Chapter 12
12
Fiona stood transfixed, staring in horror. The shot changed back to the presenters.
‘No, come back! I need to see that! Come back. Come back!’ she shouted, dropping her remote, but the story had already moved on. ‘I need to see that again!’
Scrabbling across the floor, she desperately tried to fit the pieces of the remote back together. When the second battery clicked into place, she began flicking frantically through the channels. ‘Please. Please let me see.’ Politicians, politicians, knife crime, politicians. There!
She lunged towards the television, her nose almost on the screen but, a second later, the picture had once more disappeared.
‘We’ll have more on this after the break,’ the newsreader intoned, shuffling the papers on her desk.
With her heart still hammering against her ribs, Fiona inched back towards the bed. ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ she muttered to herself. ‘You’re being utterly ridiculous. You need to get ready. You’ve got to get to work.’ She said the words out loud in the hope that she would convince herself. But she didn’t. She couldn’t think of anything else. Not until she’d seen it again. Not until she was certain.
She rested her hands on the duvet and tried to carry out the yogic breathing that had been so easy in the class. Now she was finding it a miracle that she was breathing at all.
After another sip of water, she placed the back of her hand against her forehead and felt the flush of heat. Maybe this was all part of the menopause, she thought. It would make sense. And hormones did all sorts of funny things. Perhaps they were causing her to see things. To make personal connections where there weren’t any. That would explain yesterday’s turn too. She was retrieving her robe when the photograph popped back onto the screen. All hope faded when the picture zoomed in on the exact piece of detritus she was dreading seeing again.
‘No, it can’t be. It can’t be!’
Hands trembling, she lifted her hand towards the screen. Could it really be? It was definitely a bird, there was no denying. But the wings looked more brown than green like hers had been. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the same one at all. She needed her photograph. She needed to compare. She dashed down the stairs. There was one way to put her mind at rest.
By the time she’d grabbed the photo of Joseph’s birthday party from the mantelpiece and switched on the lounge TV, the news story had, of course, changed again. This time, instead of trawling through the channels, she turned to her phone. The pictures would already be online, that was for sure. Her fingers fumbled on the keypad as she typed in the search bar.
‘It can’t be,’ she kept telling herself again and again. How could it possibly be her balloon that had ended up in this whale’s stomach? It couldn’t have, surely. The idea was preposterous. And yet it had looked so similar. Maybe it was a trick of the light. Besides, the news reporter had been sure it was a parrot, and he’d had the chance to study it for longer. It was a complete travesty, of course, for anything like that to end up in the belly of an innocent creature, but it wouldn’t be Fiona’s fault. It wouldn’t be her doing. It couldn’t be. A few seconds later, the picture appeared on her phone and she drew her fingers across the screen to zoom in. Sitting down rapidly, she held the two images side by side.
‘No,’ she whispered.
The hall clock chimed the hour. Which hour seemed irrelevant. It was as if she had stepped outside the normal flow of time and was no longer bound by its rules. She could have been sitting there for minutes or days. She didn’t know and no longer cared.
She’d discovered more information, scouring the Internet.
The necropsy took place at the Institute of Marine Life and Conservation , one report told her, after the whale was driven to Plymouth over the weekend.
Although once a relatively rare occurrence, this is the eighteenth whale to have died on the coast of the UK in the past year. Last month, three sperm washed up on the shores of Norfolk and, earlier this month, two minke whales beached themselves just north of Skegness.
‘It can’t be possible,’ she kept repeating, looking down at her photo again. ‘It just can’t be.’
Her self-defence mechanism refused to give up, no matter how much was evident from what lay before her in black and white. Or rather in colour and sepia tones. The wings were the most striking thing. A couple of tiny red feathers right at the top of one. On both birds. Both balloons. They were the same.
Only when the clock chimed again did she look at it. Eight o’clock. She blinked in surprise and checked again. Standing up, her eyes fell on her reflection in the mirror above the fireplace. Her stomach plummeted. She pinched her cheeks and turned her head from side to side. Her face was gaunt. Her skin seemed to droop and her eyes were blotchy and threaded with tiny, red blood vessels. The VertX meeting was only an hour away. There was still enough time to get there. With her thumbs on her temples and fingers pressing against her forehead, she tried to remember the key points of her presentation.
‘VertX Wellbeing Assistance…’ She’d barely got past her opening sentence when the image of Martha’s final dinner jumped into her mind. Another wave of nausea hit her. She bolted to the toilet. With her stomach empty, it was nothing but dry retching and stinging eyes. She wasn’t fit to go anywhere. Not now. Not like this.
‘Annabel.’ She didn’t bother waiting for her assistant to respond when the call went through. ‘I’m not going to make it in this morning.’
‘You’re not?’ The note of surprise was unmistakable. ‘Is everything okay?’
Fiona turned to the television. It was back to politics again, but it didn’t make any difference. All she could see was the whale and the contents of her stomach spread out on the long display table.
‘I’m not feeling too good. A stomach bug or something. I need you to push everything back until this afternoon.’ She paused and changed her mind. ‘No, tomorrow. It had better be tomorrow.’
‘Push back?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know that it’s the VertX meeting this morning?’
A spasm went through her already aching head. ‘I know.’ She stopped to reconsider her decision. Down the line came the nervous tapping of Annabel’s pen. VertX, Octavia Lovett-Rose, did it matter who she was supposed to be meeting? It should. It definitely should.
‘I’ll be in tomorrow,’ she decided, and hung up the phone.
She picked up the envelope of birthday photos and made her way back upstairs. In the twelve years since they had been developed, never had she studied them quite so intently. Mid-morning light diffused into the room, giving the illusion of summer sun, as she spread out the collection on her duvet. Never before had she noticed how the person standing behind her and Joseph in the cake photograph had their face angled down, brow furrowed, as if telling someone off. Never had she spotted the half-eaten sandwich dumped on the sideboard, without even so much as a plate. Joseph was probably to blame for that. It was something he would do. She was scowling in some of the images, she discovered, her eyes looking almost furtive. She was probably worrying about what people were thinking of the party, how she was being judged, or how many were going to ask for her to help in planning their next event.
But there were several more where she’d been oblivious to Stephen and his camera, and she seemed more relaxed. In some, her eyes had been scrunched up in laughter, her hands thrown haphazardly into the air. Those didn’t even look like her. And she certainly hadn’t remembered ever feeling that way: carefree and at ease.
She was still lying there, sifting through the photographs and her memories, when the clock chimed to signal the passing of another hour. She rolled over. Her head was pounding from lack of coffee and her limbs felt like they’d tripled in weight. You’re being ridiculous. You should get up. Do something , she told herself. But she didn’t.
Another hour went by and news bulletins were replaced by a documentary that she didn’t care about. Wars in countries she couldn’t have even located on a map were nothing to do with her. It was all very sad and everything, but what could she do about them? Nothing they were showing had anything to do with her. Except Martha. Martha did.
It was a balloon, for crying out loud. Fiona tried to instil some reason into her thinking. One balloon. Hundreds of balloons were sold every day. Thousands, more likely. Everybody used balloons at some point in their lives. It didn’t mean anything. Then again, how many people had bought one that looked identical to that parakeet?
It was as if a spark had fired somewhere in her head and connected two previously unrelated parts of her brain. No, she didn’t know how many of those balloons had been sold. Not a clue. But she knew someone who might. Galvanised by this sudden hope, she jumped off the bed and into the shower. There was somewhere she needed to go.
The fact that Frolics and Fancies was still in business was a minor miracle in the current climate for small, independent businesses and only went to show how damn good the place was. Not that she’d been there in a long time. Nostalgia swept through her as she moved down the narrow streets towards the red and yellow awning.
A pair of young girls were laughing as they walked out of a nearby clothes shop, arms laden with bags. It could have been her and Holly from a different time, she thought, staring at the way they giggled together. How would the twenty-year-old Fiona view herself now? she wondered. She’d certainly applaud the professional success she’d achieved, which she’d always dreamt of, but the rest of it was debatable. Can a marriage which ends in adultery ever be classed successful? At least there was Joseph, the one ray of sunshine in the whole sorry story.
Her sense of optimism had increased on the trip over. While the Internet hadn’t managed to give her the exact information she was after, a quick search had informed her that California alone sold over forty million balloons a year. Forty million in one American state. The UK was nearly double the size in terms of population, so even sixty million would be a conservative estimate. Per annum. Of course, that was all types of balloons – helium, water, rubber, party – not just novelty parakeet ones, with extremely distinctive feather patterns but, still, the chance of her being responsible for the one that appeared in Martha’s stomach was looking slimmer and slimmer by the minute.
A small bell tinkled above her head as she passed through the doorway and into the shop.
‘Welcome to Frolics and Fancies. How can I help you?’
While it was still another month away, Halloween displays were already up. Life-sized witches with crooked noses and flowing black capes, sitting on broomsticks, hung from the ceiling, and plastic pumpkins and paper-chain bats decorated the counter.
Picking her way past the fancy-dress outfits, Fiona steeled herself as she wondered how exactly she would start the conversation.
‘Hello,’ she smiled and observed the woman in front of her. Unless they had a time machine in the back, there was no chance that this was the same person, although she did have remarkably similar frizzy hair. ‘I’m hoping you could help me with something?’
‘I’m sure we can. What is it you’re looking for?’
‘Well,’ she placed her hands on the counter. ‘I made a purchase here a little while ago.’
‘Do you have a receipt?’
She cleared her throat. ‘No, not any more.’
‘Well, if you want to return anything, you’ll need the receipt, I’m afraid,’ the woman said brusquely.
‘No, no, it’s nothing like that.’ She tried again. ‘I bought a specific item, a while back now, and I just wanted to find out how many more like it were sold.’
‘You want to know how many sales were made of a specific item?’
‘Yes, exactly.’
The woman stared at her but a glint of curiosity registered in her eyes.
‘Well I can try. Let me have a look.’ She turned to the computer on the countertop. ‘What was it precisely?’
‘A balloon, a helium balloon.’
‘A balloon?’ The woman sighed and raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you have any idea how many balloons we sell?’
‘Well a lot, I expect, but I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Could you just have a quick look for me?’ She offered her most endearing smile.
With a huff, the woman turned back to the computer. ‘When was the purchase made?’ she asked.
‘Just over twelve years ago.’
‘So that would be two thousand and – sorry, did you say twelve years ago?’
‘Yes.’
A small vein pulsed in the woman’s forehead. ‘Is this some kind of joke? You want details of a balloon that we sold you twelve years ago?’
‘Yes,’ she replied.
The woman was not a happy bunny. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you, madam,’ she intoned and then, to further indicate the conversation was over, added, ‘Thank you for shopping at Frolics and Fancies.’
Fiona’s stomach churned. Clearly the woman’s patience had been pushed to its limit. With no alternative than leaving empty handed, she opted for all-out begging.
‘Please,’ she stretched her hands out across the counter. ‘Is there anyone else I could ask? There was an older lady here back then.’
‘Look, I don’t?—’
‘It’s ridiculous. I know I sound crazy. I think I might be going crazy.’
‘I’m sorry?—’
‘But, believe me, if you knew what was going on in my head right now, you would know how desperate I am.’
‘I think that maybe?—’
‘The old lady.’ She tried a last-ditch attempt. ‘Do you remember her? Might you have her number? If I could speak to her, she’d understand. Please, I just need a few words. Is there any way I could contact her? A number she left when she went?’
Tilting her head, the frizzy-haired woman scratched her eyebrow.
‘An older lady, you say?’
‘She must have had the place before you. She’d owned it for years.’
Pressing her lips together, the woman gave a small, barely discernible nod. ‘Just give me a moment.’