The Other Side of the Door Read online

‘There’s nothing I can say.’

  ‘This is so, so . . .’ Sonia trailed off. Again, she put a hand over her mouth as if to stop unwanted words spilling out of her. ‘We’re standing here talking quite calmly,’ she said, ‘and all the time – this.’ She gestured with her hand, blindly. Her face wrinkled for a moment.

  ‘I know. I know.’ My words seemed to fill the room. I realized I was shouting and dropped my voice to a whisper. ‘I know.’

  ‘Know what? What do you know?’ She put a hand on my arm. Her fingers pressed painfully into my flesh.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Why are you showing me this? What are you doing?’

  ‘I didn’t–’

  ‘Don’t say you didn’t know what to do again!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘He’s dead. Dead. And you and he – Christ, Bonnie, what have you done?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What makes you think I won’t just call the police myself?’

  I shrugged. A sudden weariness came over me, so heavy that I almost lay down under the sheer grey mass of it and closed my eyes. ‘You could,’ I said, ‘and I know you’re right. It’s probably the only sane thing to do.’

  At last Sonia looked at me properly, with an intense, almost fierce gaze. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright. She seemed almost unreal. ‘I need to think,’ she said.

  ‘I shouldn’t have called you. It was wrong. Everything’s wrong. Oh, God, everything’s so wrong. How did it all turn out like this?’

  ‘Be quiet. Just don’t say anything.’

  Suddenly I could no longer stand up. I sat down on the floor, my back to the body, wrapped my arms around my legs and pulled up my knees so they were pressing into my eye sockets. I tried to make myself as small as possible. Curled up into myself, I could hear my heart beat. I waited. My neck throbbed, my ribs throbbed and, around me, the room seemed to throb. At last I lifted my head on the wobbly stem of my neck. Sonia walked to the window and stood by the tiny strip of half-light between the closed curtains, looking out onto the shabby, silent little street. She was frowning, her eyes narrowed as if in intense thought; her lower lip was trapped between her teeth and I could see her chest rise and fall with her breathing. At last she turned back to the room and stared down at the body. Something in her appearance seemed to have changed. She stood straighter, and when she spoke, her voice was clearer. It was as if a fog had lifted.

  ‘OK,’ she said, as if she had come to a hard decision. ‘You turned to me for help.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, in a whisper from the floor.

  ‘And you won’t call the police?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You say you trust me. That’s where we’re going to start from. Trust.’ She was speaking very slowly and clearly, enunciating her words with exaggerated precision as if she was talking to a small child or a foreigner with only the most basic grasp of the English language, but I knew that she was actually talking to herself, going through the jumble of thoughts in her head and trying to order them. ‘So, I trust you as well. You’re my friend. I’m not going to ask you what happened here, though it seems pretty bloody obvious. If you want to tell me about it, save it for later.’

  I nodded. I would never want to tell anybody about it, not ever.

  ‘I have a horrible feeling that I’m going to regret this, but I won’t go to the police. That’s the first thing.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do. But what I don’t understand is what I am supposed to be doing. Bonnie?’

  ‘It’s – I don’t know how to say it.’

  ‘You didn’t just get me to come over here to give you a hug?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why didn’t you run away?’

  ‘I thought –’ I stopped. I couldn’t really remember what I’d thought.

  ‘Bonnie.’ Sonia’s voice was sharp, calling me to attention. ‘Why am I here? What do you want me to do?’

  It was my turn to pause for a long time.

  ‘I said I called you because I didn’t know what to do and I thought you’d somehow be able to tell me. But that’s not quite true. I do know what to do – or, at least, one thing I could do. You’re the only person I felt I could turn to, but by doing that I think I’ve done something terrible to you. So I just want to say this: say the word and you can walk out of here and I’ll wait until you’re safely away and then I’ll call the police. I’ll have to. Because, you see, what I’ve been thinking of needs someone else. I can’t do it alone.’

  Sonia looked at the body lying out of sight behind me, and this time she didn’t glance away. She was like someone standing on the edge of an abyss and staring down into it, unable to drag herself away from the horror.

  ‘So what do you want from me?’

  ‘I want –’ I took a deep breath, and then the words came out in a blurt, sounding even more absurd and impossible than I’d imagined. ‘I need you to help me get rid of the body.’

  Sonia gave a gasp and took a step backwards so she was almost against the door. ‘Get rid of it?’ she said weakly. I noted that she was saying ‘it’ not ‘he’, as if she was trying to forget that here was a man she had once known, had not long ago talked to, argued and laughed with. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘If we got rid of it, maybe nobody would look. Not for a long time at least.’

  ‘You are serious? You think that you and me – No, Bonnie. No. You don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it on my own,’ I said. ‘I tried to think of a way but I couldn’t.’

  ‘This is crazy. Look at him. He’s big. We can’t just – I mean, how?’ She gave a small, high laugh that stopped as abruptly as it had started, though the harsh sound seemed to hang in the room. ‘You’ve been watching too many films.’

  ‘It’s the only thing I can think of.’

  ‘It’s mad – and it would be horrible. I feel sick even thinking about it. Have you allowed yourself to imagine what it would be like? He’s dead. He’ll be starting to go hard or something soon.’

  ‘Oh, no! Don’t.’

  ‘What? Don’t talk about it? If you can’t even bear to talk about it, how will you actually do it? That’s what happens, isn’t it? Everything starts to change.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘You don’t want to touch him. The dead aren’t like the living.’

  ‘I have to, Sonia.’

  ‘It’s a crime, don’t forget. Maybe that doesn’t mean so much to you, not now, but for me . . .’ She stopped and swallowed hard. ‘Covering it up, blocking the investigation. We could go to prison for a long, long time. I could, I mean. Have you thought about that?’

  She stood over me, her face blazing, and my head sank back onto my knees.

  ‘You’re right and this was unforgivable,’ I mumbled. ‘Get out of here this minute, and I’m terribly sorry I ever rang you. I mean it. Go.’

  ‘Get up, Bonnie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stand up. I can’t talk to you while you’re crouching on the floor like that.’

  I stumbled upright. The room seemed to sway around me. ‘I feel drunk,’ I said. ‘Or as if I’ve got flu.’

  ‘You really thought we could just get rid of it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You were right and you should go.’

  ‘How? I mean, how on earth would we even get his body out of this flat without being seen? And then what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘When does Liza get back?’

  ‘September. But we can’t just leave his body here for her to discover.’ For the briefest second I allowed myself to think of decomposition and decay, of his body seeping and crumbling into the carpet. My stomach turned and I whimpered.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The only thing I’ve thought about is getting rid of it. Making it go away.’

  ‘Yes, that,’ said Sonia, grimly, p
ulling back her mouth again. She almost looked as though she was smiling. But she wasn’t.

  ‘Which is why I knew I needed someone. You. I needed you.’

  ‘Did you think about how you – we – would do it?’

  ‘I just thought about putting it somewhere where it would never be found.’

  ‘Brilliant. Like where?’

  ‘Like really, really deep woodland where nobody ever goes.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Bonnie, this is England,’ said Sonia. ‘There aren’t deep woodlands where nobody goes. And if there were, how would you – how would we – get it there? I can tell you that, wherever you put it, someone walking their dog would find it. When you read in the papers about bodies being found, that’s what happens. A man walking his dog.’

  ‘Couldn’t we bury it somewhere?’

  ‘Where? That’s got all the problems of finding somewhere to dump the body without being seen, and then when you’re there you have to dig a huge hole, deep enough so it doesn’t get dug up by scavengers. There’s a reason why they make graves six feet deep. And, wherever you do it, it shows for a long time. It’s not just a matter of going to Hampstead Heath after midnight.’

  ‘What about burning?’ I asked, a bit wildly.

  ‘It’s not like an old newspaper.’ She made a gesture of repugnance. ‘The human body is a difficult thing to burn.’

  ‘They do it in crematoriums.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sonia. ‘With an industrial-strength furnace that can heat up to a thousand degrees. And even then it doesn’t destroy everything. It’s not something you can do in your back garden.’

  I had a horrible flashback of cremating my guinea pig when I was small and the smell that had filled our garden. I put my hands over my face, feeling sick. ‘What then?’ I said. ‘What can we do? We can’t hide it and we can’t bury it and we can’t burn it. You’re not going to suggest cutting it up, are you? I can’t, Sonia. I’d prefer to die myself than do that.’ In fact, the thought of dying seemed inviting right now, to close my eyes on all this.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said Sonia. ‘I’ve dissected animals and I’m just not going there.’

  ‘People do go missing, though,’ I said. ‘Some bodies are never found.’

  ‘Not very often, except in films. Not unless you’re the Mafia and you can bury a body in concrete and build a motorway on top of it. This is not an easy thing to do.’

  My mind wasn’t working properly. Everything seemed to be shifting in and out of focus. His body, sprawled on the floor, seemed to fill my field of vision. Everywhere I looked, I saw it. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I can’t do this. I don’t know why I ever thought I could. Oh, God. Let’s just get out of here as quickly as we can.’ And I clutched her arm as if to pull her from the room.

  But Sonia drew back. ‘Wait,’ she said.

  ‘We just leave,’ I said. ‘It’s like you were never here.’

  She turned to me, her expression calm and almost tender. I could feel her taking charge of the situation and myself letting her – and, after all, wasn’t that why I had turned to her? So that someone else could sort out the ghastly, catastrophic mess?

  ‘We can’t bury it,’ she said. ‘We can’t burn it, we can’t just dump it. What’s left?’

  ‘Water,’ I said. ‘People are buried at sea, aren’t they? You see it in war films. They wrap them in a sail with weights.’

  ‘You’ve got a boat, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know anyone who’s got a boat?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Friends of friends. I don’t think any of them would lend me one and let me take it out to sea on my own, though. Also, I don’t know much about marinas but I imagine they’re pretty crowded in the summer.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be the sea,’ said Sonia.

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s no use.’

  ‘I don’t know yet. It’s the best idea so far. Water. A lake or a reservoir or a river. There’s a reservoir I’ve been to once; it’s quite near here. That might be the best place. There would definitely be no one around. First we need to sort things out.’ She walked over to the body and peered down at it almost dispassionately. ‘Why does it look so different from someone who’s just asleep?’

  I’d seen him asleep and I’d seen him dead and I was trying not to think of the difference.

  ‘The blood’s all on the rug,’ said Sonia, ‘so I don’t think we need to do very much cleaning.’

  She seemed to decide something and walked out of the room. I heard cupboard doors opening and closing. When she came back in she was wearing pink washing-up gloves. She threw a packet to me and I caught it. It was another packet of gloves, yellow this time.

  I ripped it open and pulled them on. Sonia picked up an ornament from the table and contemplated it. It was made of dull grey metal, of a vaguely abstract design, and showed a big figure and a small figure linked together. It probably symbolized something like friendship or parenthood.

  ‘By picking this up,’ said Sonia, ‘and moving it, I’m interfering with a crime scene. I don’t know what the exact charge would be – interfering with an investigation, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, something like that. If it blows up, we go to prison for years, lose everything. Are you really up for this?’

  ‘Are you? You’re the one I brought into it.’

  Sonia walked across the room and put the ornament on a shelf, placing it just so, like a conscientious housewife.

  Before

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Don’t get too excited, Joakim,’ I said drily. ‘It’s not going to make you rich and famous.’

  ‘A professional band.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘Playing a proper gig at last – not just some poxy school dance full of fourteen-year-old girls wearing too much makeup.’ His voice was scornful as only a just-eighteen-year-old voice can be.

  ‘It’s a wedding, that’s all. I don’t even know how many people will be there. And it’s not your kind of music, Joakim. It’s more country and blues.’

  ‘I love country music,’ he said. ‘It’s authentic. Lucinda Williams. Steve Earle. Teddy Thompson. Who else is in the band?’

  ‘So far, there’s you on violin, a man called Neal Fenton who was in the original band for a bit – he’s the bass guitarist – and Sonia Hurst is the singer. Well, you know her, of course.’

  ‘Sonia Hurst?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The chemistry teacher?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Singing in your band?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Weird,’ said Joakim. ‘Me playing a gig with Miss Hurst and Miss Graham.’

  ‘You’ve left school now. You’d better call us Bonnie and Sonia.’

  ‘What’ll you play? Piano?’

  ‘Probably I’ll just fill in the gaps. It depends on who else we get.’

  Until June, when he had taken his music A level, Joakim had been my student. I had first met him when he was fifteen, small for his age with cropped hair and the aggressive posture of someone who wants to be older, taller and cooler. Over the summer between GCSEs and sixth form, he had grown six inches and looked pale, malnourished and ungainly, with puny tufts of beard on his chin and spots on his forehead. But then, six months later, he had filled out and let his dark blond hair grow long, had taken to smoking roll-ups and wearing skinny black jeans. Suddenly he was a young man, languid and determinedly casual, damping down his natural intensity under his laid-back manner, his style a mixture of the romantic and the world-weary. I had witnessed all of his rapid incarnations and it was hard for me not to catch glimpses of the young Joakim, so anxious to belong, so cockily insecure. I had also witnessed his progress as a musician. It seemed to me – perhaps because it was true for myself as well – that it was in playing music he felt least self-conscious and most at home with
himself. I spend a lot of my time in a cacophony of sound, screeching and puffing and banging, but Joakim could really play: the flute well, the electric guitar loudly, the violin with outstanding intonation and feeling.

  It was this that made me ask him to join us – and that I’d known he was at a loose end this summer, waiting for his exam results and for the next stage of his life to begin, pretending not to care, biting his nails. He touched me, I suppose, and I wanted him to be all right.

  The wedding was weeks away, it was a beautiful summer’s day and I was on holiday. I knew I should make a start on my flat, which even on a day like today felt dark, almost subterranean, but not right now. Instead I called Sally and asked her if she fancied a picnic.

  ‘That would be completely and utterly fantastic,’ she said, with a fervour that took me by surprise. ‘I’m going stir-crazy with Lola.’

  Sally was my oldest friend. We had known each other since we were seven, and sometimes I was surprised we had managed to stay in touch over the years. We were almost like sisters. We squabbled and fell out, occasionally took each other for granted and every so often resented each other (me, that she was so settled, and her, that I was so free), but we were inextricably bound together. Lola was her eighteen-month-old daughter: a tiny, plump, fierce child with dimpled knees, hair like sticky candy floss, a voice like an electric drill and a will of iron that often reduced Sally to tears of powerless frustration. I noticed that she had stopped saying she and Richard wanted four children in quick succession.

  ‘You bring Lola and some bread for the ducks. I’ll buy us a ready-made picnic. We can meet in Regent’s Park.’

  We sat on the already-bleached grass and ate cheese rolls while Lola ran around, tripped over, yelled loudly and unconvincingly, her mouth seeming to take up her entire face, followed a squirrel, calling to it to stop and eat her bread, then abruptly crawled onto Sally’s lap and fell asleep, her thumb thrust into her mouth and her four fingers spread over her smeared face. Sally gave a sigh of relief and lay back on the grass as well, Lola across her.

  ‘I’m exhausted after an hour,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how you manage.’

  ‘“Manage” is the wrong word,’ she said. ‘“Manage” sounds neat and organized. Look at me – do I look neat and organized?’