And then, ahead of her, was a familiar figure, walking the same route slightly quicker. A glint of plentiful hair and a swinging cloak which looked as light as feathers, dancing along, entirely at home with the early hours, as if setting out or coming back made no difference to her speed, moving along as if every destination and assignation deserved the same enthusiasm, as eager to get there as she was to go away. Dear Sarah might have speeded up when someone shouted her name: it might have made her break into a run, but this time she recognised the voice, slowed down and stopped and
turned, slowly and wearily, showing a face that seemed so much older and wiser than her own.
‘Jessica? Not now, love, please. You silly thing. What have you done now?’ The voice suggested affection and exasperation. ‘Got enough money to get home? Here.’
There was a twenty-pound note in her hand, and a scarf wrapped round her neck and the other woman was walking away, no hugs, no kiss, no comfort but a clear message. Sort out your own mess; no one else can, the footsteps away telling her that.
What did she mean by ‘home’?
Slumped into a doorway, Jessie dreamed of walking down over the cliffs to the village, towards someone who loved her as she wished to be loved, whoever that was, dreamed of making someone happy. Her shoulder hurt and her bare legs were as white as lard. What kind of fool was she to pursue a man into the depths of Smithfield Market? What would she have said? Hello? Please love me like you said you would, you promised.
Then the footsteps came back, wearily.
‘Come on, Jess. We’ll find some breakfast. Come home and tell me about it.’
‘I wish I could be like you, Sarah.’
‘No, you don’t. Come home and tell me.’
‘Come home with you? Oh, please. Can I?’
Jessica, Jessie, Jess, Jezebel, she had been called all these, perked up quickly, smoothed her hair. It was a knack – she had an ability to move from misery to joy within a second; she ran from one to another on a constant collision course like a child learning to walk.
‘Home to your flat? Oh, thank you, I love your flat.’
‘I wish I did. It doesn’t feel like home any more.’
They were walking briskly in the right direction with Sarah striding and Jessica almost skipping along beside her in the cold.
‘But it’s so nice, your place. So central, so easy.’
‘Borrow it any time you like. I’ve never felt quite right with it since I had a fire. A long time ago, but I can still smell the smoke.’
Scene Two
‘I
can’t smell anything but coffee,’ Jessica said, sitting in the kitchen, sniffing appreciatively. ‘Coffee and perfume. Those are the smells that belong with you. You’re so kind, Sarah, so kind to let me in.’
She hugged Sarah from behind, impulsively and briefly, meaning it. She was almost irritatingly humbling in her appreciation of a warm room, of a single gesture, of anyone listening. Sarah had never known someone who so delighted in the details of everything, was so anxious to please and so keen to repay being noticed and accepted. There would be flowers later: Jessica was capable of blowing a week’s wages on flowers and thank-you gifts, even for a cup of coffee and toast. When Jessica Hurly said she would do anything for you, she really meant it and probably would, so Sarah was careful not to ask. Jessica would have gone to jail for a friend: she would have punched the bully boys at school: she never forgot a good deed and was incapable of ignoring the most fraudulent beggar even if it meant there was not enough money to get home. A kind fool. Jessica had a consistently passionate if misguided desire to make things right for people and in that pursuit was sublimely incapable of looking after herself. Sarah was older, looked at her with older eyes. Jessica was a loved acquaintance, to be treated with caution, because whatever her admirable qualities, judgement always fell prey to spontaneity, reserve gave way to anger, with glorious
and sometimes disastrous results. She lived in the moment.
‘I’m not being kind and the company’s nice,’ Sarah said, briskly but softly. ‘Now tell me what the hell you were doing getting into Smithfield meat market at five in the morning. Why?’
Jessica warmed her hands on the china coffee mug, tracing the pattern of flowers and leaves with her long blue-varnished fingernails. She waited half a minute, moved her hands to touch the mobile phone hanging on a leather cord round her neck.
‘I was being absolutely stupid. I went out and got a bit drunk and I was angry and sad, stupid. I had this overpowering desire to see him, you see, and I thought he might be there, buying the meat for Das Kalb, like he does, so it seemed worth a try. He goes there at night, so I did too, in case . . .’
‘Who?’
Jessica hesitated, forcing herself to smile, although big fat tears rolled down her cheeks, bearing the last of her mascara in their wake. She looked better without her armoury of aggressive make-up, the absence of which failed to disguise a strong but piquant face with huge eyes and a wide mouth, all offset by long black hair that Jess twisted into a knot only when she worked around food. She was a beautiful girl, far too uncertain of herself and her own temperament to have developed her own style. Clothes, shoes, fingernails, hair, lipstick, all clashed in colour into a gorgeous cacophony of experiment. She would make a stylist ache. She was an individual beauty still in the making.
‘I went to find the Love of My Life,’ Jessica said, dramatically. ‘The one and only. He told me to stay away from him, but I can’t.’
‘There’s no such thing as the love of one’s life,’ Sarah said,
crisply. ‘Or at least not until you’ve lived a little longer than you have.’
‘It was him who said it,’ Jessica said. ‘It was him who said he’d love me for ever and ever.’
‘And you believed him?’
Silence fell. City silence, full of the weight of traffic and machinery. The air-conditioning unit in the well of the old block of flats sprang into life with a muted breath and the world outside was a distant invisible roar. Sarah thought that advice at this point was impertinent and redundant: distraction was better, perhaps. Let Jessica return to the subject, or weep or laugh, as she wanted.
‘Yes, I believed him. I still do, but he doesn’t know what he wants, or what’s good for him. I wanted to take him home,’ Jessica said. ‘I wanted to take him home with me, so I could go, too. Maybe make it up with my mother. If I took home the love of my life, it would all be all right, wouldn’t it? Everything would be all right.’
‘You can’t make a man love you,’ Sarah said.
‘Can’t you? I think you can. What you
can’t
do is give up on something precious. You’ve got to try and keep on trying, however much you cock up.’
Another silence. Jessica looked up with a dazzling smile. ‘Don’t worry about me, Sarah love. I’ll think about something else and talk about something else, try it another way. I can’t let him lose me again, that’s all. Still, I was stupid.’
She jumped up and prowled round the kitchen. A shot of caffeine had Jessica back to normal, high-spirited, angry, sad, communicative in bursts, hyperactive and ever-helpful.
‘Sarah, I can’t bear the idea of you not being happy in a place like this. I thought you had the perfect life. God, do you remember that dinner party when we first met? Awful. You
got me out of there before that poor man killed me. First time I came here. I was
awful.
Sorry.’
‘One of the more entertaining evenings I can ever remember,’ Sarah said. ‘Only we didn’t get much to eat.’
Then they were grinning, then giggling loudly and uncontrollably: two women who knew what it was like to make fools of themselves. A couple of anarchists in the church of ego worship.
‘You poured soup over a man’s head,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ve always meant to ask you, just what was the final provocation to waste all that food after you’d gone to the trouble of cooking it?’
‘Don’t know. I was sorry for it afterwards. It wasn’t that he kept changing his mind about what he wanted, it was because he was a
bully
, and he made his wife cry in the kitchen and he wanted his guests to be miserable and envious. The food would have been wasted anyway. I said sorry to her. I sent flowers.’
‘My God, you’re magnificent when you’re angry,’ Sarah said in a breathy, adulatory voice.
‘Am I? Good. Maybe anger does it. I’ll try it out more.’
‘Oh, no, don’t.’
Jessica was standing centre stage, first messing up her hair until it was a wild mass hanging halfway over her face, planting one hand with her customised blue-painted nails onto one generous, thrusting hip, shaking her other fist at an enemy, crossing her eyes, making herself into a parody of fury and laughing at herself. Prancing and stabbing like a demented prima donna and still giggling.
‘Like this?’
‘Terrifying,’ Sarah said, laughing with her. ‘Not for wimps.’ Jessica sat down and ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it back into place.
‘It’s worse when it’s genuine. It’s what you do when you really are a wimp. My mother said I should have been an actress, hysterical roles only. She was probably right. I don’t know how to stop it.’
‘Maybe you should go back and see your mum. Take a break. Maybe you should write it all down and think about it. Where does she live?’
The sombre mood came back. Jessica stared into the middle distance, fixing her eyes at a colourful plate hung on the wall.
‘She lives in a lovely place, the loveliest place in the world. Home. I can’t go back, though. Not yet, not until I’ve proved myself. Why does everything take such a long time? I need to go back with him and maybe then they’d see the sense of me. Can’t go back until I’m a good daughter and make things right for all I did wrong. All that fucking anger for nothing. I’d love to go home, but I can’t.’
She turned her huge troubled eyes on Sarah, smiled slowly.
‘Change of subject, OK? I hate people who talk about themselves all the time. So, Miss Fortune, if you don’t feel easy here, where would you like to live?’
Distraction. Sarah spoke slowly, willing to distract and be distracted, allowing herself to dream. Thinking of how much she would like to be a million miles from here, somewhere where the smell of fire was only woodsmoke. Her home had been sabotaged and her ease with it never recovered, but the dream had predated the damage by years and years.
‘A cottage in a village close by the sea. With honeysuckle round the door and places to walk. Cliffs and sea and feeling safe. Without any noise except weather. I’ve dreamed of it all my life. I’ve always loved the sea. Always thought that when I’d got enough money I’d give it a go.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. I was taken to the sea for the first time when I was five, longed for it ever since.’
‘I don’t believe it! Yes, I do. When can you go? I can do something for you, Sarah, really I can. What time is it?’
Jessica leapt to her feet, was up and pacing round, striding out of the kitchen with her mobile held close to her ear, speaking staccato, softly for her, persuading, getting them to call back, trying another number, talking, texting, mainly talking, walking away down the long corridor of Sarah’s apartment, her voice fading away and coming back.
You’re sure? Fine. Yes.
She detoured to the bathroom: Sarah could just about hear her, still talking, Jessica who could do three things at once before collapsing into grief. Then she strode back into the kitchen with clean hands, scrubbed face and a look of triumph.
‘You can go next week,’ she said. ‘Honest, you can. You can do what you like, Sarah. We can make things happen. Try it. It’ll work if you believe it. My mother owns it: you don’t have to meet her, all done through an agent, but it would be nice if you did. Maybe you could tell her I’m not as bad as I’m painted. Maybe you could tell her . . . Oh, nothing.’ She snorted into a handkerchief. ‘Maybe not. Just go and try the dream, why not? If you want to go, it’s there, it’s perfect for you. Not a bad little cottage. The agent says yes. Just go and pay, it’s empty.’
‘Don’t you speak to your mother?’
Jessica shook her head violently.
‘No. I write to her sometimes. She doesn’t write back. She’s ashamed of me and ashamed of being a widow.’
‘It’s a good idea, writing letters. Makes you focus. Better than e-mail.’
‘Yeah, right.’
Then her face crumpled. ‘Why doesn’t he love me? Why? When did he stop? What did I do? All I did was find him. He loves me.’
Toxic grief.
Scene Three
S
ix a.m. and darkness still going on. What to do with this silly big bitch before anyone saw? Drag her down to the road; make it look like an accident. Well, it was an accident, surely, if only an accident waiting to happen to an animal of such suicidal daftness that she could be described as a creature who had been asking to be killed from the moment of birth. Her hairy hide was full of buckshot, enough to kill smaller game, but not her although she was mortally wounded, snarling and snapping, defying rescue or pity with her bloodshot eyes, her coat soaking wet from where she had dragged herself down the hillside through the damp grass, flanks heaving, unable to move much further; but it might take her a while to die even if she could still bite and he thought he should let her bite his hand and die defiant.
He studied her for a moment, admiring her for snarling rather than whimpering. Then he walked round her, sensing her struggling to move her head to follow him with her desperate eyes. He put his boot on her head, gently, leant over, judged the angle and stabbed her in the neck with his hunting knife, twice, to be sure of it. When she was finally still, he lifted the hind legs and began to drag her towards the road through the gap in the hedge. She was surprisingly light for all her size as if most of her bulk was in her hair. The road surface was warmer to lie on than wet grass. All sorts of animals migrated there for early-morning warmth, offering
themselves for roadkill. He laid her out across the carriageway. There, good girl, nothing hurts any more, the first car will hit you and explain it all. Hope it’s a posh one and you do it damage. Good girl.