He struggled to remember Imogen’s number.
‘Damn,’ he muttered. He’d never had cause to memorise it. His throat was closing up, as if someone’s hand was tightening around it. He had that frightening sensation of choking again. He needed a drink. He waved to a passing cab, but the driver sped past without giving Henry a second glance. He waved to another driver who also ignored him. A bus screeched to a halt beside him. The doors hissed open and Henry shuffled on. He didn’t attempt to show the driver his pass. There seemed little point. He fell heavily into a nearby seat and swallowed several times. It didn’t help. He would get a drink and some paracetamol and then he would feel more like his old self.
Chapter Four
He needed to stay calm. He knew that anxiety would only make his condition worse. Life was challenging enough, he told himself, without making a mountain out of a molehill. He was under the weather, that’s all it was. He looked out of the window in an attempt to get his mind off his problems. The woman beside him smelt of lavender and Henry thought if he sniffed her enough it would soothe him. He’d read in a magazine once that lavender was good for just about everything. He wondered if the health benefits went as far as bringing someone back from the dead. The bus was moving at a snail’s pace and Henry strained to see what was holding them up. His eyes alighted on a hearse at the front and he felt a tightening in his chest. He turned his attention to the other passengers on the bus. It was jammed packed with people, their faces hidden behind paperback novels, newspapers or magazines. Henry envied them. He would normally be reading his own newspaper. It unnerved Henry when his routine was disturbed. He turned to the lavender woman who was studying a crossword puzzle. Henry liked crossword puzzles. He made sure to do a sudoku puzzle every day. A sudoku puzzle a day was enough to ward off dementia, Henry reasoned. Imogen said she didn’t think doing them would make any difference.
‘If you’re going to get it, you’ll get it,’ she’d said flatly.
Henry had thought that quite a defeatist attitude.
‘You pay for the flu jab,’ he’d argued.
‘That’s different,’ she’d said.
Henry couldn’t see how it was different. Prevention was better than cure, although he conceded you couldn’t cure dementia so why take the risk. A few sudoku puzzles a week was no hardship.
He glanced idly at the puzzle, easily solving several of the clues. Suddenly a torrent of rain battered the roof like a hail of bullets. Everyone looked up, just to be sure. Who knew these days if it was torrential rain or a terrorist attack? How times had changed.
‘Oh damn,’ muttered the woman beside him. ‘I knew I should have brought my umbrella.’
Henry then realised he had left his own umbrella at the office.
‘I left mine at the office,’ he said and then wondered if he actually really had.
The woman clicked her tongue.
‘Can you see me?’ asked Henry eagerly, feeling a surge of excitement, but the woman didn’t respond, and Henry sighed. How would he get a diagnosis if the receptionist at the doctor’s surgery couldn’t see him?
‘Oh dear,’ he groaned.
It would be very worrying indeed if Henry couldn’t get to see a doctor. He wiped the condensation from the window and looked out at the torrential downpour and as he did so, he thought he saw Imogen hurrying along the street, her head down against the wind and her umbrella swaying with it. Imogen would know what to do. He jumped up and called, ‘Imogen, it’s me. Wait up love.’
The tinny sound of the bell brought the bus to a stop and Henry was jolted forward. He leapt off and looked for Imogen but now there was no sign of her. In his desperation to see her had he conjured her up? The street was a parade of colourful umbrellas. Any one of the faces hidden behind them could have been Imogen’s. Henry couldn’t remember the colour of her umbrella. Had it been blue? Why hadn’t he noticed? Surely he could be forgiven for not knowing the colour of his wife’s umbrella. Perhaps she had turned the corner. He wondered if he should walk back to the greengrocer’s where she worked. Surely Imogen, of all people would be able to see him. But she had been walking away from the shop, so it seemed pointless to go there. He glanced at his watch. Perhaps it was her break. The clock hands said seven. How could that be? He looked again. He wound the watch every morning. Henry took care of his watch. It had belonged to his grandfather. Winding it every morning had become something of a ritual for Henry. He felt certain he had wound it that morning after his shower, just as he did every day. The familiar stirrings of panic welled up again in Henry’s chest and he struggled to keep them under control. He would find Imogen and together they would sort this out. He turned the corner and glimpsed Imogen’s dark blue raincoat a few yards ahead. She was walking towards Pansies tearoom. Henry could get a drink there; a nice hot cup of tea and maybe even a scone. He and Imogen could easily sort this out over tea and scones. Pansies, was nicely sandwiched between Boots and Tesco Express. Either one of them would sell paracetamol.
‘Imogen,’ he called hurrying forward on wobbly legs. He stopped abruptly a few feet away and watched as the woman in the dark blue raincoat was met by a tall rugged man standing at the entrance. He hugged her and kissed her on both cheeks in that French way that Henry found quite ridiculous. Why do English people do that, he wondered. It wasn’t Imogen after all. He must have been mistaken. Lots of women have dark blue raincoats. His wife wouldn’t be outside Pansies meeting another man. His shoulders slumped in despair and he felt frustrated tears well up behind his eyelids. His cosy vision of tea and scones vanished from his mind. Miserably, he turned to walk back towards the bus stop when he heard the woman speak. Henry stopped in his tracks. He would recognise Imogen’s voice anywhere. The couple glanced his way and Henry stared in astonishment at his wife.
‘Imogen?’ he said as they walked past. Her face was pale, herexpression sad. She looked tired but she didn’t see him. How could she not see him?His hand reached out for the café door, but he seemed to strangely miss it. Someone pushed it open from the inside and Henry stumbled into the hot interior. He had a sudden strange sensation, almost as though he were drowning. The teashop and the diners in it blurred into aimless shapes. A nearby chair saved his fall and he sat there, dazed, for some seconds. He was perspiring heavily again. Why was everywhere so hot today? he wondered. His eyes wandered aimlessly over someone’s discarded newspaper and his heart skipped a beat. The date on the newspaper read Wednesday September 18th. How was it possible that so many days could go missing?
‘Not again,’ he muttered.
Then, a thought occurred to him and he rummaged in his briefcase. He pulled out folders and papers and fought down the panic that threatened to engulf him. Where was the Lester file? He’d put it in his case the night before. Henry was organised. The Lester file had to be in by the fourth and Henry had made sure it would be. It was not possible that the strange guy, Matt, he had seen at his desk, could have it. But no matter how many times he searched through the folders, the Lester file was nowhere to be seen.
He needed to talk to Imogen. He rushed outside but there was now no sign of her. Damn it. What had he been thinking of, sitting down? The rain was still falling steadily, and people were rushing to find shelter. His eyes searched the doorways for Imogen, but she wasn’t there. Several people were huddled in the doorway of a nearby newsagent. They would have today’s newspapers. He would finally find out for sure if it really was the 18th September. He waited for the next customer to open the door and then darted in. His glasses steamed up the minute he entered and for a time he couldn’t see the newspapers at all, let alone the date. After cleaning them with a damp handkerchief that he took from his pocket, and although the date was smeary to his eyes, he saw that it was, indeed, Wednesday 18th September, which meant that Henry had died eleven days earlier.
Chapter Five
Rita liked wearing red lipstick. Itmade her feel daring and adventurous. Not that she would ever be daring and adventurous, but she liked to imagine that other people thought she would be. She smeared it carefully into place with her little finger and then smiled at her reflection. Her lips bloomed like a red rose. Curling tongs had fashioned her hair into warm waves. The style softened her features and made her look younger than her thirty-five years. Carefully, she dabbed the excess lipstick from her finger to her cheekbones to give them a slightly flushed look. It was Wednesday and Rita liked Wednesdays because she had the afternoon off. Rita had agreed to work two Saturdays a month in exchange for Wednesday afternoons. She found herself wondering what Henry did at the weekends and whether he would come into the store. Rita wanted to go to the cinema on Saturday evening. They were showing a film that she wanted to see. Perhaps she would go to that new café that had opened near the cinema and have her dinner there afterwards. It always smelt good whenever she passed. But, of course, she knew she wouldn’t. The Rita she dreamt of being never materialised. Instead, she would don her best dress or the new two-piece she had recently bought and spray Elnett hair lacquer to set her bob in place. She would then leave the lacquer-scented bathroom to settle on the old, battered foam sofa in her tiny bedsit. She would search on Netflix until she found something to watch. Usually it would be a romantic comedy. She couldn’t watch anything violent. Violence disturbed Rita. Halfway through the film, she would pause and make a hot chocolate, heating the milk in the microwave.In the semi-darkness of her room, small curls of steam would rise from her mug into the cool air. Her intention always was to go out, but somehow, those aggravating butterflies that fluttered around in her stomach would win over and she would never get past the door. It was the most difficult thing, she’d discovered, to walk into a restaurant alone. She would visualise huge question marks, rising like balloons above the heads of the other diners.
‘What’s wrong with her that she’s eating alone?’
‘She’s obviously been stood up.’
Or they would decide that she was so unappealing that no one wanted to take her to dinner.
‘He’s not going to turn up, is he?’ they would say. There would be smugness about them. Trying to eat with all those diners making their judgements would be impossible. It wasn’t quite as difficult going to the cinema. Once the lights went down, no one knew you were alone, not really. But eating alone in public, well, that was something else.
The door opened and Rita smiled at the other assistant, who Rita recognised but didn’t know very well. It was such a large store it was impossible to know everyone who worked there. She left the loo and headed to the staff room. She hoped her supervisor, Dora, would notice the new lipstick.
