‘Were you having some kind of weird fantasy moment then?’ Lewis asks when I return my gaze to him. ‘Your eyes went off to another land or something.’
‘Yes,’ I admit. ‘I was wondering what you’d do if I put on your glasses and pretended to be you.’
He grins at me, so beatifically I have to glance away. He really is delectable.
‘And this has got nothing to do with that guy, Fynn?’ Lewis asks, serious again.
‘Why would it have anything to do with him?’
‘He’s not exactly friendly towards me. I’m guessing I might have some competition there.’
‘I’m not a prize to be won or lost,’ I remind him. ‘And Fynn or no Fynn, it doesn’t change the fact I can’t square in my head what you kept from me.’
‘True. I suppose we can call this a classic case of failure to launch,’ he states about the potential of us without bitterness.
‘I guess so,’ I say. ‘But a lot of the fun in these things is the “will we, won’t we?” part anyway. At least we got that.’
Lewis’s laugh is deep and throaty, it reverberates happy sprinkles down my spine, and it makes a couple of people turn around with awed looks at how touching his laugh is. ‘That really isn’t the fun part,’ he chortles. ‘Not by a long shot.’
‘You know what I mean.’ I laugh, too. It’s an experience being able to laugh. When was the last time I did that? I can’t even remember.
‘I’d like the chance to change your mind,’ he says.
‘Yeah, sure, why not?’ I reply. As I said to Phoebe earlier, I don’t have the energy to argue. ‘But just so you know, I rarely change my mind.’ He doesn’t know there have been enough secrets in my family, I don’t need to invite in the potential for any more.
‘And just so you know,’ he states with a smile, returning his glasses to his face, ‘I like a challenge.’
LIX
‘Mum! Mum! Wake up!’
My eyes fly open at the urgency of the voice and the weight on my body.
I do not know where I am for a moment, I’ve been here for three days, but still I wake up every time disorientated. I wince slightly, at the brightness of the world outside my eyelids – it’s clearly not early morning or the middle of the night. My body feels heavy, weighted down and something is far too close to my face for me to focus on it. The object pulls back a bit so I can see what it is. What it is, is divine.
‘Zane?’ I whisper. I’m afraid to say it too loud in case I wake myself up from this dream. ‘Zane?’
‘Yep!’ he says, happily. He bounces on me, twice, and the curves of his knees crush most of my internal organs. He’s towering over me because he seems to have doubled in size since he left three weeks ago. ‘I came back. Can’t believe what Pheebs has done now!’
If he’s here, then so are they and that means … They stand on the other side of Phoebe’s bed like twin peaks of disapproval. They’re not sure who to aim their disapproval at – when one is glaring at me, the other looks at Phoebe, then they swap.
‘Betty called us,’ Joel’s mum says. ‘She thought we should know.’
‘Oh, OK.’ I can’t believe Aunty Betty would stitch me up like this. This is the last time I take her in.
‘I can’t believe she got to ride in an ambulance,’ Zane says. ‘Flashing lights and everything, she said. Not fair.’
I cuddle Zane, draw him close to me to stop him causing me any more physical damage, and because my little boy is home. I’m going to bask in that for a moment. I’m not going to allow thoughts that having him here is another point of weakness, because I don’t care right now. He’s back, he’s here and I can put my arms around him.
‘You could have called us, Saffron,’ Joel’s dad says. ‘We would have come sooner.’
The temperature hadn’t dropped enough in hell for me to do that, I think.
‘Please,’ Joel’s mum says suddenly. She is staring right at me, and there is a look I’ve never seen before on her face. On anyone else I would think it was humility, regret. ‘Please,’ she repeats. ‘Can we start again? I know Joel isn’t here to see this, but let’s put the past behind us. Let’s be kinder to each other. And move on with a new understanding.’
Bloody hell, what did Aunty Betty say? I wonder.
‘Yes, of course,’ I say. I take the opportunity to snuggle my face into my little boy’s neck, to smell him and hold him. I’m so lucky that I’m allowed to do this, that it’s my purpose in life to do this.
I could point out that none of it was me, it was all them. I could remind her that I’d turned myself inside out for years attempting to be good enough, and they wouldn’t have it. I could say that I thought things would be different after Joel died and was gutted beyond reason when I realised things were going to carry on as before. I could say all that but I don’t. None of it matters because they’ve brought my baby home. I can forgive them almost anything right now.
XI
LX
She’s going to come for me today.
It’s one of those things I have been waiting for and today is the day it will happen.
I feel it.
There’ve been no letters at the hospital for three days, I don’t know of any new attacks on my car because it has been towed and I haven’t the time to go get it. I do know that someone called the hospital and asked when Phoebe would be sent home. The nurse who answered said they couldn’t give out that information but she did confirm that Phoebe was a patient. I knew it was her, checking to see if we were still there, finding out if I’d called the police and we were under police guard. Trying to work out how much longer I’ll be alone in the house for stretches of the day so she can come kill me.
Every day for the past four days I have come home from the hospital at the same time to get more clothes, return dirty clothes and cook some food for me and Phoebe. Aunty Betty comes and goes as she pleases during the day – getting fed by various people – but she always stays with Phoebe when I’m not there.
I can feel her approach like the coming of a bleak winter. The sensation hangs in the air, a chilling, threatening menace of things to come. She has always been coming for me, I realise. If I read the letters from the beginning, it’s obvious that they were simply the precursor to today.
It’s going to be today because Phoebe is meant to be leaving hospital tomorrow, so we’ll all be here again, the house will be alive again and I won’t be alone – properly alone – like this for a long time.
She’s coming for me and I’m ready.
I stopped off on the way home to buy some blackberries. They are my flavour I love. I haven’t had any since that day. I don’t even look at them in shops, my eyes seem to develop a blind spot wherever they are. I skim over recipes with them in books and on the internet. I loved, all that time ago, the tanginess of blackberries. I adored the sensation of several little explosions on the tongue. That day, I was going to sit down with my bowl of blackberries and read a magazine with the radio in the background and wait for my husband to come home. Instead, that day I began my wait for today.
She’s coming for me today and it’s what I’ve been waiting for.
*
I’m in the kitchen, of course. That’s where I’m going to wait for this to happen. I’m not going to eat the blackberries, I’m going to make my recipe for the book. I’m going to use it to create something I love.
I have laid out what I need and I examine each of them closely, running my fingers lightly over the surface of them to ensure I truly have everything:
Blackberries
White sugar
Lemon juice
Vanilla extract
Butter
Light brown sugar
Salt
Ground almonds
Plain flour
I have also taken out the beige ceramic mixing bowl that Joel bought me on the day he died from the cupboard under the sink. I put it there because I couldn’t look at it. For some reason it became a sy
mbol of what had gone wrong. It had been in her car and I wondered often if he hadn’t bought it as a surprise for me, would he have come home instead of dropping it off in his car? Would he still be alive? I have washed it out, and it sits beside the ingredients. This will be a good thing, an appropriate thing to do while I wait.
*
The berries explode and disintegrate under pressure from the fork in my hand. They become mush against the white sides of the bowl and every few seconds I have to stop, to look at the stain on the tiles, to remind myself what I’m doing this for. For Phoebe. For Zane. For me. For Joel. Especially for Joel.
‘J-J-J-J-J’s House!’ Joel echoes to me. ‘J-J-J-J-J’s House!’
‘Your husband has been involved in an incident,’ the he one echoes.
‘So, Unc, what you been up to?’ Zane echoes, too.
‘Everyone hooks up,’ Phoebe echoes behind him.
‘I think it’s great. The idea of finishing the cookbook and the talking,’ Lewis echoes.
‘It was only sex to you?’ Fynn echoes.
‘Please believe in yourself, Saffron,’ Aunty Betty echoes.
*
All the voices, all the things that have been said, the utterances of the people of my life are alive in here. They talk at once, they’ve all made their impression on the fabric of the heart of our home and now they fill the room, fill my head. I stop what I am doing and allow the strands of my life, the flavours of the different types of love I’ve experienced, to descend.
They are so loud, so clear, so present, I almost miss the first one: Knock-knock.
My heart is drumming out its usual rhythm, my chest creates its normal in and out. I should be scared, terrified, of who is on the other side of the door. But I’m not. This is inevitable, so I don’t need to be frightened.
Knock-knock comes again. Louder this time.
My heart flits over a beat. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I am scared and I simply don’t know it. Maybe I’ve been living in a state of fear for so long, ever since that day, that what I think is normal is what most people think of as being terribly afraid.
It takes me seconds to reach the door. My hand is shaking. I am scared.
‘If you don’t hear from me in two hours, call the police and tell them to go to the house and call Fynn and ask him to come here to be with you,’ I told Aunty Betty as I left her this morning. I have fifteen minutes left to call her, then she will do as I asked.
My trembling hand makes contact with the doorknob and I turn. I edge it open.
A boy not much older than Zane stands on my doorstep. His skin is alabaster white, his curly hair matches the colour of the freckles dotted across his nose. He has striking green eyes and he’s dressed like he is on his way to hang out with his homies in da (posh boy) ’hood: branded hoodie, branded low-slung jeans and NYC baseball cap – all brand new, all ridiculously large on him.
‘Yes?’ I wait for her to leap out at me, to appear from beside him on the doorstep and to barge her way in, like a battering ram making light work of a barricaded door.
‘This lady told me to give you this.’ He holds up a cream envelope.
Saffron Mackleroy
is scrawled on the front.
‘Which lady?’ I ask and don’t take the envelope.
‘Dunno,’ he replies with a shrug.
‘If you don’t know her, why did you take something from her?’ ‘Cos she gave me a fiver.’
‘Don’t you know you’re not supposed to take stuff from strangers?’ I say to him. I am stalling, of course. The longer I talk to him, the longer the time is until what is going to happen will happen.
‘It was a fiver,’ he says.
‘Why do you have a cockney accent?’ I ask him.
‘Dunno.’ Shrug. ‘Do you want this or not?’
Not. I think. Absolutely not. My hand trembles as I relieve him of his envelope.
‘Do yourself and whoever loves you a favour, don’t talk to strangers any more,’ I say.
‘Yeah, all right,’ he says. He thinks in this scenario that I’m the weirdo. Not the person who paid him to deliver a letter, not himself for doing it and not simply running off with the money. But me, the person who has been targeted.
The letter is heavy in my hands because it contains the weight of my rapidly growing fear; it contains the final message.
My fingers shake as I open it. I’m aware as I do that the house isn’t empty any longer. I am no longer alone. I slip out the single sheet and drop the envelope where I stand to use two hands to unfold the message.
SURPRISE!!
is written large across the page. Large and, indeed, surprising.
I drop the cream sheet too, and walk towards the kitchen. I know what’s going to happen once I’m there. The house no longer feels empty because someone is waiting in the kitchen for me.
I should turn around and run. I have children to think of. What would they do without me? But I keep walking because I have children to think of. If not me then it’ll be them. And as Aunty Betty pointed out, I’d do anything for my children without a second thought.
*
I know her. She’s one of those people you pass in the street, you stand behind in the queue for the pay machine in the car park, you clash trolleys with in the supermarket. She’s one of those people who you sometimes throw a confused half-smile at in case you know her because you vaguely recognise her face but you’re not sure where from.
She is every person you’ve ever not met properly. She’s the person you could see every day for your whole life and never notice.
She is standing in front of my back door. The hood of her black top is pulled up but it doesn’t quite obscure her face. In her right hand, held close beside her leg with the blade pointing down, is a blackhandled chef’s knife. The type that killed my husband.
‘Don’t run,’ she says. Her voice is normal, ordinary, like she is. I expected maybe a witch’s cackle, or a husky, villainous drawl. But she is ordinary.
And I smile. My smile may show on the outside, but it’s there on the inside. What a ridiculous thing for her to say. Running is the last thing I’m going to do.
LXI
In the year I was forty-one, a woman broke into my house to murder me. She murdered my husband and then she decided to kill me. I let her in by leaving the back door unlocked while I went to the front door. I knew she wasn’t the type to knock at the front door, but she was the type to sneak in and wait for me, to try to end me the way she ended my husband.
When she killed him, I think she thought she’d put a full stop onto his life and who he was. She hadn’t, of course, and that’s what drove her insane in the end. He was still alive, in his children, in his wife, in his family, in his friends. He did not end, did not cease to exist because of her, she’d wielded the ultimate power of killing someone and she thought it would make her the most important person in his world. That the world would focus on her when they thought of him, that he would not continue to exist for anyone unless they thought of her as well.
That didn’t happen. His wife continued to go to work, his children continued to go to school, his aunt moved to be near his family, they didn’t take part in the appeal, they didn’t spend all their time at his grave. They carried on as he would have wanted them to, but without her at the centre of it. And that didn’t work for her.
She’d spent a year in hiding, living in France, waiting for the knock on the door, for them to come for her. But no one did. The anniversary came and went and no one came for her. No one questioned her beyond asking why she’d called him that morning. ‘About a recipe from cooking class,’ she’d replied and no one said anything else.
His daughter didn’t tell she’d seen my husband with her that day. And so she said nothing. She waited and waited and waited. And it never happened. So she moved back to England. Back to her house, back to the life she had before. She even got another job and everything went back to normal. But she wasn’t normal, ordinary. She
was someone now. She was the woman who had done that thing everyone had talked about for months in the papers. She had held someone’s life in her hands, how could anything be the same again?
It only meant something to her, though. His wife slept with the blinds open like nothing bad had ever happened to her, that she didn’t need to lock up tight at night. His wife went to the supermarket and didn’t break down in the aisles at certain foods – not like she did when she ever saw an ingredient they’d used in class. The wife let her children come home from school by themselves as if they were safe. His wife even looked her right in the face on Brighton seafront and threw her that ‘do I know you from somewhere’ smile you gave to strangers you vaguely noticed. Nothing had changed for his wife, the woman who was meant to love him more than life itself. The Wife was the reason why this had happened in the first place and nothing had changed for her.
It had to.
The Wife had to know who she was. And then she had to be scared. And then she had to be removed. But only when The Wife knew that once she was gone, there was nothing she could do to protect her children. His end had been unplanned, quiet and horrifically sad. The Wife’s had to be slow and as terror-filled as possible. This was all her fault, after all.
In the year I was forty-one, I had two children and a late husband, and a woman several years younger than me stood in my kitchen and tried to kill me.
The first words she said to me were: ‘Don’t run.’
And I smiled at her. I smiled at her because running was the last thing I was going to do.
LXII
‘Don’t run,’ she says.
‘Why would I run?’ I reply. I sound brave, I seem courageous. I am also completely terrified. Completely. My heart cannot beat properly because of this fear. I’m not even shaking. My eyes want to focus on the blackberry stain but I can’t stop looking at her, for even a second, because that’s when she’ll come at me. ‘I don’t even know who you are.’