Forward Slash (13 page)

‘Do you want to find a spot while I get the drinks in?’

Fortunately, just as she went outside, two guys stood up and left, so she nabbed the table, swabbing ineffectually at the spilled lager on its top with the flat of her palm. Her meeting with Ross earlier was still fresh in her mind – but, more than that, the disappearing tweet. She wiped her hand on the side of her skirt, dug out her phone and checked TweetDeck for the fiftieth time. More retweets of her appeal, but no useful replies, and no more messages from Becky. She checked her email. Nothing from Daniel either.

Why had Becky deleted the message? It made no sense.

Since receiving the original email from Becky, Amy had been vacillating between two possible explanations. The first was that the email was genuinely from Becky, but that something awful had happened to make her act so out of character. This was bad enough, but the second possibility was far worse – that someone else was
pretending
to be Becky.

If this second awful scenario was true, that meant the Twitter message was from the impostor too. And if
that
was right, that meant this person was watching her tweets, probably stalking her on Facebook, too.

And who knew how else they were watching her …

Her hands began to tremble and her phone shot out of her grip like a fish leaping from a net, landing face down on the hard pavement.

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘What is it?’ Gary stood over her, holding two pints. She liked the fact that he’d bought her a pint unasked.

She held up her phone to show him. The screen was shattered, cracks zigzagging across its fragile surface.

‘Oops,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, you can get a kit off eBay to fix it. I’ll do it for you, if you like.’

‘You’re so nice, Gary,’ Amy said, half serious, half wistful, as she accepted one of the pints. ‘I wish I had a neighbour like you. My neighbours are horrible. I went away for two days once and they complained to the council because I forgot to turn off my clock alarm. It only beeps for ten minutes! What’s it like, having Becky as a neighbour?’

Gary frowned and sat down opposite her. ‘Becky’s a great girl,’ he said carefully. ‘Plays her music too loud at times, but doesn’t freak when I tell her to turn it down – which I’ve done a few times. This one time she was decorating her bedroom, and she played that Lana Del Ray album at full volume, on repeat, the whole frigging day, and by the evening I was ready to weep. I banged on the door and said, “For the love of God, Becky, PLEASE stop playing that album,” and she just laughed. She did turn it down though. It’s not all her fault – we share a living-room wall, and they’re pretty thin. She has a lot of—’ He stopped abruptly.

‘A lot of what?’

‘Visitors,’ he said, and his lips set in a hard line.

Amy affected misunderstanding. ‘What – parties, and people over for lunch, that sort of thing? She’s always had a really good social life, much better than mine.’

‘Yeah, that sort of thing …’

Amy hesitated, before deciding to park that particular piece of information. It was worth pursuing, definitely, but she didn’t feel robust enough to go there just now. Not with two beers inside her, the evening sun rosy on her sunglasses, music floating out from inside the pub, and too much else to extrapolate first.

‘How do you and Becky get along?’ Gary asked. He stretched his feet out under the table, and accidentally banged Amy’s ankle. She pulled her leg out of the way, and they both apologized, then laughed.

‘We’re really close,’ Amy said. ‘At least, I thought we were. We’ve always argued, usually about stupid stuff, almost always started by her – I love her to bits, but she can be so
confrontational
! Especially if she’s hormonal. She just can’t let anything lie; she nags and grumbles and makes snide digs about things that she perceives as having upset her. She definitely gets that from our mum. Goads me into a big row. Then we scream at each other, one of us storms off, then someone – almost always me – holds out an olive branch, and we kiss and—’

Gary grinned. ‘Make up. Well, if it’s any consolation, I don’t think it was just you that she acted like that with. I heard more tantrums coming through the walls than I thought strictly necessary from anyone out of their teens. I heard her argue with lots of people. Slamming doors, insults, tears … it could be a bit like living next door to—’

‘Naomi Campbell?’ Amy suggested, at the same time as he said, ‘John McEnroe,’ and they both laughed.

Then Gary looked worried. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m slagging her off or anything. I really like her, she’s such a laugh, and, you know – really kind.’

Tears pressed behind Amy’s eyes again. It had been easier when they’d been discussing her shortcomings.

Gary nudged her gently. ‘So, tell me to mind my own business, but when you came over the other day, you said you and her had fallen out, and you hadn’t seen her for a while … Was it a bad one?’

Amy twirled her pint glass round and round, watching its amber contents swish up the sides. ‘Hmm. Yeah. It was a pretty bad one, for us. It was one of those rows that just escalated, you know, like:
And another thing …
’

‘Thing …’ Gary agreed softly.

‘It started because my folks were over from Spain and wanted to take us out to dinner, but Becky said she couldn’t make it because she was going to a party, so she couldn’t have them to stay either – and she’s the one with the spare room. I always seem to get lumbered with them when they come over, even though they have to sleep in my bed and relegate me to the sofa bed ’cos I don’t have a second bedroom … Anyway, I think I just resented her ability to put her foot down – she never does anything she doesn’t want to do, whereas I’m such a bloody pushover, it’s not even funny – and we ended up in this big fight. I remember I told her that if she didn’t turn up at Carluccio’s by 9 p.m., I’d never speak to her again. And she wouldn’t tell me about where the party was, or whose party, or why it was so important – I started to think she was making it up. We were screaming at each other.’

‘Most people would think that being taken out to dinner by your parents would be a treat, not an ordeal,’ Gary said.

‘You clearly haven’t met our parents, then, have you? No, of course you haven’t – because they’re always staying at my place, that’s why. Not that they come over much any more.’ Amy waved her now-empty glass at him. ‘Another pint?’

‘Don’t mind if I do, thank you very much. And a packet of cheese-and-onion?’

‘Coming up,’ Amy said, noticing the way his stubble darkened in his dimples when he smiled.

As she waited at the bar, being jostled on all sides, she thought back to that evening, the horrendous row followed by the grim dinner with their mum and dad. Her parents had seemed to hold her entirely responsible for Becky’s absence that night, and the meal had seemed to drag on for hours, her mother moaning at her about why Becky wasn’t there – you’d have thought they would be happy that she, Amy,
was
there – and how Becky never kept in touch or returned her calls, and her dad banging endlessly on about the new filtration system in their pool at the villa in Ronda.

Amy had ended the night in a fury, tossing and turning on the thin foam mattress of the sofa bed with the metal struts underneath sticking into her whichever way she rolled. But it was herself she was most furious with, not her folks, or even Becky. Why did she do this to herself? She too could have said she had a prior arrangement. They could have stayed in a hotel, they had plenty of money – they were only in the UK to attend a friend’s seventieth the next day. She had decided that she’d had enough of people taking advantage of her. She was going to stick to her guns, and not contact Becky. Let Becky come crawling back to
her
, for once!

Only she hadn’t, had she? And now she was missing.

Amy finally got served and headed back outside, a pint in each hand and a bag of crisps held between her teeth. Gary shamelessly eyed her up as she sat down.

‘Can I ask you something? How come you don’t have a boyfriend? You’re so pretty.’

She shrugged her shoulders, trying to make her voice light, but fumbled as she opened the crisps. They spilled out onto the table.

‘Been there, done that, got the—’

‘T-shirt,’ Gary said, staring intently at her face, then frowning as he noticed the way her hands had suddenly started to shake. ‘Are you going to tell me about it?’

Amy looked back at him. She never told people about Nathan. Perhaps it was because she felt so vulnerable at that moment, or perhaps even just to take her mind off Becky’s disappearance, she didn’t know – but either way, she realized for the first time that she did want to talk about it. It was oddly liberating.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’

When Amy walked into the conference room at APW that day and saw Nathan sitting at the table ready for the weekly briefing, she understood the literal meaning of the word ‘swoon’. Her vision gave a wobble, her knees went weak and she felt a blush wash over her from top to toe. She had never seen a sexier man.

‘Everyone,’ announced Martin, the MD, when they had all taken their coffees off the tray in the centre of the boardroom table, ‘this is our new recruit, Nathan Stott. He’ll be heading up the business development team and taking over the Randsome account.’

Nathan nodded politely at everyone present as Martin introduced them all, but when it was her turn, Amy saw his pupils dilate and the corners of his lips curl up into a wide smile. He held her gaze for so long that she had to drop hers first, and reach for a sachet of sugar for her coffee, even though she never took sugar, just for something to do to break the sexual tension. She thought afterwards that she never had been brilliant at spotting when someone fancied her, but there was nothing ambivalent about the immediate lightning bolt she and Nathan experienced when they first met. So it was no surprise at all when he emailed her from across the office right after the meeting, and asked her out for a drink that night.

Amy couldn’t get anything done that day for thinking about his sensual mouth and incredible hazel eyes. She counted down the hours, and had this fizzing, roiling feeling in her stomach at the thought of being able to stare at him unhindered across a pub table.

The date did not disappoint. She scrutinized him so much that she could straight away have told you how many little dark freckles he had scattered on his cheeks and down his neck (eleven), the length of his artful stubble (about three millimetres), the five silver hairs sprinkled around the crown of his thick silky black hair, the sort of hair that would have been described as ‘floppy’ in a Richard Curtis movie. He had Celtic patterns tattooed around his taut right bicep, which he showed her by unbuttoning and pushing his checked shirt off his shoulder, and peeling away the sleeve of the tight khaki T-shirt he was wearing underneath. Amy pointed out to him the flowery letters around her ankle, A&B, and he laughed.

‘Get us, showing each other our tats on the first date. I love a girl with tattoos, though. So who’s B, an ex?’

‘My sister Becky,’ she said. ‘We’re really close. You’ll meet her soon. She’ll love you.’

Then she blushed – how much presumption had been in those last two sentences? Nathan saw her embarrassment, reached across the table and grasped her forearm, gazing into her face with those amazingly long-lashed eyes.

‘This is it, isn’t it?’ he said, and the intensity in his voice was visceral. ‘You’re the one.’

All Amy could do was nod, and gaze back.

As it turned out, the first of her two presumptuous sentences was correct: Nathan and Becky did meet soon. Amy moved in with him in less than a month, and Becky came over to see her flash new apartment in a gated development on the Kingston riverfront. Nathan cooked Pad Thai in a stripy chef’s apron tied firmly over a faded Nirvana T-shirt, and boasted about the surround sound he’d recently had installed in the living room.

Amy thought the evening had been a great success. Nathan was lively and inquisitive, asking them both about their childhoods, their likes and dislikes.

‘What are your worst fears then?’ he’d asked them both, so casually.

‘Spiders,’ Becks had said with a shudder. ‘And Amy’s is enclosed spaces. I’ve never known such a wuss.’

‘I’m not a wuss, I’m just claustrophobic,’ she had protested.

‘Are you now?’ Nathan had said pensively, before turning back to stir the Pad Thai.

‘What about you, Nathan?’ Becky asked. ‘What are you scared of?’

He laughed. ‘I’ve got one of those weird irrational fears – velvet, believe it or not. It makes me puke with terror, don’t ask me why. Luckily, Amy doesn’t have any velvet dresses, otherwise I wouldn’t have let her move in.’

Amy draped an arm around his neck. ‘I’d have burned it for you, sweetie. Even if Stella McCartney had personally designed and sewn it for me.’

‘Ahh, you’re so adorable …’

Nathan kissed her, and Amy saw Becky look away, out of the window at a group of rowers sliding along the smooth evening river.

Amy hoped Becky wasn’t feeling jealous. She kept trying to see him through her sister’s eyes, and thought that Becky couldn’t fail to fancy him – in fact, she even felt slightly worried that Becky would fall in love with him, too, and her overactive imagination started conjuring nightmare scenarios in which he left her for Becky, creating a rift that would never be healed …

She need not have worried. The second of her presumptuous sentences had not been true at all.

‘How can you not like him?’ Amy asked incredulously when they met for breakfast the next day. ‘He’s lovely, and he adores me.’

Becky shrugged and stared into her coffee.

‘Becks?’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t
like
him,’ she said. ‘He’s cute and all. There’s just something … I dunno … a bit
cold
about him.’

Amy made a face at her. ‘Cold? He’s not cold. He asked you all about yourself, about us as kids, our lives so far. I mean, he even asked us what our biggest fears are! He’s interested, Becky, not cold. I don’t see how you can possibly think that.’