The Other Side of the Door

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