by Fiona Harper
Maggs made a noise of grudging agreement, then she delved into her ever-present patent black leather handbag and pulled out a crumpled envelope and held it out to her.
Claire stared at it. She didn’t even want to touch it.
When she refused to respond, Maggs folded the envelope in two and tucked it into Claire’s handbag, which was nestled in the passenger footwell. ‘Never say never,’ she said quietly before she kissed Claire on the cheek, then reached for the door handle. ‘Because never is a very long time,’ she added, as she gently unclipped her seatbelt and got out of the car.
Claire tried to look cheerful, but it felt wrong, as if her smile was sitting wonky on her face. She waved her farewell and, when Maggs had disappeared inside, she put the car in gear and drove away.
Chapter Four
I Can Do Without You
Claire slid her key into the bottom lock of her front door, only half aware of what she was doing. An image of her father, stern and disapproving as he sat in his favourite armchair, would not be dislodged from her head. She hated that it was lingering in her brain like a squatter almost as much as she’d hated being summoned to see him all those years ago.
Her mother had always kept a nice house, had taken pains to make it feel welcoming and homey. They’d had yellow walls in the hallway and lounge, so it would always feel like the sun was shining even when it wasn’t, her mother had said. But Claire couldn’t picture that when she remembered standing there, frozen with fear, outside the living room door.
Her memories were bleached, making the light weak and pale blue, like the morning after a snowfall. Even now the thought of that cold light made her shiver.
The longer she’d stood there hesitating, the more the image of her father behind the door had grown in her mind, large and imposing, like one of those statues of Lenin she’d seen in a history book, until he and his stupid armchair had filled the room.
Eventually, she’d pushed the door open with her fingertips, secretly hoping it would stick, but it had always swung open; he’d been fastidious about DIY. Getting the walk and the expression on her face just right had been of the utmost importance. Too bright and bouncy and he’d think she was being flippant. Too dour and slow and he’d say she looked guilty.
She closed her eyes and shook her head as she dealt with the top lock. He wasn’t there any more. Not in that house where she’d grown up. Certainly not in her life. He really shouldn’t still be here, deep inside her skull. A rush of warmth tingled from her fingers up to her face. She was angry with him for making her think of him when she’d erased him from her consciousness so completely. Angry with him for contacting her. For pretending for even the tiniest millisecond that he cared.
Anyway, festering about the past was not the way she’d chosen to live her life. She’d learned that much from Doris Day at least.
She pushed her glossy black front door open and moved to step inside, but it bounced back and smashed her in the face.
Ow.
She frowned, rubbed her nose and tried again, this time keeping her distance. Once again the door sprang back towards her. Seriously? Had there been that much junk mail since this morning that it was blocking her progress into the hallway?
It was possible. She only owned the upstairs of the Victorian terraced house. She and the downstairs owner shared this front door and the decent-sized hallway. Her neighbour didn’t know the meaning of unsubscribing from a mailing list, and because he really just used this flat as a crash pad, she was always having to hoover up his unwanted mail and shove it in the recycling. What did ‘Mr Dominic Arden’ want with five different subscriptions to geeky-looking magazines about cameras and microphones for anyway? Surely nobody could be that sad?
And then there were the takeaway leaflets. Not just the ones that came through the door if you wanted them or not. He was such a good customer when he was here, obviously, that every greasy kebab or curry shop in the whole of north London had put him on their mailing list and sent him regular vouchers and leaflets about special deals.
She took a deep breath to steady herself and gave the door one final hefty shove. Whatever it was that had been blocking the door moved, but it felt a whole lot sturdier than a wodge of glossy leaflets advertising fifteen per cent off home delivery Chinese.
Frowning, she stepped into the hallway. She’d have to clear up whatever it was, otherwise she’d just have to fight her way through it again in the morning. She reached for the light switch beside the door, cheering herself up by imagining shoving all the junk mail through his letterbox from that day forward, letting him deal with the recycling Everest when he finally returned home.
Her fingers, however, never made it to the switch, because no sooner had she got one foot inside the door she tripped over something. Something hard and metal and rubbery at the same time. She came crashing down on her knees, her hands shooting out in front of her to stop her face hitting the black and white tiled floor.
She stayed there on all fours, shaking slightly and trying to make sense of the usually ordered universe of her hallway. Slowly, she reached out to the right and felt for whatever it was that had caused all the trouble. She found thin metal rod and then a sturdier strut, and by the time her fingers had gripped the blocky rubber tread of a wheel she’d got the whole thing worked out.
It was a flipping bike! His flipping bike. Mr Downstairs. Mr Come And Go As I Please, Not Minding Anyone Else Arden. Claire hauled herself to her feet and, without moving them for fear of being felled again, leaned towards the wall and switched on the light.
The bulb promptly exploded.
Of course it did.
The hall was plunged into darkness once again, but for a flickering moment she’d glimpsed the hulking bike lying across the hall floor, sprawled across a heap of brightly coloured leaflets and polythene-wrapped magazines. She would have kicked the stupid thing if she hadn’t been scared she’d tangle her toes up in the spokes and injure herself further.
Carefully, she felt around for the frame of the bike and then lifted it to stand against the wall, where it had undoubtedly started off the evening. However, her neighbour had thoughtlessly parked it too close to the front door, not caring that she wouldn’t be able to enter, and then had gone off to bed or God knows where without a care in the world. It was totally and utterly typical of him.
Honestly, she didn’t know how her grandmother had put up with him for so long! Claire had inherited both flat and bothersome neighbour after Gran’s death and even though she’d lived here for a year now, he’d probably only been in residence for a couple of weeks of that time – a few days here, a few days there – but she was already hoping he’d just up sticks and move abroad for good one day and stay permanently out of her hair.
Thankfully, she knew this hallway like the back of her hand and, with the help of the dim glow of a street light across the road, she made it to her flat door without further incident. Once inside, she exhaled and slumped back against the closed door. For a moment, she just concentrated on breathing.
There was no point in getting all het up about things she couldn’t change, was there? Que sera, sera and all that. She doubted her Neanderthal of a neighbour was ever going to amend his behaviour. What she needed to do was take a leaf out of Doris’s book and smile in the face of adversity, have a ‘thumbs-up’ attitude rather than a ‘thumbs-down’ one. After all, Doris had had a lot more tragedy in her life than an inconsiderate downstairs neighbour. According to her autobiography, the men in her life had done far worse to her than that.
First, she’d mentioned the musician husband who’d beat her and even once threatened to kill her and their unborn child, then her sadness at the failure of her second marriage after only eight months. She’d adored him, but he hadn’t been able to handle her growing fame. Then, according to Doris, husband number three had kept an iron grip on her career, becoming more of a father figure than a life partner. After his death, it transpired his lawyer had embezzled more
than twenty million dollars from Doris – almost the entire fortune she’d spend her career building – and had left her half a million dollars in debt. Years later, she’d still never been sure if her husband been totally duped by the lawyer or if he’d had some hand in the shady dealings. Marriage number four hadn’t ended that happily either.
In the light of that, Claire could surely endure a mountain bike and a ton of junk mail!
She breathed out again and let her shoulders relax. There. That was better. Maybe she’d even find it funny in the morning.
Whatever will be, will be. Whatever had happened, had happened. She couldn’t change it, so she might was well ignore it, move on …
But her knees complained as she started to walk down the hallway towards the living room. She looked down to discover red marks on both of them and a tiny cut on her right leg, where she must have sprawled into the upended mountain bike. That horrible warm, itchy sensation that had come over her on the doorstep when she’d been thinking of her father returned, but she attempted to bat it away like a pesky fly.
She decided to watch TV for a bit before heading to bed, her system still too pumped full of adrenalin for her to drop off yet. She collapsed onto the sofa and reached for the remote, but as she flicked through the TV channels, she found herself staring round the room more than paying attention to the screen. The itchy sensation wouldn’t leave. She had the horrible sense that bothersome insect of a feeling had landed and was laying eggs, that it would just keep growing and breeding no matter what she did.
Ugh. She shuddered and attempted to distract herself by looking around the room.
While she’d moved her furniture in, she’d also kept some of her grandmother’s stuff, including a glazed bookcase and a bureau with a roll-top that stuck. The floral wallpaper was the one she remembered from her childhood, so old it had gone out of fashion and come back in again, but it matched Claire’s modern retro-inspired sofa and armchair perfectly.
She sighed.
God, she missed her gran. Her nose stung and a tear appeared at the corners of both eyes. She kept staring at the large cream peonies on the wall, watching them blur in and out of their pale sage background until the moisture evaporated and the urge to give in and just sob abated. She realised she’d stopped on some show with loud-mouthed people arguing over the contents of abandoned storage lockers and shook her head. Gran would have hated this programme. No class. No class at all.
With that thought in her mind, she aimed the remote squarely at the screen and turned the TV off, then rose and hauled herself to bed. Suddenly, she felt very, very tired.
*
Claire tossed and turned all night, partly because of the heat, despite the fact large sash windows in her bedroom were open both top and bottom, and partly because every time she woke, she realised she’d been having a conversation with her downstairs neighbour in her sleep, letting him know just how inconsiderate and selfish she found him.
She really wasn’t doing very well at this live-and-let-live, whatever-will-be stuff, was she? It was stupid that something so trivial was affecting her this way, but ever since Maggs had mentioned her father’s letter earlier that evening she’d felt as if everything was topsy-turvy.
It didn’t help that in her dream conversations her neighbour hadn’t had a face. On the rare occasions he’d returned from wherever he’d been overseas he seemed to live a nocturnal existence. She’d heard doors slam, been woken by his music at unearthly hours, had to haul his bin back from the path after bin day, because he’d already left and someone would probably nick it if it stayed there too long, but she’d never once laid eyes on him.
At four-fifteen she let out a growl of frustration, threw back the sheet and got out of bed. There was only one way she knew to deal with this kind of thing. She needed to do something concrete, something to get these words out of her head.
It had been so hot that she’d been sleeping naked, so she pulled on her white shortie PJs with the large red hearts on them – a Christmas gift from Gran two years ago. It had been a joke between them, seeing as they resembled the ones Doris wore at the end of The Pajama Game – and stumbled into the kitchen. She grabbed the reporter’s notebook and biro she often used for her shopping lists and started to scribble.
Halfway down the page she stopped. It looked terrible. The sort of thing a lazy school child would scrawl as a forgery explaining that the family pet had digested their homework. It carried just as much weight and looked just as convincing.
She stood up and put the kettle on, deciding a nice strong cup of tea might help bring her to her senses, then reached into the dresser she’d found in a local junk shop for her good writing paper and rummaged in her pen pot for her fountain pen.
Yes, she had writing paper. The proper kind. It was the colour of clotted cream with ridges that felt nice if you ran your fingertips over the surface. Gran had always stressed the importance of a good ‘thank you’ letter, especially after birthdays and Christmas, and Claire had found it was one convention in this day of emails, status updates and Tweets that she didn’t want to let go of.
She made her tea and then sat down again, her eyes feeling slightly less gritty and her hand slightly more steady. She decided to use the scribbled note as a starting point and began to both copy and edit as her indigo ink swept across the page.
When she was finished, she folded it neatly into three and pushed it into an envelope with a tissue lining. It was a thing of beauty, and it seemed a travesty to be using stationery like this on a philistine like Mr Arden, but she hoped it would help her get her point across. She meant business, and this letter certainly screamed it loud and clear. She was tired of letting men ride roughshod over her and, while this might not be much, it was a symbol of something bigger. It was a start.
She licked the envelope, pressed the flap closed and then stood up. No time like the present, she thought, as she nipped out of her flat, padded carefully down the stairs, now illuminated with greyish pre-dawn light, and carefully and noiselessly lifted her neighbour’s letterbox.
She paused just at the moment she prepared to let the envelope drop onto the varnished floorboards inside. Slowly, she eased the letter back out of the slot, and then, still gripping it lightly, she turned her head and looked at the sprawl of junk mail cluttering up her hallway.
If she posted it, it would probably just get buried under everything else. Better to put it somewhere he was bound to find it. Her eyes came to rest on the culprit of her sore knees, resting innocently against the wall.
Hmm. He’d used his bike yesterday, and even if he didn’t use it again before he left, he’d still probably pick it up and put it back inside his flat. She walked over and placed the letter strategically on the saddle, then stepped back and surveyed her handiwork. There. That should do.
However, as she turned to creep back up the stairs, she had one last flash of inspiration …
Quickly, and before she could talk herself out of it, she grabbed the bike and rolled it forwards so the front wheel was just sticking a centimetre or two past the edge of her neighbour’s front door. There. He wouldn’t be able to miss it now – just like she hadn’t been able to miss the stupid contraption last night.
She grinned naughtily as she tiptoed back up the stairs, thinking to herself that it was just as well Doris was still going strong in her nineties. Even though Miss Day was known to have a keen sense of fun, Claire wasn’t sure she’d have been proud of what she’d just done if she’d been peering down from heaven.
Chapter Five
Anything You Can Do
Dominic’s body clock was so screwed up he’d bypassed the sleepy stage of tiredness and now just felt a bit drunk. Reality swam in and out of focus when he opened his eyes. For a moment, he thought he was in yet another hostel or airport, but he soon realised the reason he didn’t recognise his own bedroom ceiling was two-fold—firstly, he stayed here so infrequently he’d forgotten what it looked like and, secondly, someh
ow he’d turned himself around in the night, and now he was lying with one foot on his pillow and his head in the opposite corner of the bed, one arm dangling towards the floor.
Food.
That was the thought that entered his head, a primal and desperate signal sent direct from his abdomen to his brain, but the rest of him was so exhausted he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to eat or throw up. Be that as it may, he still managed to flip himself off the bed and stumble into his kitchen.
Inspecting the fridge might be a risky manoeuvre. He’d gone straight out for a ‘welcome home’ drink with his mate Pete as soon as he’d dropped his rucksack inside his front door and hadn’t checked the contents yet. He couldn’t quite recall if he’d remembered to empty it before he’d left back in February.
To be honest, he was happy to leave that riddle unanswered for now.
He turned his attention to the cupboards. There wasn’t much tempting there, either. Packets of rice and pasta. A tin of kidney beans that he had no memory of buying – especially since he hated the things. Some Cup-a-Soups that were well past their expiration date.
His stomach growled and clenched.
Great.
It had finally made up its mind what it wanted: anything, basically. As long as it arrived within the next thirty seconds. He was just giving the can of kidney beans some serious thought when he spotted something brightly coloured lurking in the back of the cupboard. Before his brain even registered what it was, his hand delved in and retrieved it.
He laughed a little manically as he saw it and thought to himself, still smiling, that he was definitely still sleep loopy. Why else would the sight of a multipack of miniature cereal boxes be quite so funny?