For the first few months, Ray couldn’t enter the flat without being struck by its emptiness. The sparse second-hand furnishings gave little sense of occupation. Barely functional, they told of a limited, almost monastic existence. The moment he shot the front door bolts and their echo died on the scuffed laminate, he felt himself consumed by the silence. A dropped teaspoon on the worktop alarmed him; the kettle’s gradual boil and click reassured him. It was a tangible absence you’d do well to stand for a week, let alone the eight months he’d kept it company. He was reconciled to its residency rights. It was a given.
That evening, before the dark came, he put some music on. Nina Simone. Last night it had been Lady Day, one of a handful of CDs grabbed from the old house before he fled. Later, depending on how much cheap red he drank before passing out, and whether Ms Simone laid her hand on his arm and reminded him he was worth a word of quiet consolation or spiked him with guilt, it might be Julie London. Some nights their voices soothed him, made the emptiness almost bearable. He’d wonder who he might have been if gifted half their sass and strength and soul? The same, he guessed. Only with a little more sugar in his bowl and a little less fear in his belly.
He hadn’t spoken in seventeen days.
Nobody’s fault but mine. It’s a question of responsibility he thought, swilling coffee grounds down the sink. The smell of fresh coffee, one of his few remaining luxuries, sprung as he cut open a new pack. The question after all this time remained the same: could he face himself, own up to himself? An answer had emerged from the silence: he had what it took to kill, but not the detachment to let it go.
Ray clung to the distinction as he peered through the kitchen’s rain-spattered window. The CD stuttered. Nina’s piano playing, which to his ear always seemed moments either from collapse or an outburst of violence, repeated one note, then stalled completely.
He ticked off the receipt against the items on his list, counted his remaining money, checked the slip from the cashpoint and scribbled a few calculations. Things were not looking good. Back in August with the police looking for the wrong people in all the wrong places, a text from Margaret assured him she’d find – an acceptable route back in three months. The old lie: home by Christmas. But, if any of them were to be trusted, it probably was Margaret. He’d burrowed through the long winter since then, fighting isolation demons. Drink demons. Guilt demons. Murderer sweats that took him to bed for soulless afternoons. There were no more text messages. The company didn’t want him. He didn’t want them. And even if the laughing blonde on the Co-op checkout – the one who blushes as she makes tannoy announcements, which makes him love her a little in spite of himself – even if she was the nearest he had come to a connection with anyone, there was no going back to London, not now.
The coffee percolator put-putted and sighed, job done. He rinsed a cup and would have dried it. He paused, hearing a new note in the silence. Something foreign and intrusive. He stood motionless feeling the rhythms; a clock tick, a fridge hum, the distant pulse of traffic. Relentless beats. But there was that false note again, a dry throated swallow, a sense of anticipation. Ray slipped out of his loafers and took a step which placed him within reach of the knife block. He eased out a narrow-bladed boning knife and planned a path from kitchen to living room.
Vaughan stood motionless by the back window in Jesuit black. His crooked index finger, its top joint missing, pointed to the knife. ‘Not necessary.’
True. He was already dead if that’s what Vaughan had decided. There would be no need for conversation. The knife suddenly seemed crude and amateurish. Ray carefully set it down on the dining table.
‘I’ll ‘ave a coffee though, Ray. Sweet and milky.’ He unbuttoned his jacket.
Ray took his time in the kitchen. He thought about running. A flight response feeding off the sinking feeling in his gut. Vaughan was sitting upright at the table looking out into the yard. ‘D’you get many sparrows? We ‘ardly get any, there’s a shortage.’
