still here too, lady!’), the ancient wine corks accumulating fluff and grease (‘Remember us?’), and the deadline for her latest potboiler (‘Tuesday, or else’), plus the pressure on her long-term book on literary doubles (‘You bitch! I can’t do it on my own!’) and you begin to understand why Belinda was giving house room to the rat. The deadlines alone she might have managed. It was the cacophony of reproach from all fucking directions in this fucking, fucking house that she couldn’t tolerate much longer. It’s sad but true that, had Belinda’s DNA not tragically lacked the genetic code for basic household organization, none of the following story need have taken place.
You couldn’t feel sorry for her, and nobody did. Many women had more responsibilities than Belinda, with considerably fewer advantages. At the nice age of thirty-six, she lived in a nice, large Victorian villa in Armadale Road, Battersea, with a nice, rather entertaining Swedish husband she’d met well into her thirties. Her work was nice, too – compiling a serious literary book alongside more lucrative horsy stuff for girls. On this Monday morning in February she was about to deliver A Rosette for Verity and collect three thousand pounds. The Swede was a senior scientist, so the Johanssons had money. Only Stefan’s habit of perusing Over-reach Your English for Foreigners on the toilet each morning could be seen as a cause of strain.
Unfortunately, however, the justice of Belinda’s complaints was not the point. The point was, her body was a twenty-four-hour adrenaline pumping station. And at the time this story starts, Belinda’s behaviour was deteriorating badly. She had caught herself waving two fingers at the postman from behind the curtains, just because he innocently delivered more post. ‘Take it away,’ she yelled. ‘Don’t bring it, take it away!’ A magazine editor had rung up with the offer of a laughably easy horse-tackle column (she’d coveted it for years), and instead of saying, ‘That’s great!’, she’d barked, ‘Do you think I just sit here with my thumb up my bum waiting for you to ring? Get a life, for God’s sake.’ At the supermarket, she had rammed her trolley into that of a dithering pensioner, saying, ‘Look, have you got a job?’ In short, the flight-or-fight mechanism Nature gave Belinda for emergencies had gone horribly haywire, as if someone had removed the knob, and lost it.
Stefan would tell her to take off the weight, or hang loose. Stefan was one of those people who has a regular job – or even, in recidivist lapses, a ‘yob’ – who attends college in office hours, and comes home in the evening to relax. In about fifteen years, he would retire. True, a certain amount of research was required of him, but it was no skin off his nose, as he was proud of remarking. Why Belinda made such a meal of things, he didn’t know.
So things came to a head in that pleasant suicide month of February, on a Monday morning. Belinda was racing out of her agreeable house at nine thirty-five for a ten a.m. train from Clapham Junction, and there was (for once) the faintest chance she would make it. She felt terrible, afflicted by a painful and humiliating dream in which she had punched Madonna on the nose for hijacking her car, only to discover that the passengers were all disabled children. This was not the sort of dream to be dislodged easily. The children had waved accusing crutches at her through the car windows, and though she’d grovelled to Madonna, she’d woken unforgiven and felt like a murderer.
Meanwhile, the manuscript of A Rosette for Verity had done its usual job of transmogrifying into a bowling ball in her shoulder-bag. She was brushing her hair with one hand and fumbling for bus-fare with the other, and Neville was helpfully practising trapeze. ‘Steady on, Neville,’ she muttered absently. And then the telephone rang in the hall.
‘Oh bugger,’ she said, as the phone trilled. Oh no. She flailed about, as if caught in quicksand. Here she was, late already, hair not dry, feeling sick with guilt about the poor crippled kiddies, and wearing a strange fashionable black slidy nylon coat she’d allowed her mother to buy her, which made her feel like an impostor.
‘Ring-ring,’ it said, as she passed.
‘Nope,’ she told it.
‘Ring-ring,’ it persisted. ‘Remember me?’
So she snatched up the receiver and answered the phone. Why? Because life’s like that. It’s a rule. The later you are, the less time you can give to it, the more vulnerable you are to far-fetched misgivings. What if it’s the publisher phoning to cancel? Or Stefan with his head caught in some railings?
All her life, Belinda’s idea of an emergency was someone with their head caught in some railings.
‘Hello?’
A high-pitched male voice with an Ulster accent. A friendly voice, but nobody she knew.
‘May I speak with Mrs Johnson, please?’
‘Johansson,’ she corrected him automatically, shooting a despairing glance at the hall clock. Why did cold-callers always waste time assuming you aren’t the person they’ve phoned? She gritted her teeth. Before catching the train she needed to buy some stamps, renew her road tax, phone a radio producer and touch up chapter three, because she’d just remembered the bay gelding of Verity’s chief rival Camilla had emerged from a three-day event as a chestnut mare. Perhaps he had got something caught in some railings. Dramatically (and distractingly) Neville swung back and forth in a spotlight, with no safety-net, accompanied by a drum-roll. Meanwhile her bag slid off her shoulder with a great whump, as if to say, ‘Well, if we’re not going out, I’ll stop here.’
‘Hello Mrs Johnson, my name is Graham, and I work for British Telecom. We recently sent you some details of new services. I wonder, is this a good time to talk?’
‘Hah!’
Belinda gave a hollow laugh and started to fill this annoying wasted time by hoisting her bag from under the hall table – the area Stefan cheerfully called the Land That Time Forgot About. Heaps of stuff made a big tangly nest under here, even though Belinda had frequently begged Mrs Holdsworth just to chuck it all out. She looked at it now, and it said, ‘Ooh, hello, remember us?’ rather excitedly, because it didn’t get the chance as often as the socks in the bathroom or the newspapers in the kitchen. Weekly free news-sheets and fluff in lumps mingled with Stefan’s favourite moose-hat, and some spare coat buttons. Three empty Jiffy-bags bled grey lunar dust over a novelty egg-timer, a bottle of Finnish vodka, a CD of the 1970s Malmö pop sensation the Hoola Bandoola Band, and an ice-hockey puck. And there among it was a single white envelope bearing the symbol of registered post. ‘Sod it,’ she said, as she stretched to reach it.
‘This is Graham from BT,’ the man reminded her. ‘Is this a good time to talk?’
She looked at the clock again: ten forty-three. This envelope clearly contained the cash-card she’d argued about with the bank. ‘You never sent it!’ she’d said. ‘But you signed for it!’ they replied. And here it was, saying, ‘Remember me?’ In her stomach, Neville started calling other rats for an acrobatic display – ‘Yip!’ ‘Hoopla!’ ‘Hi-yip!’ From the way their weight was shifting around, they had started to form the rodent equivalent of the human pyramid. She felt compelled to admire their ingenuity. It felt as though they’d acquired a springboard.
‘Look, I’ve got to go. This isn’t convenient.’
Graham made a sympathetic noise, but did not say goodbye. Instead, he asked, ‘Perhaps you could suggest a more convenient time in the next few days?’ It was a routine phone-sales question, but it unleashed something. Because suddenly Belinda lost control.
It was because he had asked her to think ahead, perhaps. That’s what did it. Normally she went through life as if driving in the country in the dark, just peering to the end of the headlights and keeping her nerve. But daylight revealed the
