Laying the Ghost (25 page)

‘Tricky! If you got a chance for that good old word “discuss”, I’d go for a). I know I’d be wrong, but over six sides of lined A4 I could make it really, really convincing.’

Ed looked at her admiringly. ‘I don’t doubt it. But soon there won’t be any room for a well-argued case. Depressing, isn’t it? Everything’s got to be cut and dried and incontrovertible.’

‘Like biscuits,’ Nell said, vaguely.

‘
Biscuits?
’ Ed laughed. ‘What have biscuits got to do with it?’

‘Oh nothing, really. I was just thinking last week, when I was eating four in a row, the way you do when you need a sugar-fix cheer-up, how guilty you’re now supposed to feel about something that used to be just a harmless little snack, and I quite enjoyed that feeling. It was just a pleasant little dose of sin, innocent – if that’s not a contradiction. But then I read on the side of the pack that they were low in salt, full of fibre and only two per cent sugar, and I suddenly didn’t want them at all. Because if I’m going to have something that’s supposed to be bad for me, I don’t want the luscious guilty edge taken off it by the nutrition police.’ She glanced up the line to see if the signal had changed. ‘Where is this train? Shouldn’t there be one here by now?’

As if on cue, a muffled voice coughed down the PA system and, sounding barely awake through boredom, announced that the District Line would be suspended for several hours because of an ‘incident’ on the line at Turnham Green.

‘Ah! Result! That means I don’t have to go.’ Ed was gleeful. ‘Not that I don’t feel sorry for any poor desperate sod who’s fallen or jumped under a train.’

Nell sent up a quick prayer for any possible suicide’s soul. ‘Me too. But hey, let’s hope it was really only a bomb scare.’ The two of them got up and walked back towards the station steps. The pigeon woman glared at them and chucked a handful of bread in their direction.

‘No thanks, I prefer stoneground!’ Ed called to her, then said to Nell, ‘But definitely not a real bomb. No bomb, no one jumping.’

It wasn’t even half in the spirit of making an effort to get to where they were supposed to be going by alternative means that ten minutes later Ed and Nell were on the fast train to Waterloo, with both their meetings cancelled and without a plan as to how they were going to spend this unexpected free time. If Nell had had to analyse how they came to be on this train rather than on the way home, she would have found it hard to decide whether to blame a fifty-strong school party hurtling down the steps that led to their exit, or the fact that bus travel to their original destinations would have involved a long, complicated trip towards central London. Whichever it was, the Waterloo-bound train was just pulling into the station and they were close enough to catch it without making any effort.

‘This is fun,’ Nell said as they watched the allotments of North Sheen whiz by. ‘I don’t know where we’re going but I love this adventure feeling. It’s like when I was a teenager and I used to hitch to places. I knew it was dangerous but it was worth it, just for the feeling that nobody knew where I was. And it shouldn’t only be schoolkids who get to skive, should it? I know that being grown-ups we can more or less go where we want, when we want, but sometimes it feels great being
not
where you’re supposed to be.’

‘And we’ve each got an excuse, an alibi,’ Ed added. ‘In
fact,
two – one for the people we’re supposed to be seeing and one for those back home who might need to know where we are. It couldn’t be better. Where shall we go? Did you bring your passport?’

‘To go to Paris? Sadly I didn’t.’

‘Never mind, next time.’

‘Hmm. Sounds good, but will planning it kill the spontaneity?’

‘It depends – you could decide that bringing your passport along simply extends the range of possibilities rather than making Paris a foregone. And if you really want to keep guessing, there’s always Lille or Brussels for that last-minute decision.’

Nell smiled, thinking how lovely a slow, delicious lunch at the Café de Flore would be with Ed. They could play at being Simone and Jean-Paul.

At Clapham, a group of Italian students got on the train. The three boys and two girls hung around by the doors, even though there were plenty of spare seats. Nell watched the smaller of the girls as she worked her charm on the boys, teasing them for her favours. Her skirt was tiny and she swung around the centre pole between the doors, never still, seemingly swaying about in time to her iPod but watching slyly as the boys jostled and joked and kept their eyes focused on her legs. Soon she had singled out the best-looking one, although the others were still hopefully including her in their banter. The chosen
one
responded to her as he was meant to, upgrading from the chat, grabbing playfully at her long hair as she twisted away from him around the pole. She kept her graceful balance easily as the train lurched, always just out of his reach. Then he was touching the skin on her neck, trying to still her, trapping her hand on the pole and leaving his there, over hers, claiming her. The other boys visibly backed away, defeated, sullen but not yet willing to start again on the taller girl, who now leaned silent against the doorside panel, waiting for the fallout. Oh, the awful competition of lust, Nell thought. Why would anyone who’d been bruised by it ever want to enter that fray again?

‘Kate gave me this book when Alex left, called
After He’s Gone
,’ she told Ed. ‘It’s about dealing with the aftermath of divorce.’

Ed laughed. ‘The title sounds more like it’s for after someone’s died, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘It’s probably not dissimilar – for some the misery must be even worse, really. If someone who loved you has died, it’s terrible, but at least they
did
love you. You’ve got that, even if it’s not a huge comfort till much later. With being left – well, you haven’t. As you know.’

‘When Alicia left me it was a relief all round, frankly,’ Ed told her. ‘She was a natural-born bolter, practically scratching her way out of the door from day one. She’s on her fifth now, Tamsin says. Tell me about this book.’

‘Well, one of its suggestions is that to lighten the general misery, you should do one thing every day that makes you feel specially good. It doesn’t have to be anything big; some women get a kick out of going to Tesco in their funkiest shoes that they’d usually only wear to a party. Or putting turquoise streaks in their hair, or eating doughnuts and sod the diet. Any small thing to get you through a day – like getting on a train on a whim, like we just have. What would you choose?’

Ed thought for a moment. ‘I quite like the odd sneaky cigarette in the garden,’ he said. ‘A crafty Gitane after a rubbish day can do it for me. Or reading one of the tabloids from cover to cover – one I’ve bought, not just found covered in someone else’s ketchup in the college canteen. It makes a jolly change from the
Guardian
.’ Ed glanced out of the window as the London Eye came into view. The train had slowed now, approaching Waterloo.

‘There goes our train,’ Nell commented, watching a Eurostar slowly pulling out from its platform.

‘Ah well … Paris another time.’ Ed smiled. ‘Never mind – for today I’ve had a better idea …’

This early in the season and on a weekday, there was hardly any queue for the London Eye. Nell and Ed bought their tickets, were patted and scanned for weapons and explosives and in no time were being ushered towards the constantly moving pods. They waited their turn to board for what was rather unnervingly described as a ‘flight’, and
Nell
looked down at the scarily insubstantial netting, there to prevent any accidental plunging into the Thames. A couple dithering with small children behind her and Ed meant that they were the only two in their capsule, and the door closed behind them.

‘Hey, that’s lucky – you have to pay a fortune to book this space to yourself!’ Ed said. ‘We should have brought champagne with us, made out it was an anniversary or something.’

‘Ah yes, but if we’d done that, it would have turned out differently. We’d be sharing it with six Japanese tourists and a drunken hen party from Newcastle.’

‘And two of those would feel sick with vertigo. You don’t get vertigo, do you? Have you been on this before?’ Ed looked nervous, possibly picturing her becoming faint and panic-stricken. He was eyeing the door as if to check it couldn’t be prised open by a hysterical screamer when they were two hundred feet up in the sky.

Nell laughed. ‘No and no!’ she told him, though as they were now on a level with the roof of the derelict Shell building, she wasn’t so sure about the first ‘no’. There was something mildly unnerving about the way the glass walls of the capsule curved at the bottom, as they became part of the floor.

The day was a clear, sunny one. They could easily see the arch of Wembley stadium, the slaty tower blocks of the Roehampton Estate, the radio mast at Crystal Palace,
Hampstead
Heath. St Paul’s, the Gherkin, Canary Wharf all looked squashed together as if there was no real distance between them, and on the other side of the river, quite close, there were intriguing glimpses of the hidden inner quadrangles of the Houses of Parliament and into the Treasury.

‘We must do that another time,’ Ed said, indicating the parliament buildings. ‘We should go in and see what they all talk about. I’ve always meant to.’

Nell watched a tourist boat turning round at Westminster Pier. Did he really mean they should go out again, properly, not just on this kind of daft, spontaneous whim? Paris and Parliament? It was close to … Well – Kate would get excited and call it dating. The ‘D’ word that she hadn’t wanted to think about when she was with Steve. But no. It wasn’t that, they were just friends and neighbours with nothing better to do. And in spite of being the only people in the pod it wasn’t remotely ‘romantic’. It was almost as if, having been pushed in here alone together, they were keeping a polite, no-complications distance. Nell tried to imagine how it would have been if, instead of being so icily hostile, Patrick had agreed to meet her, and if it were him she was with in this capsule instead of Ed. Would he have been laughingly scornful about her choice of rendezvous, mocked her for choosing something so cheesy? Or would he have raved about the scale of the view, the colour
blocks
of London’s most distant vistas? She couldn’t even begin to guess, not after all this time. Perhaps they wouldn’t have had anything at all to talk about. Or possibly she wouldn’t have been able to stop looking at him, silently trying to find the clues to the former Patrick inside the carapace of someone so much older, so lived-in, so … well, the word now could only be …
unknown
.

As the last minutes of the circuit passed, Nell sat on the long padded seat in the centre of the capsule and wondered if all such long, leather-covered benches would forever remind her of Steve’s peculiar puppy-cage table. She pushed the thought out of her mind and instead watched the railway far beneath her, a layout that looked like the kind of train set her own father would have dreamed of, with an endless dance sequence of trains going in and out of Waterloo station.

The wheel had almost turned its circle and a voice that sounded weirdly electronic told them to keep clear of the doors. Ed stepped out first on to the pier and took Nell’s hand as she left the moving capsule. It was only as they entered the crowded, rush-hour chaos of Waterloo that she realized she still had her hand in his. Ahead of them on the station concourse were the five Italian students again, and the alpha boy who had earlier pursued the smaller girl was now walking with his arm round the taller one. They looked very happy together, very comfortable and relaxed, as if this had always been the way it was
going
to be. How had that happened, Nell wondered, had both sensed they would sooner or later get together, if they simply waited for their time to come? What a strange thing love was.

14

Angels With Dirty Faces

(Sugababes)

‘WHERE ARE YOU
going? Are you going out
again
?’ Mimi was curled up in a corner of the sofa in a nest of cushions, watching as Nell dashed around finding her car keys, her coat, her bag. Andréa had been in cleaning that morning and she had her own favourite places for putting keys that she found lying around: sometimes on top of the microwave in the kitchen, sometimes on the piano, even on the stairs – anywhere but the hook in the hallway where Nell kept them.

‘I told you this morning, it’s my safety class – put off from Tuesday. Look, it’s only a couple of hours. Unless …’ Nell hesitated, wondering if putting Mimi first would be a good enough reason not to go to any more of Steve’s classes. Of course it would. That was what you did
with
children – you used them as a blatant excuse. The image of the handcuffs beside his bed kept coming to mind – the whole bedroom did. If she had to, Nell could slosh together a quick gouache mix in the exact colour of the walls of the room, draw the patterns of the cushions on the bed, add the shackle points on the leather headboard. It was all stuck there in her head like a picture. She so wished it wasn’t.

However much she told herself that what people got up to in the privacy of their own premises was their business, and that as he was an ex-detective she shouldn’t be surprised that he owned a set of handcuffs, it still wasn’t a comfortable image. Then she told herself off for being prudish. The ‘hey, don’t knock what you haven’t tried’ factor kicked in. Back when she was twenty-one, if Patrick had suggested a little light beating with a soft leather paddle, she’d have given it a go, no question. She smiled at the thought – what would that have been like? Ludicrously funny, she concluded. It would have felt so contrived, so staged, that neither of them would have been able to keep a straight face. Had he really become so humourless?

‘Would you rather I stayed in? Will you feel lonely?’ Nell went and sat beside Mimi and put her arm round her.

Mimi shrugged her off, almost growling. ‘Er … no?’ She hunched further into her cushions, flipped the remote, changing channels. ‘I’ll be fine. I was just surprised because suddenly you go out
all the time
. I mean,
you
weren’t home the other day when I got back from school. I’m a latchkey child.’