Chapter 1
One
T he sound of water rushed in my ears. The smell of dank canal water filled my nose and permeated the air. The water rose, lapping at the sides of my bed. I couldn’t move. My body was sunk into the mattress and I couldn’t move.
“You left me.” My mum’s voice was hoarse and raspy, not the sweet tones I remembered. Her hair was lank and damp, her beautiful skin rotten, her deep blue eyes soulless. “You left me, how could you leave me?” she asked as she stood staring down at me with those blank eyes.
I opened my mouth but the words never came out.
They got stuck at the back of my throat behind a mass of water reeds that blocked my airway.
I screamed a muffled scream. I squeezed my eyes shut as my mum’s bloated, dripping corpse advanced ever closer to where I lay trapped in my bed.
I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to see. My mind whirled with panic when suddenly, a different voice reached out to me.
“How could you give up on me, baby? How could you leave me behind?” I opened my eyes and found empty steel greys staring back at me.
Alfie crouched over my frozen body, mirroring my mother who still stood on my other side.
His skin rotted before me, his hair wet and slick to his scalp.
“You left me.” His damp hand curled around my throat.
“You’ll never leave me again.” Water reeds sprang from his skin, shackling me to him, and I screamed and screamed as my body was taken over, my mind broken and undone.
I screamed until the reeds broke free and I shot up in bed, damp with sweat but alone.
Well, almost.
“Are you alright?” Maia stood in the doorway, her dark skin in shadow, her mass of curls pulled back in a tight bun.
I gasped a breath and nodded. It was just a dream. A nightmare. The same one I’d had a thousand times.
“Can I get you anything?”
I shook my head and she nodded quietly, turning to leave.
“Wait,” I said before the door closed. “Thank you, for never asking.” She said nothing, only nodded again and left me. This was why I liked Maia. She minded her own business and she never complained when my nightmares woke her up.
I pulled my knees up, one hand squeezing my necklace as if my sanity depended on it.
Alfie’s memory was embedded in my chest like a piece of old shrapnel.
A war wound that had never quite healed.
During the day I could fight him off. I could be distracted.
I could smile and laugh and live like everything was perfect.
But at night, when I was alone, he came for me.
The dark, twisted memory I had of him. The man who had violated my trust, manipulated my psyche…
and was responsible for killing a man. Adam .
He was dead because of me. I’d hated him, but that didn’t make the guilt any easier.
The worst part was that even now, after all of Alfie’s damage, the only person that I wanted was him. I craved him every moment. I missed him in my bed, in my body. My Alfie . Except he wasn’t mine. Not anymore.
I sighed, rubbing at the Alfie-shaped pain in my chest. Yeah, this was all so much easier during the day. Luckily for me, the sun was beginning to rise.
I kicked off my covers and got up. I trudged to the bathroom to brush my teeth before returning to my room to dress, throwing on jeans and a t-shirt.
Next up on my morning agenda, I put together my bag for tonight. My dress was hanging in the hallway, fresh from the dry cleaners. I threw makeup, jewellery, and spare underwear into a bag. Shoes...where were my shoes? Oh crap.
“Where are they? Where are they?” I muttered furiously, clawing my way through the jumble of shoes at the bottom of my wardrobe. My black pumps. They weren’t here. With a strange sense of deja-vu, I hopped out of the chaos and stuck my head out of my bedroom door.
“Keira? Did you steal my shoes again?” Silence. The door opposite mine opened and Maia stuck her bespectacled face around her door.
“Um, I don’t think she made it to her bed last night.” She gave me a small smile, dimples forming in her cheeks. I thanked her and resolved to borrow a pair of Keira’s heels for tonight. I took a breath and returned to my mirror to finish fixing myself.
Today would be easier. I brushed out my hair and pulled it up into a ponytail. With every centimetre it grew, the urge to hack it off again gnawed at me, but I refused. Two years and four months was too long for him to still have power over me.
Those early days after I left him were a viscous whirlpool of agony.
He was everywhere. I’d been grateful that I’d thrown my GPS tracked phone away because I knew without a doubt that I would have called him, begged him to come back to me.
I wasn’t proud of it, but in those darkest moments when I ached for him deep into my bones, I’d felt like I’d poisoned myself and his touch was the only antidote.
I’d tried to keep him from my mind but every time I’d looked at myself there he was.
Every time my hair brushes over my own skin, I’d felt him.
When I washed it, dried it, brushed it, he was always fucking there.
So I’d taken Keira’s fabric scissors and hacked it off until it sat above my shoulders, destroyed and lifeless, the fallen locks laying on the floor like trodden flowers.
Still, he didn’t go away. He haunted me.
But something had snapped in me when I’d cut my hair.
I’d cut him out. Made him a ghost. Relegated him to a cold, grey space at the back of my mind where he could no longer burn me.
I’d grown steel strong since then. The tears still came, but they didn’t break me.
I ran a hand over my ponytail and told myself for the millionth time that today would be easier.
I wasn’t entirely wrong. It had gotten easier.
Smiling had gotten easier, sleeping, eating, working, all of my basic functions had gotten easier.
But still I felt gutted. That hadn’t gotten easier.
But I looked myself in the mirror and told myself it would because if I didn’t believe it, there was no way I could face the day.
I was the same Lola. Jeans and a t-shirt Lola. But inside, inside I was altered, for better and for worse.
I was glad my hair was growing back. Even if it was still as uncontrollable as ever. I ran my hands over it a final time before giving up. It wasn’t getting any better.
Our London flat was, of course, the size of a shoe box.
Our living space consisted of a tiny open plan living room and kitchenette with a small breakfast bar separating the two.
There was a narrow off-shot hallway with two doors on either side–mine and Keira’s bedrooms on one side and Maia’s and the bathroom we all shared on the other.
I found Keira snoring at the breakfast bar in a glitter-ball dress and my pumps on her feet.
With a smile and a shake of my head, I bent, retrieved them, and placed the black pumps at the bottom of the dress bag I’d left hanging on the coat hook last night.
I’d mastered many things in the last two years and walking in heels was one of them.
I wasn’t quite up to Keira’s standards but I was good enough to pass in London.
I bent to whisper in Keira’s ear. “Morning, beautiful.”
“Fuck…”
“Yes?”
“…off,” she groaned.
I grinned at her slumped form. When we’d arrived in London, I’d spent the first six months fighting the urge to turn around and run all the way home.
Keira, on the other hand, had taken to it like a duck to water.
In our quiet town, her vibrant eccentricity had caused her to stick out like a sore thumb. Here, she was in her element.
I stuck a mug of coffee under her nose and she groaned to life, lifting her head enough to inhale the fumes. I kissed her cheek.
“Don’t forget about tonight,” I whispered so I didn’t hurt her head any worse.
“Fancy people, free bar. Got it.”
I stuck a couple of painkillers and some water in front of her before grabbing my dress bag and leaving her to her self-inflicted misery.
Autumn had well and truly come to town. In my hometown, the streets would be littered with leaves and the skies would be wide open and grey, but here in London, with hardly any trees to speak of, all I could feel of autumn was the cold.
I didn’t mind it so much, though. The city thrived in a different way–a way I had come to love.
I headed into the Tube station, butterflies fluttering in my stomach.
I was excited. Hopefully, tonight would go off without a hitch.
I arrived at The Kew Gardens an hour later.
This early in the day it was quiet, but by tonight the place would be awash with guests coming to see Imani Kishi’s triumph.
I found my mentor in a bright orange, figure-hugging dress that would be more at home in the Caribbean than London in the autumn.
She was atop a ladder, adjusting the head of our pampas grass polar bear. The exhibition was almost finished.
“You decided to strip him back again then?”
Imani turned her head for a moment to glance at me. She was a stunning mix of Japanese and African. Her head was shaved smooth and her full lips were always painted a black-red. Her style was abrasive, yet it worked on her in a way that I envied. She and Keira shared that same quality.
“Yes. The lines were wrong.” She stepped back to study her own work. “Your opinion?”
“If you’re going to strip the grass back here then you ought to do it everywhere. Move the bear so its eyes zero in on the audience to give it a bigger impact, otherwise its meaning becomes gratuitous. This isn’t an exhibition you want to be tentative with.”
She considered my words. “Yes, I think you are right.” She looked down at me and smiled. At six feet tall, the slim, muscular woman towered over me. “You should be accepting this award alongside me tonight.”
“We’ve talked about this. Everyone is coming to see you tonight, no one even knows who I am.”