Prologue
The pill is small and round and grey. It is unbranded, like the bottle, and almost entirely unremarkable. I am used to swallowing them now. At first they left a metallic taste in my throat, like pennies. Now I barely taste a thing. Sometimes I drink them with juice or coffee. I used to take them with wine, but all that’s changed now. It’s all changed.
And so. I’m standing in the bathroom, water puddling at my feet. I look down at myself, noticing that I’m dressed but no shoes. The light coming through the window is the dirty grey of smog or a ruptured exhaust. It’s early, and I am at home. The heating hasn’t come on yet, and I can see my breath. Winter frost on the windows. I am shivering with cold. And I must take this pill.
There is someone at the door. I can see the shape of the figure through the patterned glass. I swallow the pill dry. My hair is wet, and he is knocking against the glass, saying, ‘Are you done yet?’, and he is saying, ‘Stella, we need to get going’, but I can tell by the set of his shoulders that what he means is I will swallow you, I will swallow you whole, and I am afraid.
Chapter 1
The moon is rising, the sky lavender-coloured. Carmel and I have walked to the end of our road, enjoying the twilight and the open windows of the houses through which can be heard the clinking of cutlery, soft music, laughter. When we draw near to the bus stop Carmel sees the poster and she nudges me, grinning.
‘Go on, Stella,’ she says, ‘go and stand beside it. Please, please, please. Just one photo. We’ll do it quickly. Give it a double thumbs up.’
‘Can I give it the finger?’ I ask, and if she hears the tremor in my voice she doesn’t comment on it. I stand beside the poster, smiling weakly, uncomfortable. My skin tingles with anxiety and something a little like revulsion. Hurry up, I think. The bus is drawing nearer. Carmel clicks the camera and then frowns down at the image.
‘Huh,’ she says, ‘wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be.’
Later, we are in Soho. I’ve got a mildly pleasant buzz on from the beer we drank before we left the flat and the warmth baking from the pavements. We’re laughing, Carmel and I, and I don’t see it coming, not then. I don’t know the bar we’re going to but Carmel does. She tells me she’s been there with a previous boyfriend, but – as I tell her – that doesn’t narrow it down. Inside it is dark and low-ceilinged. There is the thump and hiss of loud music, the wall dank with condensation. I press my hand against it and leave an almost perfect wet print. I order cocktails from a menu chalked on the wall and struggle through the crowd, where I find Carmel talking to a tall man with a neat haircut, tattoos crawling up his neck. His face is pressed close to her ear, and she is smiling.
I hand her a drink and look around. It is busy. The cocktail is exotic, with a dark kick of rum in the back of my throat. Inside, curled up like a milk-fed cat, is the part of me which would much rather be in bed. It’s a sour sort of homesickness. I swallow my drink and head back to the bar. Carmel has snaked her arms around the man’s waist; they lean into each other, like dancers, like drunks. I smile. I’m happy for her. She deserves her pleasure.
At the bar I order something else, mispronouncing the name. The barman makes me repeat it until I get it right, having to speak louder and louder into his ear. I feel stupid and tiny and too old for all this. As he hands me my drink I thank him and tip him because, absurdly, I want him to like me and think I am cool. I’ve always been needy, even as a kid. At nine years old I would make myself sick worrying about my parents separating and as a result spent a lot of time needling them for attention, sandwiching myself between the two of them on the sofa, small grabby hands at their hems. Where are you going? Don’t leave me. There were no child psychologists in those days and the doctor didn’t know what was wrong with me. On bad days I overheard them talking about me. I didn’t have enough friends, my mother was saying, and my father said well whose fault is that, and my mother replied I just want the best for her, and my father said she should be in school for God’s sake, and on and on. What it all came back to was one or both of them saying, ‘It isn’t normal.’ And that scared me most of all. I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be just like everyone else.
I look into my glass, surprised to see it empty. Carmel and the man with the tattoos have found a booth in a darkened corner, sitting in it pressed close together, his hand reaching around her back possessively. I think it’s time I leave or I’ll miss the last tube. I turn when he touches me. It was enough, that deft sweep of his fingers against my bare arm, to make me turn around.
‘Excuse me, are you—’
The question hangs in the air, creating a vacuum. I turn to face him, this dark-haired man, tall and strong-featured. He has the thick, heavy nose and jaw of a caveman. This is the first word I think of when I see him: Jurassic.
‘You are, aren’t you? You’re her.’ He’s smiling, looking me over. ‘I don’t – I don’t believe it. It is you, isn’t it? Katie Marigold.’
I nod. It was my name, or rather, it was her name: the little girl with the ringlets and the gap between her front teeth. Katie Marigold. That was me, from ages four to twelve. A halo of blonde curls, frilly little dresses like clouds orbiting my waist, my dimpled, chunky legs. I was adorable. I even had my own teatime television show in the eighties. It ran for eight years: Marigold! The exclamation mark was important, as was my catchphrase, which I was contractually obliged to say at least once per episode – I fink we’d better ask Daddy. Awful, right? It got applause every time, the audience awwww-ing and bleating like lambs. The programme was syrupy-sweet, a fictional family living in a cottage called Honeypot with a golden Labrador called Frisky and the same storyline regurgitated every week: mild family problem, implausible complication, catchphrase, resolution doled out thickly like wedding cake, audience reacts, credits. ‘A sitcom for simpletons’, it was described as once by some unwed bitter old hack who predicted my future thus: dead of an overdose at thirty. Nice woman. My mother wrote to her. I didn’t see the letter, but I remember her mouth pressed tightly together as she was writing, lips as thin as a fishing hook.
Little Katie Marigold. Obviously, Carmel thought it was hilarious. Sometimes she would make me do the voice, that cutesy little lisp through the gap in my teeth. When I got them fixed she was gutted I couldn’t do it anymore. I would catch her looking up the old episodes on the Internet and quoting me my lines or singing the theme song to me when I walked into a room, creasing herself up into giggles. I did adverts too, everything from Dentabrite toothpaste to Patches dogfood (‘I fink we’d better ask Doggy!’). By the late eighties we were pushed further and further out into the scheduling wilderness. The show had become dated, unfunny, and borderline racist. (‘Keith, there’s a man squinting at me in the garden!’, ‘That’s Ho Ching, honey, he’s Chinese.’) I’d outgrown the dress, the shoes, the buttery voice. My career was over just as puberty hit me like a truck. No one wanted to see Katie Marigold with tits and acne. I did a couple of interviews and a TV special just before my twelfth birthday, and then I shed Katie Marigold like a skin. I made the papers just once more, a year later, when my mother died. They had a long-lens photographer on the day of the funeral, capturing my face hovering over my black peacoat like a haunted white balloon. I had just turned thirteen.