by Tina Seskis
And now . . . The possibility that Rufus hadn’t yet slept with his old girlfriend again was even worse than the prospect that he most probably had. Eleanor didn’t like thinking of herself as an impediment, of Rufus gazing into this other girl’s eyes instead of hers, her rival returning the look limpidly, the pair of them wishing they could be together, but being honourable, because of her. It made Eleanor feel sick. She turned from the window, scraped at her scalp above her ears, yanked at her hair. Her mind whirled and fizzed, and eventually grew hard.
He loved someone else. It was over.
Eleanor made her decision. She’d leave right now, before Rufus got home, although she was fairly certain now that that wasn’t quite what he’d meant. He’d got flustered, said cruel things, things he’d surely regret. But at the end of the day he’d said them. They were out there. Perhaps one day he’d pay for them.
Eleanor packed her suitcase, filled it with the items she had removed with such care only recently. She took off the promise ring he had given her – a sparkly Walmart special that had always irritated her finger and had left a circle of flaky skin. A stopgap, he’d said. He’d take her to Hatton Garden one day, he’d said, although she hadn’t even known what that was. He’d love her forever, he’d said.
Oh God.
Eleanor slammed her suitcase shut as theatrically as she could manage. She wasn’t going to sit around where she wasn’t wanted. She went into the kitchen and placed the ring on the pale pine table, along with her keys and a brief note that she scrawled on an envelope. She dragged her suitcase along the corridor and out into the hallway. As she shut the door to the flat and heard the click of the latch behind her, she realised there was no going back now. Yesterday she’d been just another young girl in love . . . and today she was an American alone, lost and heartbroken, in London.
3
CHRISTIE
Two hundred miles away, in Manchester, Christie Gallagher was trying her hardest not to giggle. An intimate wedding to a mysterious stranger? An unknown person with an axe to grind? A sinister family secret? What a load of utter claptrap. Her sister Alice might well believe in all this psychic stuff, but everything the fortune teller had said so far was either plain wrong or else so generic it meant nothing. For a start, Christie and her boyfriend Paul were already engaged, so she wasn’t actually in the market to marry a handsome stranger, even if there had been one on the horizon. Madame Magdalena hadn’t spotted that little detail, had she? Christie felt a little disingenuous now that she’d taken off her diamond ring, but she wasn’t going to give Madame Magdalena any clues. Surely she shouldn’t bloody well need them.
The fortune teller leant forward suddenly and peered at Christie. The huge golden hoops in her ears glinted in the dim light. Her eyes were black as a bird’s. Christie was almost certain she was wearing a wig, and she imagined the woman’s scalp, bald and moley, errant straggles of wispy hair plastered to it. As Madame Magdalena clasped Christie’s hand her skin was dry and papery, and Christie had an almost overwhelming urge to pull her hand away, but she didn’t dare. The clairvoyant’s voice was a long slow hiss, like a tyre being let down. ‘Never trust,’ she said. ‘Never trust your husband.’
Christie felt a cold feeling at her back, as though someone had opened a door behind her, out into snow. She nodded as amiably as she could, but a shiver had started at her neck and was worming its way into her spine, vertebra by frozen vertebra . . . and then she felt as if someone had punched her in the coccyx. The fortune teller might have got pretty much every factual detail of the reading wrong, but it seemed she had a knack for spotting someone’s Achilles heel – and Christie’s was most definitely an inability to trust. And no wonder.
Christie pulled herself up. This was Paul they were talking about. The woman was clearly spouting nonsense. She glanced anxiously around the room, at the red velvet curtains, the black lace tablecloth, the cobwebby lighting, and wondered how she could make her escape.
‘I’m sorry,’ Christie said, ‘but I have to go now. My sister’s waiting for me.’
‘Oh, but I haven’t finished, my dear,’ the crow-woman said. Her voice was like a gurgle through pipes. ‘There is so much here that I need to tell you.’
‘No, it’s OK, I don’t want to know. Honestly, it’s fine.’ Christie yanked her hand away and stood up.
As she backed out of the room, Madame Magdalena started repeating, over and over, in an eerie watery voice that Christie found hard to ever forget, ‘Never trust, never trust, never trust,’ as if it were a rare and ancient mantra.
4
ELEANOR
Although Eleanor might not have had enough money to buy a flight home, thankfully she could afford a hotel for a while. Not a nice hotel, of course – but a roof over her head at least. Someone had once told her that the cheapest places to stay were always around the railroad stations, and so she’d taken the subway from Hampstead and got out at King’s Cross, mainly because it was the first place with a railroad symbol that she’d heard of. The hostel she’d found there was the epitome of crummy, and not in even her darkest moments in New York had she ever ended up anywhere that bad. It was set in a tall thin house in a Georgian mews terrace that must have once been elegant, but the net curtains were grey from age and the windows were black with spewed fumes, and the single mattress on her bunk bed had map-of-the-world-shaped stains on it. Her room-mates seemed even more down on their luck than she was, with some of them getting up to things she’d rather not have to witness, whether the lights were out or not. The bathroom across the corridor was almost as bad – the inside of the toilet was brown, the seat was covered in urine. There were several nail clippings and a globule of phlegm in the limescale-encrusted basin, and the shower was cold and clogged up with hair. Two nights here had felt like two lifetimes.
And yet still Eleanor didn’t call home. Perhaps she simply couldn’t face the humiliation. Despite her mom never having even met Rufus – she had just been shown a couple of photos, including one in black tie and tails from his Oxbridge days – she hadn’t trusted him. But, as Eleanor had told herself at the time, that was how her mom felt about the entire male species – and yet now it seemed her mom had been right to be cynical. She and Rufus had gone from starry-eyed lovers to a young cohabiting couple to dumper and dumpee within just eight months, and four of those they’d been apart anyway. Slam dunk.
Eleanor poked her head out of the cracked, scuffed door, looked about at the peeling black-and-red-striped hallway, and made a dash for it. She’d heard yelling from the room next door and didn’t want to run into any trouble. The staircase had no carpet, only beige disintegrating underlay, which at least muffled her footsteps. The hallway stank of sweet fetid rubbish mixed in with human smells, and it was a relief to wrench open the heavy black front door and escape.
Out on the street the wind was gusting, and the air felt damp, with a dull toxic quality to it that seemed to have been made worse by the sun. This was not the cutesy London of Hampstead, where until a couple days ago she’d lived with Rufus, the place with the sunny little garden filled with bright happy colours you saw in children’s books. This new London, although only five stops away on the Tube, was grey, and unforgiving, and loud and menacing, and full of harried people and dirt and rancour and disappointment. As Eleanor walked, she was amazed at how calm her mind was, and she wondered if it was some kind of natural reaction to extreme adversity, in that she couldn’t fall apart right now even if she wanted to, because survival was paramount. Perhaps that was why people enjoyed wars, she thought. Unimaginable tragedy, rather than breaking spirits, seemed to reinforce them. Perhaps peacetime was what brought out the neurosis in people, as there was nothing else to worry about, no one to rail against. And then she told herself to ignore all her father’s psychobabble nonsense, as sadly it had never got either of them anywhere.
Eleanor tried to work out her options. She couldn’t go home, as she had no money for the flight. And although either of h
er parents would help her, she couldn’t face asking right now. And even if Rufus might yet take her back, she would never actually go back. No way. Not if he was in love with someone else.
As Eleanor stood at the lights to cross a four-lane road that was dense with cars and trucks and vans going nowhere fast, a young woman was waiting alongside her. The woman had a screaming toddler on reins, and a splodge of a baby in a stroller, and a cigarette in her mouth, and she wore track pants and a puffa coat with a fake-fur hood – and although she was overweight anyway Eleanor thought she was almost certainly pregnant. As the girl caught Eleanor looking at her, she turned and said, ‘What you starin’ at?’
‘Nothing,’ Eleanor muttered, and walked on as quickly as she could, her cheeks still flaring, relieved when the girl didn’t follow her.
Children. Perhaps that was it. Maybe that was her route out of this mess. Eleanor hadn’t seen Mary Poppins a zillion times for nothing. And she’d done plenty of babysitting for the couple in the next-door apartment when she’d lived with her dad in New York. She loved kids. Maybe she could get a job as a live-in nanny, at least to tide her over. That would solve all her immediate problems in one go.
Eleanor turned on her heel and re-crossed the road, almost running in her desire to get back to the hostel. She clattered up the stairs and asked the skinny, pocked girl on reception if there was a Yellow Pages and a pen and paper she could borrow. The directory was four years out of date and dog-eared, but there was a section on childminding services where Eleanor found a few listings to call. She scribbled them down and headed straight out again. A few yards along, on the other side of the road, she found a red phone box that once, as an American, she would have cooed over, but now she was simply thankful it was in working order. The tiny space stank in a way she couldn’t even begin to describe, and the receiver was hanging almost in half, but when Eleanor picked it up there was that curious English dialling tone she’d only ever heard on TV before. The first two agencies she called weren’t interested, because she didn’t have formal nannying qualifications, and the numbers for the next two appeared to be out of service. The fifth number was permanently engaged, but at last Eleanor managed to reach a posh-sounding woman who, although she couldn’t help, was at least nice enough to give Eleanor another number to try. This time she got through to a place in somewhere called Bounds Green that sounded more promising. Yes, she was looking for live-in, she said. Yes, she had the correct paperwork to work in the UK. Yes, she was available immediately. Yes, she had experience with children. They asked her when she could come in, and she said she could be there before the end of the afternoon, and so they agreed, and she was.
5
CHRISTIE
As Christie fled the fortune teller’s room out into the brilliant sunshine, two little children were walking by with their parents, brandishing candy-flosses as big as their heads, and their innocence was so beguiling that Christie almost wanted to run over and kiss them, in an attempt to cleanse herself of the feeling that tainted her now. A man was yelling, ‘Roll up, roll up!’ not even ironically, trying to persuade passing men to have a go on the ‘high striker’, and Christie was glad of the brightness of his tattoos, the jollity of his tone, despite his broad Mancunian vowels. People were milling about the green, trying to toss rings over yellow rubber ducks to win goldfish in clear plastic bags, laughing unselfconsciously, and it was good to be out of the dark, lace-lined room and be reminded that real life was light and bright still.
Christie was surprised at how shaken up she’d been by the fortune teller, but it wasn’t just what she’d said. It had been the oppressive atmosphere, the vague sense of nefariousness that had permeated the room. Even so, Christie had managed to be suitably nonchalant to her sister, who was waiting outside for her, keen to swap notes, find out what Christie’s future held, which was typical Alice, of course. Alice’s head had always seemed somewhere in the clouds, wrapped up with the moon and the stars, even when she was little. Even now she seemed genuinely willing to leave her future to destiny and, to give her her due, she’d always seemed pretty happy with the outcome. Christie had been the more driven one, who’d gone off to Cambridge no less, but qualifications and careers had never seemed important to Alice. Christie admired her sister’s conviction, even if she did think it was crazy.
‘Well, then,’ Alice was saying, putting her arm through Christie’s. ‘What did she say about Paul? How many kids are you going to have?’
‘Oh, she didn’t say anything about that,’ Christie said, crossing her fingers.
‘Well, what did she say?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘Are you going to become a top headteacher?’
Christie smiled. ‘She didn’t say anything about that either.’
‘Are you all right, Christie?’
‘Yes,’ Christie said. ‘I just found it all a bit weird . . . creepy, in fact.’
Alice laughed. ‘That’s what I love about it,’ she said. ‘The mystique. But, come on – she must have said something to you.’
‘Not really,’ said Christie, walking on past the various stalls towards the exit. ‘She just implied that I hadn’t met my future husband yet, which she was obviously wrong about, and so after that I pretty much switched off . . . Hey, look, shall we get some doughnuts?’
Christie’s diversionary tactic was prompted by the hot-sugar smell now drifting across the air towards them, and it was almost tangible, as if she could reach out her tongue and feel the crunchiness.
‘Yuk, they’re too greasy,’ Alice said, marching past, clearly not prepared to be distracted from grilling Christie that easily. But by the time the sisters had reached the final stall, which was bowed down by slightly grubby-looking oversized cuddly toys that no one ever seemed to win, Christie had still refused to be drawn, and so they left the fairground and parted ways on the corner, Alice grumbling good-naturedly about Christie’s evasiveness.
As Christie walked home past the house with boarded-up windows and a haywire hedge, she still felt a little uneasy somehow, which she knew was irrational. She straightened her shoulders as she approached her front door, put the key in the wonky lock and jiggled it expertly. This was not going to affect her.
‘You’re back early,’ said Paul, looking over his shoulder as she padded into the kitchen in stripy threadbare socks, having taken off her boots at the door. ‘Win any coconuts?’ He winked at her.
‘Nah, not today.’ She went to the cupboard, pulled out a glass, filled it with water at the sink and downed it in one go. There was a smell of warmth and baking, and normally in these circumstances Christie would fold herself into Paul’s arms, and he would be covered in flour and his sleeves would be rolled up, and they were still at the stage where they might even end up snogging, which was pretty amazing, seeing as they’d known each other for years. There was something about them being engaged now that had relit the passion – or at least there had been, until this afternoon’s events.
‘Was it fun?’ he persisted.
‘Yeah, it was OK.’
‘Oh, like that, was it?’ She could hear the gentle humour in Paul’s voice. ‘How was Alice?’
‘Fine,’ Christie said, as she went over to the kitchen table and sat down.
‘Really? You don’t sound convinced.’
‘No, it’s nothing like that. She was on good form.’ Christie hesitated. Her trip to the fortune teller would make a pretty funny story . . . but in the end, she decided against it. It wasn’t worth stirring things up.
As Paul crouched down at the oven to peer through the window, which even from here Christie could see was steamed up, she shook her head, like a dog. It was no good – it seemed as if she had an earworm now, one that she couldn’t get rid of. Never trust never trust never trust. For goodness’ sake, Christie thought – how could a complete stranger possibly know anything about her situation? And besides, Madame Magdalena had referred to a non-existent prospective husband as the untrustworthy o
ne, not Christie’s actual real-life fiancé, Paul Ingram. So the fortune teller had been wrong about all of it, and Christie needed to remember that. She needed to remember that just because her university boyfriend had turned out to be a cheating tosser, that didn’t mean that she shouldn’t trust Paul, who was the most honest, decent bloke ever. He’d never been late for a single date, even when they’d just been friends. He’d taken her to sweaty gigs and grimy comedy clubs, reminded her of the real life that existed beyond the rarefied quads of Cambridge. He’d given her a lifelong love of the Happy Mondays. But most of all he’d made her laugh again. He’d laughed her into loving him.
Paul took his bread out of the oven with a triumphant flourish, and it was a pumped-up plaited stick that was thicker at one end than the other.
‘Woo hoo, well done,’ said Christie. After Paul had mock-bowed and turned around to thwack it on to the wooden countertop, Christie opened the Telegraph and started to do the crossword. She was trying her hardest to seem normal, but she knew she was being too quiet. Usually she would be chatty, going on about who she’d bumped into, or what Alice was up to, or asking for help at what five across might be. Paul didn’t seem to mind though, and was doing the washing-up now, uncomplaining at the lack of assistance. He was wearing her pink rubber gloves and was so tall he had to bend over the sink. He’d taken out his contact lenses and his glasses had steamed up, but still he looked handsome to her, and she reminded herself how nice he was, how good they were together.