24 Hours: An intense, suspenseful psychological thriller (8 page)

O
n the blustery station platform
, I stare at the phone, frantically weighing up whether to answer it.

If I do, he’ll know he failed – and my cover is blown for good.

It rings off – then rings again.

I don’t answer it. Thirty seconds later, the voicemail buzzes.

‘Where the hell are you? Why is everyone saying you are dead?’ Sid sounds almost hysterical.

Don’t trust him, Laurie. You can’t trust him.

I have rarely heard him this way. Angry, yes; scared – no.

‘Ring me, Laurie. Please. Tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you. Wherever you are, I’ll come there.’

Every time you’ve ever trusted him, look what has happened.

I contemplate calling him back, pleading with him to stay away from Polly – but as I twist it in my hand, the phone dies.

The train pulls in two minutes later. I get on.

I think of Sid, of the few times I glimpsed fear in his eyes; of the nightmares he constantly had when we were first together, before he discovered the beautiful peace encased in a sleeping pill. I think of trying to get him to open up about what had gone on in his family when he was small; I think of the rage it provoked if I pushed too hard at the wrong time. I think of the nightmares that began again briefly after his brother phoned and said his mother wanted to see him. And then I can’t think about it any more. It makes me almost stupid with misery.

It is painfully true that we are the sum of our experience, but what worries me more is how easily we can be ruined by others’ actions.

And sometimes, some days, I feel so angry about something unspoken between Sid and I, a frustration caused by his own damage that meant we couldn’t ever work, that I want to punch my fist through a wall. But I have not ever done that. Not yet.

I tuck the phone away and queue at the buffet car. Two swans swoop down together onto the small brown river we cross, and I feel a sadness so heavy it’s leaden; quite overwhelming.

It’s not until I am paying for my tea and see the guard wobbling down the aisle from first class that I realise I don’t have a ticket. I haven’t even thought about buying one; I don’t even know if I have enough cash to pay for one at all.

I turn quickly and walk away from him.

The cash I do have, I need to save for London. I think of my old Brownie leader. Ten pence for the phone, for emergencies. This is an emergency. I need to save my money to get to Polly.

I walk half the length of the train and linger in the area between two carriages, sipping my tea, thinking; waiting. Eventually I see the inspector at the far end of the next carriage, headed towards me. I slip into the loo. Overflowing, it stinks. God knows when it was last cleaned. Five minutes later, as we pull into the next station, someone knocks on the door.

‘Tickets from Sherborne, please.’

My stomach contracts. I really do not want to get off this train now; I do not want to have to wait again; I
must
reach my destination.

I contemplate calling on the guard’s good nature. Seconds later, I realise that is ridiculous. He knocks again.

I am clearing my throat, preparing my argument, when I hear voices, and a dog barking, a big dog by the sounds of it. There is some kind of altercation starting outside on the platform. I hear the guard speaking, moving away from the door.

‘You can’t bring that on here,’ he’s saying, and someone is jeering and someone else is swearing. A woman shouts.

I open the door and peer out. The guard is on the platform too. A boy slips onto the train as I slip out of the loo. He is tall and skinny with deep-set, haunted eyes, silver rings in his lip and nose; a dark, mottled crew-cut.

Our eyes meet and I experience a strange flash of emotion: recognition of a kindred spirit, perhaps. I pause for a second, and then I move down the carriage the guard has just come from. I slide into an empty double seat; my heart is beating fast. I feel like a fugitive. I
am
a fugitive.

The tall boy passes me; he glances down. ‘All right?’ he mutters; before I can respond, he carries on walking.

What does he recognise in me? My scratched face, my bandaged hand. I find myself wishing he had stopped and sat with me.

The argument on the platform is winding down. The huge Alsatian is being dragged off by the shouting woman. The man who was trying to board the train is obviously drunk; can of Special Brew in hand, he stumbles against the woman. She pushes at him, furious. They turn on each other now.

The guard is back on the train. He has not seen my face this whole time, I realise. He does not come into our carriage now; he must have gone the other way. An hour or two away from London, I am safe – for now.

I
didn’t invite
Mal in that night. Leonard was still glowering in the back; Polly was still utterly overwrought, I could tell from the flushed roses of colour in her cheeks, and the two of them hadn’t exchanged a word the whole journey.

When Mal pulled up outside the house, I rushed to jump out.

‘That was so kind.’ I knew I was gabbling slightly. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘You’re welcome. And if you ever fancy a drink—’

‘Yes, great, thanks.’ I wouldn’t look at him; was on the pavement already, opening Polly’s door, hoisting her out. ‘See you soon.’

I didn’t look back; I shut the door firmly behind us and bolted it. There was something to be said for sometimes locking the whole world out.

Polly and I polished off the whole tub of mint-choc-chip, though the addition of strawberry sauce left something to be desired, in my humble opinion. Soon she fell asleep beside me on the sofa. I covered her with the blanket and watched the end of
Casablanca
. And when
I found the tears coursing down my face as the beautiful Bergman walked away from Bogart to board the plane, I told myself it was a good thing to cry. All the best love stories are the most painful, obviously. If the star-cross’d lovers ended up together, they’d be arguing about the washing-up before too long.

This was a much-needed release, some form of catharsis.

So why did I feel so utterly wretched?

Around midnight, I carried Polly up to bed. On her chest of drawers was the photo of Sid and her taken in St Ives the year before he finally made it. They looked so happy and, for once, Sid looked carefree, the great golden beach unfurling behind him as he held his small daughter high in his arms, proud and strong. Pierced by a deep and unremitting sadness, I curled up next to Polly in her little white bed, my face buried in her hair, and fell asleep.

Sometime in the early hours, I came to with a gasp. Confused, I wasn’t sure what had woken me, but I had the unnerving sense that someone had been watching me.

Polly was still sleeping soundly, her breath a whisper on my cheek. My arm was twisted painfully beneath me. As I eased myself, wincing, from the bed, I heard something downstairs.

I froze.

Somewhere, a door banged. I couldn’t tell if it was inside or out in the street.

A minute passed. I forced myself from the bed; paused at Polly’s door, listening.

A creak. My heart began to race. I scolded myself. It was just the wind. An old floorboard; this old house.

I tiptoed onto the landing, towards the stairs.

Down the stairs, to the kitchen. Towards some kind of protection? A bread knife, perhaps.

Suddenly, the garden was flooded with the security light’s beam.

I stopped breathing.

What was I going to do with a bread knife?

Next door’s ginger tom stalked across the patio.

I breathed again. He’d set it off, obviously.

The front door rattled like it did when it was windy – but the night was still. There
was
someone in the house, or trying to get in.

Where was the phone?

In the sitting-room.

I edged towards the corridor.

The front door was still bolted on the inside. The windows were alarmed. The patio doors, I had just seen, were shut and locked.

I ran to the sitting-room, snatched up the phone.

Through the un-shuttered window, I saw a figure walking back down the path, towards the gate, away from the house where we lived.

L
ove should be simple
, right?

X loves Y, who loves X back.

Why wouldn’t it be?

Because it takes two people. Two minds, two wills. Two to connect; two to choose a path, a similar if not identical course. Imagine a conversation, then have it for real. Does it go the way you thought it would?

I doubt it, because you don’t know what the other person is going to say until they speak.

I met Sid when I first came to London. I was broke, waitressing, not sure what I was doing with my life. After qualifying, I’d gone travelling around South America, met hippies and bandits and shamans; I’d danced in the moonlight and on beaches, trekked through the rainforests and visited lost cities, losing myself briefly. I’d come home only to argue with my father badly, finally finding the strength to stand up to him. I wanted to go to back to college, to finish my training so I could start counselling for real, but my father unequivocally refused to help me, though he was currently solvent, and my mother couldn’t afford it at all, though she gladly gave me a bed at her home in East Finchley. Whilst I applied for grants and began my studies again, I needed as much cash as possible. I worked two jobs and then I saw an ad in the corner shop for life models at an off-shoot of Slade Art College in central London.

I was unsure but Emily encouraged me. She was in her free-love, free-will phase, sleeping with a Bob Dylan look-alike and spouting Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘It will unleash your soul, darling,’ she said, but I wasn’t so sure. It was more likely to unleash my wobbly thighs. Still, I was broke; I bit the bullet.

Sid was teaching at the art college. A year or so older than me, he was gaunt, grumpy and curt; all hollow cheeks and permanent scowl. He hardly spoke, showed me the store cupboard where I could change and pointed out the kettle in the corner, though there was no milk. ‘Come out and lie on that divan thing. And,’ he surveyed me quickly, ‘try not to lie like a lump of lard.’

I stared at him, even more appalled now. I’d never met someone so rude. And in the cupboard, shivering, I realised too late that I hated the idea of taking my clothes off with a passion. What on earth had I been thinking? I was totally and utterly wrong for it. I wasn’t proud of my body, I was simply mortified by my nudity, and worse, I was freezing, my pale skin unattractively goose-pimpled, the tiny fan heater no solace, simply burning one unsightly patch bright red on my thigh.

Halfway through the first session, during the tea-break, I made a run for it. In the tiny loo, I threw my clothes on, slipping out the back door of the studio whilst the class was grouped round the kettle and a plate of broken digestives.

Sid caught up with me halfway down the path.

‘Where are you going?’ he caught me roughly by my arm.

‘I can’t do it,’ I shook him off. But something electric pulsed through me; a pure physical thrill at his touch. ‘It’s embarrassing,’ I mumbled. My shirt was still half-unbuttoned.

‘Don’t be such a little prude.’ His eyes – the green of damp moss – narrowed. I read the disdain easily.

‘I’m not.’

‘You are. Taking your clothes off is the most natural thing in the world.’

‘For you maybe.’

‘For us all.’

‘You do it then,’ I retorted.

‘No way.’ He stared at me. ‘Your body’s much better than mine.’ And then he grinned.

I cringe when I look back. I cringe at how easily I was lost. One smile and I fell in.

I didn’t go back. He called the class to an early close and took me to the pub. We ordered whisky macs and were drunk by five. I saw something in Sid that I responded to eagerly; something forlorn that he thought he’d hidden; that he managed to hide from most. But not from me. We drained the final glasses, and then he took me to bed in his artist’s garret. And it was a garret. It had a magnificent view of the clouds through the sky-light, a double mattress and not much else; his easel and oils stacked against the wall, a bottle of whisky on a wooden box, no visible food. Some Camus and lots of Ernest Hemingway on the windowsills. I hadn’t read Hemingway yet, and I had no idea about Sid’s preoccupation with death. I just knew the room seemed romantic in the extreme; it smelt of paint and turps and Sid.

We fell into bed and we didn’t get out until the next day.

Now I implore my female clients, ‘Don’t sleep with them until you are really sure you can handle what comes next.’ Old-fashioned, maybe – but show me a woman who can have really good sex and not attach in some way, and I’ll show you a genius, a liar – or a broken soul.

I slept with Sid the first day I met him. What did I expect?

Certainly not the punishment he meted out.

B
ut even that
wasn’t simple. Because Sid took me to bed, hooked me entirely – and then vanished.

Hope died a slow and painful death. I yearned for him – and then I pushed the thought of him away, because it hurt. Stupid and naïve, I knew, after just one meeting – but I thought I’d glimpsed more. I knocked on his front door a few times, but the third time, when the landlady let me up the stairwell, I thought I heard female laughter inside, and I turned away, huddled into my own rejection.

Later, I walked past the art college once or twice, dawdled down the road, dolled up to the nines, but when the door opened and a group of tutors came out, I ran the other way.

Just when I had almost succeeded in forgetting him, he reappeared.

Typical Sid. Sticking the knife-point back in the wound just as it was about to heal.

That night he came back, it was sultry. A night when sirens wailed, as they wail continually in the city until we don’t notice anymore; a night when the pollution blurred the edges of the tallest buildings, hiding the sky from the ground. A night when the newest skyscrapers stacked light above us, and stumpy tower-blocks flicked into disjointed Lego-brick life as dusk drew in; as the DLR wended
Blade-Runner
-like between concrete and the stark shine of Canary Wharf. As the streetlights hummed and the kids on the corner doused their chips with too much vinegar and jostled each other in trousers that rested dangerously low: ‘G’wan blud’, throwing wrappers in the gutter. As the youths, all-hooded, youths who never cracked a smile, paced the pavements with their chunky dogs, and the young girls clacked past skinny-legged in shiny patent heels so high they couldn’t walk, let alone run from their hunters.

As this vibrant life spread out before me, I came alive again simply because Sid came back.

‘Sorry,’ he said, simply. And he only said it once. It was a word he struggled with. That was a lesson I quickly learnt.

‘Where were you?’ I asked.

He regarded me gravely for a moment with eyes that told me nothing.

‘Getting rid of the last one,’ he said, and then he smiled, baring teeth that were rather wolfish.

Another rarity, smiling; something he was not good at.

I said nothing; I didn’t really trust myself to speak. Because what was there to say? His words floored me; his words were enough.

Did I wonder then about how easily he did it? Got rid of her for me, whoever she was?

I don’t think it occurred to me, in fact, because it never felt easy with him. It was more like trying to keep up. Trying to dodge forwards, one step in front of him, and guess which way he would go next. It was exhausting.

But then, everything about Sid was difficult. That was what became addictive. And later, he admitted why he was attracted to me in the first place. Because I had dared, that first day, to run away.

I should have kept on running.