Lifesaving for Beginners (18 page)

‘Ssshhhhh.’
Faith straightens and stares at the door again.
‘Someone’s coming.’

We listen.
I hear footsteps.
Heavy ones.
Getting closer.

Faith grabs my arm, tries to pull me out of the chair.
‘Close it, Milo, close it now.
He’s coming.’

I hook my feet round the legs of the chair so I don’t budge.
The egg timer flashes.
Faster now.
There is a beep.
And then the correspondence tab opens.

I scroll down.

Three letters.

One name.

One address.

I hear voices in the corridor.
Two voices.
One of them is Jonathon’s.

‘Jesus, quick.
Close that tab.
Hurry up.
Get over to the couch.’
Faith waits until I’ve pressed the X before she hauls me out of the chair.
When the door opens, we are standing at the edge of the desk.
I duck my head between my legs.

Faith says, ‘I was just going to open the window.
Milo is feeling a bit .
.
.’

‘He’s not going to barf, is he?’
Jonathon is one of those adults who talk about you like you’re not there.
His shoes match but his laces don’t.

I stand up straight.
‘Actually, I feel a lot better now.’

Faith says, ‘Good.
Great.
We should go.’

Jonathon says, ‘But what about .
.
.’
He nods at the two slices of bread on a plate in one hand.
The glass in the other, half full of milk.

I take one slice of the bread.
‘Thanks.
I’ll eat it on the way out.’
I move towards the door, pulling Faith along behind me.

Faith says, ‘Sorry, Jonathon.
And thanks.
For everything.’

He stands in the middle of the office, with his shoes that match and his laces that don’t.
He looks like he wants to say something but can’t think what.
I bet he’ll eat the bread when we’re gone.
Probably drink the milk too.
He looks like the type.

Declan Darker opened the door and stepped inside, his hand resting on the gun tucked into the waistband of his faded 501s.
The house was quiet.
Dark.
He closed the door, making no sound, and began to move up the stairs.
He knew Spencer was here.
Hiding in the dark like the rat he was.

I select the paragraph and stamp on the Delete button with my fist.

Blank screen.
Page one of one.

I begin again.

Darker stopped at the foot of the stairs.
Every muscle in his body was taut, straining in the silence for a sound.
The hand gripping the banister was as steady as a rock.
He began to climb.
He knew this was how it had to end.
Him and Spencer.
The two of them.
There could be no other way.

This time, I use the backspace.
BACKSPACEBACKSPACEBACKSPACE.

Blank screen.
Page one of one.

Dialogue.
I’m not bad at dialogue.
Even the reviewers have to admit it.
I’ll kick-start the chapter with dialogue.

‘I thought you’d retired, Darker.’

‘With scumbags like you roaming the streets, Spencer?
I don’t think so.’

‘I heard you’d lost your nerve.
Since Razor Bill.
I heard he cut you pretty bad.’

Darker tightened his grip on the gun.
‘I’m lookin’ for a reason to pull this trigger, Spencer.
Go ahead.
It won’t take much.’

CHRIST!
DELETEDELETEDELETE.

And there it was again.
The blank screen.
Page one of one.
I bang the lid of the laptop down.
Again.
Shove it into the bag and push the bag under the desk until I can’t see it anymore.

I get up.
Put on my coat.
Outside, the cold is shocking.
So are the fairy lights.
And the stars.
And the lit-up Santas.
It shouldn’t be Christmas.
It’s only November.

And yet somehow it is.

I get in my car.
My beautiful car.
I love everything about it.
It even smells the same as the last one.
I bought the exact same air freshener.
I turn the key and the engine engages with its low hum.
I check the mirrors and get going.
I love driving.
People said I would be nervous, getting back behind the wheel.
I forced myself not to think about it.

In the supermarket, I’m back in the express lane.
Ten items or less.
A net of satsumas.
One large tub of low-fat natural yoghurt.
A packet of Jacob’s Cream Crackers.
A triangle of Brie.
One bag of porridge oats.
A bottle of red wine.
A family-size pepperoni pizza and a frozen stick of garlic bread.

Music pours like rain into the lift back to the car park.
Christmas music.
‘Joy to the World’.
Some marketing person came up with that idea.
Told the MD that playing Christmas songs in the shop and the lift and the car park and the toilets would make people buy more tinsel and baubles and ribbons and wrapping paper.
I’d love to take to the speaker with something hard.
The garlic bread, maybe.

Minnie is going to her Yoga for Pregnancy class, then home to cook dinner with Maurice.
They got a new fish kettle that they’re pretty excited about.

Ed said I could go to see
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two
with him and Sophie but I said no.
Things will have to get much worse before I agree to tag along on a date with my brother and his girlfriend.
He said, ‘There’s another letter for you.
It looks the same as the first one.’
It’s unusual for the college to do mailshots at this time of the year.
They usually wait till the new year, when people are desperate for a change.
I make a mental note to ring the college on Monday morning and tell them to stop writing to me.
I don’t know why I bother making a mental note because, even as I make it, I know I’ll never do it.
Minnie says it’s because I’m disorganised and slovenly.
She doesn’t mean it as an insult.
Just as a matter of fact.
I couldn’t agree more.

Thomas is probably playing
Grey’s Anatomy
with Sarah or Sandra or Sorcha or whateverhernameis.

I turn on all the lights in the apartment.
Even the lamp in the spare room, which is really Ed’s room.
I turn on the oven.
Switch on the telly.
Nothing on.
I mute it.
Put on the radio.
A Christmas song.
‘All I Want for Christmas is You’.
I switch the station.
‘Joy to the Fecking World’.
I turn off the radio.

I don’t quite make it to the end of the family-size pepperoni, but I nearly do.
Enough to do a fair bit of damage on the scales tomorrow.
I manage to finish the wine, though.
I realise this as I lift the bottle to pour another glass.
I light a cigarette.
I’m not supposed to smoke in the apartment.
I made up that rule myself.
It seems silly now.
I’ll catch my death out on the balcony, I tell myself.
Besides, it’s Friday night, I tell myself.
And it’s only me here.
Not like the pot plants are going to die of second-hand cigarette smoke, are they?
Although they don’t look at their best, to be honest.
Thomas bought them all.
He said, ‘Aloe vera –’ when I touched an odd, spiky-looking one ‘– great for sunburn and pimples.’

I said, ‘I don’t have pimples.’

He broke the top off one of the stems, poured a sticky substance onto his fingers, rubbed them together and put them under my nose.
I stepped back.

‘Smell,’ he said.
I sniffed perfunctorily.

Thomas said, ‘See?’

I nodded and allowed him to smear a bit on my neck.
It didn’t feel sticky.
In fact, it wasn’t all that unpleasant, to be honest.
It even smelled a bit like the aloe vera cream in the bathroom.
Thomas undid the buttons on my shirt.
Expertly.
With the fingers of one hand.
Like he’d done it a hundred times before he met me.
And perhaps he had.
We never told each other our tales.

I said, ‘Eh, excuse me.
What are you doing?’

He didn’t look up.
Just continued unbuttoning and then he unhooked my bra.
One of those ones that opened at the front, which he called ‘handy’.
He didn’t do anything for a moment.
Just looked at them.
My nipples were like football studs.
Then he said, ‘Aloe vera is especially effective on sunburn.’
He said it as if he were reading it out from the
Farmers Journal
.
Matter-of-fact.

‘But I’m not sunburned.’

‘I’m merely demonstrating.’

Anyway, the aloe vera plant is dead now.
And it’s not the only one.
The one that used to have pale purple flowers has the decayed look of the long, long departed.
Ditto the herbs on the windowsill.
Basil and something that begins with a C.
Coriander, maybe.

The phone rings.

The noise is huge in the quiet of the apartment.
I walk into the hall.
I might have drunk too much.
My shoulders glance off the walls.

It takes ages to reach the phone.
The hall seems longer than usual.
The phone keeps ringing.
I pick it up.
‘Hello?’

Nothing.

‘Who’s there?’

I hear someone breathing.
This is when I’m supposed to hang up.
But the wine has me cosseted like a suit of armour.

I say, ‘I know who you are.’
See what he makes of that.

It works, because he speaks.
After weeks of ringing up and saying nothing, he finally speaks.
It is a man.
A man with an English accent.
His voice is low-pitched.
He enunciates each word, like an elocution lesson.

‘And I know who you are, Kat Kavanagh.’

My heart hammers in my chest.
The kitchen door creaks in a draught and I jump.
The hallway seems darker than before.
I press the phone against my ear until it hurts.

‘What do you mean?’
I try to keep a grip on my voice but it sounds shaky.
Like I’m afraid.

‘But then again, everybody knows who you are, don’t they, Kat?
Or should I say, Killian?’
His voice is lower now.
Almost a whisper.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I think you do.’

‘Don’t ring this number again.’

‘How’s book ten coming along, Kat?’

I hang up.
My legs shake.
Everything shakes.
I sit on the floor.
I sit there for a long time.
Thomas was right about the tiles.
They are cold.
I sit there until it passes.
The need to phone Thomas is huge.
It’s been there before but never like this.

I sit on my hands.

I don’t ring Minnie.
She won’t be surprised.
She’ll say, ‘You can’t hide forever, Kat.’
She’s said that before.

‘I know who you are.’
The voice was sure of itself.
There was no doubt.
Only conviction.
I check the Caller ID.
This time, the number comes up as ‘blocked’.
I replace the phone on the cradle.
Pull the lead out of the wall.
Tuck my hands back under my legs.

I’ve been so careful.
Nobody could have been more careful than me.

I’m sober now.
An entire bottle of wine and I’m sober already.
That’s bad value.
I get up slowly.
My legs are stiff.
I hobble to the kitchen and lift the blind to look out of the window.
The streetlamp gutters and in the flickering orange light I can see it’s been raining.
The street is empty.

I get into bed with my clothes on and a full face of make-up.
The electric blanket is on but it takes ages to warm up.
I turn the light off and the darkness advances like something solid, surrounding me on all sides.

‘I know who you are.’
I believed him when he said it.
He sounds like someone who knows things.
He sounds like someone who knows everything.

I sit up and switch on the light.

I open my laptop.
Press the button.
Open the document.
There it is again.
The blank screen.
Page one of one.

It was difficult to see.
The dark was thick.
Penetrating.
Darker couldn’t even make out shadows.
Outlines.
Nothing.
It was the kind of dark that suggested it may never be light again.

This time I don’t read it before I press Delete.

Delete.

Delete.

Delete.