by Zoë Folbigg
AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS
www.ariafiction.com
First published in the UK in 2019 by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Zoë Folbigg, 2019
The moral right of Zoë Folbigg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PBO): 9781788549875
ISBN (E): 9781789542134
Cover design: Alice Moore
Cover illustrations: © Shutterstock.com
Head of Zeus Ltd
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London EC1R 4RG
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To everyone who believes in love at first sight…
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
My Travels with Train Man
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
My Travels with Train Man
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
My Travels with Train Man
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
My Travels with Train Man
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
My Travels with Train Man
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
My Travels with Train Man
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
My Travels with Train Man
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Preview
Become an Aria Addict
1
There’s a man in my room, I know there is.
A pale and weary woman reclines onto a chaise longue, with a deliberate sigh and a fake yawn. As her jaw stretches, the pretend yawn morphs at the corners of her mouth into something real and she inhales the sweet and humid air that’s smothering her, that’s pushing her into the cradle. She’s exhausted. In a town where people flock from all over the world for tranquillity and spiritual nourishment, her body feels battered and the noise in the woman’s head hurts. Her temples are sore. Her limbs are thinner than they should be, thinner than they ever have been, and she’s tired from walking, walking, walking, with one eye on lofty green mountains that surround the slim valley. Walking the colourful streets of a small peninsula, where the faded grandeur of Indochinese colours clatter like the sage green shutters on the run-down French villas. One such shutter taps rhythmically against the room window under the swirl of a storm that came out of nowhere at the end of a sunny day. Rain hammers on the awning, beating onto the street. A stream of fat, purposeful drops hits the floor outside the hotel room door with gusto.
The woman, relieved to be dry, relieved to have stopped, but feeling little comfort in her capacious room, closes her eyes and pretends to fall asleep. Scents of jasmine and frangipani roll in through the window on the steam from the rain, floating past the decorative tea set on an old chest of drawers under the window to the street, permeating through the gauze netting around the dark teak, simple four-poster bed, reaching the reclined woman.
A silver letter M sinks into the bony hollow of her jugular notch as she inhales the sweet frangipani and exhales deliberately, stirring and testing. Testing to see if she can drift away after the long walk that left her tired; testing herself to see if she can escape the dark thoughts plaguing her; testing to see if there is a predator in the room, whether he’ll come out of his hiding place if he thinks she won’t notice. So they can catch each other unawares.
If I pretend I’m asleep he might come out.
Because that’s preferable to the woman. She would rather know whether she is alone or not by coaxing someone out. It seems so much more straightforward than going to the reception desk and asking the friendly man with a dragon on his shirt to check under the bed, behind the door, or in the Thai copper bathtub.
Unless it’s him. Unless he’s the man I can hear breathing in my room.
No, the man hiding in the room is more dapper than the man in the dragon shirt. His clothing more formal, his eyes more murderous. So the woman raises her arm, in order to make her slumber look more authentic, resting it on a cream and navy striped cushion. She closes her eyes and concentrates on her stillness, so her lids don’t flicker. Within seconds she feels the sure embrace of sleep as it pulls her into the striped cotton of the chair.
I am so very tired.
She arches her arm further up above her head, into the shape of a question mark hanging over her. There the acting stops; her limbs twitch in that state of in between. They are weaker, thinner, paler than they usually are. Her skin is a milky shade despite the sunshine of her travels. Her hair is shorter, wispier, wavier than normal, as if she cut it herself with blunt scissors.
The test she spent all day planning as she walked the riverbank and the lanes has only tested herself. If there is a man in the room, he might just let himself out while she is asleep – and then she will never know. Or perhaps he’ll stay and do worse.
Deeper into the cradle, she sinks, as two hands appear at the foot of the chaise longue, curling, snaking, creeping up the stubby legs of it and then the fabric of the upholstery.
A face emerges. Long, grey hair, slicked back straight from a widow’s peak to the nape of his neck. If the woman opened her eyes, she would see his: narrow and lupine at the foot of the sofa, as if he were an animal foraging for food. He bares his teeth into a smile. His moves are slow and deliberate. His body rising as if uncoiling from a basket on the cool tiled floor. Rising as his hands stroke her bare feet, past a silver chain on her ankle, examining the edges and lines of her legs. Rough hands, olive s
kin, move up a once muscular leg that is now fragile, as he inhales every detail, every mole, as if inspecting a specimen in the lab. The man wears a dark suit, the jacket fastened with a single button at the waist, over a white shirt that is open at its deep collar. The woman doesn’t know it, but the man looks both respectable yet unhinged; impeccably dressed yet filthy-fingered. His teeth gnash sharply and eyes widen with a smile, salivating at the prospect of what’s in front of him, what he’s hungered for, what he’s about to catch.
He glides his feral fingers up over the woman’s chambray shorts, feeling her ribcage under her white vest, over her small breasts and up, onto the bones that meet at the base of her neck. He sees the silver M in its pool, and slides his hands outwards, along the protruding lines of her collarbone, along blue-white skin towards each shoulder, then back, to her neck, her throat. He caresses the tiny M with a dirty fingernail and then taps it twice, as if to turn on an alarm.
Eyes open, pupils shrink, but the woman does not scream.
I knew it.
The man jumps over the back of the chaise longue with athletic ease and sits down next to her reclined body. His legs crossed, his appearance dandy. She is frozen. Proud to have proven herself right, but paralysed in fear as she wonders whether the man will pick her up or pin her down. She looks at him, his eyes excited and deranged, glad that at last they have met, as she waits for him to eat her.
Do it then!
But the man doesn’t dig in and devour. He stands up, extends an elegant arm and gives a haughty nod, as if commanding the woman to join him in a dance. She looks at his rough hand, sees the blood-red dirt under his fingernails and wonders what he has touched. Still, she accepts, shakily placing her pale hand in his. A gold ring of flowers spins loosely on her forefinger. The man curls his spine as he leans over to lift the woman and she rises primly, her two hands in his. Their eyes meet and their faces are level.
At last.
The woman can smell meat on the man’s breath in their dancers’ embrace; she can see the nicotine stains on his sharp teeth; smell the rain and the oil in his hair. He directs her around the orange and grey tiled floors, spinning her in a violent waltz while their eyes are locked and their limbs stretched. They whirl around the four-poster bed, neat and crisp with white waffle sheets and fuchsia petals scattered on the pillows, inviting them both inside the shroud of the voile netting. They storm past the chest of drawers with the tea set on it, past another shuttered window in this grand corner room, that leads onto the garden quadrant where banana and coco fronds break the rain’s fall. They move back to the chaise longue and the door to the bathroom, where the copper bathtub refracts a golden glow through the gap in the door. Together they whirl, in a spin, a storm, as they clutch each other’s faces, wondering who will be the first to strike.
2
December 2015, London, England
‘Happy anniversary, beautiful lady!’
Maya raises her now-empty glass of water, where bubbles no longer leap with gay abandon, and disguises its emptiness with her long fingers and a rectangular smoky quartz ring on her right hand. The central heating in the apartment is giving Maya a savage thirst, but she doesn’t want to impose on her best friend, Nena, sitting opposite her, dazed and cross-legged, with a six-week-old baby in her arms.
Maya curls into the grey wing-backed armchair and feels contentment. It’s a good chair. It was Tom’s only sticking point – after access to his son Arlo – when his ex-wife asked him to move out. If he was being forced to leave the home he had loved, the son he had gazed at in the small hours while his wife refused to talk to him, he was taking his favourite armchair with him.
The chair is made even more comfortable by the reliable thighs of James’ lap underneath Maya, as she slinks across him, trying not to take up too much space.
Maya and James are in the living room of Nena and Tom’s north London flat, visiting for tea, cake and cuddles on a dark Saturday afternoon.
The flat looked a lot lighter and airier when Maya and James last visited in the summer, but now it’s drowning in bouncing chairs, nappies, playmats and feeding cushions. It’s why Maya wants to take up as little space as possible, so she raises her empty glass and swallows her thirst.
‘Cheers!’ Nena raises a bottle of Infacol and a thick, black eyebrow, while she gives the bottle a shake. Gone are the colourful cocktails of yesteryear, the flower garlands that adorned her hair and the glitter that danced across her long eyelids. Now Nena’s canvas is blank and her face is tired, but she still shines with a faraway beauty that would be hard to place if you didn’t know her father’s family migrated from Bahia in Brazil to Britain in the 1980s. Maya looks at Nena and marvels. Two years ago she was a clown by day and dancing on the West End stage by night – using her deft acrobatic training to trapeze three boyfriends on rotation and never drop a spinning plate/ball/man.
‘What a difference a year makes!’ says Maya. ‘No, two!’
Tom reappears from the kitchen with two bottles of beer and hands one to James, who extricates his arm from around Maya’s waist to switch an empty bottle for a full.
‘Thanks, mate.’
Tom puts the empties on the coffee table next to a cake and slumps into the green sofa by Nena’s side, peering in on his newborn and stroking her cheek. Maya doesn’t want to point out that neither she nor Nena have a drink. Tom rarely gets a chance to sit down.
‘Sorry, Tom,’ smiles Maya. ‘Cheers to you too!’ She raises her empty glass again.
‘Well, yes, it wasn’t just my wedding, even if it felt like it,’ laughs Nena in mock-diva mode, even though their grand Westminster nuptials, one year before, did have touches of Nena written all over it: from the Brazilian singer to the swing ensemble of her West End friends on the dance floor. But Tom was there, beaming proudly, and he’s been present ever since. Leading Nena by the hand on honeymoon to her father’s motherland; rubbing her feet as they started to swell; attending every hospital and antenatal appointment with enthusiasm, even though he’d been through it all before with Arlo; working hard to reassure Nena that maternity leave won’t ruin her career as a television presenter, in the children’s department Tom heads up.
‘Yes, dear,’ smiles Tom, in mock subordination, still as hooked as he was when he first met Nena, dressed as a clown as the children’s entertainer at Arlo’s third birthday party the winter before.
Maya raises her empty glass for a third time. ‘And cheers to you, Arlo, this is really a late birthday cake for you, sweetie.’
A boy with a shiny brown bowlcut looks at Maya and smiles shyly. The dark gap between his two front teeth almost glimmers as he walks on his knees towards the cake on the coffee table. He edges a chubby, inquisitive finger towards a standing sliced strawberry but stops just before he makes contact. Wide-eyed, he anticipates the look that comes from his dad.
Maya concocted the fraisier cake last night in her kitchen at home in Hazelworth. A delicate, decadent creation of strawberries, proud and upright like the soldiers standing in a row on Arlo’s T-shirt. The strawberries are doused in vanilla-flecked crème mousseline and framed neatly by a pale Genoise sponge. Atop it sits a disc of light pink marzipan, a glazed strawberry and crystallised rose petals. Maya made it, every single component, all by herself: lovingly painting egg white onto rose petals and whisking up crème pâtissière in a whirl, all thanks to knowledge she gained studying for her diplôme de pâtisserie – or going to Pastry School, as she called it. She knew as she was making it that a fraisier was a bit ridiculous for a kid’s birthday cake, but she wanted to put her skills to good use.
‘Well, this is a step up from Colin The Caterpillar, hey Arlimoo?’ Nena laughs from her feeding station on the sofa. ‘That’s what he had on his actual birthday, poor sod.’ Arlo smiles. ‘But I did have my hands full.’ Nena swaddles Ava, their ravenous baby, in her arms and lifts her to her breast.
‘Fancier than any cake I had when I was five,’ says Tom, stroking his smooth h
ead, his friendly blue eyes gleaming at the creation on the table.
Maya leans away from James’ lap slightly, plucks a pristine strawberry from the cake’s edge and hands it to Arlo conspiratorially.
‘Baker’s prerogative,’ she winks.
Arlo doesn’t know what Maya means, but he likes the gist of it, and his eyes light up again.
James strokes the small of Maya’s back tenderly. He saw how hard Maya worked at ‘Pastry School’, putting her heart and soul into learning new skills. She started with sweet and shortcrust pastry in January, advancing through to choux in February, in time for their first Valentine’s together, when Maya made James a love-heart-shaped wreath of rose eclairs.
By March, her Swiss and Italian meringues were peak perfect, and in May she plunged into filo, konafa and Middle Eastern delights, making herself some birthday baklava along the way. June was all about Genoise, Viennoiserie and petits fours, and by July – as James’ contract expired on his small terraced rental and he moved into Maya’s flat, Maya was up into the small hours in the kitchen, burnt and blistered from spinning hot caramel nests and mastering sugar-work.
When she graduated from Cordon Bleu in September, and they celebrated with a glass of limoncello at their friends Dominic and Josie’s Tuscan wedding, her knife, piping and presentation skills were all patisserie perfect. All thanks to hard work, dedication and an unexpected inheritance she received late last year.
Neither Maya nor James minded that they were like ships passing in the night – James would return from shooting a wedding at 1 a.m. to find Maya up to her elbows in matcha macarons, pistachio saint-honorés and raspberry millefeuille with an icing sugar mist around her brow. James had been working hard, capturing a bride and groom in their best light, taking pride in taking pictures for a living – and he was ever so proud of Maya. And a couple of kilos heavier from all the taste testing. But Maya had done it. She had got her diplôme – a distinction no less – of which she was very proud. She would have made Velma very proud too.
Arlo licks the sticky sugar-glaze of the strawberry from his lips.
‘Actually, I think we need tea with that,’ states Nena. ‘Tommy?’ she hints.
