She planned to include photo galleries showing images of all the different kinds of floral tributes and memorials that were available to choose from – sprays, wreaths and cushions and garlands – as well as offering a bespoke service for customers wanting an original design. There were so many varieties of foliage and flowers she wished to experiment with instead of the usual funeral staples such as lilies, carnations and the garish chrysanthemums that she abhorred. She didn’t want to be cynical, but she knew that Meghan would expect her to maximise profits, so the website would also need to entice ‘upsells’ with add-ons such as cards, balloons and soft toys to decorate the graves.
More mundanely, she would need online forms, enabling customers to fill out their details, as well as the address and coordinates of the grave and the name of the deceased. Then she needed a fees schedule, for same-day, next-day and specified-day deliveries, and delivery charges based on driving distance from London with a sixty-mile cut-off. On the payments side, the website would need to process online orders via a secure shopping cart and transfer payments directly into the Seventh Heaven bank account.
Celeste was confident she could deal with the artistic side including the photographs and the blurb, but the technical bit was beyond her. She would have to seek help at college. In the meantime, she decided she needed to buy herself a decent SLR camera. She would have to raid her savings as her Seventh Heaven salary barely covered her share of the rent and she was continually overdrawn. But she could look on it as an investment, a business expense. Her clients would expect to receive professional quality prints showing her beautiful arrangements on the graves. She expected that her older clients would not be satisfied with digital images alone.
She snapped closed the lid of her laptop and grabbed her bag. A few minutes later she was herself dicing with death, pedalling at top speed across town on her shaky old bicycle to the nearest camera superstore. Armed with her new toy, she spent the rest of the afternoon wheeling the bike through Green Park and Hyde Park capturing the flora and the fauna and the wildlife. And for perhaps the first time in the last seven years, she was truly at peace.
*
Friday morning, she was back in college, having submitted her paper on ‘Website Optimisation’ (written as best she could) and now fired up with enthusiasm to get started on the website design for CelestialHeadstones.com. The first half of the morning was taken up with each of the students giving a five-minute presentation on the business model for the website they were proposing to design as part of the course. Most of them had business ideas relating to computer games or fashion or cosmetics or the music industry. Along with Celeste, a couple of the students had more original plans. One was intending to set up a pet dating and mating agency, which raised a few laughs.
‘That’ll be a money spinner,’ said the tutor, ‘and I really mean it! People care more for their pets than their kids in this country!’
Another was obsessed with gaming. He was in the process of designing his own virtual reality platform – something to do with a fight for survival in a post-apocalyptic world – where gamers could register and take sides and fight out their post-apocalyptic fantasies.
Celeste’s project got a fairly cool reception. ‘That’s sick,’ said one of the girls – and she didn’t mean it in a good way. But then her website was all about ‘finding your colour wheel’ and choosing clothes to match personality, which Celeste thought rather lame.
When they got on to the technical part of the session, Celeste listened attentively, taking copious notes and trying to understand the software features that her teacher was expounding. By the end of the lesson her head was aching with the effort of concentration. She was lost. It was like a foreign language to her. Her brain just didn’t work that way. She felt hopeless. Her business venture would fall at the first hurdle, if she couldn’t get her website up and running.
Celeste ate her sandwich quickly and alone in the canteen. Although it was her day off, she couldn’t wait to get started on her website. She wanted to cycle over to Seventh Heaven in time to take photographs of the front of the shop for the website while the sun was still out and high in the sky. She walked out of college to the street and crossed over to the railings where she had chained her bike. Someone had used her bicycle basket as a waste bin to dump a half-empty packet of jelly babies and a sheet of paper torn from a notebook. She took the litter out crossly before placing her rucksack into the basket. However, when she looked more closely at the paper, she noticed that there were words written on it. She flattened it out on her knee and read the note, written in capital letters in black biro.
STOP BLOCKING ME. WE NEED TO TALK. TEXT ME.
She wasn’t sure if the message was meant for her. She looked around uncertainly at the faces of the students going up and down the pavement on either side of the road as they came and went from their classes.
Was anybody watching her?
She remembered the message she had seen on Anya’s mobile…
It had to be him. He was trying to contact her – hounding her. That girl could have told him where she was studying, thought Celeste. He might have waited for her outside college and seen her arriving. Or, he could have seen her bike. She’d had it for years – they’d been on bike rides together as teenagers and her initials were scratched on the frame.
Her hand clenched into a fist around the sweet packet and she shuddered as something sticky oozed onto her fingers before she let it drop to the pavement in disgust. She rubbed her fingers frantically on her jeans.
‘It’s no use running away,’ she said to herself. ‘I’ve got to stand up to this manipulative bully once and for all. He can’t control me now. I need to confront him and tell him to get out of my life forever…’ There was a mobile number scribbled below the message. She pushed the note into her rucksack. Her hands were trembling. She couldn’t think straight.
Without so much as a backwards glance, she bumped her bike off the kerb into the traffic and pedalled away furiously up the street.
PAST
9
Tom is about four years old – that age when little children enjoy sandpits and digging and grubbing about in the mud with toy watering cans and spades. She’s almost twelve years old, and more and more she has to act as his surrogate mother.
There’s a commotion going on in the kitchen – the usual soundtrack for a Saturday morning – swear words and sniping, raised voices, building to a full-blown row, with shouting and screaming and then a crescendo of shattered glass.
She goes into Tom’s bedroom. He’s hiding under the bed sheet, his face pinched and pale. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’ She helps him find his clothes and get dressed and they creep down the stairs. She glances into the kitchen as they go out the back door. Stacey is sitting hunched over her black coffee, her forehead resting on one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Her father is standing with his back to the sink, holding a large piece of broken glass – the jagged base of a gin bottle. He glares at her. A stream of red runs from his palm and drips onto the floor.
He has a well-paid job in the city. Though not as grand as Ben’s with its pool and sloping wooded grounds and boating lake, they live in a big detached house with a big garden like all the other prosperous, privileged, middle-class families in the neighbourhood. Not one of her friends knows the full extent of the chaos that reigns behind its high, dark green hedges.
Stacey used to be a keen gardener with a flair for garden design until drink got the better of her. Celeste’s happiest memories date from early childhood. She can remember helping her mother to prick out seedlings in the springtime even before she could see over the top of the potting bench. And she recalls misty autumn mornings when she knelt beside her mother on the damp grass digging holes with her little trowel to plant spring bulbs. Stacey showed her the pictures on the packets and taught her the names: narcissus, snowdrops, crocus, tulips, alliums and bluebells.
And then there was th
e excitement of seeing the flowers poking their bright green shoots up out of the grass the following March. Her mother would tell her they were making magic with the flower fairies – turning the wrinkly brown bulbs into beautiful creations in all the dancing colours of the rainbow. She gave the best hugs then. And she had the softest lips to kiss things better.
Celeste takes Tom down to the potting shed, now tangled in weeds and shrouded in cobwebs but still a place of refuge. She remembers that there is a dusty sack of spring bulbs abandoned in a corner under the bench. She finds the old toolbox and takes out her mother’s big trowel and her own little trowel. Both are rusty from lack of use.
She hands Tom the little trowel. ‘We’re going to make some magic,’ she says, and he follows her to the overgrown border near the apple orchard at the bottom of the garden. While she clears and weeds the plot, he potters around with his trowel. Then together they dig holes in the black crumbly soil and bury the bulbs in the earth. Celeste tells Tom that in the springtime the flower fairies will come and make the pretty flowers grow, and the shouting will stop, and everything will be sunny and bright out in the garden and inside the four walls of the house.
But Tom doesn’t care. ‘NeeNaw, NeeNaw, NeeNaw.’ His noisy refrain gets on her nerves as she wanders off to return the trowels to the potting shed. Fairies are not part of his imaginary universe.
No.
He’s a firefighter, racing up and down with his red plastic watering can, putting out the flames.
PRESENT
10
I’m so anxious and agitated that I can’t sleep. You do this to me. I toss and turn in my bed and all I can see in my black hellhole is You in a red dress, standing over me laughing.
In the dark, I hold my breath waiting for the phone to ring. I reach out to see the screen, which I’ve been checking obsessively for new texts every five minutes since yesterday lunchtime. You haven’t responded. But the spyware app I activated on your mobile when I found it at Heavana enables me to track your location at the tap of a finger. So, I know that You are at home. But are You alone? I imagine You in your bed and that man from the club doing horrible things to You.
I get up and switch on my computer. Two hours of U-Porn later and I emerge from the swamp feeling even worse. I still can’t sleep and now I imagine myself in your bed doing to You all those revolting, unspeakable things I have been watching on my screen.
I hate You for making me feel this way. It’s 3am in the morning but there’s no point lying here torturing myself. I get up and start on my college work. It takes me less than an hour to complete the assignment that our tutor set for the weekend. I should be teaching him.
By the first glimmers of dawn, I have to get out of my empty flat. Almost without thinking, I find myself standing on the pavement in the freezing rain on the opposite side of the road to where You live, looking up at your window, my eyes fixed on the gap in your curtains. From this angle, all I can see is a strip of darkness. But it’s enough to know that You are there.
As the city begins to stir, my watch is interrupted only by the occasional taxi, speeding down the slippery tarmac, its grey-skinned occupant craning his neck to gape at me.
Like a mariner scanning for icebergs… I keep my eyes ahead… don’t flinch a muscle… Nobody can arrest me for standing here quietly minding my own business… keeping watch while You sleep.
Looking isn’t a crime.
*
Anya’s boyfriend was out with his mates for the evening watching football at the pub, so she had offered to cook a seafood linguine for Celeste and Jessi to be followed by a girls’ night for the three of them watching a movie at the flat. Celeste hadn’t decided what to do about the hand-written note left in the basket of her bicycle. Coming after the text message that she’d seen on Anya’s phone, it was the combination of the sweets and the note that made her sure it must be Ben. After all, he was the only person who could know about her childhood love of jelly babies.
Celeste had spent about twenty minutes washing her hands obsessively at the bathroom sink when she got back to the flat. She was distracted throughout the meal. She kept checking her phone for messages and peered anxiously over the other girls’ screens whenever she heard them pinging.
In the end, Celeste decided to speak to her friends about it.
‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘He’s trying to make contact with me again. He won’t back off. First, he found me at the club, next he tried to match with me on Tinder, then he tried to get hold of my phone number, and now he’s following me to college and leaving weird stuff in my bike basket.’
‘Don’t be daft!’ said Anya. ‘Stop being paranoid. Your imagination’s running riot.’
‘How do you know they’re from Ben?’ said Jessi. ‘Could be from Steve or another one of your new mates?’
‘I’m sure it’s him.’ Celeste continued obsessing about it. ‘He’s the only one who knows I was addicted to jelly babies when I was a little girl. He’s bloody stalking me. It’s freaking me out.’
‘So, he left you some sweets. Big deal! Do you think he poisoned them?’ Anya laughed sarcastically. ‘You need to chill out.’
‘I think it’s cute,’ chipped in Jessi. ‘He wanted to leave you a little gift as a peace offering. Probably some joker ate half the packet.’
The bike rack was right near the bus stop. It was true there were always students hanging around who could have helped themselves.
‘The Mystery of the Missing Jelly Babies…’ Anya teased.
‘I wish you would stop gaslighting me!’ snapped Celeste.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anya. ‘I didn’t mean to make light of it. I thought you were getting over him now. You’ve been so preoccupied with your new business venture and out socialising with your new college friends. You’ve seemed so much more positive and confident recently. Like a new person.’
‘Look, I didn’t imagine this,’ said Celeste. She held out the crumpled sheet of paper. ‘I don’t want anything to do with him. That girl who sent you a text, Louise, or whatever her name is, she must have told him I’ve gone back to college.’ Anya would know she’d been snooping on her phone but Celeste didn’t care. ‘For God’s sake don’t give that girl my number.’
Anya took the note and read it silently while Jessi looked over her shoulder. Celeste caught the two women exchanging a glance.
‘No – this is not my illness coming back,’ snapped Celeste. ‘I’m over that now. I’m not deluding myself. This note is from him. I’m sure of it.’
Celeste understood only too well the meaning of that look. Anya and Jessi were a little younger than her and had been in the year below her at school, so they hadn’t been close to her or to Ben at the time of the tragedy. She had connected with them at a party in London some five years later and once their friendship was firmly established, Anya and Jessi had offered Celeste the spare room in their rented flat when their former flatmate moved out.
Because Celeste spoke very little about what she had been through, it was mostly by hearsay and idle gossip that Jessi and Anya were aware that the trauma Celeste had suffered had plunged her into mental illness requiring strong medications and successive long stays in a specialist clinic. Celeste made no secret of the fact that spikes in her anxiety when she was particularly stressed could trigger a resurgence of her depression and mania. She was largely over this roller coaster of ups and downs and seemed to be getting her life back on an even keel. But whenever she was in a state of anxiety the delusions and other mental health issues returned.
Anya read the note out loud. ‘Stop blocking me… We need to talk… Well, it’s not exactly a death threat is it? There’s nothing sinister in that. If this is from him, I guess he’s reaching out for some kind of reconciliation now that he’s back in the country.’
It was perhaps not surprising that Anya and Jessi found it hard to empathise with the angst, foreboding and distress that Ben’s return to London had aroused in Celeste. Being in the
year below, they knew Ben mainly by reputation – a popular guy that all the girls fancied and all the boys (as well as most of the male sports teachers) hero-worshipped. Anya and Jessi had had nothing in the way of intimate contact with Ben, nor had they ever witnessed or been on the receiving end of his bullying and intimidation. Moreover, Celeste had never confided in them about the way in which Ben had sexually abused her on the night of the party. She couldn’t blame them for thinking she was being pathetic. Ben had always been brilliant at hiding the cruel and despotic side of his character beneath a social veneer of confidence, good humour and charm.
It was also clear that nothing Anya and Jessi had heard coming out of the evidence given at the inquest would have given them cause to change their opinion of Ben. If he hadn’t emerged from it blameless, he didn’t come out of it looking like a monster. Word on the street was that Ben was a foolish and reckless kid caught up in a tragic accident. He had suffered too. Let’s face it – his childhood home had gone up in flames.
Close to tears, Celeste stared at her friends. ‘I know you think this is just a big joke but it’s freaking me out. I never want to set eyes on the bastard again. I don’t want a reconciliation. As far as I’m concerned, he’s out of my life forever. But it looks like he’s already found out where I go to college and where I leave my bike. Next thing, he’ll be following me home, or following me to work.’ She snatched back the note, screwed it into a ball and threw it in the recycling bin.
No Smoke Without Fire Page 6