Normal: The Most Original Thriller Of The Year

“You okay?”

“Oh, my God.” Annie lay there, coat spread, shirt hitched up, belt unbuckled. “How stupid am I?”

“Not your fault,” I lied, tossing the branch back among the trees. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head, reached up to take my outstretched hand. “No, I’m a mess, though.” I helped her to her feet, and she straightened out her clothes, fastened her belt, shook out her hair. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” she mused. “Christ, if you hadn’t come along—”

“Yeah, I did, though, so don’t think about it.” I gave her space to gather the few contents of her bag from where they’d exploded across the path. “Do you want me to take you to the police?” I offered. “I’m just parked up at the train station.”

“God, I don’t know whether I can go through all that tonight.” She slung her bag over her shoulder, gave her pockets one last check. “I do need to find a train, though, so if you’re walking that way...” She finally looked up at me, puppy eyes at the ready. She seemed remarkably untraumatized.

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “I just want to get home.”

I conceded. She turned off her phone and dropped it into her bag, and I spitefully kicked the kid’s shoe into the river as we set off briskly back toward the lights and the noise. “So,” I asked her, “what’s your name?”

“Annie,” she said.

What were the odds on that?

CHAPTER SIX

Annie made a hell of a mess.

I’d convinced her that the last train had probably gone and that even if it hadn’t, I was going her way and could get her home sooner and in greater comfort. On the basis that I’d saved her from an unpleasant mauling and was therefore to be trusted, she happily accepted a ride.

To be quite honest, when she invited me in for tea, I fully intended to just drink it and leave. In spite of my earlier intentions, I found Annie’s company pleasant and her conversation lively and interesting—sufficiently so to distract me from looking out for deserted lanes and vacant lots along the route. I also felt an unexpected pang of protectiveness, and by the time we reached the coast, my only urge was to see her home safely.

However, one cup of tea became several, and Annie matched every one I drank with a tumbler of vodka. As we talked, it quickly became apparent that this was no one-off, that the dismissive actions of the man in her life drove her most nights into the arms of a bottle.

His name was Jeremy and by two in the morning, when I finally removed the last of the stains from the carpet, I’d grown to dislike him intensely. He seemed to me grossly egotistical and of low moral standing.

“He wouldn’t tell me where he lived,” Annie recounted as she filled her glass for the third time, halfway with vodka and topped with a splash of cranberry juice. “Said he had nosy neighbors and they were friendly with his ex-wife, and that she’d make life difficult for him if she knew he was seeing anyone. I know, I didn’t buy it, either. So I followed him one night.” She took a long gulp of her drink, one that took her three attempts to swallow. “I did that thing, you know, ‘follow that taxi!,’ and I followed him right to his front door. I was expecting to see... Well, I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but it was just this crappy little two-up-two-down, nothing like as posh as he said it was.”

Contrary to the impression her flowery telephone manner had given me, she wasn’t painting an endearing picture of Jeremy. She told me that he’d lied about his home, his job, his background. Christ, she wasn’t even sure Jeremy was his real name. “He stands me up all the bloody time,” she continued. “Usually when I complain, he tells me he was stuck in the office finishing a report or his Jag wouldn’t start, which is bullshit because he hasn’t even got a car—he gets buses everywhere because they’re free because he’s a bloody bus driver, not a regional transport coordinator, which is what he said he was. And the stupid thing is, I’ve never let on that I know that because I don’t want to look like a psycho. Why, I don’t know. It’s only been six weeks, and half the time I actually resent the fact that I even bother.” Gulp. “But hey, it keeps me on my toes, right? And to be honest, when he’s not being a lying toerag, he’s quite a nice guy. And I’m grateful for the distraction—I mean come on, my life is just so...so...”

“Average?” I suggested.

She nodded and emptied her glass. “That’s right,” she said. “Annie fucking Average.”

As much as I admired the simplicity of her explanation, she was clearly deluding herself. We both knew that she put up with it because she was drunk.

By 1:47, it was all over for Annie. She’d pulled a spicy beef pizza from the oven and promptly dropped it facedown on her cream sofa. Recoiling in horror, she’d then knocked the open cranberry juice carton from the coffee table.

Overcome with exasperation, she rushed to the kitchen sink and, without first removing the dirty dishes, liberally threw up.

So it was, then, that I came quite literally to undress Annie and tuck her into bed. She was asleep before she hit the pillow.

I liked Annie a lot for some reason, and so on my way back through the city, acting on information copied from her address book, I stopped by to pay the weasel Jeremy a visit. She was right; the house was crappy—paint peeling from the doors and window frames, guttering cracked and loose, garden overrun with weeds and nettles.

Getting in was easy; the kitchen extension at the back had a flat roof, above which a boxroom window had been left open—presumably on the assumption that the fresh air would combat the condensation running down the walls. Helpfully, I closed it.

Jeremy’s bedroom was at the front of the house. The thin curtains were no match for the streetlight right outside the window, which made the ceiling and the flock wallpaper glow fluorescent orange. The dresser, a mahogany-look junk-shop special, was strewn with hair gels and torn envelopes and half-empty coffee cups, some of which showed signs of life. In the opposite corner, the matching wardrobe sagged under the weight of bulging black sacks and sports bags, piled so high that the shirts didn’t hang straight and the doors wouldn’t close.

The bed, on the other hand, looked new. A full six feet wide, with an antique-brass-effect frame in an overdone neo-Gothic style. The bedspread was patterned counter-contextually with meaningless stylized Chinese characters and, I was less than surprised to note, concealed two distinct forms in repose.

I chose to let Jeremy sleep, not out of consideration but simply because I hadn’t thought to ask what he looked like. This would not normally have been an issue, since the majority of couples are distinguishable by clear, simple and universal gender-specific identifiers. Put simply, the clue is in the cock. This couple, however, quite obviously had two.

Judging by the collection of photographs on the mantelpiece downstairs, Jeremy’s predilection was clearly not a recent discovery. The hairstyles on display dated right back to a New Romantic flick and were unerring in their attachment to one hirsute, muscular torso or another. This was a man who knew his own mind.

In the void beneath the stairs, opposite the mantelpiece and the tasteless log-effect gas fire it so shamefully highlighted, was a computer. The desk it sat on was strewn with scraps of paper carrying scribbled tidbits of personal information: email addresses, first names, hometowns, occupations, pets and vital statistics. Aliases like “Hunnybunny” and “Lucyluvsit.” Some had telephone numbers. A handful noted dates and times, names of pubs and restaurants. One, sadly, said “Burger King.”

Tacked to the small triangle of wall above the desk were a dozen photographs printed on copy paper. A dozen women sat at a dozen corner tables, alone, staring into their drinks and fingering their mobile phones.

I was glad I’d taken the time to stop by. That Jeremy should devote his leisure time to stalking straight girls seemed like a new twist on something I’d encountered a hundred times before and couldn’t be bothered to try to understand. In any case, his motivation was none of my business, but that he might have a photographic record of the recent movements of every desperate, lonely woman in the county most certainly was. God alone knew how many of them I might be in.

Affirmative, proportionate action was therefore the order of the night, and so by the time Jeremy awoke in the morning, his hard drive and memory cards were blank, his printer was out of ink and the only photograph above his desk was of himself, naked and asleep, with a pair of pinking shears artfully arranged about his under-endowment.

* * *

To those of us startled into forgetting what we went shopping for, and perhaps hoping, subliminally or otherwise, for a second attempt at a first impression, the 24-hour supermarket must surely rank alongside tea bags and ambiguous social-network privacy tools as one of modern mankind’s most useful inventions.

In the early hours there are no screaming children to contend with, no half-hour queues at the checkout. There are hundreds of empty parking spaces, and you can always find a trolley.

For the most part, the only activity you’re likely to encounter is the gaggle of fellow insomniacs charged with the unenviable task of restocking the shelves. These people are paid a reasonable wage and are therefore usually polite and unobstructive. They’ve always got what you’re looking for, and it’s always fresh.

Unfortunately, however, the fish counter was closed, and the acute sense of disappointment this brought about came as something of a shock. I was distracted and listless as I pushed my express trolley from aisle to aisle, supplementing my earlier haul of melted coconut ice cream and two defrosted salmon by randomly tipping in anything and everything purporting to be free of meat. Carrots, olives and limes. Carnaroli rice and a can of lima beans. All sense of direction and purpose again fled to the outer reaches of my mind, beaten away by the horde of metal roll cages obstructing every aisle. A blanket of frustration fell over me then, obscuring my vision and blocking my ears. The back of my neck bristled with the distinct sense that I was being watched, and I felt an overwhelming desire to be somewhere else.

I left the trolley and wandered to the entertainment aisle, where bored husbands congregate to inspect cheap laptops and watch football. It was blissfully empty, quiet but for the bank of televisions, each one tuned to a different channel, muttering to me as I passed:...according to Inca lore, once rail operators pledge to iron lace while damp, a real icon like Elvis Presley is likely to command the council to loan Eric an electric wheelchair. Detective Chief Inspector Lowry made the following statement. “Whilst we will never give up hope of finding Sarah and Erica alive, we have to face the reality that with every passing week, our chances of doing so continue to fade. I am, therefore, again appealing to anyone in the local community who thinks they may have any information, no matter how trivial you might think it is, to pick up the phone and call us, either directly to my team here in the incident room, or anonymously via Crimestoppers. Somebody out there knows something, and only with your help can we hope to bring Sarah and Erica home, or to track down the person or persons responsible for their disappearance.”

This wasn’t any better.

At night, the checkouts are deserted. In the absence of queueing customers, there is no sense in paying the staff to chew gum and stare into space. I was alone as I loaded the conveyor; the echo of cage doors, dropped boxes and idle chatter was disembodied and distant. I nudged the trolley to the end of the belt, folded my arms and turned around to rest against the counter, idly reading the covers of the leaflets on the stand opposite. Car insurance. Home insurance. Pet, travel and life insurance. Broadband internet and pay-as-you-go mobile phones. Banking and credit cards. I thought back to a time when supermarkets simply sold groceries; when a loaf of bread was a loaf of bread, and beans really did mean Heinz. A time when, on a Friday afternoon, I’d obediently follow my mother through a fluorescent maze of checkered tiles and bright white freezers in the hope of being rewarded with a Crunchie bar and a—

“Hi. Are you all right with your packing?”

There was something in the voice, something so barely there that the question of what it was kept me from turning even after the effect had passed.

“Hey!” Masked now by a broad smile, a teasing melody: “Hello! Wake up! I’m over here!”

I could feel those eyes playing on the back of my neck and spiking my hair before I turned clumsily to face them.

Blue and green and aquamarine, like pools of sunlit gasoline. The kind of eyes that make men like me walk into doors and spill our tea.

The base of my spine wound itself into a twitching, tingling knot. “Hello,” I croaked. “Yes, thank you, I’m well versed in the art of packing my bags.”

Caroline pursed her lips, narrowed her startling eyes at me. Studied me for a split second with the intensity of a prowling panther before her face softened to a bemused smile. “Nope,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to ask.”

“Sorry, long night. Very tired.” Dry, oilless fingers were making hard work of separating the slippery plastic bags. I could feel the frustration welling again inside me as I grasped and fumbled vainly at the neck of each in turn.

“I know, me, too.” She gathered up the fine cascade of dirty-blond hair from her shoulders and threw it into a careless ponytail, held in place with a simple black band from around her wrist. As she did so, her name badge rode up under her chin. “Rachel,” it said. “Here to help.” She caught me looking, and a fragment of a smile told me she knew I’d been reading “Caroline” in taillights all night.

I hoped, then, as she set about swiping my pitiful collection of rabbit food through the scanner, that she’d blindly pass each item in front of her without pausing to read the labels; that she had no interest in judging me by my shopping list. Sadly, though, I had her full attention. “Tell you what,” she remarked. “It’s a nice change to meet a herbivore who hasn’t got that pale, scrawny thing going on.”

I smiled, absurdly willing myself to believe it a greater compliment than it really was. Maddeningly, the food was coming thick and fast and I still had nothing to put it in. “Actually, I think I do need some help here.”

“Here...” She slid gracefully from her chair and reached over the counter, her plain white blouse tightening across a modest bust, sleeves riding up to reveal the faint specter of symmetrical scars adorning the underside of each wrist. Her approach to the separation and opening of carrier bags was swift and effective, though I unfortunately failed to note her precise method before she melted back into her seat, distracted as I was by the lithe twist of her hips.

“You can’t learn by watching,” she said, presumably just to let me know that she could read my fucking mind, though which part of it I wasn’t quite sure. “You’re not a conscientious objector, are you?” she noted, eyebrows raised behind an upheld fillet of cod. “Clearly, you can’t get enough white meat.”

“No,” I agreed. “I lapse just about every other day.”

“Ah, well, we all need at least one vice. Nobody’s perfect.”

My eyes fell to the loose, flowing cuffs of her blouse as she passed tuna steaks and potato bakes from hand to hand. “I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe the perfection is in the flaws.”

Her hands trembled then, barely perceptibly and for the merest sliver of a moment as she overrode the impulse to tug at her sleeves. She reddened half a shade, and her eyes drilled into mine, luring them away from the door to her self-consciousness. “Meaning?” she pressed, with a challenging smile.

“Well,” I said, “look at it this way. Some collectors are only interested in things that are like new, factory fresh, mint in the box. If something looks like it’s had a life before they got their hands on it, it loses its value. But then, other people believe that an object’s worth more if it’s been used for whatever it was designed for, so a stamp should have been stuck to an envelope and posted to somewhere a long way away, and a comic book is meant to be read and enjoyed, not sealed in a protective case and never opened, and an old racing car should be scuffed and grimy and—” with no particular emphasis “—scarred. And it’s the same with people. How much time do you think you’d want to spend with Barbie and Ken? Anodyne, by definition, is not entertaining.”

She gave a tight nod and handed me my plums. “So,” she said, slapping her totalizer and twisting the display for me to survey the damage, “what exactly is it that you collect? I mean, apart from frozen fish.”

I shan’t repeat what I said. Suffice it to say the ensuing silence was awkward enough that I might as well have just told her the truth.

It was on the dot of 6:00 a.m. that I wearily slammed the door of the Transit, remote-locked the garage and hauled my half-dozen bags of flora and fish into the house. The melodic, almost hypnotic sound of Caroline/Rachel’s voice still rang in my ears, our conversation looping over and over in my head. I knew nothing of her, and yet somehow I knew everything I needed to know. I knew the conversation wasn’t over.

An unprecedented calm enveloped me as I made space in the pantry freezer, between the joints of topside beef and the waitress from the Hungry Horse.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I cooked a late breakfast of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, picturing Caroline-or-possibly-Rachel passing me each ingredient and implement as I needed it. I presented the result to Erica with a steaming cup of fresh coffee. She threw it at me.

Having chained her to the floor and cleaned up the mess, I brought her a sealed box of Rice Krispies and an unopened carton of milk. She threw those at me, too. Since no contents were spilled, however, I chose to leave them where they fell. I laid a plastic bowl and spoon beside them on the mat and left her to it.

I gave her an hour to sort herself out, then returned to the garage to fetch the hooker from the van. Naturally, she’d remained where I’d left her, slung hammock-like from the roof; secured with four-inch nylon webbing and suspended, spreadeagled, five feet from the floor, there was little chance of her wriggling free. What did surprise me, though, was that she’d managed to fall asleep. She didn’t even stir as I blindfolded her, and it wasn’t until I’d released her extremities and stood her upright that she began to flail and scratch like a cat in a bath. Needless to say, she no longer wanted to go anywhere quiet with me, and I literally had to throw her down the stairs.

Erica regarded her new cellmate with a mixture of elation and disdain. Whilst a problem shared is a problem halved, she clearly wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of sharing hers with a bleeding, screeching harridan.

The hooker had told me that her name was Kerry. Then again, she’d told me that she was clean in every respect, where both her profession and her trackmarks suggested otherwise.

I’d picked her up a mile from Jeremy’s house on a foolish and immediately regrettable impulse fueled by raw adrenaline and the sheer bloody-minded need to catch something, so to speak. She’d directed me to a remote riverside picnic area on the south side of the city, and had been only too eager to jump into the back of the van, the false promise of mattresses and pillows offering a welcome relief from the repeated prod of a gear lever in the sternum.

Until that point, this, in a nutshell, was the reason I never interfere with ladies of the night: it’s just too damn easy. It’s a game for impotents and bed-wetters. These women queue up to get in the car with you, for Christ’s sake. They actually expect you to take them somewhere dark. That they exercise free will in putting themselves in harm’s way only makes obligingly slaughtering them all the more cowardly.

And as if that wasn’t reason enough to rue my lack of self-control, Kerry was about to give me a couple more to think about.

In her first few minutes in the cage, Kerry, despite the removal of her blindfold, seemed unaware of Erica’s presence. She flung herself at the door, screaming unintelligibly as she clawed at the mesh. As she ran simultaneously out of breath and fingernails, she began wailing that her children were home alone and that the electricity meter was empty. I suggested that had Kerry considered her parental responsibilities the night before, rather than offering to fellate me in a car park, their collective predicament might have been avoided.

Erica, on the other hand, was strangely subdued. She sat cross-legged on the bed watching this leather-skirted animal, knees skinned and blood dripping from its fingertips, howling and spitting at its captor just inches away on the other side of the door. “You bastard,” she said, simply.

Kerry whirled around then, threw herself off balance. She scrabbled on all fours to the corner of the cage and curled herself into a tight ball, fixing Erica with a petrified stare.

“What are you, starting a fucking zoo?” Erica’s face was a picture of self-righteous indignation as she jabbed an angry thumb toward the sobbing, fetal prostitute. “You can’t be fucking serious, surely?”

Not fully understanding the question, I chose not to answer.

At 6:00 p.m. I returned to the basement with two plates of tuna and pasta bake. The hooker appeared not to have moved from her corner; she merely continued to tremble and heave.

Erica had returned to the bed, where she lay silently gazing at the cage roof as I laid her dinner on the floor beside her.

“I’m not eating that,” she said.

This did not surprise me. “What’s the matter now, you don’t eat fish?”

“Of course I eat fish. I’m just not eating anything you’ve made.”

“Great, so now it’s no meat and nothing cooked, is that it?”

“Who said anything about meat?”

“You did, yesterday.”

“No.” She sighed. “What I meant was, I’m not eating any meat you’ve given me. And, yeah, I do prefer my dinner cooked. I just don’t want it cooked by you. I know your sort.”

Charming, debonair, handsome? Probably not what she meant. “Have you got any idea of the effort I went to last night to make sure you were catered for? And now what, you want me to hire you a chef? What do you think this is, the Savoy?”

“You could always just let me starve,” she said. “And yes, I can clearly see the kind of effort you went to last night, and I’m far from fucking impressed.” Her eyes never left the ceiling.

Erica hadn’t thrown her pasta bake at me, but by the following morning she hadn’t eaten it, either. To all appearances, she hadn’t moved from the bed.

Kerry was a different picture. She’d managed to piss herself three feet from the toilet, and had clearly stood in the resultant puddle. She was still pacing back and forth, leaving dirty wet footprints, when I got there. It took the threat of severed fingers to persuade her to mop.

In the evening, with Erica having eaten nothing more substantial than Rice Krispies since her arrival, I took the microwave oven from my kitchen and delivered it to her downstairs. Since I’d used the thing only twice in the three years I’d owned it, this seemed the simplest option if I wasn’t to be stuck with a weak and starving Erica.

I found them huddled together this time; Erica draped protectively over the hooker, shushing and stroking her hair as she lay curled on the mat, shuddering from head to toe. Kerry’s babbling was only barely coherent and preoccupied with her need for some “stuff.” Her domestic situation seemed all but forgotten.

Not wishing to interrupt such a tender moment, I left them a pair of microwave mushroom stroganoffs and went to run a bath.