09.04.2017 Views

1 The Cuckoo's Calling

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the empty flat under the eyes of her stunning eighteen-year-old self? Had she<br />

realized that the painting would do her work better than her physical presence?<br />

He turned away, striding through the other rooms, but she had left nothing for<br />

him to do. Every trace of him, from his tooth floss to his army boots, had been<br />

taken and deposited in the boxes. He studied the bedroom with particular<br />

attention, and the room looked back at him, with its dark floorboards, white<br />

curtains and delicate dressing table, calm and composed. <strong>The</strong> bed, like the<br />

portrait, seemed a living, breathing presence. Remember what happened here,<br />

and what can never happen again.<br />

He carried the four boxes one by one out on to the doorstep, on the last trip<br />

coming face to face with the smirking next-door neighbor, who was locking his<br />

own front door. He wore rugby shirts with the collars turned up, and always<br />

brayed with panting laughter at Charlotte’s lightest witticisms.<br />

“Having a clear-out?” he asked.<br />

Strike shut Charlotte’s door firmly on him.<br />

He slid the door keys off his key ring in front of the hall mirror, and laid them<br />

carefully on the half-moon table, next to the bowl of potpourri. Strike’s face in<br />

the glass was creviced and dirty-looking; his right eye still puffy; yellow and<br />

mauve. A voice from seventeen years before came to him in the silence: “How<br />

the fuck did a pube-headed trog like you ever pull that, Strike?” And it seemed<br />

incredible that he ever had, as he stood there in the hall he would never see again.<br />

One last moment of madness, the space between heartbeats, like the one that<br />

had sent him hurtling after her five days previously: he would stay here, after all,<br />

waiting for her to return; then cupping her perfect face in his hands and saying<br />

“Let’s try again.”<br />

But they had already tried, again and again and again, and always, when the<br />

first crashing wave of mutual longing subsided, the ugly wreck of the past lay<br />

revealed again, its shadow lying darkly over everything they tried to rebuild.<br />

He closed the front door behind him for the last time. <strong>The</strong> braying neighbor<br />

had vanished. Strike lifted the four boxes down the steps on to the pavement, and<br />

waited to hail a black cab.

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