He stepped back and smoothed out a crease on his shirtsleeve. “You know what you look like? A wilted carrot with a face drawn on it.” He puffed out his cheeks. What in god’s name had he been thinking to agree to this?
The Sentinel 4wDH was speeding around at a pleasing pace, hypnotic on the figure-eight track he’d set up. He’d deliberately chosen Ella’s “But Not for Me”—smooth and languid and beautiful—to try to calm him down, but it wasn’t helping much. This was why he didn’t socialize, because just the thought of it was making his stomach cramp up. The temptation to stay in and carry on his conversations on the forum was very much in danger of winning out. But in the end he forced himself to leave the house. Diane, he had decided, was having to pull a late one at work, but he’d managed to get a babysitter last minute.
He Googled the pub before he left and was concerned that it might be dangerously close to “cool,” judging by the ominous photos of chalkboards by the door with their aggressive slogans promising—with 50 percent accuracy—“beer and good times,” but when he got there he was relieved to see it looked fairly normal, from the outside at least. Nevertheless, he did three walk-bys, pretending to be on his phone so if Peggy or her friends saw him from the inside he could pretend he’d just been finishing a call before he came in. The timing of his arrival was crucial. If he got there too early he’d be forced into making conversation. Too late and he’d feel like an interloper. Ideally he’d join them in time to say a quick hello just before the quiz began—then the focus would be on the questions and nobody would feel like they had to make an effort to include him in conversation.
The next time he passed by he glanced through the window and spotted a group of people in the far corner. It was them. Peggy was sitting next to a man in a leather jacket who had long brown hair and a goatee. Steve, presumably. He seemed to be in the middle of an anecdote, his gestures getting more expansive as he built to what was obviously the punch line. He banged the table as the others laughed. Andrew saw a few people standing at the bar looking around to see the reason for the noise. Peggy, he noticed, was only half joining in with the laughter.
He braced his hand against the door, but then he froze.
This wasn’t him. This wasn’t what he did. What if he literally didn’t know one correct answer in this quiz, or was forced to take sides in a heated debate? What if they were on course to win and then he ruined it for everyone? And even then, it wasn’t as if the quiz was continuous—there’d be gaps where people could question him about his life. He knew how to deal with people at work when it came to talking about his family. He could predict what things they’d ask him and knew when to duck out of conversations when he felt uncomfortable about where they were going. But this was uncharted territory, and he’d be trapped.
A car pulled up behind him and he heard someone get out and offer a familiar “Have a good night”—a farewell that could mean only one thing. He turned and saw the cab’s yellow light, a welcoming beacon promising sanctuary. He rushed over and rattled off his address to the driver, yanking the door open and throwing himself inside. He sank down low into the seat, his heart racing as if he were in a getaway car leaving a bank robbery. A quarter of an hour later he was outside his building, his evening over, twenty pounds down and he hadn’t even bought a drink.
Inside his building’s hallway, in among the junk mail delivered that morning there was an envelope addressed to him in pen. He quickly stuffed it into his pocket and hurried up the stairs. Inside his flat, his urgency to get music on and a train moving around the track felt even greater than usual.
He pushed the needle down roughly on the record player and turned the volume up, then knelt down and tugged at the rail track, pulling the middle of the eight apart and pushing it out to create one loop instead of two. He set the train running and sat in the newly created circle, his knees folded to his chest. Here, he was calm. Here, he was in control. Trumpets howled and cymbals crashed, and the train fizzed around the track, encircling him, guarding him, keeping him safe.
After a while he remembered the envelope in his pocket. He took it out and opened it, pulling out the message inside. As he did so he was hit by a waft of rich aftershave.
Your disappearing act meant you weren’t around long enough to hear Sally’s will being read this morning. You little bastard. Did you know? Because I certainly didn’t. Twenty-five grand in her savings—you’d have thought she’d have mentioned that to me, wouldn’t you? After all, we were trying to grow the business—that was the dream. So you can imagine it came as something of a shock to find out about it, and that she had decided to leave the money not to me, but to you.
Maybe now you’ll begin to realize just how sick with guilt she was, all because you never forgave her, no matter how hard she tried to help you. You were like a brick tied around her ankles, weighing her down. Well, I hope you’re happy now, Andrew. It was all worth it, wasn’t it?
—
Andrew read Carl’s letter through several times, but it still didn’t make sense. Surely Sally giving him money was some sort of administrative mistake? Ticking a wrong box? Because the alternative explanation, that it was a last-gasp attempt to make things right, to rid herself of guilt that she had lived with and that he could, and should, have absolved her of, was too desperately sad for him to contemplate.
— CHAPTER 11 —
For the next three months, each time he returned home it was with trepidation at the prospect of another envelope addressed to him in Carl’s spidery scrawl.
The letters arrived erratically. Some weeks there would be two or three—tearstained and inkblotted—then there would be four weeks without one at all. But Carl’s anger never wavered—if anything he furiously doubled down on how Andrew had conned Sally out of her money. You are pathetic and cowardly and worthless, and you don’t deserve Sally’s forgiveness was how he’d ended his latest note. Andrew wondered if Carl would be surprised to know that he was broadly in agreement with this assessment.
Each time he opened the door to find a letter he would trudge upstairs and sit on the side of his bed, turning the envelope around in his hands. He told himself to stop opening them, but he was trapped in an unforgiving cycle: the more he read, the guiltier he felt, and the guiltier he felt, the more he thought he deserved Carl’s anger. This was especially true when Carl once more accused Andrew of contributing to Sally’s ill health by never reaching out to her, because the more he thought about it, the more he started to convince himself that this was true.
—
It was long enough now after Sally’s death for some sense of normality to have returned in the way that people were treating him. Cameron had gone through a phase of putting a hand on his shoulder when he spoke to him, looking at him with his sad, bulbous eyes and knitted eyebrows and doing the head tilt, but thankfully that had now stopped. More of a relief still was the fact that Keith, who had briefly restrained himself, was now back to being a complete arsehole.