‘I had the trees book.’ He looked around for an oven glove, settling eventually for the tea towel on his shoulder. ‘Dad got it for me. It was he who got me into woodwork, in fact, although he certainly never imagined I’d make a career of it. He used to take me to help him collect firewood from the log man in autumn. He let me smash some of the logs up to make kindling.’
He paused, smiling. ‘It was the smell. I fell in love with the smell at first, but I was fascinated by how quickly you could turn a tough-looking log into something completely different. One winter I started pinching bits of the kindling to make stick men. Then there came the toilet-roll holder, and the worst mallet in history.’
He chuckled. ‘And then there was Mouse.’ He opened the oven; pulled out the baking tray. ‘My pride and joy. Dad wasn’t particularly impressed, but Mum said it was the most perfect little mouse she’d ever seen.’
He put a round, fragrant loaf onto a wire rack and closed the oven.
‘He left when I was nine. Dad. He has a family on the Scottish border, somewhere north of Carlisle.’
‘Oh.’ I sat back down. ‘That must have been rough.’
He shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago.’
An easy silence fell while he retrieved butter, honey, a jar of what looked like homemade marmalade from the fridge. He passed me a plate with a deep crack running through it (‘Sorry!’) and a knife.
‘Does your mum know I’m here?’ I asked, as he started slicing the bread .
‘Ow!’ He wrenched his hand away from the loaf. ‘Why am I so greedy? It’s far too hot to eat.’
I laughed. If he hadn’t gone straight in, I would have.
‘No,’ he said, protecting his hand this time with the tea towel. ‘Mum doesn’t know you’re here. I can’t have her think her only child is a dirty old mating goat.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Maybe if I’m really good, we can do some more mating,’ he said, throwing a red-hot slice of bread in the direction of my plate.
‘Certainly,’ I said, sticking my knife into the butter. It was full of crumbs. Reuben, who liked to serve butter hipster style, smeared onto a piece of slate or some ridiculous rock or other, would have hated it.
‘You’re great at mating,’ I added, and I didn’t blush.
Eddie did. ‘Really?’
And, because I didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter, I got up, marched round the planky island thing and closed my arms around him, kissing him hard on the mouth. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This bread is too hot even for me. Let’s go back to bed.’
Chapter Thirteen
Dear Alan,
Please forgive this message from out of the blue.
You replied to my post on Eddie David’s Facebook wall earlier today. I’m a bit worried, and wanted to share what limited information I have.
Prior to your holiday with Eddie, I spent a week with him in Sapperton. I left on Thursday, 9 June, so that he could pack, and he said he’d call me from the airport.
I never heard from him again. After trying several times to contact him, I gave up, assuming that he had changed his mind. I never fully believed it, however, and when I saw your reply to my post, I knew I hadn’t been deceiving myself. Below is my phone number. I would really appreciate you sharing any thoughts or info that you might have. I am not a stalker! I just want to know he’s OK.
Best wishes,
Sarah Mackey
Eleven p.m. leached silently into midnight. My phone buzzed and I hurled myself at it, but it was just Jo saying she’d got home safely. No reply from Alan. I lay back in bed and felt my heart straining in my chest. It hurt. It actually hurt . Why did nobody tell you that a broken heart wasn’t just a metaphor?
Midnight turned into one, then two, then three. I imagined Tommy and Zoe in their giant bed along the hallway, and wondered if they held each other while they slept. I remembered Eddie’s body, wrapped around mine, and felt a longing so fierce it seemed to bore through my skin. Then I spent a while intensely disliking myself, because in Istanbul there were bodies in bags, whereas Eddie was – quite probably – a man who simply hadn’t called.
At four, having caught myself in the act of searching online for death notices in Eddie’s area, I let myself quietly out of Tommy’s flat. Dawn was pressing grey smudges into the sky, and a lone street sweeper was already at work, shuffling slowly past Zoe’s smart Georgian terrace. It would be another couple of hours until the city reached full throttle, but I couldn’t take another moment of the suffocating silence and the buzz of dark theories, each more terrible than the last.
At Holland Park Avenue, I started running. For a short while I sailed effortlessly past bus stops sheltering tired-looking migrants on their way to work, cafes with grilles still down, an inebriated man stumbling back from Notting Hill. I tuned out the whine of night buses and taxis, allowing only the slap of my trainers and the warble of the dawn chorus.
My effortless sailing didn’t last long. As the road began to climb towards Notting Hill, my lungs started to burst, as they always did, and my legs gave up. I walked up to the Portobello turn-off.
There’s nothing crazy about what I’m doing , I thought, when I could force myself to run again. London is awake already. A workers’ cafe was packed out with tradesmen in hi-vis vests; a man was opening a coffee cart on Westbourne Grove. London was on the move. Why shouldn’t I be? This was fine .
Only, of course, it was not, because my body felt tired and miserable, and I was the only runner I saw for the duration. And because it was still only 4.45 a.m. by the time I got back to Tommy’s.
I showered and slid into bed. I tried for five minutes not to check my phone.
One missed call , the screen advised, when I gave in. I sat up. It was a withheld number, at 4.19 a.m. A message had been left.
The message comprised two seconds of silence, followed by the sound of a human pressing the wrong button. After a brief scrabble, the caller managed successfully to hang up.
Briefly, I wondered if it was Eddie’s friend Alan, but according to Facebook he had not yet read my message.
Then who?
Eddie?
No! Eddie’s not that person! He’s a talker! Not some shady crackpot who calls at 4 a.m.!
By the time I woke at lunchtime, Alan had read my message. He had not replied.
I stared at my phone dementedly, refreshing it again and again. He couldn’t just ignore it. Nobody would do that!
But he had read it, and he had ignored it. The day passed; I heard nothing. And I felt frightened. Less, as each day passed, for Eddie, and more, as each day passed, for myself.
Chapter Fourteen
Rudi was absolutely still.
He stood and stared at the two meerkats closest to the fence, and they stood and stared at him, paws resting casually on their soft bellies. Rudi, without realizing what he was doing, had straightened up and had rested his own little paws on his own little belly.
‘Hello,’ he whispered reverently. ‘Hello, meerikats.’
‘Meerkats,’ I corrected.
‘Sarah, be quiet ! You might frighten them!’
Tommy alerted Rudi to the arrival of another meerkat and Rudi whipped round, forgetting in an instant that I existed. ‘Hello, meerikat three,’ he whispered. ‘Meerikats, hello! Are you a family? Or just best friends?’
Two of the meerkats started burrowing in the sand. The third shuffled over his sandy hill to give what looked like a hug to another member of the tribe. Rudi almost trembled with wonder.
Jo took a photo of her son. Five minutes ago she’d been telling Rudi off about something; now she smiled at him with a love that had no edges. And watching her, trying to imagine that sort of towering, immeasurable devotion, I felt it again. An acute poke from the lumpy cluster of feelings I kept in a remote corner. It was right that I wasn’t going to be a mother, of course, but the pain of lost possibility sometimes left me breathless.
I extracted my sunglasses from my bag.
My parents had found a carer for Granddad and would be back in Gloucestershire tomorrow. Rudi wanted a farewell tea at Battersea Park Children’s Zoo before I left to go and see them, although this, I suspected, had more to do with a recent television programme he’d watched about meerkats than it did with saying goodbye to Aunty Sarah.