Authors: C. L. Taylor
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Contemporary Women
“So did you sleep with the bouncer, then?”
Daisy smirks from behind her mug of tea. “Someone had to distract him from throwing Al out.”
Leanne looks up from her mobile. “That’s a yes, then.”
It’s been a week since we manhandled Al out of the nightclub, and the three of us are gathered in Leanne’s tiny studio flat in Plaistow, East London, to talk about how best to help her. Daisy and Leanne are sitting cross-legged on her single bed, the crocheted bed cover pooling on the threadbare beige carpet, while I’m perched on the only chair in the room, a hard-backed pine affair by the window. There’s a basic kitchen on the other side of the room – sink, microwave, fridge and a two-ring portable electric hob – and a clothes rail along the wall opposite the bed, and a small chest of drawers with a 14-inch flat-screen TV on the top. Leanne’s tried to cheer up the room with a print of a sunny poppy-filled field, a small porcelain Buddha, a plaque that says, “Only Truth Will Set You Free” on the windowsill, and a spider plant next to the cooker, but it’s still undeniably bleak. In the two years that Leanne’s lived here, it’s only the second time she’s invited me round. Correction: Daisy invited me round. Leanne texted her to suggest they get together to talk about how best to help Al; Daisy suggested I come, too.
“Right.” Leanne sits up a little straighter and presses her glasses into her nose. She’s been unusually chirpy ever since we turned up, which is slightly weird considering she told Daisy on the phone that Al was sacked from her job three days ago and she was worried she might be a suicide risk. “I’ve been thinking about how best to help Al and I’ve come up with an idea.”
Daisy puts her mug down on the chest of drawers. “Go on.”
“There are three main issues here.” Leanne pauses, relishing the fact that she’s got a rapt audience, then holds up her index finger. “One: Al is physically stalking Simone and Gem. She sat outside Gem’s house all night last night – literally on the front doorstep – waiting for Gem to come out. Simone called the police.”
“Shit.”
Leanne raises her eyebrows. “I know. Apparently they just had a ‘friendly word’ and told her to move on, but if she does it again … Anyway.” She raises a second finger. “Two: Al is stalking Simone on the internet. Now she’s lost her job, she’s spending every bloody second on her laptop. I was round there yesterday and when she went to the loo, I took a quick look at the screen. She was on some kind of forum about hacking Hotmail accounts. And three,” she adds before I can interrupt again, “well, it kind of ties in with one and two. She’s spending too much time on her own. We need to keep an eye on her, but none of us can do that twenty-four seven, unless …” She pauses dramatically. “… we take her on holiday.”
“Yes!” Daisy’s silver bracelets rattle as she punches the air. “Let’s go to Ibiza. I love it there. I know a guy who used to work for Manumission who could get us free tickets.”
“Did you shag him?”
She gives me the middle finger.
“That’s a yes, then,” I say, and she laughs.
“So? Ibiza, then? Ian will give me the time off, and I’ve got a month until my next runner job. Whoop, whoop! Ibiza, here we come.” The bed squeaks in protest as Daisy bounces up and down.
“How long for?” I ask. “I’ve got three weeks’ holiday left but I was hoping to save one of those weeks for Christmas.”
“Quit. Honestly, Emma. It’ll be the best decision you ever make. Go to Ibiza and get another job when you come back. You can afford it. You’ve got three months’ emergency money saved up, you said as much last week.”
“Actually …” Leanne tentatively raises a hand but Daisy ignores her.
“Go on, Emma, it’s for Al. She’d love a couple of weeks in Ibiza. She went last year, didn’t she?”
“Didn’t she go with Simone?”
“How’s that a problem? She won’t be there this time. Will she?”
“I don’t know, but she’ll have lots of memories of going there with Simone, and—”
“Emma!” Leanne snaps. “Can I get a word in, please?”
“Why are you having a go at me? I wasn’t the only one talking.”
“As I was saying” – she peers over her specs at Daisy – “I think we should go on holiday, but we should go to a place where, a) she’s a long way from Simone, and b) she hasn’t got access to the internet, and c) she get can her head together.”
“Like where?”
“Nepal,” Leanne says.
“Where?”
“Nepal! It’s in Asia, near Tibet.”
Daisy wrinkles her nose. “Why would we want to go there?”
“There’s an amazing retreat in the mountains called Ekanta Yatra. My yoga teacher told me about it. Look!” She flashes her mobile at Daisy then taps the screen. “Amazing fresh, home-cooked food, yoga, a river you can swim in, a waterfall, massages, facials. We could spend a day in Kathmandu then do two weeks at the retreat, then we could fly to a place called Chitwan and go on a jungle safari. It would be the adventure of a lifetime.”
Leanne’s face is aglow. I’ve never seen her look so energised; she normally looks so wan and tired. She’s desperately thin, and Daisy and I have speculated several times about whether or not she might have an eating disorder.
“Could I see that?” I reach out a hand for her mobile. She presses it into my palm without saying a word.
I scroll through the website. It would seem Ekanta Yatra’s run by a group of Westerners who met when they were travelling through Asia and decided to start a “retreat from the world” nestled in the Annapurna mountain range, an area popular with hikers. It’s beautiful, and the idea of spending a couple of weeks being pampered, reading novels and swimming in a crystal-clear river appeals, but …
“There’s no Wi-Fi,” I say.
“Is that a problem?”
“Well, yeah. I’ve started applying for new jobs and I won’t be able to check my email.”
Leanne slips off the bed and takes five steps across the room to the kettle. She picks it up and refills it from the tap. “You don’t have to come, Emma. No one’s forcing you.”
It’s not that Leanne and I actively dislike each other; we are
friends
but only when we’re with Daisy or Al. We don’t go for drinks together or have text message marathons. We’ll laugh at each other’s jokes and buy each other birthday presents, but we’ve never developed any kind of closeness or warmth. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because I didn’t like the way she looked me up and down the first time we met. Maybe it’s because I forgot to get her a drink when I went to the bar to get a round. Or maybe it’s because, sometimes, when you meet someone, you get a vibe that they just don’t like you, and that vibe never quite disappears.
“I’ll bloody force her,” Daisy says, jumping off the bed and onto my lap. “You’ll come, won’t you, Emma?” She cups her hands around my face and nods it up and down. “See, look, she’s saying yes, she says she’ll come.”
“It sounds expensive.”
“No more expensive than a couple of weeks in Ibiza,” Leanne says as she pours boiling hot water into three mugs.
“Al’s lost her job,” I say. “How’s she going to afford to go?”
“I’ll pay for her,” Daisy says. “Or, rather, Dad will.” She jumps off me and back onto the bed, but I catch her smile slip. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven her dad for sending her away to prep school when she needed him most. She was only six years old, and her little sister had died tragically a year earlier. Shortly after her baby sister’s death, unable to cope with the grief, her mum killed herself. Daisy’s dad, a City trader, justified the decision to send her to boarding school by saying it would give her life some stability, plus a mother figure in the shape of a house mistress, but, to Daisy, it was like being abandoned all over again. It’s why she’s so ruthless when it comes to ending friendships and relationships. It’s better to leave than be left, no matter how painful the separation might be.
“Well? Are you up for it or not?” Leanne turns to face us, a steaming mug in each hand. She’s smiling again but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She squeezes past me to reach the chest of drawers. Tea slops onto the pine top as she sets the mugs down. “I thought we could go next month.”
“Next month?” I catch Daisy’s eye but she shrugs. She’s got Ian, her boss, wrapped around her little finger. He lets her work in The King’s Arms whenever she’s in between runner jobs, so he won’t bat an eyelid if she suddenly announces she’s off on holiday for three weeks. And Leanne’s an aromatherapy massage therapist who rents a room in a beauty salon, so she can take off whatever time she likes. Geoff won’t make escaping to Nepal for three weeks so easy for me.
“You are entitled to time off,” Daisy says, as though she’s just read my mind. “Or you could just quit.”
“Daisy …”
“Fine, fine.” She holds out her hands as though in surrender. “But if you don’t come, I’ll never talk to you again.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Ha, ha.”
“Is that a yes, then?” Leanne twists her hands in front of her. “Are we going to Nepal?”
“Only if we can convince Al.”
Daisy grins. “Leave that to me.”
I have no idea why Al and Leanne are laughing. It’s our first night in Nepal, the bar’s rammed and, as Leanne beat me to the last seat at our table, I’m half squatting, half leaning against the low wall that separates the seating area from the rock band. I say rock band but the music the four Nepalese musicians are playing is like no rock I’ve ever heard. The drummer and the bassist are out of time, and the guitarist sounds like he’s playing a completely different song. Daisy nods at me from across the table, then sticks out her tongue and holds her hands in the air, folding her fingers into devil’s horns like a blonde, perfectly made-up Gene Simmons.
“Yeah!” she shouts, then whips her hair back and forth as she head-bangs to a guitar solo that would make Jimmy Page weep. I reach for my beer as the table wobbles precariously.
“Woah!” Daisy says, rubbing the back of her neck and looking towards the band for a reaction. The guitarist gives her the thumbs up and shouts something unintelligible.
Leanne squeals with laughter as though it’s the funniest thing she’s ever seen, while Al, to my left, drains her bottle and reaches for her mobile. There’s no Wi-Fi in the bar, but that hasn’t stopped her checking for texts every couple of minutes.
“Shots!” Daisy shouts, jumping to her feet. “Then drinking games. Fuzzy Duck, or I Have Never?”
“Fuzzy Duck!” Leanne says, pushing back her chair to stand up.
Daisy dismisses her with a wave of the hand. “I’ll get these; you can get the next lot.”
Silence descends on our table as the band stops for a break, and Daisy weaves her way through the bar, her denim shorts riding low on her hips, the strap of her red bra escaping from beneath her black vest top and resting on her shoulder. Every man she passes glances up at her. She’s the only woman I know who sashays as she walks.
Leanne nudges Al. “Have you seen that couple snogging over by the window? She’s got her hands down his shorts. It’s gross.”
“Yeah,” Al says, without looking up from her mobile.
It’s like she can sense that everything we’ve done tonight – the head-banging, the jokes, the observations, the drinks – has been for show, to try and cheer her up and distract her from thinking about Simone. It hasn’t worked. Al’s normally right up there with Daisy, telling stories and bantering, but she’s crawled into her shell since we first discussed coming to Nepal a month ago, and no amount of cajoling or piss-taking will tempt her back out.
“I’m going to the loo.” She stands up, shoves her phone into the pocket of her cargo trousers and shuffles away.
Leanne and I watch her go.
“Looking forward to Pokhara tomorrow?” Leanne asks.
“I can’t wait. I need a massage like you wouldn’t believe. How long’s the bus journey again?”
“About six hours.”
“Wow.”
“I noticed a little corner shop just down from our guest house. We should grab some water and snacks and things after breakfast.”
“Good idea.”
We lapse into silence as I gaze around the bar. We’re on the first floor of a building on the main stretch of Thamel, the tourist district of Kathmandu, and the sound of car horns drifts through the open windows. The walls are painted a deep red and decorated with fairy lights and paintings of temples and mountain ranges.
“Guys!” Daisy bounces back into view with a tray bearing eight shot glasses in her hands, just as Al rejoins us at the table. “There’s a wall over by the bar that loads of people have signed. We need to write something. Come on!”
“I don’t know what to write.” Daisy bites down on the piece of chalk in her hand then cringes as a squeaking sound fills the air.
“I do.” The tip of Al’s tongue pokes out of the corner of her mouth as she drags the chalk over the wall. The whole expanse has been painted with blackboard paint, and it’s filled with sketches, messages, dates and obscenities.
“Fuck you, Simone!” Leanne rolls her eyes as she reads aloud what Al has written. “Seriously, Al, you can’t leave that up there.”
“Why not?” Al folds her arms over her chest and stares admiringly at her handiwork.
“Because it’s really negative. This holiday is supposed to be about new starts.”
“Okay, then.” Al pulls her sleeve over her hand and rubs at the wall. “There you go.”
“Fuck?” Leanne says, and everyone laughs. “That’s it?”
“That’s the best you’re getting out of me. Your turn, Emma.” She hands me the chalk.
“Oh, God.” I look at Daisy, who’s still deliberating what to write, a pale chalky patch now smeared on her bottom lip. “I don’t know what to write, either.”
“Give it to me, then.” Leanne snatches the chalk from my hand and, before I can object, she steps towards the wall and starts scribbling. When she steps back, there’s a self-satisfied grin on her face.
“What the hell?” Al squints at what she’s written. It’s longer than the things other people have written and, to fit it all in, she’s had to twist the sentence over and around other scribbles like a snake.
“It’s a Maya Angelou quote,” Leanne says. “‘The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.’”
I have to fight not to roll my eyes. Trust Leanne to be pseudo-deep when everyone else has drawn dicks and bollocks and written things like “I love beer” on the wall.
“Okay, I’ve got it.” I twist the chalk from her fingers and read aloud as I write. “Emma, Daisy, Al, Leanne: the adventure of a lifetime.”
Daisy steps forward and nudges me out of the way. She rubs out “the adventure of a lifetime” and replaces it with “best friends forever”.
“There.” She stands back and pulls the three of us into an awkward hug. “Perfect.”
Al rummages around in her backpack, pulls out two cans of lager and chucks one at me. We left the bar half an hour ago and we’re back at the guest house, ostensibly to sleep, but Al seems to have other ideas.
I catch the can of beer. “What’s this for?”
She settles back on her bed and kicks off her trainers. “Not being a dick.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tonight. It was like the Daisy and Leanne Show. Well, the Daisy Show, with a one-woman audience.”
“They were trying to cheer you up.” I pull the tab on my beer and take a swig. We drew lots to decide who’d share with whom in the guest house. Leanne wanted to share with Al, and for me and Daisy to share, but Daisy thought it would be fun to “mix things up a bit”, especially as we’ll have to share rooms at the retreat and in the jungle, too.
“I know, and I would have laughed if it wasn’t so sad.”
“Al!”
She smirks at me over the lip of her can. “Come on, Emma, admit it. I could see you cringing.”
“Well.” I shrug. “Maybe a bit. I felt like I should have held up a neon sign pointing to our table that said, ‘We Are Having FUN!’”
“Best friends forever!” Al bursts out laughing and the tension I’ve felt all evening finally dissipates.
There’s a knock at the door and we both freeze.
“Come in,” Al shouts.
The door swings open and Daisy’s blonde head peers around the doorway.
“Are you two bitches having fun without me?” She points at our beers with mock horror. “And you’re drinking the duty free!”
Al reaches into her backpack and chucks a beer at Daisy. “Join in, let’s be friends forever!”
She cackles with laughter and the sound fills the room.