She made her excuses. She left.
On her way out, she noticed that the door to number three—Angela Sutherland’s house—was slightly ajar. She pushed it open, very gently. Peering inside, she saw Carla Sutherland’s coat draped over the banister, the expensive handbag hanging from the newel post, and the other bags, the shopper and the tote, just slung on the floor. Just lying there, within reach of an open door! Fucking rich people. Sometimes they just asked for it.
* * *
? ? ?
Back at home, she emptied the contents of the tote bag onto her living room floor, her heart racing as, along with the crappy old scarf and the decent but ancient Yves Saint Laurent jacket, came tumbling two small leather boxes. She grabbed the first, the smaller, purple box, and opened it: a gold ring, set with what looked like a large ruby. In the second, the smaller, brown leather box, there was a Saint Christopher’s medal, also in gold, with the initials BTM engraved on the back, along with a date: March 24, 2000. A christening present, maybe? Not for Daniel; the initials were wrong. Some other child. She snapped the box shut. It was a shame about the engraving, she thought, it made the medal less sellable. But the ring, if it was real, that must be worth a bit.
What a piece of shit she was.
In the kitchen, she emptied her pockets and counted out all the cash she had to her name: thirty-nine pounds fifty, twenty-six of which she’d stolen from her friend Irene.
What a lying, thieving lowlife.
Laura listened to the voice recordings on her own phone, listened to her own voice reminding her to contact the council about her housing benefit, to contact the building’s maintenance people about the boiler （again）， to call the nurse at the doctor’s surgery to talk about refilling her prescription, to buy milk, cheese, bread, tampons . . .
She paused the recording, exhausted at the very prospect of all the things she had to do, at the obstacles she could already see rising in front of her. She scrolled quickly through her messages, from boys she’d been chatting to, prospects she’d been cultivating in whom she now had no interest and for whom she had no energy. She listened to her voicemails, one of them a cold call about insurance, the other a message from her psychologist.
You’ve missed two appointments, Laura, so I’m afraid if you don’t make the next one we’re going to have to take you off the service, do you understand? I don’t want to do that because I think we’ve been making good progress and keeping you on a nice, even keel and we don’t want all that hard work to go to waste, do we? So I’m expecting to see you on Monday afternoon at three and if you can’t make it, please ring me back today to reschedule. . . .
Laura slid lower into her chair. She gently massaged her scalp with the tips of her fingers, squeezing her eyes shut, tears sliding out from under her lids and across her cheekbones. Stop stop stop, she said quietly to herself. If only it could stop.
Laura had been referred to the psychologist after the fork incident. She was a nice enough woman with a small face and large eyes; she reminded Laura of some sort of woodland creature. She told Laura that she needed to stop reacting. “You seem to spend your entire life firefighting, Laura. You keep lurching from one crisis to the next, so what we need to do is to find some way to break this pattern of reaction. We need to see if we can devise some strategies . . .”
Psychologists were always big on devising strategies: strategies to stop her acting out, lashing out, losing control. To make her stop and think, to prevent her from picking the wrong course of action. You know your problem, Laura, you make bad choices.
Well, possibly, but that was only one way of looking at it, wasn’t it? Another way of looking at it might be to say, you know your problem, Laura, you were hit by a car when you were ten years old and you smacked your head on the tarmac, you suffered a fractured skull, a broken pelvis, a compound fracture of the distal femur, a traumatic brain injury, you spent twelve days in a coma and three months in hospital, you underwent half a dozen painful surgeries, you had to learn to speak again. Oh, and on top of all that, you learned, while you were still lying in your hospital bed, that you had been betrayed by the person you loved most in the world, the one who was supposed to love and protect you. Is it any wonder, you might say, that you are quick to take offense? That you’re angry?
The One Who Got Away
In the place her smile should have been there is a question: So, where are we off to, then? Now there’s no space where her smile should have been because now she is smiling and he’s not angry anymore, he’s thinking of how it’s going to be, he’s wishing the friend wasn’t there in the back, but if he just doesn’t look at her doesn’t think about her then maybe it’ll be okay.