فصل 06

CHAPTER SIX

‘Sorry. My alarm didn’t go off.’ I rushed past Richard and hung my coat on the peg, pulling my synthetic skirt down over my thighs.

‘Three-quarters of an hour late. This is not acceptable.’

It was eight thirty a.m. We were, I noted, the only two people in the bar.

Carly had left: she hadn’t even bothered telling Richard to his face. She simply sent a text message telling him she would drop the sodding uniform in at the end of the week, and that as she was owed two weeks’ sodding holiday pay she was taking her sodding notice in lieu. If she had bothered to read the employment handbook, he had fumed, she would have known that taking notice in lieu of holiday was completely unacceptable. It was there in Section Three, as clear as day, if she had cared to look. And the sodding language was simply unnecessary.

He was now going through the due processes to find a replacement. Which meant that until due processes were completed it was just me. And Richard.

‘I’m sorry. Something … came up at home.’

I had woken with a start at seven thirty, unable for several minutes to recall what country I was in or what my name was, and had lain on my bed, unable to move, while I mulled over the previous evening’s events.

‘A good worker doesn’t bring their home life to the workplace with them,’ Richard intoned, as he pushed past me with his clipboard. I watched him go, wondering if he even had a home life. He never seemed to spend any time there.

‘Yeah. Well. A good employer doesn’t make his employee wear a uniform Stringfellow’s would have rejected as tacky,’ I muttered, as I tapped my code into the till, pulling the hem of my Lurex skirt down with my free hand.

He turned swiftly, and walked back across the bar. ‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘I said I’ll remember that for next time. Thank you very much for reminding me.’

I smiled sweetly at him.

He looked at me for several seconds longer than was comfortable for either of us. And then he said, ‘The cleaner is off sick again. You’ll need to do the Gents before you start on the bar.’

His gaze was steady, daring me to say something. I reminded myself that I could not afford to lose this job. I swallowed. ‘Right.’

‘Oh, and cubicle three’s a bit of a mess.’

‘Jolly good,’ I said.

He turned on his highly polished heel and walked back into the office. I sent mental voodoo arrows into the back of his head the whole way.

‘This week’s Moving On Circle is about guilt, survivor’s guilt, guilt that we didn’t do enough … It’s often this that keeps us from moving forward.’

Marc waited as we handed around the biscuit tin, then leaned forward on his plastic chair, his hands clasped in front of him. He ignored the low rumbling of discontent that there were no bourbon creams.

‘I used to get ever so impatient with Jilly,’ Fred said, into the silence. ‘When she had the dementia, I mean. She would put dirty plates back in the kitchen cupboards and I would find them days later and … I’m ashamed to say, I did shout at her a couple of times.’ He wiped at an eye. ‘She was such a houseproud woman, before. That was the worst thing.’

‘You lived with Jilly’s dementia for a long time, Fred. You’d have to have been superhuman not to find it a strain.’

‘Dirty plates would drive me mad,’ said Daphne. ‘I think I would have shouted something terrible.’

‘But it wasn’t her fault, was it?’ Fred straightened on his chair. ‘I think about those plates a lot. I wish I could go back. I’d wash them up without saying a word. Just give her a nice cuddle instead.’

‘I find myself fantasizing about men on the tube,’ said Natasha. ‘Sometimes when I’m riding up an escalator, I exchange a look with some random man going down. And before I’ve even got to the platform I’m building a whole relationship with him in my head. You know, where he runs back down the escalator because he just knows there’s something magical between us, and we stand there, gazing at each other, amid the crowds of commuters on the Piccadilly Line, and then we go for a drink, and before you know it, we’re –’

‘Sounds like a Richard Curtis movie,’ said William.

‘I like Richard Curtis movies,’ said Sunil. ‘Especially that one about the actress and the man in his pants.’

‘Shepherd’s Bush,’ said Daphne.

There was a short pause. ‘I think it’s Notting Hill, Daphne,’ Marc said.

‘I preferred Daphne’s version. What?’ said William, snorting. ‘We’re not allowed to laugh now?’

‘So in my head we’re getting married,’ said Natasha. ‘And then when we’re standing at the altar, I think, What am I doing? Olaf only died three years ago and I’m fantasizing about other men.’

Marc leaned back in his chair. ‘You don’t think that’s natural, after three years by yourself? To fantasize about other relationships?’

‘But if I had really loved Olaf, surely I wouldn’t think about anyone else.’

‘It’s not the Victorian age,’ said William. ‘You don’t have to wear widow’s weeds till you’re elderly.’

‘If it was me that died, I’d hate the thought of Olaf falling in love with someone else.’

‘You wouldn’t know,’ said William. ‘You’d be dead.’

‘What about you, Louisa?’ Marc had noticed my silence. ‘Do you suffer feelings of guilt?’

‘Can we – can we do someone else?’

‘I’m Catholic,’ said Daphne. ‘I feel guilty about everything. It’s the nuns, you know.’

‘What do you find difficult about this subject, Louisa?’

I took a swig of coffee. I felt everyone’s eyes on me. Come on, I told myself. I swallowed. ‘That I couldn’t stop him,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I think if I had been smarter, or … handled things differently … or just been more – I don’t know. More anything.’

‘You feel guilty about Bill’s death because you feel you could have stopped him?’

I pulled at a thread. When it came away in my hand it seemed to loosen something in my brain. ‘Also that I’m living a life that is so much less than the one I promised him I’d live. And guilt over the fact that he basically paid for my flat when my sister will probably never be able to afford one of her own. And guilt that I don’t even really like living in it, because it doesn’t feel like mine, and it feels wrong to make it nice because all I associate it with is the fact that W— Bill is dead and somehow I benefited from that.’

There was a short silence.

‘You shouldn’t feel guilty about property,’ said Daphne.

‘I wish someone would leave me a flat,’ said Sunil.

‘But that’s just a fairy tale ending, isn’t it? Man dies, everyone learns something, moves on, creates something wonderful out of his death.’ I was speaking without thinking now. ‘I’ve done none of those things. I’ve basically just failed at all of it.’

‘My dad cries nearly every time he shags someone who isn’t my mum,’ Jake blurted, twisting his hands together. He stared out from under his fringe. ‘He charms women into sleeping with him and then he gets off on being sad about it. It’s like as long as he feels guilty about it afterwards it’s okay.’

‘You think he uses his guilt as a crutch.’

‘I just think either you have sex and feel glad that you’re having all the sex –’

‘I wouldn’t feel guilty about having all the sex,’ said Fred.

‘Or you treat women like human beings and make sure you don’t have anything to feel guilty about. Or don’t even sleep with anyone, and treasure Mum’s memory until you’re actually ready to move on.’

His voice broke on treasure and his jaw tautened. We were used, by then, to the sudden stiffening of expressions, and an unspoken group courtesy meant that we each looked away until any potential tears subsided.

Marc’s voice was gentle. ‘Have you told your father how you feel, Jake?’

‘We don’t talk about Mum. He’s fine as long as, you know, we don’t actually mention her.’

‘That’s quite a burden for you to carry alone.’

‘Yeah. Well … That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’

There was a short silence.

‘Have a biscuit, Jake darling,’ said Daphne, and we passed the tin back around the circle, vaguely reassured, in some way nobody could quite define, when Jake finally took one.

I kept thinking about Lily. I barely registered Sunil’s tale of weeping in the baked-goods section of the supermarket, and just about raised a sympathetic expression for Fred’s solitary marking of Jilly’s birthday with a bunch of foil balloons. For days now the whole episode with Lily had taken on the tenor of a dream, vivid and surreal.

How could Will have had a daughter?

‘You look happy.’

Jake’s father was leaning against his motorbike as I walked across the church hall’s car park.

I stopped in front of him. ‘It’s a grief-counselling session. I’m hardly going to come out tap-dancing.’

‘Fair point.’

‘It’s not what you think. I mean, it’s not me,’ I said. ‘It’s … to do with a teenager.’

He tipped his head backwards, spying Jake behind me. ‘Oh. Right. Well, you have my sympathies there. You look young to have a teenager, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘Oh. No. Not mine! It’s … complicated.’

‘I’d love to give you advice. But I don’t have a clue.’ He stepped forward and enveloped Jake in a hug, which the boy tolerated glumly. ‘You all right, young man?’

‘Fine.’

‘Fine,’ Sam said, glancing sideways at me. ‘There you go. Universal response of all teenagers to everything. War, famine, lottery wins, global fame. It’s all fine.’

‘You didn’t need to pick me up. I’m going to Jools’s.’

‘You want a lift?’

‘She lives, like, there. In that block.’ Jake pointed. ‘I think I can manage that by myself.’

Sam’s expression remained even. ‘So, maybe text me next time? Save me coming here and waiting?’

Jake shrugged, and walked off, his rucksack slung over his shoulder. We watched him go in silence.

‘I’ll see you later, yes, Jake?’

Jake lifted a hand without looking back.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So now I feel a tiny bit better.’

Sam gave the slightest shake of his head. He watched his son go, as if, even now, he couldn’t bear to just leave him. ‘Some days he feels it harder than others.’ And then he turned to me. ‘You want to grab a coffee or something, Louisa? Just so I don’t have to feel like the world’s biggest loser? It is Louisa, right?’

I thought of what Jake had said in that evening’s session. On Friday Dad brought home this psycho blonde called Mags who is obsessed with him. When he was in the shower she kept asking me if he talked about her when she wasn’t there.

The compulsive shagger. But he was nice enough, and he had helped put me back together in the ambulance, and the alternative was another night at home wondering what had been going on in Lily Houghton-Miller’s head. ‘If we can talk about anything but teenagers.’

‘Can we talk about your outfit?’

I looked down at my green Lurex skirt and my Irish dancing shoes. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘It was worth a try,’ he said, and climbed onto his motorbike.

We sat outside a near-empty bar a short distance from my flat. He drank black coffee, and I had fruit juice.

I had time to study him surreptitiously now that I wasn’t dodging cars in a car park or lying strapped to a hospital gurney. His nose held a tell-tale ridge, and his eyes crinkled in a way that suggested there was almost no human behaviour he hadn’t seen and, perhaps, been slightly amused by. He was tall and broad, his features coarser than Will’s somehow, yet he moved with a kind of gentle economy, as if he had absorbed the effort of not damaging things just from his size. He was evidently more comfortable with listening than talking, or perhaps it was just that it was unsettling to be on my own with a man after so much time because I found I was gabbling. I talked about my job at the bar, making him laugh about Richard Percival and the horrors of my outfit, and how strange it had been to live briefly at home again, and my father’s bad jokes, and Granddad and his doughnuts, and my nephew’s unorthodox use of a blue marker pen. But I was conscious as I spoke, as so often these days, of how much I didn’t say: about Will, about the surreal thing that had happened to me the previous evening, about me. With Will I had never had to consider what I said: talking to him was as effortless as breathing. Now I was good at not really saying anything about myself at all.

He just sat, and nodded, watched the traffic go by and sipped his coffee, as if it were perfectly normal for him to be passing the time with a feverishly chatting stranger in a green Lurex mini-skirt.

‘So, how’s the hip?’ he asked, when finally I ground to a halt.

‘Not bad. I’d quite like to stop limping, though.’

‘You’ll get there, if you keep up the physio.’ For a moment, I could hear that voice from the back of the ambulance. Calm, unfazed, reassuring. ‘The other injuries?’

I peered down at myself, as if I could see through what I was wearing. ‘Well, other than the fact that I look like someone’s drawn all over bits of me with a particularly vivid red pen, not bad.’

Sam nodded. ‘You were lucky. That was quite a fall.’

And there it was again. The sick lurch in my stomach. The air beneath my feet. You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height. ‘I wasn’t trying to –’

‘You said.’

‘But I’m not sure anyone believes me.’

We exchanged an awkward smile and for a minute I wondered if he didn’t either.

‘So … do you pick up many people who fall off the tops of buildings?’

He shook his head, gazed out across the road. ‘I just pick up the pieces. I’m glad that, in your case, the pieces fitted back together.’

We sat in silence for a while longer. I kept thinking about things I should say, but I was so out of practice at being alone with a man – while sober at least – that I kept losing my nerve, my mouth opening and closing like that of a goldfish.

‘So you want to tell me about the teenager?’ Sam said.

It was a relief to explain it to someone. I told him about the late-night knock at the door, and our bizarre meeting and what I had found on Facebook, and the way she had run away before I’d had a chance to work out what on earth to do.

‘Whoa,’ he said when I’d finished. ‘That’s …’ He gave a little shake of his head. ‘You think she is who she says she is?’

‘She does look a bit like him. But I don’t honestly know. Am I looking for signs? Am I seeing what I want to see? It’s possible. I spend half my time thinking how amazing that there’s something of him left behind, and the other half wondering if I’m being a complete sucker. And then there’s this whole extra layer of stuff in the middle – like if this is his daughter then how is it fair that he never even got to meet her? And how are his parents supposed to cope with it? And what if meeting her would actually have changed his mind? What if that would have been the thing that convinced him …’ My voice tailed away.

Sam leaned back in his chair, his brow furrowed. ‘And this man would be the reason you’re attending the group.’

‘Yes.’

I could feel him studying me, perhaps reassessing what Will had meant to me.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said. ‘I don’t know whether to seek her out, or whether I should just leave well enough alone.’

He looked out at the city street, thinking. And then he said: ‘Well, what would he have done?’

And just like that, I faltered. I gazed up at that big man with his direct gaze, his two-day stubble, and his kind, capable hands. And all my thoughts evaporated.

‘You okay?’

I took a deep gulp of my drink, trying to hide what I felt was written clearly on my face. Suddenly, for no reason I could work out, I wanted to cry. It was too much. That odd, unbalancing night. The fact that Will had loomed up again, ever-present in every conversation. I could see his face suddenly, that sardonic eyebrow raised, as if to say, What on earth are you up to now, Clark?

‘Just … a long day. Actually, would you mind if I –’

Sam pushed his chair back, stood up. ‘No. No, you go. Sorry. I didn’t think –’

‘This has been really nice. It’s just –’

‘No problem. A long day. And the whole grief thing. I get it. No, no – don’t worry,’ he said, as I reached for my purse. ‘Really. I can stand you an orange juice.’

I think I might have run to my car, in spite of my limp. I felt his eyes on me the whole way.

I pulled up in the car park, and let out a breath I felt as if I’d been holding all the way from the bar. I glanced over at the corner shop, then back at my flat, and decided I didn’t want to be sensible. I wanted wine, several large glasses of it, until I could persuade myself to stop looking backwards. Or maybe not look at anything at all.

My hip ached as I climbed out of the car. Since Richard had arrived, it hurt constantly; the physio at the hospital had told me not to spend too much time on my feet. But the thought of saying as much to Richard filled me with dread.

I see. So you work in a bar but you want to be allowed to sit down all day, is that it?

That milk-fed, preparing-for-middle-management face; that carefully nondescript haircut. That air of weary superiority, even though he was barely two years older than me. I closed my eyes, and tried to make the knot of anxiety in my stomach disappear.

‘Just this, please,’ I said, placing a bottle of cold Sauvignon Blanc on the counter.

‘Party, is it?’

‘What?’

‘Fancy dress. You going as – Don’t tell me.’ Samir stroked his chin. ‘Snow White?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘You want to be careful with that. Empty calories, innit? You want to drink vodka. That’s a clean drink. Maybe a bit of lemon. That’s what I tell Ginny, across the road. You know she’s a lap-dancer, right? They got to watch their figures.’

‘Dietary advice. Nice.’

‘It’s like all this stuff about sugar. You got to watch the sugar. No point buying the low-fat stuff if it’s full of sugar, right? There’s your empty calories. Right there. And them chemical sugars are the worst. They stick to your gut.’

He rang up the wine, handed me my change.

‘What’s that you’re eating, Samir?’

‘Smoky Bacon Pot Noodle. It’s good, man.’

I was lost in thought – somewhere in the dark crevasse between my sore pelvis, existential job-related despair, and a weird craving for a Smoky Bacon Pot Noodle – when I saw her. She was in the doorway of my block, sitting on the ground, her arms wrapped around her knees. I took my change from Samir, and half walked, half ran across the road. ‘Lily?’

She looked up slowly.

Her voice was slurred, her eyes bloodshot, as if she had been crying. ‘Nobody would let me in. I rang all the bells but nobody would let me in.’

I wrestled the key into the door and propped it with my bag, crouching down beside her. ‘What happened?’

‘I just want to go to sleep,’ she said, rubbing her eyes. ‘I’m so, so tired. I wanted to get a taxi home but I hadn’t got any money.’

I caught the sour whiff of alcohol. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘I don’t know.’ She blinked at me, tilting her head. I wondered then if it was just alcohol. ‘If I’m not, you’ve totally turned into a leprechaun.’ She patted her pockets. ‘Oh, look – look what I’ve got!’ She held up a half-smoked roll-up that even I could smell was not just tobacco. ‘Let’s have a smoke, Lily,’ she said. ‘Oh, no. You’re Louisa. I’m Lily.’ She giggled and, pulling a lighter clumsily from her pocket, promptly tried to light the wrong end.

‘Okay, you. Time to go home.’ I took it from her hand, and, ignoring her vague protests, squashed it firmly under my foot. ‘I’ll call you a taxi.’

‘But I don’t –’

‘Lily!’

I glanced up. A young man stood across the street, his hands in his jeans pockets, watching us steadily. Lily looked up at him and then away.

‘Who is that?’ I said.

She stared at her feet.

‘Lily. Come here.’ His voice held the surety of possession. He stood, legs slightly apart, as if even at that distance he expected her to obey him. Something made me instantly uneasy.

Nobody moved.

‘Is he your boyfriend? Do you want to talk to him?’ I said quietly.

The first time she spoke I couldn’t make out what she said. I had to lean closer and ask her to repeat herself.

‘Make him go away.’ She closed her eyes, and turned her face towards the door. ‘Please.’

He began to walk across the street towards us. I stood, and tried to make my voice sound as authoritative as possible. ‘You can go now, thanks. Lily’s coming inside with me.’

He stopped halfway across the road.

I held his gaze. ‘You can speak to her some other time. Okay?’

I had my hand on the buzzer, and now muttered at some imaginary, muscular, short-tempered boyfriend. ‘Yeah. Do you want to come down and give me a hand, Dave? Thanks.’

The young man’s expression suggested this was not the last of it. Then he turned, pulled his phone from his pocket and began a low, urgent conversation with someone as he walked away, ignoring the beeping taxi that had to swerve around him, and casting us only the briefest of backwards looks.

I sighed, a little more shakily than I’d expected, put my hands under her armpits and, with not very much elegance and a fair amount of muffled swearing, managed to haul Lily Houghton-Miller into the lobby.

That night she slept at my flat. I couldn’t think what else to do with her. She was sick twice in the bathroom, batting me away when I tried to hold her hair up for her. She refused to give me a home phone number, or maybe couldn’t remember it, and her mobile phone was pin-locked.

I cleaned her up, helped her into a pair of my jogging bottoms and a T-shirt, and led her into the living room. ‘You tidied up!’ she said, with a little exclamation, as if I had done it just for her. I made her drink a glass of water and put her on the sofa in the recovery position, even though I was pretty sure by then that there was nothing left inside her to come out.

As I lifted her head and placed it on the pillow, she opened her eyes, as if recognizing me properly for the first time. ‘Sorry.’ She spoke so quietly that, for a moment, I couldn’t be entirely sure that that was what she had said, and her eyes brimmed briefly with tears.

I covered her with a blanket and watched her as she fell asleep – her pale face, the blue shadows under her eyes, the eyebrows that followed the same curve that Will’s had, the same faint sprinkling of freckles.

Almost as an afterthought I locked the flat door and brought the keys into my bedroom with me, tucking them under my pillow to stop her stealing anything, or simply to stop her leaving, I wasn’t sure. I lay awake, my mind still busy with the sound of the sirens and the airport and the faces of the grieving in the church hall and the hard, knowing stare of the young man across the road, and the knowledge that I had someone who was essentially a stranger sleeping under my roof. And all the while a voice kept saying: What on earth are you doing?

But what else could I have done? Finally, some time after the birds started singing, and the bakery van unloaded its morning delivery downstairs, my thoughts slowed, and stilled, and I fell asleep.