wait for the man to go away, Heather realizes there probably isn’t going to be any ice-cream sundae tonight after all, and probably no chocolate sprinkles either.
NOW
It’s much later in the afternoon when Heather gets back to her flat after visiting her old house in Bickley. She goes into town for a cappuccino, sits outside her favourite café and watches the people march up and down the pedestrianized section of the High Street.
This is a mistake.
Because eventually she joins them, and then Mothercare pulls her inside, and by the time she’s feeding pound coins into the parking machine in The Glades shopping centre a squashy toy giraffe is tucked securely in the side pocket of her bag.
She’s really glad to get back to her flat, her sanctuary. She stows her contraband in the forbidden drawer and hurries into the living room, ready to perform her breathing ritual, but when she finds her usual spot in the middle of the rug and looks up she gets a shock.
Instead of flat, green grass and regimented borders, she’s met with a garden full of people. And there’s Jason in the middle of them, flipping burgers on a barbecue and swigging Coke from a bottle. He looks completely at ease as he smiles and chats with a group of guys.
Heather is completely infuriated, but she knows she has no right to be. When they’d bumped into each other in the hallway a couple of days ago, he’d told her he was having his housewarming thing this afternoon. The weather forecast was good for once, he’d said, so he’d decided to go for it. It’s not Jason’s fault her thoughts have been so tangled lately that the information got lost inside her head.
As if he knows she’s staring at him, he turns and looks at her, meets her gaze and smiles. She waves back. His smile grows wider and he makes a beckoning motion. She has no choice but to follow his tractor beam, to unlock the French doors and walk outside. She doesn’t look to the left or the right, doesn’t pay attention to the other bodies or the curious glances she’s getting. She just walks straight towards him.
‘Hi,’ he says softly, once she is standing in front of him.
‘Hi,’ she says back.
‘Want a burger?’
She nods, even though she has no idea if she’s hungry or not. It’s not a fancy affair, no lettuce or pickle, just a charred piece of meat stuck inside a floury white roll with a blob of ketchup. It tastes like heaven.
‘Glad you could make it,’ he says as Heather takes another bite. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure you were going to put in an appearance.’ And before Heather can say neither was she, he steers her towards a group of people. ‘Here, let me introduce you to the gang.’ Her mouth is too full of burger to object.
‘This is Damien, my partner in crime from my university days, and this is his girlfriend Tola.’ More names fill Heather’s head as he goes round the group, all instantly rejected and lost – her brain’s storage drive is too full – but she pulls her cheek muscles into what she hopes is a smile and nods with each introduction.
‘So,’ says Damien (the one name she can remember), ‘you’re Jay’s mysterious girl downstairs.’
Heather’s eyebrows rise. She’s mysterious? That sounds a lot more interesting and romantic than the truth: that she is Jason’s terminally damaged girl downstairs, the one who’s on the verge of being arrested for petty theft. She doesn’t disabuse Jason’s friend of the notion, though. She learned right from childhood that most people don’t look too far below the surface and anything they superimpose on you is invariably better than the reality. These assumptions create a useful shield, one she does her best not to dislodge.
‘Put on a good face,’ her mother always said when they left the house. So no one would guess, so no one would know. Even social services hadn’t guessed the horror that lay inside the detached house in a ‘nice’ area for years. And Heather has cultivated this approach in her adult life, carefully painting a veneer of Perfectly Normal on top of her real self.
‘Oh, I’m not mysterious at all,’ she says.
‘How long have you been living here?’ Damien’s girlfriend asks.
‘A couple of years,’ Heather replies, feeling as if she’s giving something away she shouldn’t. Her mother taught her that information was to be hoarded just as much as belongings. It wasn’t until Heather was almost a teenager that she realized not everyone shared this mindset, that some people live their whole lives spilling everything out of their mouths with no thought for the consequences.
‘Oh well, don’t let Jason here keep you awake late at night when he gets maudlin and decides to play his Smiths albums back to back,’ Tola adds, sticking her tongue out at their host.
‘Oh, no, I don’t… I mean… he doesn’t. Not that I’ve heard anyway. He’s a good neighbour.’ And she shoots a look across at him and is rewarded by a burning sensation in her cheeks.
Thankfully, the rest of the group are in an ebullient mood and the conversation quickly sweeps by Heather. She stands there on the fringes of the group, sipping a beer that someone handed her, and smiling shyly every now and then when someone says something funny. She doesn’t mind that she doesn’t know any of the people they’re referring to or that she doesn’t get the in-jokes. It’s nice to stand out here in the sunshine and feel… well, as a thirty-two-year-old woman ought to feel. Just for a moment, she forgets about the faceless house in Hawksbury Road with the new driveway. She forgets about the toy giraffe that rode all the way home in her handbag.
‘So, what do you do, Heather?’ the guy with the ginger beard in the stripy T-shirt asks. She wants to call him Isaac, but she’s not sure that’s right.
‘I’m an archivist.’
‘You work in a library?’
‘Yes, well, sort of, I’ve moved all over the country since I qualified, but I’m from this area originally. I moved back when I got a job covering maternity leave for someone at the V&A. Now I work at a stately home.’
‘Cool,’ Tola says. ‘I love that museum. Which bit do you work in?’
‘Um, I’m not…’ Okay, maybe this isn’t as easy as she’d first thought, but Tola and T-shirt Man have open, enquiring looks on their faces. They don’t look as if they’re scanning the garden for someone more interesting to talk to, so she carries on. ‘I finished there about a year ago and was lucky enough to find another contract within commuting distance, so I didn’t have to pack up and move away.’
Jason comes up behind her. She knows it’s him from the smell of hickory smoke and the way the whole of her back warms up as he gets closer. ‘What’s this I’m overhearing about packing up and moving away?’
She turns to look at him. He’s frowning instead of looking hopeful, which surely has to be a good thing. ‘Oh, no one!’ she says quickly. ‘I was telling…’ – there’s a pause where she realizes she still doesn’t know T-shirt Man’s name – ‘your friends about my job.’
‘Which is?’
‘I work at Sandwood Park in East Sussex. It
