‘Tediously normal for you?’
Joe slips his hands between the seat and his thighs to stop them shaking. ‘That was not a relationship,’ he says.
‘If only you’d made that clear to her.’
‘She wasn’t even a patient. And I did make it clear. She refused to accept it.’
Delilah has the grace to look away. ‘All I’m saying is you got too close. You mean well, but there are boundaries and you’re the one who should be defining them.’
Joe drinks some more, and tells himself his mother knows nothing about the enormous task of getting society’s most damaged to learn to trust. Delilah imagines there is a rule book, that actions and reactions are entirely predictable and controllable. She has no idea that every day he is battling chaos. He will finish his pint and go. There are times when he can’t be with his mother.
‘How’s your scar?’ Delilah asks, as her eyes fall to Joe’s midriff.
‘Healing,’ he says. ‘And no, I’m not going to show you in public.’
Silence.
‘So, can you help this girl?’ Delilah asks after a moment, and it takes Joe a second to realise she is talking about Felicity again.
It is a good question. He has only given himself six weeks. And something tells him Felicity Lloyd is a very troubled young woman.
‘Because if you can’t,’ she goes on. ‘You should refer her to someone else. Before she brings you down with her.’
21
Felicity
Felicity parks her car on the edge of Midsummer Common and walks the short distance to her terraced cottage. She is hot, in spite of the air conditioning in the car and is grateful for the breeze that being closer to the river brings. The scent of evening honeysuckle drifts towards her as she unlocks the door to her courtyard garden. Keen to get inside and unload her shopping, she feels the familiar fear stealing over her. Once again, she is afraid of what she might find in her own home.
The kitchen is as she left it. No empty beer bottles – she doesn’t drink beer – in the recycling bin. Dropping the bags on the pale limestone floor, she runs quickly around the house, checking the master bedroom and bathroom on the ground floor, the sitting room and spare bedroom on the first. The bed in the spare room is neatly made, with no sign of the covers being disturbed.
She even goes down to the basement utility room, making sure the pile of ironing is where she left it, and the laundry basket is largely full of whites, which it always is on Tuesdays. She doesn’t look at the big cupboard under the basement stairs, because she never looks at that, but everything else is as it should be. Her heartbeat begins to settle, and a sense of calm creeps over her.
Maybe the session with Dr Grant has helped after all.
She likes him, she realises. Such a calm man. She cannot imagine a man like Joe becoming ruffled or losing his temper. And he works with the homeless, something she did herself, as a volunteer, years ago. Maybe she will again.
She has had a good day at work too. The BAS has been approached by a documentary production company about a TV series on icebergs and the whole team is excited about it. She has finished a presentation that she began before the accident. And, as the day has gone on, she’s found herself warming to Joe’s suggestion that keeping a diary for the next few weeks will give a focus to their discussions. She likes the idea of having a record of what she’s done each day. It will be nice to be able to look back and see – completeness. She even nipped into town and bought a beautiful silk-bound notebook.
As though relief has given her permission to feel hungry, she returns to the kitchen. She carries the bag with chilled goods to the tall aluminium fridge and pulls open the door.
It is full.
Every shelf is packed with food. The salad tray is full. There is a chicken, a pack of bacon and two salmon fillets on the meat shelf.
She does not eat meat.
A dozen yoghurts sit neatly beside a block of cheese on the dairy shelf. In the fridge door are two untouched pints of milk, a carton of orange juice and a bottle of sauvignon blanc. Two shelves are filled with fruit. Everything, bar the meat and salmon, that is currently in the supermarket bags. This is her second bulk shop in days.
She tells herself it’s no big deal, that she’s been distracted and stressed since the incident on the common. She tells herself it’s understandable that the shop slipped her mind and knows she isn’t listening.
She will have to check the house again.
The kitchen cupboards are in order. One time, maybe last week, she found everything had been taken out of the cupboards and put back in different ones. Today, though, everything is fine. So is her sitting room. There is a fine scattering of ash over her hearth, but even in summer the wind finds its way down the chimney.
She checks outside but this time, at least, there are no cigarette butts in the courtyard. She has never smoked, but someone has been smoking recently, directly outside her back door.
She makes her way upstairs to the second bedroom that doubles as an office. There is nothing in the wastebin other than Post-it notes. All in her handwriting. In her in-tray are several articles that she has found online and printed off, all relating to early-onset dementia. Reading them has brought her no comfort at all. The condition is rare, but not unknown. It is entirely possible.
Her appetite is gone and so she decides to start the diary. Joe suggested that a physical diary, rather than one online, will feel more personal and she agrees. She will record everything: what she wears, what she spends, where she goes. On edge, she is startled by a loud and unexpected sound from directly outside. For a moment, she thinks a vehicle is heading for her cottage, but the noise fades and dies. It is only a kid on a skateboard, or roller skates.
She sits at her desk, pulls open the drawer to find a pen and sees instead an elegant fold of black leather, fastened with a jewel clasp. Trembling again, she opens it to see the words My Journal on the inside page.
Someone has beaten her to it.
22
Joe
Joe drinks more than he should. He accepts a third pint because he knows he has no food at home and after three pints of beer his appetite is more or less gone. And then a fourth, because Delilah is matching him pint for pint. If he leaves now he has a feeling she might stay and after four pints, Delilah makes bad decisions.
Not for the first time, he wonders if bad decisions run in the family. Arguably, he’s made a few himself of late. And then he wonders if the reason he is so on edge this evening is because it’s almost exactly a year since he met the woman he still can’t bear to think about.
He isn’t cold, but he pulls on his sweater all the same.
‘You know these homeless types,’ his mother says, brushing crisp crumbs from her blouse. Unlike Joe, Delilah never loses her appetite when she drinks. She’ll be heading for the kebab van when they leave, rowing with the taxi driver who won’t allow food in his cab. She’ll threaten him with a parking violation or some such bollocks and he’ll make a complaint against her, which will probably be upheld.
‘I know people without homes,’ he replies. At the far end of the pub garden, sitting beneath an arch of yellow roses, is a tall young woman with blonde hair that reaches her shoulder blades. He thinks – Felicity – and doesn’t know whether he hopes it is her, or that it is not. ‘I also know a number of rough sleepers. Is that what you mean?’