‘Perhaps you’d better let her keep them,’ I said gently, handing back the bag. ‘I don’t think they’d suit me.’
He looked hurt. ‘I don’t understand you anymore, June. There’s something different about you. You seem colder. Too much like a fella for my taste.’
‘You don’t have to like it. There are a lot of things I still have to figure out. I only know that I don’t miss our old life. It was comfortable, but it made me so spineless.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. You were certainly the mistress of the house. Hilary’s away all the time and I can’t find where she keeps anything. And I never seem to have any clean pants. Don’t ask a man to do a woman’s job, eh?’ His bluff joviality faded. ‘Listen, I know I left you, but for many years you had everything you could ever ask for in Hamingwell.’
‘That’s the point, Gordon. I don’t ever want to have to ask for things again, or sit there making up ways to fill the hours. It’s time to give myself a different kind of credit.’
‘Would it make any difference to say I miss you?’
‘That’s to be expected when you spend ten years with someone. But at some point you have to ask yourself, what was it for? Did we learn anything from each other?’
‘I don’t see how you can talk like that. I looked after you.’
‘I know you did, Gordon. Maybe you protected me a little too much.’
‘Fine, go ahead and live this way, but I think you’re making a terrible mistake. People aren’t nice. They’re out for everything they can get.’
There are a lot more good ones than bad, I thought, but you’ll never see it. I watched from the upstairs window as he left, disappointed and bewildered. He didn’t stop to look up. He checked the Rover for scratches, then hastily hopped inside and started it. He couldn’t wait to get out of the area fast enough.
Me, I like it here, but I won’t stay. I’ll move around. Whitechapel, Hoxton, King’s Cross, Shoreditch, Lambeth, Borough, Pimlico, Deptford, Bayswater, I haven’t decided where next. I’m learning new lists.
I’ve taken a new job, rather an appropriate one. I’ve become a personal shopper for the wives of the wealthy, and I’m damned good at it. The first thing I’m going to do is get Mrs. Rennie to spend her way through her husband’s fortune. How we’ll laugh as we burn a path through the laundered cash of the corrupt. What’s more, I’ll be able to keep an eye on her husband’s mysteriously transmuting network of alliances. So long as respectable people require someone to do their dirty work, he and his companions will continue to make their fortunes. I desperately want to hurt him, to make him pay for what he did, but I no longer know which side I’m on.
I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve faked my death, but changing my name will be the first smart move, and if I ever do get another credit card it’ll have that new name on it. I’ll have been reborn.
My old life as June Cryer has officially ended.
I am a former housewife, an ex-housewife. Like the Monty Python parrot sketch, I have ceased to be. To put it another way, I am one mean mother of an ex-pelmet-hoovering Sainsburys-shopping dishwasher-loading housewife who can no longer remember which leading shower spray gets rid of stubborn limescale and which attacks unsightly soap-scum, and doesn’t give a flying rat-fuck, pardon my French. I’m just glad I came out of my coma long enough to build a new life.
When I finally do have a child – a girl, I feel sure – she won’t be bullied into doing what’s best for her by her parents or her peers, by suitors or salesmen. She’ll be free to choose the life she wants. Of course, I’m realistic enough to know that her choices won’t be mine. You set up home on solid ground and tend it, or you move to shifting sands. It’s a hard decision. The most important thing is discovering you have a choice.
The housewife is dead, but the woman is doing just fine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BORN IN LONDON, Christopher Fowler has written for film, television, radio, graphic novels, and for newpaper including The London Times, for more than thirty years. He is a regular columnist for The Independent on Sunday. Fowler is the multi-award-winning author of more than thirty novels, including the lauded Bryant & May mystery novels. In the past year he has been nominated for eight national book awards.
For more information visit
www.christopherfowler.co.uk
Imagine there was a supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors...
Four passengers meet on a train journey through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive. As the ‘Arkangel’ races through the war-torn countryside, they must find out:
What is in the casket that everyone is so afraid of? What is the tragic secret of the veiled Red Countess who travels with them? Why is their fellow passenger the army brigadier so feared by his own men? And what exactly is the devilish secret of the Arkangel itself?
Bizarre creatures, satanic rites, terrified passengers and the romance of travelling by train, all in a classically styled horror novel.
www.solarisbooks.com
HOW DOES IT FEEL, NOT BEING REAL?
In Hollywood, where last year’s stars are this year’s busboys, Fictionals are everywhere. Niles Golan’s therapist is a Fictional. So is his best friend. So (maybe) is the woman in the bar he can’t stop staring at.
Fictionals – characters ‘translated’ into living beings for movies and TV using cloning technology – are a part of daily life in LA now. Sometimes the problem is knowing who’s real and who’s not.
Divorced, alcoholic and hanging on by a thread, Niles – author of The Saladin Imperative: A Kurt Power Novel and many others – has been hired to write a big-budget reboot of a classic movie. If he does this right, the studio might bring one of Niles’ own characters to life. But somewhere beneath the movie – beneath the TV show it was inspired by, the children’s book behind that and the story behind that – is the kernel of something important. If he can just hold it together long enough to figure it out...
‘A disturbing, self-reflective type of brilliance.’
Pornokitsch on Death Got No Mercy
‘There’s a lot to love here.’
Total Sci-Fi on Gods of Manhattan
www.solarisbooks.com
THIS IS THE HOTEL WHERE OUR NIGHTMARES GO...
It’s where horrors come to be themselves, and the dead pause to rest between worlds. Recently widowed and unemployed, Richard Carter finds a new job, and a new life for him and his daughter Serena, as manager of the mysterious Deadfall Hotel. Jacob Ascher, the caretaker, is there to show Richard the ropes, and to tell him the many rules and traditions, but from the beginning, their new world haunts and transforms them.
It’s a terrible place. As the seasons pass, the supernatural and the sublime become a part of life, as routine as a morning cup of coffee, but it’s not safe, by any means. Deadfall Hotel is where Richard and Serena will rebuild the life that was taken from them... if it doesn’t kill them first.
‘Tem’s Deadfall Hotel makes The Shining’s Overlook Hotel look like Butlins. Eerie, disturbing and yet strangely touching, you’ll check in but may never check out.’
Christopher Fowler, bestselling author of the Bryant and May Mysteries and Hell Train
‘Rasnic Tem is at the height of his powers with this effort.’
Fearnet.com
‘Truly brilliant.’
Denver Post
‘Steve Rasnic Tem is a school of writing unto himself.’
Joe R. Lansdale
www.solarisbooks.com
Table of Contents
Praise for Christopher Fowler
Also by Christopher Fowler
Title
Indicia
Foreword
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three<
br />
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
About the Author
'Hell Train' by Christopher Fowler
'The Fictional Man' by Al Ewing
'Deadfall Hotel' by Steve Rasnic Tem
Plastic Page 27
