Chapter 5 #2
“But it’s more fun if I do it,” Chloe goes on, ignoring both of us. “Like a property show. I’ll scope them out, and you swan around and say there’s not enough hanging space.”
“She just got here,” says John.
“And yet I’m leaving,” I say, standing up. “But only to go for a drink. Chloe?”
“Phil Inn?” Chloe says. “Like we’re sixteen again? Only I’m driving, so I’ll have to drink less than I did then.”
We’re halfway there when her phone goes, and she frowns at whatever voice is coming through her Bluetooth.
“Wait,” she says. Then she turns to me. “I need to deal with this.”
I shrug my permission but, to my surprise, she pulls over, switches the engine off and gets out of the car, moving away too far for me to hear her half of the conversation.
She’s pacing up and down, gesturing as if the person on the other end can see her, and I can tell from the way she pumps her arm as she dinks the end-call button that she wishes she was slamming down an old landline.
She stalks back over towards me, stalling a step when she sees me sitting with the passenger door open.
“Friends die in hot cars,” I say, which is no lie because the evening sun is firing right in through the windscreen.
“Did you hear any of that?” she replies, without smiling.
“Nope. What’s up?”
She doesn’t answer. She’s sitting back in the driver’s seat, knuckles white on the wheel, eyes darting back and forth.
“Hear any of what?” I say.
“Work shit.” She spits the words. Then she sorts her face out and turns to me with a smile. “You run a business, Lindsay. You know how it is. Oh!” she clutches my arm. “What have I said? Why are you crying?”
I shake my head. She wouldn’t understand, best friend or no best friend, that Kai was the arse kicker and BSP-merchant and innovator and I’m as terrified to start my own business, actually on my own, as I’ve ever been in my life.
“Is it Kai?” Chloe says, and I nod because it is and I don’t want to tell her the details and have her despise me.
She lets me talk about him for one drink, passing me hankies and nodding, not trying to cheer me up or make me see some other side to it all.
Then she bangs her hands flat on the table, sends me to the loo to fix my make-up and goes to get another round in.
There’s a bag of crisps waiting for me too.
She noticed that I didn’t eat much dinner, I reckon.
We spend the rest of the time in the pub with her delivering the highlights of domestic grossness from clients’ houses and me half laughing and half retching at them.
“How could you not flush a full toilet even if your cleaner isn’t coming?” I say. “How would someone stand up and walk away from that?”
“It might be a fetish. No, listen, listen! Because what I don’t know about fetishes now, Lindsay, is not much. I rub leather conditioner into harnesses and roll them up neatly on the bedside table. These people have no shame.”
I settle into the comfort of her. Ease. Soothing. Alleviation. So many words sound better—those three are each a joy to say aloud—but comfort is the only real option.
“So what was the shock stroke disappointment?” she asks when we’re on our way back to the car after that second glass of wine, still barely mediocre even with ice cubes. We’ve just decided enough with nostalgia; next time we’ll get a taxi somewhere.
But I decide not to tell her about Mrs. March.
She’s been such a pal not just tonight making up those tall tales (surely), but over the last two grim years.
Some of the people we thought were our friends drained away like bathwater.
Some others stuck around, true. But only Chloe repaired a pretty dead-in-the-water friendship just so she could be there to help me.
Who needs an elderly acquaintance when you’ve got a friend like that?
That’s what I tell myself. The truth is I still can’t decide if I really went for tea in that house. The memory feels locked on the far side of something I can’t name, unless sleeping so long always feels like that. Or, like I keep telling myself, it’s grief and jet lag.
So I lie.
“It doesn’t even matter now,” I say, “but a house I was looking at to rent didn’t work out. There was nowhere to fake a dead room.”
Chloe’s steps slow at my side and, before I know what’s happened, I’m two paces ahead of her.
“What’s wrong?” I say, stopping and turning back.
“Fake a dead room?” she says. “What does that mean?”
“You know what it means, Chlo!” I tell her. “I’d need a windowless room with no pipes or electrical noise that I could line with quilts, till I get my permanent house and install a proper one.”
“A proper . . . dead room,” says Chloe.
“Right. Like the last one. Didn’t you ever see it?”
She’s walking again. “I didn’t know what it was called,” she says. “Can’t you call it a recording studio?”
“Bit pretentious,” I say. “It’s just an expression, Chlo. Why’s it freaking you?”
“No idea,” she says. “Maybe I need to calm it with the true-crime podcasts. So listen, shut up about the disgusting habits of the rich and spoiled for a minute and tell me what else you need in your forever home. As well as the dead room.”
I still don’t know what’s bothering her. Even when Kai was dying in a room across the corridor, it never occurred to me to call my dead room anything else.
But her mood must have affected me because, when I go to bed, after we’ve hugged goodbye outside the big gates and I’ve let myself in and double-checked the lock behind me, made a cup of sleepy tea and gone upstairs, I find myself having a brand-new nightmare.
Kai is in our dead room in Hilo and I’m trying to open the door, but it’s jammed.
I shout but I know he won’t hear me through the soundproofing, so I go round the back of the house, that’s now made of grey stone and sits on a gravel drive in a green garden.
There’s a window I can look through and I catch sight of the foot of Kai’s hospital bed and two peaks of blanket that must be his feet.
I bang on the glass, but it makes no sound, except to startle a fox behind me in the bushes and make it scream.
I don’t turn. I can’t see this fox. Awake, I wouldn’t know what it was or have any clue where the noise was coming from, but in the dream I’m sure it’s a fox.
And suddenly, I’m running around a cobbled yard, with half-open stable doors on all sides, looking for something to help me smash the window and save it, because it’s trapped inside with Kai now.
I wake filled with dread and have to concentrate hard on my breathing so I don’t whimper.
I should be used to nightmares by this time and all of them about Kai have been me trying to reach him and failing.
Whether I’m locked out or struck dumb or lost or wading through glue, every dream has been about barriers and impediments and impossibilities, my mind trying to teach itself that I’ve lost him.
There’s no reason this one should be any worse than the others.
I sink back down on my pillow and turn to pick up my phone.
What I see makes my lips curl in a seed of a smile.
My phone isn’t on my bedside table. I’ve made an inch of progress and, although no one else would break into a cheer, I’m proud of myself.
For the first time in two years, I’ve left my phone in my bag downstairs and not gone to bed primed for disaster.
I bash a dent into Zak’s horrible foam pillow and turn onto my side hoping to go to sleep again.
I could read but—
I sit bolt upright and let out a laugh before catching my teeth in my top lip and freezing, hoping I didn’t wake anyone.
I could read, I realise, clicking the light on.
I could read Sleeping Murder, which is right there on my bedside table, because the real Peggy March really gave it to me on my real visit to her house.
It’s horrible if she was pretending to be settled there, when in fact she was a day away from having to leave, but she was real and I liked her.
Maybe I could find out where she moved and give her book back, once I’ve finished it.
I settle back with it, even though my head is swimming and the print dances in front of my eyes.
And besides, what with the big spooky house and the woman all alone in the world, it isn’t exactly comforting.
People get that wrong about Agatha Christie all the time.
Even Peggy had forgotten what was actually on the page, after too many hours in front of the telly on Sunday nights.
No book then, I decide, letting it fall.
I start to drift. No foxes, I tell myself.
No voices, no screams, no thumps, no flat paper world, no poker games.
I must be nearly gone though, because what’s scary about a poker game, right? Or a fox, actually.