The Apartment Read online

  “Excusez?”

  “The people who live in apartment 3B. Where we are?”

  “No. No petits,” she says.

  I don’t know if it’s my pronunciation or she simply doesn’t get what I’m asking, but for the umpteenth time today, I have the frustrating feeling that I’m talking without a tongue. “Never mind,” I say. “Thanks.”

  I turn to the lobby door, but she says behind me, with absolute clarity, “There are no children here. Here is not for living.”

  I get moving, now picking up my pace, feeling that repeated phrase chasing me as I go; I am running up the stairs now, despite the ache in my foot, like a little child trying to outrun the darkness in a nighttime corridor. Back to the safety of home, of familiarity. I’m feeling chilled to the bone, to the soul, and right now I need Steph to soothe me.

  But when I get to our floor, the landing is dark and the door shut. I pat my pocket once and then remember: I didn’t take the keys with me. I knock on the door, my knuckles hurting against its heaviness. If Steph’s in the bathroom, she’ll never hear me knocking. But then I remember the thumping that woke us up earlier. I hammer the door until I feel a satisfying reverberation in the frame.

  “Steph,” I call. “Steph.”

  And now, behind me, the madwoman is coming up the stairs in the darkness, rounding onto our landing with her shopping bag on her arm. I turn my phone light half in her direction and notice her accusing glance as she clumps doggedly on into the blackness above. “You must not be here,” she intones into the darkness as she goes, her words trailing toward me like ink in molasses. “There is nothing good here.”

  I’m not sure what she’s talking about, and I’m too exhausted to try to figure it out. My phone light times out and I let it, slumping against the door. If Steph is in the apartment, she will have heard me; if she decided to slip out while I was down in that storeroom, there’s nothing for it but to wait for her to return. Now that I’ve stopped the noise and turned off the phone’s light, it’s pretty peaceful in the darkness. I’ve quickly become used to the building’s clanks and groans and the sound of faraway music seeping through it like a distant memory.

  I close my eyes and there’s no difference in what I can see, but my lids are heavy and I let my chin slump to my chest, allowing the stillness to swaddle me. I’m just nodding off when the door behind me disappears and I tumble backward into a glare of light, looking up at Steph’s bare legs.

  Another day, it would be funny, but she just steps over me and away, tightening the small bath towel around herself. “You’re back,” she says. “What were you doing out there? You were ages.”

  “Nothing.” I roll myself over and haul myself up, my joints crackling and my muscles pulling.

  I stand up and limp to the bedroom doorway, despondently aroused as I watch Steph get dressed in her most shapeless sweater. In my fantasy, she’d have dropped that towel and pushed me onto the bed and we’d be making love in Romantic Paris.

  “This place really sucks,” I say.

  She sits at the end of the bed, looking tired. “What’s the matter, Mark? Why are you acting so weird? Please talk to me.”

  I want to brush her off with another “Nothing,” but I can see she’s genuinely worried about me. I owe her something, so I try to tell her the truth. “There was just some hair in the bedroom closet. I was chucking it out.”

  She’s incredulous. “Hair? You mean like wigs and stuff?”

  “No. Cut hair. Like the trimmings you’d find on the floor in a barber’s. Buckets of it.”

  “Hang on, so the closet was full of cut hair as well as a dead mouse?” she says, and for a second I don’t know what she’s talking about because I’ve forgotten my lie.

  “Uh-huh. A mouse and hair.” It sounds ridiculous.

  “So why didn’t you tell me about this hair when you first found it?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. This apartment is disturbing enough as it is.”

  She snorts but seems to accept this. “You probably shouldn’t have thrown it out, Mark. Weird or not, it belongs to them. Hey, what do you think they use it for?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Maybe they’re wigmakers. Or they could actually be hairdressers…That’s it. They looked stylish in the picture, didn’t they? Maybe they need it for…for…”

  “For what, Steph? For genetic experiments? Maybe they’ll build a clone army of clients so that they—”

  “Why are you taking this out on me? What’s got into you?”

  “Into me? You’re the one who thinks we’ve stumbled upon Vidal Sassoon’s secret hair collection.”

  “Whatever, Mark.” She gets up as if to flounce into the bathroom, but I can’t let her go. I shouldn’t have told her about the hair. The argument is my fault. I need to put it right. “Wait. I’m sorry.”

  She hesitates, then sits back down.

  “I was really looking forward to this trip, Steph.”

  She places her hand on mine. “I know you were.”

  “Now I’m sorry I made us come.”

  “I wanted to come, you know that.” Hand retrieved, face slanted away again. “But I wanted to come with Hayden. I still think that would have been happier.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Seriously? After all that’s gone wrong today? “I’m glad she didn’t find that hair, though. Imagine if she’d started playing with it or something.”

  She shrugs and stands up. “You want some coffee?”

  “It’s a bit late, don’t you think?” Now that things are settled between us, I just want to shower and go to sleep.

  “Why? What’s the time?” Steph checks her phone. It’s nearly eleven p.m. “Jesus,” she says. “I’ve totally lost track of time. It’s like we’ve lost a day.”

  “And these shutters don’t help.”

  After I’ve showered until the water’s run cold, I get into bed, ignoring the must in the sheets. Half-asleep, Steph pushes her calf into my leg, and it feels good to have my friend back. I know I should just leave well enough alone and let her sleep, but something in me needs to share what I saw down in that storeroom. “You know, when I went down looking for the trash can…” I’m just about to tell her everything, but the image of that stained mattress, the children’s clothes, closes my throat.

  “Mm?” she asks, sleepily. “What?”

  “Just that…while I was throwing it away, I was really worried that the trash can was for recycling. How bourgeois is that?”

  She doesn’t answer. I think of something witty to say to make her laugh again. Maybe the trash can was for organic waste after all…But I don’t feel witty. “Not a great start, was it?”

  “Mm-mm.”

  “Tomorrow will be better.”

  Chapter 8

  Steph

  On the second day in the apartment I woke abruptly, convinced someone had shaken my shoulder. Groggy and disoriented, I sat up, trying and failing to cling to the last strands of vivid dreams about Hayden. At some point in the night I’d shrugged off my T-shirt, and my body was greasy with sweat, my hair matted. The heat in the room was oppressive, the air almost humid. I’d had two showers the day before, one when we first arrived and one while Mark disposed of the mouse and that hair—unusually obsessive behavior—and I now felt dirty again. I stretched, realizing that Mark’s space next to me was empty.

  A scratching sound was coming from the living room. Skrik, skrik, skrik.

  “Mark?”

  No response.

  I flung off the blankets, pulled on another shirt, and padded into the living room.

  Now that he’d managed to open the living room window, he was going at the shutter outside with a knife. “Mark?”

  He jumped when I touched his shoulder and let out an embarrassed laugh. “You scared me.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Early. Can’t get the bloody shutter open.”

  “Why are you bothering? It doesn’t matter.” I squi
nted through one of the gray metal slats and down into the courtyard. “It’s raining again.”

  He tossed the knife onto the coffee table and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Hey, how about I go get some croissants? And see if I can get hold of the bank again.”

  “I’ll come with. I can call Hayden from the Starbucks. I’ll just have a shower.”

  “You had a rough night. Why don’t you relax, and I’ll bring you breakfast in bed. We can go out together again later.”

  “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “And I’ll only be an hour or so. Come on, let me treat you for once.”

  I was getting the impression that he wanted some alone time, and decided not to argue. He shrugged on his coat as if he couldn’t get out of there fast enough, and leaving the keys on the coffee table “just in case,” he hurried out of the apartment. And really, I felt like I could do with some time by myself as well. Mark’s behavior the day before had thrown me. He’d been gone far longer than a trip to the trash cans warranted, and when he returned he acted like a man hiding an affair: overcautious, irritable, unsettled. After he left, I toyed with the idea of heading down to the trash cans to see the hair for myself—I knew he was lying about something—but I didn’t. I chose to trust him. Stupid. Who knows what I would have found in them?

  I took a long shower instead, scrubbing at my body until the skin on my thighs and belly was scarlet. Next, I fiddled with the coffeemaker, giving up when I couldn’t get the filthy thing to work. I killed time by wiping down the kitchen counters again, washing the plates, sweeping the floors, and scrubbing the sink. By now, Mark had been gone for more than an hour and I was getting restless. I’d told Mom I would call her at twelve thirty South African time—in less than an hour—and I couldn’t leave the apartment: there was only one set of keys, and Mark would be locked out if he returned.

  If I wanted wi-fi, there was only one option: a visit to Mark’s madwoman in the attic. Someone in close proximity had a private wi-fi network, and it had to be her. I didn’t particularly feel like meeting her—Mark had said she was a bona fide weirdo—but it would give me something to do. The worst that could happen, I rationalized, was that she’d tell me to fuck off. Pocketing the keys, I set off to try my luck.

  The music wafting down from the top floor that morning was another 1980s greatest hit, and this one I recognized immediately: “99 Red Balloons.” (It would weave through my head for the rest of the day.) The higher I walked, my feet clunking on the wooden steps, the louder it became, until I finally reached a narrow hall with two lopsided doors. I headed for the one with the music and knocked.

  The door was flung open with force. The woman in the doorway was the sort of person whom Carla would have found interesting: intense, no makeup, dressed in a shapeless smock that was a hybrid between a kimono and a monk’s robe, a half-smoked hand-rolled cigarette stuck to her bottom lip. Her hair was shorn to her scalp, and I couldn’t help but think perhaps she’d donated it to the Petits’ vile collection. She didn’t speak, merely peeled the cigarette off her lip and, without taking her eyes from me, crushed it beneath a sandaled foot. Her toenails were long and yellow.

  I gave her my best genial smile. “Bonjour. Sorry for disturbing you. You speak English—anglais?” Mark had told me she spoke fairly good English, but I didn’t want to come across as presumptuous.

  “What do you want?”

  As politely and calmly as I could—although I had to raise my voice above the music—I explained the wi-fi situation and asked her if she’d consider allowing us to use hers. “We would pay you, of course.”

  She rarely blinked, which contributed to her intense air. She sniffed, said, “Viens. Come inside,” stepped back, and beckoned me into her apartment, which was really just a single room. The space was dominated by scores of canvases, but I spied a filthy sink piled with dishes in one corner, as well as a futon with a stained Indian spread, and a small camping stove. Was she squatting here? It certainly looked like it. The room reeked of dirty laundry, smoke, and turpentine. I couldn’t see a bathroom anywhere and there was nowhere to sit. Self-consciously—she was still staring at me with that intense gaze—I shuffled farther into the room. Most of the canvases were turned to the wall, but the one she was presumably working on was propped on an easel in the center of the room. Through a murky background of heavily applied browns and greens, the half-finished image of a child’s face loomed, managing to be both disturbing and kitschy. It reminded me of those paintings of big-eyed children that were so popular in the seventies. “Very interesting,” I lied. “You sell your paintings?”

  Another sniff. “Oui.”

  It would be up to me to try to initiate some kind of conversation—that or get the hell out of there. “I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Steph.”

  “Mireille.” A pretty, birdlike name that didn’t suit her. The track had changed to “Tainted Love,” and I realized the music was coming from a MacBook Pro and speakers balanced on an upturned crate on the far side of the futon, which were at odds with the room’s squalor. “You want café?” she barked.

  I did, but the only mugs appeared to be piled in the sink, a greasy pan leaking oil on top of them. “No, merci. I’m fine.”

  This seemed to please her for some reason. Thankfully she moved to the computer and shut off the music.

  “Mireille, can I ask you a question?”

  “Quoi?”

  “Mark—my husband—he said you don’t know the Petits, the people in whose apartment we’re staying.”

  She huffed as if she couldn’t make sense of what I was saying. “Quoi?” she said again.

  “The Petits.” For the life of me I couldn’t remember their first names. “We stay in their apartment. On the third floor.” I was aware I was over-enunciating my words like an arsehole tourist.

  “Non. There is no one who lives here now. Only me.”

  “But our apartment belongs to someone.”

  “You should not stay here. I tell this to your husband.”

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  “Where you from? England?”

  “No. South Africa. Afrique du Sud.”

  A weary nod. “Go to a hotel.”

  “We don’t have the money.” Unless we managed to unlock the credit card. Hopefully Mark had been able to sort that out.

  She narrowed her eyes, sighed, and then nodded. “Bien. Okay for the internet. You give me ten euro a day.”

  “Sure. Thank you, Mireille,” I said, although that would dent our measly budget if we couldn’t use the card.

  “D’accord. I write down the password for you.” She rooted around for a pen and piece of paper, giving me an opportunity to check out the room without her noticing. A half-empty bottle of vodka and a pile of Rizla rolling papers were placed next to the bed. An upturned book was half-hidden beneath the grubby sheets. Underwear and clothes were piled on top of the pillows. She handed me the piece of paper, then grabbed my wrist. Her fingernails were grimed with paint—or worse. “Don’t stay here. C’est mal ici. Sick.”

  “Sick?” I gently pulled out of her grasp. Strangely, despite her intensity, she didn’t intimidate me. There was something beneath the surface that was almost a profound sadness.

  She shook her head. “C’est mal.”

  “Why do you stay?”

  “I am like you. I have nowhere to go. Now goodbye. I must work.”

  She ushered me out, and a few seconds later the music started up again. I wondered—I still wonder—if Mireille played it to try to banish the sickness she thought infested the building, as if early Kylie Minogue and Duran Duran were some kind of cheesy talismans against evil.

  Back in the apartment, I logged on, tapped in the key, then Skyped Mom. I was half an hour early, but she’d been waiting for me, Hayden on her lap. “Hey, monkey,” I said, feeling a tug in my gut at the sight of her.

  “Mumma!”

  “Mumma will be home soon, I promise.”r />
  She babbled something about a present from Nama, wriggled off my mom’s lap, then reappeared, thrusting a Princess Elsa doll at the screen. “Mumma, look!”

  I’d planned on buying the doll for her birthday and Mom knew that, but I tried to hide my irritation. Hayden stretched out her arms as if she could touch me through the screen, and again I felt that horrible plummeting feeling that I wouldn’t see her again. We spoke for a few minutes about yesterday’s trip to see the baby animals; then she said, “Got to go now, bye!” and slithered off. Mom tried to call her back, but with no success. Seeing her so happy without me was somehow worse than if she’d been upset and begging me to come home.

  My mother smiled at me sheepishly.

  “You’ve been spoiling her, Mom.”

  “Ag, she’s my little princess. Is that the apartment I can see in the background?”

  I didn’t want Mom to see the true state of it, so I changed the subject, and when it was clear that Hayden wasn’t returning to talk to me I hung up, planning to call later, after Hayden’s nap time.

  I checked my emails. There was nothing from the Petits, but Carla had been in touch again:

  Still no sign of your guests. Took it upon myself to check flight arrivals. No delays on any planes from Paris to Joburg. Ditto local flights from Joburg to C Town. Also called local hospitals just in case. No French tourists admitted. Do you want me to get on to the cops, see if they can check the passenger lists? Hope all is well with you two. x

  I replied to Carla, thanking her for everything she was doing and asking her to try the cops, although I doubted they’d be prepared to help. Next, I sent an email to the house swap site explaining our situation with the Petits and asking them if they had an emergency phone number on record. Just where the bloody hell were they? The last email I’d sent to them was way too polite. I fired off another one, a sharp one-liner insisting they get back to me ASAP. I ran through the possible explanations again, but paranoia was creeping in. Was this some kind of practical joke designed to freak out some random couple? Exhibit A was the hair Mark saw in the closet. I eyed the cardboard boxes in the corner of the living room, wondering if there was something equally bizarre inside them: a jack-in-the-box maybe. A porcelain clown curled up and waiting to spring. A pile of dolls with broken faces. A human skull or a collection of outlandish sex toys. I went so far as to consider that they could be filming us for some kinky online reality channel, and I even looked around the room for the telltale signs of any hidden cameras, until I snapped out of it and told myself to stop being so stupid.