After You / После тебя (by Jojo Moyes, 2015) - аудиокнига на английском

1 T he big man at the end of the bar is sweating. He holds his head low over his double scotch and every few minutes he glances up and out behind him toward the door, and a fine sheen of perspiration glistens under the strip lights. He lets out a long, shaky breath disguised as a sigh and turns back to his drink. “Hey. Excuse me?” I look up from polishing glasses. “Can I get another one here?” I want to tell him that it’s really not a good idea, that it won’t help. That it might even put him over the limit. But he’s a big guy and it’s fifteen minutes till closing time and according to company guidelines, I have no reason to tell him no. So I walk over and take his glass and hold it up to the optic. He nods at the bottle. “Double,” he says, and slides a fat hand down his damp face. “That’ll be seven pounds twenty, please.” It is a quarter to eleven on a Tuesday night, and the Shamrock and Clover, East City Airport’s Irish-themed pub that is as Irish as Mahatma Gandhi, is winding down for the night. The bar closes ten minutes after the last plane takes off, and right now it is just me, the intense young man with the laptop, the two cackling women at table 2, and the man nursing a double Jameson’s waiting on SC107 to Stockholm and DB224 to Munich, the latter of which has been delayed for forty minutes. I have been on since midday, as Carly had a stomachache and went home. I didn’t mind. I never mind staying late. Humming softly to the sounds of Celtic Pipes of the Emerald Isle Vol. III, I walk over and collect the glasses from the two women, who are peering intently at some video footage on a phone. They laugh the easy laughs of the well lubricated. “My granddaughter. Five days old,” says the blond woman, as I reach over the table for her glass. “Lovely.” I smile. All babies look like currant buns to me. “She lives in Sweden. I’ve never been. But I have to go see my first grandchild, don’t I?” “We’re wetting the baby’s head.” They burst out laughing again. “Join us in a toast? Go on, take a load off for five minutes. We’ll never finish this bottle in time.” “Oops! Here we go. Come on, Dor.” Alerted by a screen, they gather up their belongings, and perhaps it’s only me who notices a slight stagger as they brace themselves for the walk toward security. I place their glasses on the bar, scan the room for anything else that needs washing. “You never tempted then?” The smaller woman has turned back for her scarf. “I’m sorry?” “To just walk down there, at the end of a shift. Hop on a plane. I would.” She laughs again. “Every bloody day.” I smile, the kind of professional smile that might convey anything at all, and turn back toward the bar. • • • Around me the concession stores are closing up for the night, steel shutters clattering down over the overpriced handbags and emergency-gift Toblerones. The lights flicker off at gates 3, 5, and 11, the last of the day’s travelers winking their way into the night sky. Violet, the Congolese cleaner, pushes her trolley toward me, her walk a slow sway, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the shiny Marmoleum. “Evening, darling.” “Evening, Violet.” “You shouldn’t be here this late, sweetheart. You should be home with your loved ones.” She says exactly the same thing to me every night. “Not long now.” I respond with these exact words every night. Satisfied, she nods and continues on her way. Intense Young Laptop Man and Sweaty Scotch Drinker have gone. I finish stacking the glasses and cash up, checking twice to make sure the till roll matches what is in the till. I note everything in the ledger, check the pumps, jot down what we need to reorder. It is then that I notice the big man’s coat is still over his bar stool. I walk over and glance up at the monitor. The flight to Munich would be just boarding if I felt inclined to run his coat down to him. I look again and then walk slowly over to the Gents. “Hello? Anyone in here?” The voice that emerges is strangled and bears a faint edge of hysteria. I push open the door. The Scotch Drinker is bent low over the sinks, splashing his face. His skin is chalk-white. “Are they calling my flight?” “It’s only just gone up. You’ve probably got a few minutes.” I make to leave, but something stops me. The man is staring at me, his eyes two tight little buttons of anxiety. He shakes his head. “I can’t do it.” He grabs a paper towel and pats at his face. “I can’t get on the plane.” I wait. “I’m meant to be traveling over to meet my new boss, and I can’t. And I haven’t had the guts to tell him I’m scared of flying.” He shakes his head. “Not scared. Terrified.” I let the door close behind me. “What’s your new job?” He blinks. “Uh . . . car parts. I’m the new Senior Regional Manager bracket Spares close bracket for Hunt Motors.” “Sounds like a big job,” I say. “You have . . . brackets.” “I’ve been working for it a long time.” He swallows hard. “Which is why I don’t want to die in a ball of flame. I really don’t want to die in an airborne ball of flame.” I am tempted to point out that it wouldn’t actually be an airborne ball of flame, more a rapidly descending one, but suspect it wouldn’t really help. He splashes his face again and I hand him another paper towel. “Thank you.” He lets out another shaky breath and straightens up, attempting to pull himself together. “I bet you never saw a grown man behave like an idiot before, huh?” “About four times a day.” His tiny eyes widen. “About four times a day I have to fish someone out of the men’s loos. And it’s usually down to fear of flying.” He blinks at me. “But you know, like I say to everyone else, no planes have ever gone down from this airport.” His neck shoots back in his collar. “Really?” “Not one.” “Not even . . . a little crash on the runway?” I shake my head. “It’s actually pretty boring here. People fly off, go to where they’re going, come back again a few days later.” I lean against the door to prop it open. These lavatories never smell any better by the evening. “And anyway, personally, I think there are worse things that can happen to you.” “Well, I suppose that’s true.” He considers this, looks sideways at me. “Four a day, huh?” “Sometimes more. Now if you wouldn’t mind, I really have to get back. It’s not good for me to be seen coming out of the men’s loos too often.” He smiles, and for a minute I can see how he might be in other circumstances. A naturally ebullient man. A cheerful man. A man at the top of his game of continentally manufactured car parts. “You know, I think I hear them calling your flight.” “You reckon I’ll be okay.” “You’ll be okay. It’s a very safe airline. And it’s just a couple of hours out of your life. Look, SK491 landed five minutes ago. As you walk to your departure gate, you’ll see the air stewards and stewardesses coming through on their way home and you’ll see them all chatting and laughing. For them, getting on these flights is pretty much like getting on a bus. Some of them do it two, three, four times a day. And they’re not stupid. If it wasn’t safe, they wouldn’t get on, would they?” “Like getting on a bus,” he repeats. “Probably an awful lot safer.” “Well, that’s for sure.” He raises his eyebrows. “Lot of idiots on the road.” I nod. He straightens his tie. “And it’s a big job.” “Shame to miss out on it, for such a small thing. You’ll be fine once you get used to being up there.” “Maybe I will. Thank you . . .” “Louisa,” I say. “Thank you, Louisa. You’re a very kind girl.” He looks at me speculatively. “I don’t suppose . . . you’d . . . like to go for a drink sometime?” “I think I hear them calling your flight, sir,” I say, and I open the door to allow him to pass through. He nods, to cover his embarrassment, makes a fuss of patting his pockets. “Right. Sure. Well . . . off I go then.” “Enjoy those brackets.” It takes two minutes after he has left for me to discover he has been sick all over cubicle 3. • • • I arrive home at a quarter past one and let myself into the silent flat. I change out of my clothes and into my pajama bottoms and a hooded sweatshirt, then open the fridge, pulling out a bottle of white, and pouring a glass. It is lip-pursingly sour. I study the label and realize I must have opened it the previous night then forgotten to stopper the bottle, and then decide it’s never a good idea to think about these things too hard and I slump down in the chair with it. On the mantelpiece are two cards. One is from my parents, wishing me a happy birthday. That “best wishes” from Mum is as piercing as any stab wound. The other is from my sister, suggesting she and Thom come down for the weekend. It is six months old. Two voice mails are on my phone, one from the dentist. One not. Hi Louisa. It’s Jared here. We met in the Dirty Duck? Well, we hooked up [muffled, awkward laugh]. It was just . . . you know . . . I enjoyed it. Thought maybe we could do it again? You’ve got my digits . . . When there is nothing left in the bottle, I consider buying another one, but I don’t want to go out again. I don’t want Samir at the Mini Mart grocers to make one of his jokes about my endless bottles of pinot grigio. I don’t want to have to talk to anyone. I am suddenly bone-weary, but it is the kind of head-buzzing exhaustion that tells me that if I go to bed I won’t sleep. I think briefly about Jared and the fact that he had oddly shaped fingernails. Am I bothered about oddly shaped fingernails? I stare at the bare walls of the living room and realize suddenly that what I actually need is air. I really need air. I open the hall window and climb unsteadily up the fire escape until I am on the roof. The first time I’d come up, nine months earlier, the estate agent showed me how the previous tenants had made a small terrace garden, dotting around a few lead planters and a small bench. “It’s not officially yours, obviously,” he’d said. “But yours is the only flat with direct access to it. I think it’s pretty nice. You could even have a party up here!” I had gazed at him, wondering if I really looked like the kind of person who held parties. The plants have long since withered and died. I am apparently not very good at looking after things. Now I stand on the roof, staring out at London’s winking darkness below. Around me a million people are living, breathing, eating, arguing. A million lives completely divorced from mine. It is a strange sort of peace. The sodium lights glitter as the sounds of the city filter up into the night air, engines rev, doors slam. From several miles south comes the distant brutalist thump of a police helicopter, its beam scanning the dark for some vanished miscreant in a local park. Somewhere in the distance a siren wails. Always a siren. “Won’t take much to make this feel like home,” the real estate agent had said. I had almost laughed. The city feels as alien to me as it always has. But then everywhere does these days. I hesitate, then take a step out onto the parapet, my arms lifted out to the side, a slightly drunken tightrope walker. One foot in front of the other, edging along the concrete, the breeze making the hairs on my outstretched arms prickle. When I first moved down here, when it all first hit me hardest, I would sometimes dare myself to walk from one end of my block to the other. When I reached the other end I would laugh into the night air. You see? I am here—staying alive—right out on the edge. I am doing what you told me! It has become a secret habit: me, the city skyline, the comfort of the dark, and the anonymity and the knowledge that up here nobody knows who I am. I lift my head, feel the night breezes, hear the sound of laughter below and the muffled smash of a bottle breaking, see the traffic snaking up toward the city, the endless red stream of taillights, an automotive blood supply. It is always busy here, above the noise and chaos. Only the hours between 3 to 5 a.m. are relatively peaceful, the drunks having collapsed into bed, the restaurant chefs having peeled off their whites, the pubs having barred their doors. The silence of those hours is interrupted only sporadically, by the night tankers, the opening up of the Jewish bakery along the street, the soft thump of the newspaper delivery vans dropping their paper bales. I know the subtlest movements of the city because I no longer sleep. Somewhere down there a lock-in is taking place in the White Horse, full of hipsters and East Enders, and a couple are arguing outside, and across the city the general hospital is picking up the pieces of the sick and the injured and those who have just barely scraped through another day. Up here is just the air and the dark and somewhere the FedEx freight flight from LHR to Beijing, and countless travelers, like Mr. Scotch Drinker, on their way to somewhere new. “Eighteen months. Eighteen whole months. So when is it going to be enough?” I say into the darkness. And there it is, I can feel it boiling up again, this unexpected anger. I take two steps along, glancing down at my feet. “Because this doesn’t feel like living. It doesn’t feel like anything.” Two steps. Two more. I will go as far as the corner tonight. “You didn’t give me a bloody life, did you? Not really. You just smashed up my old one. Smashed it into little pieces. What am I meant to do with what’s left? When is it going to feel—” I stretch out my arms, feeling the cool night air against my skin, and realize I am crying again. “Fuck you, Will,” I whisper. “Fuck you for leaving me.” Grief wells up again like a sudden tide, intense, overwhelming. And just as I feel myself sinking into it, a voice says, from the shadows: “I don’t think you should stand there.” I half turn, and catch a flash of a small, pale face on the fire escape, dark eyes wide open. In shock, my foot slips on the parapet, my weight suddenly on the wrong side of the drop. My heart lurches a split second before my body follows. And then, like a nightmare, I am weightless, in the abyss of the night air, my legs flailing above my head as I hear the shriek that may be my own— Crunch And then all is black. 2 hat’s your name, sweetheart?” A brace around my neck. A hand feeling around my head, gently, swiftly. I am alive. This is actually quite surprising. “That’s it. Open your eyes. Look at me, now. Look at me. Can you tell me your name?” I want to speak, to open my mouth, but my voice emerges muffled and nonsensical. I think I have bitten my tongue. There is blood in my mouth, warm and tasting of iron. I cannot move. “We’re going to move you onto a spinal board, okay? You may be a bit uncomfortable for a minute, but I’m going to give you some morphine to make the pain a bit easier.” The man’s voice is calm, level, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be lying broken on concrete, staring up at the dark sky. I want to laugh. I want to tell him how ridiculous it is that I am here. But nothing seems to work as it should. The man’s face disappears from view. A woman in a neon jacket, her dark curly hair tied back in a ponytail, looms over me, shining a thin torch abruptly in my eyes and gazing at me with detached interest as if I were a specimen, not a person. “Do we need to bag her?” I want to speak but I’m distracted by the pain in my legs. Jesus, I say, but I’m not sure if I say it aloud. “Multiple fractures. Pupils normal and reactive. BP ninety over sixty. She’s lucky she hit that awning. What are the odds of landing on a daybed, eh? . . . I don’t like that bruising though.” Cold air on my midriff, the light touch of warm fingers. “Internal bleeding?” “Do we need a second team?” “Can you step back please, sir? Right back?” Another man’s voice. “I came outside for a smoke, and she dropped onto my bloody balcony. She nearly bloody landed on me.” “Well there you go—it’s your lucky day. She didn’t.” “I got the shock of my life. You don’t expect people to just drop out of the bloody sky. Look at my chair. That was eight hundred pounds from the Conran shop. . . . Do you think I can claim for it?” A brief silence. “You can do what you want, sir. Tell you what, you could charge her for cleaning the blood off your balcony while you’re at it. How about that?” The first man’s eyes slide toward his colleague. Time slips, I tilt with it. I have fallen off a roof? My face is cold and I realize distantly that I have started to shake. “She’s going into shock, Sam—” A van door slides open somewhere below. And then the board beneath me moves and briefly the pain the pain the pain—everything turns black. • • • A siren and a swirl of blue. Always a siren in London. We are moving. Neon slides across the interior of the ambulance, hiccups and repeats, illuminating the unexpectedly packed interior. The man in the green uniform is tapping something into his phone, before turning to adjust the drip above my head. The pain has lessened—morphine?—but with consciousness comes a growing terror. It is a giant airbag inflating slowly inside me, steadily blocking out everything else. Oh, no. Oh, no. “Egcuse nge?” It takes two goes for the man, his arm braced against the back of the cab, to hear me. He turns and stoops toward my face. He smells of lemons and has missed a bit when shaving. “You okay there?” “Ang I—” He leans down. “Sorry. Hard to hear over the siren. We’ll be at the hospital soon.” He places a hand on mine. It is dry and warm and reassuring. I am suddenly panicked in case he decides to let go. “Just hang in there. What’s our ETA, Donna?” I can’t say the words. My tongue fills my mouth. My thoughts are muddled, overlapping. Did I move my arms when they picked me up? I lifted my right hand, didn’t I? “Ang I garalysed?” It emerges as a whisper. “What?” He drops his ear to somewhere near my mouth. “Garalysed? Ang I garalysed?” “Paralyzed?” He hesitates, his eyes on mine, then turns and looks down at my legs. “Can you wiggle your toes?” I try to remember how to move my feet. It seems to require several more leaps of concentration than it used to. He reaches down and lightly touches my toe, as if to remind me where they are. “Try again. There you go.” Pain shoots up both my legs. A gasp, possibly a sob. Mine. “You’re all right. Pain is good. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think there’s any spinal injury. You’ve done your hip, and a few other bits besides.” His eyes are on mine. Kind eyes. He seems to understand how much I need convincing. I feel his hand close on mine. I have never needed a human touch more. “Really. I’m pretty sure you’re not paralyzed.” “Oh, thang Gog,” I hear my voice, as if from afar. My eyes brim with tears. “Please don leggo og me,” I whisper. He moves his face closer. “I am not letting go of you.” I want to speak, but his face blurs, and I am gone again. •• • Afterward they tell me I fell two floors of the five, bursting through an awning, breaking my fall on a top-of-the-line, outsized, canvas-and-wicker-effect, waterproof-cushioned sun lounger on the balcony of Mr. Antony Gardiner, a copyright lawyer and neighbor I have never met. My hip smashes into two pieces and two of my ribs and my collarbone snap straight through. I break two fingers on my left hand, and a metatarsal, which pokes through the skin of my foot and causes one of the medical students to faint. My X-rays are a source of some fascination. I keep hearing the voice of the paramedic who treated me: You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height. I am apparently very lucky. They tell me this and wait, smiling, as if I should respond with a huge grin, or perhaps a little tap dance. I don’t feel lucky. I don’t feel anything. I doze and wake and sometimes the view is the bright lights of an operating theater and then it is a quiet, still room. A nurse’s face. Snatches of conversation. Did you see the mess the old woman on D4 made? That’s some end of a shift, eh? You work up at the Princess Elizabeth, right? You can tell them we know how to run an ER. Hahahahaha. You just rest now, Louisa. We’re taking care of everything. Just rest now. The morphine makes me sleepy. They up my dose and it’s a welcome, cold trickle of oblivion. •• • I open my eyes to find my mother at the end of my bed. “She’s awake. Bernard, she’s awake. Do we need to get the nurse?” She’s changed the color of her hair, I think distantly. And then: Oh. It’s my mother. My mother doesn’t talk to me anymore. “Oh, thank God. Thank God.” My mother reaches up and touches the crucifix around her neck. It reminds me of someone but I cannot think who. She leans forward and lightly strokes my cheek. For some reason this makes my eyes fill immediately with tears. “Oh, my little girl.” She is leaning over me, as if to shelter me from further damage. I smell her perfume, as familiar as my own. “Oh, Lou.” She mops my tears with a tissue. “I got the fright of my life when they called. Are you in pain? Do you need anything? Are you comfortable? What can I get you?” She talks so fast that I cannot answer. “We came as soon as they said. Treena’s looking after Granddad. He sends his love. Well, he sort of made that noise, you know, but we all know what he means. Oh, love, how on earth did you get yourself into this mess? What on earth were you thinking?” She does not seem to require an answer. All I have to do is lie there. My mother dabs at her eyes, and then again at mine. “You’re still my daughter. And . . . and I couldn’t bear it if something happened to you and we weren’t . . . you know.” “Ngung—” I swallow over the words. My tongue feels ridiculous. I sound drunk. “I ngever wanged—” “I know. But you made it so hard for me, Lou. I couldn’t—” “Not now, love, eh?” Dad touches her shoulder. Her words tail off. She looks away into the middle distance and takes my hand. “When we got the call. Oh. I thought—I didn’t know—” She is sniffing again, her handkerchief pressed to her lips. “Thank God she’s okay, Bernard.” “Of course she is. Made of rubber, this one, eh?” Dad looms over me. We had last spoken on the telephone two months earlier, but I have not seen him in person for the eighteen months since I left my hometown. He looks enormous and familiar and desperately, desperately tired. “Shorry,” I whisper. I can’t think what else to say. “Don’t be daft. We’re just glad you’re okay. Even if you do look like you’ve done six rounds with Mike Tyson. Have you actually looked in a mirror since you got here?” I shake my head. “Maybe . . . I might just hold off a bit longer. You know Terry Nicholls, that time he went right over his handlebars by the Mini Mart? Well, take off the mustache, and that’s pretty much what you look like. Actually”—he peers closer at my face—“now that you mention it . . .” “Bernard.” “We’ll bring you some tweezers tomorrow. Anyway, the next time you decide you want flying lessons, let’s head down the ol’ airstrip, yes? Jumping and flapping your arms is plainly not working for you.” I try to smile. They both bend over me. Their faces are strained, anxious. My parents. “She’s got thin, Bernard. Don’t you think she’s got thin?” Dad leans closer, and then I see how his eyes have grown a little watery. How his smile is a bit wobblier than usual. “Ah . . . she looks beautiful, love. Believe me. You look bloody beautiful.” He squeezes my hand, then lifts it to his mouth and kisses it. My dad has never done anything like that to me in my whole life. It is then that I realize they thought I was going to die and a sob bursts unannounced from my chest. I shut my eyes against the hot tears and feel his large, wood-roughened palm around mine. “We’re here, sweetheart. It’s all right now. It’s all going to be okay.” • • • They make the fifty-mile journey every day for two weeks, catching the early train down, and then after that, come every few days. Dad gets special dispensation from work because Mum won’t travel by herself. There are, after all, all sorts in London. This is said more than once and always accompanied by a furtive glance behind her, as if a knife-wielding hoodlum is even now sneaking into the ward. Treena is staying over to keep an eye on Granddad. There is an edge to the way Mum says it that makes me think this might not be my sister’s first choice of arrangements. Mum has brought homemade food to the hospital ever since the day we all stared at my lunch and, despite five whole minutes of intense speculation couldn’t work out what it actually was. “And in plastic trays, Bernard. Like a prison.” She prodded it sadly with a fork, then sniffed the residue. She now arrives daily with enormous sandwiches—thick slices of ham or cheese in white bloomer bread—and homemade soups in flasks (“Food you can recognize”) and feeds me like a baby. My tongue slowly returns to its normal size. Apparently I’d almost bitten through it when I landed. It’s not unusual, they tell me. I have two operations to pin my hip, and my left foot and left arm are in plaster up to my joints. Keith, one of the porters, asks if he can sign my casts— apparently it’s bad luck to have them virgin white—and promptly writes a comment so filthy that Eveline, the Filipina nurse, has to put a plaster on it before the consultant comes around. When Keith pushes me to X-ray or to the pharmacy, he tells me the gossip from around the hospital. I could do without hearing about the patients who die slow and horrible deaths, of which there seem to be an endless number, but it keeps him happy. I sometimes wonder what he tells people about me. I am the girl who fell off a five-story building and lived. In hospital status, this apparently puts me some way above the compacted bowel in C ward, or That Daft Bint Who Accidentally Took Her Thumb Off With Pruning Shears. It is amazing how quickly you become institutionalized. I wake, accept the ministrations of a handful of people whose faces I now recognize, try to say the right thing to the consultants, and wait for my parents to arrive. My parents keep busy with small tasks in my room and become uncharacteristically deferential in the face of the doctors. Dad apologizes repeatedly for my inability to bounce, until Mum kicks him, quite hard, in the ankle. After the rounds are finished, Mum usually has a walk around the concourse shops downstairs and returns exclaiming in hushed tones at the number of fastfood outlets. “That one-legged man from the cardio ward, Bernard. Sitting down there stuffing his face with cheeseburgers and chips, like you wouldn’t believe.” Dad sits and reads the local paper in the chair at the end of my bed. The first week he keeps checking it for reports of my accident. I try to tell him that in this part of the city even the double murders barely merit a News In Brief, but in Stortfold the previous week the local paper’s front page ran with “Supermarket Trolleys Left in Wrong Area of Car Park.” The week before that it was “Schoolboys Sad at State of Duck Pond,” so he is yet to be convinced. • • • On the Friday after the final operation to pin my hip, my mother brings a dressing gown that is one size too big for me, and a large brown paper bag of egg sandwiches. I don’t have to ask what they are; the sulfurous smell floods the room as soon as she opens the bag. My father mouths an apology, waving his hand in front of his nose. “The nurses’ll be blaming me, Josie,” he says, closing the door of my room. “Eggs will build her up. She’s too thin. And besides, you can’t talk. You were blaming the dog for your awful smells two years after he’d died.” “Just keeping the romance alive, love.” Mum lowers her voice. “Treena says her last fellow put the blankets over her head when he broke wind. Can you imagine!” Dad turns to me. “When I do it, your mother won’t even stay in the same postcode.” There is tension in the air, even as they laugh. I can feel it. When your whole world shrinks to four walls, you become acutely attuned to slight variations in atmosphere. It’s in the way consultants turn away slightly when they are examining X-rays, or the way the nurses cover their mouths when they’re talking about someone who has just died nearby. “What?” I say. “What is it?” They look awkwardly at each other. “So . . .” Mum sits on the end of my bed. “The doctor said . . . the consultant said . . . it’s not clear how you fell.” I bite into an egg sandwich. I can pick things up with my left hand now. “Oh, that. I got distracted.” “While walking around a roof.” I chew for a minute. “Is there any chance you were sleepwalking, sweetheart?” “Dad—I’ve never sleepwalked in my life.” “Yes, you have. There was that time when you were thirteen and you sleepwalked downstairs and ate half of Treena’s birthday cake.” “Um. I may not have actually been asleep.” “And there’s your blood-alcohol level. They said . . . you had drunk . . . an awful lot.” “I had a tough night at work, and I had a drink or two and I just went up on the roof to get some air. And then I got distracted by a voice.” “You heard a voice.” “I was just standing on the top—looking out. I do it sometimes. And there was this girl’s voice behind me and it gave me a shock and I lost my footing.” “A girl?” “I only really heard her voice.” Dad leans forward. “You’re sure it was an actual girl? Not an imaginary . . .” “It’s my hip that’s mashed up, Dad, not my brain.” “They did say it was a girl who called the ambulance.” Mum touches Dad’s arm. “So you’re saying it really was an accident,” he says. I stop eating. They look away from each other guiltily. “What? You . . . you think I jumped off?” “We’re not saying anything.” Dad scratches his head. “It’s just—well—things had all gone so wrong since . . . and we hadn’t seen you for so long . . . and we were a bit surprised that you’d be up walking on the roof of a building in the wee small hours. You used to be afraid of heights.” “I used to be engaged to a man who thought it was normal to calculate how many calories he’d burned while he slept. Jesus. This is why you’ve been so nice to me? You think I tried to kill myself?” “It’s just he was asking us all sorts. . . .” “Who was asking what?” “The psychiatrist bloke. They just want to make sure you’re okay, love. We know things have been all—well, you know—since—” “Psychiatrist?” “They’re putting you on the waiting list to see someone. To talk, you know. And we’ve had a long chat with the doctors and you’re coming home with us. Just while you recover. You can’t stay by yourself in that flat of yours. It’s—” “You’ve been in my flat?” “Well, we had to fetch your things.” There is a long silence. I think of them standing in my doorway, my mother’s hands tight on her bag as she surveys the unwashed bed linen, the empty wine bottles lined up in a row on the mantelpiece, the solitary half-bar of Fruit and Nut in the fridge. I picture them shaking their heads, looking at each other. Are you sure we’ve got the right place, Bernard? “Right now you need to be with your family. Just till you’re back on your feet.” I want to say I’ll be fine in my flat, no matter what they think of it. I want to do my job and come home and not think until my next shift. I want to say I can’t go back to Stortfold and be That Girl again, The One Who. I don’t want to have to feel the weight of my mother’s carefully disguised disapproval, of my father’s cheerful determination that it’s all okay, everything is just fine, as if saying it enough times will actually make it okay. I don’t want to pass Will’s house every day, to think about what I was part of, the thing that will always be there. But I don’t say any of it. Because suddenly I’m tired and everything hurts and I just can’t fight anymore. • • • Dad brings me home two weeks later in his work van. There is only room for two in the front, so Mum has stayed behind to prepare the house, and as the motorway speeds by beneath us, I find my stomach tightening nervously. The cheerful streets of my hometown feel foreign to me now. I look at them with a distant, analytical eye, noting how small everything appears, how tired, how twee. Even the castle looks smaller, perched on top of the hill. I realize this is how Will must have seen it when he first came home after his accident, and push the thought away. As we drive down our street, I find myself sinking slightly in my seat. I don’t want to make polite conversation with neighbors, to explain myself. I don’t want to be judged for what I did. “You okay?” Dad turns, as if he guesses something of what’s going through my head. “Fine.” “Good girl.” He puts a hand briefly on my shoulder. Mum is already at the door as we pull up. I suspect she has actually been standing by the window for the past half hour. Dad puts one of my bags on the step and then comes back to help me out, hoisting the other over his shoulder. I place my cane carefully on the paving stones, and I feel the twitching of curtains behind me as I make my way slowly up the path. Look who it is, I can hear them whispering. What do you think she’s done now? Dad steers me forward, watching my feet carefully, as if they might suddenly shoot out and go somewhere they shouldn’t. “Okay there?” he keeps saying. “Not too fast now.” I can see Granddad hovering behind Mum in the hall, wearing his checked shirt and his good blue jumper. Nothing has changed. The wallpaper is the same. The hall carpet is the same, the lines in the worn pile visible from where Mum must have vacuumed that morning. I can see my old blue anorak hanging on the hook. Eighteen months. I feel as if I have been away for a decade. “Don’t rush her,” Mum says, her hands pressed together. “You’re going too fast, Bernard.” “She’s hardly flipping Mo Farah. If she goes any slower we’ll be moonwalking.” “Watch those steps. Should you stand behind her, Bernard, coming up the steps? You know, in case she falls backward?” “I know where the steps are,” I say through gritted teeth. “I only lived here for twenty-six years.” “Watch she doesn’t catch herself on that lip there, Bernard. You don’t want her to smash the other hip.” Oh, God, I think. Is this what it was like for you, Will? Every single day? And then my sister is in the doorway, pushing past Mum. “Oh, for God’s sake, Mum. Come on, Hopalong. You’re turning us into a freaking sideshow.” Treena wedges her arm under my armpit and turns briefly to glare at the neighbors, her eyebrows raised as if to say really? I can almost hear the swishing of curtains as they close. “Bunch of bloody rubberneckers. Anyway, hurry up. I promised Thomas he could see your scars before I take him to youth club. God, how much weight have you lost? Your boobs must look like two tangerines in a pair of socks.” It is hard to laugh and walk at the same time. Thomas runs to hug me so that I have to stop and put a hand out against the wall to keep my balance as we collide. “Did they really cut you open and put you back together?” he says. His head comes up to my chest. He is missing four front teeth. “Grandpa says they probably put you back together all the wrong way. And God only knows how we’ll tell the difference.” “Bernard!” “I was joking.” “Louisa.” Granddad’s voice is thick and hesitant. He reaches forward unsteadily and hugs me and I hug him back. He pulls away, his old hands gripping my arms surprisingly tightly, and frowns at me, a mock anger. “I know, Daddy. I know. But she’s home now,” says Mum. “You’re back in your old room,” says Dad. “I’m afraid we redecorated with Transformers wallpaper for Thom. You don’t mind the odd Autobot and Predacon, right?” “I had worms in my bottom,” says Thomas. “Mum says I’m not to talk about it outside the house. Or put my fingers up my—” “Oh, good Lord,” says Mum. “Welcome home, Lou,” says Dad, and promptly drops my bag on my foot. 3 L ooking back, for the first nine months after Will’s death I was in a kind of daze. I went straight to Paris and simply didn’t go home, giddy with freedom, with the appetites that Will had stirred in me. I got a job at a bar favored by expats where they didn’t mind my terrible French, and I grew better at it. I rented a tiny attic room in the 16th, above a Middle Eastern restaurant, and I would lie awake at night and listen to the sound of the late drinkers and the early morning deliveries and every day I felt like I was living someone else’s life. Those early months, it was as if I had lost a layer of skin—I woke up laughing, or crying. I felt everything more intensely, saw everything as if a filter had been removed. I ate new foods, walked strange streets, spoke to people in a language that wasn’t mine. Sometimes I felt haunted by him, as if I were seeing it all through his eyes, hearing his voice in my ear. What do you think of that, then, Clark? I told you you’d love this. Eat it! Try it! Go on! I felt lost without our daily routines. It took weeks for my hands not to feel useless without daily contact with his body: the soft shirt I would button; the warm, motionless hands I would wash gently; the silky hair I could still feel between my fingers. I missed his voice, his abrupt, hard-earned laugh, the feel of his lips against my fingers, the way his eyelids would lower when he was about to drop off to sleep. My mother, still aghast at what I had been part of, had told me that while she loved me, she could not reconcile this Louisa with the daughter she had raised. So with the loss of my family as well as the man I had loved, every thread that had linked me to who I was had been abruptly cut. I felt as if I had simply floated off, untethered, to some unknown universe. So I acted out a new life. I made casual, arm’s-length friendships with other travelers: young English students on gap years; Americans retracing the steps of literary heroes, certain that they would never return to the Midwest; wealthy young bankers; day-trippers; a constantly changing cast that drifted in and through and past, escapees from other lives. I smiled and I chatted and I worked and I told myself I was doing what he had wanted. I had to take some comfort, at least, in that. Didn’t I? Winter loosened its grip and the spring was beautiful. Then almost overnight I woke up one morning and realized I had fallen out of love with the city. Or, at least, I didn’t feel Parisian enough to stay. The stories of the expats began to sound wearyingly similar, the Parisians started to seem unfriendly, or, at least, I noticed, several times a day, the myriad ways in which I would never quite fit in. The city, compelling as it was, felt like a glamorous couture dress I had bought in haste but that didn’t quite fit me after all. I handed in my notice and went traveling around Europe. No two months had ever left me feeling more inadequate. I was lonely almost all the time. I hated not knowing where I was going to sleep each night, was permanently anxious about train timetables and currency, and had difficulty making friends when I didn’t trust anyone I met. And what could I say about myself, anyway? When people asked me, I could give them only the most cursory details. All the stuff that was important or interesting about me was what I couldn’t share. Without someone to talk to, every sight I saw—whether it was the Trevi Fountain or a canal in Amsterdam—felt simply like a name on a list that I needed to check off. I spent the last week on a beach in Greece that reminded me too much of a beach I had been on with Will only months before, and finally after a week of sitting on the sand fending off bronzed men who all seemed to be called Dmitri and trying to tell myself I was actually having a good time I gave up and returned to Paris. Mostly because that was the first time it had occurred to me that I had nowhere else to go. For two weeks I slept on the sofa of a girl I’d worked with at the bar, while I tried to figure out what to do next. Recalling a conversation I’d had with Will about careers, I wrote to several colleges about fashion courses, but I had no portfolio of work to show them and they rebuffed me politely. The course I had originally won after Will died was awarded to someone else because I had failed to defer. I could apply again next year, the administrator said, in the tones of someone who knew I wouldn’t. I looked online at jobs websites and realized that, despite everything I had been through, I was still unqualified for any of the kinds of jobs I might actually be interested in doing. And then by chance, just as I was wondering what to do next, Michael Lawler, Will’s lawyer, rang me and suggested it was time to do something with the money Will had left me. It was the excuse to move that I needed. He helped me negotiate a deal on a scarily overpriced two-bedroom flat on the edge of the Square Mile—a neighborhood I chose largely because I remembered Will once talking about the wine bar on the corner and it made me feel a bit closer to him—and there was enough money left over with which to furnish it. Then six weeks later I came back to England, got a job at the Shamrock and Clover, slept with a man called Phil whom I would never see again, and waited to feel as if I had really started living. Nine months on I was still waiting. • • • I didn’t go out much that first week home. I was sore and grew tired quickly, so it was easy to lie in bed and doze, wiped out by extrastrength painkillers, and tell myself that letting my body recover was all that mattered. In a weird way, being back in our little family house suited me; it was the first place I had managed to sleep more than four hours at a stretch since I had left; it was small enough that I could always reach out for a wall to support myself. Mum fed me, Granddad kept me company (Treena had gone back to college, taking Thom with her), and I watched a lot of daytime television, marveling at its never-ending advertisements for loan companies and stairlifts, and its preoccupation with minor celebrities whom the better part of a year abroad had left me unable to recognize. It was like being in a little cocoon, one that, admittedly, had a whacking great elephant squatting in its corner. We did not talk about anything that might upset this delicate equilibrium. I would watch whatever celebrity news that daytime television served up and then say at supper, “Well, what about that Shayna West, then, eh?” And Mum and Dad would leap on the topic gratefully, remarking that she was a trollop or had nice hair or that she was no better than she should be. We covered Bargains That Could Be Found in Your Attic (“I always wonder what that Victorian planter of your mother’s would have been worth . . . ugly old thing”) and Ideal Homes in the Country (“I wouldn’t wash a dog in that bathroom”). I did not think beyond each mealtime, beyond the basic challenges of getting dressed and brushing my teeth and completing whatever tiny tasks my mother set me (“You know, love, when I’m out, if you could sort out your washing, I’ll do it with my coloreds”). But like a creeping tide, the outside world steadily insisted on intruding. I heard the neighbors asking questions of my mother as she hung out the washing. “Your Lou home, then, is she?” And Mum’s uncharacteristically curt response: “She is.” I found myself avoiding the rooms in the house from which I could see the castle. But I knew it was there, the people in it living, breathing links to Will. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to them. While in Paris I had been forwarded a letter from Mrs. Traynor, thanking me formally for everything I had done for her son. “I am conscious that you did everything you could.” But that was it. That family had gone from being my whole life to a ghostly remnant of a time I wouldn’t allow myself to remember. Now, as our street sat moored in the shadow of the castle for several hours every evening, I felt the Traynors’ presence like a rebuke. I’d been there for two weeks before I realized that Mum and Dad no longer went to their social club. “Isn’t it Tuesday?” I asked on the third week as we sat around the dinner table. “Shouldn’t you be gone by now?” They glanced at each other. “Ah, no. We’re fine here,” Dad said, chewing on a piece of his pork chop. “I’m fine by myself, honestly,” I told them. “I’m much better now. And I’m quite happy watching television.” I secretly longed to sit, unobserved, with nobody else in the room. I had barely been left alone for more than half an hour at a time since I’d come home. “Really. Go out and enjoy yourselves. Don’t mind me.” “We . . . we don’t really go to the club anymore,” said Mum, not looking at me as she sliced through a potato. “People . . . they had a lot to say. About what went on.” Dad shrugged. “In the end it was easier just to stay out of it.” The silence that followed this disclosure lasted a full six minutes. And there were other, more concrete reminders of the life I had left behind. Ones that wore skin-tight running pants with special wicking properties. It was on the fourth morning that Patrick jogged past our house when I realized it might be more than coincidence. I had heard his voice the first day and limped blearily to the window, peering through the blind. And there he was below me, stretching out his hamstrings while talking to a girl with a blond ponytail and clad in matching blue Lycra so tight I could pretty much figure out what she’d had for breakfast. They looked like two Olympians missing a bobsled. I stood back from the window in case he looked up and saw me, and within a minute they were gone again, jogging down the road, backs erect, legs pumping, like a pair of glossy turquoise carriage ponies. Two days later I was getting dressed when I heard them again. Patrick was saying something loudly about carb loading, and this time the girl flicked a suspicious gaze toward my house, as if she were wondering why they had stopped in exactly the same place twice. On the third day I was in the front room with Granddad when they arrived. “We should practice sprints,” Patrick was saying loudly. “Tell you what, you go to the fourth lamppost and back and I’ll time you. Two-minute intervals. Go!” Granddad looked at me, and then rolled his eyes meaningfully. “Has he been doing this the whole time I’ve been back?” Granddad’s eyes rolled pretty much into the back of his head. I watched through the net curtains as Patrick fixed his eyes on his stopwatch, his best side presented to my window. He was wearing a black fleece zip-up top and matching Lycra shorts, and as he stood, a few feet from the other side of the curtain, I was able to gaze at him, quietly amazed that this was someone I had been sure, for so long, I’d loved. “Keep going!” he yelled, looking up from his stopwatch. And like an obedient gun dog, the girl touched the lamppost beside him and bolted away again. “Forty-two point three-eight seconds,” he said approvingly when she returned, panting. “I reckon you could shave another point five of a second off that.” “That’s for your benefit,” said my mother, who had walked in bearing two mugs. “I did wonder.” “His mother asked me in the supermarket were you back and I said yes, you were. Don’t look at me like that—I could hardly lie to the woman.” She nodded toward the window. “That one’s had her boobs done. They’re the talk of Stortfold. Apparently you could rest two cups of tea on them.” She stood beside me for a moment. “You know they’re engaged?” I waited for the pang, but it was so mild it could have been wind. “They look . . . well suited.” My mother stood there for a moment, watching him. “He’s not a bad sort, Lou. You just . . . changed.” She handed me a mug and turned away. • • • Finally, on the morning he stopped to do push-ups on the pavement outside the house, I opened the front door and stepped out. I leaned against the porch, my arms folded across my chest, watching until he looked up. “I wouldn’t stop there for too long. Next door’s dog is a bit partial to that bit of pavement.” “Lou!” he exclaimed, as if I were the very last person he expected to see standing outside my own house, which he had visited several times a week for the seven years we had been together. “Well. I . . . I’m surprised to see you back. I thought you were off to conquer the big wide world!” His fianc?e, who was doing push-ups beside him, looked up and then back down at the pavement. It might have been my imagination, but her buttocks may have clenched even more tightly. Up, down, she bobbed, furiously. Up and down. I found myself worrying slightly for the welfare of her new bosom. He bounced to his feet. “This is Caroline, my fianc?e.” He kept his eyes on me, perhaps waiting for some kind of reaction. “We’re training for the next Ironman. We’ve done two together already.” “How . . . romantic,” I said. “Well, Caroline and I feel it’s good to do things together,” he said. “So I see,” I replied. “And his and hers turquoise Lycra!” “Oh. Yeah. Team colors.” There was a short silence. I gave a little air punch. “Go, team!” Caroline sprang to her feet and began to stretch out her thigh muscles, folding her leg behind her like a stork. She nodded toward me, the least civility she could reasonably get away with. “You’ve lost weight,” he said. “Yeah, well. A saline-drip diet will do that to you.” “I heard you had an. . . . accident.” He cocked his head sideways, sympathetically. “News travels fast.” “Still. I’m glad you’re okay.” He sniffed, looked down the road. “It must have been hard for you this past year. You know. Doing what you did and all.” And there it was. I tried to keep control of my breathing. Caroline resolutely refused to look at me, extending her leg in a hamstring stretch. “Anyway . . . congratulations on the marriage.” He surveyed his future wife proudly, lost in admiration of her sinewy leg. “Well, it’s like they say—you just know when you know.” He gave me a fauxapologetic smile. And that was what finished me off. “I’m sure you did. And I guess you’ve got plenty put aside to pay for the wedding? They’re not cheap, are they?” They both looked up at me. “What with selling my story to the newspapers. What did they pay you, Pat? A couple of thousand? Treena never could find out the exact figure. Still, Will’s death should be good for a few matching Lycra onesies, right?” The way Caroline’s face shot toward his told me this was one particular part of Patrick’s history that he had not yet gotten around to sharing. He stared at me, two pinpricks of color bleeding onto his face. “That was nothing to do with me.” “Of course not. Nice to see you, anyway, Pat. Good luck with the wedding, Caroline! I’m sure you’ll be the . . . the . . . firmest bride around.” I turned and walked slowly back inside. I closed the door, resting against it, my heart thumping, until I could be sure that they had both finally jogged on. “Arse,” said Granddad as I limped back into the living room, and then again, glancing dismissively at the window: “Arse.” He chuckled. I stared at him. And then, completely unexpectedly, I found I had started to laugh, for the first time in as long as I could remember. • • • “So did you decide what you’re going to do? When you’re better?” I was lying on my bed. Treena was calling from college, while she waited for Thomas to come out of his football club. I stared up at the ceiling, on which Thomas had stuck a whole galaxy of Day-Glo stickers that apparently nobody could remove without bringing half the ceiling with them. “Not really.” “You’ve got to do something. You can’t sit around here on your backside for all eternity.” “I won’t sit on my backside. Besides, my hip still hurts. The physio said I’m better off lying down.” “Mum and Dad are wondering what you’re going to do. There are no jobs in Stortfold.” “Treen, I just fell off a building. I’m recuperating.” “And before that you were wafting around traveling. And then you were working in a bar until you knew what you wanted to do. You’ll have to sort out your head at some point. If you’re not going back to school, then you have to figure out what it is you’re actually going to do with your life. I’m just saying. Anyway, if you’re going to stay in Stortfold, you need to rent out that London flat. Mum and Dad can’t support you forever.” “This from the woman who has been supported by the Bank of Mum and Dad for the past eight years.” “I’m in full-time education. That’s different. So anyway, I went through your bank statements while you were in hospital and after I paid all your bills, I worked out that you’ve got about fifteen hundred pounds left, including statutory sick pay. By the way, what the hell were all those transatlantic phone calls? They cost you a fortune.” “None of your business.” “So I made you a list of estate agents in the area who do rentals. And then I thought maybe we could take another look at college applications. Someone might have dropped out of that course you wanted.” “Treen. You’re making me tired.” “No point hanging around. You’ll feel better once you’ve got some focus.” For all that it was annoying, there was also something reassuring about my sister nagging at me. Nobody else dared to. It was as if my parents still believed there was something very wrong at the heart of me, and that I must be treated with kid gloves. Mum laid out my washing, neatly folded, on the end of my bed and cooked me three meals a day, and when I caught her watching me she would smile, an awkward half smile, which covered everything we didn’t want to say to each other. Dad took me to my physio appointments and sat beside me on the sofa to watch television and didn’t even take the Mickey out of me. Treen was the only one who treated me like she always had. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?” I turned over onto my side, wincing. “I do. And don’t.” “Well, you know what Will would have said. You had a deal. You can’t back out of it.” “Okay. That’s it, Treen. We’re done with this conversation.” “Fine. Thom’s just coming out of the changing rooms. See you Friday!” she said, as if we had just been talking about music or where she was going on holiday, or soap. And I was left staring at the ceiling. You had a deal. Yeah. And look how that turned out. • • • For all Treen moaned at me, in the weeks that had passed since I’d come home I had made some progress. I’d stopped using the cane, which had made me feel around eighty-nine years old, and which I had managed to leave behind in almost every place I’d visited since coming home. Most mornings I took Granddad for a walk around the park, at Mum’s request. The doctor had instructed him to take daily exercise but when she had followed him one day she had found he was simply walking to the corner shop to buy a bumper pack of pork rinds and then eating them on a slow walk home again. We walked slowly, both of us with a limp, and neither of us with any real place to be. Mum kept suggesting we do the grounds of the castle “for a change of scene,” but I ignored her, and as the gate shut behind us each morning Granddad nodded firmly in the direction of the park anyway. It wasn’t just because this way was shorter, or closer to the betting shop. I think he knew I didn’t want to go back there. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I would ever be ready. We did two slow circuits of the duck pond, and sat on a bench in the watery spring sunshine and watched the toddlers and their parents feeding the fat ducks, and the teenagers smoking and yelling and whacking each other in the helpless combat of early courtship. We took a stroll over to the bookies so Granddad could lose three pounds on an each-way bet on a horse called Wag the Dog. Then as he crumpled up his betting slip and threw it in the bin, I said I’d buy him a jam doughnut from the supermarket. “Oh fat,” he said, as we stood in the bakery section. I frowned at him. “Oh fat,” he said, pointing at our doughnuts, and laughed. “Oh. Yup. That’s what we’ll tell Mum. Low-fat doughnuts.” Mum said his new medication made him giggly. I had decided there were worse things that could happen to you. Granddad was still giggling at his own joke as we queued up at the checkout. I kept my head down, digging in my pockets for change. I was thinking about whether I would help Dad with the garden that weekend. So it took a minute to grasp what was being said in whispers behind me. “It’s the guilt. They say she tried to jump off a block of flats.” “Well, you would, wouldn’t you? I know I couldn’t live with myself.” “I’m surprised she can show her face around here.” I stood very still, my hands rigid in my pockets. “You know poor Josie Clark is still mortified. She takes confession every single week and you know that woman is as blameless as a line of clean laundry.” Granddad was pointing at the doughnuts and mouthing oh fat at the checkout girl. She smiled politely. “Eighty-six pence, please.” “The Traynors have never been the same.” “Well, it destroyed them, didn’t it?” “Eighty-six pence, please.” It took me several seconds to register that the checkout girl was looking at me, waiting. I pulled a handful of coins from my pocket. My fingers fumbled as I tried to sort through them. “You’d think Josie wouldn’t dare leave her in sole charge of her granddaddy, wouldn’t you?” “You don’t think she’d—” “Well, you don’t know. She’s done it the once, after all . . .” My cheeks were flaming. My money clattered onto the counter. Granddad was still repeating, “Oh fat. Oh fat.” at the bemused checkout girl, waiting for her to get the joke. I pulled at his sleeve. “Come on, Granddad, we have to go.” “Oh fat,” he insisted, again. “Right.” She said, and smiled kindly. “Please, Granddad.” I felt hot and dizzy, like I might faint. They might have still been talking but my ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t tell. “’Bye-bye,” he said. “’Bye then,” said the girl. “Nice,” said Granddad as we emerged into the sunlight. Then, looking at me: “Why you crying?” • • • So here is the thing about being involved in a catastrophic, life-changing event. You think it’s just the catastrophic, life-changing event that you’re going to have to deal with: the flashbacks, the sleepless nights, the endless running back over events in your head, asking yourself if you had done the right thing, said the things you should have said, whether you could have changed things had you done them even a degree differently. My mother had told me that being there with Will at the end would affect the rest of my life, and I had thought she meant me, psychologically. I thought she meant the guilt I would have to learn to get over, the grief, the insomnia, the weird, inappropriate bursts of anger, the endless internal dialogue with someone who wasn’t even there. But what I now discovered is that it wasn’t just me. I had become that person and in a digital age I would be that person forever. It was in that faint swivel of heads when you walked through a busy street—“Is that—?” Even if I managed to wipe the whole thing from my memory, I would never be allowed to disassociate from Will’s death. My name would always be tied to his. People would form judgments about me based on the most cursory knowledge— or sometimes no knowledge at all—and there was nothing I could do about it. I cut my hair into a bob. I changed the way I dressed, bagged up everything that had ever made me distinctive, and stuffed those bags into the back of my wardrobe. I adopted Treena’s uniform of jeans and a generic tee. Now, when I read newspaper stories about the bank teller who had stolen a fortune, the woman who had killed her child, the sibling who had disappeared, I found myself not shuddering in horror, as I once might have, but wondering instead at the part of the story that hadn’t made it into print. What I felt with them was a weird kinship. I was tainted. The world around me knew it. Worse, I had started to know it too. • • • I tucked what remained of my dark hair into a beanie and put on my sunglasses and then I walked to the library, doing everything I could not to let my limp show, even though it made my jaw ache with concentration. I made my way past the singing-toddler group in the children’s corner, and the silent genealogy enthusiasts trying to confirm that, yes, they were distantly connected to King Richard III, and I sat down in the corner with the archived files of the local papers. It wasn’t hard to locate August 2009. I took a breath, then I opened them halfway, and flicked through the headlines. LOCAL MAN ENDS HIS LIFE AT SWISS CLINIC Traynor Family Asks for Privacy at “Difficult Time” The 35-year-old son of Steven Traynor, custodian of Stortfold Castle, has ended his life at Dignitas, the controversial center for assisted suicide. Mr. Traynor was left quadriplegic after a traffic accident in 2007. He apparently traveled to the clinic with his family and his caregiver, Louisa Clark, 27, also from Stortfold. Police are investigating the circumstances surrounding the death. Sources say they have not ruled out the possibility that a prosecution may arise. Louisa Clark’s parents, Bernard and Josephine Clark, of Renfrew Road, refused to comment. Camilla Traynor, a Justice of the Peace, is understood to have stood down from the bench following her son’s suicide. A local source said her position, given the actions of the family, had become “untenable.” ”And then there it was—Will’s face, looking out from the grainy newspaper photograph. That slightly sardonic smile, that direct gaze. I felt, briefly, winded. Mr. Traynor’s death ends a successful career in the City, where he was known as a ruthless asset stripper, but also as someone with a sure eye for a corporate bargain. His colleagues yesterday lined up to pay tribute to a man they described as I closed the newspaper, and let out a breath. When I could be sure that I had got my face under control, I looked up. Around me the library hummed with quiet industry. The toddlers kept singing, their reedy voices chaotic and meandering, their mothers clapping fondly around them. Behind me, the librarian and a colleague were discussing, sotto voce, the best way to make Thai curry. The man beside me ran his finger down an ancient electoral roll, murmuring: “Fisher, Fitzgibbon, Fitzwilliam.” I had done nothing. It was more than eighteen months and I had done nothing but tend bar in two different countries and feel sorry for myself. And now, after four weeks back in the house I grew up in, I could feel Stortfold reaching out to suck me in, to reassure me that I could be fine here. It would be all right. There might be no great adventures, sure, and a bit of discomfort as people adjusted to my presence here again. But there were worse things, right? Than to be with your family, loved and secure? Safe? I looked down at the pile of newspapers in front of me. The most recent front page headline read: ROW OVER DISABLED PARKING SPACE IN FRONT OF POST OFFICE I thought back to Dad, sitting on my hospital bed, looking in vain for a report of an extraordinary accident. I failed you, Will. I failed you in every way possible. • • • You could hear the shouting all the way up the street when I finally arrived home. As I opened the door my ears were filled with the sound of Thomas wailing. My sister, her finger wagging, was scolding him in the corner of the living room. Mum was leaning over Granddad with a washing-up bowl of water and a scouring pad, while Granddad politely batted her away. “What’s going on?” Mum moved to the side and I saw Granddad’s face clearly for the first time. He was sporting a new set of jet black eyebrows and a thick black, slightly uneven mustache. “Permanent pen,” said Mum. “From now on nobody is to leave Granddad napping in the same room as Thomas.” “You have to stop drawing on things!” Treena was yelling. “Paper only, okay? Not walls. Not faces. Not Mrs. Reynolds’s dog. Not my pants.” “I was doing you days of the week!” “I don’t need days-of-the-week pants!” she shouted. “And if I did I would spell Wednesday correctly!” “Don’t scold him, Treen,” said Mum, leaning back to see if she’d had any effect. “It could be a lot worse.” In our little house Dad’s footsteps coming down the stairs sounded like a particularly emphatic roll of thunder. He barreled his way into the front room, his shoulders hunched in frustration, his hair standing up on one side. “Can’t a man get a nap in his own house on his day off? This place is like a ruddy madhouse.” We all stopped and stared at him. “What? What did I say?” “Bernard—” “Ah, come on. Our Lou doesn’t think I mean her—” “Oh, my sweet Lord.” Mum’s hand flew to her face. My sister had started to push Thomas out of the room. “Oh, boy,” she hissed. “Thomas, you better get out of here right now. Because I swear when your granddaddy gets hold of you—” “What?” Dad frowned. “What’s the matter?” Granddad barked a laugh. He held up a shaking finger. It was almost magnificent. Thomas had colored in the whole of Dad’s face with blue marker pen. His eyes emerged like two gooseberries from a sea of cobalt blue. “What?” Thomas’s voice, as he disappeared down the corridor, was a wail of protest. “We were watching Avatar! He said he wouldn’t mind being an Avatar!” Dad’s eyes widened. He strode to the mirror over the mantelpiece. There was a brief silence. “Oh, my God.” “Bernard—don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.” “He’s turned me bloody blue, Josie. I think I’m entitled to take the Lord’s name to Butlins in a flipping wheelbarrow. Is this permanent pen? THOMMO? IS THIS PERMANENT PEN?” “We’ll get it off, Dad.” My sister closed the door to the garden behind her. Beyond it you could just make out the sound of Thomas wailing. “I’m meant to be overseeing the new fencing at the castle tomorrow. I have contractors coming. How the hell am I meant to deal with contractors if I’m blue?” Dad spat on his hand and started to rub at his face. The faintest smudging appeared, but mostly the ink seemed to spread onto his palm. “It’s not coming off. Josie, it’s not coming off!” Mum shifted her attention from Granddad and set about Dad with the scouring pad. “Just stay still, Bernard. I’m doing what I can.” Treena went for her laptop bag. “I’ll go on the Internet. I’m sure there’s something. Toothpaste or nail polish remover or bleach or—” “You are not putting bleach on my ruddy face!” Dad roared. Granddad, with his new pirate mustache, sat giggling in the corner of the room. I began to edge past them. Mum was holding Dad’s face with her left hand as she scrubbed. She turned, as if she’d only just seen me. “Lou! I didn’t ask—are you okay, love? Did you have a nice walk?” Everyone stopped, abruptly, to smile at me; a smile that said Everything’s okay here, Lou. You don’t have to worry. I realized I hated that smile. “Fine.” It was the answer they all wanted. Mum turned to Dad. “That’s grand. Isn’t it grand, Bernard?” “It is. Great news.” “If you sort out your whites, love, I’ll pop them in the wash with Daddy’s later.” “Actually,” I said, “don’t bother. I’ve been thinking. It’s time for me to go home.” Nobody spoke. Mum glanced at Dad. Granddad let out another little giggle and clamped his hand over his mouth. “Fair enough,” said Dad, with as much dignity as a middle-aged, blueberrycolored man could muster. “But if you go back to that flat, Louisa, you go on one condition . . .” 4 M y name is Natasha and I lost my husband to cancer three years ago.” On a humid Monday night, the members of the Moving On Circle sat in a ring of orange office chairs in the Pentecostal church hall, alongside Marc, the leader, a tall, mustachioed man whose whole being exuded a kind of exhausted melancholy, and one empty chair. “I’m Fred. My wife Jilly died in September. She was seventy-four.” “Sunil. My twin brother died of leukemia two years ago.” “William. Dead father, six months ago. All a bit ridiculous, frankly, as we never really got on when he was alive. I keep asking myself why I’m here.” There was a peculiar scent to grief. It smelled of damp, imperfectly ventilated church halls and poor-quality teabags. It smelled of meals for one and stale cigarettes, smoked hunched against the cold. It smelled of spritzed hair and armpits, little practical victories against a morass of despair. That smell alone told me I did not belong here, whatever I had promised Dad. I felt like a fraud. Plus they all looked so . . . sad. I shifted uneasily in my seat, and Marc caught me. He nodded and gave me a reassuring smile. We know, it said. We have been here before. I bet you haven’t, I responded silently. “Sorry. Sorry I’m late.” The door opened, letting in a blast of warm air, and the empty chair was taken by a mop-headed teenager who folded his limbs into place like they were always somehow too long for the space they were in. “Jake. You missed last week. Everything okay?” “Sorry. Dad messed up at work and he couldn’t get me here.” “Don’t worry. It’s good you made it. You know where the drinks are.” The boy glanced around the room from under his long fringe, hesitating slightly when his gaze landed on my glittery skirt. I pulled my bag onto my lap in an attempt to hide it and he looked away. “Hello, dear. I’m Daphne. My husband took his own life. I don’t think it was the nagging!” The woman’s half laugh seemed to leak pain. She patted her carefully set hair and looked down awkwardly at her knees. “We were happy. We were.” The boy’s hands were tucked under his thighs. “Jake. Mum. Two years ago. I’ve been coming here for the past year because my dad can’t deal with it, and I needed someone to talk to.” “How is your dad this week, Jake?” said Marc. “Not bad. I mean, he brought a woman home last Friday night, but, like, he didn’t sit on the sofa and cry afterward. So that’s something.” “Jake’s father is handling his own grief in his own way,” Marc said in my direction. “Shagging,” said Jake. “Mostly shagging.” “I wish I was younger,” said Fred, wistfully. He was wearing a tie, the kind of man who considers himself undressed without one. “I think that would have been a marvelous way to handle Jilly dying.” “My cousin picked up a man at my aunt’s funeral,” said a woman in the corner who might have been called Leanne; I couldn’t remember. She was small and round and had a thick fringe of chocolate-colored hair. “Actually during the funeral?” “She said they went to a Travelodge after the sandwiches.” She shrugged. “It’s the heightened emotions, apparently.” I was in the wrong place. I could see that now. Surreptitiously, I began to gather my belongings, wondering whether I should announce my leaving, or whether it would be simpler to just run. And then Marc turned to me and smiled expectantly. I looked blankly at him. He raised his eyebrows. “Oh. Me? Actually—I was just leaving. I think I’ve . . . I mean, I don’t think I’m—” “Oh, everyone wants to leave on their first day, dear.” “I wanted to leave on my second and third too.” “That’s the biscuits. I keep telling Marc we should have better biscuits.” “Just tell us the bare bones of it, if you like. Don’t worry. You’re among friends.” They were all looking, waiting. I realized I couldn’t run. I hunched back into my seat. “Um. Okay. Well, my name’s Louisa and the man I . . . I loved . . . died at thirty-five.” There were a few nods of sympathy around the room. “Too young. When did this happen, Louisa?” “Twenty months ago. And a week. And two days.” “Three years, two weeks, and two days.” Natasha smiled at me from across the room. There was a low murmur of commiseration. Daphne, beside me, reached out a plump, beringed hand and patted my leg. “We’ve had many discussions in this room about the particular difficulties when someone dies young,” said Marc. “How long were you together?” “Uh. We . . . well . . . a little less than six months.” A few barely hidden looks of surprise. “That’s—quite brief,” a voice said. “I’m sure Louisa’s pain is just as valid,” said Marc smoothly. “And how did he pass, Louisa?” “Pass what?” “Die,” said Fred, helpfully. “Oh. He—uh—he took his own life.” “That must have been a great shock.” “Not really. I knew he was planning it.” There is a peculiar sort of silence, it turns out, when you tell a room full of people who think they know everything there is to know about the death of a loved one that they don’t. I took a breath. “He knew he wanted to do it before I met him. I tried to change his mind and I couldn’t. So I went along with it because I loved him, and it seemed to make sense at the time. And now it makes a lot less sense. Which is why I’m here.” “Death never makes sense,” said Daphne. “Unless you’re Buddhist,” said Natasha. “I keep trying to think Buddhist thoughts but I’m worried that Olaf is going to come back as a mouse or something and I’m going to poison him.” She sighed. “I have to put poison down. We have a terrible mouse problem in our block.” “You’ll never get rid of them. They’re like fleas,” said Sunil. “For every one you see there are hundreds of them behind the scenes.” “You might want to think about what you’re doing, Natasha, love,” said Daphne. “There could be hundreds of little Olafs running around. My Alan could be one of them. You could actually be poisoning the both of them.” “Well,” said Fred, “if it’s Buddhist, it’d just come back as something else, wouldn’t it?” “But what if it’s a fly or something and Natasha kills that too?” “I’d hate to come back as a fly,” said William. “Horrible, black, hairy things.” He shuddered. “I’m not, like, some mass murderer,” said Natasha. “You’re making it sound like I’m out there slaughtering everyone’s reincarnated husbands.” “Well, that mouse might be someone’s husband. Even if it isn’t Olaf.” “I think we should try to steer this session back on track,” said Marc, rubbing his temple. “Louisa, it’s brave of you to come and tell your story. Why don’t you tell us a bit more about how you and—what was his name?—how you met. You’re in a circle of trust here. We have all pledged that these stories go no farther than these walls.” It was at this point that I happened to catch Jake’s eye. He glanced at Daphne, then at me, and shook his head subtly. “I met him at work,” I said. “And his name was . . . Bill.” • • • Despite what I had promised Dad, I hadn’t planned to attend the Moving On Circle. But my return to work had been so awful that by the time the day ended I hadn’t been able to face going home to an empty flat. “You’re back!” Carly had placed the cup of coffee on the bar, taken the businessman’s change, and hugged me, all while dropping the coins into the correct sections of the till drawer, in one fluid motion. “What the hell happened? We heard you had an accident. I wasn’t even sure you were coming back.” “Long story.” I stared at her. “Uh . . . what are you wearing?” Nine o’clock on Monday morning and the airport had been a blue-gray blur of men charging laptops, staring into iPhones, reading the City pages, or talking discreetly into handsets about market share. Carly caught the eye of someone on the other side of the till. “Yeah. Well, things have changed since you’ve been gone.” I turned to see a businessman standing on the wrong side of the bar. I blinked at him and put my bag down. “Um—if you’d like to wait there, I’ll serve you—” “You must be Louise.” He thrust out a hand. His handshake was emphatic and without warmth. “I’m the new bar manager. Richard Percival.” I took in his slick hair, his suit, his pale blue shirt, wondering what kind of bars he had actually managed. “Nice to meet you.” “You’re the one who has been off for two months.” “Well. Yes. I—” He walked along the optics, scanning each bottle. “I just want you to know that I’m not a fan of people taking endless sick leave.” My neck shifted a few centimeters back in my collar. “I am just laying down a marker, Louise. I’m not one of those managers who turn a blind eye. I know that in many companies time off is pretty much considered a staff perk. But not in companies where I work.” “Believe me, I have not thought of the last nine weeks as a perk.” He examined the underside of a tap and rubbed at it meditatively with his thumb. I took a breath before I spoke. “I fell off a building. Perhaps I could show you my surgery scars. So, you know, you can be reassured that I’m unlikely to want to do it again.” He stared at me. “There’s no need to be sarcastic. I’m not saying you’re about to have other accidents, but your sick leave is pro rata, at an unusually high level for someone who has worked for this company a relatively short time. That’s all I wanted to point out. That it has been noted.” He wore cuff links with racing cars on them. “Message received, Mr. Percival.” I said. “I’ll do my best to avoid further near-fatal accidents.” “You’ll need a uniform. If you give me five minutes I’ll get one out of the stockroom. What size are you? Twelve? Fourteen?” I stared at him. “Ten.” He raised an eyebrow. I raised one back. As he walked off toward the stockroom, Carly leaned over from the coffee machine and smiled sweetly in his direction. “Utter, utter bell end,” she said, from the side of her mouth. • • • She wasn’t wrong. From the moment I returned, Richard Percival was, in the words of my father, all over me like a bad suit. He measured my measures, inspected every corner of the bar for molecular peanut crumbs, was in and out of the loos checking on hygiene, and wouldn’t let us leave until he had stood over us cashing up and ensuring each till roll matched takings to the last penny. I no longer had time to chat with the customers, to look up departure times, hand over lost passports, contemplate the planes we could see taking off through the great glass window. I didn’t even have time to be irritated by Celtic Panpipes Vol. III. If a customer was left waiting to be served for more than ten seconds, Richard would magically appear from his office, sighing ostentatiously, then apologize loudly and repeatedly for the fact that they had been kept waiting so long. Carly and I, usually busy with other customers, would exchange secret glances of resignation and contempt. He spent half the day meeting with reps, the other half on the phone to the head office, bleating about “footfall” and “spend per head.” We were encouraged to upsell the disgusting dry-roasted peanuts with every transaction, and taken to one side for a talking-to if we forgot. All that was bad enough. But then there was the uniform. Carly came into the Ladies as I was finishing getting changed and stood beside me in front of the mirror. “We look like a pair of eejits,” she said. Not content with dark skirts and white shirts, some marketing genius high up the corporate ladder had decided that the atmosphere of the Shamrock and Clover chain would benefit from genuine Irish clothing. This genuine Irish clothing was evidently thought up by someone who believed that across Dublin, right this minute, businesswomen and checkout girls were pirouetting their way across their workplaces dressed in embroidered tabards, knee-high socks, and lace-up dancing shoes, all in glittering emerald green. With accompanying curly ringlet wigs. “Jesus. If my boyfriend saw me dressed like this he’d dump me.” Carly lit a cigarette and climbed up on the sink to disable the smoke alarm on the ceiling. “Mind you, he’d probably want to do me first. The perv.” “What do the men have to wear?” I pulled my short skirt out at the sides and eyed Carly’s lighter nervously, wondering how flammable I was. “Look outside. There’s only Richard. And he has to wear that shirt with a green logo. The poor thing.” “That’s it? No pixie shoes? Or little leprechaun hats?” “Surprise, surprise. It’s only us girls who have to work looking like porno Munchkins.” “I look like Dolly Parton: The Early Years in this wig.” “Grab a red one. Lucky us, we have a choice of three colors.” From somewhere outside we could hear Richard calling. My stomach had begun to clench reflexively when I heard his voice. “Anyway, I’m not staying. I’m going to Riverdance my way out of this place and into another job,” Carly said. “He can stick his bloody shamrocks up his tight little corporate arse.” She had given what I could only describe as a sarcastic skip, and left the Ladies. I spent the rest of the day getting little electric shocks from the static. • • • The Moving On Circle ended at half past nine. I walked out into the humid summer evening, exhausted by the twin trials of work and the evening’s events. Too hot, I shrugged off my jacket, feeling suddenly that having laid myself bare in front of a room full of strangers, being seen in a faux Irish dancer uniform that was, in truth, ever so slightly too small, didn’t really make much difference. I hadn’t been able to talk about Will; not the way they talked, as if their loved ones were still part of their lives, perhaps in a room next door. Oh, yes, my Jilly used to do that all the time. I can’t delete my brother’s voice mail message. I have a little listen to his voice when I feel like I’m going to forget what he sounds like. Sometimes I can hear him in the next room. I could barely even say Will’s name. And listening to their tales of family relationships, of thirty-year marriages, shared houses, lives, children, I felt like a fraud. I had been a caregiver for someone for six months. I loved him and watched him end his life. How could these strangers possibly understand what Will and I had been to each other during that time? How could I explain the way we had so swiftly understood each other, the shorthand jokes, the blunt truths and raw secrets? How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that it made no sense without him in it? And when it came down to it, what was the point in reexamining your sadness all the time anyway? It was like picking away at a wound and refusing to let it heal. I knew what I had been part of. I knew what my role was. What was the point in going over and over it? I wouldn’t come next week, I knew now. I would find an excuse for Dad. I walked slowly across the car park, rummaging in my bag for my car keys, telling myself it had at least meant that I didn’t have to spend another evening alone in front of my television, dreading the passing of the twelve hours until I had to return to work. “His name wasn’t really Bill, right?” Jake fell into step alongside me. “Nope.” “Daphne’s like a one-woman broadcasting corporation. She means well, but your personal story will be all over her social club before you can say rodent reincarnation.” “Thanks for that.” He grinned at me, and nodded toward my Lurex skirt. “Nice threads, by the way. It’s a good look for a grief counseling session.” He stopped briefly to retie a shoelace. I stopped with him. I hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry about your mum.” He looked down, his face somber. “You can’t say that. It’s like prison. You can’t ask someone what they’re in for.” “Really? Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t—” He looked up and grinned. “I’m joking. See you next week.” A man leaning against a motorbike lifted a hand in greeting. He stepped forward as Jake crossed the car park and enveloped him in a bear hug, kissing the side of his cheek. I stopped to watch, mostly because it was rare to see a man hug his son like that in public, once they were over bookbag-carrying age. “How was it?” “Okay. The usual.” Jake gestured to me. “Oh, this is . . . Louisa. She’s new.” The man squinted at me. He was tall and broad-shouldered. A nose that just might have once been broken gave him the faintly bruising appearance of a former boxer. I nodded a polite greeting. “It was nice to meet you, Jake. ’Bye then.” I lifted a hand and began to make my way to my car. But as I passed, the man kept staring at me, and I felt myself slowly start to color under the intensity of his gaze. “You’re that girl,” he said. Oh no, I thought, slowing suddenly. Not here too. I stared at the ground for a moment and took a breath. Then I turned back to face them both. “Okay. As I’ve just made clear in the group, my friend made his own decisions. All I ever did was support them. Not that, if I’m honest, I really want to get into this right here and with a complete stranger.” Jake’s father continued to squint at me. He lifted his hand to his head. “I understand that not everybody will get it. But that’s the way it was. I don’t feel I have to debate my choices. And I’m really tired and it’s been a bit of a day, and I think I’m going to go home now.” He cocked his head to one side. And then he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I frowned. “The limp. I noticed you have a limp. You live near that massive new development, right? You’re the girl who fell off the roof. March. April.” And suddenly I recognized him. “Oh—you were—” “The paramedic. We were the team who picked you up. I’d been wondering what happened to you.” I felt myself almost buckle with relief. I let my gaze run over his face, his hair, his arms, suddenly recalling with Pavlovian accuracy his reassuring manner, the sound of the siren, the faint scent of lemons. And I let out a breath. “I’m good. Well. Not good exactly. I have a shot hip and a new boss who’s an utter arse and—you know—I’m at a grief counseling group in a damp church hall with people who are just really, really . . .” “Sad,” said Jake, helpfully. “The hip will get better. It’s plainly not hindering your dance career.” My laugh emerged as a honk. “Oh. No. This is . . . the outfit is related to the boss who is an arse. Not my normal mode of dress. Anyway. Thank you. Wow . . .” I put my hand to my head. “This is weird. You saved me.” He shook his head. “It’s good to see you. We don’t often get to see what happens afterward.” “You did a great job. It was . . . well, you were really kind. I remember that much.” “De nada.” I stared at him. “De nada. Spanish. It was nothing.” “Oh, okay, then. I take it all back. Thanks for nothing.” He smiled, turned away, and raised a paddle-sized hand. Afterward, I didn’t know what made me do it. “Hey.” He looked back toward me. “It’s Sam, actually.” “Sam. I didn’t jump.” “Okay.” “No. Really. I mean, I know you’ve just seen me coming from a griefcounseling group and everything but it’s—well, I just—I wouldn’t jump.” He gave me a look that seemed to suggest he had seen and heard everything. “Good to know.” We gazed at each other for a minute. Then he lifted his hand again. “Nice to see you again, Louisa.” He pulled on a helmet and Jake climbed onto the bike behind him. I found myself watching as they pulled out of the car park. And because I was still watching I just caught Jake’s exaggerated eye roll as he pulled on his own helmet. And then I remembered what he had said in the session. The compulsive shagger. “Idiot,” I told myself, and limped across the rest of the Tarmac to where my car was boiling gently in the evening heat. 5 Ilived on the edge of the City. In case I was in any doubt, across the road stood a huge office block–sized crater, surrounded by a developer’s boarding upon which was written: Farthingate—Where the City Begins. We existed at the exact point where the glossy glass temples to finance butted up against the grubby old brick-and-sash windows of curry shops and twenty-four-hour grocers, of stripper pubs and minicab offices that resolutely refused to die. My block sat among these architectural refuseniks, a lead-stained warehouse-style building staring at the steady onslaught of glass and steel and wondering how long it could survive, perhaps rescued by a hipster juice bar or pop-up retail experience. I knew nobody by name except for Samir, who ran the Mini Mart, and the woman in the bagel bakery, who smiled at me but didn’t seem to speak any English. Mostly this anonymity suited me. I had come here, after all, to escape my history, from feeling as if everyone knew everything there was to know about me. And the city had begun to alter me. I had come to know my little corner of it, its rhythms and its danger points. I learned that if you gave money to the drunk at the bus station he would come and sit outside your flat for the next eight weeks; that if I had to walk through the estate at night it was wise to do it with my keys lodged between my fingers; that if I was walking out to get a late-night bottle of wine it was probably better not to glance at the group of young men huddled outside the Kebab Korner. I was no longer disturbed by the periodic whump whump whump of the police helicopter overhead. I could survive. Besides, I knew, better than anyone, that there were worse things that could happen. • • • “Hey.” “Hey, Lou. Can’t sleep again?” “It’s just gone ten o’clock here.” “So what’s up?” Nathan, Will’s former physio, had spent the last nine months in New York, working for a middle-aged Wall Street CEO with a four-story townhouse, and a muscular condition. Calling him during my sleepless small hours had become something of a habit. It was good to know there was someone who understood, out there in the dark, even if sometimes his news felt tinged with a series of small blows—everyone else has moved on. Everyone else has achieved something. “So how’s the Big Apple?” “Not bad?” His antipodean drawl made every answer a question. I lay down on the sofa, putting my feet up on the armrest.“Yeah. That doesn’t tell me a whole lot.” “Okay. Well, got a pay rise, so that was cool. Booked myself a flight home in a couple of weeks to see the olds. So that’ll be good. They’re all over the moon because my sister’s having a baby. Oh, and I met a really fit bird in a bar down on Sixth Avenue and we were getting on real well so I asked her out, and when I told her what I did, she said sorry but she only went out with guys who wore suits to work.” He started to laugh. I found I was smiling. “So scrubs don’t count?” “Apparently not. Though she did say she might have changed her mind if I was an actual doctor.” He laughed again. Nothing phased Nathan. “It’s cool. Girls like that get all picky if you don’t take them to the right restaurants and stuff. Better to know sooner, right? How about you?” I shrugged. “Getting there. Sort of.” “You still sleeping in his T-shirt?” “No. It stopped smelling of him. And it had started to get a bit unsavory, if I’m honest. I washed it and I’ve packed it in tissue. But I’ve got his jumper for bad days.” “Good to have backup.” “Oh, and I went to the grief-counseling group.” “How was it?” “Crap. I felt like a fraud.” Nathan waited. I shifted the pillow under my head. “Did I imagine it all, Nathan? Sometimes I think I’ve made what happened between Will and me so much bigger in my head. Like how can I have loved someone that much in such a short time? And all these things I think about the two of us—did we actually feel what I remember? The further we get from it, the more that six months just seems like this weird . . . dream.” There was a tiny pause before Nathan responded. “You didn’t imagine it, mate.” I rubbed my eyes. “Am I the only one? Still missing him?” Another short silence. “He was a good bloke. The best.” That was one of the things I liked about Nathan. He didn’t mind a lengthy phone silence. I finally sat up and blew my nose. “Anyway. I don’t think I’ll go back. I’m not sure it’s my thing.” “Give it a go, Lou. You can’t judge anything from one session.” “You sound like my dad.” “Well, he always was a sensible fella.” I started at the sound of the doorbell. Nobody ever rang my doorbell, aside from Mrs. Nellis in flat 12, when the postman had accidentally swapped our mail. I doubted she was up at this hour. And I certainly was not in receipt of her Elizabethan Doll partwork magazine. It rang again. A third time, shrill and insistent. “I’ve got to go. Someone’s at the door.” “Keep your pecker up, mate. You’ll be okay.” I put the phone down and stood up warily. I had no friends nearby. I hadn’t worked out how you actually made them when you moved to a new area and you spent most of your upright hours working. And if my parents had decided to stage an intervention and bring me back to Stortfold, they would have organized it between rush hours as neither of them liked driving in the dark. I waited, wondering if whoever it was would simply realize their mistake and go away. But it rang again, jarring and endless, as if the person was now leaning against the bell. I got up and walked to the door. “Who is it?” “I need to talk to you.” A girl’s voice. I peered through the peephole. She was looking down at her feet, so I could only make out long chestnut hair and an oversized bomber jacket. She swayed slightly, rubbed at her nose. Drunk? “I think you have the wrong flat.” “Are you Louisa Clark?” I paused. “How do you know my name?” “I need to talk to you. Can you just open the door?” “It’s almost half past ten at night.” “Yeah. That’s why I’d rather not be standing here in your corridor.” I had lived here long enough to know not to open my door to strangers. In this area of town it was not unusual to get the odd junkie ringing bells speculatively in hope of cash. But this was a well-spoken girl. And young. Too young to be one of the journalists who had briefly fixated on the story of the handsome former whiz kid who had decided to end his life. Too young to be out this late? I angled my head, trying to see if there was anyone else in the corridor. It appeared to be empty. “Can you tell me what it’s about?” “Not out here, no.” I opened the door to the length of the safety chain, so that we were eye to eye. “You’re going to have to give me more than that.” She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, the dewy plumpness of youth still just visible in her cheeks. Her hair long and lustrous. Long, skinny legs in tight black jeans. Flicky eyeliner in a pretty face. “So . . . who did you say you were?” I said. “Lily. Lily Houghton-Miller. Look,” she said, and lifted her chin an inch. “I need to talk to you about my father.” “I think you have the wrong person. I don’t know anyone called Houghton- Miller. There must be another Louisa Clark who you’ve confused me with.” I made to shut the door, but she had wedged the toe of her shoe in it. I looked down at it, and slowly back up at her. “Not his name,” she said, as though I were stupid. And when she spoke, her eyes were both fierce and searching. “His name is Will Traynor.” • • • Lily Houghton-Miller stood in the middle of my living room and surveyed me with the detached interest of a scientist gazing at a new variety of manure-based invertebrate. “Wow. What are you wearing?” “I—I work in an Irish pub.” “Pole dancing?” Having apparently lost interest in me, she pivoted slowly, gazing at the room. “This is where you actually live? Where’s your furniture?” “I . . . just moved in.” “One sofa, one television, two boxes of books?” She nodded toward the chair on which I sat. My breathing was still unbalanced, as I tried to make any kind of sense at all out of what she told me. I stood up. “I’m going to get a drink. Would you like something?” “I’ll have a Coke. Unless you’ve got wine.” “How old are you?” “Why do you want to know?” “I don’t understand.” I stood behind the kitchen counter and shook my head at her. “Will didn’t have children. I would have known.” I frowned at her, suddenly suspicious. “Is this some kind of joke?” “A joke?” “Will and I talked . . . a lot. He would have told me.” “Yeah. Well, turns out he didn’t. And I need to talk about him to someone who is not going to totally freak out like the rest of my family does every time I even mention his name.” She picked up the card from my mother and put it down again. “I’m hardly going to say it as a joke. I mean, yeah. My real dad: some sad bloke in a wheelchair. Like that’s funny.” I handed her a glass of water. “But who . . . who is your family? I mean, who is your mother?” “Have you got any cigarettes?” She had started pacing around the room, touching things, picking up the few belongings I had and putting them down. When I shook my head, she said: “My mother is called Tanya. Tanya Miller. She’s married to my stepdad, who is called Francis Stupid Fuckface Houghton.” “Nice name.” She put down the water and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her bomber jacket and lit one. I was going to say she couldn’t smoke in my home, but I was too taken aback, so I simply walked over to the window and opened it. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I could maybe see little hints of Will. It was in her blue eyes and vaguely caramel coloring. It was in the way she tilted her chin slightly before she spoke, her unblinking stare. Or was I seeing what I wanted to see? She gazed out of the window at the street below. “Lily, before we go on there’s something I need to—” “I know he’s dead,” she said. She inhaled sharply and blew the smoke into the center of the room. “I mean, that was how I found out. There was some documentary on television about assisted suicide and they mentioned his name and Mum totally freaked out for no reason and ran to the bathroom and Fuckface went after her so obviously I listened outside. And she was in total shock because she hadn’t even known that he ended up in a wheelchair. I heard the whole thing. I mean it’s not like I didn’t know Fuckface wasn’t my real dad. It’s just that my mum only ever said my real dad was an asshole who didn’t want to know me.” “Will wasn’t an asshole.” She shrugged. “He sounded like one. But anyway, when I tried to ask her questions she just started totally flipping out and said that I knew everything about him that I needed to know and Fuckface Francis had been a better dad to me than Will Traynor ever would have been and I really should just leave it alone.” I sipped my water. I had never wanted a glass of wine more. “So what did you do?” She shrugged, took another drag of her cigarette. “I Googled him, of course. And I found you.” • • • I needed to be alone to digest what she had told me. It was too overwhelming. I didn’t know what to make of the spiky girl who walked around my living room, making the air around her crackle. “So did he not say anything about me at all?” I was staring at her shoes—ballerina pumps, heavily scuffed as if they had spent too much time shuffling around London streets. I felt suddenly suspicious, as if I were being reeled in. “How old are you, Lily?” “Sixteen. Do I at least look like him? I saw a picture on Google images, but I was thinking maybe you had a photograph?” She gazed around the living room. “Are all your photographs in boxes?” She eyed the cardboard crates in the corner, and I wondered whether she would actually open them up and start pawing through them. I knew one of them contained Will’s jumper. And I felt a sudden panic. “Um. Lily. This is all . . . quite a lot to take in. And if you are who you say you are then we . . . we do have a lot to discuss. But it’s nearly eleven o’clock at night, and I’m not sure this is the time to start. Where do you live?” “St. John’s Wood.” “Well. Uh. I think your parents are going to be wondering where you are. Why don’t I give you my number and we—” “I can’t go home.” She turned to face the window, flicked the ash out with a practiced finger. “Strictly speaking, I’m . . . I’m not even meant to be here. I’m meant to be at school. Weekly boarding. They’ll all be freaking out now because I’m not there.” She pulled out her phone, as an afterthought, and grimaced at whatever she saw on its screen, then shoved it back into her pocket. “Well, I’m . . . not sure what I can do other than—” “I thought maybe I could stay here? Just tonight? And then you could tell me some more stuff about him?” “Stay here? No. No. I’m sorry, you can’t. I don’t know you.” “But you did know my dad. Did you say you think he didn’t actually know about me?” “You need to go home. Look, let’s call your parents. They can come and collect you. Let’s do that and I—” She stared at me. “I thought you’d help me.” “I will help you, Lily. But this isn’t the way to—” “You don’t believe me, do you?” “I—I have no idea what to—” “You don’t want to help. You don’t want to do anything. What have you actually told me about my dad? Nothing. How have you actually helped? You haven’t. Thanks.” “Hold on! That’s not fair—we’ve only just—” But the girl flicked her cigarette butt out of the window and turned to walk past me out of the room. “What? Where are you going?” “Oh, what do you care?” she said, and before I could say anything more, the front door had slammed and she was gone. • • • I sat very still on my sofa, trying to digest what had just happened for the better part of an hour, Lily’s voice ringing in my ears. Had I heard her correctly? I went over and over what she had told me, trying to recall it all over the buzz in my ears. My father was Will Traynor. Lily’s mother had apparently told her Will had not wanted anything to do with her. But surely he would have mentioned something to me. We had no secrets from each other. Weren’t we the two people who had managed to talk about everything? For a moment I wobbled: Had Will not been as honest with me as I had believed? Had he actually possessed the ability simply to airbrush an entire daughter out of his conscience? When I realized my thoughts were chasing each other in circles, I grabbed my laptop. I sat cross-legged on the sofa and typed “Lily Hawton-Miller” into a search engine, and when that came up with no results, I tried again with various spellings, settling on “Lily Houghton-Miller,” which brought up a number of hockey-fixture results posted by a school called Upton Tilton in Shropshire. I called up some of the images, and as I zoomed in, there she was: an unsmiling girl in a row of smiling hockey players. Lily Houghton-Miller played a brave, if unsuccessful defense. It was dated two years ago. Boarding school. She said she was meant to be at boarding school. But it still didn’t mean she was any relation of Will’s, or indeed that her mother had been telling the truth about her parentage. I altered the search to just the words “Houghton-Miller,” which brought up a short diary item about Francis and Tanya Houghton-Miller attending a banking dinner at the Savoy, and a planning application from the previous year for a wine cellar under a house in St. John’s Wood. I sat back, thinking, then did a search on “Tanya Miller” and “William Traynor.” It turned up nothing. I tried again, using “Will Traynor,” and suddenly I was on a Facebook thread dated some eighteen months ago, for alumni of Durham University, on which several women, all of whose names seemed to end in “ella”—Estella, Fenella, Arabella—were discussing Will’s death. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it on the news. Him of all people! RIP Will. Nobody gets through life unscathed. You know Rory Appleton died in the Turks and Caicos, in a speed-boating accident? Didn’t he do Geography? Red hair? No, PPE. I’m sure I snogged Rory at the Freshers Ball. Enormous tongue. I’m not being funny, Fenella. That’s rather bad taste. The poor man is dead. Wasn’t Will Traynor the one who went out with Tanya Miller for the whole of the third year? I don’t see how it’s in poor taste to mention that I may have kissed someone just because they then went on to pass away. I’m not saying you have to rewrite history. It’s just his wife might be reading this, and she might not want to know that her beloved stuck his tongue in the face of some girl on Facebook. I’m sure she knows his tongue was enormous. I mean, she married him. Rory Appleton got married? Here’s the link. Tanya married some banker. I always thought she and Will would get married when we were at uni. They were so gorgeous. I clicked on the link, which showed a picture of a reed-thin blond woman with an artfully tousled chignon smiling as she stood on the steps of a registry office with an older dark-haired man. A short distance away, at the edge of the picture, a young girl in a white tulle dress was scowling. She bore a definite resemblance to the Lily Houghton-Miller I had met. But the image was seven years old, and in truth it could have portrayed any grumpy young bridesmaid with long midbrown hair. I reread the thread, and closed my laptop. What should I do? If she really was Will’s daughter, should I call the school? I was pretty sure there were rules about strangers who tried to contact teenage girls. And what if this really was some elaborate scam? Will had died a wealthy man. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that somebody could think up an intricate scheme by which to leach money from his family. When Dad’s mate Chalky died of a heart attack, seventeen people had turned up at the wake telling his wife he owed them betting money. I would steer clear, I decided. There was too much potential for pain and disruption if I got this wrong. But when I went to bed it was Lily’s voice I heard, echoing in the silent flat. Will Traynor was my father. 6 S orry. 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 8:30 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 return the sodding uniform 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 3, as clear as day, if she had cared to look. And the sodding language was simply unnecessary. He was now to go 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 these emotions that keep us from moving forward.” Marc waited as we handed around the biscuit tin, and 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 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 on the escalator, I exchange a look with some random man going down. And then before I’ve even got to platform 2 I’ve started building whole relationships between us, in my head. You know, where he runs back up the escalator because he just knows there is 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 are—” “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 ancient.” “If it was me who’d died, I would 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 loose 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 benefitted 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 out, twisting his hands together. He stared out from under his fringe. “He charms women into sleeping with him, and then afterward he gets off on being sad about it. It’s like as long as he feels guilty about it afterward then 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 the word treasure and his jaw grew taut. By then we were used 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 now 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 car park of the church hall. I stopped in front of him. “It’s a grief-counseling 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 backward, spying Jake behind me. “Oh. Right. Well, you have my sympathies there. You look young to have a teenager, if you don’t mind my 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 backpack 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 look at 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 at a near-empty bar a short distance from my flat. He drank black coffee, and I ordered a fruit juice. I had time to study him surreptitiously now that I wasn’t dodging cars in a car park, or lying strapped onto a hospital gurney. His features were coarser than Will’s. His nose held a telltale ridge, and his eyes crinkled in a way that suggested there was almost no human behavior he had not seen and, perhaps, been slightly amused by. He was tall and broad, and 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 that 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 happened 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 at his coffee, as if it were perfectly normal for him to be passing the time with a feverishly chatting stranger in a green Lurex miniskirt. “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 spending time alone with a man—while sober, at least—that I kept losing my nerve, my mouth opening and closing like a goldfish’s. “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 how 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 is 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 actually have been the thing that convinced him . . .” My voice tailed off. Sam leaned back in his chair, his brow furrowed. 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 I’d been holding all the way from the bar. I glanced over at the Mini Mart, then back at my flat, and decided that I didn’t want to be sensible. I wanted wine, several large glasses of it, until I could persuade myself to stop looking backward. 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 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, sudden 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 open with my bag, crouching down beside her. “What happened?” “I just want to go to sleep,” she said, rubbing at her eyes. “I’m so, so tired. I wanted to get a taxi home but I haven’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 halfsmoked 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, clumsily pulling a lighter 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 that your boyfriend? Do you want to talk to him?” I asked 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 toward the door. “Please.” He began to walk across the street toward 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 backward 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 my 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 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 said, so quietly that for a moment I couldn’t be entirely sure that that was what she had said at all, 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. 7 Icould smell coffee. It took me several seconds to consider why that aroma might be wafting through my flat and when the answer registered I sat bolt upright and leaped out of bed, hauling my hoodie over my head. She was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, smoking, using my one good mug as an ashtray. The television was on—some manic children’s show, full of brightly clad kids making clever faces—and two Styrofoam cups sat on the mantelpiece. “Oh, hi. That one on the right’s yours,” she said, turning briefly toward me. “I didn’t know what you liked so I got you an Americano.” I blinked, wrinkling my nose against the cigarette smoke. I crossed the room and opened a window. I looked at the clock. “Is that the time?” “Yeah. The coffee might be a bit cold. Didn’t know whether to wake you.” “It’s my day off,” I said, reaching for the coffee. It was warm enough. I took a slug gratefully. Then I stared at the cup. “Hang on. How did you get these? I locked the front door.” “I went down the fire escape,” she said. “I didn’t have any money so I told the guy at the bakery whose flat it was and he said you could bring him the money later. Oh, and you also owe him for two bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese.” “I do?” I wanted to be cross, but I was suddenly really hungry. She followed my gaze. “Oh. I ate those.” She blew a smoke ring into the center of the room. “You didn’t have anything much in your fridge. You really do need to sort this place out.” The Lily of this morning was such a different character from the girl I had picked off the street last night that it was hard to believe they were the same person. I walked back into the bedroom to get dressed, listening to her watching television, padding into the kitchen to fetch herself a drink. “Hey, thingy . . . Louise. Could you lend me some money?” she called out. “If it’s to get off your face again, no.” She walked into my bedroom without knocking. I pulled my sweatshirt up to my chest. “And can I stay tonight?” “I need to talk to your mum, Lily.” “What for?” “I need to know a little bit more about what’s actually going on here.” She stood in the doorway. “So you don’t believe me.” I gestured to her to turn around, so I could finish putting on my bra. “I do believe you. But that’s the deal. You want something from me, I need to know a bit more about you first.” Just as I pulled my T-shirt over my head, she turned back again. “Suit yourself. I need to pick up some more clothes anyway.” “Why? Where have you been staying?” She walked away from me, as if she hadn’t heard, lifting an arm to sniff her armpit. “Can I use your shower? I absolutely reek.” • • • An hour later, we drove to St. John’s Wood. I was exhausted, both by the night’s events and the strange energy Lily gave off beside me. She fidgeted constantly, smoked endless cigarettes, then sat in a silence so loaded I could almost feel the weight of her thoughts. “So . . . who was he? That guy last night?” I kept my face to the front, my voice neutral. “Just someone.” “You told me he was your boyfriend.” “Then that’s who he was.” Her voice had hardened, her face closed. As we drew nearer to her parents’ house, she crossed her arms in front of her, bringing her knees up to her chin, her gaze set and defiant, as if already in silent battle. I had wondered if she had been telling me the truth about St. John’s Wood, but she gestured to a wide, tree-lined street, and told me to take the third left, and we were suddenly in the kind of road that diplomats or expat American bankers live in, the kind of road that nobody ever seems to go in or out of. I pulled the car up, gazing out of the window at the tall white stucco buildings, the carefully trimmed yew hedging, and immaculate window boxes. “You live here?” She slammed the passenger door behind her so hard that my little car rattled. “I don’t live here. They live here.” • • • She let herself in and I followed, awkwardly, feeling like an intruder. We were in a spacious, high-ceilinged hallway, with parquet flooring and a huge gilt mirror on the wall, on which a slew of white invitation cards jostled for space in its frame. A vase of beautifully arranged flowers sat on a small antique table. The air was scented with their perfume. From upstairs came the sound of some kind of commotion, possibly children’s voices; it was hard to tell. “My half brothers,” Lily said dismissively, and walked through to the kitchen, apparently expecting me to follow. I stood and stared; it was an enormous kitchen in modernist gray, with an endless mushroom-colored polished-concrete worktop. Everything in it screamed money, from the Dualit toaster to the coffeemaker that was large and complicated enough not to be out of place in a Milanese caf?. Lily opened the fridge and scanned it, finally pulling out a container of fresh pineapple pieces that she started to eat with her fingers. “Lily?” A voice from upstairs, urgent, female. “Lily, is that you?” The sound of footsteps racing downstairs. Lily rolled her eyes. A blond woman appeared in the kitchen doorway. She stared at me, then at Lily, who was dropping a piece of pineapple languidly into her mouth. She walked over and snatched the container from her hands. “Where the hell have you been? The school is beside themselves. Daddy was out driving around the neighborhood. We thought you’d been murdered! Where were you?” “He’s not my dad.” “Don’t get smart with me, young lady. You can’t just walk back in here like nothing’s happened! Do you have any idea of the trouble you’ve caused? I was up with your brother half the night, and then I couldn’t sleep for worrying about what had happened to you. I’ve had to cancel our trip to Granny Houghton’s because we didn’t know where you were.” Lily stared at her coolly. “I don’t know why you bothered. You don’t usually care where I am.” The woman stiffened with rage. She was thin, the kind of thin that comes with fad diets or compulsive exercise; her hair was expensively cut and colored so that it looked neither, and she was wearing what I assumed were designer jeans. But her face, tanned as it was, betrayed her; she looked exhausted. She spun around to look at me. “Is it you she’s been staying with?” “Well, yes, but—” She looked me up and down and apparently decided she was not enamored of what she saw. “Do you know the trouble you’re causing? Do you have any idea how old she is? What the hell do you want with a girl that young anyway? You must be, what, thirty?” “Actually, I—” “Is this what it’s about?” she asked her daughter. “Are you having a relationship with this woman?” “Oh, Mum, shut up.” Lily had picked up the pineapple again and was fishing around in it with her forefinger. “It’s not what you think. She hasn’t caused any of it.” She lowered the last piece of pineapple into her mouth, pausing to chew, perhaps for dramatic effect, before she spoke again. “She’s the woman who used to look after my dad. My real dad.” • • • Tanya Houghton-Miller sat back in the endless cushions of her cream-colored sofa and stirred her coffee. I perched on the edge of the sofa opposite, gazing at the oversized Diptyque candles and the artfully placed Interiors magazines. I was slightly afraid that if I sat back as she had, my coffee would tip into my lap. “How did you meet my daughter?” she said wearily. Her wedding finger sported two of the biggest diamonds I’d ever seen. “I didn’t, really. She turned up at my flat. I had no idea who she was.” She digested that for a minute. “And you used to look after Will Traynor.” “Yes. Until he died.” There was a brief pause as we both studied the ceiling—something had just crashed above our heads. “My sons.” She sighed. “They have some behavioral issues.” “Are they from your . . . ?” “They’re not Will’s, if that’s what you’re asking.” We sat there in silence. Or as near to silence as it could get when you could hear furious screaming upstairs. There was another thud, followed by an ominous silence. “Mrs. Houghton-Miller,” I said. “Is it true? Is Lily Will’s daughter?” She raised her chin slightly. “Yes.” I felt suddenly shaky and put my coffee cup on the table. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand how—” “It’s quite simple. Will and I were together during the last year of uni. I was totally in love with him, of course. Everyone was. Although I should say it wasn’t all one-way traffic, you know?” She raised a small smile and waited, as if expecting me to say something. But I couldn’t. How could Will not have told me that he had a daughter? After everything we had been through? Tanya drawled on. “Anyway. We were, you know, the golden couple of our group. Balls, punting, weekends away, you know the drill. Will and I—well, we were everywhere.” She told the story as if it were still fresh to her, as if it were something she had gone over and over in her head. “And then at our Founders’ Ball, I had to leave to help my friend Liza, who had got herself into a bit of a mess, and when I came back, Will was gone. No idea where he was. So I waited there for ages, and all the cars came and took everyone home, and finally a girl I didn’t even know very well came up to me and told me that Will had gone off with a girl called Stephanie Loudon. You won’t know her. But she’d had her eye on him forever. At first I didn’t believe it, but I drove to her house anyway, and sat outside, and sure enough, at 5 a.m. he came out and they stood there kissing on the doorstep like they couldn’t care who saw. And when I got out of the car and confronted him, he didn’t even have the grace to be ashamed. He just said there was no point in us getting emotional as we were never going to last beyond college anyway. “And then, of course, college finished, which was something of a relief, to be honest, because who wants to be the girl Will Traynor dumped? But it was so hard to get over, because it had ended so abruptly, you know? Then after we left and he started to work in the City I wrote to him asking if we could at least meet for a drink so I could work out what on earth had gone wrong. Because as far as I was concerned we had been really happy, you know? And he just got his secretary to send this—this card, saying she was very sorry but Will’s diary was absolutely full and he didn’t have time right now but he wished me all the best. ‘All the best.’” She grimaced. I winced internally. Much as I wanted to discount her story, this version of Will held a horrible ring of truth. Will himself had looked back at his earlier life with utter clarity, had confessed how badly he had treated women when he was younger. (His exact words were, “I was a complete arse.”) Tanya was still talking. “And then, about two months later, I discovered I was pregnant. And it was already awfully late because my periods had always been erratic and I hadn’t realized I’d already missed the first two. So I decided to go ahead and have Lily. But—” And here she lifted her chin again, as if braced to defend herself. “There was no point in telling him. Not after everything he’d said and done.” My coffee had gone cold. “No point in telling him?” “He’d as good as said he didn’t want anything to do with me. He would have acted as if I’d done it deliberately, to trap him or something.” I think my mouth might have been hanging open. I made an effort to close it. “But you—you don’t think he had the right to know, Mrs. Houghton-Miller? You don’t think he might have wanted to meet his child? Regardless of what had happened between the two of you?” She put down her cup. “She’s sixteen,” I said. “She would have been fourteen, fifteen when he died. That’s an awful long—” “And by that time she had Francis. He was her father. And he has been very good to her. We were a family. Are a family.” “I don’t understand—” “Will didn’t deserve to know her.” The words settled in the air between us. “He was an arsehole, okay? Will Traynor was a selfish arsehole.” She pushed a strand of hair back from her face. “Obviously I didn’t know what had happened to him. That came as a complete shock. But I can’t honestly say it would have made a difference.” It took me a moment to find my voice. “It would have made every difference. To him.” She looked at me sharply. “Will killed himself,” I said, and my voice cracked a little. “Will ended his life because he couldn’t see any reason to go on. If he’d known he had a daughter—” She stood up. “Oh, no. You don’t pin that on me, Miss Whoever-you-are. I am not going to be made to feel responsible for that man’s suicide. You think my life isn’t complicated enough? Don’t you dare come here judging me. If you’d had to cope with half of what I cope with . . . No. Will Traynor was a horrible man.” “Will Traynor was the finest man I ever knew.” She let her gaze run up and down me. “Yes. Well, I can imagine that’s probably true.” We stared at each other and I thought I had never been filled with such an instant dislike for someone. I had stood up to leave when a voice broke into the silence. “So my dad really didn’t know about me.” Lily was standing very still in the doorway. Just for a moment, Tanya Houghton-Miller blanched. Then she recovered herself. “I was saving you from hurt, Lily. I knew Will very well, and I was not prepared to put either of us through the humiliation of trying to persuade him to be part of a relationship he wouldn’t have wanted.” She smoothed her hair. “And you really must stop this awful eavesdropping habit. You’re likely to get quite the wrong end of the stick.” I couldn’t listen to any more. I walked to the door as a boy began shouting upstairs. A plastic truck flew down the stairs and crashed into pieces somewhere below. An anxious face—Filipina?—gazed down at me over the banister. I began to walk down the front stairs. “Where are you going?” Lily asked. “I’m sorry, Lily. We’ll—perhaps we’ll talk some other time.” “But you’ve hardly told me anything about my dad.” “He wasn’t your father,” Tanya Houghton-Miller said. “Francis has done more for you since you were little than Will ever would have done—” “Francis is not my DAD,” Lily roared. Another crash from upstairs, and a woman’s voice, shouting in a language I didn’t understand. A toy machine-gun sent tinny blasts into the air. Tanya put her hands to her head. “I can’t cope with this. I simply can’t cope.” Lily caught up with me at the door. “Can I stay with you?” “What?” “At your flat? I can’t stay here.” “Lily, I don’t think—” “Just for tonight. Please.” “Oh, be my guest,” Tanya said. “Have her stay with you for a day or two. She’s just delightful company.” She waved a sarcastic hand. “Polite, helpful, loving. A dream to have around!” Her face hardened. “Let’s see how that works out. You know she drinks? And smokes in the house? And that she was suspended from school? She’s told you all this, has she?” Lily seemed almost bored, as if she had heard this a million times before. “She didn’t even bother turning up for her exams. We’ve done everything possible for her. Counselors, the best schools, private tutors. Francis has treated her as if she were his own. And she just throws it all back in our faces. My husband is having a very difficult time at the bank right now, and the boys have their issues, and she doesn’t give us an inch. She never has.” “How would you even know? I’ve been with nannies half my life. When the boys were born, you sent me to boarding school.” “I couldn’t cope with all of you! I did what I could!” “You did what you wanted, which was to start your perfect family all over again, without me.” Lily turned back to me. “Please? Just for a bit? I promise I won’t get under your feet at all. I’ll be really helpful.” I should have said no. I knew I should. But I was so angry with that woman. And just for a moment I felt as if I had to stand in for Will, to do the thing that he couldn’t do. “Fine,” I said, as a large Lego creation whistled past my ear and smashed into tiny colored pieces by my feet. “Grab your things. I’ll be waiting outside.” • • • The rest of the day was a blur. We moved the boxes out of the spare room, stacking them in my bedroom, and made the room hers, or at least less of a storage area, putting up the blind I had never quite got around to fixing and moving in a lamp and my spare bedside table. I bought a camp bed, and we carried it up the stairs together, along with a hanging rail for her few things, and a new duvet and pillow cases. She seemed to like having a purpose, and was completely unfazed at the idea of moving in with somebody she hardly knew. I watched her arranging her few belongings in the spare room that evening and felt oddly sad. How unhappy did a girl have to be to want to leave all that luxury for a box room with a camp bed and a wobbly clothes rail? I cooked pasta, conscious of the strangeness of having someone to cook for, and we watched television together. At half past eight her phone went off and she asked for a piece of paper and a pen. “Here,” she said, scribbling on it. “This is my mum’s mobile number. She wants your phone number and address. In case of emergencies.” I wondered fleetingly how often she thought Lily was going to stay. At ten, exhausted, I told her I was turning in. She was still watching television, sitting cross-legged on the sofa and messaging someone on her little laptop. “Don’t stay up too late, okay?” It sounded fake on my lips, like someone pretending to be an adult. Her eyes were still glued to the television. “Lily?” She looked up, as if she’d only just noticed I was in the room. “Oh, yeah, I meant to tell you. I was there.” “Where?” “On the roof. When you fell. It was me who called the ambulance.” I saw her face suddenly, those big eyes, that face, pale in the darkness. “But . . . but what were you doing up there?” “I found your address. After everyone at home had gone nutso, I just wanted to work out who you were before I tried to talk to you. I saw I could get up there by the fire escape and I saw your light was on. I was just waiting, really. But when you came up and started messing about on the edge I suddenly thought if I said anything I’d freak you out.” “Which you did.” “Yeah. I didn’t mean to do that. I actually thought I’d killed you.” She laughed, nervously. We sat there for a minute. “Everyone thinks I tried to jump.” Her face swiveled toward me. “Really?” “Yeah.” She thought about this. “Because of what happened to my dad?” “Yes.” “Do you miss him?” “Every single day.” She was silent. Eventually she said, “So when is your next day off?” “Sunday. Why?” I said, dragging my thoughts back. “Can we go to your home town?” “You want to go to Stortfold?” “I want to see where he lived.” 8 Ididn’t tell Dad we were coming. I wasn’t entirely sure how to have that conversation. We pulled up outside our house and I sat for a minute, conscious, as she peered out of the window, of the small, rather weary appearance of my parents’ house in comparison with her own. She had suggested we bring flowers when I told her my mother would insist we stay for lunch, and got cross when I suggested petrol station carnations, even though they were for someone she’d never met. I had driven to the supermarket on the other side of Stortfold, where she had chosen a huge hand-tied bouquet of freesias, peonies, and ranunculus. Which I had paid for. “Stay here a minute,” I said, as she started to climb out. “I’m going to explain before you come in.” “But—” “Trust me,” I said. “They’re going to need a minute.” I walked up the little garden path and knocked on the door. I could hear the television in the living room, and pictured Granddad there, watching the racing, his mouth working silently along with the horses’ legs. The sights and sounds of home. I thought of the months I had kept away, no longer sure I was even welcome, of how I had refused to allow myself to think of how it felt to walk up this path, to smell the fabric-conditioned scent of my mother’s embrace, to hear my father’s distant bellow of laughter. Dad opened the door, and his eyebrows shot up. “Lou! We weren’t expecting you! . . . Were we expecting you?” He stepped forward and enveloped me in a big hug. I realized I liked having my family back again. “Hi, Dad.” He waited on the step, arm outstretched. The smell of roast chicken wafted down the corridor. “You coming in, then, or are we going to have a picnic out on the front step?” “I need to tell you something first.” “You lost your job.” “No, I did not lose my—” “You got another tattoo.” I stared at him. “You knew about the tattoo?” “I’m your father. I’ve known about every bloody thing you and your sister have done since you were three years old.” He leaned forward. “Your mother would never let me have one.” “No, Dad, I don’t have another tattoo.” I took a breath. “I . . . I have Will’s daughter.” Dad stood very still. Mum appeared behind him, with her apron on. “Lou!” She caught the look on his face. “What? What’s wrong?” “She says she has Will’s daughter.” “She has Will’s what?” Mum squawked. Dad had gone quite white. He reached behind him for the radiator and clutched it. “What?” I asked, anxious. “What’s the matter?” “You—you’re not telling me you harvested his . . . you know . . . his little fellas?” I pulled a face. “She’s in the car. She’s sixteen years old.” “Oh, thank God. Oh, Josie, thank God . . . These days, you’re so . . . I never know what—” He composed himself. “Will’s daughter, you say? You never said he—” “I didn’t know. Nobody knew.” Mum peered around him to my car, where Lily was trying to act as if she didn’t know she was being talked about. “Well, you’d better bring her in,” said Mum, her hand to her neck. “It’s a decent-sized chicken. It will do all of us if I add a few more potatoes.” She shook her head in amazement. “Will’s daughter. Well, goodness, Lou. You’re certainly full of surprises.” She waved at Lily, who waved back tentatively. “Come on in, love!” Dad lifted a hand in greeting, then murmured quietly. “Does Mr. Traynor know?” “Not yet.” Dad rubbed his chest. “Is there anything else?” “Anything else what?” “Anything else you need to tell me. You know, apart from jumping off buildings and bringing home long-lost children. You’re not joining the circus, or adopting a kid from Kazakhstan or something?” “I promise I am doing none of the above. Yet.” “Well, thank the Lord for that. What’s the time? I think I’m ready for a drink.” • • • “So where do you go to school, Lily?” “It’s a small boarding school in Shropshire. No one’s ever heard of it. It’s mostly posh retards and distant members of the Moldavian royal family.” We had crammed ourselves around the dining table in the front room, the seven of us knee to knee, and six of us praying that nobody needed the loo, which would necessitate everyone getting up and moving the table six inches toward the sofa. “Boarding school, eh? Tuck shops and midnight feasts and all that? I bet that’s a gas.” “Not really. They shut the tuck shop last year because half the girls had eating disorders and were making themselves sick on Snickers bars.” “Lily’s mother lives in St. John’s Wood,” I said. “She’s staying with me for a couple of days while she . . . while she gets to know a bit about the other side of her family.” Mum said, “The Traynors have lived here for generations.” “Really?” Lily looked up. “Do you know them?” Mum froze. “Well, not as such . . .” “What’s their house like?” Mum’s face closed. “You’d be better off asking Lou about that sort of thing. She’s the one who spent . . . all the time there.” Lily waited. Dad said, “I work with Mr. Traynor, who is responsible for the running of the estate.” “Granddad!” exclaimed Granddad, and laughed. Lily glanced at him and then back at me. I smiled, although even the mention of Mr. Traynor’s name made me feel oddly unbalanced. “That’s right, Daddy,” said Mum. “He’d be Lily’s granddad. Just like you. Now who wants some more potatoes?” “Granddad.” Lily repeated the words quietly, clearly pleased. “We’ll ring them and . . . tell them,” I said. “And if you like we can drive past their house when we leave. Just so you can see a bit of it.” My sister sat silently throughout this exchange. Lily had been placed next to Thom, possibly in an attempt to get him to behave better, although the risk of him starting a conversation related to intestinal parasites was still quite high. Treena watched Lily. She was more suspicious than my parents, who had just accepted everything I’d told them. She had hauled me upstairs while Dad was showing Lily the garden and asked all the questions that had flown wildly around my head, like a trapped pigeon in a closed room. How did I know she was who she said? What did she want? And then, finally, Why on earth would her own mother want her to come and live with you? “So how long is she staying?” she said at the table, while Dad was telling Lily about working with green oak. “We haven’t really discussed it.” She pulled the kind of face at me that told me simultaneously that I was an eejit, and also that this was no surprise to her whatsoever. “She’s been with me for two nights, Treen. And she’s only young.” “My point exactly. What do you know about looking after children?” “She’s hardly a child.” “She’s worse than a child. Teenagers are basically toddlers with hormones— old enough to want to do stuff without having any of the common sense. She could get into all sorts of trouble. I can’t believe you’re actually doing this.” I handed her the gravy boat. “Hello, Lou. Well done on keeping your job in a tough market. Congratulations on getting over your terrible accident. It’s really lovely to see you.” She passed me back the salt and muttered under her breath. “You know, you won’t be able to cope with this, as well as . . .” “As well as what?” “Your depression.” “I don’t have depression,” I hissed. “I’m not depressed, Treena. For crying out loud, I did not throw myself off a building.” “You haven’t been yourself for ages. Not since the whole Will thing.” “What do I have to do to convince you? I’m holding down a job. I’m doing my physio to get my hip straight and going to a flipping grief counseling group to get my mind straight. I think I’m doing pretty well, okay?” The whole table was now listening to me. “In fact—here’s the thing. Oh, yes. Lily was there. She saw me fall. It turns out she was the one who called the ambulance.” Every member of my family looked at me. “You see, it’s true. She saw me fall. I didn’t jump. Lily, I was just telling my sister. You were there when I fell, weren’t you? See? I told you all I heard a girl’s voice. I wasn’t going mad. She actually saw the whole thing. I slipped, right?” Lily looked up from her plate, still chewing. She had barely stopped eating since we sat down. “Yup. She totally wasn’t trying to kill herself.” Mum and Dad exchanged a glance. My mother sighed, crossed herself discreetly, and smiled. My sister lifted her eyebrows, the closest I was going to get to an apology. I felt, briefly, elated. “Yeah. She was just shouting at the sky.” Lily lifted her fork. “And really, really pissed.” There was a brief silence. “Oh,” said Dad. “Well, that’s—” “That’s . . . good,” said Mum. “This chicken’s great,” said Lily. “Can I have some more?” • • • We stayed until late afternoon, partly because every time I got up to leave, Mum kept pressing more food on us, and partly because having other people to chat to Lily made the whole situation seem a little less weird and intense. Dad and I moved out to the back garden and the two deck chairs that had somehow failed to rot during another winter (although it was wisest to stay almost completely still once you were in them, just in case). “You know your sister has been reading The Female Eunuch? And some old shite called The Women’s Bedroom or something. She says your mother is a classic example of oppressed womanhood, and the fact that your mother disagrees shows how oppressed she is. She’s trying to tell her I should be doing the cooking and cleaning and making out I’m some fecking caveman. But if I dare to say anything back she keeps telling me to ‘check my privilege.’ Check my privilege! I told her I’d be happy to check it if I knew where the hell your mother had put it.” “Mum seems fine to me,” I said. I took a swig of my tea, feeling a faintly guilty pang as I realized that the sounds I could hear were actually Mum washing up. He looked sideways at me. “She hasn’t shaved her legs in three weeks. Three weeks, Lou! If I’m really honest it gives me the heebie-jeebies when they touch me. I’ve been on the sofa for the last two nights. I don’t know, Lou. Why are people never happy just to let things be anymore? Your mum was happy, I’m happy. We know what our roles are. I’m the one with hairy legs. She’s the one who fits the rubber gloves. Simple.” Down in the garden, Lily was teaching Thom to make birdcalls using a thick blade of grass. He held it up between his thumbs, but it’s possible that his four missing teeth hampered any sound production, as all that emerged was a raspberry and a light shower of saliva. We sat in companionable silence for a while, listening to the squawks of the birdcalls, Granddad whistling, and next door’s dog yelping to be let in. I felt happy to be home. “So how is Mr. Traynor?” I asked. “Ah, he’s grand. You know he’s going to be a daddy again?” I turned carefully in my chair. “Really?” “Not with Mrs. Traynor. She moved out straight after . . . you know. This is with the redheaded girl, I forget her name.” “Della,” I said, remembering suddenly. “That’s the one. They seem to have known each other quite a while, but I think the whole, you know, having a baby thing was a bit of a surprise to the both of them.” Dad cracked open another beer. “He’s cheerful enough. I suppose it’s nice for him to have a new son or daughter on the way. Something to focus on.” Some part of me wanted to judge him. But I could too easily imagine the need to create something good out of what had happened, the desire to climb back out, by whatever means. They’re only still together because of me, Will had told me, more than once. “What do you think he’ll make of Lily?” I asked. “I have no idea, love.” Dad thought for a bit. “I think he’ll be happy. It’s like he’s getting a bit of his son back, isn’t it?” “What do you think Mrs. Traynor will think?” “I don’t know, love. I have no idea where she even lives these days.” “Lily’s . . . quite a handful.” Dad burst out laughing. “You don’t say! You and Treena drove your mother and me half demented for years with your late nights and your boyfriends and your heartbreaks. It’s about time you had some of it coming back your way.” He took a swig of his beer and chuckled again. “It’s good news, love. I’m glad you won’t be on your own in that empty old flat of yours.” Thom’s grass let out a squawk. His face lit up and he thrust his blade skyward. We raised our thumbs in salute. “Dad.” He turned to me. “You know I’m fine, right?” “Yes, love.” He gave me a gentle shoulder bump. “But you know, it’s my job to worry. I’ll be worrying till I’m too old to get out of my chair.” He looked down at it. “Mind you, that might be sooner than I’d like.” We left shortly before five. In the rearview mirror Treena was the only one of the family not waving. She stood there, her arms crossed over her chest, her head moving slowly from side to side as she watched us go. • • • When we got home, Lily disappeared up onto the roof. I hadn’t been up there since the accident. I’d told myself the spring weather had made it pointless to try; that the fire escape would be slippery because of the rain, that the sight of all those pots of dead plants would make me feel guilty, but, really, I was afraid. Even thinking about heading up there again made my heart thump harder; it took nothing for me to recall that sense of the world disappearing from beneath me, like a rug pulled from under my feet. I watched her climb out of the landing window and shouted up that she should come down in twenty minutes. When twenty-five had gone by, I began to get anxious. I called out of the window but only the sound of the traffic came back to me. At thirty-five minutes I found myself, swearing under my breath, climbing out of the hall window onto the fire escape. It was a warm summer evening and the rooftop asphalt radiated heat. Below us the sounds of the city spelled out a lazy Sunday in slow-moving traffic, windows down, music blaring, youths hanging out on street corners, the distant char-grilled smells of barbecues on other rooftops. Lily sat on an upturned plant pot, looking out over the City. I stood with my back to the water tank, trying not to feel a reflexive panic whenever she leaned toward the edge. It had been a mistake to go up there. I felt the asphalt listing gently underneath my feet, like the deck of a ship. I made my way unsteadily to the rusting iron seat, lowering myself into it. My body knew exactly how it felt to stand on that ledge; how the infinitesimal difference between the solid business of living and the lurch that would end everything could be measured in the smallest of measurements, in grams, in millimeters, in degrees, and that knowledge made the hairs on my arms prickle and a fine sweat seep through the skin on the back of my neck. “Can you come down, Lily?” “All your plants have died.” She picked at the dead leaves of a desiccated shrub. “Yes. Well. I haven’t been up here for months.” “You shouldn’t let plants die. It’s cruel.” I looked at her sharply, to see if she was joking, but she didn’t seem to be. She stooped, breaking off a twig and examining the dried-up center. Then she looked out at the city below. “How did you meet my dad?” I reached for the corner of the water tank, trying to stop my legs from shaking. “I just applied for a job looking after him. And I got it.” “Even though you weren’t medically trained.” “Yes.” She considered this, flicked the dead stem away into the air, then got up, walked to the far end of the terrace, and stood, her hands on her hips, legs braced, a skinny Amazon warrior. “He was handsome, wasn’t he?” The roof was swaying under me. I needed to go downstairs. “I can’t do this up here, Lily.” “Are you really frightened?” “I’d just really rather we went down. Please.” She tilted her head and watched me, as if trying to work out whether to do as I asked. She took a step toward the wall and put her foot up speculatively, as if to jump onto the edge, just long enough to make me break out into a spontaneous sweat. Then she turned to me, grinned, put her cigarette between her teeth, and walked back across the roof toward the fire escape. “You won’t fall off again, silly. Nobody’s that unlucky.” “Yeah. Well, right now, I don’t really want to test the odds.” Some minutes later, when I could make my legs obey my brain, we went down the two flights of iron steps. We stopped outside my window when I realized I was shaking too much to climb through and I sat down on the step. Lily rolled her eyes, waiting. Then, when she grasped that I couldn’t move, she sat down on the step beside me. We were only perhaps ten feet lower than we had been, but with my hallway visible through the window, and a rail on each side, I began to breathe normally again. “You know what you need,” she said, and held up her roll-up. “Are you seriously telling me to get stoned? Four floors up? You know I just fell off a roof?” “It’ll help you relax.” And then, when I didn’t take it, “Oh, come on. What, are you seriously the straightest person in the whole of London?” “I’m not from London.” Afterward, I couldn’t believe I had been manipulated by a sixteen-year-old. But Lily was like the cool girl in class, the one you found yourself trying to impress. Before she could say anything else, I took it from her and had a tentative drag on it, trying not to cough when it hit the back of my throat. “Anyway, you’re sixteen,” I muttered. “You shouldn’t be doing this. And where is someone like you getting this stuff?” Lily peered over the edge of the railing. “Did you fancy him?” “Fancy who? Your dad? Not at first.” “Because he was in a wheelchair.” Because he was doing an impression of Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and it scared the bejesus out of me, I wanted to say, but it would have taken too much explaining. “No. The wheelchair was the least important thing about him. No, I didn’t fancy him because. . . . he was very angry. And a bit intimidating. And those two things made him quite hard to fancy.” “Do I look like him? I Googled him but I can’t tell.” “A bit. Your coloring is the same. Maybe your eyes.” “My mum said he was really handsome and that was what made him such an arsehole. One of the things. Whenever I’m getting on her nerves now she tells me I’m just like him. Oh God, you’re just like Will Traynor.” She always calls him Will Traynor, though. Not ‘your father.’ She’s determined to make out like Fuckface is my dad, even though he is patently not. It’s like she thinks she can just make a family by insisting that we are one.” I took another drag. I could feel myself getting woozy. Apart from one night at a house party in Paris, it had been years since I’d had a joint. “You know, I think I’d enjoy this more if there wasn’t a small possibility of me falling off this fire escape.” She took it from me. “Jeez, Louise. You need to have some fun.” She inhaled deeply and leaned her head back. “So did he tell you about how he was feeling? Like the real stuff?” She inhaled again and handed it back to me. She seemed totally unaffected. “Yes.” “Did you argue?” “Quite a lot. But we laughed a lot, too.” “Did he fancy you?” “Fancy me? . . . I don’t know if fancy is the right word.” My mouth worked silently around words I couldn’t find. How could I explain to this girl what Will and I had been to each other, the way I felt that no person in the world had ever understood me like he did or ever would again? How could she understand that losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill? She stared at me. “He did! My dad fancied you!” She started to giggle. And it was such a ridiculous thing to say, such a useless word to describe what Will and I had been to each other, that in spite of myself I giggled too. “My dad had the hots for you. How mad is that?” She gasped. “Oh, my God! In a different universe, you could have been MY STEPMUM.” We gazed at each other in mock horror and somehow this fact swelled between us until a bubble of merriment lodged in my chest. I began to laugh, the kind of laugh that verges on hysteria, that makes your stomach hurt, where the mere act of looking at someone sets you off again. “Did you have sex?” And that killed it. “Okay. This conversation has now got weird.” Lily pulled a face. “Your whole relationship sounds weird.” “It wasn’t at all. It . . . it . . .” It was suddenly too much: the rooftop, the questions, the joint, the memories of Will. We seemed to be conjuring him out of the air between us: his smile, his skin, the feel of his face against mine, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. I let my head fall slightly between my knees. Breathe, I told myself. “Louisa?” “What?” “Did he always plan to go to . . . that place? Dignitas?” I nodded. I repeated the word to myself, trying to quell my rising sense of panic. In. Out. Just breathe. “Did you try to change his mind?” “Will was . . . stubborn.” “Did you argue about it?” I swallowed. “Right up until the last day.” The last day. Why had I said that? I closed my eyes. When I finally opened them again, she was watching me. “Were you with him when he died?” Our eyes locked. The young are terrifying, I thought. They are without boundaries. They fear nothing. I could see the next question forming on her lips, the faint searching in her gaze. But perhaps she was not as brave as I’d thought. Finally she dropped her gaze. “So when are you going to tell his parents about me?” My head lurched. “This week. I’ll call this week.” She nodded, turned her face away so that I couldn’t see her expression. I watched as she inhaled again. And then, abruptly, she dropped the joint through the bars of the fire-escape steps, stood up, and climbed inside without a backward look. I waited until my legs felt as if they could support me again, then followed her through the window. 9 Icalled on Tuesday lunchtime, when a joint one-day strike by French and German air traffic control had left the bar almost empty. I waited until Richard had disappeared to the wholesalers, then stood out on the concourse, outside the last Ladies before security, and searched my phone for the number I had never been able to delete. The phone rang three, four times, and just for a moment I was filled with the overwhelming urge to press END CALL. But then a man’s voice answered, his vowels clipped, familiar. “Hello?” “Mr. Traynor? It—it’s Lou.” “Lou?” “Louisa Clark.” A short silence. I could hear his memories thudding down onto him along with the simple fact of my name and felt oddly guilty. The last time I had seen him had been at Will’s graveside, a prematurely aged man, repeatedly straightening his shoulders as he struggled under the weight of his grief. “Louisa. Well . . . goodness. This is— How are you?” I shifted to allow Violet to sway past with her trolley. She gave me a knowing smile, adjusting her purple turban with her free hand. I noticed she had little Union Jacks painted on her fingernails. “I’m very well, thank you. And how are you?” “Oh—you know. Actually I’m very well too. Circumstances have changed a little since we last saw each other, but it’s all . . . you know . . .” That temporary and uncharacteristic loss of bonhomie almost caused me to falter. I took a deep breath. “Mr. Traynor, I’m ringing because I really need to talk to you about something.” “I thought Michael Lawler had sorted out all the financial matters.” The tenor of his voice altered just slightly. “It’s not to do with money.” I closed my eyes. “Mr. Traynor, I had a visitor a short time ago and it’s someone I think you need to meet.” A woman bumped into my legs with her wheeled case and mouthed an apology. I lifted my foot and turned away. “Okay. There’s no simple way of doing this, so I’m just going to say it. Will had a daughter, and she turned up on my doorstep, and she’s desperate to meet you.” A long silence this time. “Mr. Traynor?” “I’m sorry. Can you repeat what you just said?” “Will had a daughter. He didn’t know about her. The mother is an old girlfriend of his, from university, who took it upon herself not to tell him. He had a daughter and she tracked me down and she really wants to meet you. She’s sixteen. Her name is Lily.” “Lily?” “Yes. I’ve spoken to her mother and she seems genuine. A woman called Miller. Tanya Miller.” “I—I don’t remember her. But Will did have an awful lot of girlfriends.” Another long silence. When he spoke again his voice cracked slightly. “Will had . . . a daughter?” “Yes. Your granddaughter.” “You—you really think she is his daughter?” “I’ve met her mother, and heard what she had to say, and yes, I really think she is.” “Oh. Oh, my.” I could hear a voice in the background. “Steven? Steven? Are you all right?” Another silence. “Mr. Traynor?” “I’m so sorry. It’s just—I’m a little . . .” I put my hand to my head. “It’s a huge shock. I know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t think of the best way to tell you. I didn’t want to just turn up at your house in case . . .” “No. No, don’t be sorry. It’s good news. Extraordinary news. A granddaughter.” “What’s going on? Why are you sitting down like that?” The voice in the background sounded concerned. I heard a hand go over the receiver, then, “I’m fine, darling. Really. I—I’ll explain everything in a minute.” More muffled conversation. And then back to me, his voice suddenly uncertain. “Louisa?” “Yes?” “You’re absolutely sure? I mean, this is just so—” “As sure as I can be, Mr. Traynor. I’m happy to explain more to you, but she’s sixteen and she’s full of life and she’s . . . well, she’s just very keen to find out about the family she never knew she had.” “Oh, my goodness. Oh, my . . . Louisa?” “I’m still here.” When he spoke again I found my eyes had filled unexpectedly with tears. “How do I meet her? How do we go about meeting . . . Lily?” • • • We drove up the following Saturday. Lily was afraid to go alone, but wouldn’t say as much. She just told me it was better if I explained everything to Mr. Traynor because “Old people were better at talking to each other.” We drove in silence. I felt almost sick with nerves at having to enter the Traynor house again, not that I could explain it to the passenger beside me. Lily said nothing. Did he believe you? Yes, I’d said. I think he did. Although she might be wise to have a blood test, just to reassure everyone. Did he actually ask to meet me, or did you suggest it? I couldn’t remember. My brain had set up a kind of static buzz just speaking to him again. What if I’m not what he’s expecting? I wasn’t sure he was expecting anything. He’d only just discovered he had a grandchild. Lily had turned up on Friday night, even though I hadn’t expected her until Saturday morning, saying that she’d had a massive row with her mother and that Fuckface Francis had told her she had some growing up to do. She sniffed. “This from a man who thinks it’s normal to have a whole room devoted to a train set.” I had told her she was welcome to stay as long as (a) I could get confirmation from her mother that she always knew where she was; (b) she didn’t drink; and (c) she didn’t smoke in my flat. Which meant that while I was in the bath she simply walked across the road to Samir’s shop and chatted to him for the length of time it took to smoke two cigarettes, but it seemed churlish to argue. Tanya Houghton-Miller wailed on for almost twenty minutes about the impossibility of everything, told me four times I would end up sending Lily home within fortyeight hours, and only got off the phone when a child started screaming in the background. I listened to Lily clattering around in my little kitchen, and to music I didn’t understand vibrating the few bits of furniture in my living room. Okay, Will, I told him silently. If this was your idea of pushing me into a whole new life you certainly nailed it this time. •• • That morning, I walked into the spare room to wake Lily and found her already awake, her arms curled around her legs, smoking by my open window. An array of clothes was tossed around on the bed, as if she had tried on a dozen outfits and found them all wanting. She glared at me as if daring me to say anything. I had a sudden image of Will, turning from the window in his wheelchair, his gaze furious and pained, and just for a moment it took my breath away. “We leave in half an hour,” I said. •• • We reached the outskirts of town shortly before eleven. Summer had brought the tourists flocking back to the narrow streets of Stortfold like clumps of earthbound, gaudily colored swallows, clutching guide books and ice creams, weaving their way aimlessly past the caf?s and seasonal shops full of castleimprinted coasters and calendars that would be swiftly placed in drawers at home and rarely looked at again. I drove slowly past the castle in the long queue of National Trust traffic, wondering at the PAC-a-MACs, anoraks, and sunhats that seemed to stay the same every year. This year was the five-hundredth anniversary of the castle, and everywhere we looked there were posters advertising events linked to it: morris dancers, hog roasts, village fetes. I drove up to the front of the house, grateful, suddenly, that we weren’t facing the annex where I had spent so much time with Will. We sat in the car for a moment and listened to the engine ticking down. Lily, I noticed, had bitten away nearly all of her nails. “You okay?” She shrugged. “Shall we go in, then?” She stared at her feet. “What if he doesn’t like me?” “Why wouldn’t he?” “Nobody else does.” I closed the door. “I’m sure that’s not true.” “Nobody at school likes me. My parents can’t wait to get rid of me.” She bit savagely at the corner of a remaining thumbnail. “What kind of mother lets her daughter go and live at the moldy old flat of someone they don’t even know?” I took a deep breath. “Mr. Traynor’s a nice man. And I wouldn’t have brought you here if I thought it wouldn’t go well.” “If he doesn’t like me, can we just leave? Like, really quickly?” “Of course.” “I’ll know. Just from how he looks at me.” “We’ll skid out on two wheels if necessary.” She smiled then, a small, reluctant grin. “Okay,” I said, trying not to show her that I was almost as nervous as she was. “Let’s do it.” • • • I stood on the step, watching Lily so that I wouldn’t think too hard about where I was. The door opened slowly, and there he stood, still in the same cornflower blue shirt I remembered from two summers ago, but a newer, shorter haircut, perhaps a vain attempt to combat the aging effects of extreme grief. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something to me but had forgotten what it was, and then he looked at Lily and stared, and his eyes widened just a little. “Lily?” She nodded. He gazed at her intently. Nobody moved. And then his mouth compressed, and tears filled his eyes, and he stepped forward and swept her into his arms. “Oh, my dear. Oh, my goodness. Oh, it’s so very good to meet you. Oh, my goodness.” His gray head came down to rest against hers. I wondered, briefly, if she would pull back; Lily was not someone who encouraged physical contact. But as I watched, her hands crept out and she reached around his waist and clutched his shirt, her knuckles whitening and her eyes closing as she let herself be held by him. They stood like that for what seemed an eternity, the old man and his granddaughter, not moving from the front step. He leaned back, and there were tears running down his face. “Let me look at you. Let me look.” She glanced over at me, embarrassed and pleased at the same time. “Yes. Yes, I can see it. Look at you! Look at you!” His face swung toward mine. “She looks like him, doesn’t she?” I nodded. She was staring at him too, searching, perhaps, for traces of her father. When she looked down, they were still holding each other’s hands. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized I was crying. It was the naked relief on Mr. Traynor’s battered old face, the joy of something he had thought lost and partially recaptured, the sheer unexpected happiness of both of them in finding each other. And as she smiled back at him—a slow, sweet smile of recognition— my nervousness, and any doubts I’d had about Lily Houghton-Miller were banished. • • • It had been less than two years, but Granta House had changed significantly since I had last been there. Gone were the enormous antique cabinets, the trinket boxes on highly polished mahogany tables, the heavy drapes. It took the waddling figure of Della Layton to indicate why that might be. There were still a few glowing pieces of antique furniture, yes, but everything else was white or brightly colored—new sunshine-yellow Sanderson curtains and pale rugs on the old wood floors, modern prints in unmolded frames. She moved toward us slowly and her smile was faintly guarded, like something she had forced herself to wear. I found myself moving back involuntarily as she approached; there was something oddly shocking about such a very pregnant woman—the sheer bulk of her, the almost obscene curve of her stomach. “Hello. You must be Louisa. How lovely to meet you.” Her lustrous red hair was pinned up in a clip, a pale blue linen shirt rolled up around slightly swollen wrists. I couldn’t help noticing the enormous diamond engagement ring cutting into her wedding finger, and wondered with a vague pang what the last months had been like for Mrs. Traynor. “Congratulations,” I said, nodding toward her belly. I wanted to say something else, but I could never work out whether it was appropriate to say a heavily pregnant woman was “large,” “not large,” “neat,” “blooming,” or any of the other euphemisms people seemed to use to disguise what they wanted to say, which was essentially along the lines of bloody hell. “Thank you. It was a bit of a surprise, but a very welcome one.” Her gaze slid away from me. She was watching Mr. Traynor and Lily. He still had one of her hands encased in hers, patting it for emphasis, and was telling her about the house, how it had been passed through the family for so many generations. “Would everyone like tea?” she asked. And then, again, “Steven? Tea?” “Lovely, darling. Thank you. Lily, do you drink tea?” “Could I have juice, please? Or some water?” Lily smiled. “I’ll help you,” I said to Della. Mr. Traynor had begun to point out ancestors in the portraits on the wall, his hand at Lily’s elbow, remarking on the similarity of her nose to this one, or the color of her hair to that one over there. Della watched them for a moment, and I thought I noticed something close to dismay flicker across her features. She caught me looking, and smiled briskly, as if embarrassed to have her feelings so nakedly on display. “That would be lovely. Thank you.” • • • We moved around each other in the kitchen, fetching milk, sugar, a teapot, exchanging polite queries about biscuits. I stooped to get the cups out of the cupboard when Della couldn’t comfortably reach that low, and placed them on the kitchen worktop. New cups, I noticed. A modern, geometrical design, instead of the worn, delicately painted porcelain featuring wild herbs and flowers with Latin names that her predecessor had favored. All traces of Mrs. Traynor’s thirty-eight-year tenure here seemed to have been swiftly and ruthlessly erased. “The house looks . . . nice. Different,” I said. “Yes. Well, Steven lost a lot of his furniture in the divorce. So we had to change the look a bit.” She reached for the tea caddy. “He lost things that had been in his family for generations. Of course she took everything she could.” She flashed me a look, as if assessing whether she could consider me an ally. “I haven’t spoken to Mrs. . . . Camilla since Will . . .” I said, feeling oddly disloyal. “So. Steven said this girl just turned up on your doorstep.” Her smile was small and fixed. “Yes. It was a . . . surprise. But I’ve met Lily’s mother, and she . . . well, she was obviously close to Will for some time.” Della stood up and put her hand on the small of her back, then turned back to the kettle. Mum had said she headed a small solicitors’ practice in the next town. You’ve got to wonder about a woman who hasn’t been married by thirty, she had said sniffily, and then, after a quick look in my direction, Forty. I meant forty. “What do you think she wants?” “I’m sorry?” “What do you think she wants? The girl?” I could hear Lily in the hall, asking questions, childish and interested, and I felt oddly protective. “I don’t think she wants anything. She just discovered she had a father she hadn’t known about, and wants to get to know his family. Her family.” Della warmed and emptied the teapot, measured out the tea leaves (loose, I noted, just as Mrs. Traynor would have had). She poured the boiling water slowly, careful not to splash herself. “I have loved Steven for a very long time. He—he—has had a very hard time this last year or so. It would be . . .” She didn’t look at me as she spoke. “It would be very difficult for him if Lily were to complicate his life at this point.” “I don’t think Lily wants to complicate either of your lives,” I said carefully. “But I do think she has a right to know her own grandfather.” “Of course,” she said smoothly, that automatic smile back in place. I realized, in that instant, that I had failed some internal test, and also that I didn’t care. And then with a final murmured check of the tray, Della picked it up and, accepting my offer to bring the cake and the teapot, carried it through to the drawing room. • • • “And how are you, Louisa?” Mr. Traynor leaned back in his easy chair, a broad smile breaking his saggy features. He had talked to Lily almost constantly throughout tea, asking questions about her mother, where she lived, what she was studying (she didn’t tell him about the problems at school), whether she preferred fruitcake or chocolate (“Chocolate? Me too!”), liked ginger (no), and cricket (not really —“Well, we’ll have to do something about that!”). He seemed reassured by her, by her likeness to his son. At that point, he probably wouldn’t have cared if she had announced that her mother was a Brazilian lap dancer. I watched him sneaking looks at Lily when she was talking, studying her in profile, as if perhaps he could see Will there too. Other times I caught a flicker of melancholy in his expression. I suspected that he was thinking what I had thought: this new, unexpected grief that his son would never know her. Then he would almost visibly pull himself together, forcing himself a little more upright, a ready smile back upon his face. He had walked her around the grounds for half an hour, exclaiming when they returned that Lily had found her way out of the maze “on your first go! It must be a genetic thing.” Lily had smiled as broadly as if she had won a prize. “And Louisa? What is happening in your life?” “I’m fine, thank you.” “Are you still working as a . . . caregiver?” “No. I—I went traveling for a bit, and now I’m working at an airport.” “Oh! Good! British Airways, I hope?” I felt my cheeks color. “Management, is it?” “I work in a bar. At the airport.” He hesitated, just a fraction of a second, and nodded, firmly. “People always need bars. Especially at airports. I always have a double whisky before I get on a plane, don’t I, darling?” “Yes, you do,” replied Della. “And I suppose it must be rather interesting watching everyone fly off every day. Exciting.” “I have other things in the pipeline.” “Of course you do. Good. Good . . .” There was a short silence. “So when is the baby due?” I said, to shift everybody’s attention away from me. “Next month,” said Della, her hands proudly resting on the swell of her belly. “It’s a girl.” “How lovely. What are you going to call her?” They exchanged the glances that parents-to-be do when they have chosen a name but don’t want to tell anyone. “Oh . . . we don’t know.” “Feels most odd. To be a father again, at my age. Can’t quite imagine it all. You know, changing nappies, that sort of thing.” He glanced at Della, then added, reassuringly, “It’s marvelous, though. I’m a very lucky man. We’re both very lucky, aren’t we, Della?” She smiled at him. “I’m sure,” I said. “How’s Georgina?” Perhaps only I would have noticed how Mr. Traynor’s expression changed, just a degree. “Oh, she’s fine. Still in Australia, you know.” “Right.” “She did come over a few months ago . . . but she spent most of her time with her mother. She was very busy.” “Of course.” “I think she’s got a boyfriend. I’m sure someone told me she had a boyfriend. So that’s . . . that’s nice.” Della’s hand reached across and touched his. “Who’s Georgina?” Lily was eating a biscuit. “Will’s younger sister,” said Mr. Traynor, turning to her. “Your aunt! Yes! In fact, she looked a little like you when she was your age.” “Can I see a picture?” “I’ll find you one.” Mr. Traynor rubbed the side of his face. “I’m trying to remember where we put that graduation photo.” “Your study,” said Della. “Stay there, darling. I’ll get it. Good for me to keep moving.” She levered herself off the sofa and walked heavily out of the room. Lily insisted on going with her. “I want to see the rest of the photographs. I want to see who I look like.” Mr. Traynor watched them go, still smiling. We sat and sipped our tea in silence. He turned to me. “Have you spoken to her yet? . . . Camilla?” “I don’t know where she lives. I was going to ask you for her details. I know Lily wants to meet her too.” “She’s had a difficult time of it. George says so, anyway. We haven’t really spoken. It’s all a bit complicated because of . . .” He nodded toward the door and let out an almost imperceptible sigh. “Would you like to tell her? About Lily?” “Oh, no. Oh . . . No. I—I’m not sure she’d really want . . .” He ran a hand over his brow. “Probably better if you do it.” He copied out the address and phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “It’s some distance away,” he noted, and smiled apologetically. “Think she wanted a fresh start. Give her my best, won’t you? It’s odd . . . to finally have a grandchild, in these circumstances.” He lowered his voice. “Funnily enough, Camilla is the only person who could really understand how I’m feeling right now.” If he had been anybody else I might have hugged him just then, but we were English and he had once been my boss of sorts, so we simply smiled awkwardly at each other. And possibly wished we were somewhere else. Mr. Traynor straightened in his chair. “Still. I’m a lucky man. A new start, at my age. Not sure I really deserve it.” “I’m not sure happiness is a matter of what you deserve.” “And you? I . . . I know you were very fond of Will . . .” “He’s a hard act to follow.” I was conscious of the sudden lump in my throat. When it cleared, Mr. Traynor was still looking at me. “My son was all about living, Louisa. I don’t need to tell you that.” “That’s the thing, though, isn’t it?” He waited. “He was just better at it than the rest of us.” “You’ll get there, Louisa. We all get there. In our own ways.” He touched my elbow, his expression soft. Della, arriving back into the living room, began to move the tea tray, stacking the cups so ostentatiously that it could only have been a signal. “We’d better get going,” I said to Lily, standing as she came in, holding out the framed photograph. “She does look like me, doesn’t she? Do you think our eyes are a bit the same? Do you think she’d want to speak to me? Is she on e-mail?” “I’m sure she will,” said Mr. Traynor. “But if you don’t mind, Lily, I’ll speak to her myself first. It’s quite big news for us all to digest. Best give her a few days to get used to it.” “Okay. So when can I come and stay?” To my right, I heard the clatter of Della almost dropping a cup. She stooped slightly, righting it on the tray. “Stay?” Mr. Traynor bent forward, as if he weren’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “Well. You’re my grandfather. I thought maybe I could come and stay for the rest of the summer? Get to know you. We’ve got so much to catch up on, haven’t we?” Her face was alight with anticipation. Mr. Traynor looked toward Della, whose expression halted whatever he might have been about to say. “It would be lovely to have you at some point,” Della said, holding the tray in front of her, “but we have other things going on just now.” “It’s Della’s first child, you see. I think she’d like—” “I just need a little time by myself with Steven. And the baby.” “I could help. I’m really good with babies,” Lily said. “I used to look after my brothers all the time when they were babies. And they were awful. Really horrible babies. They screamed, like, all the time.” Mr. Traynor looked at Della. “I’m sure you’ll be simply brilliant, Lily darling,” he said. “It’s just that right now is not a very good time.” “But you’ve got loads of room. I can just stay in one of the guest rooms. You won’t even know I’m here. I’ll be really helpful with nappies and stuff and I could babysit so you could still go out. I could just . . .” Lily tailed off. She glanced from one to the other, waiting. “Lily . . .” I said, hovering uncomfortably near the door. “You don’t want me here.” Mr. Traynor stepped forward, made as if to put a hand on her shoulder. “Lily, darling. That’s not—” She ducked away. “You like the idea of having a granddaughter, but you don’t actually want me in your life. You just . . . you just want a visitor.” “It’s just the timing, Lily,” said Della calmly. “It’s just—well, I waited a long time for Steven—your grandfather, and this time with our baby is very precious to us.” “And I’m not.” “That’s not it at all.” Mr. Traynor moved toward her again. She batted him off. “Oh, God, you’re all the same. You and your perfect little families, all closed off. Nobody has any room for me.” “Oh, come on now. Let’s not be dramatic about—” Della began. “Get lost,” Lily spat. And as Della shrank back, and Mr. Traynor’s eyes widened in shock, she ran, and I left them in the silent drawing room to race after her. 10 Ie-mailed Nathan. The answer came back: Lou, have you started on strong meds? WTAF? I sent him a second e-mail, filling in a little more detail, and his normal equanimity seemed to return. Well, the old dog. Still had some surprises for us, eh? I didn’t hear from Lily for two days. Half of me was concerned, the other a tiny bit relieved just to have a brief interlude of calm. I wondered if once she was free of any fairy-tale ideas about Will’s family she might be more inclined to build bridges with her own. I wondered whether Mr. Traynor would call her directly to smooth things over. I wondered where Lily was and whether her absence involved the young man who had stood and watched her in my doorway. There had been something about him—about Lily’s evasiveness when I asked about him—that had stayed with me. I had thought a lot about Sam, regretting my rapid exit. With hindsight, it had all seemed a bit overemotional and weird, running away from him like that. I must have seemed the exact person I kept protesting I wasn’t. I resolved that the next time I saw him outside the Moving On Circle I would react very calmly, perhaps say hello with an enigmatic, non-depressed-person smile. Work sagged and dragged. A new girl had started: Vera, a stern Lithuanian, who completed all the bar’s tasks with the kind of peculiar half smile of someone contemplating the fact that she had actually planted a dirty bomb nearby. She called all men “filthy, filthy beasts” when out of earshot of Richard. He in turn had begun giving morning “motivational” chats, after which we all had to pump the air with our fists, jump up, and shout “YEAH!,” which always dislodged my curly wig; then he would roll his eyes like it was somehow a failure indicative of my personality and not a built-in hazard of wearing a nylon hairpiece that didn’t actually stick to my head. Vera’s wig stayed immobile on hers. I wondered whether it was too afraid to fall off. One night when I got home I did an Internet search on teenagers’ problems, trying to work out whether I could help repair the damage of the weekend. There was quite a lot on hormones and breakouts but nothing on what to do when you had introduced a sixteen-year-old you had just met to her dead biological quadriplegic father’s surviving family. At half past ten I gave up, gazed around at the bedroom in which half my clothes were still stored in boxes, promised myself that this would be the week I’d do something about it, and finally, having reassured myself that I totally would, fell asleep. • • • I was woken at half past two in the morning by the sound of someone trying to force my front door. I stumbled out of bed and grabbed a mop, then put my face to the peephole, my heart thumping. “I’m calling the police!” I yelled. “What do you want?” “It’s Lily. Duh.” She fell through the door as I opened it, half laughing, reeking of cigarettes, her mascara smeared around her eyes. I wrapped my dressing gown around me and locked the door behind her. “Jesus, Lily. It’s the middle of the night.” “Do you want to go dancing? I thought we could go dancing. I love dancing. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I do like dancing but that’s not why I’m here. Mum wouldn’t let me in. They’ve changed the locks. Can you believe it?” I was tempted to answer that just at that moment, with my alarm clock set for 6 a.m., funnily enough, I could. Lily bumped heavily against the wall. “She wouldn’t even open the stupid door. Just shouted through the letterbox at me. Like I was some kind of . . . vagrant. So . . . I thought I’d stay here. Or we could go dancing . . .” She swayed past me and headed for the iHome, where she turned up the music to a deafening volume. I raced toward it to turn it down, but she grabbed my hand. “Let’s dance, Louisa! You need to bust some moves! You’re so sad all the time! Cut loose! C’mon!” I wrenched my hand away and rushed to the volume button, just in time for the first thumps of outrage to land from downstairs. When I turned around, Lily had disappeared into the spare room, where she teetered and finally collapsed, facedown, on the camp bed. “Oh, my God. This bed is soooooo rubbish.” “Lily? . . . Lily? You can’t just come in here and—oh, for God’s sake.” “Just for a minute,” came the muffled answer. “Literally a stopover. And then I’m going dancing. We’re going dancing.” “Lily, I have work tomorrow morning.” “I love you, Louisa. Did I tell you that? I really do love you. You’re the only one who . . .” “You can’t just collapse here like—” “Mmph . . . disco nap . . .” She didn’t move. I touched her shoulder. “Lily . . . Lily?” She let out a small snore. I sighed, waited a few minutes, then carefully removed her tatty pumps, and the contents of her pocket (cigarettes, mobile phone, a crumpled fiver), which I took into my room. I propped her onto her side in the recovery position, and then finally, wide awake at 3 a.m. and knowing that I would probably not sleep for fear she would choke, sat on the chair, watching her. Lily’s face was peaceful. The wary scowl, and the manic, overeager smile had stilled into something unearthly and beautiful, her hair fanned around her shoulders. Maddening as her behavior was, I couldn’t be angry. I kept recalling the hurt on her face that Sunday. Lily was my polar opposite. She didn’t nurse a hurt, or contain it. She lashed out, got drunk, did God knows what to try to make herself forget. She was more like her father than I’d thought. What would you have made of this, Will? I asked him silently. But just as I had struggled to help him, I didn’t know what to do for her. I didn’t know how to make it better. I thought of my sister’s words: you won’t be able to cope, you know. And just for a few still, predawn moments, I hated her for being right. • • • We developed a routine of sorts, in which Lily would turn up to see me every few days. I was never certain which Lily I would find at my door: manically cheerful Lily, demanding that we go out and eat at this restaurant or look at the totally gorgeous cat outside on the wall downstairs or dance in the living room to some band she’d just discovered; or subdued, wary Lily, who would nod a silent greeting on her way in, then lie on my sofa and watch television. Sometimes she would ask random questions about Will—what programs did he like? (He barely watched television; he preferred films.) Did he have a favorite fruit? (Seedless grapes. Red ones.) When was the last time I saw him laugh? (He didn’t laugh much, but his smile . . . I could picture it now, a rare flash of even white teeth, his eyes wrinkling with pleasure.) I was never sure whether she found my answers satisfactory. And then, every ten days or so, there was drunk Lily, or worse (I was never sure), who would hammer on my door in the small hours, ignoring my protests about time and lost sleep, stumble past me with mascara-smudged cheeks and missing shoes, and pass out on the little camp bed, refusing to wake when I left in the morning. She seemed to have no hobbies, and few friends. She would talk to anyone in the street, asking favors with the unembarrassed insouciance of a feral kid. But she wouldn’t answer the phone at home and seemed to expect everyone she met to dislike her. Given that most private schools had finished for the summer, I asked her where she was when she wasn’t at my flat or visiting her mother, and after a brief pause, she said “Martin’s.” When I asked if he was her boyfriend, she pulled the universal teenage face in response to an adult who had said something not just spectacularly stupid but revolting too. Sometimes she would be angry, at others, rude. But I could never refuse her. Chaotic as her behavior was, I got the feeling my flat was a safe haven. I found myself searching for clues: examining her phone for messages (pin locked), her pockets for drugs (none, apart from that one joint), and once, ten minutes after she had come in, tearstained and drunk, staring down at the car that sat outside my block and sat on its horn intermittently for the better part of three quarters of an hour, until one of my neighbors went downstairs and thumped on his window so hard that he had finally driven off. “You know, I’m not judging, but it’s not a good idea to get so drunk that you don’t know what you’re doing, Lily,” I said one morning, as I made us both coffee. Lily spent so much time with me now that I’d had to adjust the way I lived: shopping for two, picking up mess that wasn’t my own, making a full pot of tea and not just a mug, remembering to lock the bathroom door to avoid shrieks of Oh, my God. Gross! “You are totally judging. That’s exactly what saying ‘it’s not a good idea’ means.” “I’m serious.” “Do I tell you how to live your life? Do I tell you that this flat is depressing, and you dress like someone who has lost the will to live, apart from when you’re being a gammy-legged porno pixie? Do I? Do I? No. I don’t say anything, so just leave me alone.” I wanted to tell her then. I wanted to tell her what had happened to me nine years earlier, on a night when I had drunk too much, and how my sister had led me home, shoeless and crying silently, in the early hours. But she would no doubt greet it with the same childish scorn with which she greeted most of my revelations, and it was a conversation I had only ever managed to have with one person. And he wasn’t here anymore. “It’s also not fair to wake me up in the middle of the night. I have to get up early for work.” “So give me a key. Then I won’t wake you up, will I?” She blasted me with that winning smile. It was rare and dazzling and enough like Will’s that I found myself giving the key to her. Even as I handed it over, I knew what my sister would say. • • • I spoke to Mr. Traynor twice during that time. He was anxious to know Lily was well, had started to worry about what she was going to do with her life. “I mean, she’s plainly a bright girl. It’s not a good idea for her to drop out of school at sixteen. Do her parents not have anything to say about it?” “They don’t seem to speak very much.” “Should I speak to them? Do you think she needs a university fund? I have to say, things are a tad tighter than they were since the divorce, but Will left a fair bit. So I thought that might be . . . an appropriate use for it.” He lowered his voice. “It might be wise, though, for us not to mention anything to Della just now. I don’t want her getting the wrong idea.” I resisted the urge to ask what the right idea might be. “Louisa, do you think you could persuade Lily to come back? I keep thinking about her. I’d like us all to try again. I know Della would love to get to know her better too.” I remembered Della’s expression as we had tiptoed around each other in the kitchen, and wondered whether Mr. Traynor was willfully blind or just an eternal optimist. “I’ll try,” I promised. • • • There is a peculiar sort of silence in a flat when you are on your own in a city on a hot summer weekend. I was on the early shift, finished at four, and arrived home by five, exhausted, and secretly grateful that for a few brief hours I had my home to myself. I showered, ate some toast, took a look online to see if there were any jobs that either paid more than the minimum wage or were not zerohour contracts, and then sat in the living room with all the windows open to encourage a breeze, listening to the sounds of the city filtering in on the warm air. Most of the time, I was reasonably content with my life. I had been to enough group sessions now to know that it was important to be grateful for simple pleasures. I was healthy. I had my family again. I was working. If I hadn’t made peace with Will’s death, I did at least feel like I might be crawling out from under its shadow. And yet. On evenings like this, when the streets below were filled with couples strolling, and laughing people spilled out of pubs, already planning meals, nights out, trips to clubs, something ached inside me, something primal telling me that I was in the wrong place, that I was missing something. These were the moments when I felt most left behind. I tidied up a little, washed my uniform, and then, just as I was sinking into a kind of quiet melancholy, my buzzer sounded. Lily tended to use it only in the small hours of the morning, or when she had forgotten she now owned a key. And as she so kindly pointed out, I had no other friends. Or at least none that were likely to come to my home. I stood and picked up the entry phone wearily, expecting a request for directions from a UPS driver, or some misdirected Hawaiian pizza, but instead I heard a man’s voice. “Louisa?” “Who is this?” I said, though I knew immediately who it was. “Sam. Ambulance Sam. I was just passing by on the way home from work, and I just . . . Well, you left in such a hurry the other night, I thought I’d make sure you were okay.” “A fortnight later? I could have been eaten by cats by now.” “I’m guessing you weren’t.” “I don’t have a cat.” A short silence. “But I’m fine, Ambulance Sam. Thanks.” “Great . . . That’s good to hear.” I shifted, so I could see him through the grainy black and white of the little entry video screen. He was wearing a biker jacket instead of his paramedics uniform, and had one hand resting against the wall. He took his hand off the wall and turned to face the road. I saw him let out a breath, and that small motion that prompted me to speak. “So . . . what are you up to?” “Not much. Trying and failing to chat someone up through an entry phone, mostly.” My laugh was too quick. Too loud. “I gave up on that ages ago,” I said. “It makes buying them a drink really, really hard.” I saw him laugh. I looked around at my silent flat. And I spoke before I could think. “Stay there. I’ll come down.” • • • I was going to bring my car, but when he held out a spare motorbike helmet, it seemed prissy to insist on my own transport. I stuffed my keys into my pocket and stood waiting for him to motion me aboard. “You’re a paramedic. And you ride a motorbike.” “I know. But as vices go she’s pretty much the only one I have left.” He grinned wolfishly. Something inside me lurched unexpectedly. “You don’t feel safe with me?” There was no appropriate answer to that question. I held his gaze and climbed onto the back. I figured if he did anything dangerous he had the skills to patch me up again afterward. “So what do I do?” I said, as I pulled the helmet over my head. “I’ve never been on one of these before.” “Hold on to those handlebars on the seat, and just move with the bike. Don’t brace against me. If you’re not happy tap me on the shoulder and I’ll stop.” “Where are we going?” “You any good at interior decorating?” “Hopeless. Why?” He fired up the ignition. “I thought I’d show you my new house.” And then we were in the traffic, weaving in and out of the cars and lorries, following signs to the motorway. I had to shut my eyes, press myself against his back and hope that he couldn’t hear me squeal. • • • We went out to the very edge of the city, a place where the gardens grew larger, then morphed into fields, and houses had names instead of numbers. We came through a village that wasn’t quite separate from the one before it, and Sam slowed the bike at a field gate and finally cut the engine, motioning for me to climb off. I removed the helmet, my heart still thumping in my ears, and tried to lift my sweaty hair from my head with fingers that were still stiff from gripping the pillion handles. Sam opened the gate and ushered me through. Half the field was grassland, the other an irregular mess of concrete blocks. In the corner beyond the building work, sheltered by a high hedge, stood a railway carriage and, beside it, a chicken run in which several birds stopped to look expectantly toward us. “My house.” “Nice!” I glanced around. “Um . . . where is it?” Sam set off down the field. “There. That’s the foundation. Took me the better part of three months to get that down.” “You live here?” “Yup.” I stared at the concrete slabs. When I looked at him, something in his expression made me bite back what I was going to say. I rubbed at my head. “So . . . are you going to stand there all evening? Or are you going to give me a guided tour?” Bathed in the evening sun, and surrounded by the scents of grass and lavender and the lazy hum of the bees, we walked slowly from one slab to another, Sam pointing out where the windows and doors would be. “This is the bathroom.” “Bit drafty.” “Yeah. I need to do something about that. Watch out. That’s not actually a doorway. You just walked into the shower.” He stepped over a pile of concrete blocks onto another large gray slab, holding out his hand so that I could step safely over them too. “And here’s the living room. So if you look through that window there,” he held his fingers in a square, “you get the views of the open countryside.” I looked out at the shimmering landscape below. It felt as if we were a million miles away from the city, not ten. I took a deep breath, enjoying the unexpectedness of it all. “It’s nice, but I think your sofa’s in the wrong place,” I said. “You need two. One here, and maybe one there. And I’m guessing you have a window here?” “Oh, yes. Got to be dual aspect.” “Hmm. Plus you totally need to rethink your storage.” The crazy thing was, within a few minutes of our walking and talking, I could actually see the house. I followed the line of Sam’s hands as he gestured toward invisible fireplaces, summoned staircases out of his imagination, drew lines across invisible ceilings. I could see its overheight windows, the banisters that a friend of his would carve out of aged oak. “It’s going to be lovely,” I said, when we had conjured the last en suite. “In about ten years. But, yup, I hope so.” I gazed around the field, taking in the vegetable patch, the chicken run, the birdsong. “I have to tell you, this is not what I expected. You aren’t tempted to, you know, get builders in?” “I probably will, eventually. But I like doing it. It’s good for the soul, building a house.” He shrugged. “When you spend all day patching up stab wounds and overconfident cyclists and the wives whose husbands have used them as punching bags and the kids with chronic asthma from the damp . . .” “. . . and the daft women who fall off rooftops.” “Those too—” He gestured toward the concrete mixer, the piles of bricks. “I do this so I can live with that. Beer?” He climbed into the railway carriage, motioning for me to join him. It was no longer a railway carriage inside. It had a small, immaculately laid out kitchen area, and an L-shaped upholstered seat at the end, though it still carried the faint smell of beeswax and tweedy passengers. “I don’t like mobile homes,” he said, as if in explanation. He gestured to the seat. “Sit,” then pulled a cold beer from the fridge, cracking it open and handing me the bottle. He set a kettle on the stove for himself. “You’re not drinking?” He shook his head. “I found after a couple of years on the job that I’d come home and have a drink to relax. And then it was two. And then I found I couldn’t relax until I’d had those two, or maybe three.” He opened a caddy, dropped a teabag into the mug. “And then I . . . I lost someone close to me, and I decided that either I stopped or I would never stop drinking again.” He didn’t look at me while he said this, just moved around the railway carriage, a bulky, yet oddly graceful presence within its narrow walls. “I do have the odd beer, but not tonight. I’m driving you home later.” Comments like that took the weirdness out of sitting in a railway carriage cum residence with a man I didn’t really know. How could you maintain a reserve with someone who had tended your broken, partially unclothed body? How could you feel anxious around a man who had already told you of his plan to take you home again? It was as if the manner of our first meeting had removed the normal, awkward obstacles of getting to know someone. He had seen me in my underwear. Hell, he had seen under my actual skin. It meant I felt at ease around Sam in a way I didn’t with anyone else anymore. While he was making tea, I gazed around me at the little space. It reminded me of the Gypsy caravans I had read about in childhood, where everything had a place, and there was order in a confined space. It was homey, but austere, and unmistakably male. It smelled agreeably of sun-warmed wood, of soap and bacon. A fresh start, I guessed. I wondered what had happened to his and Jake’s old home. “So . . . um . . . what does Jake think of it?” He sat down at the other end of the bench with his mug of tea. “He thought I was mad at first. Now he quite likes it. He does the animals when I’m on shift. In return I’ve promised to teach him to drive around the field once he turns seventeen.” He lifted his mug. “God help me.” I raised my beer in return. Perhaps it was the unexpected pleasure of being out on a warm Friday evening with a man who held your eye as he spoke and had the kind of hair you slightly wanted to ruffle with your fingers, or maybe it was just the second beer, but I finally started to enjoy myself. It got stuffy in the carriage, so we moved outside onto two fold-up chairs, and I watched the chickens peck around in the grass, which was oddly restful, and listened to Sam’s tales of obese patients who required four teams to lift them out of their homes, and young gang members who tried to attack each other even as they were being stitched up in the back of his rig. As we talked, I found myself sneaking looks at him; at the way his hands held his mug, at his unexpected smiles, which caused three perfect lines to span out from the corner of each eye as if they had been drawn with fine-pointed precision. He told me about his parents: his father a retired fireman, his mother a nightclub singer who had given up her career for her children. (“I think it’s why your outfit spoke to me. I’m comfortable with glitter.”) He didn’t mention his late wife by name, but observed that his mother worried about the ongoing lack of a feminine influence in Jake’s life. “She comes and scoops him up once a month and takes him back to Cardiff so she and her sisters can coo over him and feed him up and make sure he has enough socks.” He rested his elbows on his knees. “He moans about going, but he secretly loves it.” He went quiet for a while after that. I told him about Lily’s return, and he winced at my tale of her meeting with the Traynors. I told him about her moodiness, and her erratic behavior, and he nodded, as if this were all to be expected. When I told him about Lily’s mother he shook his head. “Just because they’re wealthy doesn’t make them better parents,” he said. “If she was on benefits, that mother would probably get a little visit from social services.” He lifted his mug to me. “It’s a great thing you’re doing, Louisa Clark.” “I’m not sure I’m doing it very well.” “Nobody ever feels they’re doing well with teenagers,” he said. “I think that’s kind of the point of them.” It was hard to reconcile this Sam, at ease in his home, with his chickens, with the sobbing, skirt-chasing version that we heard about in the Moving On Circle. But then I knew better than anyone how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was really inside. I knew how grief could make you behave in ways you couldn’t even begin to understand. “I love your railway carriage,” I said. “And your invisible house.” “Then I hope you’ll come again,” he said. The compulsive shagger. If this was how he picked up women, I thought, a little wistfully, then, boy, he was good. It was a potent mix: the gentlemanly, grieving father, the rare smiles, the way he could scoop up a hen one-handed and the hen actually looked happy about it. I would not allow myself to become one of the psycho girlfriends, I told myself repeatedly. But there was a sneaking pleasure to be had in just flirting gently with a handsome man. It was nice to feel something other than anxiety, or mute fury, the twin emotions that seemed to make up so much of my daily life. The only other encounters I’d had with the opposite sex in the past eighteen months had been fueled by alcohol and ended with a taxi and tears of self-loathing in the shower. What do you think, Will? Is this okay? It had grown darker, and we watched as the chickens clucked their way indignantly into their coop. “I get the feeling, Louisa Clark, that when you’re talking to me, there’s a whole other conversation going on somewhere else.” I wanted to come back with a smart answer. But he was right, and there was nothing I could say. “You and I. We’re both skirting around something.” “You’re very direct.” “And now I’ve made you uncomfortable.” “No.” I glanced over at him. “Well, maybe, a little.” Behind us, a crow lifted noisily into the sky, its flapping wings sending vibrations through the still air. I fought the urge to smooth my hair and instead took a last swig of my beer. “Okay. Well. Here’s a real question. How long do you think it takes to get over someone dying? Someone you really loved, I mean.” I’m not entirely sure why I asked him. It was almost cruelly direct, given his circumstances. Perhaps I was afraid that the compulsive shagger was about to come out to play. Sam’s eyes widened just a little. “Whoa. Well”—he looked down at his mug, and then out at the shadowy fields—“I’m not sure you ever do.” “That’s cheery.” “No. Really. I’ve thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people anymore. It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It’s just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become . . . a doughnut instead of a bun.” There was such sadness in his face, I felt suddenly guilty. “A doughnut.” “Stupid analogy,” he said with a half smile. “I didn’t mean to—” He shook his head. He looked at the grass between his feet then sideways at me. “C’mon. Let’s get you home.” We walked across the field to his bike. It had finally cooled off, and I crossed my arms over my chest. He saw, and handed me his jacket, insisting when I said I was okay. It was pleasingly heavy, and potently male. I tried not to inhale. “Do you pick up all your patients like this?” “Only the live ones.” I laughed. It came out of me unexpectedly, louder than I had intended. “We’re not really supposed to ask patients out on dates.” He held out the spare helmet. “But I figure you’re not my patient anymore.” I took it. “And this isn’t really a date.” “It isn’t?” He gave a small, philosophical nod as I climbed aboard. “Okay.” 11 J ake wasn’t there when I arrived at the Moving On Circle that week. As Daphne discussed her inability to open jars without a man in her kitchen, and Sunil talked of the problems of dividing up his brother’s few belongings among his remaining siblings, I found myself waiting for the heavy red doors to open at the end of the church hall. I told myself that it was his welfare I was concerned about; that he needed to be able to express his discomfort at his father’s behavior in a safe place. I told myself firmly that it was not Sam I was hoping to see, leaning against his bike, waiting. “What are the small things that you find trip you up, Louisa?” Perhaps Jake had finished with the group, I thought. Perhaps he had decided he didn’t need it anymore. People did drop out, everyone said. And that would be it. I would never see either of them again. “Louisa? The daily things? There must be something.” I kept thinking about that field, the neat confines of the railway carriage, the way Sam had strolled down the field with a hen under one arm, like he was carrying a precious parcel. The feathers on her chest had been as soft as a whisper. Daphne nudged me. “We were discussing the small things in day-to-day life that force you to contemplate loss,” said Marc. “I miss sex,” said Natasha. “That’s not a small thing,” replied William. “You didn’t know my husband,” said Natasha, and snorted a laugh. “Not really. That’s a terrible joke to make. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” “It’s good to joke,” said Marc encouragingly. “Olaf was perfectly well endowed. Very well endowed, in fact.” Natasha’s eyes flickered around us. When nobody spoke she held up her hands, a foot apart, and nodded emphatically. “We were very happy.” There was a short silence. “Good,” said Marc. “That’s nice to hear.” “I don’t want anyone thinking . . . I mean, that’s not what I want people thinking when they think of my husband. That he had a tiny—” “I’m sure nobody thinks that about your husband.” “I will, if you keep going on about it,” said William. “I don’t want you thinking about my husband’s penis,” said Natasha. “In fact, I forbid you to think about my husband’s penis.” “Stop going on about it then!” said William. “Can we not talk about penises?” said Daphne. “It makes me go a bit peculiar. The nuns used to smack us with rulers if we even used the word undercarriage.” Marc’s voice was now tinged with desperation. “Can we steer the conversation away from—back to symbols of loss. Louisa, you were about to tell us which were the small things that brought your loss home to you?” I sat there, trying to ignore Natasha holding up her hands again, silently measuring some unlikely invisible length. “I think I miss having someone to discuss things with,” I said carefully. There was a murmur of agreement. “I mean, I’m not one of those people who has a massive circle of friends. I was with my last boyfriend for ages and we . . . we didn’t really go out much. And then there was . . . Bill. We just used to talk all the time. About music and people and things we’d done and wanted to do, and I never worried about whether I was going to say the wrong thing or offend someone, because he just ‘got’ me, you know? And now I’ve moved to London and I’m sort of on my own apart from my family, and talking to them is always . . . tricky.” “Word,” said Sunil. “And now there’s something going on that I’d just really like to chat to him about. I talk to him in my head, but it isn’t the same. I miss having that . . . ability to just go, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ And knowing that whatever he said was probably going to be the right thing.” The group was silent for a minute. “You can talk to us, Louisa,” said Marc. “It’s . . . complicated.” “It’s always complicated,” said Leanne. I looked at their faces, kind and expectant, and completely unlikely to understand anything I told them. Not really understand it. Daphne adjusted her silk scarf. “What Louisa needs is another young man to talk to. Of course she does. You’re young and pretty. You’ll find someone else,” she said. “And you, Natasha. Get back out there. It’s too late for me, but you two shouldn’t be sitting in this dingy old hall—Sorry, Marc, but they shouldn’t. You should be out dancing, having a laugh.” Natasha and I exchanged a look. Clearly, she wanted to go out dancing about as much as I did. I thought about Ambulance Sam and pushed the thought away. “And if you ever do want another penis,” William said. “I’m sure I could pencil in a—” “Okay, everyone. Let’s move on to wills,” said Marc. “Anyone surprised by what turned up?” • • • I got home, exhausted, at a quarter past nine, to find Lily lying on the sofa in front of the television in her pajamas. I dropped my bag. “How long have you been here?” “Since breakfast.” “Are you okay?” “Mm.” Her face held a pallor that spoke of either illness or exhaustion. “Not feeling well?” She didn’t look up. She was eating popcorn out of a bowl and lazily scooped her fingers around the bottom of it, looking for crumbs. “I just didn’t feel like doing anything today.” Lily’s phone beeped. She stared listlessly at the message that came through, and then pushed it away from her under a sofa cushion. “Everything really okay?” I asked, after a minute. “Fine.” She didn’t look fine. “Anything I can help with?” “I said I was fine.” She did not look at me as she spoke. • • • Lily spent that night at the flat. The following day, just as I was leaving for work, Mr. Traynor rang and asked to speak to her. She was stretched across the sofa and looked blankly up at me when I told her who was on the phone, then finally, reluctantly, held out a hand for the receiver. I stood there as she listened to him speak. I couldn’t hear his words, but I could hear his tone: kind, reassuring, emollient. When he finished, she left a faint pause, and then said, “Okay. Fine.” “So are you going to see him again?” I asked, as she handed back the phone. “He wants to come to London to see me.” “Well, that’s nice.” “But he can’t be too far away from her just now in case she goes into labor.” “Do you want me to take you back there to see him?” “No.” She tucked her knees up underneath her chin, reached out for the remote control, and flicked through the channels. “Do you want to talk about it?” I said, after a minute. But she did not look up from the television, and after a minute or two, I realized the conversation was over. • • • On Thursday, I went into my bedroom, closed the door, and called my sister. We were speaking several times a week again. It was easier now that my estrangement from our parents no longer hung between us like a conversational minefield. “Do you think it’s normal?” “Dad told me I once didn’t speak to him for two whole weeks when I was sixteen. Only grunts. And I was actually quite happy.” “She’s not even grunting. She just looks miserable.” “All teenagers look miserable. It’s their default setting. It’s the cheerful ones you want to worry about—they’re probably hiding some massive eating disorder or stealing lipsticks from Boots.” “She’s spent the last three days just lying on the sofa.” “And your point is?” “I think there’s something wrong.” “She’s sixteen years old. Her dad never knew she existed, and popped his clogs before she could meet him. Her mother married someone she calls Fuckface, she has two little brothers who sound like trainee Reggie and Ronnie Kray, and they changed the locks to the family home. I would probably lie on a sofa for a year if I was her.” Treena took a noisy slurp of her tea. “Plus she’s living with someone who wears glittery green Spandex to a bar job and calls it a career.” “Lurex. It’s Lurex.” “Whatever. So when are you going to find yourself a decent job?” “Soon. I just need to get this situation sorted out first.” “This situation.” “She’s really down. I feel bad for her.” “You know what makes me feel down? The way you keep promising to live some kind of a life, then sacrifice yourself to every waif and stray who comes across your path.” “Will was not a waif and stray.” “But Lily is. You don’t even know this girl, Lou. You should be focusing on moving forward. You should be sending off your CV, talking to contacts, working out where your strengths are, not finding yet another excuse to put your own life on hold.” I stared outside at the city sky. In the next room, I could hear the television burbling away, then Lily getting up and walking to the fridge before flopping down again. I lowered my voice. “So what would you do, Treen? The child of the man you loved turns up on your doorstep, and everyone else seems to have pretty much handed over responsibility for her. You’d walk away too, would you?” My sister fell briefly silent. This was such a rare occurrence that I felt obliged to keep talking. “So if that’s Thom in eight years’ time, and he’s fallen out with you, for whatever reason, and say he was pretty much on his own and was going off the rails, you’d think it was great, would you, if the one person he asked for help decided it was altogether too much of a pain in the arse? That they should just bugger off and suit themselves?” I rested my head against the wall. “I’m trying to do the right thing here, Treen. Just cut me a break, okay?” Nothing. “It makes me feel better. Okay? It makes me feel better knowing I’m helping.” My sister was silent for so long I actually wondered whether she had hung up. “Treen?” “Okay. Well, I do remember reading a thing in social psychology about how teenagers find too much face-to-face contact exhausting.” “You want me to talk to her through a door?” One day I would have at least one telephone conversation with my sister that didn’t involve the weary sigh of someone explaining something to a halfwit. “No, doofus. What it means is that if you’re going to get her to talk, you need to be doing something together, side by side.” • • • On my way home on Friday evening I stopped off at the DIY superstore. I lugged the bags up the four flights of stairs, and let myself in. Lily was exactly where I was expecting to find her: stretched out in front of the television. She looked up. “What’s that?” “Paint.” She looked blankly at me. “This flat’s looking a bit tired. You keep telling me I need to brighten it up. I thought we could get rid of this boring old magnolia.” She couldn’t help herself. I pretended to be busy making myself a drink, watching out of the corner of my eye as she stretched, then walked over and examined the paint cans. “That’s hardly any less boring. It’s basically pale gray.” “I was told gray is the ‘in’ thing. I’ll take it back if you think it won’t work.” She peered at it. “No. It’s okay.” “I thought the spare room could have cream on two walls, and then one gray wall there. Do you think they go?” I busied myself with unwrapping the paintbrushes and rollers as I spoke, not looking at her. I changed into an old shirt and some shorts and asked if she could put on some music. “What sort?” “You choose.” I hauled a chair off to one side and laid some dust sheets along the wall. “Your dad said I was a musical philistine.” She didn’t say anything, but I had her attention. I cracked open a paint can and began to stir the paint. “He made me go to my first concert ever. Classical, not pop. I only agreed because it meant he would leave the house. He didn’t like going out much in the early days. He put on a nice shirt and a good jacket, and it was the first time I had seen him look like . . .” I remembered the jolt as I had seen, suddenly, emerging from that stiff blue collar, the man he had been before his accident. I swallowed. “Anyway. I went preparing to be bored, and then cried my way through the second half like a complete loon. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard in my life.” A short silence. “What was it? What did you listen to?” “I can’t remember. Sibelius? Does that sound right?” She shrugged. I started painting, as she came up beside me. She picked up a brush. She said nothing at first, but she seemed to lose herself in the repetitive nature of the task. She was careful too, adjusting the sheet so that she didn’t spill paint, wiping her brush on the edge of the can. We didn’t speak, except for muttered requests: Can you pass me the smaller brush? Do you think that will still show through on the second coat? It took us just half an hour to do the first wall between us. “So what do you think?” I said, as I stood back, admiring the wall. “Think we can do another?” She moved a dust sheet, and started the next wall. She had put on some indie band I had never heard of; the music was lighthearted and agreeable. I started to paint again, ignoring the ache in my shoulder, the urge to yawn. “You should get some pictures.” “You’re right.” “I’ve got this really big print at home of a Kandinsky. It doesn’t really go in my room. You could have it if you want it.” “That would be great.” She was working faster now, speeding across the wall, carefully cutting in around the large window. I glanced at her and then I spoke. “So I was thinking . . . we should speak to Will’s mum. Your grandmother. Are you okay if I write to her?” She said nothing. She crouched down, apparently absorbed in carefully coating the wall down to the baseboard. Finally, she stood up. “Is she like him?” “Like who?” “Mrs. Traynor? Is she like Mr. Traynor?” I stepped down from the box I was using to stand on and wiped my brush on the edge of the can. “She’s . . . different.” “That’s your way of saying she’s a cow.” “She’s not a cow. She’s just—it takes longer to get to know her is all.” She looked sideways at me. “This is your way of telling me she’s a cow and she’s not going to like me.” “I’m not saying that at all, Lily. But she is someone who doesn’t show her emotions easily.” Lily sighed and put down her paintbrush. “I am basically the only person in the world who could discover two grandparents I didn’t know I had, then find out that neither of them even likes me.” We stared at each other. And suddenly, unexpectedly, we both started to laugh. I put the lid on the paint. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go out.” “Where?” I shrugged. “You’re the one who says I need to have some fun. You tell me.” • • • I pulled out a series of tops from one of my storage boxes until Lily finally determined which one was acceptable, and I let her take me to a tiny cavernous club in a back street near the West End where the bouncers knew her by name and nobody seemed to consider for a minute that she might be under eighteen. “It’s nineties music. Olden-days stuff!” she said cheerfully, and I tried not to think too hard about the fact that I was, in her eyes, basically geriatric. We danced until I stopped feeling self-conscious and sweat came through our clothes and our hair stuck in fronds to our heads and my hip hurt so much that I wondered whether I would even be able to stand up behind the bar the following week. We danced as if we had nothing else to do but dance. Lord, it felt good. I had forgotten the joy of just existing, of losing yourself in music, in a crowd of people, the sensations that came with becoming one communal, organic mass, alive only to a pulsing beat. For a few dark, thumping hours, I let go of everything, my problems floating away like helium balloons: my awful job, my picky boss, my failure to move on. I became a thing, alive, moving, joyful. I looked over the crowd at Lily, her eyes closed as her hair flew about her face, that peculiar mixture of concentration and freedom in her features that comes when someone loses herself in rhythm. Then she opened her eyes and looked straight at me and I wanted to be angry about the fact that her raised arm held a bottle that clearly wasn’t cola, but I found myself smiling back at her—a broad, euphoric grin—and all I could think was how strange it was that it was a messed-up child who barely knew herself who actually had so much to teach me about the business of living. • • • Around us London was shrill and heaving, even though it was 2 a.m. We paused for Lily to take joint selfies of us in front of a theater, a Chinese sign, and a man dressed as a large bear (apparently every event had to be marked by photographic evidence), then wove our way through crowded streets in search of a night bus, past the late-night kebab shops and the bellowing drunkards, the pimps and the gaggles of screeching girls. My hip was throbbing badly, and sweat was cooling unpleasantly under my damp clothes, but I still felt energized, as if I had been snapped back on. “God knows how we’re going to get home,” Lily said, cheerfully. And then I heard the shout. “Lou!” I looked across the road, and there was Sam, leaning out of the driver’s window of an ambulance. As I lifted my hand in response, he pulled the truck across the road in a giant U-turn. “Where you headed?” he asked. “Home. If we can ever find a bus.” “Hop in. Go on. I won’t tell if you won’t. We’re just finishing our shift.” He looked at the woman beside him. “Ah, come on, Don. She’s a patient. Broken hip. Can’t leave her to walk home.” Lily was delighted by this unexpected turn of events. And then the rear door opened and a woman in a paramedic’s uniform, eyes rolling, was shepherding us in. “You’re going to get us sacked, Sam,” she said, and motioned for us to sit down on the gurney. “Hiya. I’m Donna. Oh, no—I do remember you. The one who . . .” “. . . fell off a building. Yup.” Lily pulled me into her for an “ambulance selfie,” and I tried not to look as Donna rolled her eyes again. “So where have you been?” Sam called through to the rear. “Dancing,” said Lily. “I’ve been trying to persuade Louisa to be less of a boring old fart. Can we put the siren on?” “Nope. Where’d you go? That’s from another boring old fart, by the way. I won’t have a clue whatever you say.” “The Twenty-two,” said Lily. “Down the back of Tottenham Court Road?” “That’s where we had the emergency tracheotomy, Sam.” “I remember. You look like you’ve had a good night.” He met my eye in the mirror and I colored a little. I was suddenly glad to have been out dancing. It made me seem like I might be someone else altogether. Not just a tragic airport barmaid whose idea of a night out was falling off a roof. “It was great,” I said, beaming. Then he looked down at the computer screen on the dashboard. “Oh, marvelous. Got a Green One over at Spencer’s.” “But we’re headed back in,” said Donna. “Why does Lennie always do this to us? That man’s a sadist.” “No one else available.” “What’s going on?” “A job’s come up. I might have to drop you. It’s not far from yours, though. Okay?” “Spencer’s,” said Donna, and let out a deep sigh. “Hold on tight, girls.” The siren went on. And we were off, lurching our way through the London traffic with the blue light screaming above our head, Lily squealing with delight. On any given weeknight, Donna told us, as we clutched the handrails, the station would get calls from Spencer’s, summoned to fix those who hadn’t made it upright to closing time, or to stitch up the faces of young men for whom six pints in an evening left them combative and without any accompanying sense. “These kids should be feeling great about life, but instead they’re just knocking themselves out with every spare pound they earn. Every bloody week.” We were there in minutes, the ambulance slowing outside to avoid the drunks spilling out onto the pavement. The signs in Spencer’s smoked windows advertised “Free drinks for girls before 10 p.m.” Despite the stag and hen nights, the catcalling and gaudy clothes, the packed streets of the drinking zone seemed less a carnival atmosphere and more something tense and explosive. I found myself gazing out of the window warily. Sam opened the rear doors and picked up his bag. “Stay in the rig,” he said, and climbed out. A police officer headed over to him, muttered something, and we watched as they walked over to a young man who was sitting in the gutter, blood streaming from a wound to his temple. Sam squatted beside him, while the officer attempted to keep back the drunken gawkers, the “helpful” friends, the wailing girlfriends. He seemed to be surrounded by a bunch of well-dressed extras from The Walking Dead, swaying mindlessly and grunting, occasionally bloodied and toppling. “I hate these jobs,” said Donna, checking briskly through her pack of plasticwrapped medical supplies as we watched. “Give me a woman in labor, or a nice old granny with cardiomyopathy any day. Oh, flipping heck, he’s off.” Sam was tilting the young lad’s face back to examine it when another boy, his hair thick with gel and the collar of his shirt soaked in blood, grabbed at his shoulder. “Oi! I need to go in the ambulance!” Sam turned slowly toward the young drunk, who was spraying blood and saliva as he spoke. “Back away now, mate. All right? Let me do my job.” Drink had made the boy stupid. He glanced at his mates, then he was up in Sam’s face, snarling. “Don’t you tell me to back away.” Sam ignored him, and continued attending to the other boy’s face. “Hey! Hey you! I need to get to the hospital.” He said it again, then pushed Sam’s shoulder. “Hey!” Sam stayed crouched for a moment, very still. Then he straightened slowly, and turned, so that he was nose to nose with the drunk. “I’ll explain something in terms you might be able to understand, son. You’re not getting in the truck, okay? That’s it. So save your energy, go finish your night with your mates, put a bit of ice on it, and go see your GP in the morning.” “You don’t get to tell me nothing. I pay your wages. My effing nose is broke.” As Sam gazed steadily back at him, the boy swung out a hand and pushed at Sam’s chest. Sam looked down at it. “Uh-oh,” said Donna, beside me. Sam’s voice, when it emerged, was a growl: “Okay. I’m warning you now—” “You don’t warn me!” The boy’s face was scornful. “You don’t warn me! Who do you think you are?” Donna was out of the truck and jogging toward a cop. She murmured something in his ear and I saw them both look over. Donna’s face was pleading. The boy was still yelling and swearing, now pushing at Sam’s chest. “So you sort me out before you deal with that wanker.” Sam adjusted his collar. His face had become dangerously still. And just as I realized I was holding my breath, the policeman was there, between them. Donna’s hand was on Sam’s sleeve and she was steering him away, back toward the young lad on the curb. The policeman muttered something into his radio, his hand on the drunk’s shoulder. Something about the uniform seemed to defeat him. But the boy suddenly swung round and spat on Sam’s jacket. “Fuck you.” There was a brief, shocked silence. Sam stiffened. “Sam! Sam! Come on, give me a hand, yes? I need you.” Donna propelled him forward. When I caught sight of Sam’s face, his eyes glittered as cold and hard as diamonds. “Come on,” said Donna, as they loaded the semicomatose lad into the back of the truck. “Let’s get out of here.” • • • He drove silently, Lily and I wedged into the front seat beside him. Donna cleaned the back of his jacket as he stared ahead of him, his stubbly jaw jutting. “Could be worse,” Donna said cheerfully. “I had one throw up in my hair last month. And the little monster did it on purpose. Shoved his fingers down the back of his throat and ran up behind me, just because I wouldn’t take him home, like I was some kind of bloody minicab.” She stood up and motioned for the energy drink she kept in the front. “It’s a waste of resources. When you think what we could be doing, instead of scooping up a load of little . . .” She took a swig, then looked down at the barely conscious young boy. “I don’t know. You have to wonder what goes on in their heads.” “Not much,” said Sam. “Yeah. Well, we have to keep this one on a tight leash,” Donna patted Sam’s shoulder. “He got a caution last year.” Sam glanced sideways at me, suddenly sheepish. “We went to pick up a girl from the top of Commercial Street. Face smashed to a pulp. Domestic. As I went to lift her onto the gurney, her boyfriend came flying out of the pub and went for her again. Couldn’t help myself.” “You took a swing at him?” “More than one,” Donna scoffed. “Yeah. Well. It wasn’t a good time.” Donna shifted to grimace at me. “So, this one can’t afford to get into trouble again. Or he’s out of the service.” “Thanks,” I said, as he let us out. “For the lift, I mean.” “Couldn’t leave you in that open-air asylum,” he said. His eyes briefly met mine. Then Donna shut the door and they were gone, heading for the hospital with their battered human cargo. “You totally fancy him,” said Lily, as we watched the ambulance disappear. I had forgotten she was even there. I sighed as I reached into my pockets for the keys. “He’s a shagger.” “So? I would totally shag that,” Lily said, as I opened the door to let her in. “I mean, if I was old. And a bit desperate. Like you.” “I don’t think I’m ready for a relationship, Lily.” She was walking behind me, so there was no way I could actually prove it, but I swear I could feel her pulling faces at me the whole way up the stairs. 12 Iwrote to Mrs. Traynor. I didn’t tell her about Lily, just that I hoped she was well, that I was back from my travels and would be in her area in a few weeks with a friend, and would like to say hello if possible. I sent it first class, and felt oddly excited as it plopped into the postbox. Dad had told me over the phone that she had left Granta House within weeks of Will’s death. He said the estate workers had been shocked, but I thought back to the time I had spotted Mr. Traynor out with Della, the woman he was now about to have a baby with, and wondered how many genuinely had been. There were few secrets in a small town. “She took it all terrible hard,” Dad said. “And once she was gone your redheaded woman there was in like Flynn. She saw her chance, all right. Nice auld fella, own hair, big castle, he’s not going to be single for long, eh? Speaking of which, Lou. You—you wouldn’t have a word with your mother about her armpits, would you? She’s going to be after plaiting it if she lets it all grow any longer.” I kept thinking about Mrs. Traynor, trying to imagine how she would react to the news about Lily. I remembered the joy and disbelief on Mr. Traynor’s face at their first meeting. Would Lily help to heal her pain a little? Sometimes I watched Lily laughing at something on television, or simply gazing steadily out of the window lost in thought, and I saw Will so clearly in her features—the precise angles of her nose, those almost Slavic cheekbones—that I forgot to breathe. (At this point she would usually grumble, “Stop staring at me like a weirdo, Louisa. You’re freaking me out.”) Lily had come to stay for two weeks. Tanya Houghton-Miller had called to say they were off on a family holiday to Tuscany and that Lily didn’t want to go with them. “Frankly, the way she is behaving right now, as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine. She is exhausting me.” I pointed out that, given that Lily was barely at home, and Tanya had changed the locks to her front door, it would be pretty hard for Lily to exhaust anyone unless she was tapping at their window and singing a sad lament. There was a short silence. “When you have your own children, Louisa, you might eventually have some idea what I’m talking about.” Oh, that trump card of all parents. How could I possibly understand? She offered me money to cover Lily’s board and lodging while they were away. I took some pleasure in telling her I wouldn’t dream of taking it, even though having her stay with me was, frankly, costing me more than I had anticipated to have her there. Lily, it turned out, wasn’t satisfied with my beanson-toast or cheese-sandwich suppers. She would ask for cash and then return with artisan bread, exotic fruit, Greek yogurt, organic chicken—the staples of a wealthy middle-class kitchen. I remembered Tanya’s house, the way Lily had stood by the oversized fridge and thoughtlessly dropped chunks of fresh pineapple into her mouth. “By the way,” I said as she said her good-byes, “who is Martin?” There was a short pause. “Martin is my former partner. Lily apparently insists on seeing him, even though she knows I don’t like it.” “Could I have his number? I’d just like to make sure I know where she is. You know, while you’re gone.” “Martin’s number? Why would I have Martin’s number?” she squawked, and the phone went dead. • • • Something had changed since I’d met Lily. It wasn’t just that I’d learned to accommodate the explosion of teenage-related mess in my near-empty flat. I had actually started to quite enjoy having Lily in my life, having someone to eat with, sit side by side with on the sofa commenting on whatever we happened to be watching on the television, keeping a poker face when she offered me some concoction she’d made. “Well, how should I know you have to cook the potatoes in a potato salad? It’s a salad, for God’s sake.” At work I now listened to the fathers at the bar wishing their children good night as they flew off on business trips—You be good for Mummy now, Luke. . . . Did you? . . . You did? Aren’t you a clever boy!—and the custody arguments conducted in hissed telephone conversations—No, I did not say I could pick him up from school that day. I was always due in Barcelona . . . Yes, I was . . . No, no, you just don’t listen. I couldn’t believe that you could give birth to someone, love them, nurture them, and by their sixteenth year, claim that they so exasperated you that you’d change the locks of your house against them. Sixteen was still not grown up, surely? For all her posturing, I could see the child in Lily. It was there in the excitements and sudden enthusiasms. It was there in the sulks and the trying on of different looks in front of my bathroom mirror and the abrupt, innocent sleep. I thought of my sister and her uncomplicated love for Thom. I thought of my parents, encouraging, worrying about and supporting Treena and me, even though we were both well into adulthood. And in those moments I felt Will’s absence in Lily’s life like I felt it in my own. You should have been here, Will, I told him silently. It was you she really needed. • • • I booked a day’s holiday—an outrage according to Richard. (“You’ve only been back five weeks. I really don’t see why you need to disappear again.”) I smiled, curtsied in a grateful Irish-dancing-girl manner, and drove home later to find Lily painting one of the spare-room walls a particularly vivid shade of jade green. “You said you wanted it brightened up,” she said, as I stood with my mouth open. “Don’t worry. I paid for the paint myself.” “Well”—I pulled off my wig and unlaced my shoes—“just make sure you’ve finished by this evening. Because I’ve got the day off tomorrow,” I said when I had changed back into my jeans. “And I’m going to show you some of the things your dad liked.” She stopped, dripping jade paint onto the carpet. “What things?” “You’ll see.” • • • We spent the day driving, our soundtrack a playlist on Lily’s iPod that provided one minute a heart-breaking dirge of love and loss, the next an eardrumperforating raging anthem of hatred against all mankind. I mastered the art, while on the motorway, of mentally rising above the noise and focusing on the road, while Lily sat beside me, nodding in time to the beat and occasionally performing an impromptu drumroll on the dashboard. It was good, I thought, that she was enjoying herself. And who needed both eardrums to be working, anyway? We started off in Stortfold, and took in the places where Will and I used to sit and eat, the picnic spots in the fields above the town, his favorite benches around the grounds of the castle, and Lily had the grace to try not to look bored. To be fair, it was quite hard to work up enthusiasm about a series of fields. So I sat down and told her how when I had first met him, Will had barely left the house, and how through a mixture of subterfuge and bloody-mindedness I had set about getting him out again. “You have to understand,” I said, “that your father hated to be dependent on anyone. And us going out didn’t just mean that he had to rely on someone else but also that he had to be seen relying on someone else.” “Even if it was you.” “Even if it was me.” She was thoughtful for a moment. “I would hate people seeing me like that. I don’t even like people seeing me with wet hair.” We visited the gallery where he had tried to explain to me the difference between “good” and “bad” modern art (I had to admit I still couldn’t tell), and she pulled a face at almost everything on its walls. We poked our heads into the wine merchant’s where he had made me taste different sorts of wine (“No, Lily, we are not doing a wine tasting today”), then walked to the tattoo shop where he had persuaded me to get my tattoo. She asked if I could lend her the money for one (I nearly wept with relief when the man told her no because she was under eighteen), then asked to see my little bumblebee. It was one of the few occasions when I felt I’d actually impressed her. She laughed out loud when I told her what he had chosen for himself: a Best Before date stenciled on his chest. “You have the same god-awful sense of humor,” I said, and she tried not to look pleased. It was then that the owner, overhearing our conversation, mentioned that he had a photograph. “I keep pictures of all of my tattoos,” he said from under a heavily waxed handlebar mustache. “I like to have a record. Just remind me of the date.” We stood there silently as he flicked through his laminated binder. And there it was, from almost two years ago, a close-up of that black-and-white design, neatly inked onto Will’s caramel-colored skin. I stood and stared at the photograph, and for a moment its familiarity took my breath away. That little patterned block, the one I had washed with a soft cloth, which I had dried, rubbed sunscreen into, rested my face against. I would have reached out to touch it, but Lily got there first, her fingers with their bitten nails tracing gently over the image of her father’s skin. “I think I’ll get one,” she said. “Like his, I mean. When I’m old enough.” “So how is he?” Lily and I turned. The tattooist was sitting on his tattooing chair, rubbing at a heavily colored forearm. “I remember him. We don’t get many quadriplegics in here.” He grinned. “He’s a bit of a character, isn’t he?” A lump rose suddenly to my throat. “He’s dead,” said Lily baldly. “My dad. He’s dead.” The tattooist winced. “Sorry, sweetheart. I had no idea.” “Can I keep this?” Lily had started to work the photograph of Will’s tattoo out of its plastic binder. “Sure,” he said hurriedly. “If you want it, take it. Here, have the plastic cover as well. Case it rains.” “Thank you,” she said, tucking it neatly under her arm, and as the man stuttered another apology, we walked out of the shop. • • • We had lunch—an all-day breakfast—silently in a caf?. Feeling the day’s mood start to leach away from us, I began to talk. I told Lily what I knew of Will’s romantic history, about his career, that he was the kind of man who made you long for his approval, whether just by doing something that impressed him or making him laugh at some stupid joke. I told her how he was when I met him, and how he had changed, softened, starting to find joy in small things, even if many of those small things seemed to involve making fun of me. “Like I wasn’t very adventurous when it came to food. My mum basically has ten set meals which she’s rotated for the past twenty-five years. And none of them involve quinoa. Or lemongrass. Or guacamole. Your dad would eat anything.” “And now you do too?” “Actually, I still try guacamole every couple of months or so. For him, really.” “You don’t like it?” “It tastes okay, I suppose. I just can’t get past the fact that it looks like something you blow out of your nose.” I told her about his previous girlfriend, and how we had gate-crashed her wedding dance, me sitting on Will’s lap as we turned his motorized wheelchair in circles on the dance floor. Lily snorted her drink through her nose. “Seriously? Her wedding?” In the overheated confines of the little caf?, I conjured her father for her as best I could, and perhaps it was because we were away from all the complications of home, or because her parents were in a different country, or because, just for once, someone was telling her stories about him that were uncomplicated and funny, but she laughed, and asked questions, nodding often as if my answers had confirmed something she already believed. Yes, yes, he was like this. Yes, maybe I’m like that too. And as we talked well into the afternoon, letting our cups of tea cool in front of us, and the weary waitress offered yet again to remove the last of the toast we had taken two hours to eat, I grasped something else: for the first time, I was recalling Will without sadness. “What about you?” “What about me?” I put the last crust in my mouth, eyeing the waitress, who looked as if this was her cue to come back again. “What happened to you after Dad died? I mean, you seem to have done a lot more stuff when you were with him—even with him being stuck in a wheelchair —than you do now.” The bread had turned claggy in my mouth. I struggled to swallow. Eventually, when the mouthful had gone down, I said, “I do things. I’ve just been busy. Working. I mean, when you’re on shifts, it’s hard to make plans.” She raised her eyebrows a fraction, but she didn’t say anything. “And my hip is still quite painful. I’m not really up to mountain climbing yet.” Lily stirred her tea idly. “My life is eventful. I mean, falling off a roof isn’t exactly humdrum. That’s quite a lot of excitement for one year!” “But it’s hardly doing something, is it?” We were silent for a moment. I took a breath, trying to quell the sudden buzzing in my ears. The waitress, arriving between us, swept up our empty plates with a faint air of triumph, and took them to the kitchen. “Hey,” I said, when I finally managed to swallow. “Did I tell you about the time I took your dad to the races?” • • • With immaculate timing, my car overheated on the motorway, forty miles from London. Lily was surprisingly sanguine about it. In fact, she was curious. “I’ve never been in a car that broke down. I didn’t know they even did that anymore.” My jaw dropped at this statement (my dad would regularly pray loudly to his old van, promising her premium petrol, regular tire pressure checks, endless love, if she would make it back home again). Then she told me her parents traded in their Mercedes every year. Mostly, she added, because of the level of damage done to the leather interior by her half brothers. We sat by the side of the motorway, waiting for the tow truck to arrive, and feeling the little car judder sporadically as the lorries rumbled past. Eventually, deciding it would be safer for us to be out of the car, we scrambled up the embankment at the side of the motorway and sat side by side on the grass, watching as the afternoon sun lost its heat and slid down the other side of the motorway bridge. “So who is Martin?” I asked, when we had exhausted all breakdown-related conversation. Lily plucked at the grass beside her. “Martin Steele? He’s the man I grew up with.” “I thought that was Francis.” “No. Fuckface only came into the picture when I was seven.” “You know, Lily, you might want to stop calling him that.” She gave me a sideways look. “Okay. You’re probably right.” She lay back on the grass and smiled sweetly. “I’ll call him Penisfeatures instead.” “Let’s stick with Fuckface then. So how come you still visit him?” “Martin? He wasn’t even my real dad. Mum got together with him while I was small. He’s a musician. Very creative. He used to read me stories and stuff and make up songs about me, that kind of thing. I just—” She tailed off. “So what happened? Between him and your mum?” Lily reached into her bag and pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. She inhaled and let out a flute of smoke, almost dislocating her jawbone in the process. “I came home from school one day with the au pair and Mum just announced that he’d gone. She said they’d agreed he had to go because they weren’t getting on anymore.” She inhaled again. “Apparently he wasn’t interested in her personal growth or he didn’t share her vision of the future. Some bullshit. I think she just met Francis and knew Martin was never going to give her what she wanted.” “Which was?” “Money. And a big house. And the chance to spend her day shopping and bitching to her friends and aligning her chakras or whatever. Francis earns a fortune doing private bank things in his private bank with all the other private bankers.” She turned to me. “So basically, one day Martin was my dad—I mean I called him Daddy right up until the day he left—and the next he wasn’t. He used to take me to nursery and primary school and everything—and then she decides she’s had enough of him, and I get home and he’s just . . . gone. It’s her house, so he’s gone. Just like that. And I’m not allowed to see him and I’m not even allowed to talk about him because I’m just dredging things up and being difficult. And obviously she is in so much pain and emotional distress.” Here Lily did a scarily good impression of Tanya’s voice. “And when I really did get mad at her, she told me there was no point getting so upset because he wasn’t even my real dad. So that was a nice way to find out.” I stared at her. “And the next thing, there’s Francis turning up at our door, all over-the-top bunches of flowers and so-called family days out, where I’m basically playing gooseberry and sent off with the nannies while they’re all over each other at some child-friendly luxury hotel. And then six months later she takes me to Pizza Express and I think it’s some treat for me and that maybe Martin is coming back, but she says she and Francis are getting married and it’s wonderful and he’s going to be the most wonderful daddy to me and I ‘must love him very much.’” Lily blew a smoke ring up into the sky, watching as it swelled, wavered, and evaporated. “And you didn’t.” “I hated him.” She looked sideways at me. “You can tell, you know, when someone’s just putting up with you. Even if you’re little. He never wanted me, only my mother. I can sort of understand it—who wants another man’s kid hanging around? So when she had the twins they sent me away to boarding school. Bang. Job done.” Her eyes had filled with tears and I wanted to reach out to her, but she had wrapped her arms around her knees and was staring straight ahead. We sat there in silence for a few minutes, watching the traffic start to build below us as the sun faded. “I found him, you know.” I faced her. “Martin. When I was eleven. I heard my nanny telling another one that she wasn’t allowed to tell me he had come around. So I told her she had to tell me where he lived or I’d tell my mum she was stealing. I looked up the address and he lived about fifteen minutes’ walk from where we were. Pyecroft Road—do you know it?” I shook my head. “Was he pleased to see you?” She hesitated. “So happy. He nearly cried, actually. He said he’d missed me so much, and that it was awful being away from me and that I could come around whenever I wanted. But he had hooked up with someone else and they had a baby. And when you turn up at someone’s house and they have a baby and, like, a proper family of their own, you realize you’re not part of his family anymore. You’re a leftover.” “I’m sure nobody thought—” “Yes, well. Anyway, he’s really lovely and all but I’ve told him I can’t really see him. It’s too weird. And, you know, like I said to him, ‘I’m not your real daughter.’ He still calls me all the time though. Stupid really.” Lily shook her head furiously. We sat there for a while and then she looked up at the sky. “You know the thing that really bugs me?” I waited. “She changed my name when she got married. My own name, and nobody ever even bothered to ask me.” Her voice cracked a little. “I didn’t even want to be a Houghton-Miller.” “Oh, Lily.” She wiped briskly at her face with the palm of her hand, as if embarrassed to be seen crying. She inhaled her cigarette and then ground it out on the grass and sniffed noisily. “Mind you, these days Penisfeatures and Mum argue all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they split up too. If that happens no doubt we’ll all have to move again and change names and nobody will be able to say anything because of her pain and her need to move forward emotionally or whatever. And in two years’ time there will be some other Fuckface and my brothers will be Houghton-Miller-Branson or Ozymandias or Toodlepip or whatever.” She half laughed. “Luckily I’ll be long gone by then. Not that she’ll even notice.” “You really believes she thinks that little of you?” Lily’s head swiveled around, and the look she gave me was both too wise and utterly heartbreaking. “I think she loves me. But she loves herself more. Or how could she do what she does?” 13 M r. Traynor’s baby was born the following day. My phone rang at six thirty in the morning and for a brief, awful moment I thought something terrible had happened. But it was Mr. Traynor, breathless and tearful, announcing, in the slightly disbelieving, exclamatory tones of all new fathers, “It’s a girl! Eight pounds one ounce! And she’s absolutely perfect!” He told me how beautiful she was, how like Will when he had been a baby, how I simply must come and see her, and then asked me to wake Lily, which I did, and watched her, sleepy and silent as he gave her the news that she had a . . . a . . . (they took a minute to work it out) an aunt! “Okay,” she said finally. And then, having listened for a while, “Yeah . . . sure.” She ended the call and handed the phone back to me. Her eyes met mine, then she turned in her crumpled T-shirt and went back to bed, closing the door firmly behind her. • • • The well-lubricated health plan salesmen were, I estimated, at ten forty-five, one round off being barred from their flight, and I was wondering whether to point this out when a familiar reflective jacket appeared at the bar. “No one in need of medical assistance here.” I walked over to him slowly. “Yet, anyway.” “I never get tired of that outfit. I have no idea why.” Sam climbed up on a stool and rested his elbows on the bar, nodding toward me. “The wig is . . . interesting.” I tugged at my Lurex skirt. “The creation of static electricity is my superpower. Would you like a coffee?” “Thanks. I can’t hang around, though.” He checked his radio and put it back in his jacket pocket. I made him an Americano, trying not to look as pleased as I felt to see him. “How did you know where I worked?” “We had a callout at gate fourteen. Suspected heart attack. Jake reminded me you worked at the airport and, you know, you weren’t exactly hard to track down . . .” He gazed around him. The businessmen were briefly muted. Sam was the kind of man, I had noticed, who made other men go a bit quiet. “Donna’s sneaking a look in duty free. Handbags.” “I’m guessing you’ve seen your patient?” He grinned. “No. I was going to ask for directions to gate fourteen after I’d sat down with a coffee.” “Funny. So did you save his life?” “I gave her some aspirin, and advised her that drinking four double espressos before ten a.m. was not the best idea. I’m flattered that you have such an exciting view of my working day.” I couldn’t help but laugh. I handed him his coffee. He took a grateful swig. “So. I was wondering . . . You up for another nondate sometime soon?” “With or without an ambulance?” “Definitely without.” “Can we discuss problem teenagers?” I looked down and found I was twirling a curly lock of nylon-fiber hair with my fingers. For crying out loud. I was playing with my hair and it wasn’t even my actual hair. I dropped it. “We can discuss whatever you like.” “What did you have in mind?” His pause was long enough to make me blush. “Dinner? At mine? Tonight? I promise if it rains I won’t make you sit in the dining room.” “You’re on.” “I’ll pick you up at seven thirty.” He was just gulping down the last of his coffee when Richard appeared. He looked at Sam, then at me. I was still leaning against the bar, a few inches from him. “Is there a problem?” Richard asked. “No problem whatsoever,” said Sam. When he stood up, I noticed, he was a whole head taller than Richard. A few fleeting thoughts flickered across Richard’s face, so transparent that I could see the progression of each one. Why is this paramedic here? Why is Louisa not doing something? I would like to tell Louisa off for not being obviously busy but this man is too big and there is a dynamic I do not entirely understand and I am a little bit wary of him. It almost made me laugh out loud. “So. Tonight.” Sam nodded at me. “Keep the wig on, yes? I like you flammable.” One of the businessmen, florid and pleased with himself, leaned back in his chair so that his stomach strained the seams of his shirt. “Are you going to give us the lecture about alcohol limits now?” The others laughed. “No, you go ahead, gentlemen,” Sam said, saluting them. “I’ll just see you in a year or two.” I watched him head off through Departures, joined by Donna outside the newsagent. When I turned back to the bar Richard was watching me. “I have to say, Louisa, I don’t approve of your conducting your social life in a work setting,” he said. “Fine. Next time I’ll tell him to ignore the heart attack at gate fourteen.” Richard’s jaw tightened. “And what he said just then. About your wearing your wig later on. That wig is the property of Shamrock and Clover Irish Themed Bars Inc. You are not allowed to wear it on your own time.” This time I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. “Really?” Even he had the grace to flush a little. “It’s company policy. It’s classified as uniform.” “Damn,” I said. “I guess I’ll just have to buy my own Irish-dancing-girl wigs in future. Hey, Richard!” I called, as he walked back into the office, his back bristling. “For fairness, does that mean you can’t get jiggy with Mrs. Percival while wearing your polo shirt?” • • • I arrived home to find no sign of Lily, other than a cereal box that had been left out on the kitchen counter, and, inexplicably, a pile of dirt on the floor in the hallway. I tried her phone, got no response, and wondered how you were ever meant to find a balance between overanxious parent, normally concerned parent, and Tanya Houghton-Miller. And then I jumped into the shower and got ready for my date that absolutely, definitely wasn’t a date. • • • It rained, the heavens opening shortly after we arrived at Sam’s field, and we were both soaked even running the short distance from his bike to the railway carriage. I stood dripping as he closed the door behind me, remembering how unpleasant the sensation of wet socks is. “Stay there,” he said, brushing the drops from his head with his hand. “You can’t sit around in those wet clothes.” “This is like the opening to a really bad porn movie,” I said. He stood very still and I realized I had actually said the words out loud. I gave him a smile that went a bit wonky. “Okay,” he said, raising his eyebrows. He disappeared into the back of the carriage and emerged a minute later with a jumper and what looked like some jogging bottoms. “Jake’s joggers. Freshly washed. Possibly not very porn movie though.” He handed them to me. “My room’s back there if you want to get changed, or the bathroom’s through that door if you’d prefer.” I walked into his bedroom and closed the door behind me. Above my head the rain beat noisily on the carriage roof and obscured the windows with a neverending stream of water. I wondered about drawing the curtains and then realized there was nobody to see me, other than the hens, which were huddling out of the wet, grumpily shaking drops from their feathers. I pulled off my soaked top and jeans and dried myself with the towel he’d placed with the clothes, then flashed the hens for fun through the window, something, I observed afterward, Lily might do. They didn’t look impressed. I held the towel to my face and sniffed it guiltily, like someone inhaling a forbidden drug. It was freshly laundered but somehow still managed to smell irrevocably male. I hadn’t breathed in a scent like it since Will. It made me feel briefly unbalanced and I put it down and stepped away. The double bed filled most of the floor space. A narrow cupboard opposite acted as a wardrobe, and two pairs of work boots were neatly stacked in the corner. There was a book on the nightstand and beside it a photograph of Sam with a smiling woman whose blond hair was tied up in a messy knot. She had her arm around his shoulder and was grinning at the camera. She was not supermodel beautiful, but there was something compelling about her smile. She looked like the kind of woman who would have laughed a lot. She looked like a feminine version of Jake. I felt suddenly crushingly sad for him, and had to look away before I made myself sad too. Sometimes I felt as if we were all wading around in grief, reluctant to admit to others how far we were waving or drowning. I wondered fleetingly whether Sam’s reluctance to talk about his wife mirrored my reluctance to discuss Will; the kind of knowledge that the moment you opened the box, let out even a whisper of your sadness, it would mushroom into a cloud that overwhelmed all other conversation. I checked myself, took a breath. Just have a nice evening, I murmured, recalling the words of the Moving On Circle. Allow yourself moments of happiness. I wiped the mascara smudges from under my eyes, observing in a small mirror that little could be done for my hair. Then I pulled Sam’s oversized sweater over my head, trying to ignore the weird intimacy that came from wearing a man’s clothes, pulled on Jake’s joggers, and gazed at my reflection. What do you think, Will? Just a nice evening. It doesn’t have to mean anything, right? Sam grinned as I emerged and walked past him, carrying my wet clothes. “You look about twelve.” I went into the bathroom, wrung out my jeans, shirt, and socks in the sink, then hung them over the shower curtain. “What’s cooking?” I asked, peeking my head back into the kitchen. “Well, I was going to do a salad, but it’s not really salad weather anymore. So I’m improvising.” He had set a pot of water boiling on the stove, where it had fogged the windows. “You eat pasta, right?” “I eat anything.” “Excellent.” He opened a bottle of wine and poured me a glass, motioning me to the bench seat. In front of me the little table had been laid for two, and I felt a faint frisson at the sight. It was okay just to enjoy a moment, a small pleasure. I had been out dancing. I had flashed some hens. And now I was going to enjoy spending an evening with a man who wanted to cook me dinner. It was all progress, of sorts. Perhaps Sam detected something of this internal struggle because he waited until I took my first sip, then said, while stirring something on the hob: “Was that the boss you were talking about? That man today?” The wine was delicious. I took another sip. I hadn’t dared drink while Lily had been with me; I might have let my guard down. “Yup.” “I know the type. If it’s any consolation within five years he’ll either have a stomach ulcer or enough hypertension to cause erectile dysfunction.” I laughed. “Both those thoughts are oddly comforting.” Finally he sat down, presenting me with a steaming bowl of pasta. “Cheers,” he said, raising a glass of water. “And now tell me what’s going on with this long-lost girl of yours.” • • • Oh, but it was such a relief to have someone to talk to. I was so unused to people who actually listened—as opposed to those, at the bar, who only wanted to hear the sound of their own voices—that talking with Sam was a revelation. He didn’t interrupt, or tell me what he thought, or what I should do. He listened, and nodded, and topped up my wine and said, finally, when it was long dark outside, “It’s quite a responsibility you’ve taken on.” He reached over and refilled my glass. I leaned back on the bench and put my feet up. “I don’t feel like I have a choice. I keep asking myself what you said: what would Will want me to do?” I took another sip. “It’s harder than I’d imagined, though. I thought I’d just take her to meet her grandmother and grandfather and everyone would be delighted and it would all be a happy ending, you know, like those reunion programs on television.” He studied his hands. I studied him. “You think I’m mad getting involved.” “No, I don’t. Too many people follow their own happiness without a thought for the damage they leave in their wake. You wouldn’t believe the kids I pick up at the weekends, drunk, drugged, off their heads, whatever. The parents are wrapped up in their own stuff, or have disappeared completely, so they exist in a vacuum, and they make bad choices.” “Is it worse than it used to be?” “Who knows? I only know I see more messed-up kids. And that the hospital’s young person’s psych ward has a waiting list as long as your arm.” He smiled wryly. “Hold that soapbox. I need to go shut the birds up for the night.” I wanted to ask him then how someone so apparently wise could be so careless of his own son’s feelings. I wanted to ask if he understood how unhappy Jake was. But it seemed a bit too confrontational, given the way he was talking, and the fact that he had just cooked me a very nice supper. Then I was distracted by the sight of the hens popping one at a time into their coop and then he came back in, bringing with him the faint scents of outside, and the cooler air, and the moment passed. We poured more wine, and I drank it. I let myself take pleasure in the snugness of the little railway carriage, and the sensation of a properly full belly, and I listened to Sam talk. He told of nights holding the hands of elderly people who didn’t want to make a fuss, and of management targets that left them all demoralized and feeling as if they weren’t doing the job they’d been trained for. I listened, losing myself in a world far from my own, watching his hands draw animated circles in the air, his rueful smile when he felt he was taking himself too seriously. I watched his hands. I watched his hands. I colored slightly as I realized where my thoughts were headed, and took another swig of my wine to hide it. “Where’s Jake tonight?” “Barely seen him. At his girlfriend’s, I think.” He looked rueful. “She has this Waltons-style family, about a billion brothers and sisters and a mum who’s home all day. He likes hanging out there.” He took another sip of his water. “So where’s Lily?” “Don’t know. I texted her twice but she hasn’t bothered to reply.” Oh, but the sheer presence of him. It was like he was twice as large, twice as vivid as other men. My thoughts kept drifting, pulled toward his eyes, which narrowed slightly as he listened, as if he were trying to ensure he had understood me perfectly . . . the faint hint of stubble on his jaw, the shape of his shoulder under the soft wool of his jumper. My gaze kept sliding downward to his hands, resting on the table, fingers absently tapping on the surface. Such capable hands. I remembered the tenderness with which he had cradled my head, the way I had held on to him in the ambulance as if he were the only thing anchoring me. He looked at me and smiled, a gentle inquiry in it, and something in me turned molten. Would it be so bad, as long as my eyes were open? “You want a coffee, Louisa?” He had this way of looking at me. I shook my head. “Do you want—” Before I could think about it, I leaned across the little table, reached for the back of his head, and kissed him. He hesitated for just a moment then shifted forward, and kissed me back. At some point I think someone knocked over a wineglass but I couldn’t stop. I wanted to kiss him forever. I blocked out all thoughts about what this was, what it might mean, what further mess I might create for myself. C’mon, live, I told myself. And I kissed him until reason seeped out through my pores and I became a living pulse, conscious only of what I wanted to do to him. He pulled back first, slightly dazed. “Louisa—” A piece of cutlery clattered to the floor. I stood and he stood and pulled me to him. And suddenly we were crashing around the little railway carriage, all hands and lips and, oh, God, the scent and taste and feel of him. It was like tiny fireworks going off all over me, bits of me I’d thought dead reigniting into life. He picked me up and I wrapped myself around him, all bulk and strength and muscle. I kissed his face, his ear, my fingers in his soft dark hair. And then he stood me back down and we were inches apart, his eyes on me, his expression a silent question. I was breathing hard. “I haven’t taken my clothes off in front of anyone since . . . the accident,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m medically trained.” “I’m serious. I’m a bit of a mess.” I felt suddenly, oddly tearful. “You want me to make you feel better?” “That’s the cheesiest line I’ve—” He lifted his shirt, revealing a two-inch purple scar across his stomach. “There. Stabbed by an Australian with mental-health issues, four years ago. Here —” He turned to reveal a huge green and yellow bruise across his lower back. “Got a kicking from a drunk last Saturday. Woman.” He held out his hand. “Broken finger. Caught in a gurney while lifting an overweight patient. And, oh, yes, here—” He showed me his hip, along which ran a short, silvery, jagged line with the stitch marks just about visible. “Puncture wound, unknown provenance, nightclub fight in Hackney Road last June. The cops never worked out who did it.” I looked at the solidity of him, at the smattering of scars. “What’s that one?” I said, gently touching a smaller scar on the side of his stomach. His skin was hot under his shirt. “That? Oh. Appendix. I was nine.” I gazed at his torso, then his face. Then holding his gaze, I lifted the jumper slowly over my head. I shivered involuntarily, whether from the cooler air or nerves, I couldn’t tell. He moved closer, so close that he was inches from me, and ran his finger gently along the line of my hip. “I remember this. I remember I could feel the break here.” He ran it gently across my bare stomach, so that my muscles contracted. “And there. You had this bloom of purple on your skin. I was afraid it was organ damage.” He placed his palm against it. It was warm, and my breath caught. “I never thought the words organ damage could sound sexy before.” “Oh, I haven’t started yet.” He walked me slowly backward toward his bed. I sat down, my eyes still on his, and he knelt, running his hands down my legs. “And then there was that foot.” He picked up my right foot tenderly. You could still see the vivid red scar across the top. He traced the line of it with his thumb. “There. Broken. Soft tissue damage. That one would have hurt.” “You remember a lot.” “Most people I couldn’t recognize in the street a day later. But you, Louisa, well, you kind of stuck.” He dipped his head and kissed the top of my foot, then slowly ran his hands up my leg and placed his hands on either side of me, so that he was above me, supporting his own weight.“Nothing hurts now, right?” I shook my head, mute. I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care if he was a compulsive shagger, or playing games. I was so overwhelmed with wanting him I didn’t actually care if he broke my other hip. He moved across me, inch by inch, like a tide, and I lay back so that I was flat on the bed. With each movement my breath became shallower until it was all I could hear in the silence. He gazed down at me, then closed his eyes and kissed me, slowly and tenderly. He kissed me and let his weight fall onto me just far enough that I felt the delicious powerlessness of lust, the hardness of a body against mine. We kissed, his lips on my neck, his skin against my skin, until I was giddy with it, until I was arching involuntarily against him, my legs wrapped around him. “Oh, God,” I said breathlessly, when we came up for air. “I wish you weren’t so totally wrong for me.” His eyebrows shot up. “That’s—uh—seductive.” “You’re not going to cry afterward, are you?” He blinked. “Uh . . . no.” “And just so you know, I’m not some weird obsessive. I’m not going to follow you around afterward. Or ask Jake to tell me things about you while you’re in the shower.” “That’s . . . that’s good to know too.” And once we had established the ground rules, I flipped over so that I was on top of him and kissed him until I had forgotten everything we had just talked about. • • • An hour and a half later I was lying on my back and gazing dazedly up at the low ceiling. My skin buzzed, my bones hummed, I ached in places I hadn’t known I could ache, yet I was possessed with an extraordinary sense of peace, as if the core of me had simply melted and settled into a new shape. I wasn’t sure I would ever get up again. You never know what will happen, when you fall from a great height. That surely wasn’t me, I colored as I thought back to even twenty minutes earlier. Did I really—and did I . . . My thoughts chased themselves in hot circles. I had never had sex like that. Not in seven years with Patrick. It was like comparing a cheese sandwich with . . . what? An enormous steak? I giggled involuntarily and clamped a hand over my mouth. I felt utterly unlike myself. Sam had dozed off beside me and I turned my head to look at him. Oh, my God, I thought, marveling at the planes of his face, his lips, the way it was impossible to look at him and not want to touch him. I wondered whether I should move my face a little bit closer and maybe move my hand or maybe my mouth so that I could— “Hey,” he said softly, his eyes slanted with sleep. . . . and then it hit me. Oh, God. I’ve become one of them. • • • We dressed in near silence. Sam offered to make me tea, but I said I should probably get back as I needed to check whether Lily was home. “Her family being on holiday and all.” I tugged my fingers through my now-matted hair. “Sure. Oh. You want to go now?” “Yes . . . please.” I fetched my clothes from the bathroom, feeling self-conscious and suddenly sober. I couldn’t let him see how unbalanced I was. Every bit of me was focused on trying to redistance myself and it made me awkward. When I came out he was dressed and tidying up the last of the supper things. I tried not to look at him. It was easier that way. “Could I borrow these clothes to go home? Mine are still damp.” “Sure. Just . . . whatever.” He rifled in a drawer and held out a plastic bag. I took it and we stood there in the dark space. “It was a . . . nice evening.” “Nice.” He looked at me as if he were trying to work something out. “Okay.” • • • As we rode through the damp night, I tried not to rest my cheek against his back. He insisted on lending me a leather jacket, although I had insisted I’d be fine. A few miles in, the air was cold and I was glad of it. We made it back to my flat by a quarter past eleven, although I had to check when I saw the clock. I felt like I’d lived several lifetimes since he’d picked me up. I dismounted from the bike and started to take off his jacket. But he pushed down his kickstand with his heel. “It’s late. Let me at least see you upstairs.” I hesitated. “Okay. If you wait I can give you back your clothes.” I tried to sound insouciant. He looked at me strangely. Then he gave a shrug that could have meant yes, or whatever, I wasn’t sure, and followed me to the door. • • • We emerged from the stairwell to the sound of music thumping down the hallway. I knew immediately where it was coming from. I limped briskly down the corridor, then paused outside the flat and opened the door slowly. Lily stood in the middle of the hall, gazing into the mirror, cigarette in one hand, a glass of wine in the other. She was wearing a yellow flowered dress I had bought from a vintage boutique, back in the days when I cared about what I wore. I stared—and it’s possible that when I registered what else she was wearing I stumbled, as I felt Sam reach for my arm. “Nice leathers, Louisa!” Lily pointed her toe. She was wearing my green glittery shoes. “Why don’t you ever wear these? You have all these crazy outfits, and yet you just wear like, jeans and T-shirts and stuff every day. Sooo boring!” She walked back into my room and emerged a minute later, holding up a gold seventies lam? jumpsuit I used to pair with brown boots. “I mean, look at this! I have total and utter jumpsuit envy right now.” “Get them off,” I said, when I could speak. “What?” “Those tights. Get them off.” My voice emerged strangled and unrecognizable. Lily looked down at the black and yellow tights. “No, seriously, though, you have some proper vintage gear in there. Biba, DVF. That purple Chanel-type thing. Do you know what this stuff is worth?” “Get them off.” Perhaps registering my sudden rigidity, Sam began to propel me forward. “Look, why don’t we go through to the living room and—” “I’m not moving until she takes those tights off.” Lily pulled a face. “Jesus. No need to have a baby about it.” I watched, vibrating with anger, as Lily began to peel down my bumblebee tights, kicking at them when they wouldn’t slide off her feet. “Don’t rip them!” “They’re just a pair of tights.” “They are not just a pair of tights. They were . . . a gift.” “Still a pair of tights,” she muttered. She finally got them off, leaving them in a black and yellow heap on the floor. In the other room I could hear the clatter of hangers as the rest of my clothes were presumably being hastily replaced. A moment later, Lily reappeared in the living room. In her bra and knickers. She waited until she could be sure she had our attention, then pulled a short dress slowly and ostentatiously over her head, wiggling as it went over her slim, pale hips. Then she smiled at me sweetly. “I’m going clubbing. Don’t wait up. Nice to see you again, Mr.—” “Fielding,” said Sam. “Mr. Fielding.” She smiled at me. A smile that wasn’t a smile at all. And with a slam of the door, she was gone. I let out a shaky breath, then walked over and retrieved the tights. I sat down on the sofa and straightened them out, smoothing them until I could be sure there were no snags or cigarette burns. Sam sat down beside me. “You okay?” he said. “I know you must think I’m crazy,” I said, eventually. “But they were a—” “You don’t have to explain.” “I was a different person. They meant that—I was—he gave . . .” My voice was choked. We sat there for a moment in the silent flat. I knew I should say something but I was lost for words and there was an enormous lump in my throat. I took Sam’s jacket off and held it out to him. “It’s fine,” I said finally. “You don’t have to stay.” I felt his eyes on me, but didn’t raise mine from the floor. “I’ll leave you to it then.” And then, before I could say anything else, he was gone. 14 Iwas late to the Moving On Circle that week. Having left me a coffee, perhaps in lieu of an apology, Lily had subsequently spilled green paint on the hall floor, left a tub of ice cream to melt on the kitchen counter, taken my door keys, with my car key attached, because she couldn’t find her own, and borrowed my wig for a night out without asking. I had recovered it from the floor of her bedroom. When I put it on, I looked as if an Old English sheepdog were doing something unmentionable to my head. By the time I reached the church hall, everyone else was sitting down. Natasha moved obligingly so that I could take the plastic chair beside her. “Tonight we are talking about signs that we might be moving on,” said Marc, who was holding a mug of tea. “These don’t have to be huge things—new relationships, or throwing out clothes, or whatever. Just small things that make us see there may be a way through grief. It’s surprising how many of these signs go unnoticed, or we refuse to acknowledge them because we feel guilty for moving forward.” “I joined a dating website,” said Fred. “It’s called May to December.” There was a low hum of surprise and approval. “That’s very encouraging, Fred.” Marc sipped his tea. “What are you hoping to get from it? Some company? I remember you said you particularly missed having someone to go for a walk with on Sunday afternoons. Down by the duck pond, wasn’t it, where you and your wife used to go?” “Oh, no. It’s for Internet sex.” Marc spluttered. There was a brief pause while someone handed him a tissue to mop the tea off his trousers. “Internet sex. That’s what they’re all doing, isn’t it? I’ve joined three sites,” Fred said. He held up his hand, counting them off on his fingers. “May to December, that’s for young women who like older men, Sugar-Papas—that’s for young women who like older men with money, and . . . um . . . Hot Studs.” He paused. “They weren’t specific.” There was a short silence. “It’s nice to be optimistic, Fred,” said Natasha. “How about you, Louisa?” “Um . . .” I hesitated, given Jake was in front of me, and then thought: What the hell. “Well, I actually went on a date this weekend.” There was a low woo-hoo! from other members of the group. I looked down a little sheepishly. I couldn’t even think about that night without color seeping into my face. “And how did it go?” “It was surprising.” “She shagged someone. She totally shagged someone,” said Natasha. “She’s got that glow,” said William. “Did he have moves?” said Fred. “Got any tips?” “And you managed to not think about Bill too much?” “Not enough to stop me . . . I just felt I wanted to do something that . . .” I shrugged. “. . . I just wanted to feel . . . alive.” There was a murmur of agreement at that word. It was what we all wanted, ultimately, to be freed from our grief. To be released from this underworld of the dead, half our hearts lost underground, or trapped in little porcelain urns. It felt good to have something positive to say for once. Marc nodded encouragingly. “I think it sounds very healthy.” I listened to Sunil say that he had started to listen to music again, and Natasha talk about how she had moved some of the pictures of her husband from the living room to her bedroom “so that I don’t end up talking about him every single time somebody comes over.” Daphne had stopped sniffing her husband’s shirts, furtively, in his wardrobe. “If I’m honest they didn’t really smell of him anymore anyway. I think it was just a habit I’d got into.” “And you, Jake?” He still looked miserable. “I go out more, I s’pose.” “Have you talked to your father about your feelings?” “No.” I tried not to look at him as he spoke. I felt oddly raw, not knowing what he knew. “I think he likes someone, though.” “More shagging?” said Fred. “No, I mean as in properly likes someone.” I could feel myself blushing. I tried rubbing at an invisible mark on my shoe in an attempt to hide my face. “What makes you think that, Jake?” “He started talking about her over breakfast the other day. He was saying that he thought he was going to stop the whole picking-up-random-women thing. That he had met someone and he might want to make a go of it with her.” I was glowing like a beacon. I couldn’t believe that nobody else in the room was able to see it. “So do you think he’s finally worked out that rebound relationships are not the way forward? Perhaps he just needed a few partners before he fell in love with someone again.” “He’s done a lot of rebounding,” said William. “Actual Space Hopper levels of rebounding.” “Jake? How does that make you feel?” said Marc. “A bit weird. I mean, I miss my mum, but I do think it’s probably good that he’s moving on.” I tried to imagine what Sam had said. Had he mentioned me by name? I could picture the two of them in the kitchen of the little railway carriage, having this earnest discussion over tea and toast. My cheeks were aflame. I wasn’t sure I wanted Sam to make assumptions about us so early on. I should have been clearer that it hadn’t meant we were in a relationship. It was too soon. And too soon to have Jake discussing us in public. “And have you met the woman?” said Natasha. “Do you like her?” Jake ducked his head for a moment, then rubbed at his face. “Yeah. That was the really crap bit.” I glanced up. “He asked her round for brunch on Sunday, and she was a total nightmare. She wore this super-tight top and she kept putting her arm around me like she knew me, and laughing too loudly, and then when my dad was in the garden she would look at me with these big round eyes and go ‘And how are you?’ with this really annoying head tilt.” “Oh, the head tilt,” said William, and there was a low murmur of agreement. Everyone knew the head tilt. “And when Dad was there she just giggled and flicked her hair all the time like she was trying to be a teenager even though she was plainly at least thirty.” He wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Thirty!” said Daphne, her gaze sliding sideways. “Imagine!” “I actually preferred the one who used to quiz me about what he was up to. At least she didn’t pretend to be my best friend.” I could barely hear the rest of what he said. A distant ringing had begun in my ears, drowning out all sound. How could I have been so stupid? I suddenly recalled Jake’s eye roll the first time he had watched Sam chatting me up. There was my warning, right there, and I had been stupid enough to ignore it. I felt hot and shaky. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t listen to any more. “Um . . . I just remembered . . . I have an appointment,” I mumbled, gathering my bag up and bolting from my seat. “Sorry.” “Everything all right, Louisa?” asked Marc. “Totally fine. Got to dash.” I ran for the door, my fake smile plastered on my face so tightly that it was painful. • • • He was there. Of course he was. He had just pulled up on the bike in the car park and was removing his helmet. I emerged from the church hall and stopped at the top of the steps, wondering if there was any way I could get to my car without passing him, but it was hopeless. The physical part of my brain registered the shape of him before the remaining synapses caught up: a flush of pleasure, the flash of memory of how his hands had felt on me. And then that blazing anger, the blood pulse of humiliation. “Hey,” he said, as he caught sight of me, his smile easy, his eyes crinkling with pleasure. The fecking charmer. I slowed my step just long enough for him to register the hurt on my face. I didn’t care. I felt like Lily suddenly. I was not going to internalize this. This had not been me climbing out of one person’s bed and straight into another’s. “Nice job, you utter, utter wanker,” I spat, then ran past him to my car before the choke in my voice could turn into an actual sob. • • • The week, as if in response to some unheard malign dog whistle, actually managed to go downhill from there. Richard grew ever pickier, complained that we didn’t smile enough and that our lack of “cheery bantz” with the customers was sending travelers along the way to the Wings in the Air Bar and Grill. The weather turned, sending the skies a gunmetal gray and delaying flights with tropical rainstorms, so the airport was filled with bad-tempered passengers, and then, with immaculate timing, the baggage handlers went on strike. “What can you expect? Mercury is in retrograde,” said Vera savagely, and growled at a customer who asked for less froth on his cappuccino. At home, Lily arrived under her own dark cloud. She sat in my living room, glued to her mobile phone and whatever was on it seemed to give her no pleasure. She would stare out of the window, stony-faced, as her father had, as if she were just as trapped as he had been. I had tried to explain that the yellow and black tights were ones that Will had given me, that their significance was not in the color or the quality, but that they— “Yeah, yeah, tights. Whatever,” she said, not looking at me. For three nights I barely slept. I stared at my ceiling, fired by a cold fury that lodged in my chest and refused to go away. I was so angry with Sam. But I was angrier with myself. He texted twice, a maddeningly faux-innocent “??,” to which I didn’t trust myself to respond. I had done that classic thing that women do, of ignoring everything a man says or does, preferring to listen to their own insistent drumbeat: It will be different with me. I had kissed him. I had made the whole thing happen. So I had only myself to blame. I tried to tell myself I’d probably had a lucky escape. I told myself, with little internal exclamation marks, that it was better to find out now, rather than in six months’ time! I tried to view it through Marc’s eyes: it was good to have moved on! I could chalk this one up to experience! At least the sex was good! And then the stupid hot tears would leak out of my stupid eyes and I would screw them up and tell myself that this was what you got for letting anyone get close at all. • • • Depression, we had learned in the group, loves a vacuum. Far better to be doing, or at least planning. Sometimes the illusion of happiness could inadvertently create it. Sick of coming home to find Lily prostrate on my sofa every evening and just as sick of trying not to look irritated by it, on Friday night I told her that we would be headed to see Mrs. Traynor the following day. “But you said she didn’t reply to your letter.” “Maybe she didn’t get it. Whatever. At some point Mr. Traynor is going to tell his daughter about you, so we might as well go and see her before that happens.” She didn’t say anything. I took that as a tacit sign of agreement, and left her to it. That night I found myself going through the clothes that Lily had pulled out of the closet, clothes that I had ignored since leaving England for Paris two years previously. There had been no point in wearing them. I hadn’t felt like that person since Will died. Now, though, it felt important to put something on that was neither jeans nor a green Irish-dancing-girl outfit. I found a navy minidress I had once loved that seemed sober enough for a slightly formal visit, ironed it, and put it to one side. I told Lily we would be leaving at nine the following morning and I went to bed, thinking how exhausting it was to live with someone who believed that communicating with more than a grunt was a superhuman feat. Ten minutes after I had closed my door, a handwritten note was pushed under it. Dear Louisa I’m sorry I borrowed your clothes. And thanks for everything. I know I’m a pain sometimes. Sorry. Lily xxx PS You should totally wear those clothes though. They are WAY better than that stuff you wear. I opened the door, and Lily was standing there. She stepped forward and gave me a brief, emphatic hug, so tight that my ribs hurt. Then she turned and, without a word, disappeared back into the living room. • • • The day dawned brighter, and our mood lifted a little with it. We drove several hours to a tiny village in Oxfordshire, a place of walled gardens and mustardtinted, sunbaked stone walls. I prattled on during the journey, mostly to hide my nerves about seeing Mrs. Traynor again. The hardest thing about talking to teenagers, I had discovered, was that whatever you said inevitably came across like something an elderly aunt would say at a wedding. “So what things do you like doing? When you’re not at school?” She shrugged. “What do you think you might want to do after you leave?” She gave me the look. “You must have had hobbies growing up?” She reeled off a dizzying list: show jumping, lacrosse, hockey, piano (grade five), cross-country running, county-level tennis. “All that? And you didn’t want to keep any of it up?” She sniffed and shrugged simultaneously, then put her feet up on th dashboard, as if the conversation were closed. “Your father loved to travel,” I remarked, a few miles on. “You said.” “He once told me he’d been everywhere except North Korea. And Disneyland. He could tell stories about places I’d never even heard of.” “People my age don’t go on adventures. There’s nowhere left to discover. And people who backpack in their gap year are unbelievably tedious. Always yakking on about some bar they discovered in Ko Phang Yan, or how they scored amazing drugs in the Burmese rain forest.” “You don’t have to backpack.” “Yeah, but once you’ve seen the inside of one Mandarin Oriental you’ve seen them all.” She yawned. “I went to school near here once,” she observed later, peering out of the window. “It was the only school I actually liked.” She paused. “I had a friend called Holly.” “What happened?” “Mum got obsessed with the idea that it wasn’t the right sort of school. She said they weren’t far enough up the league tables or something. It was just some little boarding school. Not academic. So they moved me. After that I couldn’t be arsed making friends. What’s the point if they’re just going to move you on again?” “Did you keep in touch with Holly?” “Not really. There’s no point when you can’t actually see each other.” I had a vague memory of the intensity of teenage female relationships; more of a passion than a normal friendship. “What do you think you’ll do? I mean if you really aren’t going to go back to school?” “I don’t like thinking ahead.” “But you’re going to have to think about something, Lily.” She closed her eyes for a minute, then put her feet back down and peeled some purple varnish off her thumbnail. “I don’t know, Louisa. Perhaps I’ll just follow your amazing example and do all the exciting things you do.” I took three deep breaths, just to prevent myself from stopping the car on the motorway. Nerves, I told myself. It was just her nerves. And then, just to annoy her, I turned on Radio 2 really loudly and kept it there the rest of the way. • • • We found Four Acres Lane with help from a local dog walker, and pulled up outside Fox’s Cottage, a modest white building with a thatched roof. Outside, scarlet roses tumbled around an iron arch at the start of the garden path, and delicately colored blooms fought for space in neatly tended beds. A small hatchback car sat in the drive. “She’s gone down in the world,” said Lily, peering out. “It’s pretty.” “It’s a shoebox.” I sat, listening to the engine tick down. “Listen, Lily. Before we go in. Just don’t expect too much,” I said. “Mrs. Traynor’s sort of formal. She takes refuge in manners. She’ll probably speak to you like she’s a teacher. I mean, I don’t think she’ll hug you, like Mr. Traynor did.” “My grandfather is a hypocrite.” Lily sniffed. “He makes out like you’re the greatest thing ever, but really he’s just pussy-whipped.” “And please don’t use the term ‘pussy-whipped.’” “There’s no point pretending to be someone I’m not,” Lily said sulkily. We sat there for a while. I realized that neither of us wanted to be the one to walk up to the door. “Shall I try to call her one more time?” I said, holding up my phone. I’d tried twice that morning but it had gone straight to voice mail. “Don’t tell her straight away,” she said suddenly. “Who I am, I mean. I just . . . I just want to see who she is. Before we tell her.” “Sure,” I said, softening. And before I could say anything else, Lily was out of the car and striding up toward the front gate, her hands bunched into fists like a boxer about to enter a ring. • • • Mrs. Traynor had gone quite, quite gray. Her hair, which had been tinted dark brown, was now white and short, making her look much older than she actually was, or like someone recently recovered from a serious illness. She was probably a stone lighter than when I had last seen her, and there were liver-colored hollows under her eyes. She looked at Lily with a confusion that told me she didn’t expect any visitors, at any time. And then she saw me, and her eyes widened. “Louisa?” “Hello, Mrs. Traynor.” I stepped forward and held out a hand. “We were in the area. I don’t know if you got my letter. I just thought I’d stop by and say hello . . .” My voice—false and unnaturally cheery—tailed off. The last time she had seen me was when I helped clear her dead son’s room; the time before that at his last breath. I watched her relive both those facts now. “We were just admiring your garden.” “David Austin roses,” said Lily. Mrs. Traynor looked at her as if noticing her for the first time. Her smile was slight and wavering. “Yes. Yes, they are. How clever of you. It’s—I’m very sorry. I don’t have many visitors. What did you say your name was?” “This is Lily,” I said, and watched as Lily took Mrs. Traynor’s hand and shook it, studying her intently as she did so. We stood there on her front step for a moment, and then finally, as if she thought she had no alternative, Mrs. Traynor turned and pushed the door open. “I suppose you’d better come in.” • • • The cottage was tiny, its ceilings so low that even I had to duck when moving from the hall to the kitchen. I waited as Mrs. Traynor made tea, watching Lily walk restlessly around the tiny living room, navigating her way among the few bits of highly polished antique furniture that I remembered from my days in Granta House, picking things up and putting them down again. “And . . . how have you been?” Mrs. Traynor’s voice was flat, as if it were not a question she was really seeking an answer to. “Oh, quite well, thank you.” Long silence. “It’s a lovely village.” “Yes. Well. I couldn’t really stay in Stortfold . . .” She poured boiling water into the teapot and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Della, moving heavily around Mrs. Traynor’s old kitchen. “Do you know many people in the area?” “No.” She said it as if that might have been the sole reason for her moving there. “Would you mind taking the milk jug? I can’t fit everything on this tray.” There followed a painfully labored half hour of conversation. Mrs. Traynor, a woman infused with the instinctive upper-middle-class skill of being all over any social situation, had apparently lost the ability to communicate. She seemed only half with us when I spoke. She asked a question, then asked it again ten minutes later, as if she had failed to register the answer. I wondered about the use of antidepressants. Lily watched her surreptitiously, her thoughts ticking across her face, and I sat between them, my stomach in an increasingly tight knot, waiting for something to happen. I chattered on into the silence, talking of my awful job, things I’d done in France, the fact that my parents were well, thank you—anything to end the awful, oppressive stillness that crept across the little room whenever I stopped. But Mrs. Traynor’s grief hung over the little house like a fog. If Mr. Traynor had seemed exhausted by sadness, Mrs. Traynor appeared to be swallowed up by it. There was almost nothing left of the brisk, proud woman I had known. “What brings you to this area?” she said, finally. “Um . . . just visiting friends,” I said. “How do you two know each other?” I said, “I . . . I knew Lily’s father.” “How nice,” said Mrs. Traynor, and we smiled awkwardly. I watched Lily, waiting for her to say something, but she had frozen, as if she, too, were overwhelmed, faced with the reality of this woman’s pain. We drank a second cup of tea and remarked upon her beautiful garden for the third, possibly fourth time, and I fought the sensation that our enduring presence was requiring a sort of superhuman effort on her behalf. She didn’t want us there. She was far too polite to say so, but it was obvious that she really just wanted to be on her own. It was in every gesture, every forced smile, every attempt to stay on top of the conversation. I suspected that the moment we were gone she would simply retreat into a chair and stay there, or shuffle upstairs and curl up in her bed. And then I noticed it: the complete absence of photographs. Whereas Granta House had been filled with silver-framed pictures of her children, of their family, of ponies, skiing holidays, distant grandparents, this cottage was bare. A small bronze of a horse, a watercolor of some hyacinths, but no people. I found myself shifting in my seat, wondering if I had simply missed them, gathered on some occasional table or windowsill. But no; the cottage was brutally impersonal. I thought of my own flat, my utter failure to personalize it or allow myself to turn it into any kind of a home. And I felt suddenly leaden, and desperately sad. What have you done to us all, Will? “It’s probably time to go, Louisa,” said Lily, looking pointedly at the clock. “You did say we wouldn’t want to hit traffic.” I gazed at her. “But—” “You said we shouldn’t stay too long.” Her voice was high and clear. “Oh. Yes. Traffic can be very tedious.” Mrs. Traynor began to rise from her chair. I was glaring at Lily, about to protest again, when the phone rang. Mrs. Traynor flinched, as if the sound were now unfamiliar. She looked at both of us, as if wondering whether to answer it, and then, perhaps realizing that she couldn’t ignore it while we were there, she excused herself and walked through to the other room, where we heard her answer. “What are you doing?” I said. “It just feels all wrong,” said Lily miserably. “But we can’t go without telling her.” “I just can’t do this today. It’s all . . .” “I know it’s scary. But look at her, Lily. I really think it might help her if you told her. Don’t you?” Lily’s eyes widened. “Tell me what?” My head swiveled. Mrs. Traynor was standing motionless by the door to the little hallway. “What is it you need to tell me?” Lily looked at me, then back toward Mrs. Traynor. I felt time slow around us. She swallowed, then lifted her chin a little. “That I’m your granddaughter.” A brief silence. “My . . . what?” “I’m Will Traynor’s daughter.” Her words echoed in the little room. Mrs. Traynor’s gaze slid toward mine, as if to check whether this was in fact some grotesque joke. “But . . . you can’t be.” Lily recoiled. “Mrs. Traynor, I know this must come as something of a shock—” I began. She didn’t hear me. She was staring fiercely at Lily. “How could my son have had a daughter I didn’t know about?” “Because my mum didn’t tell anyone.” Lily’s voice emerged as a whisper. “All that time? How can you have been a secret for all that time?” Mrs. Traynor turned toward me. “You knew about this?” I swallowed. “It was why I wrote to you. Lily came to find me. She wanted to know about her family. Mrs. Traynor, we didn’t want to cause you any more pain. It’s just that Lily wanted to know her grandparents and it didn’t go particularly well with Mr. Traynor and . . .” “No. He would have said something,” she said, shaking her head. “I know he would. He was my son.” “I’ll take a blood test if you really don’t believe me,” said Lily, her arms folding across her chest. “But I’m not after anything of yours. I don’t need to come and stay with you or anything. I have my own money, if that’s what you think.” “I’m not sure what I—” Mrs. Traynor began. “You don’t have to look horrified. I’m not, like, some contagious disease you’ve just inherited. Just, you know, a granddaughter. Jesus.” Mrs. Traynor sank slowly into a chair. After a moment, a trembling hand went to her head. “Are you all right, Mrs. Traynor?” “I don’t think I . . .” Mrs. Traynor closed her eyes. She seemed to have retreated somewhere far inside herself. “Lily, I think we should go. Mrs. Traynor, I’m going to write down my number. We’ll come back when this news has had a chance to sink in—” “Says who? I’m not coming back here. She thinks I’m a liar. Jesus. This family.” Lily stared at us both in disbelief, then pushed her way out of the little room, knocking over a small walnut occasional table as she went. I stooped, picking it up, and carefully replaced the little silver boxes that had been laid out neatly on its surface. Mrs. Traynor’s expression was gaunt with shock. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Traynor,” I said. “I really did try to speak to you before we came.” I heard the car door slam. Mrs. Traynor took a breath. “I don’t read things if I don’t know where they’ve come from. I had letters. Vile letters. Telling me that I . . . I don’t answer anything much now . . . It’s never anything I want to hear.” She looked bewildered and old and fragile. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” I picked up my bag and fled. • • • “Don’t say anything,” said Lily, as I got into the car. “Just don’t. Okay?” “Why did you do that?” I sat in the driver’s seat, keys in my hand. “Why would you sabotage it all?” “I could see how she felt about me from the moment she looked at me.” “She’s a mother, plainly still grieving for her son. We had just given her an enormous shock. And you went off at her like a rocket. Could you not have been quiet and let her digest it all? Why do you have to push everyone away?” “Oh, what the hell would you know about me?” “Enough to know that you seem determined to wreck your relationship with every person who might get close to you.” “Oh, God, is this about the stupid tights again? What do you know about anything? You spend your whole life alone in a crappy flat where nobody visits. Your parents plainly think you’re a loser. You don’t have the guts to even walk out of the world’s most pathetic job.” “You have no idea how hard it is to even get any job these days, so don’t you tell me—” “You’re a loser. Worse than that, you’re a loser who thinks you can tell other people what to do. And who gives you the right? You sat there at my dad’s bedside and you watched him die and you did nothing about it. Nothing! So I hardly think you’re any great judge of how to behave.” The silence in the car was as hard and brittle as glass. I stared at the wheel. I waited until I was sure that I could breathe normally. Then I started the car and we drove the 120 miles home in silence. 15 Ibarely saw Lily for the next few days, and that suited me fine. When I would arrive home from work a trail of crumbs or empty mugs confirmed that she had been there. A couple of times I walked in and the air was oddly disturbed, as if something had taken place I couldn’t quite identify. But nothing was missing and nothing obviously altered, and I chalked it up to the weirdness of sharing a flat with someone with whom you weren’t getting on. For the first time I allowed myself to admit that sometimes I missed being on my own. I called my sister, and she had the good grace not to say, “I told you so.” Well, maybe just once. “That is the worst thing about being a parent,” she said, as if I were one too. “You’re meant to be this serene, all-knowing, gracious person who can handle every situation. And sometimes when Thom is rude, or I’m tired, I just want to slam the door at him or stick my tongue out and tell him he’s an arse.” Which was pretty much how I felt. Work had reached a misery point where I had to make myself sing show tunes in my car to endure the drive to the airport, knowing what awaited me there. And then there was Sam. Whom I didn’t think about. I didn’t think about him in the morning, when I caught sight of my naked body in the bathroom mirror. I didn’t remember the way his fingers had traced my skin and made my vivid red scars not so much invisible as part of a shared history—or how, for one brief evening, I had felt reckless and alive again. I didn’t think about him when I watched the couples, heads bowed together as they examined their boarding passes, off to share romantic adventures—or just hot monkey sex—in destinations far from here. I didn’t think about him on the way to and from work, whenever an ambulance went screaming past—which seemed to happen an inordinate number of times. And I definitely didn’t think about him in the evening when I sat home alone on my sofa, gazing at a television show whose plot I couldn’t have told you and looking, I suspected, like the loneliest flammable porno pixie on the planet. • • • Nathan rang and left a message, asking me to call. I wasn’t sure I could bear to hear the latest episode of his exciting new life in New York, and put it on my mental to-do list of things that would never actually get done. Tanya texted me to say the Houghton-Millers had come home three days early, something to do with Francis’s work. Richard called, telling me I was on the late shift from Monday to Friday. And please don’t be late, Louisa. I would like to remind you again that you are on your final warning. I did the only thing I could think of: on Saturday I went home, driving to Stortfold with the music turned up loud so that I didn’t have to be alone with my thoughts. I felt suddenly grateful for my parents. I felt an almost umbilical pull toward home, the comfort offered by a conventional family and a traditional Sunday lunch. • • • “Lunch?” said Dad, his arms crossed across his stomach, his jaw set in indignation. “Oh, no. We don’t do Sunday lunch anymore. Lunch is a sign of patriarchal oppression.” Granddad nodded mournfully from the corner. “No, no, we can’t have lunch. We do sandwiches on a Sunday now. Or soup. Soup is apparently agreeable to feminism.” Treena, studying at the dining table, rolled her eyes. “Mum is doing a women’s poetry class on Sunday mornings at the Adult Education Center. She’s hardly turned into Andrea Dworkin.” “See, Lou? Now I’m expected to know all about feminism, and this Andrew Dorkin fella has stolen my bloody Sunday lunch.” “You’re being dramatic, Dad.” “How is this dramatic? Sundays are family time. We should have family Sunday lunch.” “Mum’s entire life has been family time. Why can’t you just let her have some time to herself?” Dad pointed his folded-up newspaper at Treena. “You did this. Your mammy and I were perfectly happy before you started telling her she wasn’t.” Granddad nodded in agreement. “It’s all gone pear-shaped around here. I can’t watch the television without her muttering, ‘Sexist,’ at the yogurt ads. This is sexist. That’s sexist. When I brought home Ade Palmer’s copy of the Sun just for a bit of a read of the sports pages she chucked it in the fire because of Page Three. I never know where she is from one day to the next.” “One two-hour class,” said Treena mildly, not looking up from her books. “On a Sunday.” “I’m not being funny, Dad,” I said, “but those things on the end of your arms?” “What?” Dad looked down. “What?” “Your hands,” I said. “They’re not painted on.” He frowned at me. “So I’m guessing you could make the lunch. Give Mum a surprise when she gets back from her poetry class?” Dad’s eyes widened. “Me make the Sunday lunch! Me? We’ve been married nearly thirty years, Louisa. I don’t do the bloody lunch. I do the earning, and your mother does the lunch. That’s the deal! That’s what I signed up for! What’s the world coming to if I’m there with a pinny on peeling spuds on a Sunday? How is that fair?” “It’s called modern life, Dad.” “Modern life. You’re no help,” Dad harrumphed. “I’ll bet you Mr. bloody Traynor gets his Sunday lunch. That girl of his wouldn’t be a feminist.” “Ah. Then you need a castle, Dad. Castles trump feminism every time.” Treena and I started to laugh. “You know what? There’s a reason why the two of you haven’t got boyfriends.” “Ooh. Red card!” We both held up our right hands. He shoved his paper up in the air and stomped off to the garden. Treena turned and grinned at me. “I was going to suggest we cook lunch but . . . now?” “I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to perpetuate a patriarchal oppression. Pub?” “Excellent. I’ll text Mum.” My mother, it seemed, had, at the age of fifty-six, begun to come out of her shell, first as tentatively as a hermit crab but now, apparently, with increasing enthusiasm. For years she hadn’t left the house unaccompanied, had been satisfied with the little domain that was our three-and-a-half-bedroom home. But spending weeks in London after I’d had my accident had forced her out of her normal routine and sparked some long-dormant curiosity about life beyond Stortfold. She had started flicking through some of the feminist texts Treena had been given at the GenderQuake awareness group at college, and these two alchemic happenings had caused my mother to undergo something of an awakening. She had ripped her way through The Second Sex and Fear of Flying, followed by The Female Eunuch, and after reading The Women’s Room had been so shocked at what she saw as the parallels to her own life that she had refused to cook for three days, until she had discovered Granddad was hoarding fourpacks of stale doughnuts. “I keep thinking about what your man Will said,” she remarked, as we sat around the table in the pub garden watching Thom periodically butt heads with the other children on the sagging bouncy castle. “You only get the one life—isn’t that what he told you?” She was wearing her usual blue short-sleeved shirt, but she had tied her hair back in a way I hadn’t seen before. It made her look oddly youthful. “So I just want to make the most of things. Learn a little. Take the rubber gloves off once in a while.” “Dad is quite pissed off,” I said. “Language.” “It’s a sandwich,” said my sister. “He’s not trekking forty days through the Gobi desert for food.” “And it’s a ten-week course. He’ll live,” said my mother firmly, then sat back and surveyed the two of us. “Well, now, isn’t this nice? I’m not sure the three of us have been out together since . . . well, since you were teenagers and we would go shopping in town on a Saturday.” “And Treena would complain that all the shops were boring.” “Yeah, but that’s because Lou liked charity shops that smelled of people’s armpits.” “It’s nice to see you in some of your favorite things again.” Mum nodded at me admiringly. I had put on a bright yellow T-shirt in the hope that it would make me look happier than I felt. They asked about Lily, and I said she was spending more time with her mother, and had been a bit of a handful, and they exchanged looks, like that was pretty much what they had expected me to say. I didn’t tell them about Mrs. Traynor. “That whole Lily thing was a very odd situation. I can’t think much of that mother just handing her daughter over to you.” “Mum means that nicely, by the way,” said Treen. “But that job of yours, Lou, love. I don’t like the thought of you prancing around behind a bar in your next-to-nothings. It sounds like that place . . . What is it?” “Hooters,” said Treena. “It’s not like Hooters. It’s at an airport. My hooters are fully suited and hooted.” “Nobody toots those hooters,” said Treena. “But you’re wearing a sexist costume to serve drinks. If that’s what you want to do, you could do that at . . . I don’t know, Disneyland Paris. If you were Minnie, or Winnie the Pooh, you wouldn’t even have to show your legs.” “You’ll be thirty soon,” said my sister. “Minnie, Winnie, or Nell Gwynnie. The choice is yours.” “Well,” I said, as the waitress brought our portions of chicken and chips, “I’ve been thinking, and yes, you’re right. From now on I’m going to move on. Focus on my career.” “Can you say that again?” My sister moved some of the chips from her plate onto Thom’s. The pub garden had become noisier. “Focus on my career,” I said, louder. “No. That bit where you said I was right. I’m not sure you’ve said that since 1997. Thom, don’t go back on the bouncy castle yet, sweetheart. You’ll be sick.” We sat there for a good part of the afternoon, avoiding Dad’s increasingly cross texts demanding to know what we were all doing. I had never just sat with my mother and sister, like normal, grown-up people, having grown-up conversations that didn’t involve putting anything away or somebody being so annoying. But we found ourselves surprisingly interested in each other’s lives and opinions, as if we had suddenly realized that each of us might have roles beyond the brainy one, the chaotic one, and the one who does all the housework. It was an odd sensation, having to view my family as human beings. “Mum,” I said, shortly after Thom had finished his chicken and run back to play, and about five minutes before he would lose his lunch on the bouncy castle and put it out of action for the rest of the afternoon, “do you ever mind not having had a career?” “No, love. I loved being a mum. I really did. But it’s odd . . . Everything that’s happened over the past two years, it does make you think.” I waited. “I’ve been reading about all these women—these brave souls who made such a difference in the world to the way people think and do things. And I look at what I’ve done and wonder whether, well, whether anyone would notice a jot if I wasn’t here.” She said this quite evenly, so I couldn’t tell if she was actually much more upset about it than she was prepared to let on. “We’d notice more than a jot, Mum,” I said. “But it’s not like I’ve made an impact on much, is it? I don’t know. I’ve always been content. But it’s like I’ve spent thirty years doing one thing and now everything I read, see on television and in the papers, it’s like everyone’s telling me it was worth nothing.” My sister and I stared at each other. “It wasn’t nothing to us, Mum.” “You’re sweet girls.” “I mean it. You—” I thought suddenly of Tanya Houghton-Miller. “You made us feel safe. And loved. I liked you being there every day when we came home.” Mum put her hand on mine.“I’m fine. I’m so proud of the pair of you, making your own way in the world. Really. But I just need to work out some things for myself. And it’s an interesting journey, really it is. I’m loving the reading. Mrs. Deans at the library is calling in all sorts of things she thinks I might be interested in. I’m going to move on to the American New Wave feminists next. Very interesting, all their theories.” She folded her paper napkin neatly. “I do wish they’d all stop arguing with each other, though. I slightly want to smack their heads together.” “And . . . are you really still not shaving your legs?” I had gone too far. My mother’s face closed off, and she gave me the fishy eye. “Sometimes, it takes you a while to wake up to a true sign of oppression. I have told your father, and I’ll tell you girls, the day he goes to the salon to have his legs covered with hot wax, then have it ripped off by a ruddy twenty-oneyear-old is the day I’ll start doing mine again.” • • • The sun eased down over Stortfold like melting butter. I stayed much later into the evening than I had intended, but finally said good-bye to my family, climbed into my car, and drove home. I felt grounded, tethered. After the emotional turbulence of the past week, it was good to be surrounded by a bit of normality. And my sister, who never showed signs of weakness, had confessed that she thought she would remain single forever, brushing away Mum’s insistence that she was “a gorgeous-looking girl.” “But I’m a single mother,” she’d said. “And worse, I don’t do flirting. I wouldn’t know how to flirt with someone if Louisa stood behind him holding up cue cards. And the only men I’ve met in two years have either been frightened off by Thom or after one thing.” “Oh, not—” my mother began. “Free accounting advice.” Suddenly, looking at her from the outside, I’d felt truly sympathetic. She was right: I had been handed, against the odds, all the advantages—a home of my own and a future free of any responsibilities. The only thing holding me back was myself. The fact that she wasn’t actually eaten up with bitterness over our respective lots was pretty impressive. I hugged her before I left. She was a little shocked, then momentarily suspicious, patted her upper back to check for KICK ME signs, then finally hugged me back. “Come and stay,” I said. “Really. Come and stay. I’ll take you dancing at this club I know. Mum can mind Thom.” My sister laughed and closed the door of the car as I started it. “Yeah. You dancing? Like that’s going to happen.” She was still laughing as I drove away. • • • Six days later I returned home after a late shift to a nightclub of my own. As I came up the stairs of my block, instead of the usual silence, I could hear the distant sound of laughter, the irregular thump of music. I hesitated for a moment outside my front door, thinking that in my exhausted state I must be mistaken, then unlocked it. The smell of weed hit me first, so strong I almost reflexively held my breath rather than inhale. I walked slowly to the living room, opened the door, and stood there, not quite able to believe at first the scene that confronted me. In the dimly lit room, Lily was lying on my sofa, her short skirt rucked up somewhere just below her bottom, a badly rolled joint midway to her mouth. Two young men were sprawled against the sofa, islands amid a sea of alcoholic detritus, empty crisps packets, and polystyrene takeaway cartons. Also seated on the floor were two girls of Lily’s age, one, her hair pulled back tightly into a ponytail, looked at me with her eyebrows raised, as if to question what I thought I was doing there. Music blasted from the sound system. The number of beer cans and overflowing ashtrays told of a long night. “Oh,” Lily said exaggeratedly. “Hi-i-i.” “What are you doing?” “Yeah. We were out, and we sort of missed the late bus, so I thought it would be okay if we crashed here. You don’t mind, do you?” I was so stunned I could barely speak. “Yes,” I said, tightly. “Actually, I do mind.” “Uh-oh.” She began to cackle. I stood in the doorway and dropped my bag at my feet. I gazed around me at the municipal rubbish dump that had once passed for my living room. “Party’s over. I’ll give you five minutes to clear up your mess and go.” “Oh, God. I knew it. You’re going to be boring about it, aren’t you? Ugh. I knew it.” She threw herself back on the sofa melodramatically. Her voice was slurred, her actions thickened with—what? Drugs? I waited. For one brief, tense moment, the two young men looked steadily at me and I could see they were assessing whether to get up or simply to sit there. One of the girls sucked her teeth audibly. “Four minutes,” I said slowly. “I’m counting.” Perhaps my righteous anger gave me some authority. Perhaps they were actually less brave than they appeared. One by one they slowly clambered to their feet and sloped past me to the open front door. As the last of the boys left, he ostentatiously lifted his hand and dropped a can on the hall floor so that beer sprayed up the wall and over the carpet. I kicked the door shut behind them and picked it up. By the time I got to Lily, I was shaking with anger. “What the hell do you think you are playing at?” “Jesus. It was just a few friends, okay?” “This is not your flat, Lily. It is not your place to bring people back as you see fit . . .” A sudden flashback: that strange sense of dislocation when I had returned home a week ago. “Oh, my God. You’ve done this before, haven’t you? Last week. You had people here and then left before I got back.” Lily climbed unsteadily to her feet. She pulled down her skirt and ran her hand through her hair, tugging at the tangles. Her eyeliner was smudged, and she had what could have been a bruise, or perhaps a hickey on her neck. “God. Why do you have to make such a big deal out of everything? They were just people, okay?” “In my home.” “Well, it’s hardly a home, is it? It’s got no furniture, and nothing personal. You haven’t even got pictures on your walls. It’s like . . . a garage. A garage without a car. I’ve actually seen homier petrol stations.” “What I do with my home is none of your business.” She let out a small belch and fanned the air in front of her mouth. “Ugh. Kebab breath.” She padded to the kitchen where she opened three cupboards until she found a glass. She filled it and gulped down the water. “And you haven’t even got a proper television. I didn’t know people even still had eighteen-inch screens.” I began to pick up the cans, shoving them into a plastic bag. “So who were they?” “I don’t know. Just some people.” “You don’t know?” “Friends.” She sounded irritated. “People I know from clubbing.” “You met them in a club?” “Yes. Clubbing. Blah, blah, blah. It’s like you’re being deliberately thick. Yes. Just some friends I met in a club. It’s what normal people do, you know? Have friends they go out with.” She threw the glass into the washing-up bowl, where I heard it crack, and stalked out of the kitchen, giving me a resentful look. I stared at her, my heart suddenly sinking. And I ran next door to my room and opened my top drawer. I riffled through my socks, looking for the little jewelry box that contained my grandmother’s chain and wedding ring. I stopped and took a deep breath, telling myself I couldn’t see it because I was panicking. It would be there. Of course it would. I began picking up the contents of the drawer, carefully checking through each item and throwing them onto the bed. “Did they come in here?” I shouted. Lily appeared in the doorway of my bedroom. “Did what?” “Your friends. Did they come in my bedroom? Where’s my jewelry?” Lily seemed to wake up a little. “Jewelry?” “Oh, no. Oh, no.” I opened all my drawers, began dumping the contents on the floor. “Where is it? And where’s my emergency cash?” I turned to her. “Who were they? What were their names?” Lily had gone quiet. “Lily!” “I—I don’t know.” “What do you mean you don’t know? You said they were your friends.” “Just . . . clubbing friends. Mitch. And . . . Lise and—I can’t remember.” I ran for the door, bolted down the hallway and hurled myself down the four flights of stairs. But by the time I reached the front door, the corridor and the street beyond it were empty, but for the late bus to Waterloo sailing gently, illuminated, down the middle of the dark road. I stood in the doorway, panting. Then I closed my eyes, fighting back tears, dropping my hands to my knees as I realized what I had lost: my grandmother’s ring, the fine gold chain with the little pendant she had worn from when I was a child. I knew already I would never see them again. There were so few things to pass down in my family, and now even these were gone. I walked slowly back up the stairs. Lily was standing in the hallway when I opened the front door. “I’m really sorry,” she said, quietly. “I didn’t know they would steal your stuff.” “Go away, Lily,” I said. “They seemed really nice. I—I should have thought—” “I’ve been at work for thirteen hours. I need to figure out what I’ve lost and then I want to go to sleep. Your mother is back from her holiday. Please just go home.” “But I—” “No. No more.” I straightened up slowly, taking a moment to catch my breath. “You know the real difference between you and your dad? Even when he was at his unhappiest he wouldn’t have treated anyone like this.” She looked as if I’d slapped her. I didn’t care. “I can’t do this anymore, Lily.” I pulled a twenty-pound note from my purse and handed it to her. “There. For your taxi.” She looked at it, then at me, and swallowed. She ran a hand through her hair and walked slowly back into the living room. I took off my jacket and stood staring at my reflection in the little mirror above my chest of drawers. I looked pale, exhausted, defeated. “And leave your keys,” I said. There was a short silence. I heard the clatter as they were dropped on the kitchen counter, and then with a click the front door closed and she was gone. 16 Imessed it all up, Will. I hauled my knees up to my chest. I tried to imagine what he would have said if he could see me then, but I could no longer hear his voice in my head and that small fact made me even sadder. What do I do now? I understood I could not stay in the flat that Will’s legacy had bought me. It felt as if it were steeped in my failures, a bonus prize I had failed to earn. How could you make a home in a place that had come to you for all the wrong reasons? I would sell it and invest the money somewhere. But where would I go instead? I thought of my job, the reflexive way my stomach now clenched when I heard Celtic panpipes, even on television, the way Richard made me feel useless, worthless. I thought of Lily, noting the peculiar weight of the silence that resulted when you knew without doubt that nobody but you would be in your home. I wondered where she was, and pushed the thought away. • • • The rain eased off in the morning, slowing and ceasing almost apologetically, as if the weather were admitting it hadn’t really known what had got into it. I pulled on some clothes, vacuumed the flat, and put out the bags of party-related rubbish. I walked to the flower market, mostly to give myself something to do. Always better to get out and about, Marc said. I decided I might feel better being in the thick of Columbia Road, with its gaudy displays of blooms and its slowmoving crowds of shoppers. Marc told us repeatedly that it was important to go through the motions of being happy. I fixed my face into a smile, frightened Samir when I bought myself an apple (“Are you on drugs, man?”), and headed off into a sea of flowers. I bought myself a coffee at a little coffee shop and watched the market through its steamed window, ignoring the fact that I was the only person in there on my own. I walked the length of the sodden market, breathed in the damp and heady scents of the lilies, admired the folded secrets of the peonies and roses, glass beads of rain still dotting their surfaces, and bought myself a bunch of dahlias, and the whole time I felt as if I were acting, a figure in an advert: Single city girl living the London dream. I walked home, cradling my dahlias in one arm, doing my best not to limp, all the while trying to stop the words Oh, who do you think you’re kidding? that popped repeatedly into my head. • • • The evening stretched and sagged, as lonely evenings do. I finished cleaning the flat, pulled cigarette butts out of the toilet cistern, watched some television, washed my uniform. I ran a bath full of bubbles and climbed out of it after five minutes, afraid to be alone with my thoughts. I could not call my mother or my sister; I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up the pretense of happiness with them. Finally, I reached into my bedside table and pulled out the letter, the one Will had arranged for me to receive in Paris, back when I was still full of hope. I unfolded its well-worn creases gently. There were times, that first year, when I would read it nightly, trying to bring him to life beside me. These days I rationed myself, told myself I didn’t need to see it; I was afraid it would lose its talismanic power, the words becoming meaningless. Well, I needed them now. The computer text, as dear to me as if he had been able to write it by hand, some residual trace of his energy still in those laser-printed words. You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone . . . There is a hunger in you, Clark. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do. Just live well. Just live. I read the words of a man who had once believed in me, and I put my head on my knees and finally I sobbed. • • • The phone rang, too loud, too close to my head, sending me lurching upright. I scrambled for it, noting the time: 2 a.m. The familiar, reflexive fear. “Lily?” “What? Lou?” Nathan’s familiar, deep drawl rolled across the phone line. “It’s two a.m., Nathan.” “Aw, man. I always mess up the time difference. Sorry. Want me to hang up?” I pushed myself upright, rubbing at my face. “No. No. . . . It’s good to hear from you.” I flicked on the bedside light. “How are you?” “Good! I’m back in New York.” “Great.” “Yeah. It was great to see the olds and all, but after a couple of weeks I was itching to get back here. This city is epic.” I forced a smile, in case he could hear it. “That’s great, Nathan. I’m glad for you.” “You still happy at that pub of yours?” “It’s fine.” “You don’t . . . want to do something else?” “Well, you know when things are bad, and you tell yourself stuff like, ‘Oh, it could be worse. I could be the person who cleans the poop out of the dog-poop bins?’ Well, right now I’d rather be the person who picks up the poop out of the dog-poop bins.” “Then I’ve got a proposition for you.” “I get that a lot from customers, Nathan. And the answer is always no.” “Ha. Well. There’s a job opening out here, working for this family I live with. And you were the first person I thought of.” Mr. Gopnik’s wife, he explained, was not a typical Wall Street wife. She didn’t do the whole “shopping and lunches” thing; she was a Polish ?migr?, prone to mild depression. She was lonely, and the help—a Guatemalan woman —wouldn’t say two words to her. What Mr. Gopnik wanted was someone he could trust to keep his wife company and help with the children, to be an extra pair of hands when they traveled. “He wants a sort of girl Friday to the family. Someone cheerful and trustworthy. And someone who is not going to go blabbing about their private life.” “Does he know—” “I told him about Will at our first meeting, but he’d already done background. He wasn’t put off. Far from it. He said he was impressed that we’d followed Will’s wishes and never sold our stories.” Nathan paused. “I’ve worked it out. At this level, Lou, people value trust and discretion over anything else. I mean obviously you can’t be an idiot, and have to do your job well, but, yeah, that’s basically what matters.” My mind was whirling, an out-of-control waltzer at a fairground. I held the phone in front of me and put it back to my ear. “Is this . . . Am I actually still asleep?” “It’s not an easy ride. It’s long hours and a lot of work. But I’ll tell you, mate. I’m having the best time.” I pushed my hand through my hair. I thought about the bar, with its huffing businessmen and Richard’s gimlet stare. I thought about the flat, its walls closing in on me every evening. “I don’t know. This is . . . I mean it all seems—” “It’s a green card, Lou.” Nathan’s voice dropped. “It’s your board and lodging. It’s New York. Listen. This is a man who gets stuff done. Work hard and he’ll look after you. He’s smart, and he’s fair. Get out here, show him what you’re worth, and you could end up with opportunities you wouldn’t believe. Seriously. Don’t think of this as a nanny job. Think of it as a gateway.” “I don’t know. . . .” “Some fella you don’t want to leave?” I hesitated. “No. But so much has gone on . . . I’ve not been . . .” It seemed an awful lot to explain at two o’clock in the morning. “I know you were knocked by what happened. We all were. But you’ve got to move on.” “Don’t say it’s what he would have wanted.” “Okay,” he said. We both listened as he said it silently. I tried to gather my thoughts. “Would I have to go to New York for an interview?” “They’re in the Hamptons for the summer, so he’s looking for someone to start in September. Basically, in six weeks. If you say you’re interested, he’ll interview you on Skype, sort out the paperwork to get you over, and then we go from there. There will be other candidates. It’s too good a position. But Mr. G. trusts me, Lou. If I say someone’s a good bet, they’re in with a chance. So shall I throw your hat in the ring? Yes? It is a yes, right?” I spoke almost before I could think. “Uh . . . yes. Yes.” “Great! E-mail me if you’ve got questions. I’ll send you some pics.” “Nathan?” “Gotta go, Lou. The old man has just buzzed me.” “Thank you. Thanks for thinking of me.” There was a slight pause before he responded. “No one I’d rather work with, mate.” • • • I couldn’t sleep after he rang off, wondering whether I had imagined the whole conversation, my mind humming with the enormity of what might lie in front of me if I hadn’t. At four, I sat up and e-mailed Nathan a handful of questions, and the answers came straight back. The family is okay. The rich are never normal (!) but these are good people. Minimal drama. You’d have your own room and bathroom. We’d share a kitchen with the housekeeper. She’s all right. Bit older. Keeps herself to herself. Hours regular. Eight—at worst ten—a day. You get time off in lieu. You might want to learn a bit of Polish! I finally fell asleep as it grew light, my mind full of Manhattan duplexes and bustling streets. And when I woke up, there was an e-mail waiting for me. It read: Dear Ms. Clark, Nathan tells me you might be interested in coming to work in our household. Would you be available for a Skype interview Tuesday evening at 5 p.m. GMT (midday EST)? Yours sincerely, Leonard M. Gopnik • • • I stared at it for a full twenty minutes, proof that I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. And then I got up and showered, made myself a strong mug of coffee, and typed my reply. It wouldn’t hurt to have the interview, I told myself. I wouldn’t get the job, if there were lots of highly professional New York candidates. But it was good practice, if nothing else. And it would make me feel as if I were finally doing something, moving forward. Before I left for work, I took Will’s letter carefully from the bedside table. I pressed my lips to it, then folded it carefully and put it back in the drawer. Thank you, I told him silently. • • • It was a slightly thinned-out version of the Moving On Circle that week. Natasha was on holiday, as was Jake, for which I was mostly relieved, and a tiny bit put out in a way I couldn’t reconcile. The evening’s topic was “If I could turn back time,” which meant that William and Sunil hummed or whistled the Cher song unconsciously at intervals for the entire hour and a half. I listened to Fred wishing he had spent less time at work, then Sunil wishing that he’d got to know his brother better (“You just think they’re always going to be there, you know? And then one day they’re not.”), and I wondered if my coming here tonight really had been worth it. There had been a couple of times when I’d thought the group might actually be helping. But for an awful lot of the time I was sitting among people I felt I had nothing in common with, droning on for the few hours they had company. I felt grumpy and tired, my hip ached on the hard plastic chair, and I thought I might have got just as much enlightenment about my mental state if I’d been watching EastEnders. Plus the biscuits were rubbish. Leanne, a single mother, was talking about how she and her older sister had argued about a pair of tracksuit bottoms two days before her sister had died. “I accused her of taking them, because she was always nicking my stuff. She said she hadn’t, but then she always said she hadn’t.” Marc waited. I wondered if I had any painkillers in my handbag. “And then, you know, she got hit by the bus and the next time I got to see her was at the morgue. And when I was looking for dark clothes to wear to her funeral, you know what was in my wardrobe?” “The tracksuit bottoms,” said Fred. “It’s difficult when things are unresolved,” said Marc. “Sometimes for our own sanity we just have to look at the bigger picture.” “You can love someone and also call them a prat for nicking your tracksuit bottoms,” said William. That day I didn’t want to speak. I was only there because I couldn’t face the silence of my little flat. I had a sudden, sneaking suspicion I could easily become one of those people who so crave human contact that they talk inappropriately to other passengers on trains, or spend ten minutes picking things from the shop so that they can chat to the assistant. I was so busy wondering whether discussing my new physio support bandage with Samir at the Mini Mart was symptomatic that I tuned out Daphne wishing she’d just come back from work an hour earlier that day, and when I tuned back in found that she had dissolved, quietly, into tears. “Daphne?” “I’m sorry, everyone. But I’ve spent so long thinking in ‘if onlys.’ If only I hadn’t stopped off for a chat with the lady at the flower stall. If only I’d left that stupid accounts book and come home from work earlier. If only I’d just got back in time . . . maybe I could have persuaded him not to do what he did. Maybe I could have done one thing that persuaded him life was worth living.” Marc leaned forward with the box of tissues, and I took them and placed it gently on Daphne’s lap. “Had Alan tried to end his life before, Daphne?” She nodded and blew her nose. “Oh, yes. Several times. He used to get what we called ‘the blues’ from quite a young age. And I didn’t like to leave him when they came on because it was like . . . it was like he couldn’t hear you. Didn’t matter what you said. So quite often I would call in sick just to stay with him and jolly him along, you know? Make his favorite sandwiches. Sit with him on the sofa. Anything, really, just to let him know I was there. I always think that’s why I never got a promotion at work when all the other girls did. I had to keep taking time off, you see.” “Depression can be very hard. And not just on the sufferer.” “Was he on medication?” “Oh, no. But, then, it wasn’t . . . you know . . . chemical.” “Are you sure? I mean depression was often underdiagnosed back in—” Daphne lifted her head. “He was a homosexual.” She said the word as if it were five full, clearly defined syllables, and looked directly at us, a little flushed, as if daring us to say anything in return. “I’ve never told anyone that. But he was a homosexual, and I think he was sad because he was a homosexual. And he was ever such a good man and he wouldn’t have wanted to hurt me, so he wouldn’t have . . . you know . . . gone off and done things. He would have felt I’d be shamed.” “What makes you think he was gay, Daphne?” “I found things when I was looking for one of his ties. Those magazines. Men doing things to other men. In his drawer. I don’t suppose you would have those magazines if you weren’t.” Fred stiffened slightly. “Certainly not,” he said. “I never mentioned them,” said Daphne. “I just tucked them back where I found them. But it all started to click into place. He was never very keen on that side of things. But I thought I was lucky, you see, because I wasn’t either. It’s the nuns. They made you feel dirty for just about everything. So when I married a nice man who wasn’t jumping on top of me every five minutes, I thought I was the luckiest woman on earth. I mean, I would have liked children. That would have been nice. But . . .” She sighed. “We never really talked about such things. You didn’t in those days. Now . . . I wish we had. Looking back, I keep thinking, What a waste.” “You think if you’d talked honestly, it might have made a difference?” “Well, times are different now, aren’t they? It’s fine to be homosexual. My dry cleaner is and he talks about his boyfriend to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that walks in. I would have been sad to lose my husband, but if he was unhappy because of being trapped, then I would have let him go. I would have done. I never wanted to trap anyone. I only wanted him to be a bit happier.” Her face crumpled, and I put my arm around her. Her hair smelled of lacquer and lamb stew. “There, there, old girl,” said Fred, and stood up to pat her on the shoulder a little awkwardly. “I’m sure he knew you only ever wanted the best for him.” “Do you think so, Fred?” Her voice was tremulous. Fred nodded firmly. “Oh, yes. And you’re quite right. Things were different back then. You’re not to blame.” “You’ve been very brave sharing that story, Daphne. Thank you.” Marc smiled sympathetically. “And I have huge admiration for you picking yourself up and moving on. Sometimes just getting through each day requires almost superhuman strength.” When I looked down, Daphne was holding my hand. I felt her plump fingers intertwine with mine. I squeezed hers back. And before I could think I began to talk. “I’ve done something I wish I could change.” Half a dozen faces turned to me. “I met Will’s daughter. She sort of landed in my life out of the blue and I thought that was going to be my way of feeling better about his death but instead I just feel like—” They were staring. Fred was pulling a face. “What?” “Who’s Will?” said Fred. “You said his name was Bill.” I slumped a little in my chair. “Will is Bill. I felt weird about using his real name before.” There was a general release of breath around the room. Daphne patted my hand. “Don’t worry, dear. It’s just a name. Our last group we had a woman who invented the whole thing. Said she had a child who died from leukemia. Turned out she didn’t even have a goldfish.” “It’s okay, Louisa. You can talk to us.” Marc gave me his Special Empathetic Gaze. I gave him a small smile back, just to show him I had received and understood. And that Will was not a goldfish. What the hell? I thought. My life is no more mixed up than any of theirs. So I told them about Lily turning up and how I had thought I could fix her and bring about a reunion that would make everyone happy, and how I now felt stupid for my naivete. “I feel like I’ve let Will—everyone—down again,” I said. “And now she’s gone, and I keep asking myself what I could have done differently, but the real truth is I couldn’t cope. I wasn’t strong enough to take charge of it all and make it better.” “But your things! Your precious things got stolen!” Daphne’s other plump, damp hand clamped onto mine. “You had every right to be angry!” “Just because she doesn’t have a father doesn’t give her the excuse to behave like a brat,” said Sunil. “I think you were very nice to let her stay in the first place. I’m not sure I would have,” said Daphne. “What do you think her father might have done differently, Louisa?” Marc poured himself another mug of tea. I wished, suddenly, that we had something stronger. “I don’t know,” I said. “But he had this way of taking charge. Even when he couldn’t move his arms and legs you got the feeling he was capable. He would have stopped her doing stupid stuff. He would have got her straightened out somehow.” “Are you sure you’re not idealizing him? We do idealization in week eight,” said Fred. “I keep turning Jilly into a saint, don’t I, Marc? I forget that she used to leave her hold-ups hanging over the shower rail and it drove me absolutely potty.” “Her father might not have been able to do anything to help her at all. You have no idea. They might have loathed each other.” “She sounds like a complicated young woman,” said Marc. “And it’s possible that you gave her as many chances as you could. But . . . sometimes, Louisa, moving on means we do have to protect ourselves. And perhaps you understood that, deep down. If Lily simply brought chaos and negativity into your life, then for now, it’s possible you did the only thing you could.” “Oh, yes.” There were nods around the circle. “Be kind to yourself. You’re only human.” They were so sweet, smiling at me reassuringly, wanting me to feel better. I almost believed them. • • • On Tuesday I asked Vera if she could give me ten minutes. (I muttered something vague about women’s troubles, and she nodded as if to say women’s lives were nothing but trouble, and murmured that she would tell me later about her fibroids.) I ran to the quietest Ladies—the only place I could be sure Richard wouldn’t see me—with my laptop in my bag. I threw a shirt over the top of my uniform, balanced the laptop near the basins, and hooked into the thirty minutes’ free airport Wi-Fi, positioning myself carefully in front of the screen. Mr. Gopnik’s Skype call came in dead on five o’clock, just as I whipped off my ringletted Irish-dancing-girl wig. Even if I had seen nothing more of Leonard Gopnik than his pixilated face, I could have told you he was rich. He had beautifully cut salt-and-pepper hair, gazed out of the small screen with natural authority, and spoke without wasting a word. Well, there was that and the gilt-framed old master on the wall behind him. He asked nothing about my school record, my qualifications, my CV, or why I was conducting an interview beside a hand dryer. He looked down at some papers, then asked about my relationship with the Traynors. “Good! I mean I’m sure they would provide a reference. I’ve seen both of them recently, for . . . one reason or another. We get on well, despite the—the circumstances of . . .” “The circumstances of the end of your employment.” His voice was low, decisive. “Yes, Nathan has explained a lot about that situation. Quite a thing to be involved in.” “Yes. It was,” I said, after a short, awkward silence: “But I felt privileged. To be part of Will’s life.” He registered this. “What have you been doing since?” “Um, well, I traveled a bit, Europe mostly, which was . . . interesting. It’s good to travel. And get a perspective. Obviously.” I tried to smile. “And I’m now working at an airport but it’s not really—” As I spoke, the door opened behind me and a woman walked in, pulling a wheelie case. I shifted my computer, hoping Mr. Gopnik couldn’t hear the sound of her entering the cubicle. “It’s not really what I want to be doing long term.” Please don’t wee noisily, I begged her silently. Mr. Gopnik asked me a few questions about my current responsibilities and salary level. I tried to disregard the sound of flushing and kept my gaze straight ahead, ignoring the woman who emerged. “And what do you want—” As Mr. Gopnik began to speak, she reached past me and started up the hand dryer, which let out a deafening roar. He frowned at the sound. “Hold on one moment please, Mr. Gopnik.” I put my thumb over what I hoped was the microphone. “I’m sorry,” I shouted at the woman. “You can’t use that. It’s . . . broken.” She turned toward me, rubbing perfectly manicured fingers, and then back toward the machine. “No, it’s not.” “It is. It overheats.” “Where’s the out-of-order sign then?” “Burned off. Suddenly. Awful, dangerous thing.” She fixed me, and then the hand dryer, with a suspicious look and then she removed her hands from under it, took her case, and walked out. I wedged the chair against the door to stop anyone else from coming in, tilting my laptop again so that Mr. Gopnik could see me. “I’m so sorry. I’m having to do this at work and it’s a little . . .” He was studying his paperwork. “Nathan tells me you had an accident recently.” I swallowed. “I did. But I’m much better. I’m completely fine. Well, fine except I walk with a slight limp.” “Happens to the best of us,” he said, with a small smile. I smiled back. Someone tried the door. I moved so that my weight was against it. “So what was the hardest part?” Mr. Gopnik asked. “I’m sorry?” “Of working for William Traynor. It sounds like quite a challenge.” I hesitated. The room was suddenly very quiet. “Letting him go,” I said. And found myself unexpectedly biting back tears. Leonard Gopnik gazed at me from several thousand miles away. I fought the urge to wipe my eyes. “My secretary will be in touch, Miss Clark. Thank you for your time.” And then, with a nod, his face stilled and the screen went blank and I was left staring at it, contemplating the fact that I had blown it, yet again. • • • That night, on the way home, I decided not to think about the interview. Instead I repeated Marc’s words in my head, like a mantra. I totted up the things that Lily had done, the uninvited guests, the theft, the drugs, the endless late nights, the borrowing of my things, and ran them through the prism of my group’s counsel. Lily was chaos, disorder, a girl who took and gave nothing in return. She was young, and biologically related to Will, but that didn’t mean I had to assume total responsibility for her or put up with the turmoil she left in her wake. I felt a little better. I did. I reminded myself of something else Marc had said: that no journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days. Today was just a bad day, a kink in the road, to be traversed and survived. I let myself into the flat, and dropped my bag, suddenly grateful for the small pleasure of a home that was just as I’d left it. I would allow some time to pass, I told myself, and then I would text her, and I would make sure our future visits were structured. I would focus my energies on getting a new job. I would think about myself for a change. I would let myself heal. I had to stop at that point, because I was a little worried that I was starting to sound like Tanya HoughtonMiller. I glanced over at the fire escape. Step one would be getting back up on that stupid roof. I would climb up there by myself without having an actual panic attack and I would sit there for a full half hour and breathe the air and stop letting a part of my own home have such a ridiculous hold on my imagination. I took off my uniform and put on shorts and, just for confidence, Will’s lightweight cashmere jumper, the one I had taken from his house after he died, comforted by the soft feel of it against my skin. I walked down the corridor and opened the window wide. It was just two short flights of iron steps. And then I would be up there. “Nothing will happen,” I said aloud and took a deep breath. My legs felt curiously hollow as I climbed out onto the fire escape, but I told myself firmly that it was just a feeling, the echo of an anxiety. I could overcome it, just as I would overcome everything else. I heard Will’s voice in my ear. C’mon, Clark. One step at a time. I grasped the rails tightly with both hands and began to make my way up. I didn’t look down. I didn’t let myself think about what height I was at, or how the faint breeze in my ears recalled an earlier time gone wrong, or the recurring pain in my hip that never seemed to go away. I thought about Sam, and the fury that invoked made me push on. I didn’t have to be the victim, the person to whom things just happened. I told myself these things and made it up the second flight of steps just as my legs began to shake. I climbed inelegantly over the roof’s low wall, afraid that they would give way under me, and dropped onto my hands and knees. I felt weak and clammy. I stayed on all fours, my eyes shut, while I let myself absorb the fact that I was on the roof. I had made it. I was in control of my destiny. I would stay here for as long as it took to feel normal. I sat back on my heels, reaching for the solidity of the wall around me, and leaned back, taking a long, deep breath. It felt okay. Nothing was moving. I had done it. And then I opened my eyes and my breath stopped in my chest. The rooftop was a riot of blooms. The dead pots I had neglected for months were filled with scarlet and purple flowers, spilling over the edges like little fountains of color. Two new planters mushroomed with clouds of tiny blue petals and a Japanese maple sat in an ornamental pot beside one of the benches, its leaves shivering delicately in the breeze. In the sunny corner by the south wall two grow bags sat by the water tank, with little red cherry tomatoes dangling from their stalks, and another lay on the asphalt with small frilly green leaves emerging from the center. I began to walk slowly toward them, breathing in the scent of jasmine, and then stopped and sat down, my hand grasping the iron bench. I sank onto a cushion that I recognized from my living room. I stared in disbelief at the little oasis of calm and beauty that had been created from my barren rooftop. I remembered Lily snapping the dead twig from a pot and informing me in all seriousness that it was a crime to let your plants die, her casual observation in Mrs. Traynor’s garden: “David Austin roses.” And then I remembered little unexplained bits of soil in my hallway. And I sank my head into my hands. 17 Itexted Lily twice. The first time was to thank her for what she had done to my rooftop. It’s so gorgeous. I wish you had told me. A day later, I texted to say I was sorry that things had become so tricky between us, and that if she ever wanted to talk more about Will I would do my best to answer any questions. I added that I hoped she would go and see Mr. Traynor and the new baby, as I knew as well as most that it was important to stay in touch with your family. She didn’t reply. I wasn’t entirely surprised. For the next two days I found myself returning to the rooftop like someone worrying a loose tooth. I watered the plants, feeling a creeping, residual guilt. I walked around the glowing blooms, imagining her stolen hours up here, how she must have carried bags of compost and terra-cotta pots up the fire escape in the hours I was at work. But every time I thought back to how we had been together, I still went around in circles. What could I have done? I couldn’t make the Traynors accept her in the way she needed to be accepted. I couldn’t make her happier. And the one person who might have been able to was gone. • • • There was a motorbike parked outside my block. I locked the car and limped across the road to get a carton of milk after my shift, exhausted. It was spitting, and I put my head down against the rain. When I looked up, I saw a familiar uniform standing at the entrance to my block, and my heart lurched. I walked back across the road straight past him, fumbling in my bag for my keys. Why did fingers always turn into cocktail sausages at moments of stress? “Louisa.” The keys refused to appear. I rifled through my bag a second time, dropping a comb, bits of tissue, loose change, and cursing. I patted my pockets, trying to work out where they might be. “Louisa.” And then, with a sickening drop of my stomach, I remembered where they were: in the pocket of the jeans I had changed out of just before leaving for work. Oh, great. “Really? You’re just going to ignore me? This is how we’re doing this?” I took a deep breath, and turned to him, straightening my shoulders a little. “Sam.” He looked tired too, his chin grayed with stubble. Probably just off a shift. It was unwise to notice these things. I focused on a point a little left of his shoulder. “Can we talk?” “I’m not sure there’s any point.” “No point?” “I got the message, okay? I’m not even sure why you’re here.” “I’m here because I’ve just finished a crappy sixteen-hour shift and I dropped Donna off up the road and I thought I might as well just try to see you and work out what the hell happened with us. Because I sure don’t have a clue.” “Really?” “Really.” We glared at each other. Why had I not seen before how abrasive he was? How unpleasant? I couldn’t understand how I had been so blinded by lust for this man when every part of me now wanted to walk away from him. I made one last futile search for my keys and fought the urge to kick the door. “So, are you at least going to give me a clue? I’m tired, Louisa, and I don’t like playing games.” “You don’t like playing games.” The words emerged in a bitter little laugh. He took a breath. “Okay. One thing. One thing and I’ll go. I just want to know why you won’t return my calls.” I looked at him in disbelief. “Because I’m many things, but I’m not a complete idiot. I mean I must have been—I saw the warning signs, and I ignored them—but basically, I haven’t returned your calls because you’re an utter, utter knob. Okay?” I stooped to pick up my things that had fallen on the ground, feeling my whole body heat rapidly, as if my internal thermostat had suddenly gone haywire. “Oh, you’re so good, you know? So bloody good. If it weren’t all so sick and pathetic I’d actually be quite impressed by you.” I straightened up, zipping my bag. “Look at Sam, the good father. So caring, so intuitive. And yet what’s really going on? You’re so busy shagging your way through half of London you don’t even notice that your own son is unhappy.” “My son.” “Yes! Because we actually listen to him, you see. I mean we’re not meant to tell outsiders what goes on in the group. And he won’t tell you because he’s a teenager. But he’s miserable, not just for the loss of his mum but because you’re busy swallowing your own grief by having an entire army of women traipse in and out of your bed.” I was shouting now, my words tumbling over each other, my hands waving. I could see Samir and his cousin staring at me through the window of the Mini Mart. I didn’t care. This might be the last time I ever got to say my piece. “And, yes, yes, I know, I was stupid enough to be one of those women. So for him, and from me, you’re a knob. And that’s why I don’t want to talk to you right now. Or ever, actually.” He rubbed at his hair. “Are we still talking about Jake?” “Of course I’m talking about Jake. How many other sons have you got?” “Jake isn’t my son.” I stared at him. “Jake is my sister’s son. Was,” he corrected himself. “He’s my nephew.” These words took several seconds to filter down into a form I could understand. Sam was gazing at me intently, his brow furrowed as if he, too, were trying to keep up. “But—but you pick him up. He lives with you.” “I pick him up on Mondays because his dad works shifts. And he stays with me sometimes, yes. He doesn’t live with me.” “Jake’s . . . not your son?” “I don’t have any children. That I’m aware of. Though the whole Lily thing does make you wonder.” I pictured him hugging Jake, mentally rewound half a dozen conversations. “But I saw him when we first met. And when you and I were talking he rolled his eyes, like . . .” Sam lowered his head. “Oh, God,” I said. My hand went to my mouth. “Those women . . .” “Not mine.” We stood there in the middle of the street. Samir was now in the doorway, watching. He had been joined by another of his cousins. To our left everyone at the bus stop turned away when they realized we knew they’d been watching us. Sam nodded at the door behind me. “Do you think we could talk about this indoors?” “Yes. Yes. Oh. No, I can’t,” I said. “I seem to have locked myself out.” “Spare key?” “In the flat.” He ran a hand over his face, then checked his watch. He was clearly drained, weary to the bone. I took a step backward into the doorway. “Look—go home and get some rest. We’ll talk tomorrow. I’m sorry.” The rain suddenly grew heavy, a summer dump, creating torrents in gutters and flooding the street. Across the road Samir and his cousins ducked back inside. Sam sighed. He looked up at the skies and then straight at me. “Hang on.” • • • Sam took a large screwdriver he had borrowed from Samir and followed me up the fire escape. Twice I slipped on the wet metal and his hand reached out to steady me. When it did, something hot and unexpected shot through me. When we reached my floor, he pushed the screwdriver deep into the hall window frame and started to lever upward. It gave gratifyingly swiftly. “There.” He wrenched it upward, supporting it with one hand, and turned to me, motioning me through, his expression faintly disapproving. “That was way too easy for a single girl living in this area.” “You look nothing like a single girl living in this area.” “I’m serious.” “I’m fine, Sam.” “You don’t see what I see. I want you to be safe.” I tried to smile, but my knees were trembling, my palms slippery on the iron rail. I made to step past him and staggered slightly. “You okay?” I nodded. He took my arm and half lifted, half helped me climb clumsily into my flat. I slumped down on the carpet by the window, waiting to feel normal again. I hadn’t slept properly for days and felt half dead, as if the fury and adrenaline that had sustained me had all leached away. Sam climbed in and closed the window behind him, eyeing the broken lock on the top of the sash. The hall was dark, the thrumming of the rain muffled on the roof. As I watched, he rummaged around in his pocket until, among other detritus, he picked out a small nail. He took the screwdriver and used the handle to knock the nail in at an angle to stop anyone from opening it from outside. Then he walked heavily over to where I was sitting, and held out a hand. “Benefits of being a part-time house builder. There’s always a nail somewhere. C’mon,” he said. “If you sit there you’ll never get up.” I looked up at him, his hair flattened from the rain, his skin glistening in the hall light, and I let him pull me to my feet. I winced, and he saw. “Hip?” I nodded. He sighed. “I wish you’d talk to me.” The skin under his eyes was mauve with exhaustion. There were two long scratches on the back of his left hand. I wondered what had happened the previous night. He disappeared into the kitchen and I heard running water. When he came back he was holding two pills and a cup. “I shouldn’t really be giving you these. But they’ll give you a painfree night.” I took them gratefully. He watched me as I swallowed them. “Do you ever follow rules?” “When I think they’re sensible.” He took the cup from me. “So are we good, Louisa Clark?” I nodded. He let out a long breath. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Afterward, I wasn’t sure what made me do it. My hand reached out and took his. I felt his fingers close slowly around mine. “Don’t go. It’s late. And motorbikes are dangerous.” I took the screwdriver from his other hand and let it fall onto the carpet. He looked at me for the longest time, then slid a hand over his face. “I don’t think I’m good for much just now.” “Then I promise not to use you for sexual gratification.” I kept my eyes on his. “This time.” His smile was slow to come, but when it did, everything fell away from me, as if I had been carrying a weight I hadn’t known. You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height. He stepped over the screwdriver, and I led him silently toward my bedroom. • • • I lay in the dark in my little flat, my leg slung over the bulk of a sleeping man, his arm pinning me pleasurably beneath it, and gazed at his face. Fatal cardiac arrest, motorbike accident, suicidal teenager, and a gangrelated stabbing on the Peabody Estate. Some shifts are just a bit . . . Sssh. It’s okay. Sleep. He had barely managed to get his uniform off. He had stripped to his T-shirt and shorts, kissed me, then closed his eyes and collapsed into a dead slumber. I had wondered whether I should cook him something, or tidy the flat so that when he woke I might look like someone who actually had a handle on life. But instead I undressed to my underwear and slid in next to him. For these few moments I just wanted to be beside him, my bare skin against his T-shirt, my breath mingling with his. I lay listening to his breathing, marveling at how someone could be so still. I studied the slight bump on the bridge of his nose, the variation in the shade of the bristles that shadowed his chin, the slight curl at the end of his dark, dark eyelashes. I ran through conversations that we’d had, putting them through a new filter, one that pitched him as a single man, an affectionate uncle, and I wanted to laugh with the idiocy of it all, and cringe at my mistake. I touched his face twice, lightly, breathing in the scent of his skin, the faint tang of antibacterial soap, the primal, sexual hint of male sweat, and the second time I did so I felt his hand tighten reflexively on my waist. I shifted onto my back and gazed out at the streetlights, feeling, for once, that I was not an alien in this city. And finally, I found myself drifting off . . . •• • His eyes open, on mine. A moment later he realizes where he is. “Hey.” A lurch into waking. The peculiar dreamlike state that suffuses the small hours. He is in my bed. His leg against mine. A smile, creeping across my face. “Hey yourself.” “What time is it?” I swivel to catch the digital readout of my alarm. “A quarter to five.” Time settles into order, the world, reluctantly, into something that makes sense. Outside, the sodium-lit dark of the street. The minicabs and night buses rumble past. Up here it is just him and me in the night and the warm bed and the sound of his breathing. “I can’t even remember getting here.” He looks off to the side, his face faintly lit by the streetlights, frowning. I watch as memories of the previous day land softly, a silent, mental Oh. Right. His head turns. His mouth, inches from mine. His breath, warm and sweet. “I missed you, Louisa Clark.” I want to tell him then. I want to tell him that I don’t know what I feel. I want him but I’m frightened to want him. I don’t want my happiness to be entirely dependent on somebody else’s, to be a hostage to fortunes I cannot control. His eyes are on my face, reading me. “Stop thinking,” he says. He pulls me to him, and I relax. This man spends each day out here, on the bridge between life and death. He understands. “You think too much.” His hand slides down the side of my face. I turn toward him, an involuntary reflex, and put my lips against his palm. “Just live?” I whisper. He nods, and then he kisses me, long and slow and sweet, until my body arches and I am just need and want and longing. His voice is a low rumble in my ear. My name, pulling me in. He makes it sound like something precious. •• • The next three days were a blur of stolen nights and brief meetings. I missed Idealization Week in the Moving On Circle, because he turned up at the flat just as I was leaving and we somehow ended up an urgent mess of arms and legs, waiting for my egg timer to go off so that he could dress and race to pick Jake up on time. Twice he was waiting for me when I returned from my shift, and with his lips on my neck, his big hands on my hips, the indignities of the Shamrock and Clover were, if not forgotten, swept aside along with last night’s empties. I wanted to resist him, but I couldn’t. I was giddy, diverted, sleepless. I got cystitis and didn’t care. I hummed my way through work, flirted with the businessmen, and smiled cheerfully at Richard’s complaints. My happiness offended my manager; I could see it in his chewed cheek, the way he sought ever more feeble misdemeanors for which to tell me off. I cared about none of it. I sang in the shower, lay awake dreaming. I wore my old dresses, my brightly colored cardigans, and my satin pumps, and let myself be enclosed in a bubble of happiness, conscious that bubbles only ever existed for so long before they popped anyway. “I told Jake,” he said. He had half an hour’s break, and he and Donna had stopped outside my flat with lunch before I went off for a late shift. I sat beside him in the front seat of the ambulance. “You told him what?” He had made mozzarella, cherry tomato, and basil sandwiches. The tomatoes, grown in his garden. burst in little explosions of flavor in my mouth. He was appalled at how I ate when I was alone. “That you’d thought I was his dad. He laughed more than I’ve seen him laugh for months.” “You didn’t tell him I told you his dad cried after sex, right?” “I knew a man who did that once,” said Donna. “But he really sobbed. It got sort of embarrassing. The first time I thought I’d broken his penis.” I turned to her, openmouthed. “It’s a thing. Really. We’ve had a couple in the rig, haven’t we?” “We have. You’d be amazed at the coital injuries we see.” He nodded at my sandwich, which was still on my lap. “I’ll tell when you don’t have your mouth full.” “Coital injuries. Great. Because there aren’t enough things in life to worry about.” His gaze slid sideways as he bit into his sandwich, so that I blushed. “Trust me. I’d let you know.” “Just so we’re straight, my old mucker,” said Donna, offering up one of her ever-present energy drinks, “I am so totally not going to be your first responder for that one.” I liked being in the cab. Sam and Donna had the no-nonsense wry manner of those who had seen pretty much every human condition, and treated it too. They were funny and dark and I felt oddly at home wedged between them, as if my life, with all its strangeness, was actually pretty normal. These were the things I learned in the space of several snatched lunch hours: Almost no men or women over the age of seventy would complain about their pain or their treatment, even if a limb were actually hanging off. Those same elderly men or women would almost always apologize for “making a fuss.” The term “Patient PFO” was not scientific terminology but “Patient Pissed and Fell Over.” Pregnant women rarely gave birth in the back of ambulances. (I was quite disappointed by that one.) Nobody used the term “ambulance driver” anymore. Especially not ambulance drivers. There would always be a handful of men who would answer, when asked to describe how much pain they were in from one to ten, with “eleven.” But what came through most, when Sam arrived back after a long shift, was the bleakness: of solitary pensioners; of obese men glued to a television screen, too large even to try to get themselves up and down their own stairs; of young mothers who spoke no English, confined to their flats with a million small children, unsure how to call for help when it was needed; and of the depressed, the chronically ill, the unloved. Some days, he said, it felt like a virus: you had to scrub the melancholy from your skin along with the scent of antiseptic. And then there were the suicides, the lives ended under trains or in silent bathrooms, their bodies often unnoticed for weeks or months until somebody remarked on the smell, or wondered why soand-so’s post was now spilling out of their pigeonhole. “Do you ever get frightened?” He lay, oversized in my little bath. The water had turned faintly pink with the blood from a patient’s gunshot wound that had gone all over him. (I was a little surprised at how swiftly I had got used to having a naked man in the vicinity. Especially one who could move by himself.) “You can’t do this job if you’re frightened,” he said, simply. He had been in the army before he’d joined the paramedics; it was not an unusual career arc. “They like us because we don’t scare easy, and we’ve seen it all. Mind you, some of those drunk kids scare me far more than the Taliban ever did.” I sat on the loo seat beside him and stared at his body in the discolored water. Even with his size and strength, I shivered. “Hey,” he said, seeing something pass across my face, and reaching out a hand to me. “It’s fine, really. I have a very good nose for trouble.” He closed his fingers around mine. “It’s not a great job for relationships, though. My last girlfriend couldn’t cope with it. The hours. Nights. The mess.” “The pink bathwater.” “Yeah. Sorry about that. The showers weren’t working at the station. I should really have gone home first.” He looked at me in a way that showed me there had been no chance of him going home first. He pulled the plug to let some of the water drain away, then turned on the taps for more. “So who was she, your last girlfriend?” I kept my voice level. I was not going to be one of those women, even if he had turned out not to be one of those men. “Iona. Travel agent. Sweet girl.” “But you weren’t in love with her.” “Why do you say that?” “Nobody ever says ‘sweet girl’ about someone they were in love with. It’s like the whole ‘we’ll still be friends’ thing. It means you didn’t feel enough.” He was briefly amused. “So what would I have said if I had been in love with her?” “You would have looked very serious, and said, ‘Karen. Complete nightmare,’ or shut down and gone all ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’” “You’re probably right.” He thought for a bit, wiped his hand down his face. “If I’m honest I didn’t really want to feel much after my sister died. Being with Ellen for the last few months, helping look after her, kind of knocked me sideways. Cancer can be a pretty brutal way to go.” He glanced over at me. “Jake’s dad fell apart. Some people do. So I figured they needed me there. If I’m honest, I probably only held it together myself because we couldn’t all go to pieces.” We sat in silence for a moment. I couldn’t tell if his eyes had gone a bit red from grief or soap. “Anyway. So, yes. Probably not much of a boyfriend back then. So who was yours?” he said, when he finally turned back to me. “Will.” “Of course. Nobody since?” “Nobody I want to talk about.” I shuddered. “Everyone’s allowed his own way back, Louisa. Don’t beat yourself up about it.” His skin was hot and wet, making it hard for me to hold on to his fingers. I released them, and he began to wash his hair. I sat and watched him, letting the mood lift, enjoying the bunched muscles in his shoulders, the gleam of his wet skin. I liked the way he washed his hair, vigorously, with a kind of matter-offactness, shaking off the excess water like a dog. “Oh. I had a job interview,” I said, when he finished. “For a thing in New York.” “New York.” He raised an eyebrow. “I won’t get it.” “Shame. I’ve always wanted an excuse to go to New York.” He slid slowly under the water so that only his mouth remained on the surface. It broke into a slow smile. “But you’d get to keep the pixie outfit, yes?” I felt the mood shift. And, for no reason at all other than that he didn’t expect it, I climbed fully clothed into the bath and kissed him as he laughed and spluttered. I was suddenly glad of his solidity in a world where it was so easy to fall. • • • I finally made an effort to sort out the flat. On my day off I bought an armchair, and a coffee table, and a small framed print, which I hung near the television, and those things somehow conspired to suggest someone might actually live there. I bought new bedding and two cushions and hung up all my vintage clothes in the wardrobe so that opening it now revealed a riot of pattern and color, instead of several pairs of cheap jeans and a too-short Lurex dress. I managed to turn my anonymous little flat into something that felt, if not quite like a home, vaguely welcoming. By some strange beneficence of the shift-scheduling gods, Sam and I both had a day off. Eighteen uninterrupted hours in which he did not have to listen to a siren, and I did not have to listen to the sound of panpipes or complaints about dry-roasted peanuts. Time spent with Sam, I noted, seemed to go twice as fast as the hours I spent alone. I had pondered the million things we could do together, then dismissed half of them as too “couple-y.” I wondered whether our spending so much time together was wise. I texted Lily one more time. Lily, please get in touch. I know you’re mad at me, but just call. Your garden is looking beautiful! I need you to show me how to look after it, and what to do with the tomato plants, which have got really tall (is this right?). Maybe after we could go out dancing? x I pressed send and stared at the little screen just as the doorbell rang. “Hey.” He filled my doorway, holding a toolbox in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other. “Oh, my God,” I said. “You’re like the ultimate female fantasy.” “Shelves,” he said, deadpan. “You need shelves.” “Oh, baby. Keep talking.” “And home-cooked food.” “That’s it. I just came.” He laughed and dropped the tools in the hallway and kissed me and when we finally untangled ourselves, he walked through to the kitchen. “I thought we could go to the pictures. You know one of the greatest benefits to shift work is empty matin?es, right?” I checked my phone. “But nothing with blood in it. I get a bit tired of blood.” When I looked up he was watching me. “What? Don’t fancy it? Or is that going to stamp all over your plans for Zombie Flesh Eaters Fifteen? . . . What?” I frowned, and dropped my hand to my side. “I can’t get hold of Lily.” “I thought you said she’d gone home?” “She did. But she won’t take my calls. I think she’s really upset with me.” “Her friends stole your stuff. You’re allowed to be the one who’s upset.” He started to pull things out of the bag, lettuces, tomatoes, avocados, eggs, herbs, stacking them neatly in my near-empty fridge. He looked up at me as I texted her again. “Come on. She could have dropped her phone, left it in some club, or run out of credit. You know what teenagers are like. Or she’s just throwing a massive strop. Sometimes you need to let them work it out of their system.” I took his hand and shut the fridge door. “I need to show you something.” His eyes lit up briefly. “Not that, no, you bad man. That will have to wait till later.” • • • Sam stood on the rooftop and gazed around him at the flowers. “And you had no idea?” “None at all.” He sat down heavily on the bench. I sat next to him and we both stared at the little garden. “I feel awful,” I said. “I basically accused her of destroying everything she went near. And all the time she was creating this.” He stooped to feel the leaves on a tomato plant, and then straightened, shaking his head. “Okay. So we’ll go talk to her.” “Really?” “Yeah. Lunch first. Then the cinema. Then we’ll turn up on her doorstep. That way she won’t be able to avoid you.” He took my hand and raised it to his lips. “Hey. Don’t look so worried. The garden is good news. It shows that her head’s not in a totally bad place.” He released my hand and I squinted at him. “How come you always make everything better?” “I just don’t like seeing you look sad.” I couldn’t tell him that I wasn’t sad when I was with him. I couldn’t tell him that he made me feel so happy I was afraid of it. I thought of how I liked having his food in my fridge, how I glanced at my phone twenty times a day waiting for his messages, how I conjured his naked body in my imagination in the quiet minutes at work and then had to think very hard about floor polish or till receipts just to stop myself glowing. Slow down, said a warning voice. Don’t get too close. His eyes softened. “You have a sweet smile, Louisa Clark. It’s one of the several hundred things I like about you.” I let myself gaze back at him for a minute. This man, I thought. And then I slapped my hands heavily on my knees. “C’mon,” I said, briskly. “Let’s go watch a movie.” • • • The cinema was almost empty. We sat side by side at the back in a seat where someone had knocked out the armrest, and Sam fed me popcorn from a cardboard bucket the size of a dustbin, and I tried not to think about the weight of his hand resting on my bare leg, because when I did I frequently lost track of what was happening with the plot. The film was an American comedy about two mismatched cops who find themselves mistaken for criminals. It wasn’t very funny, but I laughed anyway. Sam’s fingers appeared in front of me, bearing a bulbous knobble of salted popcorn and I took it, and another, then, as an afterthought, kept hold of his fingers between my teeth. He looked at me and shook his head slowly. I finished the popcorn and swallowed. “Nobody will see,” I whispered. He raised an eyebrow. “I’m too old for this,” he murmured. But when I turned his face to mine in the hot, dark air and started to kiss him, he dropped the popcorn and his hand slid slowly up my back. And then my phone rang. There was a hiss of disapproval from the two people at the front. “Sorry. Sorry, you two!” (Given there were only four of us in the cinema.) I scrambled off Sam’s lap and answered. A number I didn’t recognize. “Louisa?” It took me a second to register her voice. “Just give me a minute.” I pulled a face at Sam, and made my way out. “Sorry, Mrs. Traynor. I just had to— Are you still there? Hello?” The foyer was empty, the cordoned off queue areas deserted, the frozendrinks machine churning its colored ice listlessly behind the counter. “Oh, thank goodness. Louisa? I wondered if I could speak to Lily.” I stood with the phone pressed to my ear. “I’ve been thinking about what happened the other week and I’m so sorry,” she said. “I must have seemed . . .” She hesitated. “Look, I was wondering if you thought she would agree to see me?” “Mrs. Traynor—” “I’d like to explain to her. For the last year or so I’ve . . . well, I’ve not been myself. I’ve been on these tablets and they make me rather dim-witted. And I was so taken aback to find you on my doorstep, and then I simply couldn’t believe what you both were telling me. It all seemed so unlikely. But I . . . Well, I’ve spoken to Steven and he confirmed the whole thing and I’ve been sitting here for days and digesting it all and I just think . . . Will had a daughter. I have a granddaughter. I keep saying the words. Sometimes I think I dreamed it.” I listened to the uncharacteristic flurry of her words. “I know,” I said. “I felt like that too.” “I can’t stop thinking about her. I do so want to meet her properly. Do you think she’d agree to see me again?” “Mrs. Traynor, she’s not staying with me anymore. But, yes.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “Yes, of course I’ll ask her.” • • • I couldn’t focus on the rest of the film. In the end, perhaps realizing that I was simply staring at a moving screen, Sam suggested we leave. We stood in the car park by his bike and I told him what she’d said. “There, see?” he said, as if I had done something to be proud of. “Let’s go.” He waited on the bike across the road as I knocked on the door. I lifted my chin, determined that this time I would not let Tanya Houghton-Miller intimidate me. I glanced back, and Sam nodded encouragingly. The door opened. Tanya was dressed in a chocolate linen dress and Grecian sandals and she looked me up and down, as she had when we first met, as if my own wardrobe had failed some invisible test. (This was a little annoying, as I was wearing my favorite checked cotton pinafore dress.) Her smile stayed on her lips for just a nanosecond, then fell away. “Louisa.” “Sorry to turn up unannounced, Mrs. Houghton-Miller.” “Has something happened?” I blinked. “Well, yes, actually.” I pushed my hair from the side of my face. “I’ve had a call from Mrs. Traynor, Will’s mother. I’m sorry to bother you with this, but she’d really like to contact Lily, and as she’s not picking up her phone, I wondered if you’d mind asking her to call me?” Tanya gazed at me from under perfectly plucked brows. I kept my face neutral. “Or maybe we could have a quick chat with her.” There was a short silence. “Why would you think I would ask her?” I took a breath, picking my words carefully. “I know you have strong feelings about the Traynor family, but I do think it would be in Lily’s interests. I don’t know if she told you but they had a rather difficult first meeting the other week and Mrs. Traynor would really like the chance to start again.” “She can do what she wants, Louisa. But I don’t know why you’re expecting me to get involved.” I tried to keep my voice polite. “Um . . . because you’re her mother?” “Whom she hasn’t bothered to contact in more than a week.” I stood very still. Something cold and hard settled in my stomach. “What did you just say?” “Lily. Hasn’t bothered to contact me. I thought at least she might come and say hello after we got back from holiday but, no, that’s plainly beyond her. Suiting herself, as usual.” She extended a hand to examine her fingernails. I stared at her. “Mrs. Houghton-Miller, she was meant to be with you.” “What?” “Lily. Was moving back in with you. When you got home from your holiday. She left my flat . . . ten days ago.” 18 W e stood in Tanya Houghton-Miller’s immaculate kitchen and I stared at her shiny coffee machine with 108 knobs, which had probably cost more than my car, and ran through the previous week’s events for the umpteenth time. “It was around half past twelve. I gave her twenty pounds for a taxi and asked her to leave her key. I just assumed she’d come home.” I felt sick. I walked the length of the breakfast bar and back again, my brain racing. “I should have checked. But she tended to come and go as she pleased. And we . . . well, we’d had a bit of a row.” Sam stood by the door, rubbing his brow. “And neither of you has heard anything from her since.” “I’ve texted her four or five times,” I said. “I just assumed she was still angry with me.” Tanya hadn’t offered us coffee. She strolled to the stairwell, peered upstairs, then glanced at her watch, as if she were waiting for us to go. She did not look like a parent who had just discovered her child was missing. Periodically I heard the dull roar of a vacuum upstairs. “Mrs. Houghton-Miller, has anyone here heard from her at all? Can you tell from your phone whether she’s even read her texts?” “I told you,” she said. Her voice was strangely calm. “I told you this was what she was like. But you wouldn’t listen.” “I think we—” She lifted a hand, stopping Sam. “This is not the first time. Oh, no. She disappeared for days before, when she was meant to be at boarding school. I blame them, of course. They were meant to know exactly where she was at all times. They only rang us when she’d been gone forty-eight hours and then we had to get the police involved. Apparently one of the girls in her dorm had lied for her. Why they couldn’t tell who was and who wasn’t there is completely beyond me, especially given the ridiculous fees we pay. Francis was all for suing them. He was called out of his annual board meeting to deal with it. It was a huge embarrassment.” Upstairs there was a crash and somebody started to cry. Tanya walked to the kitchen door. “Lena! Take them out to the park, for goodness’ sake!” She came back into the kitchen. “You know she gets drunk. She takes drugs. She stole my Mappin and Webb diamond earrings. She won’t admit it, but she did. They were worth thousands. I have no idea what she did with them. She’s taken a digital camera too.” I thought back to my missing jewelry and something in me tightened uncomfortably. “So, yes. This is all rather predictable. I did tell you. And now if you’ll excuse me, I really have to go and sort the boys out. They’re having a difficult day.” “But you’ll call the police, yes? She’s sixteen years old and it’s been almost ten days.” “They won’t be interested. Not once they know who it is.” Tanya held up a slender finger. “Expelled from two schools for truanting. Cautioned for possession of a class-A drug. Drunk and disorderly. Shoplifting. What’s the phrase? My daughter has ‘form.’ To be perfectly frank, even if the police do find her and bring her back here, she will simply up and go again when it suits her.” A wire had tightened across my chest, constricting my breath. Where would she have gone? Was that boy, the one who hung around outside my flat, involved? The nightclubbers who had been with Lily that drunken night? How had I been so distracted? “Let’s call them regardless. She’s still very young.” “No. I do not want the police involved. Francis is having a very tricky time at work right now. He’s fighting to retain his place on the board. If they get wind that he’s involved in some sort of police business that will be it.” Sam’s jaw tightened. He took a moment before he spoke. “Mrs. HoughtonMiller, your daughter is vulnerable. I really think it’s time to get someone else involved.” “If you call them I’ll simply explain to them what I’ve just told you.” “Mrs. Houghton-Miller—” “How many times have you met her, Mr. Fielding?” She leaned back against the stove. “You know her better than I do, do you? You’ve been kept up nights waiting for her to come home? You’ve lost sleep? Had to explain her behavior to teachers and police officers? Apologize to shop assistants for things she’s stolen? Bail out her credit card?” A muscle tightened in Sam’s jaw. “Some of the most chaotic kids are those most at risk.” “My daughter is a talented manipulator. She will be with one of her friends. Just as she has been before. I will guarantee that within the next day or two Lily will turn up here, drunk and screeching in the middle of the night, or knocking at Louisa’s door, or begging for money, and you will probably have reason to wish she never had. Someone will let her in and she’ll be sorry and contrite and terribly sad, and then a few days later, she’ll bring a bunch of friends home or steal something. And the whole sorry cycle will revolve again.” She pushed her golden hair back from her face. She and Sam stared at each other. “I’ve had to undergo counseling to cope with the chaos my daughter has brought into my life, Mr. Fielding. It’s hard enough coping with her brothers and their . . . behavioral difficulties. But one of the things you learn in therapy is that there comes a point when you have to take care of yourself. Lily is old enough to make her own decisions—” “She’s a child,” I said. “Oh, yes—that’s right. A child you turned out of your apartment some time after midnight.” Tanya Houghton-Miller held my gaze with the complacency of someone who has just been proven right. “Not everything is black and white. Much as we would like it to be.” “You’re not even worried, are you?” I said. She held my gaze. “No, frankly. I’ve been here too many times before.” I made to speak again but she was ahead of me. “Quite the savior complex, haven’t you, Louisa? Well, my daughter doesn’t need saving. And if she did, I wouldn’t be hugely convinced by your record so far.” Sam’s arm was around me even before I was able to take a breath. My retort formed, toxic, in my mouth, but she had already turned away. “C’mon,” he said, propelling me out into the hallway. “Let’s go.” • • • We drove around the West End for several hours, slowing to peer at the groups of catcalling, staggering girls, and then, more soberly, at the homeless sleepers, as we parked and walked side by side along the dark archways under bridges. We put our heads around the doors of nightclubs, asking if anyone had seen the girl in the photographs on my mobile phone. We went to the club where she had taken me dancing, and to a couple more that Sam said were notorious haunts for underage drinkers. We passed bus stops and fast-food joints and the farther we went the more I thought how ridiculous it was to try to find her among the thousands milling around the humming streets of central London. She could have been anywhere. She seemed to be everywhere. I texted her again, twice, to tell her we were urgently looking for her, and when we got back to my flat Sam rang various hospitals just to be sure she hadn’t been admitted. Finally we sat on my little sofa and ate some toast and he made me a cup of tea and we sat in silence for a bit. “I feel like the worst parent in the world. And I’m not even a parent.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “You can’t blame yourself.” “Yes, I can. What kind of person turfs a sixteen-year-old out of her flat in the small hours without checking where she’s actually going?” I closed my eyes. “I mean, just because she’s disappeared before doesn’t mean she’ll be okay now, does it? She’ll be like one of those teenage runaways who disappear and nobody ever hears of them again until some dog out walking digs up their bones in the woods.” “Louisa.” “I should have been stronger. I should have understood her better. I should have thought harder about how young she is. Was. Oh, God, if something’s happened I’ll never forgive myself. And out there right now is some innocent dog walker who has no idea that he’s about to have his life ruined—” “Louisa.” Sam put his hand on my leg. “Stop. You’re going around in circles. Irritating as she is, it’s entirely possible Tanya Houghton-Miller’s right and Lily will coast in or ring your bell in about three hours’ time and we’ll all feel like fools and forget what’s happened until it all starts again.” “But why won’t she answer her phone? She must know I’m worried.” “Perhaps that’s why she’s ignoring you.” He gave me a wry look. “She may be enjoying making you sweat a little. Look, there’s not much more we can do tonight. And I’ve got to go. I have an early shift.” He cleared away the plates and put them in the sink, leaning back against the kitchen cabinets. “Sorry,” I said. “Not exactly the most fun start to a relationship.” He lowered his chin. “This is a relationship now?” I felt myself color. “Well. I didn’t mean—” “I’m kidding.” He reached out a hand and pulled me to him. “I quite enjoy your determined attempts to convince me you’re basically just using me for sex.” He smelled good. Even when he smelled faintly of anesthetic, he smelled good. He kissed the top of my head. “We’ll find her,” he said, as he left. • • • After he’d gone, I climbed up onto the roof. I sat in the dark, inhaling the scent of the jasmine she’d trained up the edge of the water tank, and ran my hand softly over the tiny purple heads of the aubretia that tumbled over the terra-cotta planters. I looked over the parapet and scanned the winking streets of the city, and for the first time my legs didn’t even tremble. I texted her again, then got ready for bed, feeling the silence of the flat close in around me. I checked my phone for the millionth time, and then my e-mail, just in case. Nothing. But there was one from Nathan: Congratulations! Old Man Gopnik told me this morning he’s going to offer you the job! See you in NY, mate! 19 LILY P eter is waiting again. Out of the window, she sees him standing against his car. He spots her, gestures up, and mouths. “You owe me.” Lily opens the window, glances across the road to where Samir is putting out a fresh box of oranges. “Leave me alone, Peter.” “You know what’ll happen . . .” “I’ve given you enough. Just leave me alone, okay?” “Bad move, Lily.” He raises an eyebrow. He waits, just long enough for her to feel uncomfortable. Lou will be home in half an hour. He hangs around so often she’s pretty sure he knows this. Eventually he climbs back into his car and pulls out onto the main road without looking. As he drives off, he holds his phone up out of the driver’s window. A message: Bad move, Lily. Spin the bottle. Such an innocent-sounding game. It had been her and four girls from her school and they had come up to London on an exeat. They had stolen lipsticks from Boots and bought too-short skirts in Top Shop and got into nightclubs for free because they were young and cute and doormen didn’t ask too many questions if there were five of you and you were young and cute, and inside, over rum and Cokes, they had met Peter and his friends. They had ended up in someone’s flat in Marylebone at 2 a.m. She couldn’t entirely remember how they had got there. Everyone was sitting in a circle, smoking and drinking. She had said yes to everything that was offered her. Rihanna on the music system. A blue beanbag that smelled of Febreze. Nicole had been ill in the bathroom, the idiot. Time had slipped by: 2:30 a.m., 3:17 a.m., 4 . . . She lost track. Then someone had suggested Truth or Dare. The bottle spun, careered into an ashtray, tipping butts and ash onto the carpet. Someone’s truth, the girl she didn’t know: on holiday the previous year she had engaged in phone sex with her ex-boyfriend while her grandmother slept in the twin bed beside her. The others reeled in fake horror. Lily had laughed. “Niche,” said someone. Peter had watched her the whole time. She had been flattered at first; he was the best-looking boy there by miles. A man, even. When he looked at her she refused to look away. She wasn’t going to be like the other girls. “Spin!” She had shrugged when it pointed to her. “Dare,” she had said. “Always dare.” “Lily never says no to anything,” said Jemima. Now she wonders whether there was something in the way she had looked at Peter when she said it. “Okay. You know what that means.” “Seriously?” “You can’t do that!” Pippa was holding her hands to her face in the way she did when she was being dramatic. “Truth, then.” “Nah. I hate truth.” So what? She knew these boys would be chicken. She stood, nonchalantly. “Where. Here?” “Oh, my God, Lily.” “Spin the bottle,” said one of the boys. It hadn’t occurred to her to be nervous. She was a bit woozy and anyway, she quite liked standing there, unbothered, while the other girls clapped and squealed and acted like idiots. They were such fakes. The same girls who would whack anyone on the hockey pitch and talk about politics and what careers in law and marine biology they were aiming for became stupid and giggly and girly in the presence of boys, flicking their hair and doing their lipstick, like they had spontaneously filleted out all the interesting parts of themselves. “Peter . . .” “Oh, my God. Pete, mate. It’s you.” The boys, all catcalling and crowing to hide their disappointment, or perhaps relief, that it wasn’t them. Peter, climbing to his feet, his narrow cat’s eyes meeting hers. Different from the others, his accent spoke of somewhere tougher. “Here?” She shrugged. “I don’t mind.” “Next door.” He gestured toward the bedroom. She stepped neatly over the other girls’ legs as they walked through to the next room. One of the girls grabbed at her ankle, telling her not to, and she shook her off. She walked with a faint swagger, feeling their eyes on her as she left. Dare. Always dare. Peter closed the door behind him and she glanced around her. The bed was rumpled; a horrid patterned duvet that you could tell from five yards hadn’t been washed in ages, and left a faint, musty trace in the atmosphere. There was a pile of dirty laundry in the corner, a full ashtray by the bed. The room fell silent, the voices outside temporarily stilled. She lifted her chin. Pushed her hair back from her face. “You really want to do this?” she said. He smiled then, a slow, mocking smile. “I knew you’d back out.” “Who says I’m backing out?” But she didn’t want to do it. She didn’t see his handsome features anymore, just the cold glitter in his eyes, the unpleasant twist to his mouth. He put his hands on his zipper. They stood there for a minute. “It’s fine if you don’t want to do it. We’ll go outside and say you’re chicken.” “I never said I wouldn’t do it.” “So what are you saying?” She can’t think. A low buzzing has started up in the back of her head. She wishes she hadn’t come in here. He stifles a theatrical yawn. “Getting bored, Lily.” A frantic knocking on the door. Jemima’s voice. “Lily—you don’t have to do it. C’mon. We can go home now.” “You don’t have to do it, Lily.” His voice is an imitation, mocking. A calculation. What’s the worst that will happen—two minutes, at worst? Two minutes out of her life. She will not be a chicken. She will show him. She will show them all. He is holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s loosely in one hand. She takes it from him, opens it, and swigs from it twice, her eyes locked on his. Then she hands it back and reaches for his belt. •• • Pictures or it didn’t happen. She hears the boy’s catcalling voice through the thumping in her ears, through the pain in her scalp as he grips her hair too tight. It is too late, by then. Way too late. She hears the camera-phone click just as she looks up. •• • One pair of earrings. Fifty pounds in cash. One hundred. Weeks later and the demands keep coming. He sends her texts. I wonder what would happen if I put this on Facebook? She wants to cry when she sees the picture. He sends it to her again and again: her face, her eyes bloodshot, smudged with mascara. That thing in her mouth. When Louisa comes home she has to stuff the phone under the sofa cushions. It has become radioactive, a toxic thing she has to keep close. I wonder what your friends would think. The other girls don’t talk to her afterward. They know what she did because Peter flashed the picture to everyone as soon as they walked back into the party, ostentatiously adjusting his zipper, long after he had to. She had to pretend she didn’t care. The girls stared at the picture, then at her, and she had known as soon as their eyes met hers that their tales of BJs and sex with unseen boyfriends had been fiction. They were fakes. They had lied about everything. Nobody thought she was brave. Nobody admired her for not being chicken. She was just Lily, the slag, a girl with a cock in her mouth. It made her stomach go into knots even to think about it. She had swigged more Jack Daniels and told them all to go to hell. Meet me at McDonald’s Tottenham Court Road. By then her mother had changed the locks to her house. She couldn’t take money from her purse anymore. They had blocked her access to her savings account. I haven’t got anything else. Do you think I’m a mug, Little Rich Girl? Her mother had never liked the Mappin