26. Crow
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CROW
Pumpkin gnocchi, please. No starter for me, thank you. Oh, I’m not that hungry. I had a big lunch. I have an early start tomorrow, so no drinking. Just tap water.
I have rehearsed these phrases in my head.
I studied the menu as soon as it was confirmed which restaurant the office Christmas dinner would be at, and the pumpkin gnocchi (knock-ee, I made sure I pronounced it correctly) was the cheapest item, still at a staggering twenty pounds and fifty pence.
The starters are all fourteen or fifteen pounds and the desserts range from anywhere between twelve and fifteen.
I can’t not have a main, so they’ve had to be sacrificed.
Every single alcoholic drink is another bullet to my bank account, so it’s tap water only.
But even though I had my excuses, everyone still looked at me like I’d grown a second head, especially when the waiter brought over their own bottled water and I reminded them that I ordered it from the tap.
I’m not paying six pounds for something that’s free.
The restaurant is gorgeous though. All white tablecloths and candles and someone to greet us at the door.
The Christmas decorations are abundant but tasteful, careful golds and silvers and the occasional crimson to make the room sparkle.
We are at the long table at the back, and even though I’m on the end, I don’t mind; it was my fault for arriving first, sitting in the middle, and then being pushed along as more and more people took their seats.
The food is nice, but not amazing like I imagined.
The gnocchi is served with strong mushrooms that are bitter on my tongue, and I end up piling them at the side of my plate.
Everyone else has ordered multiple courses and rounds of cocktails, even Nadine and Clare, who work the same marketing job I do, so I have no idea how they’re affording it.
“What are your plans for Christmas, babe?” Nadine asks me. She calls everyone babe, a fact I learned slightly too late when I returned the favor, thinking we were close friends, and she laughed and laughed.
“Oh, nothing exciting,” I say. “Just going home, you know. Seeing family. How about you?”
You know is my new vocal tic. I have noticed the others saying it, noticed the students at university using it as a placeholder, a way of pausing, without sounding unsure. It took a lot of practice, drumming out the ums and ers and uhs from my vocabulary, but I’ve done it.
“Same, same,” she says. “We’ll go skiing in the New Year, because who doesn’t, but otherwise it’s a dull family affair in the Cornwall house.”
“I’m going to New York,” Emily says. “My dad has a business trip already scheduled, and it was easy enough for us to tag along.”
“Wow, that’s amazing!” I say. “I’ve always wanted to go.”
Emily wrinkles her nose. “You’ve never been? It’s okay, I guess, the first few times. I’m mainly looking forward to the shopping.”
“And the food, no doubt,” Nadine puts in. “There are some amazing restaurants there.”
I don’t tell them I’ve never been on a plane, let alone to America.
These are conversations I am used to now, after having a crash course at university.
The endless discussions around travel and especially food where I have no idea what they’re talking about.
I look up the words and phrases I remember later and commit them to memory, but there is always something else, and I am forever playing catch-up.
The students at Durham were brutal. I know now they had me sussed out from that first question, the one I didn’t realize was a test: What school did you go to?
And I’d say the name of where I went, puzzled why they’d even ask, and immediately they would withdraw, close ranks, know I wasn’t one of them.
I thought I could assimilate into the network, but the network was already established before I could even try.
“Anyone want to join me for a smoke?” Emily asks, turning around in her seat.
Her dessert, a delicious-looking cheesecake, has only had two bites out of it, and one of them is still on the fork.
She is going to waste it, and it takes everything in me not to ask if I can have it instead.
“I’ll be five minutes. We’re splitting the bill, right? Let me know what I owe when I’m back.”
“Aren’t we just paying for what we ordered?” I mumble when Emily is gone. Nadine is already keen to speak to Duncan and Jack a couple of seats up, but she turns back to me at this, bemused expression on her face.
“It’s easier to just split it,” she says. “Who cares one way or the other?”
The thirty pounds in my bank account, maybe. I laugh, but I’m worried it sounds strangled. “I only got the gnocchi. It’s just . . .”
“Oh.” She looks amazed. “Of course. Everyone!” To my horror, she calls down the table to the rest of the office, knocking so they all turn to her. “Let’s just pay for what we got, yeah? Some people”—she inclines her head toward me—“had less, so let’s make it fair.”
If the floor would open up and swallow me whole, I would feel nothing but relief.
“There you go, babe,” she says, after everyone agrees. “Problem solved.”
“Yes. Thank you.” There is nothing else I can say.
I don’t follow them to the bar afterward.
I think they’re the ones who are relieved.
I make my excuses, but they’re not really listening, and most of them don’t even bother saying goodbye.
We work for a marketing company that prides itself on feeling like a “family,” and maybe by family they mean the kind that barely talks to one another unless they have to.
I joined thinking it would be a community-led kind of job, that I wouldn’t be left out like at university.
I didn’t realize most jobs just lie about the kind of places they are.
My days are spent either in meetings about an advertising campaign being worked on by people in better positions than me, answering emails, copyediting articles, or writing press release statements.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not being an author.
I have managed to avoid my phone all night, determined not to refresh my inbox. Part of me is convinced if I ignore it for long enough, my reward will be an email that doesn’t look like the ones I have already received for my manuscript, a horror novel about a group of women on a wilderness trip.
Unfortunately I won’t be offering representation at this time . . .
The marketplace is very subjective and another agent may feel differently . . .
It is in your best interest if I step aside as I cannot offer my complete passion for this project . . .
But when I open my phone, there is no email.
There is, however, a missed call from Wren.
The bus arrives; I am momentarily distracted.
Go through the motions of greeting, ticket request, money, waiting for the ticket to pop out, handed to me by the bus driver, whose hand blocks me from collecting it myself.
I stumble down the aisle of the bus, which moves before I am seated, and collapse in a seat at the back, away from anyone else.
I am convinced I have imagined the missed call.
I’ve been so stressed lately, I’ve made up something even more stressful in my own head.
I check again and it is still there: 1 missed call, Wren.
Perhaps it is a mistake. She’ll still have me in her contacts as Crow; maybe she now has a friend or colleague called Cressida, and she’s hit my name just below in error. She saw her mistake and quickly ended the call, but it had already connected.
Yes. That is what happened.
So I ignore her, swiping the notification away, checking my emails just in case and finding nothing. Someone has taken the seat next to me, thin and hardly taking up any space. She is wearing black skinny jeans, and her hair is curly, and I know it is Goldie before I even look up at her face.
“Not today,” I tell her, and she tilts her head at me, questioning. “Please.”
Goldie is always here, and every time I beg her to leave. I don’t want to talk to her, don’t want to look at her, don’t want to be reminded of how we left her. And yet she still persists in haunting me, determined to break me.
For once, she obeys; I turn to look out of the window, and there is no one next to me in the reflection, and she doesn’t follow me home.
Chelsea is on me as soon as I put my key in the door.
“You’re leaving post in the hall again,” she says, before I even have a chance to step inside.
She is ten years older than me, my downstairs neighbor, and I have no idea what she does.
Whatever it is, she seems to always have the time to lurk around in our shared hallway, ready to complain about something.
Today she is wearing her dungarees, which means she’s been in the garden even though it’s December, muddy patches on her knees. “What have I told you about the post?”
Chelsea is another tenant, not my landlord.
The landlord is a man named Philip who spends his time in Portugal and who I’ve never actually met.
But he’s the one who owns this gorgeous Edwardian house, which he has split into two flats, one upstairs, one downstairs, and he’s the one I pay an insane amount to every month for the pleasure of living here.
It’s too much, but I refuse to live at home.
And if people at work want to think I live in this house in its entirety, that I might even own it, that’s fine by me.
They’ll never actually be invited inside.
They won’t have to suffer Chelsea. Which is a shame because I would love to entertain them.
The flat is stunning, all old features and proper floorboards and a new kitchen, exactly the kind of place I deserve, even if it is draining me beyond measure.
There is a single envelope on the circular table by the front door.
It’s a beautiful hallway, with a sweeping staircase that circles around to my flat, and original tiles.
The oak table is the only piece of furniture in here, that and a giant fake fern in the empty space under the stairs.
The envelope is my internet bill, still coming to me in paper format, no matter how many times I’ve put my settings as paperless.
Chelsea is the one who puts the post on the circular table and then gets mad about it.
“I don’t ask for much,” she says, which is a lie. “I want the communal spaces to be tidy. I keep the garden immaculate, and I don’t ask to be paid for that.”
She is obsessed with the garden. If I take a step out there, she either comes out herself to watch what I’m doing or peers through her kitchen window, waiting for me to make some kind of invented mistake that she can yell at me for.
I scoop up the envelope now, bone-tired. I don’t want another argument. “I am taking it upstairs. Good night, Chelsea.”
She is still talking behind me, but I have become very good at tuning people out.
Safely inside my flat, I should feel better, but that missed call is all I can think about.
If it was Cuckoo, maybe I could excuse it.
She’d make that kind of mistake, call someone.
I bet she has a million new friends; she was always so good with people.
But Wren? Wren is careful. Wren is terrified of one-on-one conversations.
Or at least she used to be. If Wren did this, she would have left a message explaining her error.
Instead there’s nothing, and that’s so much worse.
She called me for a reason, and she probably wants me to call back.
I won’t. If it is that important, if she truly needs me—
My phone buzzes in my hand. Wren.
—she would ring again.
I accept the call.
“Crow?” It is her, unmistakably Wren, her soft, almost breathless voice.
I am straight to the point. “It’s been seven years.”
“Bishop’s House,” she says. “It’s been bought. At last. They’re going to redevelop the whole place. Tear it down. Make changes to the land. Just like he wanted.”
Goldie has appeared in my kitchen. She leans against a counter, arms folded. She is not surprised by this news. Of course she knows already. She is not, as my mum used to say when I got nervous about anything, jelly and ice cream, wobbling and cold all over the place.
Which is exactly how I am now.
“We need to meet,” Wren continues. “All of us.”
I look around at my beautiful flat. It has an open-plan kitchen and living room, perfect for entertaining.
When I signed the rental contract, I imagined dinner parties in here, evenings with my sophisticated new friends.
I bought fancy cutlery and placemats I couldn’t afford, and they’ve been sitting in their packaging, collecting dust at the back of the cupboard.
“We can meet here,” I say. “Come round mine. I’ll give you the address.”