So Lizzie made her way to a supermarket and she bought three new bags of ice. There would be coffee bars she could go to, to warm up, if need be; and she walked the streets with her bags on her shoulders and the plastic bag of ice in her hand feeling newly alert and alive to the challenge of finding herself here. She no longer thought to worry about what people looking in at her might see. People were busy; caught up in their own dramas, and seeing only what they wanted to see. No one in the world was looking for a cannibal in a tall woman from Puttenham and so she ducked into the first open coffee shop she came to and went at once to the toilets to recharge the ice.
At four in the morning, she sat on a bench on the concourse at Glasgow station and she watched water being sprayed on the floor from a motorized cleaning machine. The lights were still on overhead though the shops had long been closed and barred. She watched pigeons fly down from the roof and a lost dog come running in and running out again. She thought of Rita and tried to imagine her here with her, lying at her feet with one ear up, one eyebrow lifted, looking around, overwhelmed. It pierced her heart to think of the dog, her loving eyes, and warmth, and she looked around the station, trying to find something, anything to keep her eyes on. This wasn’t a way to begin her future, but she lacked the energy right at the moment to think of another option. She let herself lie down on the bench, her back muscles hunched and tense against the cold. Just imagine, she told herself, that Jacob is in the garden chair; he is sitting at home, knowing I have gone. Then this new life becomes a real possibility, she thought. I have left him in order to start again. He is not my responsibility; he lives, without me, at home. It made her calmer to think of Jacob alive, being there for her, if she needed him, at home. It wasn’t possible, after all, to cut bits of one’s life out and go on alone as if the past had never happened. In her mind, and in her physical reality, Jacob Prain, the man she’d married, was still with her. Moving on without him was going to lead her to make a bad decision. How could she trust her own judgment? He would have to be included, she felt, in all that she set out to do.
Lizzie uncurled her legs, and got up from the bench. There was still an ache in her stomach from the consumption at the weekend of all that had been left, and she was feeling weary now from the journey, and the final cleaning frenzy she had put herself through.
The youth hostel was a ten-minute walk from the station, and by the time she arrived she was feeling very cold. It was six o’clock in the morning, and the hostel wasn’t open yet. Lizzie sat outside, on her bag. Her coat and scarf weren’t nearly thick enough for the Scottish weather, but until she found a job and could buy something else, perhaps from a charity shop, they would have to do. She hadn’t much money and the train ticket and ice supplies, the coffee and food had eaten up one hundred pounds. She would have to take it slowly from here, cut the coffee out, drink tap water, think ahead and write everything down.
232. You are starting to get very tired.
233. Find somewhere to rest.
234. You’ve gone without sleep now for forty-eight hours and you’ve not slept properly since the beginning of March.
235. There will be a youth hostel where you can find a bed. There may well be a deep freeze in the kitchen at the hostel. You could say that you have been staying on a cattle farm and have bought some meat that you would like to keep frozen.
236. Book yourself a room for the day and for the night.
237. Anyone looking in will see only a bag of ice on top and a layer of newspaper underneath.
At the hostel, Lizzie lay down on the clean sheets of the lower bunk and let her body sink into the mattress. She slept for five and a half hours, and when she woke, she decided to venture out in search of somewhere to eat. She took the cool bag with her and found a place down a cobbled street where they said it would be all right if she sat outside, at one of the metal tables on the street. The patron, who was wearing a bow tie, explained that he had no patio heaters and she might get very cold. Lizzie smiled and said that was fine. Then she asked him for a glass of red wine and a bowl of whatever soup he had. She had a cigarette and she read through the menu, just to see what was on it and because she could; then she sat back in her chair, with Jacob’s head underneath it, and she watched the street and the people walking and she tried to figure out from their faces and footsteps what sort of lives they might be leading.
“Lizzie, I think that between us, we do have the imagination to make this work, to make a success of our cakes.”
“It isn’t about imagination, Jacob, but application, hard work, and making sure that enough people out there know what we’re trying to do.”
“I disagree,” he’d said, and shook his head, though he hadn’t been able to add anything else.
“Jacob?”
“Yes?”
“Do you still love me?”
“For goodness sake!”
“Do you think you ever did?”
Tom
Even after years, and with a new life, I am still that boy at the garden center biking back to the house in the woods. I come back to a shiny hatchback parked in the lane, and I find that Joanna is there, standing out in the garden with Lizzie. I see the two of them as I step through the kitchen and I know it’s her, that shock of white hair, and I can tell from the body language that something is wrong. Lizzie is standing back on her heels with her arms folded; Joanna also has her arms folded, shielding her body, and one hand is pressed flat against the side of her nodding face. It looks as if the visitor is being told something she doesn’t believe. It looks as if she isn’t going until she has got what she came for.
I breeze out. “Afternoon all,” I say, and I feel my chest puffing up, my shoulders rising to the challenge this woman from London has brought to our hidey-hole in the woods. Suddenly I hate the hatchback, and the scruffy jeans and the bangles the woman is wearing over the sleeves of a long gray cardigan. Beside Joanna Lizzie looks like a stiff, startled giraffe. Her clothes and hair look cheap and faded.
I hear her say, “Oh God, I’m fine!” then she sees me and claps her hands in front of her breasts and calls me over, rubbing her hands together like a nervous person preparing for a speech.
I go feeling heavy and sick and faint in case somehow this woman is going to bring an end to the happiness here, or make some remark, or show me a face that tells me she doesn’t approve of my being here.
“This is Tom,” says Lizzie, loudly.
“Yes,” says Joanna. “He came to see me in London.”
The corners of Joanna’s mouth push out to the sides in a flat fixed smile.
“I just know that Jacob would reply to me,” she says. “I believed in him. I know that he wouldn’t take off like that. I just think that…Oh, I don’t know. I feel like I’m not getting the whole picture here. I’m sorry for just arriving, but I felt that we had to talk.”
Lizzie is smiling in a sweet and friendly way with her head tipping way down to the side. Her face seems to be reflecting the green from the trees. Her chin is stiff as flint.
“Can I get you anything?” I ask the air between them and then look from one to the other.
Joanna sighs and splits the straps of her handbag along her cashmered arm to fish around in the contents for her keys,
“No,” she says, shaking her head into her bag. The voice that has been politely controlled behind a trembling lip and an arch, slightly pleading way of speaking—trying to have a discussion rather than an argument—gives way now to a series of whimpers as she looks at each of us in turn and says she’ll be in touch soon.
Lizzie walks into the kitchen in long manly strides and pours herself a glass of white wine from the bottle in the fridge.
“My grandfather wants to come and see us,” I say. “And Mike and Nic. They just want to pop in and see.”
“See what?”
“Us! Me. Here!”
Her knees go. She sinks into a chair at the table and rests her head on the wood.
“You h
ave to leave now, Tom.”
“What?”
“You should go. It’s been very pleasant having you here, but really, now, that’s enough.”
I sit down at the table.
“I don’t want to go, though. We’re fine here.”
“You have to find a home of your own now,” she says. “Not hang around here, clinging on to me.”
“Who’s the one clinging on?”
She drains her glass, and stands up. A blast of cold air whips around the room as the back door swings open.
“I can’t go,” I tell her. “I don’t know where to go.”
“You’ll find somewhere quite quickly,” she says, turning now in the doorway to the kitchen and folding her arms. She is looking upwards, as if calculating how long it will take her to get her rucksack out from under the bed and make her move.
I laugh, sit back in my chair like a boy waiting for punches. “We are cool!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
I laugh. I don’t know what else to do.
“Fuck it,” I say. “I’ll go home. If you don’t want me here!”
“I do,” she says, softening, turning back into the room. “I do want you here. But we need to make sure that no one else comes here, Tom. We need to know that Joanna won’t come to find us, that no one will. It’ll just be us, Tom. That’s the way it has to be. Do you understand?”
She stands there smiling at me. Through her tears she is bright red, and her mouth is forming into a tiny circle through which it seems she is trying to suck some air in.
“It has to be just us if you stay here, Tom. Because I’ve done something…”
17
“Could you sell me some ice?” Lizzie said to the waitress when she came to clear her bowl and plate. The waitress frowned and wrinkled her nose while clearing the table, pushing her nostrils out, as if she had smelled something foul. She said they didn’t sell ice.
Lizzie felt herself going very red. After the waitress had gone she sniffed under her chair. There was something there. It was indistinct. She put her head further down and sniffed again. Then she withdrew her head and looked around at the street. She went back under and sniffed again; pulled her head back up, took in some air. She glugged back the rest of her wine. It was hard to know what was worse: being down there with it and fully aware of how the smell was developing, or being up above the table where the smell was so faint she couldn’t keep tabs on it.
She had thought there would be more time before he woke up. She had thought she would get the night to sleep a little with it out on the windowsill at least. She had hoped to be able to find a little studio flat in the morning, with a freezer. Even one that came above or below a fridge. She would have been able to take the shelf out and squeeze the head right in.
“Not so,” she whispered tightly.
She left the cool bag under the table and went into the restaurant to pay for her soup. She walked towards the counter hoping to avoid contact with the waitress, who was down the back of the room, standing beside the door to the toilets pinning up her hair. She caught Lizzie’s eye in the mirror and didn’t smile.
Lizzie fumbled in her bag for her purse and pulled out a twenty-pound note to pay for her meal.
She lit a cigarette just as soon as she was out and decided to smoke at all times while carrying the bag. Wherever she went from now on, she would walk in a cloud of cigarette smoke so that no one could get near her and smell what was in the bag she was carrying.
She turned left at the end of the street and walked in the direction of the all-night supermarket. If she got three more bags of ice, and replenished tonight, she would surely be able to leave the bag on the windowsill and get a night’s sleep.
She loosened the strap on the cool bag so that she could put it over one arm and over her head and drape it diagonally across her body. She now had it square on her stomach, which meant that she could put her arms around it, and blow smoke directly onto the blue material. She had bought a bag with wipe-clean foil lining, and Endura thermal insulation, but it wasn’t working as it should.
“You had to bloody wake up,” she whispered to the bag as she walked along. “You couldn’t let me be.”
At least she wasn’t home now. At least she’d got away from the woods. She stood on the street, in the dark, and lit another cigarette. When a large burly man staggered towards her muttering to himself, she blew smoke in a downward plume so that it would billow around the bag and then drift upwards around her. A vision of Jacob’s head, then his corduroy trousers, came into her mind. She blew more smoke out and flapped her hand around the bag.
She dared not leave the bag outside the all-night supermarket, but went in with it for ice, and deodorant, which she sprayed there and then, all over herself, while pretending to experience the scent in the aisle. She chose a man’s deodorant, believing it to be stronger—it was the one Jacob had used—and she sprayed this around her feet as she walked towards the counter to pay. She also bought a bottle of disinfectant and some chewing gum for her breath.
There was one other person booked into her room, and the girl was asleep under a mass of black hair. Lizzie gasped when she switched her bedside light on and saw the tattooed roses wrapped around the girl’s upper arm. It was freezing cold out, so the head went on the sill, and Lizzie opened her holdall, got changed into her nightclothes, and slipped under the duvet. For a long time she lay there, stiff on her back, and holding the covers in her hands. Her eyes were fixed open on the slats of the bed above.
She did sleep, and when she woke she had the sensation, for the first time in weeks, of having been gently lifted out of a peaceful dream. For a brief moment she felt as if she were starting again, like a child. Then the thought of what was on the sill and all she would have to do today crowded in on her, and she shut her eyes before fully registering the air coming in through the open window.
The bag was gone.
Lizzie got up very quickly and pulled her clothes on. Her heart was beating very fast and her hands were shaking.
“I found it,” said the huge Glaswegian woman sitting at the counter.
“Could I have it?” Lizzie asked. She could feel the sweat running down her sides.
“Why would you leave your things outside?”
“I…I just put it on the sill to keep it cool. It’s a cool bag!” said Lizzie, and her voice was very high.
“I can see that!” said the woman as she pulled her knitted cardigan in over her breasts. With one of her eyes she was looking at the air to the left of Lizzie’s head.
“Where is it?” Lizzie asked.
“It’s right here. At my feet.”
“Can I have it, please?”
“Course,” said the woman, and she pushed her chair back and bent forward. Lizzie dashed round behind the counter and leaped for the bag.
“Urgh!” cried the woman, as Lizzie pushed to the side under the desk. She heaved herself back in the chair. “What the bloody…!”
“I’m so sorry,” Lizzie spluttered on her knees. She grabbed the bag with both hands and dragged it past the woman’s legs. The smell was unbearable. “I’m so sorry. I’m going. I’m leaving. I’m going to get right out of your way now.”
The woman was staring at her with her mouth open.
“It’s not gone six a.m.!” she said, as if it was hard for her to believe there could be this much nervous energy in another human being. “What’s the name?” she said, with one eyebrow raised.
“I’m Lizzie,” came the reply as Lizzie ran back around the counter.
“Lizzie who?”
“Prain,” said Lizzie, and then she turned in the corridor and tried to sling the stinking cool bag over her shoulder as she walked, striding manfully away.
Tom
In my mind, I go back and it’s like the last time.
I am cycling fast in a thick fog in the dark. I swerve onto the verge above the cycle path, sit back on the bike and release the handlebar. Th
e bike skates down the hill towards a valley.
I push hard, head down, past damp thatched cottages in the village, past the primary school, past the post office, and a steamed-up mirror on the bend. Past the Dog and Duck with the climbing frame in the garden, a horse lifting its head by a fence, a trough with twigs frozen in the ice, and water on the field, a dip and a mud-caked road.
I spin at the turning for Tubford Lane, and I am in the woods. Alder trees with skinny catkins. I bike past the faded blue Volvo, and come to a dark, stifled house on the bend.
I know her story now. I have known it for twenty-four hours. During that time I have not slept. I have been to work and tripped around.
I throw the bike at the yew hedge and stumble on the stone steps, through an unlocked door, not stopping to stretch or breathe, or take the helmet off. I am in my cycling gear. I switch the lights on to signs of life having moved on. I see a note on the kitchen table. And an envelope with a letter inside it.
She’d left the hostel straightaway that morning and got on a train from Glasgow.
Once she was on the train, there was nothing to do but sit there hoping.
“I just had to sit and hope,” she says, “that people would tolerate it, not feel so oppressed that they would be forced to make inquiries or a complaint to the ticket inspector.
“Every time he came to check my ticket,” she says, “I thought it was going to be time. I sat there watching him wrinkle his nose; and I could see that the carriage I was in was virtually empty. People had had to evacuate the carriage. I didn’t blame them. So sinister,” she says. “A smell like that. The way it creeps up on you and stops your heart.”
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