‘I’ve got enough food here for an army! You don’t mind if I change the station, do you?’
Before I can answer, she has retuned the radio from Daniel’s sports coverage to some poppy station I don’t listen to. She bops around the kitchen, her bump bouncing with her. I am out of touch with music and can’t place the song. It is the sort of music they play in bars, hairdressers, coffee shops. It always gives me a headache.
‘Got any chutneys or anything?’
Rachel is rooting around on the top shelf of the fridge. Jars of mustard and mayonnaise clunk loudly against each other. She pulls a few out, piles them up between her arm and her chest, decants them onto the worktop. Before she closes the fridge door, she plunges her hand into an open punnet of raspberries, helps herself to a handful, and tips them into her mouth.
‘This will be great,’ she announces, through a mouthful of smashed red fruit. ‘A proper feast.’
Rachel turns to rummage in one of her bags, leaving a knife wobbling on the edge of the board. I’ll just move it out of her way, I think. Before it falls, hurts someone. But just as I’m about to close my fingers around the knife, Rachel snatches it up and spins around, the metal glinting.
‘Oh no you don’t.’
The knife flashes in her hand. I feel hot and cold at once.
‘I’m doing all this, silly!’ she cries, chuckling and waving me away. ‘I told you. My treat. You sit down, relax.’ She turns back to the board, starts hacking at the cheeses. Clack, clack.
I lower myself down on a stool. I realise I have been holding my breath; I let the air out of my lungs, slowly, so she doesn’t notice.
‘Is Daniel into football, then?’
The comment throws me. What is she talking about now?
‘What do you mean?’
‘The radio,’ she says. ‘It was on 5 Live.’
‘Oh, right. Yes, he is.’
‘Which team?’
‘Newcastle United.’
‘He from up there, is he?’
‘Um. No. His parents are. Do you want a cheese knife for that?’
‘No, this is fine.’
Clack. Clack.
‘Rachel – are you all right?’ I say eventually. ‘You seem a bit … you said you’d had a bad day?’
‘It’s fine,’ she says, with a manic shake of the head. She turns back to the board and begins to pile up sticky slices of ham and pastrami, which she pulls from cellophane packs. Doesn’t she know we can’t eat that?
‘Just, you know. Men,’ she mutters.
My curiosity returns, like an itch I can’t scratch.
‘Did you decide to tell him, in the end? The father?’
Rachel doesn’t seem to hear. Having carved up an entire wheel of Brie, she now appears to be moving on to another.
‘Rachel,’ I tell her, ‘that’ll be loads. I’m actually not all that hungry.’
‘Oh, really?’ She drops the knife. It clatters down onto the marble block. She turns to me, rubbing her eye. ‘You know what? Let’s forget it. Let’s forget the whole thing,’ she says. She shoves the block away from her, so that it slams into the wall with a bang. ‘It was a stupid idea.’
‘Oh no, no,’ I say, alarmed by her rapid mood change. ‘Not at all. It was a lovely idea. Let’s take it out to the end of the garden, shall we? Away from where the builders are. We can, um … graze.’
Rachel eyes me suspiciously.
‘Really, Rachel. It’s fine.’ I glance at the knife, hear the sound of my own breathing in my ears.
‘OK.’ She smiles. ‘Great! I’ll make you a tea though. You always like a cup of tea.’
‘Oh. Yes,’ I say. ‘Lovely. Thanks.’
Rachel flicks the kettle on, flings the cupboard above it open and pulls out two mugs. Dives into another cupboard for tea bags, sugar. She knows where everything is. She hands me a mug then shovels three heaped teaspoons of sugar into her own.
‘I’m just going to use your other bathroom,’ she says, heading for the stairs. ‘Then we can tuck in.’ She has left the tea bags in hot wet puddles on the worktop. A pale circle of spilled milk. A dusting of sugar.
I perch on a stool and listen to Rachel’s footfalls on the stairs, the flush, the sound of the tap. She doesn’t return. Then I hear a scraping noise, the creak of floorboards far at the top of the house. What is she doing? Surely she’s not trying the floorboards again? For a mad moment, I think about the note, tucked in the back of the book on my bedside. Why would you suspect she would go and poke around up there? I ask myself. Because it’s exactly the sort of thing you would do, a voice in my head answers.