I took a deep breath and then another. I felt removed from myself; as if most of me was off somewhere nearby, watching what was happening from afar.
"Don't worry," she said. "It was stupid of me to - to contact you here. I might have known it would be too much."
I felt cold again. This sounded like a dismissal. "What do you mean?"
"Maudie, it was too much of a shock for you, I know that. I should have realised. I just thought - I knew you'd seen me and when you followed me the other night, I panicked. And then I thought how upset you must have been and so I knew I had to do something. So, when I saw you here, I just - I just - well, you know-"
I stared at her. I was only taking in about one word in four, but something struck a chord with me. "How did you know I was going to be here?"
She laughed, a little harsh, gasping laugh. "I didn't. It was pure coincidence, believe it or not. I admit that I've been, well, following you around a bit lately, but I was here myself, anyway. I just about dropped when I saw you on the dance floor."
I felt the first beginnings of a smile struggle onto my face. "You weren't the only one."
"No, well-” she sighed. "I've been so stupid. This hasn't gone exactly as I planned it."
There was a short silence between us.
She sighed again. "I'm going to go now. I think you need some time to let this sink in."
"Go?"
"Yes, go. I'll let you - calm down a bit."
I felt a jab of panic hit me in the stomach. As much of a shock as it had been, I didn't want to lose her. What if I never saw her again?
"You will come back again?" My voice squeaked higher. "You won't go away again?"
She looked me right in the eyes. "I promise, Maudie. I won't leave you again. I'm not going anywhere."
I was clutching my arms to my body. I was beginning to get very cold; my teeth were almost chattering.
"Do you promise?" I said, feebly.
“I do. I do promise. But-” she hesitated for a moment. ”I want you to promise me something, too."
"What?"
She moved her head a little and her eyes caught the light from the doorway. Her pupils were huge. "Don't - tell anyone about me. Don't mention me to anyone. Not yet. I don't - it's just that I have to be sure - I mean - look, Maudie, just don't tell anyone about me, okay? Not Angus. And for God's sake, don't tell my parents."
I felt a brief spasm of pain. Now was obviously not the time to tell her that her parents were dead. And Angus, too. She's got no one to come back to, I thought. Except me. I thought of everything we had to catch up on, two and half decades of life lived, of happenings and incident and memories. I felt suddenly very tired.
"I promise," I said. What else could I say?
She touched my hand for a brief moment. "I'm going now," she said. "Stay here. Shut your eyes for a moment."
I did as I was told, standing there in the night air. I felt a brief movement of air beside me, stirring my hair, and when I opened my eyes, she was gone.
Chapter Twenty One
"Where the hell did you go?"
I'd had Becca bleating in my ear for five minutes now. I was on the arm of the living room sofa, staring out of the window at the grey day beyond. I took the phone away from my ear for a moment. I could still hear Becca.
"I came back from the bar and you'd just gone-"
"Alright," I snapped. "I said I'm sorry."
“I was worried.”
I was silent.
"Oh well," she said, after a moment. "Doesn't really matter. It actually turned out okay, you know. I met a man."
There was an exultant kind of giggle in her voice. At any other time, I would have shrieked enthusiastically and pressed for details. Now, I struggled to sound interested.
"Oh yes?"
"Yes, he's lovely. His name's Martin and he's a whole seven years younger than me. A proper toy boy! It's very exciting-"
She went on talking but I'd tuned out. I watched a pigeon flap its slow way across a sky that looked like curdled milk. I was thinking about Jessica.
After she'd left me at the party, I'd left the venue myself five minutes later. I could barely walk to the taxis massed outside, my legs were shaking so much. I'd let myself into a cold and empty flat - Matt was staying at his cousin's house that night - and lay in bed, hugging my knees to my chest and listening to my teeth chatter.
In the morning it seemed even more unlikely. I kept checking the street outside, nervily, expecting to see her standing there in her black coat. All the time I was showering, forcing down some breakfast, flicking listlessly through television channels, I kept asking myself the same questions. I went back over our conversation, our meeting, until I couldn't remember what had really happened and what I'd imagined happening.
"Are you alright?" Matt asked me over the dinner table.
It was the first time either of us had said a word since we'd sat down. I came to with a start, realising I'd been staring off into space, my fork held aloft.
"Sorry," I said, blushing a little. "I was miles away."
"So I can see." He poured himself another glass of wine and took a long sip. "You were so far away you almost disappeared from view."
I hesitated, wondering whether to tell him. But I couldn't - I'd promised...
Later, I lay beside him in the dark, staring up at the ceiling and listening to his breathing. After a while, I got up and went through to the living room and straight to the window. A plastic bag fluttered along the pavement in the wind like a small, ragged ghost. No Jessica. I walked away from the window, rested my hand on the back of one of the armchairs and walked back. Surely this time - but there was nothing, just the orange tint of the streetlight and the massed ranks of the parked cars jammed against the pavements.
Becca invited us over for dinner the following night. She owned the basement flat in a terraced house in Hackney; being sensible, fiscally prudent and all the other things that I was not, she’d bought it for tuppenny-happenny, or thereabouts, back in the early nineties. She’d lived there for so long the flat seemed to have grown around her - it was now the very essence of Becca; warm, chaotic and loud. The rooms were painted in unexpected colours, her bedroom hung with swaying Chinese lanterns, the walls bedecked with sari silks. Once in a while you came across something truly startling, like the fake skull she’d stolen from a client’s Halloween party on the mantlepiece in the sitting room.
As Matt and I arrived, Becca’s equally Amazonian sister Lauren and her positively gigantic brother Sam were just leaving. There was a confused scrum in the tiny hallway as we all attempted to greet and say goodbye to everyone else at once.
“Don’t worry about this lot,” said Becca, as if there were hundreds of relatives cluttering up the place. “They’re leaving. They were just dropping off the vino for tonight.”
“Haven’t seen you two for ages,” said Lauren, kissing both Matt and I. “Married life treating you well?”
Matt and I both laughed and I made some sort of noise indicating agreement. Sam patted my shoulder as I squeezed past him.
“Phew,” said Becca, waving them off and then ushering us into the kitchen. “Sorry about that. This place isn’t really big enough for more than one of my family to visit at any one time but Sam just kind of turned up after the football and stayed on... anyway, vino? Lauren's got us some fantastic champagne. Matt, would you do the honours?”
Matt popped the cork of the bottle she proffered while I sat down at the table. The kitchen was at the front of the house and, from one side of the table, you could see up to the street and watch people’s feet walk past the railings, rather like being in the burrow of a voyeuristic mole. I sat down and looked up, clutching my wine glass. I had a feeling that soon a pair of feet would come into view, feet framed by the edge of a long black coat. I was sure she would appear.