I put my hand gently on her arm. “I promise, it’s just me.”
She fixed me with a long look before turning and pointing at the ice creams, now turned to liquid on the ground.
“You owe me eight quid for those.”
“Hazel?” Maria is tapping lightly on the door. I shake myself. I’m not in a stupor, not yet, but I’m dizzy and irrational with hunger. My throat feels raw and scaly, my lips dry. I shouldn’t have told her that story. I don’t like how it ends.
“Did you get it? Is the padlock off?”
“Yes.” Her voice is quiet and polite, but I detect a note of wariness, like she wishes she hadn’t done it. “You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”
“What? No!” I laugh to show her how absurd I find the idea, but then I think of my sister saying,If you can’t keep it under control, Hazel,then you don’t come around here anymore, and I feel that choked, painful sensation in my throat again. “Why would you think that?”
Silence. I hear the rattle of the hasp falling away, thethunkas the heavy padlock hits the floor. My body feels like it is vibrating all over. Hope, not quite extinguished, flares a little brighter. It is fragile, wavering. A candle in a vast, dark cave.
“Now the bolt. Can you reach?”
No answer. But I hear Maria moving, the creak of the floorboards as her weight shifts. The metal scraping as she draws the bolt back and then a soft click, more felt than heard. There is a moment in which the air feels thin and cold, and drawing it into my lungs is difficult. I put my hand against the door and slowly push it open.
23
Suzie can’t stop thinking about that receipt. At ten minutes to one, she turns the sign in the pharmacy window toCLOSEDand takes her lunch out of her bag. It’s tuna salad, but she isn’t hungry. She wishes she could have a nice glass of cold white wine, wash the weird taste of this day away.
That’ll teach me to skip my morning run, she thinks as she pulls out the chair at the desk. The weather this morning had been for temperatures close to freezing, so she’d turned on the heating in the shop, but now she takes another look at the thermostat on the wall and kicks it up another few notches. Then, doing it almost casually, as if she has barely given it any thought, Suzie takes the receipt from her pocket and lays it carefully over the radiator. A heat source can be anything, she reckons, and although she’d never tested their secret messages out like this before, she doesn’t see any reason why it couldn’t work.
She stirs the salad in the pot, waiting for Teddy. They always meet up a few minutes after the hour when he leaves his practice and cycles across town to sit in the little office with her and eat their lunch together. Sometimes they do a crossword, or a sudoku.Teddy likes the sudokus. He likes mathematics and numbers; he says they make sense to him.
While she’s waiting, Suzie pulls up Facebook on the office computer and searches for Cathy Maddon, but there are only results in Cumbria and Bristol, a primary school teacher in Leicestershire. She tries a combination of Idless or Cornwall, and even runs through local directories in Knox Row, but finds nothing.
She finds Hazel, but her profile is private, just the thumbnail image visible of Hazel and a man Suzie supposes must be Joe. They are at a Halloween party, Joe dressed as Beetlejuice, all wiry hair and black-ringed eyes. Hazel is wearing a long black wig and a low-cut dress, Morticia Addams, Suzie supposes, or the vampire one. Elvira.She looks so happy, Suzie thinks,but then we all do on the outside, don’t we?
The clock ticks. The temperature climbs. The receipt lies flat, revealing nothing. Teddy will be another few minutes yet. Suzie sighs, typing in Abigail’s name as if by muscle memory, an action she performs so often she is barely aware she is doing it anymore. The profile is public, so Suzie can see it without being linked to her own profile, which she is glad of. She wouldn’t want Abigail to know she’d been looking, even though she did so regularly, at least once a week that Suzie would admit to. It was a comfort, in a way. She liked seeing Abigail’s successes, the man she’d married, the beautiful daughter she had. It made her feel better to know that Abigail was winning, despite everything that happened.
It’s called a salve to your conscience, Suzie, the little voice in her head pipes up, the one which always sounds so frustratingly like her mother. Nagging, pedantic.But it doesn’t work, does it? Not really. Because you still feel the guilt. It eats away at you like acid.
The most recent post is a photograph of Abigail in a bathing suit, smiling at the camera. Beneath it, she has posted:
As some of you know I’ll be back in hospital on the 18th for more treatment on my legs—hoping we get lucky this time around and it’ll be the end of all these procedures! Send us good wishes and wine!
Suzie hurriedly closes the laptop when she hears someone rapping on the front door. A quick look at the CCTV as she stands up reveals it as Teddy outside, his bike helmet in one hand, lunch box in the other, squinting up at where he knows the camera to be. She is still thinking about Abigail when she walks past the radiator and glances down at the receipt, immediately turning cold all over.
Two words are slowly appearing on the paper, seeming to rise to the surface like things long submerged.
Teddy’s face drops as she opens the door, and she immediately feels guilty. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go to Cathy’s.” She gives Teddy a weak smile. “I’m so sorry, it’s an emergency.”
“What? Who’s Cathy? Suze?”
Suzie is already pulling the door closed behind her. She’ll be late opening back up after lunch, but that can’t be helped. She doubts there will be many customers in this afternoon anyway. It’s been shocking how fast footfall has dropped off after the new chemist opened up in the shopping center.
“Hazel’s sister. I mentioned her, didn’t I?”
“You definitely did not.” He’s upset. He has that look about him, the one she knows so well—forlorn, like a kicked dog. “When will you be back? What about our lunch?”
Suzie leans up and kisses him, using his lapel to pull him closer to her. He tastes like the dental clinic; clean and sanitary, almost antiseptic. It’s delicious.
“Don’t be mad at me, Ted-Ted. I’ll see you at dinner, okay?”