If a change in life could be marked with a point in time, the way a signpost marks a fork in the road, or an island divides a river, Sally looked back at her life and saw two markers: the first, when, during a childhood squabble with Zoë, Sally had fallen off a bed on her hand, an event their parents had treated with unexpected seriousness, behaving suddenly as if an unspeakable darkness had descended on the family, and, the second, that day with Julian – the day when she had, at last, grown up. Sitting hunched over her cup of hot chocolate, her feet wet and cold, her propped-up umbrella leaking a pitiful puddle on the floor, she saw the world in its plainest colours. Saw it was serious. It was real. The divorce was real and the overdraft was real. There really existed things like bankruptcy and repossessed houses and children living on sink estates. They didn’t happen Out There. They happened In Here. In her life.
The six months that had followed were some of the hardest of her life. She got herself a job, she traded in her car for a smaller Ford Ka, she learned how to work out interest rates and how to write letters to banks. She heated only the kitchen and Millie’s bedroom all winter, and never used the tumble-drier. There always seemed to be bird dirt on at least one of Millie’s school shirts when it came in from the line – that, or when it was really cold, frost making the clothes as stiff as boards. But she persevered. It was an uphill struggle and even now it was like running to keep still. She didn’t turn to her parents for help – they’d have been devastated to know the state she was in and, besides, it would get back to Zoë eventually. Zoë would never have got herself into a predicament like this. Zoë had always been the clever one. Amazing. She’d never have ended up accepting jobs from people like David Goldrab. She’d judo-kick him over the nearest hedge before she did that.
Still, it had to be done, she thought, as she got up the morning after Lorne had been found, and padded barefoot into the kitchen to make breakfast. There weren’t any choices in this new world of hers. She switched on the kettle, set a pan of milk on the hob, arranged cups and plates on the table. Steve was still asleep so she didn’t put the radio on. Anyway, it would all be about Lorne Wood and she didn’t know if she could face listening to any more of that. She put some croissants into the oven. The tarot cards were still sitting in an untidy pile on the table where she’d dumped them last night. Now she paused and studied the one of Millie. It wasn’t that the paint was fading, she saw. It was that something corrosive had blistered the surface, worming and chewing at Millie’s face. Feeling suddenly cold, she raised her eyes and looked out of the window at the fields that strained limitlessly to the bottom of the sky. The canal where Lorne had died was miles away. Miles and miles and miles.
You don’t believe in stuff like that, do you?
Of course not.
She turned the card face down and went to switch on the kettle. Millie was safe. She was fifteen. She knew how to look after herself. And, anyway, sooner or later you had to learn to take a step back.
Chapter 10
On the other side of town, in her living room, Zoë stood with a cup of coffee in her hand and studied the photos on her wall. Most of them came from the trip she’d taken eighteen years ago. Just her and the bike. She’d been everywhere. Mongolia, Australia, China, Egypt, South America. Getting the money together for the adventure had been one of the toughest things she’d ever done – it had just about ripped the skin from her back. Had taken her places, made her do things she never wanted to think about again. But the trip itself turned out to be the most important time in her life. It had taught her all she knew about self-sufficiency, survival, determination. It had sprung her from the trap she’d lived in since childhood.
Lorne Wood would never have the chance to learn any of those things, she thought now, as the sun powered into her kitchen through the bay windows. That was a whole chapter of Lorne’s life that would never be opened.
She put down the coffee and wandered around the room, opening cupboards and drawers until she found a tube of Slazenger tennis balls. They’d been there for two or three summers, since she’d got it into her head she was going to beat every woman in the constabulary tennis club at Portishead. She’d done it within six months. Then she turned her attention to the men. But none of the men would play with her after that, so she’d got bored and dropped it.
Ben was still in bed, still asleep. Zoë sat on the sofa arm with her back to the stairs and popped open the tin. The balls smelt of rubber and old summer grass. She tipped one out and bounced it once on the floor, then blew on it to clean off the fluff and grit. She rubbed it on her sleeve, opened her mouth wide, and pushed the ball in as far as it would go.
It went in surprisingly easily, lodging at its widest point between her teeth – half in, half out of her mouth. The dry, chemical-tasting nap pushed her tongue to the back of her mouth, kicking in the gag reflex. The impulse was to rip the ball out – she really believed she could hear the gristle in her jaw joint popping – but she dug her fingers into the arm of the sofa, closed her eyes and tried to breathe through it, forcing herself to picture the ball being taped into her mouth. Her body shook, sweat popped under her arms, little black and white stars burst against her retinas. And then, when she thought the skin at the edges of her mouth would split open, like Lorne’s had, she tugged the ball out and let it tumble to the floor, taking with it thick bands of saliva.
She sat back against the sofa, shaking, sucking in breath after breath, while on the floor the ball bounced and bounced. It hit the curtains and came to a juddering halt.
Chapter 11
‘Hey. I found you.’ Steve stood in the kitchen doorway. He was naked, rubbing his eyes and stretching his arms above his head. ‘God, I slept well. I love it here.’
‘Sit down.’ Sally got an elastic band out of a drawer, bound Millie’s card to the outside of the pack and pushed it into the back of one of the drawers. She turned to check the milk that was heating on the stove. ‘I’ve got to get going. Got to be at work at nine.’
‘No time for hanky-panky, then?’
‘I’ve got to be at work.’
He smiled and stretched some more. His hands found the low ceiling and he used it to press himself down, bending his knees, lengthening his body and cracking the sleep out of his muscles. He was different in every way from Julian, who had been pale and hairless with soft arms and womanly hips. Steve was big, with dark hair and a solid, suntanned neck. His legs were hard and hairy, like a centaur’s. Looking at him now, stretching, was like watching one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy studies come to life.
She stood at the hob, whisking the milk into froth, shooting him surreptitious looks as he wandered around, yawning and checking inside the fridge. It had been four months since they’d got together and she still couldn’t quite believe he was here. Steve had given her sex on the brain: if she had even half an hour between cleaning jobs, she’d scurry over to his house and they’d end up naked on the kitchen floor. Or on the stairs, halfway up to the bedroom. It was totally different from being with Julian. Maybe she was having a mid-life crisis. At thirty-five.
Steve was in ‘corporate espionage’. Sally wasn’t entirely sure what that meant – but he always seemed to be dealing with people who lived in remote and glamorous places. His address book, which she’d seen lying open at his house one day, was crammed with addresses in countries like the Emirates, Liberia and South Africa, and more than once he’d had to set his alarm for the middle of the night so he could get up and take a conference call with someone in Peru or Bolivia. He wore a suit when he left the house in the morning, but in her imagination he wore a black polo-neck and jeans and had secret knives fitted in his soles. She had no idea why he wanted to be with someone as stupid as she was. Maybe it was because she was so easy. He only had to look at her and she’d roll backwards on to the bed, her legs open, a blank, grateful smile on her face.