Chapter 12
Monday 16 October
“It was terrible,” Kay told Sondra the following day at work. “The brownies were burnt to a crisp, along with my reputation as a master baker.”
The drama of her words had to be expressed through intonation rather than volume because, well, they were in a library. Not that either of the current customers were likely to overhear her: the middle-aged lady in the yellow hat and shaggy grey coat was deeply engrossed in the Mind, Body, Spirit shelf, and old Colonel Lonsdale was dozing over his Daily Telegraph . Sondra was wheeling the book trolley along the aisles, returning books to their homes while Kay trailed along behind her, occasionally neatening up a line of spines just to look busy.
“But how could you have forgotten the brownies?” Sondra asked her.
“We were kissing weren’t we, and we got lost in the moment.”
“You were kissing this guy who – let me get this right – you’d only just met. ”
“Not just met. I’d known him a week and a half.”
Sondra stopped the trolley and turned to her friend. “No, Kay. You’d known him for exactly one hour. That was the length of the photography lesson you had with him a week and a half ago, after which you invited him, quite at random, for a bakery lesson at your flat.”
“He was cute.”
“Be that as it may, he could have been anyone. Although if you ask me, you were the predator in this instance. You lied about knowing how to bake as a way of luring him back to your flat, and then…”
“I object to the use of the word luring . It was a spur of the moment thing. There was no luring going on.”
“Whatever. You invited him back to your flat and then proceeded to snog him with such… incontinence, you forgot all about the brownies, thereby nearly causing a major fire.”
“What does incontinence mean? Isn’t that something Clint has?”
“Honestly, Kay. As a librarian, you shouldn’t have to ask that sort of question. I’m disappointed in you. Really disappointed.”
“Because of my lack of vocabulary or my lack of morals?”
“Both. Mainly morals. What were you thinking?”
“That’s the problem. I wasn’t. As soon as I saw him, I just wanted to rip his clothes off and do bad things with him. It was terrible, Sondra. I’m terrible.”
“On that we’re both agreed,” Sondra sighed, continuing with her round. “So what happened next? After you burned the brownies.”
“I had to throw them away, and open all the windows to get rid of the smell. Then we ordered in some pizza.”
“So he didn’t blame you for lying to him about your baking skills?”
“No, that was the weird thing. He didn’t blame me one bit. Said it was all his fault for distracting me. He even offered to pay for the pizza.”
“And you let him?”
“Well yeah. I mean, he’s a lot richer than me. He owns his own business – Perfect Drive. I mean, um, Perfect Picture.”
“I will never understand you Kay, but that doesn’t stop me worrying about you. You should never just invite strangers back to your flat, certainly not under false pretences, and you need to check the battery in your smoke alarm.”
“I know, I know. I’ll try and do better in future. It’s just there’s this devil that gets inside me sometimes. Mother says so, and she’s not even religious.”
For Kay, Monday mornings after a badly behaved weekend were, she supposed, the equivalent of confession for Catholics. Somehow the act of getting it all (or most of it) off her chest released her of some of the burden of guilt. She didn’t exactly get absolution at the end, but by promising to try and do better, she did at least make a gesture towards repentance. Sondra was better than Barbara at playing the priest because she hadn’t completely written her off as a lost cause. Sondra genuinely cared about Kay and wanted to rescue her from herself, and for that Kay was grateful, even if she wasn’t too sure she wanted to be rescued.
That day, Kay ate her lunch as usual at Isobel’s, a small coffee shop on Lincoln Road, round the corner from the library. At her table by the window, she ate a smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich and watched a cloud shaped like a wolf chase another one shaped like a strawberry across the sky. Briefly, her dad flickered in her mind, like an image glimpsed in the snowy static of a TV screen. Nearby, someone was tucking into a cinnamon swirl, and Kay was tempted to get one herself. Instead, she went to the bathroom. While washing her hands, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and wondered how others saw her. Would Dan even recognise her now in her glasses and ponytail and dowdy librarian garb?
This morning’s confession to Sondra had failed to give Kay the usual sense of release. For one thing, it was itself partly made up of lies. She’d turned Dan into a photographer in order to reinforce the walls between Kay World and Elaine World, which had grown dangerously thin. And, of course, she hadn’t mentioned the fact that Dan happened to be the hot brother of the guy she’d ghosted, and the driving-slash-photography lesson had simply been a ruse to meet him. The offer of a bakery lesson had been no spur of the moment thing either, but planned out beforehand. Far from the ditzy, impulsive girl she’d portrayed herself as to Sondra, she’d been a manipulative schemer with a ruthless streak that would have made Machiavelli shudder.
And yet despite this, Kay wasn’t sure she felt that guilty about any of it. She knew she ought to. Everything Sondra had said about her behaviour was true, and Sondra didn’t know the half of it. But, as Machiavelli said, the ends justify the means, and if the ends, or end, was Dan, then surely that made everything worth it. Who actually got hurt, after all, apart from the brownies?
Monday was a half day, and with no special need to be anywhere, Kay took a walk in Bush Hill Park, down the long avenue of trees that, on this fine autumn day, formed a golden and red-roofed tunnel – God’s infrastructure . She smiled at a brown-and-white, sad-eyed spaniel as it loped after its track-suited owner. A bird squawked loudly above her and dropped a large, creamy poop inches from her shoe. Kay wished she could speak bird so she could remonstrate with it. She strolled past the croquet lawn and the skate park and the willow dome, and sat on a bench near the playground and watched the children play, wondering if she’d ever have any herself. Did Dan want kids?
The more she got to know him, the more lovely he became to her. For all his manliness, there was something sweetly shy and innocent about him. The way he’d stood there like a gentle giant in her living room, holding the flowers and chocolates like some sixteen-year-old on his first date, was adorable – so much so, she hadn’t been able to stop herself laughing. He loved her photographs, and didn’t care that she lied about working in that pub, and he didn’t mock her when she said she’d sensed her dad’s ghost. The fact that he knew and loved the Hill Garden and Pergola meant so much to her. “A little slice of Heaven”, he’d called it. And then he’d said that thing about the walls between our worlds and other worlds being thinner there, which was so beautiful and perfect she’d wanted to kiss him. That feeling grew even stronger when he started telling her about what it was like after his parents died, when Jeremy started hearing their ghosts. His eyes had grown dark and sad, like the windows of those cars you sometimes see in the driveways of abandoned houses.
Seated near Kay was a young woman with cropped blonde hair. She wore a check shirt, mustard-colour trousers and very dark sunglasses, and she was smoking a cigarette. Kay wished she was a smoker because lighting up a cigarette would very much fit with her current mood. A beam of afternoon sun lit a corner of the playground where a dark-haired boy slowly rotated by himself on a roundabout. Maybe she should photograph playgrounds after she’d finished her series on access ways. She’d need a kid with her or else she’d quickly be seen off by angry mobs of parents waving toy pitchforks. Where could she borrow a kid? Should she have one herself just so she could do her series? She hardly dared imagine what Sondra would think of that.
That afternoon, Kay went to Enfield Town and bought a green canvas handbag she didn’t need and a Danielle Steele paperback. She was a sucker for romances set in the world of the rich and famous. Imagining herself in such settings was almost as good as being there. She preferred the heroines in Steele’s later novels, because they tended to be stronger and were willing to fight for what they wanted. More like Elaine in other words.
Kay realised that she didn’t feel one tiny shred of guilt over her behaviour yesterday. Her whole life she’d been other people’s spaniel – Barbara’s, Stuart’s, Sondra’s – all in their own ways laying their expectations on her. This was what taking control felt like. It wasn’t exactly pretty, and it didn’t necessarily make her a nice person, but it would hopefully allow her to be a happy one. The jitteriness in her veins wasn’t guilt but fear. She was straddling two realities, riding a pair of ever-diverging horses and trying not to do the splits. She hadn’t worried about it too much until yesterday because, deep down, she didn’t think things would work out with Dan. She assumed the little spark between them would sputter and die, as would Elaine, who’d be buried in the cemetery alongside all Kay’s previous fantasies.
But that wasn’t what happened. Dan’s visit, despite the brownie debacle, had been like every stupid love song ever written, like every fluffy-headed teenager’s dream date. They’d kissed for eons in her doorway before he left. She wouldn’t let him go, and he didn’t want to be let go. There were goodbyes, then encores to the goodbyes, then encores to the encores. He’d say I really should go , and she’d say must you? and he’d say maybe after just one more kiss . She’d be surprised if the pregnant lady next door didn’t have to take more than her usual dose of nausea medication that night.
And before he finally departed, Dan invited her round to his place for dinner next Saturday. To be accurate (and herein lay the problem), he invited Elaine, actor and part-time bartender. And most likely the weekend after that, he’d introduce Elaine to his brother Jeremy, and then the clumsy, romantic hot-air balloon she’d launched would finally hit the aeroplane propeller of reality. Why did taking control have to be so messy? This wasn’t some glamorous Danielle Steele romance she was in, but a pratfall comedy of her own devising, and in about a fortnight by her reckoning, she was going to wind up falling on her arse.