside my jeans pocket. The five computer keys are still there. I take them from my pocket and I arrange them on the kitchen counter.
I open the kitchen cupboards. Glasses. Plates. Bowls. A cutlery set. Tins and jars of food.
I try the taps. Water spills into the sink, splashing the work surface. I dip my head and drink directly from the stream.
I examine some of the things on the shelves.
There is a small wooden box. I lift the lid. Leaflets. Train tickets. A flyer advertising a gig by a local band called CreepJoint: the band Jadee wanted to see at Le Poisson Rouge.107
There is a typewriter, vintage, light blue: Olivetti Lettera 22.108 I lift the typewriter and I am surprised by its weight. I put the typewriter back on the shelf and I continue exploring.
Files and folders containing bank statements, bills, letters.
I look on the bookshelves. It’s all chick-lit and new age fiction, with a few self-help books.
There are two candles on the glass stand that holds the TV.
I lift one of then and hold it to my face: the familiar, nauseating scent of vanilla.
106 Yes, the note is there too. Emily wrote it. I never bought the milk. She didn’t either.
107 Steve Hollyman’s band, according to Fatima. He works at the Manchester Writing School. I am going to get in touch with him and ask him what the fuck is going on.
It always reminds me of her.109
There is a brown leather bean chair to the right-hand side of the French windows. On top of it sits a lime-green pillow and, on top of the pillow, a small brown bear.
I look at some of the magazines and newspapers on top of the coffee table.
Vogue. Manchester Evening News. The European edition of the Wall Street Journal.
The bathroom is no longer empty, either. A picture of the sea hangs on the wall.110 I look at the picture and I see myself being swept away by the tide. I imagine that the sensation of drowning is beautiful and comforting.
There are more candles, and some tea lights. A floor-to-ceiling mirror.
A towel draped over the edge of the bath. Digital scales on the floor.
I tap the scales with my foot and the number 0/0 appears on the screen. I step onto the scales.
I am 8st 2lbs and I am five foot eight. I knew I had lost weight.
I go back into the living room.
On the wall, in the kitchen, a large black-and-white photo print of New York City.
Where am I?
This place is familiar to me, but that doesn’t mean anything. I might have been born in this room and I might have even died here. I sit down on the sofa with my head bowed, resting on my hands.
I might have spent a lifetime sitting like this or it might be only a few seconds. When I look up I notice that there is a photograph on the table, beside the sofa.
I pick the photograph up and I look at it.
109
Me too. I should really throw them away. 110 Bought it on holiday. In North Wales.
Emily. She’s sitting in a bar somewhere, in the sun, holding a bottle of Corona with a wedge of lime poking out of its neck. To her left, stage right, sits a man, and he has his hand on her leg. The man is me.
There is a word in my head and the word is ‘information’. I think I know where I am.
I think this is the apartment I shared with Emily.
I think I know what’s in the bedroom.
I think that I might have known what is in the bedroom all along but I have simply refused to see it.
I am stood outside the room with my hand on the silver door handle. The door is shut tight and I think I am considering whether or not I dare open the door and look inside.
My hand is shaking. It might be shaking because I need a drink. I remember that there is a half-full bottle of vodka in the kitchen.
When I reach the kitchen counter, the bottle is empty. I think I might have drunk the vodka already.
I think my hand might be shaking for a different reason. I go back into the hallway.
I am thinking about Schrödinger’s cat paradox.111
The fact that until you open the box and look at the cat, it is simultaneously alive and dead.
I push the handle down and fling the bedroom door open. And I step into the void.
Into the nothing. The never.
There is a girl asleep on the bed. She has her back to me. She’s wearing a black strappy top and blue dorella boxers. Her dark grey tights, denim shorts and black leather ankle boots are strewn about the floor. Her short red hair falls over her face and I know that if I were to step over and brush it to one side then I would see the stud glistening in the side of her nose.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
111 Can you hear me, Vincent?
I look at my watch and I see that it is ticking again. I wonder if it is set to the correct time and I remember what the Russian spy told me in the underpass.
A stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day. Just the same way as defective vision is, in many ways, worse than the dead black of absolute blindness.
My sight is defective. I wonder if the watch ever stopped ticking at all.
My hand is on the girl’s shoulder.
I roll her towards me. The hair falls away from her face. I jerk backwards, pulling my hand away spastically, as if scalded.
There is blood. Clotted, congealed blood. The sort of blood that could be lifted with a fork. And there is something else. Something membranous. Purple. The matted hair clings to the scalp like as if trying to suffocate it. I am thinking of shotgun suicides and of the fact that certain brain tumours have teeth, hair and fingernails. I am picturing vile sea creatures, aliens. And then the smell. It is the smell of hands after rifling through a jar of decades-old copper coins. It is the smell of decomposition. It is the smell of piss and shit and fear. The smell of salt and rust. It is the smell of suffering. It is the sort of smell you walk into, jarring, abrupt, as one walks into a closed patio door. The sort of smell reminiscent of chicken carcass- filled bin bags left out in the sun for days and days and days on end. It is the sort of smell that attacks your eyes and your throat and sinks into every pore on the surface of your skin like you’re standing neck-high in a barrel of excrement. It is the sort of smell that permeates, that nauseates, that asphyxiates. The sort of savage smell that ravages each and every cell inside you.
It is the stench of death itself.
There is something around the cadaver’s foot.
It is an anklet. A plait of leather looped twice and held in place with a silver clip.
And on the anklet? A black plastic square.
Did I give this to her? Or did I put it on her afterwards?
I reach forward and pull at the anklet. The back of my hand brushes against the cold flesh of Emily’s leg, and I flinch.
S.
AVOIDS.
The smell is still choking my throat. It is impossible to get used to it. It is thick and it hangs in the air like cruel words shouted in the heat of an argument.
I gag and retch.
I stare again at the blood and the viscous grey matter and the livid purple of the skin. This girl – no, this thing, this monster in the bed, this meat-suit with its disfigured face and its black fingernails, its blood and sebaceous fluids, its guts, its brains, its humbles – bears no resemblance to the Emily whose very betrayal I obsessed over for days, weeks, months. But it’s her. Oh God. Oh God. It’s her.
I vomit a disgusting emulsion of alcohol and mushed-up crisps onto the shit- coloured carpet. The caustic bite of the bile in my nose and throat helps mask the stench of the corpse and I am grateful for it.
It is easy to forget how much throwing up takes out of you. I lie on my side, face in my own puke, convulsing. I don’t resist the cramps and the muscle-jerks. I just let them get to work on me. It is very much like getting beaten up, like curling into a ball and lying on the pavement as three or four pairs of fists and feet go at you, kicking you in all the right places, giving your vital organs a real going-over. I feel the familiar dislodging sensation behind my sternum, the fragmentation, the cold hard plastic shifting up my oesophagus. I feel it stuck in my throat, behind my larynx. It is such an obscure pain that it is impossible to confuse it with anything else.
I have felt this pain before. I sit up and I cough and strain. Then I crawl on my hands and knees into the hallway. I remain there on all fours, a string of saliva hanging from my bottom lip and pooling on the wooden floor.
This is the feeling of choking backwards. I cough.
I spit.
I cough some more.
I am thinking of the conversation I had with Jadee. Or the conversation I thought I had with Jadee. It was probably Emily; they’re the same person anyway. About the silent N in the word autumn and about how she felt that she could hear the letter whenever a person uttered it. If you read the word autumn without the N on the end then it just doesn’t feel the same in your mouth.
You should try it sometime.
Time has passed. I am still coughing and still spitting. I picture a mangy cat expelling a fur ball. Then, after several seconds, I feel a sharp pain in my throat, backwardly choking again, like something is coming up, out of me, like something is dislodged, out of place, and then I feel it rise up, up to the surface, feel it
scratching against the back of my tongue, rattling like a splinter from a broken tooth, and I open my lips, just enough for a black square to shoot from between them and clatter onto the wooden floor of the hallway, bounce several times like a fateful die cast in a board game, fall onto its edge then right itself and land face up, all in slow motion.
There is a word in my head. The letter N.
There is a word in my head and the word is. The word is.
DAVISON.112
112
And now the phone in my apartment, in Manchester, is ringing. It is impossible to ignore a ringing phone. You see it in films: a phone rings and someone answers. It’s usually bad news. And I am sitting here with my laptop computer, lid open, screen lit, making these notes in one window and reading an email from my friend Taylor in the other, something to do with a program I’m using to parse this very document in order to excavate hidden messages. The phone is still ringing. The phone should not be ringing because I unplugged it so I could work. I see myself and I am standing up and I am walking over to the phone and my trembling hand feels clammy against the red plastic and I lift the receiver and I say, Hello? but there is nothing but silence and then suddenly I shiver and my whole body bristles and I turn round and that’s when I sense him and he opens his mouth to speak and he says,