by Eleanor Ray
“We’re not her children,” said Charles.
“Ice cream, PLEEEASE,” demanded Daniel.
“I’ve had enough of this,” said Nina. She turned around and squeezed herself back through the fence. They all heard her slam the back door behind her.
“I kicked my ball over the fence by accident,” explained Charles. “I was looking for it in the brambles. Daniel followed me. He was playing with the cat.”
“No harm done,” said Richard, with an apologetic look. “Sorry about your pot, Amy.” Amy looked up. “I’ll get that fence mended too,” he added. He glanced around, taking in her garden. “I can see that this space isn’t really designed for little monsters.” Richard went over to the fence and encouraged both children through. He followed them.
Amy sank to the ground. In spite of the shock, she was determined to use what little daylight there was left to find the pieces of the pot. If she found them all, perhaps she’d be able to repair it. Already she’d gathered about eight pieces, but she was sure it amounted to less than half of what she needed. She squeezed the largest piece in her hand, feeling the shard digging into her palm, then set it down and balanced the others inside it as she used her whole hand flat on the ground, feeling for more fragments.
Then she stopped. Something was glinting at her in the last of the summer evening’s sun.
She pushed an ivy leaf aside and reached out to pick up the object. It was a ring. A pale blue aquamarine was set in the center, framed by two tiny diamonds.
Beautiful.
And familiar.
Chapter Three
“Damn it,” said Amy as a heavy recipe book landed on her big toe and sent little waves of pain all the way up her leg. She glanced down at the book. The Joy of Slow Cookers. She’d never even used it, but she had a couple of slow cookers too, somewhere, probably still in their boxes. She rarely even fast-cooked. She decided to get rid of the book, and the cookers too, if she could find them. She looked for a place to start a rubbish pile, but there wasn’t an inch of space in the spare room. Later, she told herself, and kicked the book out of the way.
Except there was no out-of-the-way. She could barely even get into the room. Amy felt she’d been pretty disciplined in the rest of the house. There were walkways to help her reach the key areas of most rooms: doors, windows, vital furniture. She had a bed she could sleep on, most of the sofa to sit on, enough kitchen to grab food and make tea, and she could almost always get to the toilet.
The spare bedroom was different; it was where it had all started. Amy had decided long ago not to beat herself up about it. People kept stuff they didn’t often use in spare rooms. Everyone did.
At first, she’d just had a shoebox. It had been the counselor’s idea, a memory box to help her accept what had happened. And it had helped. She’d stopped hassling Tim’s friends and Chantel’s mother for news, stopped writing down everything they told her in her diary in an attempt to make sense of what had happened. In fact, she’d cut them off entirely. People were not what she needed: they could always leave. Instead she’d collected her memories and put them neatly into a box.
The shoebox had grown too small, or perhaps her memories were too big. She stopped seeing the counselor and instead found a large box that had once carried oranges to the supermarket. She filled it; it felt good. Even now, just the smell of an orange made her think of him.
She picked up more boxes, ones that had transported bananas from Peru, mangoes from Pakistan, and carrots from Shropshire. Once she’d filled these, she gave up using boxes and started piling her treasures on the bed. No one was sleeping there, as of course Chantel was gone too.
Now, facing a wall of stuff, Amy found herself regretting her decisions. Why couldn’t she at least have kept the original box somewhere accessible? She looked at the objects, piled up. She caught the eye of a china magpie, staring at her accusingly from between two bottles and a broken clock. Spines of more cookbooks mocked her. She hadn’t made a single crumb from 101 Breads and Batters, nor experienced The Taste of India. The saucepans she’d need were probably at the back of that room somewhere, underneath more newspapers spanning the last decade.
She would get rid of it all, she decided, immediately feeling better. Anything she didn’t need would go in the rubbish. She’d find the box in no time. Amy grabbed the china magpie, and felt its cold vulnerability in her hands. She’d keep just this one thing. She reached for a cookbook, but made the mistake of glancing at the title: Pie Night. She had to keep that one; she did love pies. A wooden spoon caught her eye—it would be wasteful to throw that away. But she could put it down in the kitchen. That would help.
Amy carefully made her way down the stairs, holding her spoon. Perhaps she didn’t have too much stuff, she decided. It just needed to be better organized. Redistributed throughout the house. She popped the spoon on the kitchen counter and trotted back up the stairs. She’d find that box in no time.
* * *
AMY SAT ON the floor, just inside the spare room doorway. She’d forgotten that the carpet was green in there, a light shade like lichen creeping over a tree. She’d been working for an hour and she’d cleared a space that not even Smudge could sleep in. She was acres away from finding the box. A bottle cork sat next to her, the one item she’d decided to get rid of. She chucked it back into the room; it wasn’t worth bothering with. Amy leaned back against her piles and closed her eyes.
That ring.
Maybe she didn’t need to find the diary that was in her box. Memories drifted back to her like waves lapping at her feet. She remembered the first time she’d spotted the ring in the window of the small antiques shop. The shop was in what was the center of town, before the modern high street had been created to service the new flats and houses. The old town center was a bus ride from her family home, but seemed a world away. Cobbled and crumbling, it was built around a meandering river inhabited by swans.
Of course that area would house that shop, and of course that shop would house her perfect ring. She remembered the window display still, the ring nestled between a peacock brooch and some beads cut from Venetian glass. Every time she’d walked past that shop, she’d looked to see it sitting there, as if it were waiting for her. She’d know it anywhere. Even resting in the nettles in her back garden, years later.
How had it got there? Amy asked herself the question again. It seemed impossible. Tim wouldn’t just have abandoned it in her garden, not back then, and not now after all this time.
But there it was, and now it was sitting in her living room next to Scarlett, who would guard it faithfully.
The ring changed everything.
Amy hadn’t believed it when they’d disappeared. She had searched and searched for her lifelong best friend and boyfriend of ten years, convinced something terrible had happened to them. They wouldn’t betray her.
But eventually she’d been worn down. No clues, no leads, and nothing but pitying looks from everyone she’d asked. Even the police believed they had run away to be together. Eventually Amy had accepted that as truth. She couldn’t face anyone from her past, couldn’t bear to see the people who’d known the three of them together. They must all think she was so stupid not to have seen what was going on.
And now the ring. The ring from Tim. The ring that told her he loved her.
Except he wasn’t here. What had happened?
She pulled out recipe books from the clutter in front of her, chucking them behind her into the hallway haphazardly. She pulled out another box and pushed it out of the room without even pausing to see what was inside.
She was making headway. She’d find something. A clue. Something she’d missed in the haze of grief and anger all those years ago.
Behind the box was a large wide-necked vase, made from a beautiful cut crystal. Inside it lazed a china carriage clock. The clock ticked at her; it was one of the few that still worked, and had lovely little honeysuckle blossoms painted on it. Really it should be somewhere she coul
d see it more often. The vase too; it was the perfect size to house roses cut from the garden. Or honeysuckle, she thought. Then she could put the vase with the honeysuckle next to the carriage clock and have a little honeysuckle corner in the living room. The birds would appreciate that. She pulled at the vase, but it was stuck—more boxes were wedged on top. She tugged harder, thinking again of a honeysuckle corner. Scarlett was particularly partial to the scent of that gorgeous flower.
The corner of a box was caught just inside the vase, causing the jam. Amy pushed it up, but it was heavier than she thought. Using a bit of force, she shunted it up with the base of her hand, and the vase came free at last.
The boxes swayed. Amy hurried to steady them, but it was too late.
She felt a hard, sharp stab of pain right by her eye.
Then nothing.
* * *
“WHAT HAPPENED TO your face?” asked Rachel, falling into step next to Amy.
Damn, thought Amy. Tuesday morning and she’d mistimed leaving her house, and now she’d be stuck with her neighbor on her walk to the station. Perhaps on the train too, if she couldn’t shake her, all the way to London Bridge. She considered feigning having forgotten something and going back inside, but she was already heading for the last train that would get her to the office on time. She hated being late even more than she disliked Rachel’s company. All she really wanted to do was think about her ring and what it meant, ideally with an ice pack on her injury.
“I walked into a door,” she lied.
“It’s a big bruise,” said Rachel.
“It was a big door.”
Suddenly Rachel’s hand was on her arm and Amy was pulled to a halt. “You can talk to me, you know,” said Rachel in an urgent whisper.
“Hurry up, we’ll miss the train,” Amy said. Rachel was getting weirder, she thought. Shaking off her hand, Amy started off again at a brisker pace. Rachel’s shorter legs meant that every third step turned into a funny little half skip to keep up as she bobbed along beside her.
“I didn’t know you were seeing anyone,” said Rachel, a little breathless already.
“I’m not,” said Amy, wondering where that had come from. Then she realized what Rachel was getting at. Talk about jumping to conclusions. She couldn’t help but laugh: those TV soaps had finally addled Rachel’s mind. “I’m not,” she said again.
“It’s not funny,” snapped Rachel. “I’m just trying to help. I worry about you.”
Amy spotted a bright flash of color on the ground and her heart leapt. She bent to pick it up. “I’ve never seen you smoke,” said Rachel, watching her.
“I don’t.” Amy pocketed her treasure.
“So why did you pick up that lighter?”
“Lighters aren’t just for cigarettes,” snapped Amy. “Are we getting this train or not?”
They reached the station. Amy dawdled, fiddling inside her bag to give Rachel a head start, hoping they wouldn’t have to travel together. She needn’t have bothered. Rachel had charged through the gate and was headed for the far end of the platform. Amy went in the opposite direction. The carriages at the back were often emptier, although it did mean a longer walk once the train pulled into the station at the other end.
She was just in time; the train arrived as she reached her favorite spot to board. She chose to stand, rather than to sit in the only unoccupied seat next to a man sleeping with his mouth open, a small trickle of dribble running from the corner of his mouth to his collar. Holding on to the handrail with one hand, she reached the other to touch the tender area around her eye. She flinched. It was very sore and she could tell that it was still swollen.
After the attention from Rachel, Amy was half expecting people on the train carriage to cast her some enquiring glances, but no one gave her so much as a second look. This was a big city after all, she reminded herself. She thought of the old man she’d seen last week on the train with no shoes, his gnarled feet black and bloody. And the woman who took the train every Wednesday morning and sang “All Things Bright and Beautiful” for the duration of the journey in a warbly soprano. A woman with a small bruise on her face was nothing compared to some of the people who boarded the train. It was one of the things that she loved about living in London. The anonymity.
“Oh, Rachel,” she sighed, thinking of her neighbor’s overactive imagination. The man standing next to her subtly shifted his weight to put more distance between them. She hadn’t meant to speak out loud. Rachel’s reaction had tickled her, but it made her realize something.
It wouldn’t be so funny at work. She couldn’t have her colleagues at Trapper, Lemon, and Hughes coming to the same conclusion as Rachel. Carthika and Zoe were just as silly as Rachel, if not more so. She couldn’t deal with pitying glances, and it didn’t exactly go with her carefully cultivated image of controlled competence. She needed to hide her injury and makeup was the answer.
Fortunately there was a Boots chemist at the station. Amy popped in and leafed through bottles of foundation in various shades that all reminded her of clay. Her current beauty regime was pretty nonexistent, and she couldn’t imagine her skin being any of those colors.
“I see you’ve found our soft matte range,” said a voice. Amy turned to see a young woman modeling the foundations so efficiently not a patch of her natural skin was visible. Blusher made a diagonal line from her cheeks to the tops of her ears, and she had on a pretty shade of lipstick that reminded Amy of a maraschino cherry adorning a sundae. Her name badge informed Amy that she was called Joanna. “Oh,” she said as she saw Amy’s injury.
“I’ve been in the wars,” said Amy, pleased with that explanation. Suitably vague and a little lighthearted. Not the type of thing a battered woman would say at all.
Joanna frowned at her, leaving temporary cracks in her own foundation that made Amy think she could be older than she’d at first thought. “Hmm,” said Joanna. “Ivory blush, I think. Give me your hand.” She put a stripe of the makeup on Amy’s hand and rubbed it in a little, and they both admired it. “Right every time,” said Joanna with a satisfied smile. “Unless you want to go a shade darker to bring a bit more color to your complexion?”
“I just want to cover the bruise,” said Amy. “Please.”
“Sit down.” Joanna gestured to a rather unsteady-looking stool that Amy had to hop backwards to mount. “A concealer is what you need first.” She took a small sponge and began dabbing at Amy’s eye.
“Ouch,” said Amy.
“It might sting a bit, but once I’m through no one will notice a thing. Foundation next. And maybe some blusher, right along here. You’ve got such lovely cheekbones,” she added admiringly. “All they need is a tiny little bit of color to bring them out.”
Amy sat, feeling like a chocolate-covered child having her face wiped by her grandmother, while Joanna fussed around her. “There,” Joanna said eventually, standing back and admiring her work. “Not bad at all. You have beautiful skin. You’ll only need a very light foundation once that bruise has healed.”
She handed Amy a mirror, and Amy inspected her face. Her eye looked a little puffy, but it was nothing that a bit of water retention and a bad night’s sleep couldn’t explain. The bruise itself was gone, hidden beneath a mountain of concealer. Her cheeks looked flushed, as if she’d been for a run.
“I’d love to get some eyeliner on you, bring out those beautiful gray eyes, but it’s probably not a good idea right now. Come back and see me when it’s healed, and I’ll do a proper makeover.”
“Excellent work,” said Amy politely. “It will do nicely.”
Joanna smiled at the compliment, then took Amy’s hand. Amy waited to see what she’d apply. But instead she just squeezed it.
“If you need anything else, you just need to ask me,” she said, looking straight into Amy’s eyes.
“Thank you,” replied Amy. “But you’ve done a great job.”
“Anything at all,” added Joanna, with her hands still holding Amy’s. “My
cousin…”
Amy took her hand away. Why couldn’t anyone mind their own business? “Where’s the till?” she asked. “I’m in a hurry.”
Joanna gestured to the front of the shop. “It’s three for two on makeup,” she added in her business voice again. “If you want to get the blusher too.” She lowered her voice. “And I’d recommend arnica, to help the healing.”
Amy waited in the queue, clutching her foundation, concealer, a small tub of arnica, and the pale-pink blusher. It sparkled like powdered gemstones under the fluorescent lights.
* * *
AS AMY ENTERED the office, she had a sudden urge to turn around and go home again. She could call in sick. Although she’d eaten nothing but a few crackers once she came to last night, it wasn’t just her eye that hurt. She felt sick to her stomach.
She couldn’t skip work, she decided. In all the years Amy had been an administrator, she’d barely ever called in sick. Except for when it happened, of course, and she didn’t count that. Sometimes, perhaps she should have stayed at home. She still remembered the rather unpleasant train ride into the office the day after she’d experimented with some discounted shrimp from the station deli. That was a day that should have been spent within easier reach of a toilet.
Amy made her way to the kitchen. The smell of sour coffee from the machine was making her stomach worse, and a cup of the stuff would do her no favors. She perused the tea bag selection and chose an organic-looking bag of chamomile tea.
“Bright and early again, Amy.” Trevor Trapper smiled at her as he came into the kitchen. He said that every morning, and had done so for the past seventeen years. Amy passed him his favorite mug, a large white one that even Amy didn’t care for. It declared his support for Nottingham Forest Football Club. He took the mug, then frowned. “Not having your usual coffee this morning?” he asked, looking at her selection.
