by Lucy Lawrie
THE LAST DAY I SAW HER
First published 2016
by Black & White Publishing Ltd
29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL
www.blackandwhitepublishing.com
This electronic edition published in 2016
ISBN: 978 1 78530 034 9 in EPub format
ISBN: 978 1 78530 014 1 in paperback format
Copyright © Lucy Lawrie 2016
The right of Lucy Lawrie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Ebook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore
For Arlene
Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
Acknowledgements
I owe a huge debt of thanks to my friends, Jane Farquharson and Lesley McLaren, who helped me at every stage. Second novels can be tricky and I couldn’t have got here without their writerly advice, insight and enthusiasm.
Thank you to the wonderful team at Black & White Publishing, in particular to Karyn Millar for her sensitive editing of the manuscript, and to Janne Moller for holding my hand through the whole process. Thanks also go to my agent and friend, Joanna Swainson, for her constant support and encouragement.
I want to thank my sister, Katherine, for letting me read her teenage diaries when I was trying to find Hattie’s voice – that was above and beyond the call of sisterly duty!
This book also has an older sister – Tiny Acts of Love. I was overwhelmed by the amazing response of the book-blogging community when it was released, so heartfelt thanks go out to them. I want to thank each and every one of my readers, too. A story doesn’t come to life until it is read, so thank you for finishing what I started.
Thanks also go to my mum and dad, and my husband, Colin. And to my daughters, Emily and Charlotte, who inspire me every day.
Finally, I have some incredible friends who have gone out of their way to support me, and my writing journey, over the last couple of years. I will never forget your belief in me, and all the ways you helped me. Most of all, The Last Day I Saw Her is a book about friendship, so this one’s for you.
1
Janey
I can’t even remember what I was thinking about, walking along that corridor to the classroom in those last few moments before everything changed. Pip’s meltdown over his supermarket-brand fish fingers, perhaps. Or the fact that he needed a new coat, now that the weather had turned. Did I have an inkling of what was coming – a tingling in the skin, or an adrenaline swoop in the stomach? Surely there must have been some part of me that knew.
Room 12 was the last on the right, brightly lit after the gloom of the corridor, with paintings and collages crowding the walls, and a stretch of windows overlooking a rainswept playground. Twisty wire creations hung low from the ceiling, casting filigree shadows on the surface of the large square table that stood in the middle of the room.
Four people were sitting round it already.
‘Oooh, hello!’ said the woman nearest me, who looked vaguely familiar with her rounded cheeks and long front teeth. ‘Are you new? Sit down.’
She motioned to the stool beside her.
I edged my way round, past a lifesize papier mâché goat and a row of newly painted Punch and Judy-style puppets, gazing from a shelf.
The woman shot me an appraising look. ‘You’re very smart.’
I was wearing my one still-presentable work suit – grey with a faint pinstripe through it. I’d thought, since it was a course on ‘How to Write a Killer CV and Ace that Interview’, I might as well look the part.
This woman, however, was dressed in pink hotpants and a running vest. Odd choice.
‘I’m Jody,’ she said. ‘This is my husband, Tom.’ She gestured to a short man in jeans and a Megadeth T-shirt. ‘We can’t wait to get started. Last week’s session was mindblowing.’
Gosh, she was keen. Maybe she was putting a brave face on it – how unfortunate that both she and her husband should be looking for work at the same time.
Suddenly, I placed her. ‘I – I think I know you. You go to the Jungle Jive class, don’t you – the one in St Matthew’s church hall on a Friday morning?’
‘I take Vichard to it, yes,’ she said, as though I’d accused her of attending for her own pleasure. ‘Do you have a child?’
I failed to answer for a moment, caught up wondering why anyone would name their son Richard if they couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘R’.
‘Oh – oh, yes I do. Pip. He’s two and a half. And I’m Janey,’ I added.
She nodded, narrowing her eyes, as though she wasn’t quite ready to accept my status as a Jungle Jive member.
‘I’ve only been a couple of times . . .’
‘You’ll vecognise Molly too, then,’ she said, pointing across the table to a small woman with dark curly hair, sitting next to a smug-looking man. They seemed to be fiddling with bits of green card and a box of pipecleaners.
‘Oh yes, I do. Her wee boy plays the violin, doesn’t he?’
But surely they shouldn’t be playing with the art supplies – that wouldn’t help them write killer CVs.
And why were we in the art room anyway? The corridor I’d just walked along had been lined with empty, normal classrooms. I glanced behind me at the Punch and Judy dolls, their heavy heads lolling on bendy necks.
‘Don’t you have a partner?’ Jody asked, her face twisted into an expression somewhere between pity and bewilderment.
My heart sank. She’d pegged me as a lonely, tragic single mother – was it the pinstripes? Did they look desperate? Or was it just my face?
‘Who will you practise the techniques with?’ she persisted.
Oh God, the interview techniques. Eye contact and firm handshakes, and how to command a room. ‘Oh. I didn’t know you were supposed to bring a partner. I assumed the tutor would pair us up.’
Jody snorted. ‘Oh, you’re a hoot!’
I felt like a schoolgirl, shrinking against the wall bars in the gym because nobody had chosen me. I should have probably left right then – the idea of me with a proper job was farcical anyway. But Murray would know I’d bottled it if I arrived home two hours early, and would raise a knowing eyebrow at my pathetic little bid for independence.
‘Suit yourself. Anyway, it looks like Steve’s late. Again.’ She hopped off her stool. ‘Come on, Tom. Let�
�s get started.’
She shot him a challenging look, as though she was about to start firing questions at him: ‘When’s the last time you led a team to a successful outcome?’ or some such horror.
‘Maybe we should wait,’ said Tom.
‘No. We can at least start the greasing-up process.’
She slipped off her shoes and walked over to the other side of the room where, I now noticed, there was a large plastic sheet laid out on the floor. Tom squatted down at her feet with a resigned sigh, and unscrewed a jar of Vaseline.
‘Do it properly,’ said Jody, ‘or the plaster could tear my skin off.’
I whipped round to look at the other couple. Molly was twisting green pipecleaner-and-card leaves into the man’s hair, her tongue protruding in concentration.
I jumped down from the stool, my sensible court shoes clacking loudly on the floor.
‘I’ve got the wrong class,’ I announced to nobody in particular. ‘Oops. I’ll just go now.’
Nice one, Janey. All dressed up in your pinstripes and you can’t even book an evening class.
‘This is “The Art of Love”,’ said Jody. ‘An art workshop,’ she went on, slowly. ‘For couples. Every Tuesday.’ She flicked a glance down to my feet and up again. ‘Bring your own bottle.’
‘Right.’ I wanted to slap her, standing there with her nice dull Megadeth husband and her air of entitlement. But I nodded politely. ‘See you, then . . .’
‘Stay,’ said a voice.
I turned. A man stood before me, his forehead beaded with rain, or sweat, unstrapping a wide across-the-shoulder bag. I wondered for a moment if I’d met him before. Short dark hair, mussed up into a peak in the middle. Boyish around the mouth, but lined around the eyes. Glasses with square black frames. No, he must just have one of those faces.
My legs felt heavy, suddenly, aching to sit down again.
‘I’m Steve. You’re welcome to stay. This is my class.’ He had a trace of a Northern accent – from Leeds, or Sheffield perhaps, exotic here in New Town Edinburgh. He was taking off his jacket now – a cracked, brown leather jacket – which rattled as he threw it over a stool.
‘No, really . . .’
‘We’re down a couple.’ A coopell. ‘The Smythes have dropped out.’
Oh well, if the Smythes have dropped out . . .
I took the form out of my bag. ‘Um . . . I was looking for “How to Write a Killer CV and Ace that Interview”.’
He peered at it and shook his head, frowning. ‘That’s C808. That runs from November sixth. This is C806. “The Art of—” ’
‘Yes. Yes, I know.’
‘The admin staff aren’t the best. They can’t work the new website. Sorry about that.’
‘It’s fine, honestly, I’ll—’
He gestured towards Jody and Tom, cutting me off mid-fluster. His hands seemed too big for his body, white and knuckly.
‘We’re just playing around with materials today. Would you like to stay? Sorry, I didn’t catch your name?’
‘Janey.’
He looked me straight in the eye then, and something happened. It was as though there’d been a buzzing in the room, through my body, my mind, so constant that I hadn’t noticed it. For months. Years. A whole weary lifetime, maybe. And he’d just flicked a switch and turned it off. Stillness. Silence. Just my own heart beating.
And now I think about it, maybe that was it: the stillness made way for what was about to happen, letting it rise like a bubble to the surface.
But in that moment, all I could do was watch as he crossed the room, reached into a cupboard and came back to the workbench with a sheet of A3 paper and a packet of colouring pens.
Already I knew that I wouldn’t be leaving. I wouldn’t be walking out of this warm, brightly lit room into the night. I wouldn’t be going home to the flat, where Pip lay sleeping and Murray frowned over legal reports at the kitchen table, and shadows pooled in the corners of the rooms. Not yet.
But it was the pens that made me sit down. They were brand new – a perfect rainbow held lightly in my two hands. The gummy smell of the clear plastic packet transported me to the first day of a dozen autumn terms: the sweet, pink-sharpened wood of new pencils, the clearly labelled ruler and Pritt Stick. Trimmed hair and shiny shoes.
I drew out the black pen, nestled in at the far right of the pack. My hand hovered over the cool white sweep of the page, reluctant to mark it.
‘Steve,’ called Molly. ‘I want to make roots, sort of twisting and clustering around Dave’s calves.’ She paused to make twisting and clustering movements with her hands. ‘I want to show how I really get him, from an eco perspective. I was thinking papier mâché? Could you come over?’
It was a while before he returned. I’d been enjoying the benign schoolroom bustle: Steve’s thoughts on root-making, delivered in the serious tones of one brain surgeon advising another, and Jody’s critique of her husband’s plastering skills. But my sheet of paper was still blank, apart from my name, and the date.
‘I couldn’t think of anything to draw,’ I said to him.
‘Try drawing with your left hand,’ called Jody, now wrapped in soggy white bandages up to her thighs. ‘That’s what we did last week. Just to, you know, loosen us up.’
Steve shrugged. ‘Sometimes it can be useful if you haven’t done any art for a while. The idea is to be playful with the materials, not get hung up about the results.’
‘You bypass the rational, language-based part of the brain,’ announced Jody bossily. ‘And access the inner child. Pass my wine, would you, Tom, m’darlin’?’
Well, if Jody could access her inner child, I bloody well could too.
Using my right hand, I positioned the pen in the grip of my left.
‘Look,’ Steve said. ‘Stop there for a sec. What’s happened?’
I shot a glance down my front, half expecting to see buttons undone at my cleavage, or a burst zip.
‘You just tensed up. Can you feel where you’re holding your tension?’
I released my lip from between my teeth, expelling the breath I’d been holding high in my chest.
‘That’s better. Try loosening up.’ He stretched his arms in front of him, flexing his fingers. I had the sudden urge to reach out and touch him, to wrap his fingers round mine. ‘Sounds a bit weird, but let your mouth go soft. The tension goes from your jaw into your arm, and your hand, and into your work, which is the last place we want it to go.’ He drew the pale blue pen from the pack and held it aloft, gritting his teeth as if to demonstrate.
Was this right? Should this man be telling me to make my mouth go soft, in a room of Jungle Jive couples celebrating the art of love?
‘I don’t know what to draw.’ I glanced over at Molly, who was taping a large strip of bark to her husband’s torso.
‘What do you feel like drawing? When’s the last time you drew something just for the hell of it?’
‘Probably at school.’
‘What would you have drawn?’
With my wavering left hand, I drew a figure with stick arms and legs, a lollipop head, curly hair, and added three dots, to be the three dark moles on my left cheek.
‘It’s me,’ I explained. ‘My hair used to be curlier.’
He gave a sideways nod, as if to say fair enough, and nudged his glasses up where they’d slipped down. For a second, I imagined a comedy plastic nose attached to the square, black frames. Pip had one at home, a ‘free gift’ from the front of his Thomas the Tank Engine magazine.
What to draw next? After a moment’s hesitation, I added a big smile. But somehow, I couldn’t get the curve right – it remained crooked and tight, however much I went over it. The eyes looked startled, black holes in that sea of white, so I added eyebrows, which only made the curly-headed figure look anxious. With a flash of irritation I added a skipping rope, trailing off snake-like towards the right of the picture. It looked odd, unfinished.
‘Su-perb,’ he said. ‘That’s you star
ted.’ But he didn’t move away. He hovered by the side of the bench.
Unsatisfied with the figure I’d drawn, I lifted the pen again.
‘Going to draw something else? Go for it. Try and free up that hand. There’s loads of research on this, by the way.’ He reached up his own hand and ran it over the top of his head, nudging his little peak of hair to the side.
‘Mmm.’
‘Basically, it’s about accessing the right hemisphere of the brain, things like feeling, intuition, creativity . . . All the stuff that gets knocked out of us at school, by the so-called education system.’
His voice deepened on the last three words. I smiled – he sounded like my grandpa. Any minute now he’d start talking about ‘this bloody government’ and how they’d single-handedly ruined the country.
I looked down. What was this I’d drawn? Another figure, a black scribble, stood at the end of the skipping rope. She was smaller than the first, with straight hair, and a wavy line where the mouth should have been.
A little crawling sensation down my neck.
‘Oh,’ I said.
There must have been something in my voice, because the half-mummified Jody stepped off her plastic sheet and moved, haltingly, over to my bench. She stood close enough that I could smell the gluey tang coming from her bandages.
‘So if that’s you,’ she said, pointing to the first girl. ‘Who’s that other one?’
I gave a tight little laugh. ‘I have absolutely no idea. I didn’t mean to draw this.’
Steve craned his head round to see the picture straight on. And then he moved, right round beside me so his shoulder was almost touching mine.
I stared at the paper.
‘Hey,’ said Steve, tapping my arm gently with the end of the pale-blue pen. ‘You might want to breathe.’
My left hand lifted the pen and stiffened as I tried – and failed – to take control of it.
‘Who are you, little girl?’ boomed Jody.
‘Thanks for that, Jody,’ began Steve. ‘I think—’
‘Who are you?’ I repeated, in barely a whisper under my breath.
My hand wrote five spindly words: