Season to Taste (19 page)

Lizzie looked at the gray buildings and the thick, heavy sky over London as the train pushed north through the suburbs and
broke into open fields. She didn't think of the house except to ask herself if everything had been done as she'd said it would
be. She'd been very busy, and being busy had kept her from herself for days. She hadn't had further thoughts about the police
station or about old Emmett and his signs. The busier one was, she'd found, the easier life could be. Without thought, without
feeling, one just had to have stamina. Soon, she realized, gazing out of the window, it would all be over.

So now she was giving herself the best possible chance of starting again. She would need a freezer and then she would need
a job. Sitting in the warmth of the train carriage with the smell of other humans around her, she let the muscles in her neck
relax and she stretched out the muscles in her hands and fingers. If she could just carry on like this—minute by minute—and
not let the world crash in and startle her too much, then she might just make it and really get away.

Lizzie tried to get some sleep. She knew that the journey would take four and a half hours, and so she settled back into the
seat, worked on feeling relaxed, but she felt very upright, and she was staring, wide-eyed, out of the window with both hands
around her coffee cup. In her mind she tried to imagine a slim woman with clean curls and tired skin gazing out at the fields
and picturing a better life. She sniffed, tried to stretch her awareness into all corners of the carriage for someone who
might think her odd, or suspicious, or be able to detect something amiss in the air and atmosphere.

It was dark and late when Lizzie arrived in Glasgow. She had not slept. She had listened to her heart beating all the way
there. She pushed to be first off the train, collected her bags from the luggage compartment, and began to blow loudly from
her mouth, to detract attention from any smell that might have been coming from the bag as she stood in the cramped area between
two carriages with other passengers. As soon as the doors opened, she stepped out onto the platform and walked hurriedly with
her bags, not noticing the cold, not thinking of anything but her need to get to an all-night supermarket for some ice.

There were so many people still on the station concourse and the buildings outside the station were tall and looming in the
dark. She would not be able to find a bed and settle down here, she realized; even asking someone to recommend a place to
stay seemed too much. Hunkering down with her bags and trying not to get too cold was the best she would be able to do this
night, and keeping his head outside felt much safer to her than trying to take it in somewhere.

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.

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?”

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 have 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…”

“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.