The Last Day

by Claire Dyer

  ‘Colin-next-door must have a guest,’ Boyd says.

  Honey nods, sleepy now.

  ‘Do you want me to …?’ Boyd is smiling. She can hear the duvet rustle as he gently withdraws and moves off her.

  She nods again.

  And he makes her come with his tongue. She is still sleepy but comes quickly and fiercely under him. Neither of them speaks. She’s on autopilot, overtaken by instinct and, for a second as the ripples spread and fade, she relaxes; really relaxes. This is unusual. She keeps her eyes closed because she doesn’t want to break the spell.

  Also, she feels there is the presence of something else in this room, something delicate and fragile, something she’s afraid of acknowledging.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘We’re all done.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ She turns and curls into a ball and he wraps his body around her.

  They stay like that for a while until he says, ‘I need to pee.’

  After he’s used the bathroom, he moves the chair back to where he’d got it from and gets into bed and soon he’s asleep, his breaths rumbling out of him like a bear’s, but she can’t drop off. Her brain is humming as though she’s waiting for something. To distract herself, she lets herself think back to when she got the job working for Boyd.

  She’d been lucky to get it. Lucky that the Job Centre sent her the details. Lucky that Ali, whose corner shop she’d worked in now and again, was happy to give her a reference. She really needed the money. It had taken her a long time to shake off the past: the well-meaning foster carers who didn’t quite know what to make of her; the battles she’d fought at school; the unsavoury company she’d kept; the sex; the grubby money; the long, bitterly cold nights; the hunger; the night it all changed. She’d hoped this job was going to save her.

  She guesses it must have taken a huge leap of faith on Trixie’s part to take her on. She was as honest as she could be with her. ‘My background hasn’t been what you may call orthodox,’ she said as they sat either side of a meeting table in a small, airless room at the back of the office. Trixie was drinking coffee. Honey had a glass of water in front of her and, in her lap, her hands were shaking.

  ‘Give me someone’s whose has been!’ Trixie said. ‘We’re all made up of fault lines and scars.’

  ‘Are you sure though?’ Honey asked. She’d told her about her recent past, but not the rest. She still didn’t know the words to describe the rest of it.

  She’d dressed carefully. Dark skirt, tights, a thistle coloured jumper which she thought suited her complexion, sensible shoes, knickers inside out for good luck. Everything, apart from the underwear, had been purchased from the local charity shop, but then charity shops in Farnham aren’t your common or garden ones, so the clothes were smart enough; smarter than she’d worn in a long time.

  ‘You have GSCEs,’ Trixie said. ‘You have retail experience. You have an address and a bank account and what’s more, I like your smile. It’s honest and open. And I know Boyd will like you too.’

  ‘Boyd?’ Honey asked. It was the first time she’d heard his name.

  ‘It’s his agency. Boyd is Boyd Harrison, hence Harrison’s Residential.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you were the boss!’

  ‘Well, I guess I am really.’ Trixie grinned at her and winked.

  Trixie’s in her late forties. She has shoulder-length auburn hair, pale skin and green eyes. It was autumn then and she was wearing a simple, black dress with a cowl neck and long sleeves. She’s short and petite and, Honey was to learn, married to Richard who had once done something with money in the City but who’d recently lost his job. They had two sons at university who, she said, seldom rang or came to visit.

  Honey had lifted her hands from her lap and rested them on the table. Trixie touched them briefly and stood up. ‘Well,’ Trixie said. ‘I think we’re done here. Come back tomorrow and meet Boyd, just in a belt and braces exercise. I know he’s going to love you too.’

  And he did.

  And he does.

  Honey went back in the morning. Boyd was at his desk but stood up when she approached him.

  ‘Honey,’ she said. ‘My name’s Honey. Trixie said …’ she tailed off nervously.

  He smiled down at her from his great height, his left eyebrow raised a little.

  ‘Ah, Miss Honey,’ he said. ‘Welcome to our happy family! Did Trixie show you around properly yesterday?’

  She managed to stammer out, ‘I had a short tour, but it would be good to know where everything lives, what I’m expected to do.’

  ‘All in good time. Let’s show you the essentials first. Kettle, loo, back yard in case you need to smoke, our stationery store – you have to be careful of the step down to it, it’s a health and safety hazard that step, I’ve been saying so to Trixie for ages.’

  ‘Oh,’ Honey said, interrupting him, ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Good, you’ve passed that test then!’

  Again, he looked at her and this time she noticed the brown of his eyes, brown as melted chocolate. His lips were full, his body on the bulky side; there was certainly no six pack under that brightly-striped shirt but he held his height and this weight well. Instinctively she checked for a wedding ring. There wasn’t one.

  She settled in. She settled down. She worked hard and each night she caught the bus back to her tiny bedsit and thought of Boyd and imagined a life for him: a life where he lived in a detached, mock-Tudor home, had a small, well-kept wife, some children, a dog.

  Of course, his life was and is nothing like that.

  Boyd was, she discovered, separated and lived alone in a two-bed apartment on the main drag through town. The flat was in a Georgian house which had been tastefully divided up and, looking at it from the outside, as she often did, she thought of him in its spacious rooms, she imagined his body spread out on a dark leather sofa; there would be a widescreen TV and a glass of full-bodied red wine on the table in front of him.

  Neither Boyd nor Trixie ever spoke of Boyd’s home life but she gathered he didn’t have children, had never owned a dog.

  Most of Boyd’s non-work attention seemed to centre on his mother, who lived at great expense in a local care home. Boyd had persuaded her to sell her house to finance her stay there but she wouldn’t sign over the money to him, wouldn’t let him have power of attorney or even, she’d told him, make a will. He moaned about this a lot to Trixie.

  Boyd had told Honey that his mother had said, ‘When I’m gone, I’m gone, and you can clear up the mess. I’m not going to make it easy for you.’ Boyd had also told her later that he believed that his mother was punishing him for something he’d done when he was younger. He seemed unwilling, however, to say what this might have been.

  He and Trixie rarely spoke about Boyd’s wife. She was just a presence in the shadows, someone Honey didn’t pay much attention to. Not at the beginning. It didn’t seem important then.

  And then there was the day they put his car through the car wash.

  Honey had been working at Harrison’s for about four months. It was early spring. The weather was clement, business was OK, or so she thought, and she was happy; happier than she’d been in a long while. Life was simple and good. She was making good choices, staying on the right side of herself, showing her best self to the world. It was an effort and she was taking a huge risk, but she was doing it. She was holding on.

  ‘Boyd suggested you go out with him on a valuation today, if that’s all right,’ Trixie said as Honey sat down at her desk, putting her bag underneath it and bending down to switch on her computer. ‘Mrs Chambers is putting ‘Chimneys’ up for sale.’

  ‘Oh,’ Honey said. ‘What a shame. It’s a lovely house. I hope whoever buys it doesn’t change it too much.’

  ‘Yes it is. Original Arts and Crafts, I think. Anyway, Boyd thinks it would be good if you got an idea of what he does when he’s drawing up details; all that guff about ‘estate-agent-speak’ is unfair when you do business like he does. He has integrity �
��’

  ‘Who does?’ Boyd asked, coming out of the meeting room and surprising both women. With him was a small, beaky man with thinning hair, carrying two A4 lever arch files in his arms.

  ‘Ooh,’ Trixie blushed. ‘Doesn’t matter, we were only gossiping.’

  ‘Ah, gossip. The lifeblood of any self-respecting business,’ Boyd said, laughing. ‘This, by the way, Honey, is Anthony, my accountant, for his sins.’

  Anthony lifted the files in greeting and Honey waved back. It would have been impossible to shake his hand.

  ‘I’ll be off then,’ Anthony dipped his head in Boyd’s direction. ‘Remember what we talked about. The time for caution and all that. You need to start making provisions …’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Boyd swept a large dismissive arm in the air. ‘Point taken, point taken.’

  As Anthony left, Honey noticed one of his trouser legs had got stuck in the top of his sock and wondered who he lived with who could have let him go out like that.

  ‘So, Trixie’s given you the order of the day then?’ Boyd asked Honey. ‘Ready to roll in about five?’

  After wondering about Anthony, Honey wondered when Boyd was going to stop talking to her as if they were on the set of a forties’ movie or in the pages of an Enid Blyton novel. But she played along nonetheless, saying, ‘Sure thing boss,’ and doing a mock curtsey.

  A short time later they left the office. Trixie was on the phone and Boyd was humming as they stepped out into the street.

  ‘We’ll go out the front if that’s OK? I’d like to see the window displays. We can use the alleyway three doors down through to the service yard.’

  Honey knew this and also knew she’d have to come back through the same door later. It was one of her things.

  Harrison’s was on the corner next to the Swan’s Head and opposite Costa. Honey had redone the window displays the day before and Boyd stopped for a moment to study them before he nodded and strode on. She had to take two steps for each one of his to keep up.

  ‘We’ll go in the car,’ he said. ‘Creates a better impression than arriving on foot.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ she replied, panting slightly.

  ‘But first, I want to take the car to the garage, give it a whoosh through the wash.’

  ‘OK,’ she said again.

  Boyd’s car was a large dark blue Lexus, he would have looked ridiculous in a smaller car – he would have looked pretentious in an even bigger one. This one fitted him perfectly.

  He opened the car door for her and she could smell his aftershave; it was tropical, coconuty, at odds with the fresh, early spring day in Surrey. She sat in the front, sinking into the soft cream leather.

  ‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘You have a nice car.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ he snorted, ‘would be even nicer if it was actually mine. Still paying for the bloody thing to tell you the truth.’

  The door shut with an expensive click and then he was getting in beside her and that was the moment she realised they’d never been so close to one another, or alone, before.

  She could feel the warmth of his body; she could feel the size and shape of him beside her. As he did up his seat belt his arm brushed against hers. A memory from her past buzzed through her, like electricity almost.

  This memory wasn’t a good sort of memory though. It was uncomfortable, like bonfire smoke caught at the back of your throat. He was supposed to have looked after her, the man who’d been married to her first foster mother. But he hadn’t, not really. He’d never done anything more than brush his hand over some part of her – her arm, the small of her back, her knee when they were sitting on the sofa watching TV – but there’d been something menacing about him, as though there was a switch somewhere which, if flicked, would create a shift in the balance of power that, as a child, she hadn’t completely understood but which, she’d known, had posed a threat.

  It hadn’t made for an easy life. At school, she’d tried to keep her head down, do her homework on time, stay out of bother, but trouble always seemed to find her. There were the girls who waited for her round the back of the gym and who pelted her with soil, saying, ‘Yo, bitch. You got no mum, yeah? You a bastard girl, that’s what you are.’ And Honey had hit back, had kicked, had spat in their faces.

  And there’d been that cow of a science teacher who always seemed to have it in for her, picking on her in class, never letting an opportunity pass to undermine her. And, of course, eventually Honey had snapped, called the teacher a ‘fucking whore’ and had been excluded for a day.

  Her foster parents at the time had grounded her, put her on short rations, taken away her TV privileges, but Honey had never wanted to be the sort of girl who lashes out. She spent years struggling to manage the two sides of herself: the girl who stays and fights and the girl who runs away.

  Maybe it’s because of all this that she believes so fervently in her superstitions. She has to have something to hold on to, to keep some kind of control.

  And all she’s ever really wanted is someone who loves her unconditionally. She’d never known it, not until she met Boyd. And now her greatest fear is that this unconditional love would, if he knew the real her, prove to be conditional: this is why she must keep her secret self a secret.

  To Boyd she was – is – something new, untried, umblemished. He must never know she’s damaged goods.

  ‘Oops,’ Boyd had said, as he bumped into her in the car. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No problem,’ she’d replied, adjusting her skirt and stretching out her legs in the footwell.

  She could hear his bones click and stretch as he turned to look over his shoulder and reverse out of the space; his hands were spread over the steering wheel and, for the first time, she noticed the tiny, boyish hairs on his wrists.

  ‘So,’ he said, stopping at the junction into the main road, ‘how are you getting on? Enjoying it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she managed to say, ‘very much. Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. Trixie says you’re doing a good job. It’s nice to have you around.’

  She thought he might glance at her when he said this, but he didn’t. He kept looking at the road and then, when there was a gap in the traffic, he indicated and pulled out.

  There was a silence she thought she ought to fill and so she said, ‘I’ve never …’

  He put his hand on her knee; his hand was huge and hot and she liked having it there. This time she didn’t think there was anything remotely untoward about it. It’s odd how instinct kicks in. In the past, a hand on her knee would have been a threat; now it was a comfort, a gesture that promised something good.

  ‘Hang on,’ Boyd said lifting his hand off, ‘let me just get round this stupid parked car and then you can say what you’ve never …’

  She realised then that his hand on her knee had been to stop her from talking, nothing more, and a weird kind of disappointment knotted itself into a ball inside her chest. Stupid car, stupid Honey, she thought.

  ‘Well?’ he said after a moment. They were waiting at a set of traffic lights. Ahead on the right was the garage. ‘What have you never …?’

  ‘I was going to say that I’ve never had a job like this before. It’s great. Thank you.’

  ‘I told you that you don’t have to thank me!’ He laughed and this time he did glance at her. His eyes were dark and shining. Then they were turning into the garage forecourt. Again the indicator made its soft tick-tock noise. ‘Right, here we are. You wait here; I’ll pop inside and get the token. Unless you want anything?’

  Suddenly he seemed shy, unsure.

  ‘No, I’m OK,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anything.’

  But she did. She wanted him. She hadn’t realised until he’d put his hand on her leg, until he’d turned and looked at her. She’d had lovers, many lovers, many kinds of lovers: some she remembered almost fondly, some with shame, others with relief that she’d got away from them when she did, and one with terror that he may yet come to find her.

  I
t seemed she’d spent a lifetime kissing frogs, but there seemed something good and different about Boyd. Of course it was inappropriate and a thousand shades of wrong, but by then her palms were sweating, the skin on the back of her neck prickling. She hadn’t felt this kind of rush, this innocent type of desire for as long as she could remember, if ever. It flooded through her like words from the hymns she used to sing in assembly at school. It was a kind of comfort she craved, a sense of belonging.

  But she mustn’t, she thought. She shouldn’t. She can’t. She’d just got everything back on track and wanting something good, like this promised to be, was surely pushing her luck. She’d long believed that aiming for the stars was the occupation of fools.

  Boyd got back into the car, flourishing a slip of paper. ‘No token, just a code. I’d forgotten for a moment that we’re now in the twenty-first century,’ he said, smiling at her.

  He drove forward, punched in the code on the control panel. He drove forward again until the green light turned red and his front tyres were on the buffers. The door behind them rolled shut. The door in front did the same. They were enclosed, cut off, completely alone.

  The jets whooshed water at the car, the brushes whirred and spun. The noise was deafening. She watched, mesmerised, as the mechanism rolled slowly towards them. The car rocked slightly. There was a brief pause as the brushes slowed to a stop as they reached the end of the car and, in this pause, Boyd turned to her and said, ‘I …’

  The air inside the car was crackly; she could almost hear it sparking.

  ‘I shouldn’t but …’ he said.

  ‘Shouldn’t what?’ she asked. But she thought she already knew.

  Then he thumped the steering wheel and bent his head so that it rested on it. ‘I can’t,’ he said. He turned and looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Honey?’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this. It’s like a body blow. There’s been no one, not since … I don’t understand,’ he said again. ‘Why now, when I’ve seen you every day? Why has this happened now?’

  She studied the collar of his shirt; the skin on his neck was rubbing up against the inside of it.