The Girl You Left Behind (23 page)

The woman, woollen hat rammed low over her
head despite the heat, nods a greeting. She is digging around in a plastic bag. She has
an endless collection of them, tied with twine or stuffed inside each other, which she
endlessly sorts and rearranges. Today she has moved her two boxes, covered with a blue
tarpaulin, to the relative shelter of the caretaker’s door. The previous caretaker
tolerated Fran for years, even using her as an unofficial parcel stop. The new one, she
says, when Liv brings her down a coffee, keeps threatening to move her. Some residents
have complained that she is lowering the tone. ‘You had a visitor.’

‘What? Oh. What time did she
go?’ Liv had not left out either a note or a key. She wonders whether she should
stop by the restaurant later to make sure Mo is okay. Even as she thinks it, she knows
she won’t. She feels vaguely relieved at the prospect of a silent, empty
house.

Fran shrugs.

‘You want a drink?’ Liv says, as
she opens the door.

‘Tea would be lovely,’ Fran
says, adding, ‘Three sugars, please,’ as if Liv has never made her one
before. And then, with the preoccupied air of someone who has far too much to do to
stand around talking, she goes back to her bags.

She smells the smoke even as she opens the
door. Mo is sitting cross-legged on the floor by the glass coffee-table, one hand around
a paperback book, the other resting a cigarette against a white saucer.

‘Hi,’ she says, not looking
up.

Liv stares at her, her key in her hand.
‘I – I thought you’d left. Fran said you’d gone.’

‘Oh. The lady downstairs? Yeah. I just
got back.’

‘Back from where?’

‘My day shift.’

‘You work a day shift?’

‘At a care home. Hope I didn’t
disturb you this morning. I tried to leave quietly. I thought the whole desk-drawer
thing might wake you. Getting up at six kind of kills the whole “welcome
houseguest” vibe.’

‘Desk-drawer thing?’

‘You didn’t leave a
key.’

Liv frowns. She feels as if she is two steps
behind in this conversation. Mo puts her book down and speaks slowly. ‘I had to
have a little dig around till I found the spare key in your desk drawer.’

‘You went in my desk
drawer?’

‘It seemed like the most obvious
place.’ She turns a page. ‘It’s okay. I put it back.’ She adds,
under her breath, ‘Man, you like stuff tidy.’

She returns to her book. David’s book,
Liv sees, checking out the spine. It is a battered Penguin
Introduction to Modern
Architecture
, one of his favourites. She can still picture him reading it,
stretched out on the sofa. Seeing it in someone else’s hands makes her stomach
tighten with anxiety. Liv puts her bag down, and walks through to the kitchen.

The granite worktops are covered with toast
crumbs. Two mugs sit on the table, brown rings bisecting their insides. By the toaster,
a bag of sliced white bread sits collapsed and half open. A used teabag squats on the
side of the sink and a knife emerges from a pat of unsalted butter, like the chest of a
murder victim.

Liv stands there for a moment, then begins
to tidy, sweeping the detritus into the kitchen bin, loading cups and plates into the
dishwasher. She presses the button to draw back the ceiling shutters, and when they are
fully open, she presses the button that will open the glass roof, waving her hands to
get rid of the lingering smell of smoke.

She turns to find Mo standing in the
doorway. ‘You can’t smoke in here. You just can’t,’ she says.
There is a weird edge of panic to her voice.

‘Oh. Sure. I didn’t realize you
had a deck.’

‘No. Not on the deck either. Please.
Just don’t smoke here.’

Mo glances at the work surface, at
Liv’s frantic tidying. ‘Hey – I’ll do that before I leave.
Really.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘It obviously isn’t, or you
wouldn’t be having a heart attack. Look. Stop. I’ll clean up my own mess.
Really.’

Liv stops. She knows she is overreacting,
but she can’t help it. She just wants Mo gone. ‘I’ve got to take Fran
a cup of tea,’ she says.

Her blood thumps in her ears the whole way
down to the ground floor.

When she gets back the kitchen is tidy. Mo
moves quietly around the space. ‘I’m probably a bit lazy when it comes to
clearing up straight away,’ she says, as Liv walks back in.
‘It’s the whole clearing-up-at-work thing. Old people, guests at
restaurants … You do so much of it in the day, you kind of rebel against it at
home.’

Liv tries not to bristle at her use of the
word. It is then she becomes aware of the other smell, under the smoke. And the oven
light is on.

She bends down to peer inside it and sees
her Le Creuset dish, its surface bubbling with something cheesy.

‘I made some supper. Pasta bake. I
just threw together what I could get from the corner shop. It’ll be ready in about
ten minutes. I was going to have mine later, but seeing as you’re
here …’

Liv cannot remember the last time she even
turned the oven on.

‘Oh,’ says Mo, reaching for the
oven gloves. ‘And someone rang from the council.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. Something about council
tax.’

Liv’s insides turn briefly to
water.

‘I said I was you, so he told me how
much you owe. It’s quite a lot.’ She hands her a piece of paper with a
figure scribbled on it.

As Liv’s mouth opens to protest, she
says, ‘Well, I had to make sure he had the right person. I thought he must have
made a mistake.’

She had known roughly how much it would be,
but seeing it in print is still a shock. She feels Mo’s eyes on her and, in her
uncharacteristically long silence, she knows that Mo has guessed the truth.

‘Hey. Sit down. Everything looks
better on a full stomach.’ She feels herself being steered into a chair. Mo flips
open the oven door, allowing the kitchen to flood with the
unfamiliar smell of home-cooked food. ‘And if not, well, I know of a really
comfortable banquette.’

The food is good. Liv eats a plateful and
sits with her hands on her stomach afterwards, wondering why she is so surprised that Mo
can actually cook. ‘Thanks,’ she says, as Mo mops up the last of hers.
‘It was really good. I can’t remember the last time I ate that
much.’

‘No problem.’

And now you have to leave
. The
words that have been on her lips for the past twenty hours do not come. She does not
want Mo to go just yet. She does not want to be alone with the council-tax people and
the final demands and her own uncontrollable thoughts; she feels suddenly grateful that
tonight she will have somebody to talk to – a human defence against the date.

‘So. Liv Worthing. The whole
husband-dying thing –’

Liv puts her knife and fork together.
‘I’d rather not talk about it.’

She feels Mo’s eyes on her.
‘Okay. No dead husbands. So – what about boyfriends?’

‘Boyfriends?’

‘Since … the One We Must Not
Mention. Anyone serious?’

‘No.’

Mo picks a piece of cheese from the side of
the baking dish.

‘Ill-advised shags?’

‘Nope.’

Mo’s head shoots up. ‘Not one?
In how long?’

‘Four years,’ Liv mumbles.

She is lying. There was one, three years
ago, after well-meaning friends had insisted she had to ‘move on’. As if
David had been some kind of obstacle. She had drunk herself halfway to oblivion to go
through with it and then wept afterwards, huge, snotty sobs of grief and guilt and
self-disgust. The man – she can’t even remember his name – had barely been able to
contain his relief when she had said she was going home. Even now when she thinks about
it she feels cold shame.

‘Nothing in four years? And
you’re … what? Thirty? What is this, some kind of sexual suttee? What
are you doing, Worthing? Saving yourself for Mr Dead Husband in the
hereafter?’

‘I’m Halston. Liv Halston.
And … I just … haven’t met anyone I wanted to …’
Liv decides to change the direction of this conversation. ‘Okay, how about you?
Some nice self-harming Emo in the wings?’ Defensiveness has made her spiky.

Mo’s fingers creep towards her
cigarettes and retreat again.

‘I do okay.’

Liv waits.

‘I have an arrangement.’

‘An arrangement?’

‘With Ranic, the wine waiter. Every
couple of weeks we hook up for a technically proficient but ultimately soulless
coupling. He was pretty rubbish when we started but he’s getting the hang of
it.’ She eats another stray piece of cheese. ‘Still watches too much porn,
though. You can tell.’

‘Nobody serious?’

‘My parents stopped talking about
grandchildren some time around the turn of the century.’

‘Oh, God. That reminds me: I promised
I’d ring my dad.’ Liv has a sudden thought. She stands and reaches for her
bag. ‘Hey, how about I nip down to the shop and get a bottle of wine?’ This
is going to be fine, she tells herself. We’ll talk about parents and people I
don’t remember, and college, and Mo’s jobs, and I’ll steer her away
from the whole sex thing, and before I know it tomorrow will be here and my house will
feel normal and today’s date will be a whole year away again.

Mo pushes her chair back from the table.
‘Not for me,’ she says, scooping up her plate. ‘I’ve got to get
changed and shoot.’

‘Shoot?’

‘Work.’

Liv’s hand is on her purse. ‘But
– you said you’d just finished.’

‘My day shift. Now I start my evening
shift. Well, in about twenty minutes.’ She pulls her hair up and clips it into
place. ‘You okay to wash up? And all right if I take that key again?’

The brief sense of wellbeing that had
arrived with the meal evaporates, like the popping of a soap bubble. She sits at the
half-cleared table, listening to Mo’s tuneless humming, the sound of her washing
and scrubbing her teeth in the spare-room bathroom, the soft closing of the bedroom
door.

She calls up the stairs. ‘Do you think
they need anyone else tonight? I mean – I could help out. Maybe. I’m sure I could
do waitressing.’

There is no reply.

‘I did work in a bar once.’

‘Me too. It made me want to stab
people in the eye. Even more so than waiting tables.’

Mo is back in the hallway, dressed in a
black shirt and bomber jacket, an apron under her arm. ‘See you later,
dude,’ she calls. ‘Unless I get lucky with Ranic, obvs.’

She is gone, downstairs, drawn back into the
world of living. And as the echo of her voice dies away, the stillness of the Glass
House becomes a solid, weighty thing and Liv realizes, with a growing sense of panic,
that her house, her haven, is preparing to betray her.

She knows that she cannot spend this evening
here alone.

These are the places it is not a good idea
to drink alone if you’re female.

1. Bazookas: this used to be the White Horse, a
   quiet pub on the corner opposite the coffee shop, stuffed with sagging plush velvet
   benches and the occasional horse brass, its sign half obscured by age-related paint
   loss. Now it is a neon-clad titty bar, where businessmen go late, and taut-faced
   girls with too much makeup leave in platform shoes some time in the small hours,
   smoking furiously and moaning about their tips.
   
2. Dino’s: the local wine bar, packed throughout
   the nineties, has reinvented itself as a spit-and-sawdust eatery for yummy mummies
   in the daylight hours. After eight o’clock in the evening it now runs
   occasional speed-dating sessions. The rest of the time, apart from Fridays, its
   floor-to-ceiling windows reveal it to be conspicuously and painfully empty.
   
3. Any of the older pubs in the backstreets beyond the
   river, which draw small groups of resentful locals, men who smoke roll-ups with
   dead-eyed pit bulls and who will stare at a woman alone in a pub as a mullah would
   at a woman taking a stroll in a bikini.
   
4. Any of the new cheerfully packed drinking places
   near the river that are packed with people younger than you, mostly groups of
   laughing friends with Apple Mac satchels and thick black glasses, all of whom will
   make you feel more lonely than if you had just sat indoors.
   

Liv toys with the idea of buying a bottle of
wine and taking it home. But every time she pictures sitting in that empty white space
alone, she is filled with an unusual dread. She does not want to watch television: the
last three years have shown her that this is the evening of cosmic jokes, where normally
mundane comedy dramas will suddenly, poignantly, kill off a husband, or substitute a
wildlife programme with another about sudden death. She doesn’t want to find
herself standing in front of
The Girl You Left Behind
, recalling the day they
had bought it together, seeing in that woman’s expression the love and fulfilment
she used to feel. She doesn’t want to find herself digging out the photographs of
her and David together, knowing with weary certainty that she will never love anybody
like that again, and that while she can recall the exact way his eyes crinkled, or his
fingers held a mug, she can no longer bring to mind how these elements fitted
together.

She does not want to feel even the faintest
temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year
after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service. Most days now his
loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else,
subtly altering the way she moves through the day. But today, the anniversary of the day
he died, is a day when all bets are off.

And then she remembers something one of the
women had said at dinner the previous night.
When my sister wants to go out without
being hassled, she heads for a gay bar. So funny.
There is a gay bar not ten
minutes’ walk from here. She has passed it a hundred times without ever wondering
what lies behind the protective wire grilles on the windows. Nobody will hassle her in a
gay bar. Liv reaches for her jacket, bag and keys. If nothing else, she has a plan.