Chapter Twenty-Five #4
“Happy birthday anyway,” he mutters, shoving a parcel toward me.
I turn it over in my hands to look for clues.
It’s shoebox size and rattles as if it contains shoes, which is odd as I haven’t ordered any.
The paper is plain and brown, tied with old-fashioned parcel string, and my name and address is handwritten across the top in confident black script.
I murmur, “It’s not my birthday,” as Dwayne heads away toward the High Street whistling, and I look around and find Lestat about to cock his leg on a potted plant that wasn’t there when I went to bed last night.
I shove the parcel under my arm and dash toward him flapping my hands, rather like I’m trying to shoo seagulls away from a sandwich on the beach. He shoots me a filthy look, but all the same he shuffles farther on down the cobbles to pick himself a different spot.
Well, that’s perplexing. The new plant is in a terra-cotta pot and it’s sort of like a little tree that reaches up to my hip. On closer examination I see that it has fruit on it. Lemons. Teeny ones, like candies.
An inkling of understanding whispers in the back of my mind, but I can’t quite catch it. Luckily, I spy a small envelope strung from one of the lower branches.
Laying down the mystery parcel for a moment, I detach the envelope from the plant and lift the flap.
A healthy snack in case you get hungry again. Rhubarb was out of season. x
I stand there in the alley and hug my big old sweater around me then, as if I’m in some cheesy rom-com movie, I pluck one of the miniature lemons and pop it into my mouth whole.
If this was a cheesy rom-com I’d smile and go all soft-focus and faraway, because the girl got her guy and they all lived happily ever after.
But this isn’t a movie, and oh farts, this is the sourest lemon in the entire goddamn world.
So for the second time this week, I lean over and heave out a mouthful of vile fruit I’ve eaten because of Fletcher bloody Gunn.
My eyes are streaming and my head feels as if it’s been turned inside out.
I go in with Lestat at my heels and chuck the lemon into the kitchen bin before brushing my teeth to get rid of the bitter taste in my mouth.
As gift givers go, Fletch is up there with the most random.
Awhile back he gave me a lime-green plastic pooper-scooper and now he’s given me lemons.
I could not have a sweeter tooth if my teeth were made of actual candy. Lemons are pretty much my nemesis, unless they’re in a meringue pie or one of Nonna Malone’s biscuits.
Me and Fletch really are the most unlikely match.
He can make my veins swim with acid and then flood with honey.
Because he is so good with his mouth, it’s easy to forget sometimes that he is intent on proving that my family and everyone like us, or not like him, are a bunch of charlatans.
It must pain him greatly that he’s so wildly attracted to me. I like that thought.
Don’t stick with this in the hope you’re going to find “reader, I married him” anytime soon. “Reader, I murdered him” is highly likely though.
Lestat has taken a shine to Fletch’s carryall. I flung it down beside mine in the corner of my living room when I got home this morning, and now my disloyal pug seems to have claimed it as his new bed and parked his pudgy ass on top of it.
“Come on, fur face,” I say as I wait for the shower to fill the bathroom with a relaxing fog of heat and steam before I go in there. “Shift it.”
He doesn’t move a muscle, so I give him a little nudge with my toe until he lifts his eyelids at me in lazy question.
He clearly doesn’t have any intention of moving.
I consider leaving him there to carpet Fletch’s bag with loose hair, but then I panic that Fletch might be secretly asthmatic and die a wheezy, hairball-induced death in his shabby flat and then come back to haunt me forever.
At least I’d be able to gloat about being right about ghosts all along.
He’d probably still try to deny it.
Resigned, I bend down and annoy Lestat as much as I can with a combination of tickling and double-handed ass shoves until he looks at me reproachfully and kind of commando rolls off the bag toward his own bed three feet away.
I haven’t looked in Fletch’s bag. What sort of person would that make me?
It’s zipped up, anyway. I go to straighten, but then I notice a black notebook poking from the open, very unzipped side pocket.
It’s practically dropping out, so I poke it back in again, and while I’m there, I fan the pages a tiny bit and see that it’s full of notes.
Well, he is a reporter. Taking notes is his job.
When I stand up, I find that the notebook is somehow in my hand now and I have one of those moments where you know what the right thing to do is and have a five-second mental breakdown.
I know the right thing is to put this book back without looking inside. And I also know I’m going to look.
I should never have looked. I’ve slumped down against the wall and read his fancy Moleskine book from cover to cover, and I wish I could rewind the clock and never lay eyes on it.
They say no good can come of snooping and they’re bang on the money, because I can’t unsee the notes Fletch has written about me and mine.
The Bittersweet family built their reputation in a simpler age and they stubbornly continue to peddle their outdated Victorian trade in this modern, scientifically astute world.
Our outdated trade? I don’t know if he wrote this last week or last year; there is no date.
It rings a bell as something from an article he ran last year.
Yes, he makes a habit of taking potshots at us whenever the opportunity arises.
And at Leo, or anything else that leans even slightly toward unscientific.
I flip through notes about other people and other stories he’s covered, reminders to himself about meetings and events, occasional side rants about things that have pissed him off.
There are lists of clinical treatments noted beside the details of a center in Birmingham, presumably medical options for his mum.
It’s like looking inside his head, and I feel distinctly shabby about myself for doing it.
I cannot help but want to believe she is genuine, but to set aside everything rational flies in the face of all common sense. How can that be wise? How can someone be so plausible, and yet so implausible at the same time? At best, she is deluded and, at worst, she is a charlatan.
There’s more of the same farther toward the back, an article written in note form about the case at Maplemead.
In brackets underneath he’s made rougher pencil notes, more of a personal lament as an aside to the professional piece, definitely not words for his article.
[Why can’t she just be a normal fucking girl?
A nurse or a secretary or a dentist or a loo cleaner?
Anything but a ghost buster. How can someone be crazy fucking gorgeous 70 percent of the time and just plain crazy the other 30?
She laughs her way through life like an accident waiting to happen, and every time I see her, I have to wonder how much of her is real, because the one thing I know is ghosts categorically are not.
I’m screwed. I’m screwed because she isn’t a shag-and-shake-hands kind of girl, and once was never going to be enough. Or twice. Shit.]
You know what? I’m not angry. None of what I’ve read is news to me, and God knows, I’d have written worse about him in a notebook if I kept one. That doesn’t make it hurt any less to see it in black and white though, even though he called me crazy gorgeous.
The fact is Fletch and I have an inexplicable connection and it’s bloody inconvenient for both of us.
He and I are too fundamentally different to ever have a meaningful, lasting relationship.
But equally we are too fundamentally in lust to let a small thing like life incompatibility stop us from sex-dancing around each other.
It was easier to categorize before Maplemead, because I could tell myself it’s purely a chemical reaction.
Now, though…God, I don’t know what it is.
We insult each other and then he makes me feel like the only woman in the world.
We pour scorn on each other, then he holds me as if I’m made of spun sugar.
It’s push me, pull me, love me, hate me, kiss me, screw me, leave me, then kiss me again because it felt so mind-bendingly good. It’s confusing as hell.
He’s right. I’m 30 percent crazy. I must be, because I’m still going to the ball, and if he’s there, I’ll no doubt let him kiss me stupid all over again.
I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I’ve bathed, shaved, and slathered. I’ve primped, smoothed, and spritzed; even my flicky eyeliner has gone to plan.
“Mum? Gran?”
They’re both sitting at the scrubbed pine kitchen table and look up when I pop my head around the door before I go.
“I’m off,” I say, half hanging into the room. I’d sort of wanted to show them my dress, but now that I’m here I feel a bit ridiculous so I pretend to be in a tearing hurry.
“Er, not so fast, young lady,” my mother says, standing up and beckoning me in. “Let’s have a proper look at you.”
Bashful but secretly glad, I pretend to roll my eyes and then step into the warm, cinnamon-scented kitchen. They both look me over appraisingly and I style it out by doing a slow twirl and dropping a curtsy to finish.
“Where did you get that dress?” my mother asks.
“Maplemead,” I say. “Britannia said I could help myself from the wardrobe there.”
“French silk,” my gran says, sipping from her champagne flute. “And damn expensive.”
I’d intended to wear the purple dress I’d loved on sight, but when I pulled it out of the wardrobe I spotted this one next to it and fell head over Converse in sartorial love. I imagine it must be like when you find your perfect wedding dress. Except it’s black.