The Other Side of the Door, Nicci French [new reading .TXT] 📗

with a kind of howl that sounded as though it was tearing the back of his throat. ‘I hurt what I love.’

‘This isn’t some crappy song,’ I said. ‘You hit me.’

‘You’re right to hate me.’

‘Hate you? Just fuck off. Now.’

‘Please.’

‘Now.’

Hayden lowered himself onto the sofa and put his head in his hands, rocking backwards and forwards slightly.

‘Stop it,’ I said. I went over and stood beside him.

‘Please please please please please,’ he was whimpering.

‘Enough now.’

And I laid my hand very lightly on the top of his head.

He became abruptly silent, then leaned forward and buried his face in my stomach, putting his arms around me as he wept with renewed force. The sobs that were convulsing him shook through me as well. At last he stopped and lifted his face. It was wet, gleaming, terribly beautiful. ‘Does it hurt much?’ he whispered.

‘I don’t know.’

He touched my cheek with two fingers. ‘Christ, Bonnie.’

He led me to the bathroom. A bruise was flowering on my left cheekbone; I could see it darkening as I watched. My nose throbbed and I could taste blood in my mouth. Hayden soaked cotton wool in warm water and dabbed at the injury very carefully, biting his lip when I gasped at the stinging pain.

‘Now we’ve got to put a cold compress on it,’ he said. ‘To stop the swelling.’

‘I can do that for myself.’

But I let him sit me down in my dank little kitchen and rummage in the freezer compartment of the fridge. He snapped several chunks of ice from their bendy plastic tray and wrapped them in a rather grubby tea-towel, which he held to my cheek. His eyes were puffy and his face still stained with tears.

‘Something awful came over me,’ he said.

‘You felt humiliated by me,’ I said. ‘That’s what came over you. I didn’t praise you enough, or act like one of your groupies, or say that you were a genius.’

‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘It’s this horrible roaring blank and then I was standing there looking at you with your bruised cheek.’

‘Very convenient. It wasn’t really you.’

‘No. No. I know. It was me. Something in me. That’s what’s so scary.’

If Hayden had made any excuse at all or tried to explain it, tried to convince me that there was some kind of rationality behind the burst of violence and rage, I would have pushed him out of the door and never seen him again. Or that’s what I tell myself, because I can’t bear to think it might not be true. But he didn’t. He sat beside me holding the ice cubes against my skin, looking so defeated, and it was as if I had seen someone that no one else ever had. Could it really be that this was the moment at which I properly fell for Hayden, when he had lashed out at me and then wept?

‘I’m hungry,’ I said, after a while. It was true. All at once I felt hollow inside.

Hayden took away the compress. ‘How about if I get us something? A curry? There’s an Indian down the road.’

‘Sure.’ There was a pause as he stood uncertainly beside me. ‘My wallet’s in my bag.’ I gestured towards the satchel by the sofa.

Later, we sat together and ate ravenously out of the tin-foil containers, not speaking. Then I had a shower, standing under the nozzle and letting the tepid water stream over my bruised face and tired body. When I came back into the living room in my dressing-gown, Hayden was fast asleep, a tiny rumbling snore escaping from his half-open mouth. He seemed entirely at rest. I watched him for a long time, and I don’t know what I was thinking or what I was feeling. It was as if I was under water, moving slowly through an unfamiliar element, and the world I knew was far away.

I went into my bedroom, pulled my sleeping-bag out of the cupboard and unzipped it, laying it over him where he slept and making sure the zip wasn’t against his skin. Then I went back to my own room, shut the door firmly and climbed into my bed. My face throbbed and I felt utterly drained and depleted. Yet several times in the night I woke, thinking of Hayden on the other side of the wall, sleeping like a helpless baby. And in the early morning I went to him and took him in my arms to comfort him for having hurt me.

After

‘You’re not dressed properly for this, Bonnie. You can’t demolish a kitchen in your pyjamas.’

I had forgotten that Sally was coming round to help me with the flat this morning. She stood in the doorway, dressed for the part in tatty old jeans with split knees and an oversized T-shirt that had a picture of a bear on the front. Her hair was tied up in a scarf.

‘I’ll get dressed,’ I said, trying to hide my dismay at seeing her. ‘After coffee—you want coffee, right?’

‘Yes. I’m so tired I could fall asleep standing up.’

‘Is Lola not sleeping?’

‘Yes. And stuff. You know when you lie in bed and thoughts churn round and round in your head?’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said. ‘What have you been fretting about?’

‘Oh, life,’ she said vaguely. ‘Small-hours panics.’

At any other time I would have encouraged her to tell me about them, but not now, not this morning. ‘Is Richard looking after Lola?’

‘As if,’ said Sally. ‘My mum’s got her for a few hours. It’ll give her a chance to get to know her granddaughter. It’s the first time she’s spent real time with her.’

‘You should be off having fun, going to an exhibition, drinking coffee. I mean, really drinking coffee, in a café, not working like this.’

‘No, you’re wrong, Bonnie. This is just what I need. I can spend a morning being a normal person, not having to feed her or try to get her to go to sleep or, when she’s finally gone to sleep, lean over her to hear that