A Hundred Pieces of Me
Read A Hundred Pieces of Me Online
Authors: Lucy Dillon
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #General
Also by Lucy Dillon
The Secret of Happy Ever After
Walking Back to Happiness
Lost Dogs and Lonely Hearts
The Ballroom Class
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A Hundred Pieces of Me
Lucy Dillon
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Lucy Dillon 2014
The right of Lucy Dillon to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 72708 1
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For Patricia Routledge,
always an inspiration, more now than ever
Contents
Ten tips for being a good client
Greyhounds: some reasons why they make the perfect pet
Prologue
ITEM
: a red cashmere scarf
Longhampton, June 2008
Gina wraps her new scarf tightly around her wrist, like a bandage. It’s a scarlet cashmere one that she bought on the way home from work two days ago, the colour of lipstick and poisoned apples and danger. For something that cost so much, it took no time to buy: she was cold, she’d always wanted a beautiful big cashmere scarf, and the usual sensible voice of caution, reminding her of the gas bill or the council tax, had gone, and in the silence Gina could hear her own voice asking aloud,
Why not?
‘Why not?’ always makes Gina feel queasy. She isn’t a ‘why not?’ sort of person. But this whole week has felt like careering downhill on a sledge, swerving and dodging as shock after shock has rushed at her. The price tag on the scarf didn’t even register.
The bright colour is still taking her by surprise. Gina doesn’t normally like red – her house and her wardrobe are calming shades of sea blue and slate grey – but something in the bold scarlet feels right. It looks alive against her pale skin, somehow Spanish against her wavy dark hair, her brown eyes. This red is bold and definite, grabbing attention, fixing her against the greyness of the town.
Gina’s extravagant scarf is the only giveaway of the reason she and Stuart are sitting here. The red slash lurking at the corner of her eye whispers that now is the time to indulge herself. Now might be the last chance to do it.
She glances at Stuart again, to see if he’s noticed the scarf. He hasn’t. He’s frowning over some notes he made for today’s consultation: he sat up until 2 a.m. in bed with his laptop while she was pretending to sleep, the greenish light reflecting the planes of his handsome face, his forehead lined with concentration.
Stuart’s absorbing everything. There’s a lot of information to absorb, on the Internet, from the hospital, from the friends of friends. Words and terms are floating around her but nothing will settle in her brain. They melt away like snowflakes as soon as they touch her.
The door behind them opens and Mr Khan hurries in, fresh from some other crisis, full of apologies for keeping them waiting. Stuart stiffens in his seat. Gina remembers the suspended moment in school exams when the invigilator coughed and told them to turn over their papers. Weeks and months hanging in the air, the desperate scrabble to go back, one more week’s revision, but it’s too late. It’s already over. Half panic, half relief.
Now.
‘Hello, Georgina . . . Gina?’ he says, with an easy smile. ‘Lovely, yes, Gina, and this is your . . .?’
‘Fiancé, Stuart Horsfield, hello,’ says Stuart, and Gina still thinks it sounds strange, but everything that’s happening to her seems to be happening to someone else. She grips his hand. It’s strong and comforting.
While Mr Khan flips through her notes Gina makes herself look around the room so she won’t try to read the scrawled words in front of him. Maybe that’s why doctors make their handwriting so bad, she thinks, so it can’t be read upside-down from the other side of the desk.
She notes everything deliberately. There’s a window, looking onto the car park, white gloss paint, a calendar and a candy-pink cyclamen (very hard to kill off). There’s a mirror on the wall by the door, simple, unframed, too far from the desk to be intended for the doctor.
A cool shiver of fear runs over Gina’s skin. It’s for the patients. So they can adjust their faces, wipe away their mascara smears before they go back to the silent waiting area outside. Stuart’s fingers tighten around hers.
Mr Khan clicks the lid back on his chunky silver fountain pen, pushing it in with his palm and letting a sigh escape from his downturned lips. He doesn’t smile. And that’s when Gina knows. She struggles to stay in the moment. Part of her is flying above it, her consciousness shooting backwards, out of her head, detaching her. Is this really happening to me? she wonders. How can I tell?
A bleak longing to go back sweeps through her, and she has to force herself to concentrate on the now.
Now.
Now.
‘So, Georgina,’ he says, ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’
Chapter One
ITEM
: a gold blown-glass Christmas-tree decoration in the shape of an angel playing a trumpet
Longhampton, December 2013
Gina stands back and breathes in the sharp dark-green scent of the Douglas fir, and thinks, Yes,
this
is why I bought this house. For Christmas.
It’s an extravagantly tall, old-fashioned tree and it fills what she’d earmarked from their very first viewing as a specific Christmas-tree space in the black-and-white-tiled entrance hall of 2 Dryden Road. The springy branches are ready to be hung with glass baubles, topped with a star, the special iron tree-stand hidden by a pile of presents underneath. The final Victorian touch to a lovingly renovated Victorian family home.
Gina smiles at it, pleased. It’s taken a long time, renovating the house themselves, after work, at weekends. The mental picture of this tree, of this moment, has kept her going through the endless months of sanding, plastering, builders turning the electricity off without warning, washing in a bucket: the backdrop to her own slow crawl back to normality. It’s been one tiny goal at a time – a finished room, a complete lap of the park – and now, finally, it’s here: Christmas in Dryden Road.
As she reaches for the first bauble, a memory skims the back of her mind, moving too fast for her to place it: she’s filled with a sudden glow of contentment, a deep-red sort of Christmassy anticipation that wraps round her like a sudden soft blanket of joy. It’s more like
déjà vu
than a memory: the satisfying sensation of something clicking into place.
What is it? The smell of pine and cinnamon sticks? The slithery rustle of tinsel? The cosiness of the central heating ticking into life as the afternoon shadows start to fall? Gina probes in the shapeless depths of her early memories but can’t find the exact moment. She doesn’t have a lot of childhood memories, and the precious few she does have are blurred by over-examination, and she’s never sure whether she’s remembering actual facts, or something her mother’s told her happened. But this happy feeling is familiar.
It’s probably dressing the tree, she thinks, turning back to the box of ornaments in their tissue nest. It’s a tradition: first Saturday in December, tree goes up. Decorating it was always something she and her mum, Janet, did, just the two of them, listening to a Christmas compilation tape and sharing a tin of Roses, Gina handing the baubles to Janet, Janet fixing them in the same spots every year. They lived in lots of houses while Gina was growing up, but the tree routine was always the same.
Gina has a box of baubles, including some old favourites handed on by her mum, and she’s adopted Janet’s ritual of buying a new one every Christmas. She picks up the decoration she bought for this year: it’s a golden angel, playing a trumpet. Next year, she thinks, suddenly light inside with hope, will be better. It’s a long time since Gina’s felt simply content; the uncomplicated pleasure is so unfamiliar that she’s horrified by how long it’s been.
A few snowflakes blow past the window and Gina hopes it’s not snowing in the New Forest where Stuart’s office is on a Christmas jolly. Instead of their usual all-you-can-eat bonanza in the local Chinese restaurant, the whole sales department of Midlands Logistics has been treated to some sort of karting event, followed by a murder mystery dinner.
Stuart will almost certainly be leading one of the teams. He cycles; he plays cricket; he’s still captaining his football team at thirty-six, with his modest but determined attitude. The other football WAGs, most of whom have not-so-secret crushes on Stu, joke that he’s the Longhampton David Beckham. Without the tattoos. Obviously. Stuart’s not a fan of tattoos.