Sloshing water from the kettle into the cup, Neve then fumbles in the drawer for a spoon and adds two spoons of sugar before lifting it to her lips and chugging the bitter, lukewarm coffee down. Lou and Steve don’t believe in proper coffee.
‘Honestly, Neve,’ Lou continues in a low, tolerant voice, ‘Lottie is getting to an age when she’s going to start asking questions about why her aunty has stayed out all night. You can’t just come in looking like something the cat dragged in when you are in a family home. Don’t you think that it’s time you—’
‘I watched a woman commit suicide tonight. Right in front of me.’
Lou’s eyes widen and she slaps her free hand across her mouth.
‘Oh God, no. Where? On the tube?’
Maisie grizzles. She buries her face into her mother’s shoulder, squidging her legs up and rounding her back.
Lou swings from side to side. She is always moving to some maternal metronome inside her, even when she isn’t holding a child. She shushes and pats the baby’s back, her eyes pinned to Neve’s face.
‘Where? What happened?’
Neve goes to fill the kettle again and Lou bustles over.
‘Here, let me get that. You sit down and tell me everything. You look awful. Are you warm enough?’ Lou is finally in her comfort zone. Looking after people’s physical needs is what she does best.
Neve does as she’s told, sitting, and shakes her head to indicate that no, she isn’t warm enough. She can’t envisage ever being warm again, in fact. Lou leaves the room and comes back with a travel blanket from the sofa. Neve wraps it around her neck and shoulders, trying to ignore the vaguely sickly smell emanating from it, thanks to various small, dirty hands.
As Lou makes her another coffee she begins to tell her about what happened, starting with walking across the bridge.
‘Wait,’ Lou interrupts her straight away, a deep frown on her face. ‘Was this after your work thing? Have you been at a police station all night?’
Neve sighs. She’s tempted to lie then she thinks, why should I?
‘I’d been back to someone’s house,’ she says, as a compromise. The hotel really does sound so sleazy. Despite their decidedly agnostic upbringing, Lou has turned a bit Christian since meeting church-goer Steve.
She looks her sister directly in the eye as she says this and Lou looks down at the baby’s head and pats her back gently.
‘Okay,’ she says patiently. ‘Go on …’
Neve tells her the rest of the story in a series of terse sentences.
‘What a thing,’ says Lou in wonder. ‘What a terrible thing.’
They sit in silence.
It is only as Neve is slipping gratefully into her chilly bed and fighting off the returning shivers that she remembers she didn’t tell her sister about the strange exchange with the envelope.
I wonder what was in it, she thinks as scrambled images race across her mind. Finally, as she begins to warm up for the first time since she left Whatsisname’s hotel room, she tips into sleep.
Neve doesn’t have any difficulty in recalling what happened when she wakes. There’s no moment of mental filing from night to day. It’s right there at the forefront of her mind.
A woman talked to me and then she jumped off the bridge.
Isabelle. Her name was Isabelle.
She cracks her sore eyes open and gazes up at the white meringue swirl of the ceiling rose above her.
From downstairs she hears the squawks and shrieks of CBeebies, Maisie’s low-level grizzling and the rumble of Steve’s voice.
The thought of being with them all makes her groan and turn her face into the pillow.
Steve has never actually said he doesn’t want her there. Neither has Lou.
But she sees the looks that slide between them when she’s forgotten to wash up, or left a glass and plate on the patio. Her toiletries had been a growing skyline on the bathroom shelf and every morning she sees that they have been tidied and grouped together. Steve practically follows her around with a dustpan and brush.
It’s not like she’s deliberately taking the piss. She really is grateful that they’re putting her up like this. It’s just that mess seems to follow her. She can enter a room and within minutes has laid her keys in one place, her handbag somewhere else and where did she put her phone again?
Steve doesn’t drink much, doesn’t smoke and doesn’t even swear. He runs, he cycles, he plays five-a-side football with people from the large insurance company where he works. He has two comfortably off parents and likes to think of himself as a hands-on dad to his daughters.
He is almost completely lacking in a sense of humour.
Unfortunately, people like Steve bring out the worst in Neve. The little pursed crease at the corner of his mouth as she sloshes more red wine into a glass, or says, ‘Fuck me, it’s cold,’ only eggs her on.
She’d passed him on the way back from the shower early the other morning, dressed in only a towel. He’d kept his eyes so averted it had given her a wicked urge to drop the towel just to see what would happen. He’d probably have spontaneously combusted, like that picture of the sad stockinged leg in a pile of ash she’d seen in her dad’s old Unexplained part-work magazine as a little girl.
Steve’s prudishness has got worse since an evening a couple of weeks before. They’d all got unexpectedly drunk together. Steve only had a couple of beers but had loosened up enough that Neve found herself quite liking him.
But she’d made a smutty joke while helping him load the dishwasher after Lou had stumbled off to bed and he’d reacted as though he’d been bitten by a snake. Neve can’t even really remember what she’d said now. Somehow, his brain had interpreted this as her coming on to him in some way and ever since he’d avoided eye contact.
He clearly thought she was some sort of mad sex fiend now who would jump on him, were it not for the restraints of him being married to her older sister.
It was all so tedious.
Neve gets out of bed feeling like an old woman and wraps herself in her dressing gown before heading to the bathroom. Thank God it’s Saturday, although these days, the pleasures of the weekend are tempered by being a) more or less homeless and b) miserably single.
When she goes into the kitchen she sees Steve at the sink, carefully cutting sandwiches into fingers. He has already been for a run; she can tell by the ruddy glow of his cheeks. He will no doubt have a long cycle later, just at the time the girls are needing their tea. Neve has noticed this, that he manages to live exactly like he had before kids, yet gets praised for
