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‘My nan,’ he said. ‘The one who used to take me along with her while she bet on the horses? She’d been the same, I think, although I never saw that side of her. A shrew – I heard her called that more than once. I suppose those were different times and to me she was wicked and fun. But she finished her husband off, that was the family rumour. Drove him to a heart attack with the stress of living with her. He smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and ate like a pig, but that was how he coped, thenboom!’ He made an explosion with his hands. ‘Then my dad the same. Spent as much time out of the house as he could. I remember my mum shouting at him, him standing there with his shoulders slumped and his head down. He was a gambler too, but what’s funny is I didn’t know that till later, and by then I’d already run up a two-grand overdraft on top of my student loan.’
‘Funny what we pick up without words, isn’t it?’ I said as he drained his glass. ‘You must have known it somehow, somewhere in you, like, that he was a gambler, without anyone saying anything.’ I stood, picked up his glass. ‘Another one?’
He shook his head. ‘Better not.’
I knew he’d run out of money. He’d paid his last quid in coppers. I’d have given him a free pint while no one was looking, but that wasn’t the way to help him; it would only make things worse.
‘I’d better get on,’ I said.
‘Yeah. No problem. Thanks, Rachel.’
Meanwhile I’d got to know some of the dog walkers by name. Pete only walked his chihuahua as far as the lamp post of an evening before he went to bed. His wife had dementia and was there one minute, gone the next. Marj, whose daughter had become withdrawn when I first met her, was happier now because said daughter had finished with her misery-guts of a boyfriend and was back to her old self. Claire’s dog had died, actually, but Claire, bless her, a lovely woman with a bright white-blonde crop and never without her fabulous red lipstick, couldn’t break the habit of her evening constitutional and was now thinking about getting a poodle because she’d always had poodles as a child. She was on her own, for the moment, having not found the right person. She worked a lot from home, copywriting, and came to the conclusion, talking it out, that she needed to find an office-based job at least part-time. She was a book nut too, like me. And like me, she was walking out for other reasons than the pooch.
‘But one thing was bugging me,’ I say.
Amanda raises her perfectly shaped eyebrows. ‘What was that?’
‘Something that was impossible to get around.’ My chest swells, sinks.
‘Which was?’
‘Well, just as I stopped going anywhere secluded with the people I met…’ I reach for the glass of water and cradle it in my hands, ‘so the attacks stopped. There were no attacks locally that summer. Not one.’
I realise I can’t hear that fly anymore. It must have escaped. Or died.
‘Which brings us to September,’ Amanda says, very slowly. ‘To the next… to the next murder.’ She narrows her eyes; her mouth flattens. ‘Do you think you can talk about that?’
I drink the rest of my water in one go, feel it run cold down my gullet. I place the glass back on the table and make myself take a deep breath. Even now, I’m not sure what I can say; all I can do is tell her what I think I know.
‘September came, like you say,’ I begin. ‘I mean, September follows summer, doesn’t it? Like dessert follows a main course in one of those fixed menu things. Even if you don’t want any pudding, it will still arrive. And you’ll still eat it. Even if you know it’ll make you feel sick.’
I look up. I look up at her a lot now that we’ve been here together so long. I feel like I need to see her, like she’s my point on the horizon.
‘I was desperate,’ I say. ‘I see that now. I was desperate to put everything behind me and somehow find my way out of the hole.’
‘So you were starting to come out of this difficult period of your life?’
‘Well, I did something I’d been meaning to do for a long time, so that’s a sign, isn’t it?’
‘Breaking the inertia, yes. Usually, that’s an indicator of positive energy returning. What did you do?’
‘I put my name down for a spinning class.’
Not the great revolution, I know, if you’ll pardon the pun, but it felt big at the time. In TK Maxx I found some cheap sports leggings with super-strength elastic that held everything in and which looked OK with one of Mark’s old T-shirts over the top. As for not looking like Elle Macpherson, something Katie had read to me once from one of the body-positive accounts she follows popped into my mind:the girl in the photo doesn’t even look like the girl in the photo. God help the middle-aged woman – you barely see a photo of her at all, let alone an airbrushed one. So I kept that in mind and resolved to see what my body could do, not judge how it looked.
Amanda’s blue eyes are still there, a constant in all my zigzagging about. I wipe more endless tears from the bottom of my chin.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s just that telling you this makes me feel so sad.’
‘Do you feel sad for yourself?’
‘Yes, but mainly for her. For Anne-Marie.’
‘All right.’
‘If only I hadn’t gone to that class.’ A huge sob catches in my chest.
‘But you did. And we need to talk about that.’
