The Girl You Left Behind (57 page)

‘And we need to get this due diligence
thing worked out before Martin gets in –’

He glances up at the screeching sound, the
rude blare of a horn. He sees the side of the glossy black taxi in front of him, the
driver already winding down his window, and at the edge of his field of vision something
he can’t quite make out, something coming towards him at an impossible speed.

He turns towards it, and in that split
second he realizes that he is in its path, that there is no way he is going to be able
to get out of its way. His hand opens in surprise, letting the BlackBerry fall to the
ground. He hears a shout, which may be his own. The last thing he sees is a leather
glove, a face under a helmet, the shock in the man’s eyes mirroring his own. There
is an explosion as everything fragments.

And then there is nothing.

There are 158 footsteps between the bus
stop and home, but it can stretch to 180 if you aren’t in a hurry, like maybe if
you’re wearing platform shoes. Or shoes you bought from a charity shop that have
butterflies on the toes but never quite grip the heel at the back, thereby explaining
why they were a knock-down £1.99. I turned the corner into our street (68 steps), and
could just see the house – a four-bedroomed semi in a row of other three- and
four-bedroomed semis. Dad’s car was outside, which meant he had not yet left for
work.

Behind me, the sun was setting behind
Stortfold Castle, its dark shadow sliding down the hill like melting wax to overtake me.
When I was a child we used to make our elongated shadows have gun battles, our street
the O. K. Corral. On a different sort of day, I could have told you all the things that
had happened to me on this route: where Dad taught me to ride a bike without
stabilizers; where Mrs Doherty with the lopsided wig used to make us Welsh cakes; where
Treena stuck her hand into a hedge when she was eleven and disturbed a wasp’s nest
and we ran screaming all the way back to the castle.

Thomas’s tricycle was upturned on the
path and, closing the gate behind me, I dragged it under the porch and
opened the door. The warmth hit me with the force of an air bag; Mum is a martyr to
the cold and keeps the heating on all year round. Dad is always opening windows,
complaining that she’d bankrupt the lot of us. He says our heating bills are
larger than the GDP of a small African country.

‘That you, love?’

‘Yup.’ I hung my jacket on the
peg, where it fought for space amongst the others.

‘Which you? Lou? Treena?’

‘Lou.’

I peered round the living-room door. Dad was
face down on the sofa, his arm thrust deep between the cushions, as if they had
swallowed his limb whole. Thomas, my five-year-old nephew, was on his haunches, watching
him intently.

‘Lego.’ Dad turned his face
towards me, puce from exertion. ‘Why they have to make the damned pieces so small
I don’t know. Have you seen Obi-Wan Kenobi’s left arm?’

‘It was on top of the DVD player. I
think he swapped Obi’s arms with Indiana Jones’s.’

‘Well, apparently now Obi can’t
possibly have beige arms. We have to have the black arms.’

‘I wouldn’t worry. Doesn’t
Darth Vader chop his arm off in episode two?’ I pointed at my cheek so that Thomas
would kiss it. ‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Upstairs. How about that? A two-pound
piece!’

I looked up, just able to hear the familiar
creak of the ironing board. Josie Clark, my mother, never sat down. It was a point of
honour. She had been known to stand on
an outside ladder painting the
windows, occasionally pausing to wave, while the rest of us ate a roast dinner.

‘Will you have a go at finding this
bloody arm for me? He’s had me looking for half an hour and I’ve got to get
ready for work.’

‘Are you on nights?’

‘Yeah. It’s half
five.’

I glanced at the clock. ‘Actually,
it’s half four.’

He extracted his arm from the cushions and
squinted at his watch. ‘Then what are you doing home so early?’

I shook my head vaguely, as if I might have
misunderstood the question, and walked into the kitchen.

Granddad was sitting in his chair by the
kitchen window, studying a sudoku. The health visitor had told us it would be good for
his concentration, help his focus after the strokes. I suspected I was the only one to
notice he simply filled out all the boxes with whatever number came to mind.

‘Hey, Granddad.’

He looked up and smiled.

‘You want a cup of tea?’

He shook his head, and partially opened his
mouth.

‘Cold drink?’

He nodded.

I opened the fridge door.
‘There’s no apple juice.’ Apple juice, I remembered now, was too
expensive. ‘Ribena?’

He shook his head.

‘Water?’

He nodded, murmured something that could
have been a thank you as I handed him the glass.

My mother walked into the room, bearing a
huge basket
of neatly folded laundry. ‘Are these yours?’ She
brandished a pair of socks.

‘Treena’s, I think.’

‘I thought so. Odd colour. I think
they must have got in with Daddy’s plum pyjamas. You’re back early. Are you
going somewhere?’

‘No.’ I filled a glass with tap
water and drank it.

‘Is Patrick coming round later? He
rang here earlier. Did you have your mobile off?’

‘Mm.’

‘He said he’s after booking your
holiday. Your father says he saw something on the television about it. Where is it you
liked? Ipsos? Kalypsos?’

‘Skiathos.’

‘That’s the one. You want to
check your hotel very carefully. Do it on the internet. He and Daddy watched something
on the news at lunchtime. Apparently they’re building sites, half of those budget
deals, and you wouldn’t know until you got there. Daddy, would you like a cup of
tea? Did Lou not offer you one?’ She put the kettle on then glanced up at me.
It’s possible she had finally noticed I wasn’t saying anything. ‘Are
you all right, love? You look awfully pale.’

She reached out a hand and felt my forehead,
as if I were much younger than twenty-six.

‘I don’t think we’re going
on holiday.’

My mother’s hand stilled. Her gaze had
that X-ray thing that it had held since I was a kid. ‘Are you and Pat having some
problems?’

‘Mum, I –’

‘I’m not trying to interfere.
It’s just, you’ve been
together an awful long time.
It’s only natural if things get a bit sticky every now and then. I mean, me and
your father we –’

‘I lost my job.’

My voice cut into the silence. The words
hung there, searing themselves on the little room long after the sound had died
away.

‘You what?’

‘Frank’s shutting down the cafe.
From tomorrow.’ I held out a hand with the slightly damp envelope I had gripped in
shock the entire journey home. All 180 steps from the bus stop. ‘He’s given
me my three months’ money.’

The day had started like any other day.
Everyone I knew hated Monday mornings, but I never minded them. I liked arriving early
at The Buttered Bun, firing up the huge tea urn in the corner, bringing in the crates of
milk and bread from the backyard and chatting to Frank as we prepared to open.

I liked the fuggy bacon-scented warmth of
the cafe, the little bursts of cool air as the door opened and closed, the low murmur of
conversation and, when quiet, Frank’s radio singing tinnily to itself in the
corner. It wasn’t a fashionable place – its walls were covered in scenes
from the castle up on the hill, the tables still sported Formica tops, and the menu
hadn’t altered since I started, apart from a few changes to the chocolate bar
selection and the addition of chocolate brownies and muffins to the iced bun tray.

But most of all I liked the customers. I
liked Kev and Angelo, the plumbers, who came in most mornings and
teased Frank about where his meat might have come from. I liked the Dandelion Lady,
nicknamed for her shock of white hair, who ate one egg and chips from Monday to Thursday
and sat reading the complimentary newspapers and drinking her way through two cups of
tea. I always made an effort to chat with her. I suspected it might be the only
conversation the old woman got all day.

I liked the tourists, who stopped on their
walk up and down from the castle, the shrieking schoolchildren, who stopped by after
school, the regulars from the offices across the road, and Nina and Cherie, the
hairdressers, who knew the calorie count of every single item The Buttered Bun had to
offer. Even the annoying customers, like the red-haired woman who ran the toyshop and
disputed her change at least once a week, didn’t trouble me.

I watched relationships begin and end across
those tables, children transferred between divorcees, the guilty relief of those parents
who couldn’t face cooking, and the secret pleasure of pensioners at a fried
breakfast. All human life came through, and most of them shared a few words with me,
trading jokes or comments over the mugs of steaming tea. Dad always said he never knew
what was going to come out of my mouth next, but in the cafe it didn’t matter.

Frank liked me. He was quiet by nature, and
said having me there kept the place lively. It was a bit like being a barmaid, but
without the hassle of drunks.

And then that afternoon, after the lunchtime
rush had ended, and with the place briefly empty, Frank, wiping his hands on his apron,
had come out from behind the hotplate and turned the little Closed sign to face the
street.

‘Now now, Frank, I’ve told you
before. Extras are not included in the minimum wage.’ Frank was, as Dad put it, as
queer as a blue gnu. I looked up.

He wasn’t smiling.

‘Uh-oh. I didn’t put salt in the
sugar cellars again, did I?’

He was twisting a tea towel between his two
hands and looked more uncomfortable than I had ever seen him. I wondered, briefly,
whether someone had complained about me. And then he motioned to me to sit down.

‘Sorry, Louisa,’ he said, after
he had told me. ‘But I’m going back to Australia. My Dad’s not too
good, and it looks like the castle is definitely going to start doing its own
refreshments. The writing’s on the wall.’

I think I sat there with my mouth actually
hanging open. And then Frank had handed me the envelope, and answered my next question
before it left my lips. ‘I know we never had, you know, a formal contract or
anything, but I wanted to look after you. There’s three months’ money in
there. We close tomorrow.’

‘Three months!’ Dad exploded,
as my mother thrust a cup of sweet tea into my hands. ‘Well, that’s big of
him, given she’s worked like a ruddy Trojan in that place for the last six
years.’

‘Bernard.’ Mum shot him a
warning look, nodding towards Thomas. My parents minded him after school every day until
Treena finished work.

‘What the hell is she supposed to do
now? He could have given her more than a day’s bloody notice.’

‘Well … she’ll just
have to get another job.’

‘There are no bloody jobs, Josie. You
know that as well as I do. We’re in the middle of a bloody recession.’

Mum shut her eyes for a moment, as if
composing herself before she spoke. ‘She’s a bright girl. She’ll find
herself something. She’s got a solid employment record, hasn’t she? Frank
will give her a good reference.’

‘Oh, fecking
marvellous … “Louisa Clark is very good at buttering toast, and a dab
hand with the old teapot.”’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence,
Dad.’

‘I’m just saying.’

I knew the real reason for Dad’s
anxiety. They relied on my wages. Treena earned next to nothing at the flower shop. Mum
couldn’t work, as she had to look after Granddad, and Granddad’s pension
amounted to almost nothing. Dad lived in a constant state of anxiety about his job at
the furniture factory. His boss had been muttering about possible redundancies for
months. There were murmurings at home about debts and the juggling of credit cards. Dad
had had his car written off by an uninsured driver two years previously, and somehow
this had been enough for the whole teetering edifice that was my parents’ finances
to finally collapse. My modest wages had been a little bedrock of housekeeping money,
enough to help see the family through from week to week.

‘Let’s not get ahead of
ourselves. She can head down to the Job Centre tomorrow and see what’s on offer.
She’s got enough to get by for now.’ They spoke as if I weren’t there.
‘And she’s smart. You’re smart, aren’t you, love? Perhaps she
could do a typing course. Go into office work.’

I sat there, as my parents discussed what
other jobs my limited qualifications might entitle me to. Factory work,
machinist, roll butterer. For the first time that afternoon I wanted to cry. Thomas
watched me with big, round eyes, and silently handed me half a soggy biscuit.

‘Thanks, Tommo,’ I mouthed
silently, and ate it.

He was down at the athletics club, as I had
known he would be. Mondays to Thursdays, regular as a station timetable, Patrick was
there in the gym or running in circles around the floodlit track. I made my way down the
steps, hugging myself against the cold, and walked slowly out on to the track, waving as
he came close enough to see who it was.

‘Run with me,’ he puffed, as he
got closer. His breath came in pale clouds. ‘I’ve got four laps to
go.’

I hesitated just a moment, and then began to
run alongside him. It was the only way I was going to get any kind of conversation out
of him. I was wearing my pink trainers with the turquoise laces, the only shoes I could
possibly run in.

I had spent the day at home, trying to be
useful. I’m guessing it was about an hour before I started to get under my
mother’s feet. Mum and Granddad had their routines, and having me there
interrupted them. Dad was asleep, as he was on nights this month, and not to be
disturbed. I tidied my room, then sat and watched television with the sound down and
when I remembered, periodically, why I was at home in the middle of the day I had felt
an actual brief pain in my chest.