He stood outside his front door, shivering. Eventually, when the cold became too much to bear, he brought out his keys. There was usually one day a week like this, when he’d pause outside, key in the lock, holding his breath.
Maybe this time.
Maybe this time it would be the lovely old town house behind that door: Diane starting to prepare dinner. The smell of garlic and red wine. The sound of Steph and David squabbling or asking questions about their homework, then the excitable cheers when he opened the door because Dad’s home, Dad’s home!
When he entered the hallway the smell of damp hit him even harder than usual. And there were the familiar scuff marks on the corridor walls and the intermittent, milky yellow of the faulty strip light. He trudged up the stairs, his wet shoes squeaking with each step, and slid the second key around on his key ring. He reached up to right the wonky number 2 on the door and went inside, met, as he had been for the last twenty years, by nothing but silence.
— CHAPTER 3 —
Five Years Previously
Andrew was late. This might not have been so much of a disaster if on the CV he’d submitted ahead of that morning’s job interview he hadn’t claimed to be “extremely punctual.” Not just punctuaclass="underline" extremely punctual. Was that even a thing? Were there extremities of punctuality? How might one even go about measuring such a thing?
It was his own stupid fault, too. He’d been crossing the road when a strange honking noise distracted him and he looked up. A goose was arrowing overhead, its white underside lit up orange by the morning sun, its shrill cries and erratic movement making it seem like a damaged fighter plane struggling back to base. It was just as the bird steadied itself and continued on its course that Andrew slipped on some ice. There was a brief moment where his arms windmilled and his feet gripped at nothing, like a cartoon character who’d just run off a cliff, before he hit the ground with an ugly thud.
“You okay?”
Andrew wheezed wordlessly in reply at the woman who had just helped him to his feet. He felt like someone had just taken a sledgehammer to his lower back. But it wasn’t this that stopped him from finding the words to thank the woman. There was something about the way she was looking at him—a half smile on her face, how she brushed her hair behind her ears—that was so startlingly familiar it left him breathless. The woman’s eyes seemed to be searching his face, as if she too had been hit with an intense feeling of recognition and pain. It was only after she’d said, “Well, bye then,” and walked off that Andrew realized she’d actually been waiting for him to thank her. He wondered if he should hurry after her to try to make amends. But just then a familiar tune began to play in his head. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone. It took all his concentration to shake it away, squeezing his eyes shut and massaging his temples. By the time he looked again the woman was gone.
He dusted himself down, suddenly aware that people had seen him fall and were enjoying their dose of schadenfreude. He avoided eye contact and carried on, head down, hands thrust into his pockets. Gradually his embarrassment gave way to something else. It was in the aftermath of mishaps like this where he would feel it stir at his core and start to spread out, thick and cold, making it feel like he was walking through quicksand. There was nobody for him to share the story with. No one to help him laugh his way through it. Loneliness, however, was ever vigilant, always there to slow-clap his every stumble.
Though somewhat shaken up after his slip, he was fine apart from a small graze on his hand. (Now that he was nearing forty he was all too aware there was a small but visible spot on the horizon where such a standard slip would become “having a little fall.” He secretly welcomed the idea of a sympathetic stranger laying their coat over him as they waited for an ambulance, supporting his head and squeezing his hand.) But while he hadn’t suffered any damage, unfortunately the same couldn’t be said for his white shirt, which was now splattered with dirty brown water. He briefly considered trying to make something out of this and the graze to impress his interviewer. “What, this? Oh, on my way here I was briefly diverted by diving in front of a bus/bullet/tiger to save a toddler/puppy/dignitary. Anyway, did I mention I’m a self-starter and I work well on my own and as part of a team?” He decided on the more sensible option and dashed into the nearest Debenhams for a new shirt. The detour left him sweaty and out of breath, which was how he announced himself to the receptionist at the cathedral of concrete that was the council offices.
He took a seat as instructed and sucked in some deep, steadying breaths. He needed this job. Badly. He’d been working in various admin roles for the council of a nearby borough since his early twenties, finally finding a position that had stuck, and which he had been in for eight years before unceremoniously being made redundant. Andrew’s boss, Jill (a kind, rosy-cheeked Lancastrian with a “hug first, ask questions later” approach to life), had felt so terrible at having to let him go that she’d apparently called every council office in London asking about vacancies. The interview today was the only one that had come out of Jill’s calls, and her e-mail to him describing the job was frustratingly vague. From what Andrew could tell it was similar to what he’d been doing before, largely admin based, though it involved something to do with inspecting properties. More importantly, it paid exactly the same as his last job and he could start the following month. Ten years ago there had been a chance he might have considered a fresh start. Traveling, maybe, or a bold new career move. But these days just having to leave the house left him with an unspecific feeling of anxiety, so hiking to Machu Picchu or retraining as a lion tamer wasn’t exactly on the cards.
He tore at a loose flap of skin on his finger with his teeth, jiggling his knee, struggling to relax. When Cameron Yates finally appeared Andrew felt certain he’d met him before. He was about to ask if that was actually the case—perhaps he’d be able to use it to curry favor—but then he realized that he only recognized Cameron because he was a dead ringer for a young Wallace from Wallace and Gromit. He had bulbous eyes that were too close together and large front teeth that jutted down unevenly like stalactites. The only real differences were his tufty black hair and home counties accent.
They exchanged some awkward small talk in the coffin-sized lift, and all the while Andrew couldn’t tear his eyes away from the stalactites. Stop looking at the fucking teeth, he told himself, while staring directly at the fucking teeth.
They waited for someone to bring them two blue thimbles of lukewarm water before finally the interview began in earnest. Cameron started by rattling through the job description, barely pausing for breath as he outlined how, if Andrew were to get the role, he’d be dealing with all deaths covered under the Public Health Act. “So that’s liaising with funeral directors to organize the services, writing death notices in the local paper, registering deaths, tracing family members, recovering funeral costs through the deceased’s estates. There’s an awful lot of the old paperwork malarkey, as you can imagine!”
Andrew made sure to nod along, trying to take it all in, inwardly cursing Jill for neglecting to mention the whole “death” thing. Then, before he knew it, the spotlight was on him. Disconcertingly, Cameron seemed as nervous as he was, switching from simple, friendly questions to meandering, confusing ones, a harsher edge to his voice—as if he were playing good cop/bad cop by himself. When Andrew was afforded a second to respond to Cameron’s nonsense, he found himself stumbling over his words. When he did manage to string a sentence together his enthusiasm sounded like desperation, his attempts at humor just seeming to confuse Cameron, who on more than one occasion looked past Andrew’s shoulder, distracted by someone walking past in the corridor. Eventually it got to a point where he felt so despondent he considered giving up on the spot and just walking out. In among his depression at how things were going he was still distracted by Cameron’s teeth. For one thing, he’d started to question whether it was stalactites or stalagmites. Wasn’t there a thing about pulling down tights that helped you remember? It was at that moment that he realized Cameron had just asked him something—he had no idea what—and was now waiting for an answer. Panicked, he sat forward. “Ermmm,” he said, in a tone he hoped conveyed that he was appreciative of such a thoughtful question and thus needed to give it due consideration. But this was clearly a mistake, judging from Cameron’s growing frown. Andrew realized the question must have been a simple one.