We sit for a while and I try to remember the last time I saw Jade. The way she looked and those times she stopped to say hello to Billy. She didn’t deserve whatever happened to her.
‘Do you think we should be in here?’ I ask, suddenly aware of our surroundings.
The answer is largely self-evident, but Karen doesn’t seem fazed by it all. She pushes herself up from the sofa and takes another look around before we step into the corridor.
‘Should we close the door?’ she asks. ‘It probably stuck when whoever was leaving, like yours does.’
I make the decision instinctively, clicking the door closed, though continuing to clutch Melanie’s jacket under my arm. There’s no returning it now.
Karen steps away towards her own flat. ‘Gotta get ready for work,’ she says. ‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything else about Jade. There might be more when I get back to the school gates later.’
She’s about to go when I stop her. The secrets are building up and mashing together in my mind. Melanie’s coat is almost the final thing. I’m not sure how much more I can remain on top of.
‘Can I ask you something?’ I say.
‘Sure.’
‘When I was at yours the other day, I found an envelope in one of the kitchen drawers—’
Karen’s features shift in an instant. It’s not surprise, more embarrassment. She covers her mouth and nose with both hands and half turns away. I end up interrupting myself.
‘I wasn’t snooping,’ I say. ‘I was looking for teabags.’
‘I know…’ She huffs out a long breath and stares past me towards the end of the corridor.
I check over my shoulder, but there’s nobody there.
‘Come on,’ she says, beckoning me towards her place.
‘It’s none of my business,’ I add hastily, but she’s already unlocking the door and ushering me inside. She rattles it closed behind us and then rushes to the kitchen drawer and pulls out the envelope I found the other day. Without another word, she upends it, sending the sprawl of notes cascading onto the counter. More bounce onto the floor and she chases them around the kitchen until everything is in hand. There are a mix of twenties and tens, but they’re not neatly packed in the way mine were.
Karen shuffles them all together into raggedy piles of mixed amounts; something that hurts my eyes simply to look at.
‘There’s almost nine-hundred quid here,’ she says.
‘Wow.’
She unties her hair and runs her fingers through it, pulling out a knot and then stopping to stare at the money. I’m doing the same. It’s what I’ve spent large part of my time doing since Friday.
‘Where did it come from?’ I ask.
Karen breathes in deeply and stuffs the money back into the envelope. There’s no neatness or finesse. It’s all rammed in together. She returns the envelope to the drawer and then starts going through her cupboards until she’s found a bottle of vodka. She unscrews the cap and then offers it to me.
‘No, thanks,’ I say.
She eyes the liquid and there’s a moment in which I think she’s going to wrap her lips around the bottle and neck it. She doesn’t. She slowly re-screws the cap and returns it to the cupboard.
‘I should’ve told you before,’ she says.
I say nothing, waiting for her to continue.
‘When you’ve been babysitting on the Sundays, it’s because I’ve been earning this.’ She nods to the drawer and there’s silence as I wait. ‘The agency sent a few of us out for a cleaning job a couple of months ago,’ she says. ‘It was at this big old house in the country. I think they get us in three or four times a year to go bottom to top. There are ten or twelve bedrooms, plus two dining rooms, this other one that’s full of art – proper Downton Abbey stuff. It takes us a whole week.’
She’s out of breath and fills a glass with water from the tap, before swigging it.
‘I got talking to the housekeeper and he said there might be a bit of extra work for me if I gave him my number. He told me not to tell the agency. I figured he meant cleaning but, when I phoned him at the end of the week, well… it wasn’t that.’
Karen has another glass of water and I realise she’s stopped to stare at the drawer in which the money is kept. I know that feeling of being indebted to an idea.
‘What was it?’ I ask, not completely sure if I want to know the answer.
‘There are parties there every Saturday and Sunday night,’ she says. She bites her lip and then lowers her voice. ‘Sex parties.’
At first, I think I’ve misheard her, but then I’m not sure if I should laugh or if this is serious.
‘You go to sex parties?’ I reply.
‘No!’ she fires back, before lowering her voice again. ‘Well… yes – but not like that.’ Her brow wrinkles and she squeezes the top of her nose. ‘They were looking for a couple of people to work as greeters on the door. You have to hand out glasses of champagne and these wristband things that people have to keep on. Everyone’s supposed to have an invite, so you have to check that, too. Then there’s this giant rack where everyone leaves their phones and you have to hand out tokens. That’s it. I don’t get involved with any of that.’
This time I do laugh.
‘Stop it!’ she scolds – but that only makes me laugh harder. ‘I don’t understand what’s funny,’ she says.
‘It’s the way you said it. “Any of that” – like you’re a granny repulsed by the idea of s-e-x.’
A grin creeps onto Karen’s face and then she’s laughing too.
‘It’s cash in hand,’ she says eventually. ‘All I have to do is put on a black dress and be on time. Nobody cares what anybody else looks like. It’s every body type you can imagine.’
‘So, every time I’ve been looking after your kids, you’ve been sexing it up with strangers?’
I burst out laughing before she can answer and she stands with her arms folded.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she says.
‘Course not. It sounds hilarious.’
The edges of Karen’s lips twitch. ‘It kind of is.’
‘Where do they keep the tokens?’ I ask.
‘What tokens?’
‘People check in their phones and you give them a token for it – but when they’re doing all the sex party stuff, where do they keep the token?’
She looks at me and then dissolves into giggles. ‘I’m not going to be able to get that out of my head now.’
It’s a good ten minutes before we stop sniggering. As soon as I think it’s over, the laughing starts once more.
Eventually, Karen says: ‘I’m using that money to pay for my birthday party.’ She pauses and then adds: ‘Can I tell you something?’
‘It’s your fiftieth?’
‘Oi! It’s my thirty-sixth.’ Her smile fades and she adds quietly: ‘What I was going to say was that I’ve never had a birthday party before…’
The silliness seems to evaporate.
‘I went to other kids’ but never had one of my own,’ she says. ‘I wanted to do something for me for once.’
I touch her on the arm and then wrap an arm around her back until my head is resting on her shoulder. It was only a few days ago that the idea of going seemed like such a chore. I’ve spent days thinking of myself, how seemingly small things mean different things to different people – that lad with his ‘only two quid’ – but this is the same thing.
‘How many are going?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ Karen replies. ‘People are being flaky. Lots are saying they’ll see what they can do, that sort of thing. Maybe fifty, if I’m lucky. There are a few I know from work and others from the building. It’ll clash with Bonfire Night, obviously, but there’s not a lot I can do about that. I can hardly go back in time and tell Mum to stop pushing for a few hours.’
I feel her body relaxing and, when I let her go, Karen lets out a little grin.
‘I’ve never liked fireworks,’ she says.
‘They always stole my thunder,’ she says. ‘No one seemed bothered about my birthday because they all had fireworks displays to go to.’
‘Shall we both agree that Bonfire Night and fireworks in general are rubbish?’
‘Definitely.’
I take a step backwards and it feels as if things have changed. There was an innocent reason for all this suspicion – so perhaps that’s true of everything else?
The sense of well-being lasts for about a minute until I remember I’m holding onto Melanie’s jacket.
‘What about you?’ Karen says.
‘What about me?’
‘It feels like there’s something on your mind. If you want to share…?’
She’s read me better than I thought. There definitely has been something on my mind – more than one thing. I could unload everything on her now and see what she thinks. Tell her about the money and the music from across the hall. About Melanie stumbling back into my life and her jacket. About being fired and the man outside our building, who also happened to be at the memorial service. About Harry and how he was attacked in the same way that Ben’s brother went to prison for.
Then I remember the poster from the lamp post – and the fact that somebody wants their money back.
It’s all or nothing and I choose nothing.
Or almost nothing.
‘I left my job,’ I say. ‘I didn’t want to do it any more.’
Karen stares at me for a second and then leans in, wrapping her arms around my back. ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she says.
I suppose I can add lying to the whole fired-for-stealing outcome.
‘Can I do anything to help?’ she asks.
I pat her back gently, wanting to be released. ‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘I think I’m going to have to sort it out by myself.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Karen keeps me chatting for a few minutes more, but we quickly run out of steam. I tease her a little more about being a ‘sex-person’ and then return to my own flat. I put Melanie’s red jacket on my counter and am hoping Billy will greet me something like his old self. His food bowl is full and he seems to be asleep. I cross and sit next to him, but, when I touch his ears, he still doesn’t open his eyes. His back is rising slowly, but that’s the only sign of movement.
‘Come on, Bill,’ I say.
He doesn’t acknowledge his name. His ears don’t even twitch.
‘Bill?’
I rub his ears and his eyelids give the merest flicker, though barely enough for him to see through.
That feeling of my stomach bottoming out is back again. It’s like I’m falling, that everything is zooming past me at such a speed that I cannot focus on anything.
I’ve not had to take Billy to the vet for two years – and, back then, it was one of the most stressful periods of my life. Not only did I spend weeks nursing him back to health with the medicines, but there was a constant worry every time I left the flat without him. If he was a person, I could have at least called him during the day to see how he was doing. As it was, I’d find myself pulling out small tufts of hair in the ladies’ bathroom, or biting my nails down even further than usual. I would pinch the webbing in between my thumb and forefinger for a reason I wasn’t sure of then and definitely am not now.
It took me four months to pay off the vet bills and that was with denying myself anything but noodles to eat six days a week. My treat on the other day was an out-of-date pack of Quorn sausages that had got stuck down the back of the fridges at work. Jonathan told me to take them and not tell anyone.
Not this time.
I grab the envelope from the drawer, stuff it into my bag and then go to knock on Karen’s door. Her hair is half tied back and she’s busy pinning a row of clips.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks.
‘Do you still have that child’s buggy?’
She tilts her head, asking without words if I’ve gone mad.
‘Billy’s not well,’ I say. ‘I need to get him to the vet but he can’t walk.’
At this, Karen springs into action. She hurries inside and returns a moment later with a pushchair that she folds out. ‘I’d help but I have to get to work,’ she says. ‘Will he fit in there?’
‘He’ll have to.’
I take the buggy back to the flat and it takes all my strength to lift Billy into it. He opens his eyes a fraction but otherwise doesn’t fight. I have to fix him into a semi-sitting position and then fasten the straps across his front. His head lolls to the side, his eyes still closed.
I’ve done all that without figuring out how I’m going to get him down the stairs. Karen chooses that moment to emerge from her flat. She heads towards me, initially muttering that she’s late, and then going quiet when she sees Billy.
‘The poor thing,’ she coos as she takes the back and I take the front of the pushchair.
Between us, Karen and I get him to the bottom of the stairs – and then we head off in opposite directions to catch different buses. Through all of this, Billy barely moves. His head flops from side to side and he can hardly open his eyes.
I crouch at the side of the buggy and stroke his soft fur. I gently squeeze his paw to see if he might have some reaction, but he does nothing other than open his eyes a fraction.
‘Oh, Bill…’
The bus seems to be taking an age to arrive. People pass and glance sideways, expecting to see a child in the buggy. Each time they let off a little ‘ooh’ when they see a sleeping Staffie strapped into the chair. Nobody actually says anything.
It’s a similar reaction when the bus finally does pull in. I get on and show my pass. The driver says ‘It’s a pound for the little ’un’ – but, when I step to the side to show off Billy in the pushchair, the driver makes the same ‘ooh’ sound.
I wheel him into the pram spaces at the front and sit next to him, gently rubbing his ears. It’s hard to ignore the sideways glances from everyone either already on the bus or the people who get on. Everyone does a double take and there are at least five people who take photographs on their phones when they think I don’t realise.
If circumstances were different, I suppose it would be funny, but it’s like his sickness has spread to me. My throat is dry, my gaze unfocused. It’s hard to concentrate on anything other than the softness of his fur. The desperation and desolation is overwhelming. I’d take every note in the envelope and dump it on the vet’s counter if it meant them being able to make Billy right again.
The height of the step makes it an effort to get Billy back off the bus – but a man who’s getting on helps after giving the obligatory ‘ooh’. I’m in such a muddled panic that I start wheeling Billy the wrong way, as if I’m heading to work, before remembering where I am.
By the time I reach the vet’s itself, I am a frazzled mess. I can barely get the words out to explain what’s going on – but the woman behind the counter understands anyway. She quickly comes around to help Billy out of the pushchair, though all he wants to do is sleep on the floor.
She takes a few details and tells me a general appointment will be £40 – though there might be additional costs. I tell her to ‘do whatever’.
After that, Billy is helped into the waiting area… where we do precisely that.
The receptionist is apologetic, saying that someone is already in with the vet, but that she’ll try to rush me in next. I understand – but it’s little comfort when it feels as if Billy is slipping away at my feet. I sit with him on the floor, running my hand against the length of his back, desperately wanting him to open his eyes. All he does is breathe and, at times, it barely feels as if he’s doing that.
Time passes. I’m not sure how long. It’s probably minutes, but it feels like an age. A couple come out of the main vet room holding one another and there’s no sign of a pet. It’s hard not to think the worst as they stand solemnly at the counter, signing various bits of paperwork before disappearing out of the door.
They didn’t stop holding each other for reassurance the entire time.
Another minute passes, perhaps two, and then the receptionist comes across with a fixed, flat expression, saying I can take Billy in to see the vet.
It’s some solace that he walks himself, although it’s as if it’s in slow motion. His feet don’t seem to leave the ground as he shuffles into the office.
The veterinarian is a young man, but I hardly notice him as my eyes stay on Billy. He asks questions about symptoms, usual behaviour, current behaviour, what Billy eats and more. I tell him about the doggy cake – but say it was from the pet store. He is concerned enough to phone them and ask for the ingredients, which they presumably give him, because he says it’s fine.
That done, the vet looks Billy over and then shaves a small patch of his fur away, before syringing out a blood sample. The worst moment is when the needle goes in and Billy doesn’t react. The vet must notice the horror on my face because he assures me there’s nothing unusual for now, although I’m pretty sure not reacting to having a needle jabbed into flesh is – by definition – unusual.
It’s time to wait some more. I’m ushered into a second, smaller area while the vet sees another pet. There is nobody else in the room, only a pair of chairs and walls full of posters about pet health. Billy lies on the floor at my feet and I have no idea what to do. There is only emptiness. Everything else that has happened in the past few days suddenly feels irrelevant.
By the time the knock comes on the door, I can barely say ‘come in’ fast enough.
The vet comes and sits on the seat next to me and reaches to gently stroke Billy’s back. The silence is excruciating.
‘It’s not bad news,’ he says, before quickly destroying everything. ‘But it’s not good news, either.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘There’s nothing specific on the blood test. We can send it off for further examination but it’s costly and, if I’m honest, I’m not sure it will be of benefit at the moment.’
‘I still don’t understand what that means.’
He smiles kindly. ‘I think he’s probably eaten something that’s not quite right,’ the vet says. ‘Sometimes on a walk, dogs can ingest something they shouldn’t. If it was something serious, something to worry about, there would be indications on the blood work.’
A Face in the Crowd: An absolutely unputdownable psychological thriller Page 15