Killing Me Softly by Nicci French Page A

me. ‘Why?’
    This was unexpected, and I didn’t feel prepared for it. I had come in order to be given a hard time, to be made to feel guilty.
    ‘There’s Jake.’
    Sylvie lit another cigarette and gave a half-smile. ‘Yes, there is Jake.’
    ‘Have you seen him?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How is he?’
    ‘Thin. Smoking again. Sometimes completely quiet, and sometimes talking so much about you that no one else can get a word in edgeways. Weepy. Is that what you want to hear? But he will recover. People do. He won’t be wretched for the rest of his life. Not many people die of heartbreak.’
    I took a sip of the coffee. It was still too hot. It made me cough. ‘I hope so. I’m sorry, Sylvie, I feel as if I’ve just come back from abroad and I’m out of touch with what’s going on.’
    There was a silence that obviously embarrassed both of us.
    ‘How’s Clive?’ I blurted desperately. ‘And what-sername?’
    ‘Gail,’ said Sylvie. ‘He’s in love again. And she’s good fun.’
    Another silence. Sylvie fixed me with a pensive expression. ‘What’s he like?’ she said.
    I felt myself going red and oddly tongue-tied. I realized with an ache of something I didn’t quite understand that it – Adam and me – had been a hidden activity and none of it had ever been put into words for the benefit of others.
    We’d never arrived at a party together. There was nobody who saw us as a couple. Now there was Sylvie, curious for herself, but also, I suspected, a delegation despatched from the Crew to forage for information she could bring back for them to pick at. I had an impulse to keep it secret for a while longer. I wanted to retreat back to a room once more, just the two of us. I didn’t want to be possessed and gossiped and speculated about by other people. Even the thought of Adam and his body sent ripples through me. I suddenly dreaded the idea of routine, of being Adam and Alice who lived somewhere and owned possessions in common and went to things together. And I wanted it as well.
    ‘God,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to say. He’s called Adam and… well, he’s completely different from anybody I’ve ever met before.’
    ‘I know,’ said Sylvie. ‘It’s wonderful at the beginning, isn’t it?’
    I shook my head. ‘It’s not like that. Look, all my life everything has gone more or less to plan. I was quite clever at school, quite well liked, never bullied or anything like that. I got on all right with my parents, not brilliantly but… well, you know all that. And I had nice boyfriends, and sometimes I left them and sometimes they left me, and I went to college and got a job and met Jake and moved in and… What was I doing all those years?’
    Sylvie’s well-shaped eyebrows shot up. For a moment she looked angry. ‘Living your life, just like the rest of us.’
    ‘Or was I just skating along, not touching anything, really, not letting myself be touched? You don’t need to answer that. I was thinking aloud.’
    We sipped our cooling coffee.
    ‘What does he do?’ Sylvie asked.
    ‘He doesn’t really have a job in the way that we all do. He does odds and ends to raise money. But what he really does is, he’s a mountaineer.’
    Sylvie looked authentically and satisfyingly startled. ‘Really? You mean, climbing mountains?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I don’t know what to say. Where did you meet? Not on a mountain.’
    ‘We just met,’ I said vaguely. ‘Just bumped into each other.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘A few weeks ago.’
    ‘And you’ve been in bed ever since.’ I didn’t reply. ‘You’re already moving in with him?’
    ‘It looks like it.’
    Sylvie puffed at her cigarette. ‘So it’s the real thing.’
    ‘It’s something. I’ve been knocked sideways by it.’
    Sylvie leaned forward with a roguish expression. ‘You should be careful. It’s always like this at the beginning. He’s all over you, obsessed with you. They want to fuck you all the time, come in your face, that sort of