by Julie Frayn
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used strictly for fictional purposes. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events or locales is purely coincidental.
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Ebook cover design by Dane Low of www.ebooklaunch.com
Copyright 2015 Julie Frayn
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-988042-01-5
Dedication
This is for the odd ones. The nerds, the geeks, and the weirdos. You know, for everyone.
Contents
Dedication
Goody One Shoe
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other work by Julie Frayn
Contact the Author
Late September, 2015
BILLIE FULLALOVE sat on an upturned crate and shifted her attention to the man at her feet. She slid the knife into his abdomen, between his ribs and into his cold, dead heart.
Adam Ant ear-wormed his way into Billie’s subconscious. All it took was a few notes to cross her mind, that unmistakable guitar riff and those screeching horns. What were those, trumpets? Taunts and jibes reached out from her childhood. More than two decades later, she couldn’t escape feeling like a bullied third-grader.
“Goody two shoes! Goody two shoes!”
If only they could see her now. Sure, she still had one shoe firmly planted in good-girl ground, fertile with etiquette and kindness and prayer. But the other foot dangled over the pier and dipped into the evil pool. Evil with a purpose. Evil with a heart. Or at least, half a heart.
And one goody shoe.
The city skyline shone in the distance. The lights of downtown reflected in the wide expanse of the Grantham River, sparkling against the muck, each twinkle of wattage oblivious to the stench of dead fish, spilled fuel, and rotted flesh.
The justice system couldn’t deliver the punishment the corpse on the dock deserved. They would never be able to prove he was guilty of the crime he’d committed. How he’d ruined Billie’s life before she was old enough to live at all. She’d righted an atrocious miscarriage and delivered justice on the eve of a super moon. Carried out his death sentence under its eerie glow.
He would never kill another innocent victim.
Billie ran her fingers along the bars of the gold crucifix that hung from her neck. She closed her eyes and found her father’s face. A breeze picked up, tossed strands of her long, chocolate hair about her face, and cooled her cheeks where tears wet them.
Five months earlier
BILLIE GRABBED A PENCIL from her desk and rammed it between layers of stockings and the foam cover of her prosthesis. It was always at the height of frustration when her stump itched. Perhaps the stub on the end of where her calf used to be was the outlet for words she couldn’t scream into the open office space. Words like “they’re, not there, you stupid fucking asshole writers!”
Not that she’d ever say the F-word. Not out loud anyway. Her private cussing was between her and God. He understood that even good girls needed to be profane on occasion.
She glanced around at the green-tinged fluorescent lighting bouncing off shiny foreheads, at the shoulders scrunched up near everyone’s ears, scowls on their faces. Did they all hate their jobs as much as she did?
It hadn’t always been this way. Her heart used to quicken when she was assigned a new author, a new manuscript. Maybe this one would be that one — the one that put her on the publishing map. The one that elevated her out of the proofing primordial soup and onto the evolved editorial beach. But it never was. How could she take a pile of crap and elevate it to anything more than less-than-crap without just writing it herself?
“Ah, to heck with it.” She tugged her plaid skirt above her knee, pushed down the foam cover — the thing that was supposed to make the average passerby think she had two functioning legs — slid the black compression sock off, and popped her leg free of the socket. She stripped the rubber sheath and two layers of soft stocking from her stump, scratched and rubbed the end until it stopped screaming. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Oh yeah. Much better.”
“Gross! Billie, cover that thing up.”
She slit her eyes open to find the office whiner staring at her vacant calf. “If you’re so disgusted by it, why do you always look?”
He pushed his thick-framed hipster glasses up higher on his pointed nose and blinked. “It’s like a train wreck, complete with dismembered body parts. Awful. Disgusting. But you can’t look away.”
Her mental red pen appeared and drew little mouse ears on either side of his head. “You’re an idiot, Jeffrey.” She added whiskers and tiny buckteeth, then scratched out a thought bubble with “squeak, squeak” in the centre.
“Wilhelmina Fullalove. We’ve talked about this.” Katherine Busby stood behind Jeffrey. She put one hand on his shoulder and jerked her head at his desk. He obeyed in that silent way he had of ingratiating himself at every opportunity. Like an annoying little brother who always got the last word, always got the biggest slice of pie, always got mother’s full love and attention. Katherine crossed her arms and glared at Billie’s stump. “Cover it up. Keep it covered. Respect your fellow workers or you’ll find yourself freelancing. And let me tell you, that’s no walk in the park. Even if you were walking on two legs.”
Billie winced. Her mouth said “Yes, Katherine,” but she screamed all manner of profanities on the inside. Even a few threats against the safety of Taffy, Katherine’s prized Chiweenie and provider of incessant yapping. Billie couldn’t air out her own skin, but the boss brought her little urine-spewing, ankle-nipping, piss-poor excuse for a dog to the office every day and expected her minions to take it out to the two-by-three foot piece of grass that supported the only city-planted tree on the entire block to do its business. And clean up after it too. Handle its little steaming shit piles with plastic gloves so thin the heat from the dog’s excrement warmed her fingers. And then there were days when the gloves split open.
Katherine turned her back so fast, Billie imagined the sound of a whip snapping in her ear. She massaged and scratched her scars and mangled flesh one last time. Her body had grown in the twenty-two years since she lost her leg, but the skin on her stump hadn’t kept up. It simply stretched. She sighed, reassembled the layers of her fake leg, and slid her sensible skirt back over her knees.
She turned to the manuscript on her monitor. The one she’d opened on Monday morning, full of promise and potential. Now, three days later, laden with spelling corrections and grammar edits, it sat there staring back at her with the vacant eyes of a corpse.
Her body swayed and jerked against the plastic seat. The subway rocketed underneath the streets of Grantham. Each time her shoulder crashed against the four-hundred-pound man beside her, she cringed and clenched her fingers around the handle of her briefcase. Garlic and cheese and sweat and feet crawled into her nostrils and poked at her sanity.
Freelancing. Not a one-legged walk i
n the park. But not a gut-turning, nose-plugging ride in a hurtling metal tube either.
Maybe it was time. Not to quit her job or anything, that was professional suicide. Or maybe just regular suicide, since she’d have no regular income, no regular way of feeding herself. Or supporting Peg Leg. She kept her smile inside but allowed a flash of her three-legged cat to brighten her commute.
They’d found each other eight years before. Billie was two years out of university and had been living on her own a mere six months, in a tiny, walk-up apartment. Peg Leg was hobbling through the alley behind her building, scrounging around the Dumpsters for any scraps that hadn’t landed in the bin. She’d just gotten her latest prosthesis, one that looked more like a real leg, with a foot that would fit into kitten heels. It was one of her desperate periods where she yearned to meet a man, to find love, to be transformed into someone feminine and pretty. That was tough to accomplish with a foot that only fit into runners or ballet flats. No flip-flops, no stiletto heels. Not even open-toed sandals. She forked over a ton of cash for that leg, added it to her growing collection, like normal women would add to their shoe closets.
But that damn thing hurt. Her real toes ached inside the snug little pumps. The fake toes didn’t quite fit the pointed shoe so she had trimmed them. Not the nails. Not corns or callouses. The toes. She hacked off the pinky and filed down the big toe until the pointed patent pump slid on. Too bad she couldn’t do the same to her real toes. Maybe then, those heels would have been comfortable.
So there he was, a three-legged cat, struggling and failing to bound up the crates and into the garbage bins. And Billie, her fake leg strong, her real leg crippled by the kitten heel and her need to be normal, to be pretty, to be a real woman. She approached the cat, his inky fur matted and bald in patches. He hissed at her, bared a declawed paw and swatted at the air. She cooed and poured milk from a grocery bag into her palm. The cat lapped it up, his eyes on her face, assessing her trustworthiness with each tickle of his raspy tongue against the soft skin of her hand. In the end, he followed her. And she took him into her home. Into her life. Into her heart.
There was a lot of available space.
The subway car lurched and convulsed, then shuddered to a stop. The fat man laboured to his feet and left two empty seats behind. A new crowd of commuters poured in through the doors.
Billie said a silent prayer that they would choose to sit somewhere else. She tugged the shank of her prosthesis up to expose a foam foot and titanium tibia. Each rider that eyed the empty spot to her right glanced at her leg and moved along. The car thrust forward. She kept her eyes trained on the pole resting against her thigh and kept her satisfied grin internal.
That moment she made her choice. Time to dip a toe in the freelance water, find a few clients outside of the publishing house. Perhaps she could muster enough work to never have to step foot on the subway again, never sit on a seat thousands of passengers before her had farted on.
Was she allowed to take on private clients? She made a mental note to check her contract when she finally, blessedly, got back home.
Four stops later, Billie walked two blocks and stood at the threshold of her building, her little apartment three flights up, overlooking the roofs of a two-story business block. The deli smells, though garlicky and cheesy, were enticing, now that feet and sweat weren’t mixed into the aromatic soup. She climbed the stairs, nodded at Mrs. Rogerson, always sitting outside her apartment door, spying on the comings and goings of the inhabitants. Billie felt like an ant in a farm, stared at through the glass as she went about her day, scrabbling through the tunnels of her life.
She tossed her keys into the pottery bowl next to the phone. “Peg Leg. Where are you, sweetheart?”
The cat mewed from his favourite perch on the window ledge. Did he stay there all day, his tail swishing in the sunlight, his amber eyes trained on the bustling crowd below, like so many mice just waiting for him to snatch them up and stuff them into his watering mouth? She imagined him lounging on the couch, the television clicker in one paw, the other paw wrapped around a cold beer, one eye on the clock. Five twenty-seven. TV off, assume the cat position at the window. Don’t tip human off to the reality of cat life. Must maintain the façade.
Billie joined him at the window, cooed at him, and scratched between his ears. His eyes became slits and a rumble of satisfaction shook his body. She gave his stump a rub and a scratch before tossing her briefcase onto the sofa. A plate of last night’s remains from Thai-Bow, her favourite take out place just up the block, heated in the microwave while Billie poured a rare glass of chardonnay. She deserved it. It had been a long week.
She sipped the wine and flipped through the mail until three beeps announced that Tom Yum soup and satay chicken skewers over coconut rice were ready. She salivated like Pavlov’s bloody dog. Maybe it was time for a change, to shake up the routine. Learn to cook her own meals. It would save some money.
Cutting expenses ─ a good first step on the path to freelance heaven.
1993
BILLIE’S MOTHER HELD HER hands over Billie’s eyes. “Don’t peek.” It was four in the afternoon and already nips of whisky slurred her words.
Billie said a brief prayer and asked God to make her mother stop drinking. Just for today. It was all she wanted for her eleventh birthday. No ponies, no new clothes. Not even the new Teen Talk Barbie that all the girls at school already had. Billie’s big birthday wish was for her mother to find a better way to cope. Not buying cigarettes and alcohol with what little money her father made.
She inhaled the comfort of her father’s cologne.
“Okay, Billie Angel,” he said. “Open them.”
Her mother released Billie’s eyes and she stared at the cake, ablaze on the kitchen counter. Not even a homemade cake, but a fancy store-bought one with big roses and “Happy Birthday Billie 11 years-old” written in cursive blue-icing letters atop the white slab. The flames from eleven candles danced and swayed and threw their glorious light on Billie’s face.
Her parents broke out into the birthday song. When they finished, they urged her to blow out the candles.
Billie shut her eyes tight and wished for a sober mother. Then she made another wish. The same one she made last year. She wished to have friends. Real friends, not just her daddy or mother, or the five-year-old next door who wouldn’t leave her alone. Not just her grandmother, who doted on Billie since grandpa passed away the year before.
Real. Friends. Please. God.
She opened her eyes and stared at the flickering candlelight. Were two wishes even allowed? She took a deep breath and blew out every candle. Their extinguished bodies sent wisps of smoke into the air. Then every single one of them relit. Billie blinked.
It was a miracle. A sign.
“Woohoo!” Her mother’s volume was whisky-fueled. “Billie’s got eleven secret boyfriends.” She threw her arms in the air, clapped, and laughed.
Billie fought back tears. “I do not.” She blew out the candles, and once again they relit by themselves.
Her mother doubled over, one arm across her belly, laughter shaking her oversized bosom. “Ah, shit, Billie. Do it again.”
“Florrie,” Billie’s father touched his wife’s arm. “That’s enough. It’s not funny anymore.”
Billie crossed her arms. Her mother was never funny.
Her mother yanked her arm out of his grip. “It was fucking hilarious.” She turned a finger on Billie. “You need to get a sense of humour.”
“Florrie! For God’s sake, make some coffee.” Her father squatted in front of Billie. “We’re going out to dinner. All fancy for your birthday.”
Billie glanced at her mother. She put her forehead against father’s. “But we can’t afford it,” she whispered.
He put his hand on the back of her head and patted her hair. “Don’t you worry about that. We can afford one night out.” He cut his eyes to his wife and set his lips in a thin line.
Billie’s fat
her pulled her chair out for her, like she was a real lady. He told her to get anything she wanted. Her mouth watered at the choices on the menu. Some she didn’t recognize. Escargot. Lobster bisque. She settled on something familiar, yet exotic. Roast chicken with demi-glace, garlic mashed potatoes, and asparagus with hollandaise sauce. She hoped that meant cheese.
It didn’t. And it smelled like farts. But the chicken and potatoes were delicious.
“I have one more surprise for you.” Her father beamed across the table at her. He reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small box. He slid it across the table.
Billie picked it up. It was made of soft velvet. Short sprigs of royal blue material stood on end, and shifted under her fingertips when she rubbed the surface. She swallowed and eased the lid open. Inside, nestled against ivory satin, was a gold cross. Billie gasped. She ogled the shiny pendant and looked up at her father. “Gold? For me?”
“Just for you. Because we couldn’t ask for a better daughter.”
Her mother rolled her eyes and pulled a cigarette from her purse.
“Jesus, Florrie. Can’t you skip it for one night? I hate it when you smoke in front of Billie.”
Her mother pinched her lips together and pitched the cigarette into the gullet of her cheap purse.
Her father stood and came around behind Billie’s chair. He plucked the necklace from inside the box, undid the clasp, and placed it around her neck.
She touched the cross, ran her fingertips over the pattern carved into its surface. She closed her eyes, held it in her hand, and imagined Jesus on the crucifix. A tear sprang to her eye. She turned in her chair and threw her arms around her father’s waist. “Thank you, Daddy. I’ll take good care of it.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I know you will.”