Chapter 17
My palm is sweating when I wake up, my fingers cramped from clutching the hard corners of my phone case.
I feel pretty foolish when I look over and see the keys, like a little iron bonfire on my bedside table.
I feel even more ridiculous when I get out of bed and pick up the book from the floor, flipping it open to chapter eleven of Sleeping Murder, with Miss Marple out for a walk on the prom at Dillmouth.
I climb back under the covers and lie listening to the rain that started overnight.
It’s lashing against my bedroom window like someone hurling gravel.
He would have left prints on the grass if it had rained even an hour or two earlier.
If he was real. He was real. He left a handprint on the—
I leap out of bed and go downstairs at a gallop, holding my bottom lip in my teeth as I wheel round the finial post and into the garden room.
“No!” I say, loud enough to make it ring out in this still almost empty room. I go closer to check but I know already. The rain has washed that handprint off the outside of the glass, leaving no trace.
If he was real. If I wasn’t dreaming.
“I wasn’t dreaming,” I say out loud to myself.
But I’m not sure I believe me. Because I was dreaming the switcheroo of books.
And wasn’t I half convinced I knew who it was, that “ogre” who ran through my house exactly the way someone would in a dream?
The way no housebreaker or mad axeman ever would in real life.
And isn’t it much more likely that I would half recognise a man inside my dream than in the real world, in the dead of night?
I crouch down at the French windows and try to wiggle my fingers in under the stiff bristles of the draught excluder.
It could be done. I can feel raindrops on my fingertips, so he could have pushed the key back inside, couldn’t he?
But it’s much more likely that a draught in one of the chimneys of this house, whose habits I’ve yet to learn, shook the frame, waking me and dislodging the key.
Maybe the wind, maybe the north wind, was already picking up, just about to bring the rain, instead of the sun. And I dreamed the rest.
I didn’t realise I had brought my phone with me, and I jump when it buzzes in my hand.
David Minto, the screen tells me. I try to sound cheerful when I answer it and say hello.
“How about starting Operation Old Farts tonight?” he says. “Why not come round to mine and let me make you a delicious Italian meal? At the twist of a Ragú jar lid, that is. It’s a decent night on the telly.”
Suddenly nothing sounds better than getting away from this house.
“I’ve got to warn you, it’s a bit of a bitter divorce cliché,” he says. “But as long as you don’t judge me . . .”
My heart sinks a bit, although I say nothing. I wanted to be in a home, messy, full of football boots and Xboxes. Photos on the fridge. I accept anyway and tell him I’ll bring wine.
When the phone rings again a minute later, I assume it’s David telling me red or white, but it’s Dunblane Police Station, doing a follow-up, and I get to live through total humiliation for a long five minutes, confirming that nothing was taken from or left in my house and no one was there and all the doors and windows were locked at all times and, yes, I probably do need to speak to my doctor, thank you.
I spend the rest of the day flattening boxes, wondering why I didn’t make any attempt to clear out before I packed up.
Of course, I had just been forced to let go of my most precious gift, so the thought of discarding school report cards or old playbills was horrendous.
But as I flip through them now, I think I’m more than ready to let them go.
I don’t want to find places for them in my new home, folding them into my new start.
It still is a new start, if a bit dented by the mess inside my brain. Still something to hold on to.
David is wearing an apron when he answers the door at six o’clock, but not in a jokey way to have an effect on me, just as if he’s got good shirts and doesn’t want to splash them with sauce while he’s piercing the film.
His house is not what I expected, not at all what I thought he was warning me about.
It’s the Doune equivalent of Saint Helen’s, in fact.
A big square of stone with a carved peak on the porch and mullioned windows.
“What kind of bitter divorce cliché is this then?” I say, waving around as he takes my jacket and slings it over a hall stand with antler pegs and a chinoiserie umbrella stand underneath.
“Well,” he says, “Aileen didn’t particularly want to keep the family home—because Mrs. Aileen didn’t want to move in and who can blame her—so I just about bankrupted myself hanging on to it.”
“I thought you meant black leather couches and a monster TV,” I say.
He laughs uncomfortably and points the way into a room across the hall, where I find three leather couches, in charcoal grey, and the biggest telly I have ever seen in my life, hanging on the short wall.
“I’ve been in cinemas with smaller screens than that,” I say. “Have you got a waterbed?”
“And a mini dressing gown in red satin, to match the sheets,” he says.
“Drink?” He gives my bottle of wine an approving look and carries on into a kitchen stuffed with stainless steel and more knives than a professional chef would need, even if he filleted his own fish straight from the market and butchered sides of beef.
“So how have you been?” he asks me.
“Terrible then fine,” I tell him. “Mad, weird, waking nightmares then six hours of sleeping nightmares and an okay day.” He gives me a concerned look and I do consider telling him, but who wants to hear that their girlfriend called the cops and gave them a load of nonsense.
“I’ve been wandering down memory lane all day, unpacking papers,” I say instead, sitting on a high stool and watching him debag and rinse a salad.
“I still can’t remember Aileen, you know.
I don’t suppose you’ve got photos of her from years back, have you? It’s bothering me.”
“You’re kidding,” he says. He puts the salad in a wooden bowl and opens the fridge. “I cut the family photos into origami, trying to get her out of them but keep the boys and the dog.” He’s looking at the sell-by dates on a selection of bottles of salad dressing.
“Kirigami,” I say. “Origami is folds.” I hold my breath. This could be the moment I find out that, like most men, he doesn’t like being told things.
“Honey mustard okay?” he says. Then he looks up. “How the hell do you know that? Are you crafty? Will you start giving me candles and scarves if I don’t nip it in the bud now?”
“I narrated a history of paper,” I said. “It was surprisingly interesting. But I wouldn’t have thought it sold many copies, so I won’t be narrating the sequel.”
“What would the sequel be?” he says. He takes two trays of food out of the fridge and slips them free of their cardboard wrappers. “The future of paper? The history of plastic?”
“You’ve got a very logical mind,” I tell him.
“Goes with the job,” he says. Then, for some reason, he watches me very closely to see what I make of this.
Maybe he thinks he’s boasting. Or maybe he thinks I’ll think he’s boasting, ramming it home that he’s a posh lawyer and I’m just someone who reads things out for people.
I hope not, because I’m proud of my job and the business we built up, Kai and me.
“Speaking of jobs,” I say, “you know the compliment I get most often from people who email me?” I accept a glass of the wine he seems to think has been breathing for long enough now.
I know letting wine breathe is an old wives’ tale, but I don’t tell him this.
“They say they listen to the books I read to help them go to sleep.”
“Rude!”
“Not at all,” I say, even though I’m glad he thinks so; I’m glad he doesn’t realise I was doing a bit of boasting right back at him. “It’s rude to the author if the content doesn’t keep them awake, but it’s high praise for me if my voice sends them off. I think so, anyway.”
He has closed the fridge door again and he leans forward until his head is resting against it and starts snoring.
I take a big drink of wine, feeling my heart open and rise up like a burp bubble.
It’s been a long time since I talked nonsense with someone puttering around in a kitchen on an ordinary weekday evening.
They’re dead right that it’s the small things you miss.
This is such a tiny thing I wouldn’t even have been able to name it, but I flood with happiness, welcoming it back again.
“So I spoke to Aileen again,” David says, sliding onto the stool opposite me with a full glass.
The trays of food are still sitting on the worktop.
“About you coming round when the boys are here. Bloody ridiculous, as you pointed out. I pointed it out too and she said all she knew about you was that you were a dab hand at painting trainers and onions, hated PE, and once melted a sink drain in the science block.”
“Wow, she really does remember me, doesn’t she?” I say. “I wasn’t a vandal, by the way. It was the chemistry teacher’s fault. We were pouring away some noxious stuff and he told us to pour the acid before the alkaline.”
“So you did an experiment? Out of intellectual curiosity?”
“No! He said pour the acid first. Don’t pour the alkaline first. The alkaline must follow the acid. If the acid doesn’t precede the blah blah blah . . . pour the alkaline and the acid in the right order.”
“Well then he was a complete pillock,” says David. “I can’t remember which way to pour them out now either.”
“Exactly!” I take a drink. “So . . . was Aileen in my chemistry class? I was looking through school stuff earlier and, like I said, I still can’t remember her. I feel terrible. When you’re going to bat for me. And like I also said, I don’t like brain stuff I can’t explain.”