Barefoot in the Dark

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  BAREFOOT IN THE DARK

  Lynne Barrett-Lee

  Published by Accent Press Ltd – 2012

  ISBN 9781908917744

  Copyright © Lynne Barrett-Lee 2006

  The right of Lynne Barrett-Lee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High Street, Bedlinog, Mid Glamorgan CF46 6RY

  Cover Design by Anna Torborg

  The publisher acknowledges the financial support

  of the Welsh Books Council

  With thanks to everyone at the

  Children’s Hospital for Wales,

  Cardiff

  Chapter 1

  January

  People will tell you that there is no essential difference between Monday and any other day of the week. The sun rises and sets just as it does on, say, Thursday. The meteorological patterns that govern the weather do not lay on any special horrors at Monday’s behest. It is not possessed by a malevolent alien life-force, nor is it occupied by evil spirits or gremlins.

  For Hope Shepherd, however, this was plainly so much tosh. When you were newly divorced, and all-at-odds with the world, Monday was a day like any other only in the same way that a rottweiler was like a poodle, or a self-assessment tax return was like a hair-appointment card. Thus, as she jogged the last fifty yards to Cefn Melin Station with a box-file under her arm and a thumping headache, she knew there was only one sure route to defeating the beast that was Monday and that was, simply, by getting better organised to deal with it: in particular, by remembering all those things that should never be done on a Monday. Like taking Friday’s lunchboxes out of school bags. Like being forced to acknowledge that you cannot put a tin of beans in a sandwich. Like taking the school uniform you have remembered to wash on Sunday evening out of the washing machine. Like noticing that you do not have twenty pence for your son’s bus fare. Like remembering you have failed to set the alarm again.

  Of course, you could just cancel Monday altogether. Or designate it a non-contact day, like teachers have from time to time. A day in which hopelessly disorganised people could pause, take stock and, well… get organised.

  Except Hope knew that if you did that, Tuesday would simply become The New Monday, which was why one of her New Year’s resolutions this year was to stop trying to re-schedule the Gregorian calendar and to simply lick herself into shape. It would be a challenge, however, because getting organised was not something that came easily to her. Getting organised was something her ex-husband used to do. And still did, no doubt. And would do in perpetuity. Hope didn’t do organised. Organised was boring. She used to do spontaneity and optimism, didn’t she? Yes. So much better. And optimism did work, in a roundabout way. Why fuss, for example, with the bother of remembering an umbrella if you knew perfectly well it wasn’t going to rain?

  Except now it was. Which struck Hope as unfair, and a metaphor for the state of her life generally. She shunted her bag higher on her shoulder and broke into a run. Missing the train was an absolute no-no, because the next wasn’t due for twenty minutes. She’d no business aiding and abetting a day that was already intent on frustrating her. This, she thought, as she scuttled down the ridiculously long flight of steps – the station was in a cutting – was what making all those New Year’s resolutions was really all about. Greeting every new day with a smile. Yeah, right. She bared her teeth, her breath whistling as it tried to keep up with her, and jumped the last two steps before sprinting towards the platform.

  Hope didn’t get the train often – she generally drove to work – but today she was off to the printers in town and had to bite the fetid bullet that was rush-hour commuting. She ran faster. The train, she saw, was already at the station.

  She braced her shoulders, quarterback style, in preparation for pressing her way into the fuggy interior. Even from outside, her nose prickled under the assault of anti-perspirant and perfume, of jackets smoked overnight in essence of chip fat, of cloying post-weekend early morning breath.

  The doors on the eight-forty-two from Cefn Melin to Queen Street were of the concertina variety. There was a well – a deep step – between door frame and carriage, which had to be kept clear for the doors to sweep shut. She needed to get her hand round a pole and pull herself up before they did. But even as she made one last heave out of no man’s land, some sixth sense told Hope her day was about to get worse. And it did. As she moved fully on board and the doors began hissing, she felt the crush of someone else trying to squeeze in behind her and an unlikely resistance as she lifted her right foot. Hope had not, up to now, been aware of her laces. Which was why she had no reason to know that the one on the right was undone. But plainly it was, for as she tried to lift her foot from the doorwell, she felt it begin to slip out of its trainer, like a resolute trout trying to escape from a net. She scrunched her toes up and swivelled to see, but before she could do anything else, she was shunted hard from behind and felt the chill wind of the morning – and it just became chillier – now playfully caressing her besocked right foot. And then something else. Something infinitely more worrying. The plump-plump of an item of unattached footwear, as it fell the short distance between carriage and well. And, although she couldn’t see through the Narnian coatscape, her ears didn’t deceive her. The doors had shut.

  And if the doors had shut…

  ‘Er, excuse me,’ she panted at no one in particular. ‘Do you mind if I just… er… oomph… excuse me… I’m sorry… um, it’s just that my trainer’s come off.’

  The body closest to her, which was wide and smelled of bacon, was attached to a smiling female face topped off with an arrestingly-hued rain-hood. She shuffled a little to make room. Hope peered at the floor. She couldn’t see her trainer.

  ‘Come off, lovely?’ asked the woman, even though it must have been completely obvious. Because she too was now looking down at Hope’s sock.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hope, dipping to scour the doorwell itself. She still couldn’t see her trainer. ‘Er. Oh God –’ The train began gliding slowly, but oh-so-surely, out of the station. A small explosion of panic whumped in her stomach. Heads turned. ‘Oh God! Where’s my trainer gone?’

  Feet began to move. Eyes peered downwards. Everyone around her was now looking at the floor. Hope banged heads with a man in a suit. It was at this point that she realised there were worse things than your trainer falling off. Immeasurably worse. Like your trainer falling off as you were boarding a train, and then – the realisation leapt up and bear-hugged her – failing to board the train with you. ‘Oh my God!’ she cried now. ‘ It must still be on the platform!’

  A ripple of mild interest began to eddy around her.

  ‘Er, can someone press the alarm or something, please? My trainer – ’

  ‘I can’t see it,’ said another female voice, which belonged to a stout lady with a stiff conker-brown coiff and an ivory pashmina, who was wedged against the window behind her. Was it she who had pushed her? Was it this hateful woman who had trodden on her lace? The woman in the rain-hood peered through the perspex and shook her bagged head. ‘I can’t see it on the platform, lovely.’

  The platform which was fast disappearing beside them. ‘But it mu
st be!’ Hope gasped.

  The woman shook her head sorrowfully. ‘I don’t think it was.’

  A glimmer of hope surfaced. ‘It must still be here, then!’

  The wodge of legs shuffled some more.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ said a voice.

  ‘Me neither,’ said another.

  Because it wasn’t there. Because it was under the train.

  ‘You’ve got to laugh,’ quipped the woman in the rain hood, patting her.

  Yeah, right, thought Hope, miserably. Or you’d cry.

  At the offices of Heartbeat, a little after eleven, there was a tangible joie de vivre in the air, of the kind that only an entertaining misfortune happening to someone else on a wet Monday morning could bring.

  Kayleigh, who did reception plus the filing and photocopying, had picked up Hope’s left trainer and was clutching it to her chest as she gaped.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘You mean you got off the train and walked all the way from the station to the shoe shop with one trainer missing?’

  ‘Well, no, as it happens,’ corrected Hope, dumping her box-file on her desk and reflecting that having spent nineteen pounds ninety-nine on another (rather nasty) pair of trainers meant she would now have to forego the Eva Cassidy CD she wanted. ‘Have you tried walking any distance in one shoe?’

  Kayleigh shook her head.

  ‘So I took the other one off as well.’

  ‘So you walked there in your at you?’socks? God, wasn’t everyone looking

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘God, that’s dire! I’d be mortified.’

  ‘Oh, but it gets worse.’

  ‘Worse?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Because I stepped in something unspeakable outside Benetton. Sick, to be precise. So then I had to take my socks off as well.’

  ‘What? You mean you walked all the way to the shoe shop barefoot?’

  ‘Barefoot.’

  ‘In January?’

  ‘In January. God, I’m so wild.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Simon, with habitual tenderness. He was sitting opposite Hope wearing a pea-green sleeveless sweater. ‘Oh dear,’ he added. ‘You must have felt such a prat.’

  Hope irritably pulled a pen from her pen pot. ‘Oh, it’s not that,’ she said, though this was entirely untrue. On alighting at Queen Street station, her most compelling thought was that as she had never been so excruciatingly embarrassed in her life she might as well do the thing she most wanted to at that moment. Which was to sit down on a bench on the platform and burst into tears. But she hadn’t done it, and for very sound reasons. One being that if she had burst into tears her embarrassment would have leapt, at a stroke, to unimaginable proportions, and the other being that she wasn’t allowed to anyway, another major New Year’s resolution being that she wasn’t going to burst into tears over nothing any more.

  And she had made the shoe shop and the memory was fading. As her mother would say, died ‘Darling, nobody.’

  ‘Well, it was a bit,’ she conceded now, reflecting that listening to Eva Cassidy might not be an altogether uplifting pastime anyway, what with her having died. ‘But mainly it’s the money. Fifty-five quid I paid for those trainers! And it’s been raining all morning. So even if it’s still there it’ll be fit for nothing.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ soothed Madeleine, who had come in from a meeting of her own, and who thought nothing of spending that amount of money on lunch. ‘I used to have my au pair put all my kids’ trainers in the washing machine. They come up a treat.’

  ‘And that’s assuming it hasn’t already been mangled by fifteen trains,’ Hope added. ‘Or zapped by four million volts. Or –’

  ‘But someone will have seen it and handed it in, surely?’ Simon gently persisted. He persisted gently in all things. He was that kind of man.

  Hope shot him a look of frustration. ‘That’s just the point! There’s no-one there to hand it in to. There’s no-one there, period. The station’s unmanned. And besides, who’s even going to see it if it’s down on the line?’

  ‘You never know,’ Simon said. ‘Someone might have seen it.’

  Hope lifted her foot and peeled down one of her new socks. There was a blister the size of a sprout on her heel.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ she said irritably. ‘And pigs might fly. Besides, even if someone did see it, Simon, who in their right mind would pick the bloody thing up?’

  Before he could utter another platitude, she stood up and took herself off to the toilets. Because quite without warning, the tears, ever threatening, had welled in her eyes in treacherous floods. Bloody hell. Bloody hell. What a start to the week. What a start to the year. She chewed on her lip and railed at her frailty. When would this stuff ever stop?

  Chapter 2

  Some five miles distance from the Heartbeat office, Jack Valentine was sitting in the studio six cubicle at the BBC, swivelling on a chair while he went through his script. He glanced up as his co-presenter bounced in.

  Patti pulled a face and gestured with a finger at an object on the filing cabinet. ‘Jack, what is that, exactly?’

  Jack looked on appreciatively as she plopped herself down on another chair. She was wearing a sapphire-coloured stone in her belly-button today. Patti’s stomach was as familiar a presence to Jack as was her round, rather cherubic face. He felt certain he would be able to pick her out in a police line-up on the strength of it. Jack was rather fond of Patti’s belly. It wasn’t so much sexual as sensual (he’d decided), but he liked the caramel-brown softness and rotundity of it. The way it swelled so unashamedly whenever Patti sat down. And it was smooth. Hairless. His ex-wife’s belly-button had had a row of little hairs growing down from it, which had sprung forth in pregnancy and never quite gone away. She would, he remembered, pluck them out irritably on occasion, but never, to his knowledge, in the last year or two. Probably the sort of thing her half-arsed womens’ group disapproved of as being too submissive and spiritually-draining an act. Jack wondered idly whether Patti’s belly would at some point sprout hairs as well, but he’d not scrutinised enough post-partum bellies to know. Come to think of it, there’d onlybeen Lydia’s, hadn’t there? He hoped not. Patti’s belly had such a youthful exuberance.

  He tore his gaze from her navel.

  ‘It’s a potato,’ he said. ‘I’m leaving it there to seed.’

  Patti’s jewel winked at him as she tutted. ‘You never can do it, can you?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Give a straightforward answer to a straightforward question,’ she said equably. She waved her pen in the air. ‘You know what I mean. What’s it doing on the filing cabinet?’

  Jack plucked the trainer from the top of the cabinet and turned it over thoughtfully in his hands.

  ‘I found it,’ he said, ‘while I was waiting for the train this morning. Size four. Very new. I’ve been wondering who it belongs to. Look –’ he lifted it to show her. ‘There’s even a clue. It has a purple drawing-pin stuck in the heel.’

  Unlike Hope Shepherd, Jack Valentine was not a man given to last-minute panics. Not because he was particularly well-organised, but because years of working to broadcasting schedules had taught him that the only sure way to minimise disaster and dyspepsia was to be half an hour early for everything you did. A strategy that involved a lot of waiting around, but one that had stood him in good stead. He had got through almost the entire canon of Penguin Classics, digested impressive chunks of Stephen Hawking, and travelled much of the developed world with Bill Bryson. He was thus never lost for dinner party conversation. Though this particular skill (oh, happy thought) was one without much practical application now.

  Getting the train, on the other hand, was a wholly new experience. One that would have been one of Jack’s New Year’s resolutions, had it not been one of his après-divorce resolutions, and therefore something he should already have been doing for three months. But he hadn’t, and not being fully up-to-date with the train timetables – where did one
get them? – he had arrived at Cefn Melin station a good twenty minutes before his train was due in. He watched the nine-ten wheeze away as he started down the steps. It had been bitterly cold first thing, spiky with hoar frost, but by then rain had rumbled over and was falling in quantity, scooping up icy shards from the trees as it came. A damp sort of day. A dull sort of day. A day that lent itself to introspection, and this morning, this second Monday of a new and (he fervently hoped) better year in his life, was well-suited to the almost ceaseless motivational dialogue that he had begun with himself on January 1st. He’d flipped up his collar and made his way across to the platform, pulling his paperback from his jacket pocket as he did so. He was reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a Christmas gift from his cousin Sally in Kent. Since discovering Amazon, Sally had taken to dealing with Christmas by simply having book parcels dispatched to everyone on her list. Jack didn’t mind. He liked getting parcels. Would that stop, he wondered? Lydia had always been the one to do presents and his own efforts this year had been patchy, at best.

  He was just folding back the corner of page fifty-one when he sensed something odd at the edge of his vision. He took three steps along the platform. There was something teetering on the edge, a little further along.

  He slipped the book in his pocket and strode towards it, seeing very quickly what it was. How curious. A lone trainer, on its side, at the very edge of the platform. He looked all around him, but the station was deserted. Whoever had lost it had obviously gone. Intrigued, he picked it up. It was small, almost brand new – there was still the faded remains of a price sticker in the heel – and decorated with two glittering silver flashes. How long had it been here? He peered in, then eased a hand gingerly inside it. It was stone cold. He wondered briefly about the foot that had vacated it. Had it meant to do so, he wondered? Was it even now hobbling around Cardiff unshod?

  ‘So you brought it to work. Are you onsomething, Jack?’

  Patti left her chair and peered idly through the window. In the studio, Dave Parfitt (‘Dave’s Daily’– nine till eleven) was cocking an arm and winking at her. She poked up a finger and turned back to Jack.