The Forger

The salon always smelled of warm towels and apple shampoo. Anya had come to think of that smell as a kind of weather, a climate that existed only here, between the mirrors and the stacked magazines and the low radio that Amanda never quite tuned properly. It was one of the few rooms in which she still remembered how to sit.

Amanda’s fingers were already in her hair, sectioning the copper curls with the unthinking competence of someone who had been doing this for years.

“You’ve let it go a bit,” Amanda said, not unkindly. “Not that I’m complaining. More work for me.”

Anya tried for a smile. It arrived late and thinner than it should have been.

“Work’s been busy.”

“Bertram still making you polish the same bezel seventeen times?”

“Eighteen, last week.”

Amanda snorted. The sound was so familiar that Anya felt, briefly, like the girl who used to come here every six weeks and talk without measuring every sentence first. That girl had opinions about television and terrible dates and the exact shade of gold she preferred for a simple band. That girl had laughed with her whole mouth.

Amanda draped the protective cape around her, fastened it at the nape, and smoothed it over her shoulders. The vinyl whispered. Anya’s arms were inside it, hidden, which was the point of capes and long sleeves and standing a certain way under fluorescent light.

Amanda reached to adjust the collar.

The cape shifted.

For a moment the upper part of Anya’s left arm was bare to the mirror and to Amanda’s green eyes: a bloom of dull colour just below the shoulder, yellow at the edges, darker violet towards the centre, the particular tired palette of a bruise that was no longer new and not yet gone. It sat where a sleeve would ordinarily cover it. It sat where a hand might have closed.

Anya moved first.

She tugged the cape back into place with a little laugh that did not belong to her.

“The bench at work,” she said. “I turned round too fast and caught the corner. Bertram nearly had a fit about the wax model.”

Amanda’s fingers stilled in her hair.

It was only a second. Anyone watching from the other chair might have missed it. Anya did not. She had become an authority on the length of silences.

Then Amanda picked up the spray bottle and misted the curls as if nothing in the world had changed.

“You’ll have a dent in your pride before you’ve a dent in the gold,” she said. “Sit still.”

Anya sat still.

She watched Amanda in the mirror: highlighted blonde hair twisted up with a clip, a tiny gold stud in one ear, the concentration that made her look older than twenty-five. Amanda had begun as an appointment. Somewhere between a disastrous fringe and a winter of root touch-ups, she had become the nearest thing Anya had to a friend who saw her without Karl in the room.

Which was precisely why Anya could not look at her now.

Amanda combed, sectioned, snipped. She talked about a client who wanted platinum blonde over box-dyed black and about the price of colour these days and the new place on the corner that burned every sandwich it sold. She did not ask about the bruise. She did not say Karl’s name. Anya understood the mercy of that and hated that she needed it.

“How’s the shop?” Amanda asked after a while, in the same tone she used for the sandwiches.

Anya’s shoulders loosened by a fraction.

“All right. Better than all right, actually. Bertram’s letting me set a small cluster. Nothing grand. Seed pearls and a little citrine. He stood over me for an hour on Thursday and then went into the back and left me with it.” She heard herself and was faintly astonished. The words had warmth in them. “He said if I rushed the claws he’d make me take them all out again. I nearly did rush them, just to see if he meant it.”

“Did he mean it?”

“He always means it.”

Amanda smiled at her in the glass.

“There she is,” she said, very quietly.

Anya looked down at her own hands in her lap, at the short nails she kept for work, at the thin white line on her thumb where the torch had kissed her six months ago. For a few minutes she was Anya from Sinclair Goldsmiths, who knew the weight of a needle file and the particular satisfaction of a stone that sat true. The rest of her life receded to the edges of the mirror.

Amanda finished the cut, dried the curls in sections so they sprang instead of frizzed, and unfastened the cape with a flourish that was only half a joke.

“There. Presentable. Try not to walk into any more benches.”

“I’ll do my best.”

At the desk Anya paid and tipped more than she could comfortably spare. Amanda walked her to the door, as she always did, and put a hand lightly on her sleeve, the unbruised one, and said the thing she had said before, on a different afternoon when Anya had been quiet and Amanda had pretended not to notice that either.

“You know I’m always here, don’t you? Whatever it is.”

Anya nodded. The street air was cooler than the salon. A bus sighed at the lights.

“I know,” she said. “Thank you.”

Amanda held her gaze a moment longer than the sentence required.

“Good. Go on, then. Don’t let Bertram catch you late.”

Anya stepped out. Behind her, the radio found another station and lost it again. She did not know, not then, that the reminder had already begun its work, or that she would need it before the day was finished.

She only knew that for forty minutes she had been allowed to be a girl having her hair cut, and that the walk home would take it back.

The flat was on the second floor of a converted terrace off Holloway Road that had given up being handsome some time in the nineties. The stairwell smelled of other people’s dinners. Anya climbed with her keys already between her fingers, not because she expected to use them as a weapon. She had tried imagining that once, and the picture had collapsed under the weight of his height. She held them because the feel of them was something to hold on to.

She paused on the landing.

From inside came the muffled thump of the television. So he was home. She had hoped, without quite admitting the hope, that he might have gone in early. Karl managed the bar three streets over. Some afternoons he left at four and did not come back until the small hours, smelling of beer and other people’s perfume. Some afternoons he did not.

Anya put the key in the lock and turned it softly, as if softness had ever changed anything.

The hall was narrow. His jacket hung on the peg. His shoes were a dark scatter by the mat. She slipped hers off without being told and set them straight.

He was in the kitchen doorway.

Six foot one of him, filling the frame the way he filled most rooms, brown hair still damp from a shower, a grey T-shirt that made his arms look exactly as strong as they were. Hazel eyes. The look that was not yet a look. Anya had learned to read the weather of his face the way other people read a sky: not for beauty, for warning.

“Hi,” she said.

She heard herself calibrate it. Not too bright. Not too flat. A greeting that asked for nothing and offered no complaint.

Karl’s gaze travelled over her, hair, bag, the way she stood, and returned to her face.

“You’re late.”

“Amanda ran over. There was a colour in the other chair.”

He made a small sound that might have been acceptance. Anya moved past him into the kitchen because standing in doorways made her feel like a thing waiting to be judged, and because movement could sometimes pass for ease.

The mug was on the table.

She did not see it at first. She was already reaching for the kettle, already arranging her body into the shape of a person coming home from an ordinary appointment. Then Karl said, quite mildly,

“What’s that?”

She turned.

The mug sat in the middle of the table as if it had been placed there for a photograph. Her mug. The one with the faded gold rim she had bought in a charity shop because it reminded her, faintly, of the trays at work. A skin had formed on the tea she had poured that morning and then forgotten. She had been late. She had been thinking about the cluster setting and about whether Karl would still be asleep when she left. The mug had simply ceased to exist the moment the door closed behind her.

“Oh,” she said. “I must have—”

“You left it.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I was rushing. I’ll wash it now.”

She reached for it.

Karl did not move from the doorway, but the air in the room changed.

“I asked you to keep this place decent.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It was one mug. I’ll do it now.”

“It was one mug.” He repeated it as if tasting the smallness of the words and finding them insulting. “That’s what you want to say, is it? It was one mug.”

Anya’s mind performed the old arithmetic. If she explained, she was arguing. If she stayed silent, she was sulking. If she smiled, she was taking it lightly. If she looked frightened, she was making it worse by making him into the sort of man who frightened her.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll clean it. I’ll do the rest of the kitchen too.”

He came off the doorframe.

She had time to notice the mug still sitting there, stupid and brown-ringed, before his hand closed on her upper arm, the same arm Amanda had seen, and the world narrowed to the heat of his palm and the knowledge, already arriving, of what came next.

It was not that she had never learned to fight. It was that fighting made it last longer, and she had the measurements of that now, stored in her body like a second set of bones. She knew which way to turn her face. She knew that noise brought Mrs Derry from downstairs and that Mrs Derry’s concern was a kindness Anya could not afford, because concern became questions and questions became Karl smiling in the hallway, explaining that they’d had a row, you know how it is, she’s dramatic. She knew that if she spoke now he would hear defiance in it, even if the word was only his name.

So she did not say his name.

The first blow was to her stomach. It emptied the air from her with a sound she tried to keep inside her teeth. He had the height and the reach and the particular talent of a man who understood that the torso told no stories in a supermarket queue. His fist found her ribs on the left side, then the soft place beneath them, then the same place again because the first time had been a beginning and not a conclusion. She folded. The edge of the table met her hip. The mug rattled and did not fall.

She thought, absurdly, of the cape. Of vinyl and apple shampoo. Of Amanda’s fingers stilling.

Karl said things. She caught fragments, lazy, disrespect, think I don’t see, but the content had stopped mattering months ago. The words were only the shape he wrapped the permission in. Today the permission was a mug of cold tea. Last week it had been the way she had answered him in front of one of his friends from the bar. Before that it had been a look. There was always a look, if you waited long enough.

She put a hand on the table to stay upright and he took that for resistance and hit her again, lower, where a waistband would sit. Pain arrived in layers: the bright first shock, then the deeper, spreading ache that she already knew would keep her company through the night. She made herself small. She made herself quiet. She counted, not because counting helped, but because the mind reached for any work that was not this.

When he let go, she caught herself on the chair.

Karl stood over her, breathing a little harder than before, the flush high in his face. For a moment he looked almost puzzled, as if the mug had promised him something and then failed to deliver it.

Then he stepped back, shook out his hand, and reached past her for the mug.

He emptied the tea into the sink. He rinsed the cup. He set it on the draining board with a neatness that belonged to a different man.

“There,” he said. “Was that so difficult?”

Anya swallowed. The taste in her mouth was metal and old breakfast.

“No.”

He glanced at the clock on the cooker.

“I’m going in. Don’t wait up. And do something with this kitchen. It looks like a tip.”

“I will.”

He went into the bedroom. She heard drawers, the jingle of his belt, the spray of deodorant that always seemed to her like a curtain coming down on a play she had not agreed to watch. When he came back he was in the black shirt he wore for work, the one that made the girls at the bar laugh at his jokes. He paused in the kitchen long enough to take his keys from the bowl.

“Anya.”

She looked up.

Whatever he saw in her face, he decided it would do.

“Love you,” he said.

The front door closed.

The television, which had been talking to an empty sofa all this time, laughed at something in a studio.

Anya stood in the kitchen with one hand on the chair and waited until she was sure the stairs had taken him. Then she locked the door, which was habit and not safety, and let herself down onto the linoleum because the linoleum did not require her to be a person yet.

The mug gleamed on the draining board, clean.

By seven the flat had the particular hush of a place that had been left to her by accident. Karl would be behind the bar now, charming, competent, the man whose staff liked him and whose regulars asked after his pretty little girlfriend. Anya had seen that version of him so often that she sometimes wondered whether she was the one inventing the other.

She was not inventing the other.

In the bathroom she peeled her jumper off and stood under the bulb. The glass was cheap and spotted, but it was honest enough. Her abdomen was already darkening, a blotched continent spreading from the lower ribs towards the hip, the skin tight and hot. There would be more by morning. There always was. She pressed her fingers gently along the worst of it and hissed through her teeth, cataloguing the damage the way Bertram catalogued a flawed stone: here, and here, and this place that would catch when she sat at the bench tomorrow.

If she sat at the bench tomorrow.

The thought arrived without drama.

Amanda’s voice came with it, as clearly as if the salon radio had followed her home.

You know I’m always here, don’t you? Whatever it is.

Whatever it is.

Anya leaned her head back against the tiles. The bag of frozen peas she had wrapped in a tea towel numbed and then burned and then numbed again against her stomach. She was twenty years old. She knew how to grain-set a diamond no larger than a grain of sugar. She knew the melting point of solder. She knew, with a precision that would have pleased Bertram, exactly how much of herself she had already given away to keep the peace in a two-bedroom flat.

She thought about leaving.

She had done it before.

Last time there had been a girl from a foundation course whose cousin had a spare room in a house with too many bicycles in the hall. Anya had packed a bag while Karl was at a staff meeting. She had told herself, on the bus, that the hardest part was over. She had slept that first night with the bag still zipped at the foot of the bed, like a person who believed in departures.

He found her on the sixth day.

She could still feel, if she let herself, the exact shock of his hand in her hair on the front path. The sound she had made. The cousin in the doorway saying hey and then saying nothing, because Karl was already talking, already reasonable, already the worried boyfriend who only wanted her home. Neighbours loved a man who looked worried. They did not love a scene. Anya had gone with him because the alternative was to be dragged, and she had been dragged anyway, up the stairs of their own building, his fist in her curls, her scalp screaming, the world reduced to the smell of his deodorant and the knowledge that there was no house far enough if the house still had her name on it.

She had not tried again.

The peas leaked a little against the towel. Anya stared at the crack in the plaster above the cistern and understood, with a calm that frightened her more than the bruises, that leaving was not the thing she needed.

Leaving meant a bag. Leaving meant a friend’s sofa, a forwarding address, a telephone that still rang. Leaving meant Karl with time and a temper and the particular patience of a man who believed she belonged to him.

She did not need to leave Karl.

She needed to disappear from him.

A new name.

A new city.

A new home.

A new telephone number.

A new apprenticeship.

The last one landed in her chest with its own bruise.

Sinclair Goldsmiths occupied a narrow shop in Hatton Garden with a green facade and a window that Bertram dressed himself, slowly, as if the arrangement of a tray were a moral act. Behind the shop was the workshop, which smelled of rouge and hot metal and the ghost of coal from a hearth that had not been lit in twenty years. Anya knew the exact protest of the back door. She knew which floorboard outside Bertram’s bench announced you before you intended to be announced.

She closed her eyes and saw his hands.

They were older than the rest of him somehow. Bertram was sixty-two, white-haired, blue-eyed, always slightly overdressed for a room full of emery and dust, but the hands were the point of him. Steady. Unshowy. Capable of a cruelty of standard that had nothing to do with unkindness. He had stood behind her on Thursday and watched her raise a claw and said, without raising his voice, “Again.” Not because he enjoyed her failing. Because he refused to let her succeed incorrectly. There was a difference, and Anya had learned it in her wrists.

She had made a practice ring in her first year, a plain band in gilding metal, slightly fire-stained, the solder seam visible if you knew where to look. Bertram had turned it in the light, given it back, and said, “Keep that. You’ll want to remember what your hands didn’t know.” She kept it in a saucer on the chest of drawers. She could see the saucer now from the bathroom doorway if she leaned. The ring was nothing. It was also the first object in her adult life that existed because she had insisted on becoming someone.

Karl had not given her that.

Karl had given her a flat and a set of rules that changed depending on the day and a version of love that arrived afterwards, like a cloth for a spill.

The apprenticeship was hers.

And he was going to cost her that too.

She saw it clearly, sitting there with thawing peas against her skin. If she vanished properly, she could not tell Bertram where she was going. She could not tell him she was going at all. If Karl came to the shop, and he would; he had come before, smiling, asking if she’d left her lunch, filling the doorway the way he filled every doorway, Bertram would have nothing to give him only if Bertram had nothing to know. Kindness would not protect Bertram from Karl. Information would only endanger them both.

So she would have to walk out of Sinclair Goldsmiths as if she were coming back on Monday, and not come back.

The grief of that was enormous and strangely clean. It did not shout. It simply occupied the space where her future had been.

She thought of Bertram removing his loupe and looking at her, the way he did when a setting was almost right and therefore worse than a setting that was honestly wrong. She thought of saying goodbye and knew she would say nothing. She thought of the cluster with the seed pearls, unfinished on her bench, the citrine waiting in its paper. Someone else would finish it, or no one would. It would not be her.

If she stayed, the alternative had a shape now too.

Not immediately. Karl was careful in his fashion. He hit where clothing went. He said love you on the way out of the door. But the permission slips were getting smaller, and the spaces between them were getting shorter, and Anya was not a fool about trajectories. She had seen the look on his face when the mug failed to be enough. One day a mug would not be required. One day she would go to work with something a cape could not hide, or she would not go to work at all.

She was twenty.

She wanted to become a goldsmith.

She wanted a life that belonged to her hands and not to his temper.

Keeping that life meant setting down almost everything currently in it: the shop, the green facade, the man who had taught her that patience was a kind of love. It meant becoming, on purpose, a person who had never sat in Amanda’s chair.

The peas were water now. Anya dropped the towel in the sink and dressed in the same jumper, moving as if her middle were made of glass. She washed the tea towel. She cleaned the kitchen until it would have satisfied a man more reasonable than the one who lived here. She put the practice ring into the palm of her hand and closed her fingers around it until the metal was warm.

Then she put it back in the saucer.

She could not take it. Not if taking it meant a thing he would notice gone.

That, more than the bruises, was what decided her.

Amanda’s salon was near Angel. It did not open until nine. Anya was on the pavement at ten to, holding a paper cup she had not drunk from, her coat buttoned to the throat although the morning was not cold.

Amanda saw her through the glass while she was still turning the sign.

The look on her face went from surprise to something sharper, and then, because Amanda was Amanda, into a smile that tried to make a walk-in into an ordinary thing.

She unlocked the door.

“You’re a day early for a trim, love. I only just sent you out looking respectable.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Can I come in?”

Amanda’s gaze flicked over her, quick and professional and not only professional. The salon behind her was empty. The radio was not on yet. The smell of yesterday’s shampoo still hung in the warmth.

“Come in,” Amanda said.

She locked the door again behind them and did not turn the sign to OPEN.

Anya sat in the same chair as yesterday because her legs had an opinion about which chair was safe. The cape hung over the next one, unused. In the triple mirror she looked like a person who had slept, which was a lie she had constructed with concealer and a high neck.

Amanda pulled the other chair round and sat in it, close, her highlighted hair down today, her green eyes very still.

“What’s happened?”

Anya had practised, on the walk, a version of this that was tidy. She needed help. There was a man. She could not stay. She had thought Amanda might know someone, or some place, or some way of being unfindable that did not involve the police, because the police had been to the flat once after a neighbour called and Karl had been so sorry, so bewildered, so good at being a man who had merely raised his voice.

The tidy version lasted as far as Amanda’s face.

“I can’t—” Anya began, and then the sentence broke, and then she was crying in a way she had not cried in the kitchen, or on the linoleum, or under the bathroom bulb. Those had been private, contained, the tears of someone still performing competence. This was worse. This was Amanda’s hand on her knee and the humiliating sound of her own breath, and the bruise on her arm beating in time with her heart as if it wanted to be shown.

“It’s Karl,” she said, when she could say anything. “It’s been Karl. For a long time. I keep thinking I can manage it. I can’t manage it. Yesterday he—” She stopped. The mug would sound like nothing. That was the trap of mugs. “He hits me. Not where anyone would see. I left once. I went to a house. I thought I’d done it.”

Amanda did not look shocked in the cheap way. She looked like a woman having a suspicion confirmed, which was its own kind of pain.

“He found me,” Anya said. “Within a week. He dragged me back by my hair. I thought if I was just careful enough. If I just didn’t leave mugs, or look at him wrong, or—” She pressed her fingers to her mouth. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t put this on you. You didn’t ask to be involved in any of this.”

Amanda reached out and took the hand from her mouth and held it.

“You never have to apologise for trying to save yourself.”

The sentence went into Anya like heat. She cried harder, and then, because there was only so much crying a body could do before it remembered the ribs, she sat very still and let Amanda hold her hand and hated how much she needed even that.

Amanda waited.

When Anya could speak again, she said the thing she had come to say.

“I don’t need a sofa for a few nights. I don’t need somewhere to hide while he calms down. He doesn’t calm down. He looks. I need—” She searched for language that did not sound mad. “I need to not be Anya Nelson. I need a name he can’t search, and a city he won’t think of, and a number that isn’t this number. I need to become someone he cannot find.”

Amanda looked at her for a long time.

Something moved behind her eyes. Not doubt. Memory.

“All right,” she said.

Amanda stood, went to the desk, and opened the drawer where she kept appointment cards and spare clips and the ordinary debris of a working salon. She did not take out a phone at first. She took out an envelope that had gone soft at the corners, the flap tucked rather than sealed, and from the envelope she drew a slip of paper with a number written in someone else’s hand.

“My cousin,” she said. She kept her eyes on the paper, as if the story were easier to tell to the ink. “Last year. She needed to go. I still don’t know all of it, and I don’t think I want to. Before she left she told me I wouldn’t be able to reach her. Not properly. Not in any way that was safe. But if there was ever a genuine emergency, if I needed her, or someone like her needed what she’d needed, there was one person who would know how to find her.”

Anya’s mouth was dry.

“She gave you a name.”

“She gave me a number,” Amanda said. “And a name to ask for. Edmund Demaris.”

The name did not sound like anyone Anya knew. It sounded like a brass plate. Like a man who owned fountain pens.

“What is he?” Anya asked.

Amanda hesitated. The hesitation was not theatrical. It was the honest pause of a woman examining the limits of her own knowledge and finding them narrower than she wished.

“I’m not entirely sure.”

Despite everything, a breath of something almost like laughter moved through Anya’s chest and vanished.

“That’s not enormously reassuring.”

“No,” Amanda agreed. She sat down again, the paper between them. “I know she went to him because she needed to disappear. I know she disappeared. I know that if she trusted anyone in the world with the fact of her afterwards, it was him. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know what he charges, or where he lives, or whether he even uses that name when he buys milk. I know she told me he could make a person stand up to scrutiny. Papers. History. The sort of identity that isn’t just a fake driving licence in a pub.” She looked up. “Real enough. Or real enough to live inside.”

Anya stared at the number. It was only digits. It had the power, suddenly, of a door.

“And you think he’d see me.”

“I think,” Amanda said carefully, “that he saw her. And I think you are in the same kind of trouble she was in. I wouldn’t give you this if I thought he was going to make it worse. I don’t know him. I know her. I trust her judgement. That’s the whole of it.”

Anya nodded. The movement pulled at her side.

“Will you call?” she asked. “I don’t think I can explain it to a stranger on the telephone. Not yet. Not from my number.”

“I’ll call,” Amanda said.

Amanda did not have Edmund Demaris saved in her contacts. The number lived only on the slip, as if even digital ink might have been a kind of trail. She dialled from the salon landline, which sat beside the till like an object from another decade, and Anya listened to the single ring, then the second, with her hands knotted in her lap.

Someone answered.

“Hello,” Amanda said. Her professional voice, almost, but stripped of the lilt she used on clients. “I’m trying to reach Edmund Demaris.”

A pause. Amanda’s eyes flicked to Anya.

“Yes. I was given this number by someone you helped last year. I have a friend who needs the same kind of help.”

Another pause, longer. Amanda listened. She looked at Anya as if checking her against a list being read down the line.

“Twenty,” she said. “Yes. She’s twenty.”

The salon clock ticked. A van went past outside, rattling the glass.

“Yes. She’s in danger.” Amanda’s jaw tightened. “Yes. The person she’s trying to escape has found her before.”

Silence.

Anya could hear, faintly, the texture of a man’s voice, but not the words. It was low. Unhurried. It did not sound like Karl. It did not sound like anyone who shouted across a bar.

Amanda put her hand over the mouthpiece.

“Can you get there this afternoon?”

Anya’s stomach turned, a slow, sick roll that had nothing to do with the bruising and everything to do with the suddenness of doors that opened. Last night it had been a thought she could still fold away. This morning it had been a conversation. Now it had a time of day.

If she said no, she would go back to the flat and wash another mug. If she said yes, she would be the sort of person who sat opposite a man she did not know and asked him to unmake her.

She thought of Bertram’s hands. She thought of Karl’s mouth saying love you. She thought of her own hair in Karl’s fist on a front path in a street she had believed was far enough.

“Yes,” she said.

Amanda took her hand off the mouthpiece.

“She can be there.” A beat. “Thank you.”

She wrote while she listened: an address, a time, the printed care of someone who understood that a wrong street would matter. When she hung up, the salon felt too quiet, as if the call had taken the air with it.

Amanda folded the slip, then thought better of it and copied the details onto a fresh appointment card, the kind with her logo at the top, because an appointment card in a handbag looked like nothing.

She held it out.

Anya took it.

The address meant little to her, a part of the city she did not go to, a number above something, an hour that would require her to invent a reason for Karl if he came home between shifts, or to hope that he did not. Beneath the time, in Amanda’s tidy writing:

Edmund Demaris.

Anya looked down at the card until the letters stopped being letters and became a fact.

A man she had never met.

A man she was about to trust with her name, her history, and whatever remained of her future.

She did not know what he looked like. She did not know how old he was. She did not know, not really, what he did when he was not answering a telephone that existed for emergencies other people hoped never to have.

She knew only this: that by later that afternoon she would be sitting opposite a criminal, and she would be asking him to make Anya Nelson disappear.