‘I didn’t.’ Suddenly, it doesn’t seem a very good idea to admit who I am, so I say the first thing that comes to mind. ‘Holly Golightly.’ It must be the whole adrift-on-the-streets-of-a-big-city-in-the-rain thing that’s getting to me if I’ve gone from Four Weddings to channelling Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
‘I’m sending my man round to talk to you. Where are you? Coffee shop?’
He can hear the hiss of the milk being steamed into submission and the Italian being bandied about behind the counter. I calculate what could happen. To lie or not to lie? He needs time to send someone over. ‘Yes, I’m in Carlo’s, Soho Square. Do you know it?’
‘No, but my man will find you.’
‘Why? What do you want?’
‘I’ve got something for you.’
That doesn’t ring true. He didn’t know I existed until he took the call. ‘Right then. I’ll wait for him here. I’m in the seat by the window.’ I mentally picture Audrey Hepburn sitting there over a solitary coffee to make it more real for us both.
‘You fucking be there, all right?’
‘Of course.’ Sending a mental two-fingers, I end the call and then power off the mobile. I have to hope that no unsuspecting girl on her own takes a seat by the window but so far I’m good: there are two Asian boys with laptops who look like they’ve settled in for the morning.
This is getting ridiculous. I’ve just talked to a man who sounds like the cliché of the mobster boss. I don’t do that. My life doesn’t include that kind of conversation. Gathering my things, I leave the cafe, having already plotted my next move into the garden square. I stand in the shelter of the half-timbered hut in the centre, a child-sized Tudor fortress, and keep watch on Carlo’s. A damp ten minutes pass and then a man arrives on a motorbike. He gets off, locks his helmet in the seat compartment, revealing he is the spitting image of Idris Elba, and heads into the cafe. Is that him, the landlord’s man? Two women follow him in with their pushchairs, children under plastic wrap. Then an older man with a briefcase.
I should’ve got a description, but I never got the knack of thinking things through.
Motorcycle man comes back out with a sandwich in a to-go box and roars off. OK, not Idris. Through the window, I see the mothers edge out the Asian students with an interesting piece of psychological warfare. They let their two-year-olds occupy the low window seat normally devoted to flyers for local businesses and West End shows. The kids, two boys, lounge on their bellies and wave their heels in the air as they bash toy cars into each other. The Asian students exchange a look, close their laptops and scram. The mothers settle in the still-warm chairs like a couple of self-satisfied generals. The man with the briefcase comes out but with no sign he’s bought anything.
Him? He doesn’t look dangerous but he looks legal. I don’t want to take charge of any papers or writs that the landlord might be trying to serve. I’ve worked out by now that Jacob must owe him money – just as, come to think of it, he owes me my pay.
The older man, paunchy, grey receding hair, navy suit, makes a call. I would bet that if I had my phone switched on, it would be ringing right now. Then more bad news: he is joined by two serious-looking blokes who have just got out of an SUV, the muscle to the brains. The knee cappers. Spine crackers. My fertile brain comes up with lots of words for them but no hint of how to handle them.
Self-preservation instinct kicks in. I really shouldn’t still be here.
Something tips him off. Mr Lawyer raises his eyes and meets mine across the square. He knows. I break into a run and risk taking the shortest route to Tottenham Court Station. Good idea? Bad idea? How do I know? All I can be sure of is that they’ll be in pursuit. If I get into the Underground their car won’t help. I reach Oxford Street and feel too exposed on the pavement. I dive into the first shop with open doors, a saucy lingerie store where a woman blends in and three guys stand out like priests in a bordello. I weave expertly through the aisles of satin and lace panties and barely-there bras and take the far exit that brings me out closest to the entrance to the station. Once at the bottom of the stairs, I fly through the barriers with a wave of my Oyster card and vanish down the escalator to the Central Line.
With heart pounding, I get on the first service going anywhere. I’m not even sure if I’m going east or west. I’ll work out the route home later. I duck down as I think I catch sight of one of the big guys arriving on the platform just as the doors close. The woman opposite gives me a funny look, but this is London and the trains are full of weird people you really don’t want to challenge. She turns her gaze back to her paperback.
That’s right, sister. Nothing to see here.
The train goes into a tunnel and I sit up.
Well, hell. It appears that my boss and my job have gone. Time I was too.
I reach home with only a cracked phone to show for my attempt to fulfil my part of the gainful employment deal. On the doorstep of our Victorian semi-detached house, stone worn into a dip by the passage of so many feet, so many bags of shopping, I have a moment of doubt as I slide my key into the lock, but there are no surprises. It turns. Wouldn’t that be the cherry on top of the crap if Michael had taken it into his head to edit me out of his life today too? If he’d given the order for the locks to be changed while I was at work and he was guten tag-ing the frauleins? I’m like that paragraph in one of his articles, the one around which the copy editor has put a square bracket. Do you really need this part?
Stet. For now. I have my uses.
I go inside, disarm the alarm, and walk through to the kitchen conservatory at the back to dump my shoulder bag on the table. Something prompts me to check so I go past the tiny utility room and peer nervously out of the glass in the back door but I’m not sure what I’m expecting to see. An abandoned Scream-face mask? Footprints in the flowerbeds? I still can’t shake that feeling of not being alone, the flight from Soho not having helped my rational processes.
I check the door to the basement is securely bolted – it features in another of my nightmares where I imagine the undead breaking through the London clay beneath, climbing up the wooden stairs and invading the house. It’s actually not that scary with the light on as it’s full of Michael’s snow sports gear and boxes of his wife’s things that he has never wanted to throw out. He goes down there from time to time just to bury his face in her ski-suit – he thinks I don’t know. It’s kind of sad really, this wanting to catch the scent of someone who’s gone forever. He won’t do that with anything of mine if I go.
I return to the kitchen. Here I’m surrounded by the hobbies I have adopted and failed to finish during my recovery: the bulky quilt project stuffed in a bag like a dead Elmer the elephant, the jewellery maker’s starter kit, and the half-finished oil painting of the Serengeti – I’d had big plans for that. Beginning to feel a little desperate and a whole lot suspicious, I boot up the old desktop and check my last two months’ statements. I had one payment in June, a cheque that I’d cashed myself, but the promised standing order has still not arrived. I can see Jacob now, fingers hovering over his laptop keyboard, handsome ‘trust me’ dark eyes meeting mine as he asks me what day of the month I’d like to receive my pay. He’s a good-looking man, an outdoors type with tanned skin and work-roughened hands. He habitually wears a string of wooden beads around his throat like a dog’s collar that he said he carved himself, and I believe him. In that game of ‘Which person would you take with you to a desert island?’, he’d be a good choice as he’d whittle, build and farm his way to survival.
‘I’d like to be paid on the first,’ I said, just so thankful that someone would pay me after all that had happened. When my salary hadn’t come through in July, I’d raised it with him and Jacob had laughed it off as a mistake, saying he’d missed the deadline to set something up for the previous month