“Ah…” She pursed her lips, her eyes alighting on her existing drink, then back to the bar. “Just another one of these please!”
She raised her red pint and grinned.
She was different, yes, very different. Polished up till she looked like a whole other person.
But it was definitely her.
She smiled at passing well-wishers who’d gathered up her shoes for her. Wellingtons, the posh ones, with a tweed trim, practical but still stylish. Then her eyes tracked straight onto me.
My stomach dropped.
Her face went eerily static for a moment. Then her mouth pulled wide.
Wider.
Wider still.
Until I could see every one of her teeth.
It was definitely her. Alive. Transformed. Looking right at me.
“Good to see you,” she said, “neighbour.”
CHAPTER 25
I left The Curtyard in a rush. Just slipped out the door while no one was watching. It was easy to do. Everyone there was gathered in one crowd around the bar, listening intently while my neighbour enacted some fascinating story from her life.
My heart pounded. It was her. She was alive.
I pressed both palms to my chest.
Thank fuck! I hadn’t killed her! I was free! No one would hunt me down and lock me up. I could live my life. My new life.
I should have been relieved.
Why wasn’t I relieved?
I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d seen in the basement last night, her appearance today, the scar on her forehead. My mind obsessively picked away at the scab of it all. None of it made sense.
The bridge and the road out of Carlinsrest were quiet, thank God. No one to see me scuttling home. No one to see me muttering to myself. No one to see me picking at my skin until the small spots on the outer edge of my arms bled.
She’d looked so… different.
The hair, the expression, the voice. The way she’d moved her hands. So confident. So at ease. Where was the nervy, strange woman from the other night? The lank hair. The staring, watery eyes. Maybe I had caught her on an off day. Maybe she’d always had that scar.
The afternoon sky stretched long and high above my lonely walk back.
I thought of the way everyone had gathered round her at The Curtyard. How they’d watched her, intently, genuinely. How they’d laughed at her jokes. For a brief moment I remembered when I’d felt like the confident one, looking on at her shyness, her awkwardness, as if she were a problem to solve, or a contagion to avoid.
Now we’d switched places.
Or the world had righted itself back to its true order.
That certainly makes more sense.
As I walked back along the empty road, I thought of all the parties I’d slipped out of over the years. The family get-togethers, the school reunions, the work dos. It had always felt better to remove myself before I grew tired of pretending to be normal, before I gave myself away, before people sussed me out. But even with all that history against me, I had tried to be different back at my last company. I’d really tried.
After shrugging off the first pub invitation from Issy, I was very careful to make the next one. But finding out about the next one had been more difficult than the first. I kept coming in on Monday to tales of what the team had got up to the Friday before. Stories of shots, of hook-ups, of bouncing between bars until folk ended up at the casino or the jazz bar or whatever was still open in the early hours of Saturday. I’d make an effort to listen in, to join in the conversations about those nights, to remark—positively, I’d thought—on the ‘crazy’ adventures everyone had been up to without me. And I’d ask, each Monday morning, that they let me know next time they were going out, even though doing so made my heart beat loud in my ribcage and my palms turn slick with sweat. But still the Fridays brought no invites and still the Monday mornings brought plenty of stories. Maybe people aren’t so keen to extend invites when they feel the first one’s been snubbed.
