Strangers (ARC)
Page 13
out how to fit the lock to the outside of the door and the chain to the inside wasn’t a problem – a quick visit to YouTube on
her phone sorted that out. Neither is using the drill; her dad taught her how to put together a flatpack chest of drawers with an electric screwdriver when she was eleven, then progressed
her DIY knowledge to a drill when she turned twelve. What
will be harder will be tracing the man in the black-and-white
photo. With no laptop, and no working camera on her phone,
she can’t do a Google image search. She’s going to have to use a library computer instead.
She finishes the job as quickly as she can, twisting the screws into place then giving first the chain, then the padlock, a hefty tug to check that they hold. She nods, pleased with her work,
then deposits her tools in the bottom of her wardrobe and closes and padlocks her bedroom door.
Knowle library is surprisingly quiet and Ursula joins a queue to speak to the librarian, hovering behind a woman who can’t
borrow any more books for her child because the last lot were
overdue. The librarian, a tall, thin man with grey hair and a
neat beard, unlocks the woman’s account, then looks up at
Ursula and offers her a quick smile.
‘How can I help you?’
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She gestures at the bank of computers across the room. They’re all being used, apart from one. ‘Hello, can I borrow a computer please? I need to use a scanner.’
The man pulls an apologetic face. ‘You’re very welcome to
use a computer but the scanner’s broken, I’m afraid. We’re
waiting for a technician to come and take a look at it.’
‘Oh no.’ She touches the left pocket of her jogging bottoms
where the newspaper clipping is being kept flat and smooth
between two pieces of cardboard cut from an empty box of
Weetabix. ‘Is he coming in today?’
The librarian shakes his head. ‘He’s not due until tomorrow,
I’m afraid. You could try the central library. What is it you want to scan? Phone cameras are pretty good these days. Could you
take a photo instead?’
Ursula shakes her head. ‘My lens is all scratched up. Any
photo I take is so grainy and blurred it looks as though it was taken in the 1970s, and I need to run it through Google Images.’
The librarian laughs. ‘Ah. Well, if you’re after a good quality replication I’d say a scanner is your best bet.’
Ursula considers her options. To get into the centre of town
she could either take a bus or she could walk back to her house and use the van. A bus would be cheaper but would probably
mean hanging around a stop for twenty minutes and the same
on the way home. Taking her van would be quicker. She presses
a hand to her belly as it tightens with excitement. She could go to the Meads shopping centre before she visits the library. Maybe pop into Mirage Fashions.
She never used to go into the city centre and did most of
her shopping online. But then she had a breakdown at work,
a month after Nathan died. She was teaching her Reception
class in a tiny village school on the outskirts of Bristol. She was introducing the children to some new phonics and hadn’t
noticed the window cleaner strolling through the playground
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until he was right up against the glass. She saw a knife, not a squeegee, in his hand and she screamed at the children to run.
And as they shrieked and froze and stared at her in horror,
she curled up in a ball under her desk and sobbed with fear.
The headteacher was understanding. She told Ursula to go
home, that it had been a mistake returning to work so soon,
that she should see her GP and talk to him about PTSD. But
Ursula didn’t go back to the empty house that was no longer
a home and she didn’t take herself off to the doctor’s surgery.
Instead she got in her car and she drove. She can’t remember
why she went into the centre of town, or how long she walked
before she drifted into the Meads. But she can remember the
numbness in her chest and the feeling that something inside
her had died. She remembers the row of jewellery at the back
of the shop and the sharp edges of a pendant under the
pad of her thumb. She remembers walking out with it in the
clutch of her palm, staring at the security guard, daring him
to stop her. But he didn’t. How could he? She was invisible.
She didn’t exist.
Instinctively, she reaches into the right-hand pocket of her
jogging bottoms and fingers the polished brass door knob that
caught her eye in B&Q earlier. It was so bulbous and smooth in the palm of her hand, cool and calming, that it found itself in her pocket before she even knew what she was doing.
‘Before I go.’ She reaches into her other pocket and carefully extracts the newspaper clipping. ‘Do you know who this is?’
She holds it out towards the librarian, then snatches it away
from his grasping fingers. ‘Sorry, I don’t want it to get crumpled.’
The librarian drops his hand and sits forward in his seat to
get a better look. Ursula searches his face for any sign of recognition then sighs in disappointment as he shakes his head.
‘I don’t recognise him. Should I?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why I need the scanner.’
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‘Oh well. Good luck.’
‘Thanks for your help.’ She flashes him a smile in goodbye.
She cuts through Subway, thinking about the blank look on the
librarian’s face as he looked at the newspaper clipping. He can’t be famous, the man in the photo, or he’d have recognised him.
So why did she feel a frisson of familiarity when she first looked at it? Well, she’ll find out who he is soon enough. She just needs to get to her van and—
She squeals in surprise as someone walks straight into her,
then yelps as her chest sings with pain. One look at the brown stain on her white T-shirt, the aghast expression on the face of the woman standing in front of her, empty cardboard cup in
one hand and mobile phone in the other, makes her realise
immediately why she feels as though someone just set fire to
her chest.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’ The woman waves her hands
around desperately, her gaze flicking from Ursula to the shocked faces of the customers on the tables either side of them. ‘Let me . . . let me . . .’
‘Here!’ Another woman, with a toddler in a pushchair, leaps
up with a wad of napkins in her hand.
‘Pull the material away from your skin!’ someone else calls.
‘Or it’ll burn.’
‘No, don’t!’ A man further down the room stands up from
his chair. ‘It’ll pull the skin from your body. You need to splash yourself with cold water.’
With everyone still shouting, and ignoring the employee in
his green polo shirt and stripy apron rushing towards her, Ursula turns and runs out of the shop.
She winces as the cold water of the shower hits her skin. She
didn’t immediately run home. She headed for the toilets near
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Iceland first and splashed her T-shirt until it, and the floor, were sodden. Then she fastened her coat over her chest and speed-walked to the house, gritting her teeth as the wet material rubbed against her skin. Her chest is pinkened and sore to the touch
but not badly burnt. As she steps out of the shower she gingerly wraps her towel around her body and steps out onto the landing.
‘Woah!’ She freezes, pressing a hand to her chest. Edward is
standing outside her room. The door is ajar, the padlock hanging from the latch. She didn’t think to lock it when she hurried into the shower.
‘Ursula.’
She winces as she peels her hand from her damaged skin,
then, suddenly feeling exposed in a towel that only reaches part way down her thighs, steps back into the bathroom and peers
out at him. He’s dressed casually in jeans, boots and a navy-blue crew-neck jumper, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. She’s not sure why but she imagined he’d go to work in a suit. Not that
she knows what he does for a job. The one and only time she
asked him what he did for a living he was so prickly and evasive she resolved not to ask again.
‘What are you doing home?’ she asks, annoyed with herself
for the note of distress in her voice.
‘I live here.’ He arches an eyebrow.
‘But you left this morning?’
‘And I’ve come home between shifts. Just like I do every day,
not that you’d know. Why aren’t you on your round?’
‘Day off,’ she lies.
‘It’s not Sunday.’
‘I booked an extra day.’
‘I see.’ His gaze shifts towards the door of her bedroom, the
padlock hanging open. ‘It appears you’ve been busy.’
‘I . . . um . . . I thought I’d save you a job.’
‘Did you now?’ His tight smile doesn’t reach his eyes. ‘You
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do realise that, officially, you’ve caused damage to the fixtures and fittings. I could withhold your deposit and kick you out.’
The threat isn’t entirely unexpected. Ursula knew as she set
to work on her door that it would probably infuriate her
landlord, particularly given his fondness for walking uninvited into her room, but she has a weapon of her own in her arsenal.
It’s the secret she discovered in one of the kitchen drawers on her first morning in the house – his contract with the real
owner.
‘You could do that,’ she says, tightening her grip on the bathroom door. ‘But as you’re breaking your tenancy agreement by
subletting my room that probably wouldn’t be the best idea.’
Edward’s face remains impassive apart from the tiniest
upwards twitch of his eyebrows. It’s the smallest of movements but enough for Ursula to register his surprise. Check, she thinks, the memory of her one and only chess victory against Nathan
flashing through her mind. But does Edward have checkmate?
She waits, heart pounding, for his next move. Despite her
height and weight advantage, she’s dressed in a towel with no
weapon to hand and nowhere to retreat other than the bathroom.
Edward might be small and slight, but he’s an unknown quan-
tity – he could be a complete psychopath for all she knows
– and there’s no correlation between size and aggression.
The air between them grows thick with anticipation as Edward
keeps his beady eyes fixed on Ursula, his hands hanging loosely at his sides and the toe of one boot tap-tapping on the wooden floor.
You could always sleep in the van, the little voice in the back of her head whispers urgently. An apology rises in her throat.
She wants to say something to break the terrible tension but a bigger part of her refuses to back down. She hasn’t actually
done anything wrong.
As Edward steps towards her she braces herself. If he lunges
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she’ll pull back into the bathroom and slam the door in his face.
But her landlord doesn’t lunge anywhere. He walks straight past to his room, then reaches into his pocket for his key. He slots it into the lock, then turns back to look at her.
‘I like you, Ursula.’ Something glitters in his eyes that she
can’t quite read. Mischief? Danger? Amusement? She can’t be
sure. ‘You keep me on my toes.’
Before she can respond he slips into his room. He disappears
inside and pulls the door closed with the quietest of clicks.
Ursula slides the safety chain across her bedroom door, then
slumps onto the bed, not caring as her towel untucks from her
chest and puddles around her naked body. Her hands, resting
by her sides, are shaking so much she has to press them between her knees to still them. She fights to control her breathing,
inhaling for four counts, holding for seven, then exhaling for eight until her pulse gradually slows and she slumps forward
over her knees, closing her eyes as she hugs her legs to her body.
What are you doing? Nathan’s voice is as clear in her head as if he were sitting next to her. It’s not safe, Albi.
She smiles at his use of her pet name – Albi, Nathan’s very
own ‘big bird’. She’s not heard that nickname for a very long time.
Yeah well, she answers him back, we all know what happens if I just walk away.
This isn’t your battle.
Everything’s my battle now, Nath.
She gets up, carries the towel over to her laundry basket,
drops it inside, then stoops to pick up her coffee-sodden T-shirt and jogging bottoms. She drops the T-shirt into the laundry
basket then, reflexively, searches the pockets of her jogging
bottoms for tissues, change or pens and drops them into the
basket too. As she crosses the room to her chest of drawers
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something rankles at her, making her pause: something about
the jogging bottoms. She returns to the laundry basket and fishes them out. Something’s missing from the pockets. Her keys? No,
they’re still on the chest of drawers where she left them. Her work ID? No, that’s right next to the keys. What then? The
photo! It was definitely in her pocket when she got home. She
remembers because she checked that it didn’t have coffee on it.
She searches through the soft, fleecy pockets again. Nothing.
Nothing on the floor either, or on the bed. Nothing on or under the chest of drawers. Nothing in the laundry basket. Nothing
caught up in the folds of her damp T-shirt. She searches the
room from top to bottom, then wraps her dressing gown around
her and slides back the security chain on her door. She hurries into the bathroom and scans the top of the toilet cistern, the sink, the floor, even the shower, then walks the length of the corridor, scanning each gap between the boards. But it’s not
there. She turns slowly and stares at the closed door to her
landlord’s room. The small scrap of newspaper, carefully pressed between two thin pieces of cardboard, didn’t just disappear.
Edward took it back.
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Chapter 20
Gareth
His mum is asleep in the armchair when Gareth gets home, the
TV booming out the seven o’clock news. He stands in the
doorway, watching for the rise and fall of her chest. He can’t remember when he started doing that, checking that his mum
was asleep rather than . . . the alternative. Was it after the official dementia diagnosis and he realised that both of their lives had swerved, roughly and painfully, onto a new course? Or was
it before that? He hadn’t ever thought of his mum as old before.
She always had so much energy, always visiting this person or
that, forever baking and cleaning, gardening and shopping.
Maybe he’d started to worry about her around the same time
he’d looked in the mirror one morning and hadn’t recognised
the tired, lined man staring back at him. Ageing didn’t creep up on him, he didn’t notice a wrinkle here and a dark spot there.
It was as though he looked in the mirror one day and, BAM,
he was stunned by what he saw. Nothing could have prepared
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him for the shock of acknowledging the jowly, tired man it had taken him forty-eight years to become. He started growing his
goatee the very next day.
As he watches his mum sleep he thinks about his dad, about
the mental image he’s been carrying around for the last twenty years. His dad at fifty-seven, his hair more grey than brown,
with a lined, sagginess to his face that hadn’t been there in his forties. Just ten years older than Gareth is now. Until the other day, he’d never imagined him as an old man. And now he was
struggling to concentrate at work. Even though he was convinced that Mackesy was behind the postcards he couldn’t stop himself abandoning whatever he was doing and zooming in every time
he spotted a male with white-grey hair amongst the shoppers.
But none of the men were wearing an olive-green jacket. None
of them had a military posture. And none of them were his dad.
He scans the living room, looking for anything out of place,
and his gaze rests on the vase of flowers on top of the sideboard.