The party was in a claustrophobic basement room. It looked like everyone Sadie had ever met was crammed into the room. Personal space came at a premium. I felt the bass throb in my throat. We made our way to the bar, where there were bottles of beer in huge buckets. I grabbed two, one for each of us. The music drowned out everything so each time we wanted to speak we leant in, hand over mouth, feeding the words directly into each other’s eardrums. Even then I had no idea what she was saying, just nodded along and tried to fix a smile to my face. Kira started to move with the music; she was always a good dancer. A natural. I had been known to shamelessly copy her moves when my own limited repertoire was exhausted, but my body wouldn’t move as fluidly as hers. I got the sense I’d need more than one bottle of beer to get it going tonight. I shifted a bit on my feet, like a dad at a disco.
Kira nudged me.
‘He’s here, just over there, talking to Mark and Sadie.’
He was called Fred. A friend of Sadie’s with whom Kira had shared a brief encounter weeks before.
He waved in her direction, smiled a warm, toothy smile which she returned while touching her hair self-consciously. He started to make his way over towards us. She shot me a look: don’t worry, I won’t leave you. I shouted in her ear: ‘Get lost. If you don’t go for him, I will.’
I shuffled away to give her space. The crowd at the bar had thinned out, drifted to the centre of the room, where a DJ was playing in front of a makeshift dance floor. The tunes were ones I knew, late nineties dance anthems that had the crowd throwing their arms in the air, glancing at each other and nodding in recognition. A couple I recognised embraced and gave each other a lingering kiss. Looking around the room I saw everyone standing in groups or couples, dancing, roaring, shouting, touching. As far as I could tell there was only one other person, a man who appeared older than the rest of the crowd, who wasn’t talking or dancing. I recognised the look, as if he couldn’t plug himself into the energy of the night. I wasn’t in the mood either. If it hadn’t been for Kira I would have slipped away, but glancing over in her direction I saw she was deep in conversation with Fred, his hand lightly touching her hip as they talked. I turned to the bar and ordered a cocktail instead.
Two minutes later a woman pushed past me and knocked the glass out of my hand. The white top I was wearing was drenched with strawberry daiquiri.
I stood, head down, watching a trail of pink cut through white fabric and drip down into my cleavage so I could feel strawberry gloop on my boobs. Under normal circumstances I might have laughed. Instead I realised I was about to cry.
I felt someone push paper into my hand.
The woman who had bumped me, no doubt. I wasn’t ready to look up. I wanted to disappear.
‘Here, take these.’ It was a man’s voice. ‘Are you OK?’ He was shouting, but his voice was barely audible against the music.
‘Fine,’ I attempted to say. I raised my head a fraction, opened my eyes. He pulled back away from me, held out one remaining paper towel. ‘They’ve run out here but I can fetch more from upstairs.’ He saw me about to protest. ‘Any excuse to get out of here for a minute.’
It was the guy who had been standing on his own at the bar. I smiled. ‘That makes two of us,’ I said.
I followed him, weaving our way through the faces towards the stairs, where the noise began to recede. True to his word, he extracted a pile of paper towels from the bar, waited as I dabbed down my top. ‘Lost cause, I think, but thanks all the same.’ I pulled my coat around me to hide the stain. His face was familiar, the cut of his eyes, the line of his jaw. I glanced around awkwardly, unsure of what to do now, reluctant to go back downstairs. The pub was arranged like a living room, squashy sofas dotted around, battered armchairs, a fire. I was overcome by the desire to sit down, still my head. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
He hesitated. ‘That’s probably not a good idea.’
Brilliant. Now he thinks I’m trying to come on to him. I shot a look over to the door to plan an escape route. A sea of people stood in my way.
‘It wasn’t a come-on,’ I said defensively. ‘Just a thank-you.’
‘I didn’t think it was, it’s just …’
‘You don’t have to explain. It’s fine. Thanks for the help.’ I went to move away.
‘A pint,’ he said. ‘A pint would be lovely.’
We installed ourselves in a corner of the pub, me on a sofa and him on the chair opposite. A large low coffee table was positioned between the two. I felt like I needed a loudspeaker to talk to him. He took a swig of his pint and ran his finger up and down the glass. Was he actually going to say anything? I should have cut my losses and run. Why had I felt the need to buy him a drink and prolong the evening?
‘I’m sure I recognise your face from somewhere,’ I said when the silence grew painful.
He looked up, squinted, as if measuring me up. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied and returned to staring at his glass.
‘Are you always this talkative, or is it just me?’
He lifted his eyes and gave me something close to a smile. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’m Eve, by the way. How do you know Sadie?’
‘She’s a friend of my sister.’
‘Maybe I have seen you before. What’s your sister called?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Annie … Annie Alden,’ he said, as if forcing the words out in defiance, before turning to the glass again to study the trails of condensation that had collected on it.
‘Oh,’ I said before I could stop myself.
The reluctance, the studied air of detachment made sense now.
My glass was almost full, his pint too. I wouldn’t get up to leave. I would finish my drink. I would talk to him until it was finished. Then I would go home.
‘David,’ I said. ‘You must be David.’ He gave a small nod.
‘You can go if you want. I won’t hold it against you,’ he said.
‘I still have a full glass of wine.’ I held it up to prove my point.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
On the same day Mark had left our flat two weeks earlier, David Alden had walked out of Pentonville prison. His mother and his sister Annie had been outside waiting for him as the first flakes of snow fell and melted on the ground. They’d hugged, properly, without guards watching, for the first time in more than five years and led him to the car in awkward silence. In David’s eyes everything appeared altered. The colours sharper, noises louder, the speed of movement of buses, people, cars accelerated. Like a ride that was going too fast for him to get on. On the journey back to the family home in Kent, they’d talked about the weather, about the tenant in his flat who had called to say there was a leak in the roof, about how lucky they’d been with the traffic on the way there. They arrived back at three o’clock. Too late for lunch, too early for supper. His mum produced a chocolate cake she’d baked especially, the words ‘Welcome Home’ spidered on the top in white, leaking into the brown of the chocolate icing.
‘Here’s to freedom,’ his mum had said, raising her mug of tea. She reached out to touch his face, as if she couldn’t recognise him by sight alone. ‘You look so different. I can’t bear to …’
‘Well it’s over now,’ Annie jumped in, steering the conversation away from the past, the days and nights in prison, the horror of which they would never, could never understand.
David had smiled weakly, taken a bite of the cake and remarked on how good it was. His mother squeezed his hand, a light sparked in her eyes. This was what they wanted to hear, the part he would have to play.
He couldn’t tell them that it wasn’t over; that although he was sitting in his mum’s living room, on the sofa he’d bounced on as a boy, although he could see out to the garden where the grass was lush underneath the scant covering of snow, not worn and brown from his childhood football games, he wasn’t free. He couldn’t spoil the afternoon by telling them the truth. He was still penned in a room six feet by eight feet.
&
nbsp; ‘You don’t need to prove anything to us, love,’ his mum had told him once. ‘I know you wouldn’t have done it.’
He was grateful for her love and belief when friends had faded away unsure of who he was any more. But his mum was wrong. He needed to prove it to everyone, and to Melody, who had been his friend. He needed to prove it to the police, who had charged the wrong man. Where was the person who had done it? He’d dreamt of him, walking the streets, inhaling fresh air, under a wide open sky. Would he do it again? Had he done it already? No, David Alden couldn’t move forward by as much as an inch until he cleared his name. It wasn’t the world that had altered but his place in it.
‘They said I had come on to her in the car that night and when she turned me down I got so angry I attacked her. It was never like that between me and Melody. We were friends. I didn’t want anything else.’ He stared at me across the table. ‘I tried to appeal, but they said there were no grounds for it. Tonight is my first night out since I was released. I can see people watching me and pretending they haven’t seen me. I can see them whispering. Even the few who’ve talked to me … you know, the ones who say they believe me … I know what they’re thinking. They’re thinking, did he do it? No smoke without fire. That’s what they’re thinking.’ He stopped, looked across to me. ‘It’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?’
I was thinking questions, lots of them. I was looking at his face and wondering if that was the face of a man who would try to kill a friend. I was trying to glance at his eyes without being too obvious. Were they cold, or just dead and beaten?
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that is what I’m thinking.’
‘At least you’re honest,’ taking a gulp of his pint. ‘I’ll give you that. Sorry to dump this on you. I need to learn to keep my mouth shut. It’s not your problem. I should never have come out because I can’t do any of this right now. I can’t make polite conversation because all I can think about is working out a way to clear my name, so I can get a job, have a girlfriend who doesn’t worry I’m going to kill her. I’d like to be able to walk down the street and not want to disappear. No one gets it, not really. I didn’t value it until it was gone. Your reputation is the most valuable thing you have. That’s what they took from me. So yes, I might not be in prison any more eating shit food, but everything still tastes crap to me because it’s leaked into my whole life. I need to put it right.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life down there. I only came out because my boiler has broken and it’s minus two inside my flat.’
‘It’s going to snow this weekend.’
‘So I hear. I’ve timed it perfectly.’
‘I know a good plumber if you …’ He stopped himself. ‘I’m sure you’ve got it sorted already.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I haven’t.’
‘I’ll get Annie to text you the number. Nice to talk to you, Eve.’ He didn’t want to ask for my number, didn’t want to put me in an awkward position. I began to understand in the smallest way what he meant when he said he couldn’t engage. Your reputation is social currency, the entrance fee into normal life. Without it you will always be on the outside.
He unhooked his coat from the back of the chair, gave me one last lingering look before he walked to the door and disappeared into the dark. His pint was only half finished.
When I was alive, my head was filled with the constant chatter of thoughts, endless to-do lists, meetings, deadlines, overdue bills, forgotten birthdays. I think I was fairly typical. For most of us the minutiae of life tends to crowd out the bigger picture. In that context it is easy to see how the moments that matter slip by undetected. They’re unassuming, rarely announce themselves with fanfare. It’s only hours, days, years later that you might look back and realise that the chance meeting with an old friend on a bus, the last-minute decision to take a trip, the choice you made to go out to a pub and not stay in watching TV changed the course of your life completely.
Death made it easy to pinpoint my sliding-doors moments.
If my boiler hadn’t broken I wouldn’t have gone to the party.
If I hadn’t gone to the party I wouldn’t have met David.
If I hadn’t met David I would still be alive.
Death made it easier to spot other people’s moments too. I had the necessary perspective, hindsight and foresight. Even as I watched Nat walk towards Melody in a drab NCP car park close to Richmond Police Station, I knew what was about to unfold. I could predict that their conversation of two minutes, no more, would change the course of her life.
Call it fate, serendipity.
It had to happen.
Chapter Twelve
Melody
THE STREET AIR is fresh and welcome after being cooped up in the police station. They step out on to a thin strip of pavement, only narrowly missing a toddler on a scooter. Mel spies the boy’s mother fifty yards or so further down from the look on her face and the fact that she is shouting, ‘Dexter, wait there.’ She mouths ‘sorry’ to them as she walks past shaking her head.
‘Coffee?’ Sam suggests.
‘No thanks.’ How can he think of coffee after what they’ve just heard in the police station?
‘Well I’m starving, wait here while I grab a sandwich.’ Without another word he darts into an Italian coffee shop next to the train station, leaving her standing in the middle of the pavement being bumped and jostled by shoppers. A woman carrying a Marks and Spencer Food Hall bag in each hand knocks her and glares at Mel as if she is in the wrong.
Her eyes cut over to Sam, who is now standing at the deli counter deliberating over sandwich fillings. She can feel the beat of her heart pounding through her. Quickly she walks across to the café and waits outside the door where she can see him.
Two women brush past, arms linked, chatting together. One of them says something she can’t catch and they pull away from each other laughing. Dressed up, tight jeans, spike-heeled boots, chunky (architectural, she’s heard it called) jewellery, red lipstick. She used to wear it; Mac Lady Danger was her shade. She felt like a right idiot asking for it at the make-up counter. And the clothes, the weekends spent in Selfridges and Liberty touching fabrics, trying them on, emerging with goods that simultaneously emptied her account for the rest of the month and made her feel like the richest woman in London.
She catches sight of her feet. What is she wearing? FitFlops that her mum bought her. Bootleg jeans that must have been in her wardrobe for more than a decade. And where has all her make-up gone? The Lady Danger red that she wouldn’t leave the house without? The liquid blush that gave her instant pink cheeks.
Where has she gone?
She thinks of the hours spent in Julia’s consulting room. Julia is her therapist. Before Julia there was Hugo, and Michael before him. Has she disappeared down a hole somewhere listening to them talk about isolating personal thoughts and representation strategies?
‘What do YOU think?’ Julia asks her regularly. Why doesn’t Melody say what she is really thinking? Why, when she’s looking at the nub of Julia’s shoulder bone protruding from her clothes and the feathery hair that coats her skin, does she not say, ‘I’m thinking that you should eat something’?
Or ‘Do you actually eat anything, Julia, because it looks to me like you could be doing with a very good meal?’
Or ‘Did you choose the job of therapist so you could focus on other people’s issues as a way of ignoring your own?’
It occurs to Melody that she has allowed herself to be reprogrammed, all her idiosyncrasies willingly ironed out. She runs on a straight line now, an even keel without modulation. No, she doesn’t get so low she weeps until her eyes puff up, but then nor does she hit the highs, the moments when she loves life and wants to squeeze every last laugh out of it. When was the last time she went out without a plan, happy to go where the evening took her? The hangovers are a thing of the past, but sometimes she craves that feeling from a glass of champagne when the bubble
s first hit her head.
She has become so pathetic and invisible that a woman with two bags of ready meals can bump into her and think that is OK. The old Melody with Lady Danger lips and killer clothes wouldn’t have stood for that. She’d have said, ‘No, excuse ME,’ loudly, with a pointed stare, so the woman knew exactly what she thought of her.
The sky dims, like someone has flicked off the lights. Dollops of black cloud sit above her head. Sam leaves the café, a sandwich held to his mouth. Is he eating it or is it eating him? She’s not certain.
‘Ready?’ he says, as if there’s a chance she might like to stand on the street and do nothing a little longer. A spot of mayonnaise on the top of his lip moves when he speaks. She’d like to shove the sandwich down his throat.
‘Ready.’
At the pay machine, Sam pulls out the ticket from his wallet. Only the machine doesn’t take cards, or at least the one that is in working order doesn’t, and Sam doesn’t have cash.
‘Have you got any money?’
‘No.’ She shakes her head without checking. She can tell by the weight of her bag that she didn’t bring her purse with her. Come to think of it, why did she even bother to bring her bag? There’s nothing useful in it, perhaps nothing in it at all.
‘I spent my last on the sandwich.’ He looks mildly irritated. ‘Here.’ He thrusts the keys in to her hand. ‘I’ll go to the cashpoint then, shall I?’
He takes off, running up the slight incline, a lolloping, gangly stride with his arms flailing at his sides. His shape shrinks then disappears entirely before it registers that he has left her on her own. Where is the car? How many levels up are they in the multi-storey? Two, three? She can’t remember. Her eyes slide across to the stairwell. It will smell of stale urine; there will be discarded cans and crisp packets littering the entrance. Nope, she can’t go that way, she’ll have to use the ramp, avoid the oncoming cars. She tries to get her feet to move but they won’t. They’re stuck to the ground. She feels her body harden, drying out like modelling clay. If she moves, she might crack and break.
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