The Girl You Left Behind (27 page)

‘I’m the woman who takes in
stolen handbags for Liv.’

‘Right. So what’s the
address?’

‘You don’t know?’
There’s another silence. ‘Hmm. I tell you what, come to the corner of Audley
Street and Packers Lane, and someone will meet you down there –’

‘I’m not a bag thief.’

‘So you keep saying. Ring when
you’re there.’ He can hear her thinking. ‘If nobody answers, just hand
it to the woman in the cardboard boxes by the back door. Her name’s Fran. And if
we do decide to meet you, no funny business. We have a gun.’

Before he can say anything else, she has
rung off. He sits at his desk, staring at his phone.

Janey walks into his office without
knocking. It has started to annoy him, the way she does this. It makes him think
she’s trying to catch him in the middle of
something.
‘The Lefèvre painting. Have we actually sent off the opening letter
yet?’

‘No. I’m still doing checks on
whether it has been exhibited.’

‘Did we get the current owners’
address?’

‘The magazine didn’t keep a
record of it. But it’s fine – I’ll send it via his workplace. If he’s
an architect he shouldn’t be hard to find. The company will probably be in his
name.’

‘Good. I just got a message saying the
claimants are coming to London in a few weeks and want a meeting. It would be great if
we could get an initial response before then. Can you throw some dates at me?’

‘Will do.’

He stares at his computer screen very hard,
even though only the screensaver is in front of him, until Janey takes the hint and
leaves.

Mo is at home. She is a strangely
unobtrusive presence, even given the startling inky black of her hair and clothing.
Occasionally Liv half wakes at six and hears her padding around, preparing to leave for
her morning shift at the care home. She finds the presence of another person in the
house oddly comforting.

Mo cooks every day, or brings back food from
the restaurant, leaving foil-covered dishes in the fridge and scrawled instructions on
the kitchen table. ‘Heat up for 40 mins at 180. That would mean SWITCHING ON THE
OVEN’ and ‘FINISH THIS AS BY TOMORROW IT WILL CLIMB OUT OF ITS CONTAINER AND
KILL US.’ The house no longer smells of cigarette
smoke. Liv
suspects Mo sneaks the odd one out on the deck, but she doesn’t ask.

They have settled into a routine of sorts.
Liv rises as before, heading out on to the concrete walkways, her feet pounding, her
head filled with noise. She has stopped buying coffee, so she makes tea for Fran, eats
her toast and sits in front of her desk trying not to worry about her lack of work. But
now she finds she half looks forward to the sound of the key in the lock at three
o’clock, Mo’s arrival home. Mo has not offered to pay rent – and she is not
sure that either of them wants to feel this is a formal arrangement – but the day after
she heard about Liv’s bag, a pile of crumpled cash had appeared on the kitchen
table. ‘
Emergency council tax,
’
the note with it
read
. ‘
Don’t start being all weird about it.
’

Liv didn’t get even remotely weird
about it. She didn’t have a choice.

They are drinking tea and reading a London
free-sheet when the phone rings. Mo looks up, like a gundog scenting the air, checks the
clock and says, ‘Oh. I know who this is.’ Liv turns back to the newspaper.
‘It’s the man with your handbag.’

Liv’s mug stalls in mid-air.
‘What?’

‘I forgot to tell you. He rang up
earlier. I told him to wait on the corner and we’d come down.’

‘What kind of man?’

‘Dunno. I just checked that he
wasn’t a bailiff.’

‘Oh, God. He definitely has it? Do you
think he’ll want a reward?’ She casts around in her pockets. She has four
pounds in coins and some coppers, which she holds out in front of her.

‘It doesn’t seem like a lot, does
it?’

‘Short of sexual favours, it’s
pretty much all you have.’

‘Four pounds it is.’

They head into the lift, Liv clutching the
money. Mo is smirking.

‘What?’

‘I was just thinking. It would be
funny if we stole
his
bag. You know, mugged him. Girl muggers.’ She
sniggers. ‘I once stole some chalk from a post office. I have form.’

Liv is scandalized.

‘What?’ Mo’s face is
sombre. ‘I was seven.’

They stand in silence as the lift reaches
the bottom. As the doors open, Mo says, ‘We could make a clean getaway. He
doesn’t actually know your address.’

‘Mo –’ Liv begins, but as she
steps out of the main doorway she sees the man on the corner, the colour of his hair,
the way he runs his hand over the top of his head, and whips round, her cheeks
burning.

‘What? Where are you going?’

‘I can’t go out
there.’

‘Why? I can see your bag. He looks
okay. I don’t think he’s a mugger. He’s wearing shoes. No mugger wears
shoes.’

‘Will you get it for me? Really – I
can’t talk to him.’

‘Why?’ Mo scrutinizes her.
‘Why have you gone so pink?’

‘Look, I stayed at his house. And
it’s just embarrassing.’

‘Oh, my God. You did the nasty with
that man.’

‘No, I did not.’

‘You did.’ Mo squints at her.
‘Or you wanted to. YOU WANTED TO. You are so busted.’

‘Mo – can you just get my bag for me,
please? Just tell
him I’m not in. Please?’ Before Mo can
say anything else, she is back in the lift and jabbing at the button to take her to the
top floor, her thoughts spinning. When she reaches the Glass House she rests her
forehead against the door and listens to her heart beating in her ears.

I am thirty years old
, she says to
herself.

Behind her the lift door opens.

‘Oh, God, thanks, Mo, I –’

Paul McCafferty is in front of her.

‘Where’s Mo?’ she says,
stupidly.

‘Is that your flatmate?
She’s … interesting.’

She cannot speak. Her tongue has swollen to
fill her mouth. Her hand reaches up to her hair – she’s conscious that she
hasn’t washed it.

‘Anyway,’ he says.
‘Hey.’

‘Hello.’

He holds out a hand. ‘Your bag. It is
your bag, right?’

‘I can’t believe you found
it.’

‘I’m good at finding stuff.
It’s my job.’

‘Oh. Yes. The ex-cop thing. Well,
thanks. Really.’

‘It was in a bin, if you’re
interested. With two others. Outside University College Library. The caretaker found
them and handed them all in. I’m afraid your cards and your phone are
gone … The good news is that the cash was still there.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. Amazing. Two hundred pounds. I
checked it.’

Relief floods her, like a warm bath.
‘Really? They left the cash? I don’t understand.’

‘Nor me. I can only think it fell out
of your purse as they opened it.’

She takes her bag and rummages through it.
Two hundred pounds is floating around in the bottom, along with her hairbrush, the
paperback she’d been reading that morning and a stray lipstick.

‘Never heard of that happening before.
Still, it’ll help, eh? One less thing to worry about.’

He is smiling. Not a sympathetic
oh-you-poor-drunken-woman-who-made-a-pass-at-me kind of smile, but the smile of someone
who is just really pleased about something.

She finds she is smiling back. ‘This
is just … amazing.’

‘So do I get my four-pound
reward?’ She blinks at him. ‘Mo told me. Joke. Really.’ He laughs.
‘But …’ He studies his feet for a moment. ‘Liv – would you like
to go out some time?’ When she doesn’t respond immediately, he adds,
‘It doesn’t have to be a big deal. We could not get drunk. And not go to a
gay bar. We could even just walk around holding our own door-keys and not letting our
bags get stolen.’

‘Okay,’ she says slowly, and
finds she is smiling again. ‘I’d like that.’

Paul McCafferty whistles to himself the
whole way down in the noisy, juddering lift. When he gets to the bottom he takes the
cashpoint receipt from his pocket, crumples it into a little ball, and throws it into
the nearest bin.

They go out four times. The first time they
have a pizza and she sticks to mineral water until she’s sure he doesn’t
really think she’s a soak, at which point she allows herself one gin and tonic.
It’s the most delicious gin and tonic she has ever had. He walks her back to her
house and looks like he’s about to leave, then after a slightly awkward moment he
kisses her cheek and they both laugh as if they know this is all a bit embarrassing.
Without thinking, she leans forward and kisses him properly, a short one, but with
intent. One that suggests something of herself. It leaves her a bit breathless. He walks
into the lift backwards and is still grinning as the doors close on him.

She likes him.

The second time they go to see a live band
his brother recommended and it’s awful. After twenty minutes, she realizes, with
some relief, that he thinks it’s awful too, and when he says does she want to
leave, they find themselves holding hands so they don’t lose each other as they
fight their way out through the crowded bar. Somehow they don’t let go until they
reach his flat. There they talk about their childhoods and bands they like and types of
dog and the horror of courgettes, then kiss on the sofa until her legs go a bit weak.
Her chin stays bright pink for two whole days afterwards.

A couple of days after this he rings her at
lunchtime to
say he happens to be passing a nearby café and does
she fancy a quick coffee? ‘Were you really passing by?’ she says, after they
have stretched their coffee and cake as far as his lunch hour can reasonably allow.

‘Sure,’ he says, and then, to
her delight, his ears go pink. He sees her looking and reaches a hand up to his left
lobe. ‘Ah. Man. I’m a really bad liar.’

The fourth time they go to a restaurant. Her
father calls just before pudding arrives to say that Caroline has left him again. He
wails so loudly down the telephone that Paul actually jumps at the other side of the
table. ‘I have to go,’ she says, and declines his offer of help. She is not
ready for the two men to meet, especially where the possibility exists that her father
may not be wearing trousers.

When she arrives at his house half an hour
later, Caroline is already home.

‘I forgot it was her night for life
drawing,’ he says sheepishly.

Paul does not attempt to push things
further. She wonders briefly if she talks too much about David; whether somehow she has
made herself off limits. But then she thinks it might just be him being gentlemanly.
Other times she thinks, almost indignantly, that David is part of who she is, and if
Paul wants to be with her, well, he’ll have to accept that. She has several
imaginary conversations with him and two imaginary arguments.

She wakes up thinking about him, about the
way he leans forward when he listens, as if determined not to miss a single thing she
says, the way his hair has greyed prematurely at the temples, his blue, blue eyes. She
has forgotten what it’s like to wake up thinking about someone, to want
to be physically close to them, to feel a little giddy at the
remembered scent of their skin. She still doesn’t have enough work but it bothers
her less. Sometimes he sends her a text message in the middle of the day and she hears
it spoken in an American accent.

She is afraid of showing Paul McCafferty how
much she likes him. She is afraid of getting it wrong: the rules seem to have changed in
the nine years since she last dated. She listens to Mo and her dispassionate
observations about Internet dating, of ‘friends with benefits’, of the dos
and don’ts of sex – how she should wax and trim and have ‘techniques’
– and it’s as if she’s listening to someone speaking Polish.

She finds it hard to tally Paul McCafferty
with Mo’s assertions about men: sleazy, chancing, self-serving, porn-obsessed
slackers. He is quietly straightforward, a seemingly open book. It was why climbing the
ranks of his specialist unit in the NYPD didn’t suit him, he says. ‘All the
blacks and whites get pretty grey the higher up you get.’ The only time he looks
even remotely uncertain, his speech becoming hesitant, is when discussing his son.
‘It’s crap, divorce,’ he says. ‘We all tell ourselves the kids
are fine, that it’s better this way than two unhappy people shouting at each
other, but we never dare ask them the truth.’

‘The truth?’

‘What they want. Because we know the
answer. And it would break our hearts.’ He had gazed off into the middle distance,
and then, seconds later, recovered his smile. ‘Still, Jake is good. He’s
really good. Better than we both deserve.’

She likes his Americanness, the way it makes
him slightly alien, and completely removed from David. He has an innate sense of
courtesy, the kind of man who will instinctively open a door for a woman, not because
he’s making some kind of chivalrous gesture but because it wouldn’t occur to
him not to open the door if someone needed to go through it. He carries a kind of subtle
authority: people actually move out of the way when he walks along the street. He does
not seem to be aware of this.

‘Oh, my God, you’ve got it so
bad,’ says Mo.

‘What? I’m just saying.
It’s nice to spend time with someone who seems …’

Mo snorts. ‘He is
so
getting
laid this week.’

But she has not invited him back to the
Glass House. Mo senses her hesitation. ‘Okay, Rapunzel. If you’re going to
stick around in this tower of yours, you’re going to have to let the odd prince
run his fingers through your hair.’

‘I don’t know …’

‘So I’ve been thinking,’
says Mo. ‘We should move your room around. Change the house a bit. Otherwise
you’re always going to feel like you’re bringing someone back to
David’s house.’

Liv suspects it will feel like that however
the furniture is arranged. But on Tuesday afternoon, when Mo is off work, they move the
bed to the other side of the room, pushing it against the alabaster-coloured concrete
wall that runs like an architectural backbone through the centre of the house. It is not
a natural place for it, if you were going to be really picky, but she has to admit there
is something invigorating about it all looking so different.