Strangers

by C. L. Taylor

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  As she steps out of the living room her daughter bursts out of the kitchen, phone still clamped to her ear. She grabs her coat from the stand and snatches her keys off the sideboard.

  ‘You’re not driving, are you?’ Alice asks, horrified. ‘You’ve had the best part of a bottle of wine to drink and—’

  ‘I’ve booked a taxi to Adam’s. Don’t stress.’

  And then Emily is gone, the silence she leaves behind pulsing in Alice’s ears. Sighing, she heads into the kitchen and picks up the empty bottle of red wine from the kitchen table and drops it into the recycling bin. The only booze left is a small bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin that Lynne gave her for Christmas. She pours out a large measure, adds a splash of tonic, then heads into the living room. As she settles back onto the sofa her phone bleeps again. Two new messages, one from Lynne and one from Simon:

  Have you seen that new reality show on Channel 4? OMG. Makes me SO glad I’m not in my twenties again.

  Alice skips over Lynne’s message to get to Simon’s.

  Ah, I have my arsehole moments that’s for sure but I’d never do what that guy did. If you hadn’t dropped your purse I would have lamped him one myself, that’s for sure. What are you drinking? I’m on the gin.

  Alice smiles.

  I’m on the gin too. Bombay Sapphire.

  Her phone beeps.

  I’m an Adnams Copper fan myself.

  Alice taps the Chrome app on her phone and googles ‘Adnams Copper’. She gives a little laugh.

  An artisan gin! Get you. Hipster!

  She takes a sip of her drink. A second or two later her phone bleeps again:

  Hipster?! How very dare you. I’ll have you know that a) I don’t have a beard, b) I can’t stand craft ale and c) my thighs are far too chunky for skinny jeans. Although I have been known to crochet a cabbage and stew my own pickle juice.

  Alice laughs loudly. What the hell’s pickle juice?

  You know how Peter Parker was bitten by a spider and became Spiderman? Pickle juice is like that but for hipsters. It gives us superpowers.

  She takes another sip of her gin as she composes her reply in her head. There’s something hugely enjoyable about bantering with him like this – batting silly comments back and forth without second-guessing herself.

  As her phone vibrates again she glances down at it. Her fixed smile fades. Someone called ‘Ann Friend’ just sent her a Facebook friend request with a message. She clicks it.

  Whatever you do, don’t trust Simon.

  What? She clicks on Ann Friend’s profile. The photo is a black square and there’s nothing in the cover photo space either. No friends, no information. Just the name – Ann Friend. It has to be Michael, lashing out and angry because she called the police. Anger bubbles in her belly as she taps out a reply.

  Leave me alone, Michael. I’ll be passing that message on to the police and any other message that you decide to send me. Don’t EVER contact me again.

  Hand shaking, she sets her phone down on the table and reaches for her glass. She knocks back the last of the gin then refills it. As she raises it to her mouth her phone bleeps with a new message. It’s from Ann Friend again.

  Who is Michael?

  Chapter 11

  Gareth

  Gareth waits for the familiar dum-dum-dum music that signals the end of EastEnders then crouches beside his mum’s chair. She leans away from him, startled by his proximity.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He holds out the postcard, showing her the image of the dancing couple. ‘When did this arrive?’

  His mother looks vaguely in the direction of the card and squints. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a postcard, Mum. Put your glasses on.’

  She reaches a hand over to the side table, her hand spidering over the surface until her fingertips find the rough tapestry of her glasses case. She snaps it open then places her specs on the end of her nose. She holds the card at arm’s length.

  ‘Isn’t that lovely, a postcard from your dad.’

  Gareth frowns, trying to read her face. The gaps between her lucidity and her dementia have been growing and he’s not entirely sure which state she’s in now. The latter probably, if she thinks the postcard is ‘lovely’. At a guess she’s firmly caught in the first fifteen years of her marriage when his dad was in the navy and would be away from home for months at a time. Gareth knows from bitter experience that breaking the news that his dad is missing presumed dead would lead to an outpouring of grief so wretched and terrible it would take him until bedtime, or beyond, to calm her down.

  ‘Do you know when it arrived?’ he asks. ‘The postcard?’

  His mum shrugs and flips it over to look at the image. ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it? Reminds me of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.’

  ‘Mum, when did the postcard arrive?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before. Lovely, though.’ She dismisses the card with a wave of her hand and looks up at her son. ‘I’m hungry. I should probably think about putting the dinner on.’

  Standing in the kitchen, slopping singed scrambled eggs onto two pieces of toast, Gareth presses a hand to the centre of his chest. He fishes a crumpled packet of antacids from his pocket and pops two into his mouth. Bloody junk food, bloody stress. He looks down at his belly, sitting on top of his belt like a fleshy bowling ball hidden behind straining shirt buttons. It’s the only part of his body that’s carrying any weight; his arms and legs are still as lithe as they were when he was younger and competed in cross-country races, going out to run several times a week. He smooths a hand over the curve of his stomach. His dad, who prided himself in staying in shape, would be appalled at the way his son has let himself go. Gareth’s gaze flits towards the postcard, lying beside the cooker, the location on the postmark too smudged to read.

  Maybe, he thinks, as he carefully places the supper tray on his mum’s lap, apologising as she warily regards the burnt offering, his dad wasn’t as content in his early retirement as he let everyone believe. Maybe he never had any intention of going anywhere near Scafell Pike and had simply packed up his navy rucksack, his walking poles and his anorak and walked out of their lives without looking back. It was a gutless move if so, and something Gareth can’t reconcile with the principled man he grew up with. To abandon him, a twenty-seven-year-old man at the time, would be one thing, but to vanish without saying goodbye to the woman who’d loved him for so many years? He can’t, won’t, let himself believe that his dad would stoop so low.

  As his mum picks up her knife and fork Gareth slopes back into the kitchen, a fist pressed against his sternum, acid still burning deep in his chest. He pops another two antacids into his mouth and picks up the postcard, tracing one finger over his dad’s familiar handwriting. How well did he know him, really? Could his dad have been one of those men with another family, a secret life he’d kept hidden for years? Might he be gay or transsexual? He could have struggled with his true identity and chosen to vanish rather than out himself and cause his wife pain. For nearly twenty years Gareth has grieved his father’s disappearance, believing with more and more certainty with each year that passed that the man he’d loved and respected was dead.

  Back in February, when a national newspaper broke the news that the Missing Persons Bureau were sharing images of unidentified people and their belongings on a public access website, he spent a gruelling evening searching through the records of all the men on their database. By the time he went to bed he felt hollow, as though each death, each unclaimed, unknown man, had carved a piece out of his soul. There were so many suicides – hanged, struck by trains, found in rivers. One man, whose almost skeletal remains were found hanging from a tree in the woods near a golf club, had been there for approximately three months, the website said. His identity was still unknown. How was that possible? For no one in the world to care where you were?

  Gareth barely slept a wink that night.

  He wants to believe that his dad is
still alive but it seems so unlikely. The police searched for him. They discovered he’d taken the train from Bristol to Penrith, hired a car and then booked into a hotel at the base of Scafell Pike. If it was all an elaborate ruse to escape from family life he’d laid the trail well. Then again, he was an ex-military man. But if he had sent the postcard, why do it now, after twenty years? He must be nearly eighty. Was he looking back on his life and regretting his disappearance? Or perhaps he was dying? Maybe he’d been told to put his affairs in order and that included saying sorry to his wife. Although he hadn’t actually said sorry, had he? Just that he loved her.

  Gareth runs the hot tap, squirts washing-up liquid into the tub in the sink, then plunges the pan with its burnt, eggy stains into the water. As he scrubs, he gazes out of the window. Apart from two lines of solar-powered fairy lights – strung up to celebrate his mother’s 79th birthday with a small garden party last year – that cast a wan light onto the peeling paint of the shed, the garden is in darkness. His mum loves that garden; on a sunny day she’ll sit outside for hours watching the birds in the trees. But it’s not the garden that Gareth’s looking at. He’s looking beyond the reach of his small world, out into Bristol and the lights that flicker and twinkle in the distance. Is his dad out there? Is he thinking about them? Has he reached out in the secret hope that he’ll be found? Gareth’s gaze flicks again towards the postcard and the pain in his chest radiates through his body.

  I love you, Joan.

  His dad hasn’t mentioned him at all.

  Chapter 12

  Alice

  For the last hour Alice has been holed away in the back office of Mirage Fashions, rearranging the rotas to fit around childcare issues, holidays and doctor’s appointments and now her head is pounding and she feels breathless in the tiny room. She stretches her arms above her head then stands up, stamping the life back into her legs. She hasn’t finished but she needs to get back out on the shop floor and check how everyone’s getting on before she breaks for lunch.

  As she walks through the staff changing room she glances at her coat, hanging on the rack that runs the length of one wall. She’s strict with her staff when it comes to checking their mobile phones at work – only ever on official break times – but the urge to see if there have been any new messages is more than she can bear. Keeping one eye on the door, she fumbles her phone out of her bag. Nothing. No new messages from ‘Ann Friend’ and nothing from Simon either.

  Last night, after she received the ‘who is Michael?’ message, she rang the number of the detective she’d spoken to earlier.

  ‘This is Alice Fletcher,’ she said, when DC Mitchell’s phone went straight to voicemail. ‘I spoke to you a couple of hours ago about an assault a man named Michael Easton carried out on me in the Evening Star pub. Well, I’ve just had a Facebook message from someone calling themselves Ann Friend saying that I shouldn’t trust Simon, the man who witnessed the assault. I thought it might be Michael so I replied saying I’d go to the police. The next message I received said: “Who is Michael?” He’s obviously playing games with me and I wanted to tell you just in case …’ just in case anything happens to me, she thought but couldn’t bring herself to say ‘… Just in case it might be evidence. Anyway, thank you. Goodbye.’

  There was a voicemail from DC Mitchell waiting for her at 8 a.m. telling her to come in and make a statement. Alice rang Lynne, telling her she’d need her to open up, then made her way to the station. After she’d finished relaying what had happened to the detective, a blonde woman in her thirties with sharp, inquisitive blue eyes, she was reassured that she was right to report the messages and to keep a record of any other contact, sightings or occurrences that frightened or upset her. Three hours later, DC Mitchell left a message on Alice’s phone. Michael Easton had been interviewed and admitted assaulting her. He’d been given a caution and released.

  Alice didn’t know whether to be upset that Michael hadn’t been locked up or relieved that he’d admitted to the assault. But she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, being startled by her own shadow, because some wanker had shoved her into a wall. If he got in touch again she’d tell him exactly where to get off.

  Now she tucks her phone back into her bag, then presses a hand to her grumbling belly. Lynne’s already had her lunchbreak so she’ll be eating in Costa alone.

  Alice pushes open the door to Costa, takes three or four steps across the coffee shop then freezes in her tracks. Sitting at the far end of the room with headphones jammed over his ears and a book in his hands is Simon. Keeping her eyes on him, Alice moves between the tables and reaches into the sandwich cabinet.

  ‘A latte please,’ she says to the barista as she places a chargrilled chicken and pesto sandwich on the counter, ‘and this.’ She fishes a bottle of water out of a chiller cabinet. ‘And this.’ She adds a chocolate muffin.

  She pays, then moves to the end of the counter, Simon temporarily out of sight as she waits for her hot drink. Her heart is fluttering in her chest and she feels jittery and excited, like she did as a schoolgirl when she’d spot her crush, Jim Seymour, walking down the corridor towards her. Simon must work locally to spend his lunchbreak in Costa, she thinks. Or maybe, says a little voice in the back of her head, maybe he came here for lunch today in the hope that he’d run into you.

  She carries her lunch to a free table near the window and chooses a chair between the glass-walled shop front and the counter. This way she can see the door and Simon. Normally she’d sit with her back to a solid wall like he has but everyone else seems to have had the same idea and there are no such tables free. She takes a sip of her coffee and unwraps her sandwich. Someone’s left a newspaper on her table, the headline, ‘Hunt for Missing Man Continues’, splashed across the front page alongside the image of a laughing young man. Instinctively Alice thinks about Emily and how easily someone else’s heartbreak could be her own. She pushes the thought away and steals a glance at Simon. She holds her gaze for a second, two, willing him to look up from his book, simultaneously excited and terrified. It’s one thing to share jokey text banter at home with a gin and tonic in her hand, and another to run into him in the middle of the day, sober, in her work uniform. She pats at her hair, smoothing it away from her face and runs her fingers through the ends. Why didn’t she refresh her lipstick before she left for lunch?

  She takes a bite of her sandwich, steals another look at Simon, then reaches into her bag for her phone. She grins to herself as her thumbs move over the keys.

  If I drank pickle juice I’d be more likely to turn into a villain than a superhero.

  She presses send then peers from between her fingers to watch for Simon’s reaction. A second or two later he lays down his book and picks up his phone. Alice feels a jolt of pleasure as a smile creeps onto his lips. He’s not going to answer, she tells herself. He’ll want to get back to his book instead. But she’s wrong; his thumbs move over the screen, then Alice’s phone bleeps.

  What would your villain name be?

  Gin-Face. Like Two-Face but with better skin, and smelling faintly of juniper berries.

  She isn’t sure if she’s imagining it or not but she’s pretty sure she catches the sound of a soft chuckle from across the room.

  And what powers would Gin-Face have? he messages back.

  Alice’s grin widens. Invisibility.

  She presses send then, before Simon has time to reply she fires off another text.

  Enjoying your book?

  His jaw drops, then he looks up, his gaze sweeping the room. As their eyes meet he throws back his head and laughs. He raises a hand in hello then bends back over his phone. As Alice reaches for her latte her phone pings again.

  Want to join me or shall we continue to text and pretend we’re not both in the same café?

  Smiling, Alice gathers up her things and makes her way towards him.

  ‘Well, fancy seeing you here,’ he says as she draws closer. ‘Are you stalking
me?’

  She laughs. ‘I could ask you the same thing seeing as I actually work here.’

  ‘True, true. So you’re a Batman fan then?’ he asks and all the awkwardness Alice is holding in her chest slips away as they segue into a discussion about Ben Affleck, Christian Bale or Michael Keaton and who made the best Batman. As Simon talks – all expressive hands and bright eyes – she takes in the details of his face: his nose, the bridge bending towards his left eye, permanently skewed by a rugby ball, an accident or a fist, his grey eyes framed with dark blonde eyebrows, his wide, pale lips and the hint of ginger stubble on his jaw. The difference between his face when he talks, and when he listens, is extraordinary. It’s as though a light goes on behind his eyes when he speaks. It’s not that he’s not interested in what Alice has to say – he listens intently, his eyes never leaving hers – but he seems to find real joy in expressing himself. And he does it so well.

  ‘Has anyone told you what an amazing voice you’ve got?’ she blurts, before she can stop herself.

  Simon laughs. ‘That might have been mentioned before.’

  ‘Has it?’ She feels a flush of embarrassment and averts her gaze. As she does she notices the woman sitting at the table to their right. She’s around Alice’s age, dressed in jeans and a pale pink jumper, with shoulder-length brown hair and greying roots. She’s got a book in her hands and a coffee in front of her and she’s openly gawping at Simon. Alice looks away. It seems she’s not the only one who finds Simon attractive.

  ‘Yeah, anyway.’ He moves a hand through the air, as though swiping the topic away. ‘Tell me more about you.’ His gaze flickers towards her left hand. ‘I’m guessing you’re not married?’

  ‘Divorced.’

  ‘Great!’ His response is so enthusiastic, so unchecked, that now it’s Simon’s turn to colour. He looks away and clears his throat. When he looks back at her something inside Alice lurches. He likes her, she can see it in his eyes. And, even more terrifying given what she went through the day before, she likes him too.