Calendar Girl Read online

  John Clark looked up at Saz.

  Saz reached across the table and took his hand.

  “Look Mr Clark, I know you’re upset and you’re scared and you can’t bear to think the worst but whenever you let your mind go that’s all you can think. I know you’re having an appalling time right now. But you’ve got to hold it together. You left your job two weeks ago. You’ve got sixteen thousand pounds redundancy payment, a mortgage, two kids and a wife to support who probably doesn’t yet even know you left work voluntarily, let alone that you gave over two thirds of your redundancy payment away as a ‘loan’ to a woman who’s now disappeared. Am I right?”

  John Clark nodded.

  “Right, and added to that you’ve got me to pay, so now let’s get on with it. I need you to remember stuff. The time she didn’t meet you, why was that?”

  “She hurt herself. She broke her ankle.”

  “Great. We can check hospitals and emergency records. When was it?”

  “Three years ago, only our fifteenth dinner.”

  “Wonderful. I can spend the next nine months checking hospital records. Anything else while I’m at it, anything she was allergic to? Any medication she took?”

  “I’m not sure. She did see a homeopath for a while. About two years ago. It made it very difficult to eat out. She couldn’t have alcohol or spicy foods or even coffee. It was for headaches I think. And she got hayfever – sometimes.”

  “Sometimes?”

  “Well, we went to a couple of outdoor concerts one year – I arranged them as a special treat – you know the ones, Kenwood, Alexandra Palace, she especially liked the jazz – so do I. Jazz is something of a hobby of mine Ms Martin, you see I …”

  “The hayfever, Mr Clark?”

  “Oh yes, well she got hayfever. Once. Sneezed almost constantly for a couple of hours. I had to take her away – I offered to take her home but she wouldn’t let me. Made me drop her off at the tube.”

  “Can you remember which one?”

  “Not offhand, somewhere in North London obviously – probably the Northern Line, we were at Kenwood when she started sneezing if I remember correctly.”

  “And this was?”

  “Summer before last.”

  “This is good Mr Clark, specifics are good. Now what I want you to do is this. Go home. Try and be nice to your wife. Don’t tell her about June or July or whatever her name is, she’ll never understand and she’ll definitely think you were having an affair. In fact she’ll probably think we’re having an affair. Check your diaries, I want times, dates and places of every meeting the two of you ever had. Can you do that? Do you keep your diaries?”

  “Well, yes of course.”

  Saz looked at John Clark’s grey suit and smiled.

  “Somehow I thought you might. Let me know as soon as you’ve compiled a comprehensive list of places and dates. And write more about what she looks like. You might think of more if you try to be a little poetic. Try thinking romantically.”

  “But it wasn’t like that!”

  “Well, philosophically then. Think about her – clearly. See what vision she conjures up for you. I want to know what she wanted you to feel about her. We need to know what she thought to get any insight on who she was. Is, sorry. Try and remember if she’s mentioned any shops to you – the place she gets her hair cut maybe, or any bags she might have carried her shopping in. I want to know everything. Any waiters or waitresses she might have been especially friendly with. And any foods she didn’t eat – might help if she’s funny about certain foods – religious or something like that. She’s your friend so lots of things will seem insignificant to you, but not to me, right? I need to know everything you know about her. And more. Her name for a start. Get back to me in a couple of days time. OK?”

  John Clark nodded and Saz hurried out of the cafe into the grey London drizzle, the spring in her step belying the weight on her mind. Once she was out of his range of sight she slowed down and followed the pedestrian flow into the tube, thinking it over.

  “And John Clark, I’ll take the interesting jobs. I’ll check the gyms … and the morgues –

  “Got any bodies with stunning brown eyes?”

  “No, but the ones who got punched to death have got black ones!”

  “That’s the way Saz, faced with the completely impossible, joke about it! No Mama, I’m just fine. My job’s not unsafe at all. Weird, but not unsafe. Not yet anyway … Damn you September, the left luggage at Charing Cross Station and not even giving him your real name! How naff film-noir can you get?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Milch und Fleisch

  For three months we saw each other at least three times a week. Three nights a week. Nights that extended into afternoons and the next night. For three months we saw each other three times a week, seven nights a week. Dolores wanted to find a way to hate her but she couldn’t. The Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body was quiet and accommodating and tidy and polite. At my house. In her own domain she was loud and orgasmic and a slattern. I was loud and orgasmic everywhere, upstairs, downstairs and in my lady’s chamber (especially in my lady’s chamber), but nowhere, never, was I a slattern.

  Towards the end of the third month I had a lot of work, for about three weeks we only saw each other in bed. I’d come home to my bed or hers at about 2am, we’d fuck, sleep and she’d get up for work at eight. We were tired and irritable and hungry for more of each other. We ate each other up.

  It was November. I’d just finished a run of particularly demanding late night gigs (nasty students, lots of boys, lots of alcohol) and she arrived to pick me up. I got in the back of the battered old red sports car and saw a full plastic bag in the back.

  “What’s that? Can’t find a rubbish bin in North London?”

  “No” she replied “It’s your clothes. We’re going away for a few days.”

  Charmed by the fact that someone had actually been as romantic as I’d always hoped someone – anyone – would, I fell asleep and slept beside her as she drove through the night. We arrived at about 7am. A “Women’s Guest House” in Yorkshire. Two up, two down and the whole of the down was ours. The landlady, looking rather more like someone’s mum than a northern dyke, showed us through the ‘separate entrance’ to the ground floor of her house. Sitting room backed on to kitchen/diner. Bathroom backed on to bedroom. The sitting-room and bathroom were both grey, damp and freezing. But then, we had no intention of sitting and little desire to wash the perfume of each other from our bodies. However, it was cold and Yorkshire is no place to be in November without central heating. Or a partner. The fridge in the corner of our own private kitchen was crammed with cold meats and vegetarian selections – pasta, cheeses, pâté. Fresh milk and orange juice. Honey smoked turkey. Meat and milk jostling for space on the same shelf. But I didn’t know that mattered, then. A fruit bowl filled with winter miracles of mango and pineapple. Fresh bread. We stayed five nights and every morning there was fresh bread and milk. We decided our landlady was either a witch or Jesus. But I said she couldn’t be Jesus because while there were plenty of loaves, there wasn’t a fish in sight. The Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body didn’t know what I was talking about.

  French windows, too cold to have migrated this far north, looked out on a morning moor. Bleak and blue in the faint half light. The landlady left us and we made love on the kitchen floor, 1960s cold lino, 1990s hot sex. She, exhausted from the drive and more, fell asleep naked in my arms. I half dragged her body to the bed and we slept through the morning. We stayed in bed for the rest of the day. The curtains stayed apart to let the moor in. We stayed together to keep our lust in. The wind played on my emotions and I called her Cathy for the rest of the week. She, halfway through Jane Eyre, called me Helen. I, having read the book three times before I was fourteen, hadn’t the heart to tell her it was a bad choice. We slept soundly in our red room and the next day made the pilgrimage to the parsonage. I cried because she wouldn’t come with me to Top Withins,
nor would she let me walk alone. She said it was too cold and too far and might get dangerous. I said what if they’d said that to Emily? That you could never be sure that anything might not turn out to be dangerous eventually. She said I was being swept along with the passion of it all and not being sensible. That I was being melodramatic.

  I wasn’t. You never can be sure.

  She cried at Charlotte’s tiny slippers. Cried both because her own feet were too big and because Charlotte was long dead and her feet were long cold.

  The Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body has very cold feet today.

  We walked through the parsonage hushed and excited, trying to catch inspiration. But genius is not a contagious disease and neither she nor I died of consumption on the moors.

  We drank in The Black Bull imagining the stocky and talent-free Branwell wasting himself at the bar. Wasting his sisters at the bar. I wanted to waste myself at the bar but she said there were places to see. She drove me to York Minster where I lit a candle and she muttered Hebrew to protect herself from the cult of the Messiah. We ate in teashops, stopped to buy pottery and drove back across Ilkley Moor at midnight as a full moon rose above us.

  All this really happened. It was such magic and yet now, as I ask her to remember those first few days, she will not even answer me. She cannot even answer me.

  I sent Dolores a postcard of the slippers and Esther one of other people’s gravestones.

  We ate at a just-opened first class hotel on a deserted moor with a heated swimming pool and no guests. We had drinks with three of the staff and were the only patrons until 10.30pm. She ate pheasant and tore the flesh from the dead bird’s bones. That night she tore the flesh from mine and sucked on the marrow of my heart. I was in lust and love and impatient.

  I am impatient.

  From the Brontë Parsonage to Sylvia Plath’s grave. I like my writers dead before forty. Over a hundred years of literature in a five-minute car ride. I asked at the Haworth Tourist Information Centre about Sylvia. They sold lovely plastic models of the Brontë sisters and delightful group portraits of the three of them clustered around Branwell but they’d never heard of Sylvia Plath. The girl at the desk had to go and ask her boss. Apparently he could read. She came back to me.

  “Was she married to a poet?”

  I turned white “Mmm.”

  “Well yes, we do have a note here. Under Hughes. He’s a poet, don’t know about her. A Mrs Hughes buried in the Old Church – is that the one you mean?”

  I turned red. “Her name was Sylvia Plath. She was a great poet. A very great poet in her own right. You illiterate cow.”

  The Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body led me, blind with rage, from the office.

  I was livid. Red, white and blue for the America Sylvia had left and the distant sky was black for the shoes of the man listed instead of her.

  We took the long road across the moor and some very tight hairpin bends.

  We trawled through about four cemeteries – Catholic, Methodist, Baptist – Jewish hackles rising at my side. Then we found the ruined churchyard. Two churches stood side by side. One dark and locked. The other an open ruin. In it about six cats played, two older and the others only just grown from kittens. Each one with nine times to die. One attached itself to us, it purred around her legs until the Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body pushed it away.

  She hates cats. She said she was allergic to them. She made me leave my cat behind when we moved in together. She’s allergic to feathers and pollen and dust too. But I’m leaning against a feather pillow now and she’s not sneezing at all.

  It was 6pm and dusk and I was nervous. Thick banks of cloud and the ruined church doing their best Hammer horror impression. My Christianity-sensitive Jewess was positively scared. I wanted to go back for her. She wanted to go on for me. We followed the cat.

  This really happened.

  The cat took us to a cemetery on the other side of the standing church. Graves were arranged in orderly rows. The sun was nearly set and we followed the cat to Sylvia. Again my sensibilities were stormed, in the dusk-light the tombstone wording read “Sylvia Plath-Hughes”.

  I thought I was the first person to have been offended by it.

  We both cried this time. I left a wildflower and the Woman with the Kelly McGillis Body left two stones. One for herself and one for Sylvia’s Jewish-identified pain.

  We drove back to London the next day. It was Friday and she had to be back to make it to her parents’ for dinner. She went every week without fail. I’ve never met them. They hate the idea of me. A woman and not Jewish. I’m not sure which sin they hate more.

  She hasn’t been to them for two weeks in a row now, I wonder when they’ll get up the courage to ring me and ask how she is?

  We drove without stopping. She fucked me twice with her left hand as she drove. Car in fifth gear, me in tenth. Safe sex, unsafe driving. I came three times on the motorway. She dropped me off at my house and my flatmates were, unusually, out. I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone, of not sleeping with her and made sweetly violent, soft, harsh love to her on the couch in front of the gas fire.

  She kissed me and drove north again. I cried from exhaustion and loneliness. She called me from a phone box on her way home and said “I want to live with you. I don’t want to live apart from you.”

  I promised she’d never have to.

  I went to bed ecstatic. Finally a lover who took me as seriously as I took her. Finally a lover who loved me back.

  We vowed never to sleep apart again.

  And we never have. Even now I cuddle up beside her. But although she’s wearing a warm jumper and it’s not Yorkshire, she’s very, very cold.

  CHAPTER 6

  Footwork

  Saz spilled out of the rush hour tube and went straight to the gym. Concentrating hard to ignore the beautiful glistening bodies, she started to work. Nothing like adrenalin flowing through the body to get the brain working clearly. Half an hour later and sweating herself, she walked straight past her usual Tuesday night flirtation and downstairs to the pool. After thirty lengths she was exhausted and had a nearly formulated plan of action. She showered, dressed and hurried out into the evening. The slow walk home through Brixton gave her time to both dry her hair and order her thoughts.

  In her flat she made for the phone and called Gary. Her sister’s ex-boyfriend of twelve years ago. Then a radical and angst-ridden biology student, now a part-time actor and full time office worker at St Catherine’s House, Registrar of Deaths Division. Cassie and Gary were no longer in touch, but Saz bought him tickets to the National occasionally and a lot of coffee afterwards so he could tell her what a lot of pretentious crap went on in the theatre. Except when it was performed by his company, in which case it was groundbreaking but severely underfunded. And about once a year Gary was able to help Saz.

  “Yes, Gary, it is a long shot, but see what you can do. If you can’t be bothered going through the names yourself, just give me the list and I’ll peruse them at my leisure. Thanks babe, I owe you one.”

  Having requested a list of the names of all the women in the twenty-five to thirty-five age bracket who had died in London in the past six weeks, Saz put down the phone. She well knew that despite Gary’s protests she would have the list by the day after tomorrow, she also knew this favour would cost a little more than the National. A night in Stratford more like.

  She then called Helen and Judith, old friends, coupled for five years – a minor record in Saz’s eyes and that of the two policewomen. They agreed to meet her when Judith came off duty.

  Saz went to bed for an hour to give her brain a chance to catch up.

  Ten thirty saw her wide awake, washed and looking forward to a night out. Her black lycra body threading its way through a similarly dressed crowd to the corner table where Helen and Judith sat. Helen dark, Judith fair, both bowing to the muggy, damp summer evening by wearing as little as possible under their matching cropped black leather jackets a
nd above their heavy DMs.

  “I’ll get them,” Saz called when she was within shouting distance.

  “Too late,” answered Helen, pointing to the three double gin and tonics sitting on the table before her.

  Saz kissed the women, picked up her glass and tapped it against theirs, the three of them shouting, “To Plato!”

  Saz had met Helen and Judith three years earlier on a women’s poetry course. Held deep in the wilds of West Yorkshire, all three had eagerly signed up for what was billed as a ‘Wild Weekend for Women – Greek poetry as you’ve never known it before! Discover your soul before it discovers you! Women Only!’ Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the weekend of Sapphic abandonment they’d been hoping for. The poetry was definitely Greek but none of the three women had ever anticipated wanting to read Plato – in the original – with thirteen Philosophy dons before. Sensing a kindred spirit (and one without a car) Judith and Helen had offered Saz a ride back to London on the Saturday morning and all three had done a bunk just as the other women settled down to three hours on ‘Plato – The Soul – Where Is It Located?’ During the ride back, Saz transformed her idea of ‘pigs’ (or at least of sows) and discovered more about the hidden life of the lesbian community than she’d learnt in ten years on ‘the scene’.

  “So, girls, how’s life in the sty?”

  “Not bad, sweetheart, not bad. How’s life in Camberwell? Still celibate?”

  “As ever, Hells, you can’t manage to say ‘hello’ without enquiring after my sex life, God knows why you work in the police when an ‘investigative journalist’ post at The Sun would suit you far better.”

  “Can’t help myself, Saz. If I know whether you’re doing it or not at this moment, then I won’t have to worry about putting my foot in it unnecessarily later.”

  “Can you put a foot in necessarily?” Judith asked her lover.

  “No darling, not unless it’s the boot. But if you don’t trot off to the bar and get us all another gin, you won’t be allowed to wear mine ever again.”