I stare for almost a full minute, my skin tight with gooseflesh. A movement catches my eye and I jerk, gasping. It is a moth, trapped against the windowpane. It is bracken-coloured and as big as a cotton reel.
I have been forgetting so much. So much.
I find myself kneeling in front of the cupboards, piling everything back inside. I am trying to remember this morning, the moments before I left the house. I had gone upstairs to the bathroom, hadn’t I? While Frankie had waited. Had Frankie done this? Had I done this? Is that even possible, to do this and not know it? Perhaps whoever had brought the eggs around – the eggs and that eerie little note underneath, the one which sounded so much like a threat – had let themselves inside to do this, to scare me. But then why leave the eggs on the doorstep if they had keys? Round and round it goes, none of it making sense. I sit back on my haunches, my hands pressed together at my mouth as though I am praying. I think back to the moment in the bathroom, the moment I had taken the bottle of pills from the cupboard. I had poured two into my hand and put them on the windowsill. Had I taken them? I don’t remember. I dust my hands off on my thighs and head upstairs to the bathroom. The sun is bright and golden and the clarity of the sea air coming in through the bathroom window is wonderful and the pills are not where I’d left them.
Where you thought you left them, I tell myself. They are not on the windowsill. I check the floor and lift the towel hanging there but they have disappeared. You must have taken them, I think. But I don’t know. I don’t know. I open up the cabinet and reach for the bottle. The bottle is not there. Now my heart starts to race, tick, tick, tick. Where is it? I rake the contents out of the small cupboard into the sink; packets of aspirin and waxy lip balm and throat lozenges grown sticky and furred with mould. I search the room, look behind the bath and in the little cupboard next to the radiator. I look in the cabinet, in the pockets of the dressing gown hanging on the back of the door and behind the toilet where I find another of those puddles of dirty stagnant water. But I cannot find the little brown bottle with no label. With growing unease, I search the bedroom, stripping the bed, pulling the covers from the pillows. I look under the rug and in the wardrobe and behind the curtains. I even go downstairs and look in the fridge. I cannot find it, and now I begin to really panic, almost relieved I have something concrete to hang my anxiety on. I pace the small rooms and back to the bathroom, checking and double-checking in frustration. I think I have found it when I lift my handbag and hear a rattle but it is just my keys loose at the bottom. I sit down at the kitchen table and rest my head on the surface, ignoring the growing sense of dislocation as adrenalin is dumped into my system. I think again of how much simpler my life was just over a year ago, living with Carmel, having fun. And again, that brain zap, my head turning inwards to that day in our flat – the day of Carmel’s new job – and the outside world dims around me like the flame of a gas lamp lowering.
Chapter 15
Carmel had been standing at Blackfriars waiting for her train when she found out. A dull, drizzly English lunchtime. It was me she called first.
‘I got the job.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’ll take your congratulations as implied. Soon I will be known as Mademoiselle Silky Bollocks and you will have to call me Your Highness.’
I laughed. ‘Amazing. I always knew you’d do it. When do you start?’
‘A month. They’re flying me to Paris again to sign the contracts. God. God, this is really happening!’
‘It is.’
‘God bless them. God bless France. Liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that.’
‘Yes. Très bien.’
‘Uh – je ne comprends pas.’
‘Mais-oui.’
‘This needs work. Are you home? I’m heading back now.’
‘Oui. Let’s go out and celebrate.’
‘Not the pub. Something proper. Dinner?’
I had looked over at the doorway where Marco was standing, his arms folded across his bare chest. Dark hairs coiled like wire wool on his skin. He had called me that morning, persuaded me to let him come over, told me he had cancelled all his meetings. He told me he was desperate to see me, compared it to a thirst. A need. ‘I need you,’ he had said, and laughing I had replied, ‘All right, okay then. Yes.’ We had barely been apart in the last two months. That’s how it happens for some people, he’d told me, and I’d said how what happens and he’d said, ‘Love.’ He’d twined his fingers on mine, bearing down with a pressure just short of pain. It had turned the beds of my nails white. ‘Love,’ he had continued, pressing himself against me. ‘I love you.’
‘We’re all going out for dinner tonight when she gets back, and I’m baking a cake,’ I enthused when Carmel had hung up. ‘I’m baking a cake in the shape of a bra.’
‘You can’t cook, Stella,’ he said, leaning against the fridge and tucking his hands beneath his naked armpits, ‘and can’t you put the heating on? It’s freezing.’
The poky second-floor flat was permanently cold, and in the winter a knife-sharp draught blew in through the gaps in the windows. I ignored him, pulling open the kitchen cupboards. We rarely had much food in, and today was no exception. I picked up a bag of caster sugar which had formed into a hard, solid rock.
‘It’s a brilliant job and good money. She’s done well.’
‘Yes, but it’s not your brilliant job, is it? What are you so pleased for?’
‘Because she has worked hard for this. I’m allowed to be pleased for her.’
‘We all work hard, Stella. I started off working seventeen-hour days. After my dad died I took on his business at nineteen years old. No one baked me a cake.’
He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me close. His hands dug into the soft flesh of my middle.
‘Aw, poor guy.’ I pouted. ‘Would you like me to bake you a cake too? Would man baby like a cakey?’
‘What I’d like,’ he’d said, turning me easily in his arms so we were face-to-face, ‘is for you to get out of this rut you’re in.’ He ran his hands down my back, drawing me closer, a frown tightening his features. ‘You’re too thin.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re not. Look at this.’ He lifted my T-shirt gently, pointing at the flare of my ribs. ‘There’s nothing on you.’
‘I’ve always been skinny.’
‘No, you haven’t.’
I looked at him, confused, and he smiled.
‘Katie Marigold’s nickname was “Pudge”, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh. Yeah, I suppose it was.’
That’s what Daddy Marigold had called her, at least. I’d been a plump little kid, ‘delightfully chubby’, as so many articles had referred to me. It was an asset, a part of my appeal. As I edged closer towards my teens some of that fat dropped away, shed by my nerves and hormones, pushing food around my plate with the back of my fork. Mum had wanted me to go on a high-calorie diet, terrified I would lose my trademark dimples. I stubbornly resisted. By that time Katie Marigold was an albatross around my neck.