by Karen Swan
‘No, apparently not. I had a guy turn me down last weekend – because he wanted more!’ She gave a scoffing laugh but it was a thin, brittle sound. ‘He wanted to slow things down. Can you believe that?’
Mila was quiet for a moment. ‘You’re telling me this guy wanted more from you than just meaningless sex?’
Lee rolled her eyes wearily in reply. ‘I mean, please.’
‘What did you say to him?’
‘I told him straight – that I’m not in the market for that.’
‘. . . And what was his response?’
‘He left. Just left me standing there.’ She shrugged, picking at a slice of ginger cake herself. ‘I mean, what an idiot. No-strings sex is every man’s fantasy, right?’
Mila didn’t reply.
‘Right?’ Lee jogged her.
‘Well . . .’ Mila watched her, her face sliding into an apologetic grimace. ‘Is it, though? Or is it just that you think it is?’
Lee arched an eyebrow. ‘Hello? Earth to Mila? Have you ever met a man?’
‘Yes, but Lee, you’re this successful, independent, beautiful, strong woman. Men love you, of course they do. But your utter conviction that they want nothing more from you . . . Perhaps you make it so plain to them that nothing more will come of a hook-up that they don’t even try.’
‘I haven’t seen any of them crying on their way out.’
‘I doubt you’ve ever looked.’
‘Hey!’
‘Am I wrong? Tell me honestly, you can’t get them out of there fast enough. You never see anyone twice.’
Lee blanched at her friend’s truths. It had been a fatal mistake allowing Matt back again last night. But she’d just been so determined to prove Sam right, to get on with forgetting him. Which she was already doing.
‘Lee, has it ever occurred to you that you use Jasper as an excuse to avoid getting into a relationship? You’re always so adamant about having sex without love, no ties, but maybe you’re trying to avoid deeper feelings. You’re terrified of true intimacy. And before you say it,’ she said, holding up a hand as a stop sign, ‘no, I have not been reading Grazia again.’
Lee stared back through the window at the people on the little humped bridge outside, most of them stopping to look down at the thickening ice or take a selfie. Bikes were stacked four or five deep along the railings. It was perishingly cold, everyone in gloves and hats and bundled up with thick scarves, occasional fat flakes of snow fluttering down from on high. ‘Cunningham rang. Last night,’ she said after a moment.
‘Harry? But that’s great!’ She saw Lee’s expression. ‘Isn’t it? You were so upset at dinner the other night when you heard he’d left. What did he say?’
Lee sighed. ‘Practically nothing. We couldn’t manage a conversation. The line was so bad, we’d have had better luck with a piece of string and two plastic cups. I still have no idea of what the hell he’s up to.’
‘Oh no.’ Mila frowned. ‘Well, is he going to ring back?’
‘Don’t know,’ Lee shrugged. She had thought she might have heard from him again by now. She kept checking her phone every few minutes for missed calls.
‘Well, at least you know he’s safe; that’s something.’
Lee slid her gaze towards her friend’s cup, but no further. There was no point in explaining that safety there was momentary. He had been safe in those few moments as they each shouted down the line, trying to connect, but he could already be dead by now; he could have been dead within a minute of hanging up on her. He could have stepped on an IED. A building could have collapsed on him. A bullet could have ricocheted . . . ‘Maybe,’ was all she said. She bit her lip. ‘He’s sent me a letter.’
Mila’s eyes widened. ‘A letter? Oh my God, that’s so old school! What did it say?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve not received it yet.’
‘Oh. Well, when did he send it?’
Lee shrugged.
‘What do you think’s in it?’
Lee spread her palms wide. ‘I don’t know, Mils! That he wants to transition to being a woman? He’s gone vegan?’ She laughed weakly, but it turned into a sigh. ‘Honestly, I’ve no idea.’
Mila stared at her intently, prompting Lee to arch an eyebrow. ‘What?’
‘You know what.’
‘I don’t! All I know is you’re staring at me like some kind of mad, crazy woman.’
‘What if he’s writing to tell you he loves you? That he always has and he always will?’
‘His wife is pregnant,’ Lee replied in an arch tone. ‘It’s not that.’
‘He could realize he’s made a terrible mistake?’
‘They spent months trying. There’s no mistake.’
Mila’s face fell. ‘I’ve just always had the feeling about you two that . . . you know, there was more there than just . . . former colleagues. You’re like . . . soulmates.’
Lee dropped her head in her hands. ‘You’re attaching narrative again. We’ve talked about this.’
‘But he followed you to Amsterdam after you moved here! He knocks at your door even though we all know you will never answer it. Lee, no one could drive each other as crazy as you two drive each other crazy, without it coming down to either love or hate.’
Lee was silent for several moments. ‘It isn’t either of those,’ she said quietly, her fingers interlacing around her cup. ‘I’m afraid it’s far worse than that.’
Chapter Eleven
She pulled the Christmas tree up the stairs, backwards, thousands of needles scattering across the treads. It was heavier than it looked.
‘Come on, you bastard,’ she muttered to herself, heaving it into the living area and over to the window. She would still need to get the stand and decorations down from the loft, for her and Jasper to put up together this weekend. But not now. Not now. Her hangover was getting the better of her again.
Massaging her temples, she went over to the kitchen and made herself a coffee. Her sixth so far today. Now she wasn’t sure if it was the caffeine or the whisky giving her the shakes.
‘So much for a duvet day,’ she thought, reaching for the blanket from the armchair. She was too much of a puritan to spend an entire day doing nothing, even with a cracking hangover, and since getting back from dropping off Jasper and having brunch with Mila, she had done the shopping for tomorrow’s Pakjesavond festivities and stripped and washed the bed in the spare room. She had even gone as far as opening the window to air the place. She didn’t want a trace of Matt left in her house, not even aftershave molecules lingering in the air. He had followed up already with a text and she had immediately deleted that too.
No more Matt. No more Sam. She’d had quite enough man trouble lately and some peace and quiet was what she craved now. That and a saline drip.
Putting down her coffee, she sank her full height along the length of the sofa with a grateful sigh and pulled the blanket up to her chin, closing her eyes. She needed this. An hour’s rest before she had to collect Jasper . . .
Her eyes opened again and she frowned, unable to get comfortable. She fluffed the cushions; they were too flat. Her hand touched something smooth and hard.
‘What is tha—?’ she asked herself, pulling out a book and falling still. ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ she murmured. It was the book she had found in her bike basket. Sam’s book. Jasper had asked to keep it and she had forgotten all about it. He must have been reading it, looking at the pictures.
She stared at the cover, at the arresting simplicity of the image, recognizing now his style. She could hate him and still see that it was beautiful. She could admire his book and still want never to see him again, she told herself, as she flicked through the pages. She stopped at one of a koala in a tree, looking down at a kangaroo holding open its pouch. If you fall . . .
Two million copies. She kept flicking past the pages. Two million copies had been sold of these pithy, Insta-happy wisdoms and pretty pictures?
‘Hallmark, eat your he
art out,’ she mumbled to herself, nonetheless turning to the next page.
She stopped mid-movement, jolted by what she saw there – a small flyer for her ‘Back to Front’ exhibition lay loosely against the page. She picked it up. A coincidence? Surely not. She had assumed the book ending up in her basket had been entirely random – first when she’d thought a stranger had dropped it, and latterly, too, when Liam had told her about Sam’s publisher’s marketing campaign. But the presence of a flyer for her own exhibition suggested otherwise.
Her eyes fell to the open page behind it and she felt herself start at what she saw there: Sam’s illustration of a curled-up badger had been overwritten in vivid purple felt tip with a message infinitely less reassuring than his.
She frowned, staring at it for several long moments. Was it a joke? For a moment she thought Jasper might have written it, but the certainty in the line of the letters, the desperate, rushed stab of the pen against the paper, told her not. And besides, they weren’t words he would – have cause to – say.
In her old life, she had seen messages written in a hurry, in desperation, before. She had heard these very words countless times. No, this was no prank. She sat up, flicking through the pages more quickly now, scanning for something else that might give her a clue as to who had written it – a name, an address. But there was nothing, just the plea. A desperate shout in a sea of calm.
HELP ME.
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. She liked the song, but seriously – hearing it all the way through twice, on loop . . . How long did it take a switchboard to find the right number? She had all of twenty minutes left before she needed to collect Jasper from nursery.
‘Come on. Come on.’ She was sitting on the sill of one of her two large square windows that gave onto the canal, one leg bent as she chewed on a nail. A duck was walking across the thickening ice and she could see the fallen leaves that had become trapped just below the surface.
The song clicked off just as Freddie Mercury became a poor boy.
‘Oh hi, yes,’ she said, snapping to attention as a voice came onto the line. ‘Is that the marketing department for—’ She checked the name of the publisher’s imprint on the spine; the book rested face down on her thigh. ‘—Olander Books?’
‘Yes.’
‘Great. Could I please speak to someone who does the marketing campaign for Sam Meyer? Uh, I mean Samuel Meyer. Samuel. Or Jacintha, if she’s there,’ she added, remembering the stroppy PR’s name.
There was a pause. ‘Who is calling, please?’
‘Well, my name is . . .’ She hesitated. She didn’t want this getting back to Sam in any way. ‘My name’s Ms Van Alstyne.’
Huh? Sometimes she amazed herself.
‘With which company?’
‘I’m calling as a private individual, actually.’
There was a pause. ‘Can I ask what this is concerning?’
‘Yes, I need to speak to someone about Mr Meyer’s book distribution campaign – you know, the freebies you put around the city?’
There was a longer pause. ‘And what is it you need to know?’
Lee rolled her eyes. Great, a jobsworth. ‘Well, in the first instance, I’m trying to find out if the number on the top of the title page means anything?’
‘Means anything?’
‘Yeah. I’ve got one of the books and it’s got “276” written in it, in the top right corner of the title page.’ She stared at Sam’s looping script across the body of the page: If you find this . . . may it brighten your day. Well, it hadn’t, she thought with some perverse satisfaction. Quite the opposite.
‘I see. Well, five hundred copies were distributed, so that would mean yours is number 276 of 500.’
‘Okay great, yes, I thought it might be that,’ Lee said, feeling a spasm of hope. ‘So then my next question was whether, when you handed out those five hundred books, did you have some sort of “plan”, like a map of where you were going to leave them? Or was it completely random – you know, an assistant dropping them on park benches on her lunch break?’
There was a stern pause. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand. Why do you need to know that?’
She could sense the marketing woman’s growing irritation and bafflement. ‘Because I need to find out where my issue – number 276 – was left.’
‘But surely, if you found the book, it was left where you found it?’
Lee suppressed a sigh of annoyance herself. Did this woman think she was stupid? ‘Well, the thing is, I think someone else found the book first, and then they put it in my bike basket.’
‘Paying it forward, you mean? Well, that’s good to hear. It’s very much in line with the ethos behind the campaign. Treating each other with kindness. Sam’s very—’
‘No, no. I think there might have been more to it than that.’
‘I don’t think so. Someone obviously found it, read it and then they left it for you to have afterwards.’
‘No, you really don’t understand.’ Lee dropped her head into her free hand, massaging her forehead. This headache was a kicker. ‘There was a message in it. Written over one of the pages.’
‘. . . What sort of message?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t say. But I really do need to find the person who found it first.’
She heard the woman sigh, out of patience. It would be one of the more bizarre telephone calls she’d have taken this week. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Van Alstyne, but I’m afraid we can’t help you. The success of the campaign rests on the very notion of anonymity—’
‘I understand that, but this really is important. I’m not intending to ask them on a date or something. This person needs my help.’ There was a long pause and, as Lee replayed her own words over in her head, she knew they sounded mad. She sounded mad.
‘Even if we knew who had found the book – which we do not – we could not hand out their identity or details to you; that would be a personal data breach. I’m sure you understand.’
‘I do. But if you could just give me the place where it was left—’
‘I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing further I can do. Goodbye.’
And before Lee could get another word out, she had hung up. Lee stared at the phone in disbelief. ‘Bitch!’
Chapter Twelve
The queue was snaking back towards the door. Lee twisted round and tried to count the number of people behind them. Twenty-five, thirty maybe? There had been that number in front of them when they’d arrived. She had tried getting to the front of the line with Jasper ‘for just one quick question’, but the store security guard had sent them packing and they were having to wait with everyone else. The crowds were monstrous. Tonight was Pakjesavond, or present-giving evening, and the Dutch equivalent of Christmas Eve. All the shops would be closing by lunchtime and people were on their final bursts of last-minute shopping; book-buying was seemingly a big part of that.
Jasper was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, by her feet, reading a picture book. Lee clutched her own book more tightly in her hands. The queue was moving quickly at least and they gained another few inches, Jasper bum-shuffling on the floor without looking up.
She dipped to the side, looking up the queue again. There were a lot of women standing in line, she noticed, and more than a few times the words ‘handsome’ and ‘gorgeous’ had drifted to her ear. She could see the desk, hear the excited voices of the people at the front as they got what they had come for. But would she?
‘Mama, what’s that?’ Jasper asked her in Dutch.
She looked down at the angelic face peering up at her. He was pointing to an illustration in his dinosaur book. ‘A diplodocus, darling,’ she replied in English.
‘Dip-lo-do-cus,’ he repeated in his little voice.
Her eyes grazed the store for the hundredth time as she waited, but she somehow wasn’t tiring of it. It had been decorated as a wooded wonderland – a smattering of faux trees with improbably dense, over-arching canopies, spreading and touching tips
just below the ceiling. It had been sprayed with a crispy frosting of sparkling snow from cans, and felted woodland creatures were dotted through the branches, peering out of knot holes, carrying through to intermittent nearby shelves. A small family of roe deer, standing on a white, glittering snowy carpet, was positioned by the children’s corner, and every time Jasper ran over to get another book, he stopped to stroke them, talking to them as if they were real.
They shuffled forward another few inches again, the voices at the front becoming gradually more distinct. The cash desks had been enveloped by some sort of plaster grotto and covered with fairy lights, and all the shop staff were dressed as elves. It was cheesy, she tutted, but she couldn’t ignore the fact it still soothed her. Christmas played a very lowly second fiddle to St Nicholas celebrations for the Dutch and whilst, as an expat, she had embraced her new home’s traditions, she still felt a need to mark her own childhood customs. She went in for the full Christmas works – they did the tree, Christmas carols, mince pies, stocking, and in spite of her exceptionally limited culinary skills, she still heroically grappled every year with the smallest turkey she could find (which was unfathomably never less than five kilos).
Almost there.
They were gaining ground incrementally but the queue sometimes lurched forwards, as now, when a group reached the front and then peeled off en masse.
‘A gingerbread?’ an elf asked her, stopping by her elbow and making her startle. She hadn’t noticed him making his way from the back of the line. He was holding out a tray of gingerbread biscuits.
‘Thanks.’ She took one and Jasper was on his feet in a flash, agonizing over which of the absolutely identical gingerbread men he should choose.
‘Excuse me, but is it absolutely necessary for me to queue?’ she asked the elf as they waited for Jasper’s decision. ‘I’m not actually here for the signing. I just need to ask a question.’ Just one question and she could go again and pretend this – unwelcome but unavoidable – interlude had never happened. She was very much looking forward to getting on with never having to see him again.