Authors: C. L. Taylor
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Contemporary Women
“Sorry I made you jump.” I force a smile as I step into the kitchen. “I wasn’t expecting company and I’m still not really used to the whole ‘leave your door open and friends let themselves in’ thing. That’s not something we did in Leicester.”
“You’re from Leicester?” Her face brightens and I kick myself for not being more careful. “My ex-boyfriend was from Leicester. We used to go to Kick Up the 90s at Fan Club. Have you been?”
I shake my head. “It’s been a while since I’ve been clubbing.”
“Right. Well, it’s not exactly rocking with them here, is it?”
“No.”
It strikes me, as silence descends and we stand opposite each other in the kitchen, smiling tightly and nodding awkwardly, how, even though we’re about the same age, I feel twenty years older than Angharad. She’s bright and sharp and inquisitive whereas I feel old and tired and jaded. Five years ago – that was the last time I went clubbing. I went to Love Lies
with Daisy, and I met some guy. She kicked him out of the taxi on the way back to mine. What was he called? I look up as Angharad says my name.
“Sorry, I was miles away. What was that?”
“I was just talking about the clubs I used to go to at uni. Did you go? I know you said you went to college in Exeter, but I think you said something about uni. Newcastle, was it?”
My memory of the past might be hazy but I know for a fact I haven’t told Angharad where I went to university, or even that I went at all. I’ve been careful not to give away too much about my past since I moved here. Will’s the only one who knows anything about my life as Emma. There’s a part of me that’s incredibly relieved that I don’t have to filter what I say to him any more, but I also feel vulnerable, as though I peeled off my protective layers and laid myself bare in front of him last night. As far as anyone else is concerned, though, I’m Jane Hughes, I left school at sixteen then did a variety of shop and admin jobs before deciding to get a qualification in animal care and management when I was twenty-five. I’ve told Sheila the names of my brothers and sister, but that’s it.
“No.” I shake my head. “I think you must have me confused with someone else. I’ve never even been to Newcastle.”
“Oh, right.” A half-smile plays on her lips as she raises her eyebrows. “Sorry, my mistake.”
My gaze drifts from the kitchen table to the cake on the Welsh dresser. My table is huge, a good eight-seater, and yet she chose to squeeze the sponge into the tiny space between the letter rack and the filing tray where I hid the note.
“Shall I cut you a piece?” Angharad follows my gaze and leaps into action, snatching up the knife. “I’m sure Sheila wouldn’t mind if I’m a little bit late. She did say to give you her love.”
“No.” I press a hand to the side of my head. “No, thank you. Sorry, Angharad. I don’t want to be rude, not after you’ve gone to so much trouble, but I’ve got a terrible headache. I think I might just go back to bed.”
“Oh.” Her smile fades. “Oh, okay, then.”
I shoot her a friendly smile. “I’ll see you at work on Monday. I think we’ve got a new arrival booked in. I can show you how we do the registration process.”
“Great.” Her smile returns but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Great, I’ll see you then.”
She looks at me for several seconds, as though deciding whether or not to add something else, then nods curtly and raises a hand in goodbye. “I’ll see you on Monday, then, Jane.”
She rounds the table and heads for the front door, pulling it closed behind her with a click.
I wait until the VW Polo purrs to life and crunches its way down the driveway then I take a step towards the kettle and press my fingers against its shiny curved belly.
Cold.
I cross the kitchen to the Welsh dresser, pick up the cake and move it to the table, then turn back. The paperwork in the filing tray, previously squared up and piled neatly, is askew. I rifle through it, tossing aside gas bills, council tax forms and articles I’ve snipped from the newspaper. The envelope – the one with Jane Hughes written in neat handwriting in blue biro on the front – is gone.
Within seconds, I’m surrounded. Isaac and Cera dart out from his study, and Sally and Rajesh hurry out of the kitchen. Daisy snatches her hand from my shoulder and stares at me in horror.
“What did you scream for?” She presses her hands to her chest. “Jesus fucking Christ, Emma, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“What happened?” Isaac puts a hand on my shoulder, a look of concern on his face. He doesn’t know I was listening to him and Cera talking about Al.
“Nothing. Daisy startled me when she touched me, that’s all.”
He glances down at my grazed knee. “What happened there?”
“She fell over.” Sally skips to my side and links her arm through mine, but her eyes don’t leave Isaac’s face. Raj takes a step back towards the kitchen. “I was cleaning the girls’ shower block when I heard a noise, and I found her on the walkway. One of her flip-flops broke and she tripped.”
Isaac stoops and peers at me. “And you’re sure you’re okay?”
I fan my hand in front of my face. It’s hot in the hallway and everyone’s standing too close. They’re all watching me – staring – waiting for me to speak. A bead of sweat dribbles down my back. I close my eyes momentarily, but when I open them again the walls swell, opening out like a balloon then constricting again, squeezing everyone closer, closer, closer to me until the pressure on my chest is so great I can’t breathe.
“You’re not going to faint, are you?” Sally sounds like she’s talking underwater.
I want to tell her to stop hanging on to my arm, and Isaac to get out of my face, but I can’t speak. I can’t move. I can’t bear the sensation of Sally’s fingers pressing against my skin, or the scent of tobacco on Isaac’s breath.
“Why don’t we go for a walk?” Daisy says, guiding me towards the front door, leading me into the fresh air. My knees buckle but she holds me upright.
“Emma!” Sally calls out as we take the steps one at a time. “Do you need a stick? I could find you one if you need one.”
I don’t say a word as we round the building, cross the patio – normally crowded with bending, stretching yoga bodies but now strangely deserted – and carefully pick our way down the slope towards the river. Instead, I focus in on Daisy’s voice as she tells me to breathe. She says it over and over again.
“Breathe, Emma, just breathe.”
She lowers me carefully onto a large flat rock on the edge of the river and I double over, my head in my hands. Everything still sounds as though I’m sitting in the bottom of a swimming pool, but my heart has stopped pounding and the world has stopped pulsing. Fresh blood is dribbling from my knee and running down my calf. Sally’s plaster is still in my hand.
“You okay?” Daisy peers at me as I suck on the cuff of my linen shirt and use it to wipe away the blood.
“No. No, I need my tablets.”
She stands up and looks towards the house. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them since we were in Pokhara. I’ve looked everywhere.”
“Shit.” She sits down again, rests a hand against the base of my spine. My shirt is stuck to my back with sweat but she doesn’t remove her hand. “We’ll find them. And you’ll be okay. I’m here, Emma. You’ll be fine.”
I nod but I’m not sure I will.
“What were you doing?” Daisy asks. “When I came in the front door, you were standing on your own in the hallway with the weirdest expression on your face. I thought you were supposed to be with Al.”
I look up at her. “Why did you say it like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re annoyed that I’ve been spending time with Al.”
“You have spent a lot of time with her since we got here.”
“That’s because Leanne’s always skipping off to meditation or one of Isaac’s seminars, and I didn’t want Al to feel left out.”
She looks at me for several seconds then tips back her head and laughs. “Would you look at your face! I wasn’t getting all
Single White Female
on you. I just thought it would be nice to spend a bit of time with my best friend, that’s all. Anyone would think you’re ignoring me!”
“I’m not.”
“Are you sure about that?” Her bright blue eyes bore into me.
“Of course I am. Anyway, what happened after Al and I left Isaac’s talk? Did he carry on giving Leanne the third degree?”
“No, he stopped and Isis took her off somewhere. I tried to go with them but Isaac wouldn’t let me. He said that Leanne was like an open wound, that the infection from her past was seeping out and that I couldn’t be with her or I’d contaminate her and she’d have to go through the process all over again.”
I laugh. “You’re winding me up.”
“I swear I’m not. He seriously came up with that crap. It’s a good job he’s so fit or he couldn’t get away with it. Anyway” – she dismisses the thought with a wave of her hand – “I went to look for them in the grounds but couldn’t see them anywhere, so I went back to the house. And that’s when I saw you standing in the hallway playing a game of musical statues all on your own.”
“I was listening to Isaac and Cera talking in the study.”
“What about?”
I squint into the distance. Isaac is leaning out of his study window, puffing on a cigarette. I would never admit it to Daisy but there’s something fascinating about him. On the surface he seems really chilled and laid-back, but there’s a lot more going on beneath the smiles and the pseudo-Buddhist bullshit. I’m not sure I buy what he said about getting over the abuse he suffered in his childhood by talking about it. I think the hurt’s still there but he’s found a way to block it out. “Al. I think they were pissed off with her for smashing up the hallway.”
Daisy follows my gaze. “You know he likes me?”
“Sorry?”
“Isaac. He fancies me. Leanne told me. He plays hard to get, apparently.”
I suppress a smile. Daisy’s propensity for self-delusion is astonishing, but her telling me that Isaac fancies her isn’t to share her surprise or delight; it’s to warn me off. This is her staking her claim. If it weren’t so ridiculously childish, it would be irritating. “Right, okay. That’s interesting.”
“I know, I like a challenge and, according to Leanne, it really pissed him off that I shagged Johan.” She smirks and runs a hand through her hair, preening even though Isaac is over a hundred metres away.
“Leanne told you that?”
“Yeah. I knew he liked me, I just couldn’t figure out why he was being such an arsehole about it, but now I know he had a fucked up childhood, so that explains a lot. It looks like we’ve got more in common than I thought.” Her lips twitch into a tight, self-satisfied smile and she reaches for my hand. “Shall we go and find Al?”
“I’m sorry, guys. I’ve made up my mind.” Al puffs on her cigarette, throws it on the ground, and then lights another. It’s the fourth one she’s had since dinner.
The sky is a black blanket, it’s spitting with rain and we’re sheltering under one of the mango trees in the orchard at the bottom of the garden. The house shines like a beacon in the distance – the kitchen is bright with the light of electric lamps, while the study and meditation room glow with the warmer, dimmer light of dozens of candles. The firepit on the patio crackles and sparks, illuminating Isaac and Johan. Their silhouettes are tipped together, as though deep in conversation. The garden is silent apart from the rushing of the river, the chirps of the cicadas and Al sucking on her cigarette.
We didn’t have to look far to find her. She was sitting in one of the massage huts with Johan, puffing on a joint. We heard her laughter as we walked along the bank of the river. It faded as she spotted us, and she barely said a word over dinner.
“But you can’t leave.” There’s a whiny tone to Leanne’s voice, whiny and desperate. She’s wrapped in a Nepalese yak’s wool blanket. Every time she waves her arms around to illustrate her point, the smell of damp dog drifts towards me. “We’ve only just got here.”
“If this has got anything to do with what I said earlier about Isis and what she said about your brother,” I say, “I’m sorry. What I said was thoughtless and tactless. I didn’t mean to upset you, I swear.”
Al waves away my apology with a flick of her hand. The burning tip of her cigarette dances through the air. “Don’t worry about it, Emma.”
“Seriously, I feel really—”
“Let’s not talk about it.” She fixes me with a look. “Okay?”
“It’s going to tip down later,” Daisy says, her gaze still fixed on the patio. “You heard what Johan said.”
Al leans back against the mango tree and sparks her lighter, lighting another cigarette. The flame illuminates the deep graze on her knuckles. She punched the wall in the girls’ dorm with a lot more force than I realised.
“Johan says a lot of things,” Al says.
“I thought you liked him.” Daisy sounds indignant.
“I do, he’s a decent bloke, but that doesn’t change anything. I’m still going.”
Leanne shivers and pulls the blanket over her head. “Is this because you’ve got no reception on your phone? I know it’s hard because you can’t check to see if Simone has texted you, but that’s part of the reason we’re here. You’ve got an unhealthy attachment to her. You need to acknowledge your past so you can free yourself from it. Isaac thinks—”
“I don’t give two fucks what Isaac thinks.”
Daisy and I exchange a look. Al’s never snapped at Leanne like that before.
“Seriously.” Al stands up straight so she’s no longer resting against the tree trunk. “You need to listen to yourself, Leanne. Ever since we got here it’s been Isaac this, Isaac that. Toxic minds, unhealthy attachment, meditating on nothingness; you’re even starting to sound like him.”
“And is that such a bad thing?” The yak blanket slips from Leanne’s head as she pulls herself up to her full five-foot height. Her beady eyes peer up at Al from under her glasses. “Isaac’s happy, Isis is happy, Cera is happy, everyone here is happy – and we’re not. Why do you think that is? Because they haven’t got any unhealthy attachments, and we have.”
“I’d like to get unhealthily attached to Isaac,” Daisy says, but no one laughs. She glances back towards the patio. I can’t see Isaac’s face but I can tell from the angle of his body that he’s gazing down past the gardens and into the orchard, watching us.
Al draws on her cigarette then tips back her head and exhales. The grey smoke spirals into the darkness and then disappears. “So how did purging yourself of your past work for you, Leanne? Are you a happy little sunbeam now?”
Leanne bristles. “There’s no need to be a bitch about it.”
“Sorry!” Al holds up her hands. “I don’t want to fall out with you, Leanne, honestly, but this place is doing my head in. I want to leave, I need to, and it’s got nothing to do with Simone.”
“Give it a couple of days,” Daisy says. “There’s going to be a big party once Gabe and Ruth get back from Pokhara. There’ll be vodka, lots of it! Brought up here on a donkey – a donkey, for goodness’ sake! Although how they can call themselves a business and run out of food and drink when they’ve got guests staying, I don’t know.”
Al shakes her head. “Sorry, mate, not interested. I’d rather be back down at the hotel in Pokhara with my feet in the pool.”
“But
we
wouldn’t be there.”
“I’ll cope. It won’t be long until you lot join me.” Al grinds her cigarette butt into the ground with the heel of her flip-flop. “I’d better go and get packed if I want to leave tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“I’m not spending another night sleeping in the same room as Isis. She creeps me out.”
“Then sleep in the meditation room,” Leanne says. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you dragged your mattress in there.”
Al shakes her head. “Nah, it’s cool. I’ve made up my mind.”
“But it’s spitting already, and Johan said the rain is going to get heavier! It’s not safe trekking up or down the mountain in bad weather. And it’ll take you hours.”
“It’s downhill, and unless Johan is channelling the Weather Station straight into his brain, he’s guessing about the weather.”
I shake my head. “You’re not going on your own. I’ll come with you.”
“She speaks!” Daisy feigns shock, and Leanne laughs.
“You don’t have to,” Al says.
“I want to. I can’t bear feeling so on edge. I’d enjoy this holiday a whole lot more if I could get some more tablets. I’m sure there’ll be somewhere in Pokhara where I can buy some. Daisy bought Valium over the counter in Kathmandu.” I glance at her, waiting for her to launch into her “You can’t go, you’re my wing woman” speech that I get every time I try to leave a London club early, but she merely raises her eyebrows and gives me a half-smile.
“Please.” Leanne grips Al’s hand. “Don’t go. Give it a few more days. I know I’ve been a bit crap at spending time with you, but we can fix that. We can go swimming more often, and Raj said he’d give us cookery lessons, if we want. I know how much you love his dahl bhat.”
Al shakes her head. “Nah, no offence. It’s nothing to do with you, Leanne, honestly. I just need to clear my head and it feels claustrophobic here. Look, we were only planning on spending another week or so here, anyway. I can meet you back in Pokhara and then we’ll get the bus to Chitwan and do our jungle trek.”
“Um …” Leanne lets go of Al’s hand. “About that …”
“What?”
“I haven’t actually booked it.”
“Why not?” Al glances from me to Daisy. “I thought the plan was Kathmandu, then Pokhara, two weeks here, then Chitwan. That’s what we agreed before we came out here. Haven’t you guys already paid for it?”
Daisy and I both nod as Leanne shifts from foot to foot and pulls the blanket more tightly around her. “I … I was going to book it, but then I thought I’d play it by ear just in case we … in case …” She glances up towards the patio. Isaac is alone now, the dim light of his cigarette tracing through the air. “Anyway, someone told me it was cheaper to book treks from here.”
“So we’re still going?”
“Well, as I say, I haven’t actually booked it yet, but …”
“Don’t you think we should? What if there’s no availability for next week?” Al waves a hand dismissively. “Never mind, I’ll organise it once I get back to Pokhara, if you can give me the cash.”
“I haven’t got it on me. I’d … I’d need to go to a bank.”
“Right.” Al shrugs. “Then I guess we’ll have to wait until we’re all back in Pokhara, then.”
“The rain is getting heavier.” I hold out a hand, palm up, and gaze up at the sky. Even in the darkness there’s no mistaking the menacing clouds looming overhead.
“Fuck.” Al tucks her Marlboro Lights into her bra strap and sighs heavily, looking morosely out at the view. “Tomorrow it is, then. I can put up with Isis for one more night, I guess. Come on, let’s get back inside before it pisses down.”
She sets off towards the house at a surprisingly speedy pace, and I set off after her, only pausing to glance back when I reach the now deserted patio. The heavy clouds above have finally broken open, but the firepit is still alight, a single log glowing in its belly though Isaac is long gone.
“Daisy! Leanne!” I shield my eyes from the rain and shout down to Leanne and Daisy, who are still standing beneath the mango trees, two dark, indistinct shapes in the gloom, their heads close together, as though deep in conversation. “Come on, you’ll get soaked!”
Neither of them acknowledges me.