‘Busy today,’ Renee commented when she came to relieve Kate’s post. They shifted their positions every hour, and those brief moments when someone came to take over, before you moved on to take over from the next person, were welcome respite from the tedium.
‘Yeah,’ Kate replied.
‘Did you see that girl with the eyebrows? It looked like she’d drawn two fighting caterpillars on her forehead! I’m sure she came through this room.’
Kate hadn’t, but only because she had been letting herself gaze at a twenty-something couple clearly on a date. The girl was pretty in an ethereal, fairy-like way, and he was messy-handsome, meticulously scruffy and smiling. They were sitting on a bench in front of a huge, busy depiction of some mythological battle, and while she was gazing at the scene, he was gazing at her. Kate sighed.
‘You need to get out there,’ Renee said, following Kate’s gaze. ‘Online dating, or singles nights or something.’
‘You know it’s not for me,’ Kate replied. She’d had the same conversation so many times with Lindsey, it almost bored her now. Nobody ever seemed to understand how hard it was.
‘Nonsense. Besides, the more men you meet, the more likely one is to stick.’
‘Sometimes I think that whole part of me has shut down, if it was ever there at all. Like, I can appreciate a good song, but that doesn’t mean I can sing or play an instrument. Perhaps this is it for me. Maybe this is just something I have to accept.’
‘For goodness’ sake, can you hear yourself? You’re not even thirty yet. And besides, you’re one of the romantic ones. Things always work out for the romantic ones.’
‘I’m very nearly thirty. But I love your conviction.’
‘It’s because it’s true.’
Kate checked her watch and knew it was time to move on. She had the next person on the rota to relieve from their post.
It was lunchtime when they caught up again. In the dull quiet of the basement staff room, they stretched their legs out under a table and put their feet up on chairs on the other side, and tried not to laugh when Una reheated her tomato soup on too high a setting, causing it to furiously bubble and explode within the microwave.
‘Sometimes I think that Claude’s art is what would happen if Picasso and Warhol had a baby,’ Renee was musing as she deep-dived through his social media.
‘Do you fancy Claude, or his work?’ Kate asked, peering over her friend’s shoulder and twisting as she tried to take in a lava-lamp-like series of blobs that may or may not have also been a face.
‘If you’re daring me to engage in a debate on the separation between art and artist, you’ve picked a day when I’m feeling particularly confident,’ Renee warned.
‘Another time maybe. I’ve got to try and get the flatmate thing sorted.’
‘Still no luck?’
‘Nope. Are you sure I can’t convince you?’
‘Your place is amazing, so trust me, I wish I could. Knock a few hundred off a month and I’m there.’
What Kate would have given for a couple of hundred off a month. The place had been perfectly affordable until she had been made redundant. And even after that, her savings and redundancy settlement had covered a fair proportion of the costs for a few months. But for the past year, it had been Kate’s parents who had done the most to take the rental burden off.
Kate felt a prickle of anxiety. She hated asking them for money. Felt terrible that they were so happy to give it to her. But the new job, and its associated salary, was just around the corner, wasn’t it?
Kate looked down at her phone and started scrolling through her Facebook notifications. She knew that she hadn’t been the best at keeping in touch with her old friends, but it wasn’t easy when she felt so downhearted much of the time. She rationally knew that she had nothing to be ashamed of, that life happened and everybody went through rough patches on occasion, but that sense of shame didn’t pay much attention to rationality. Every time she opened Instagram it felt like she was failing them somehow. But they were her oldest friends, they’d understand, surely?
However awkward it felt to start escalating Plan B and to let her friends know just how much of a pickle she was in, a big motivating factor was that it meant she didn’t have to consider Plan C for a little while longer. So when she opened the Facebook app and saw the photos right there on her feed, what upset her the most, at least at first, was realising she would have to rethink everything.
Chapter 3
The Rocking Horse seemed different in daylight. Or, at least, it was different from how Freddie remembered it. There was light pouring through the old-style mullioned windows, and instead of music, the only sound was the roar of the vacuum cleaner, operated by a guy still wrapped up in his parka, scarf and gloves, despite being indoors. Many of the chairs were stacked upside down on the tables, revealing a carpet busy with constellations of dark spots where chewing gum and wine stains had been trodden in over the years.
Freddie’s hangover was like a metal helmet fastened around his head, so heavy that his neck and shoulders were struggling to cope with it. He had drunk a whole bottle of orange juice on the way over to the pub, hoping that the sugars and vitamin C would revive him, but instead it just felt like a gummy slime was coating the inside of his mouth and furring his tongue. He had rushed out of the house without bringing his trusty tube of travel-sized toothpaste with him, and oh boy, was he regretting that now.
‘Um, are you Carmen?’ Freddie asked the girl drying up pint glasses behind the bar.
She had a shockingly beautiful face, expertly made up into something simultaneously dream-like and vaguely sinister, punctuated by a gold ring septum piercing. Despite it being January, and her colleague dressing for work like he was exploring the Arctic, this girl was wearing nothing but a black vest top with her jeans, and she was quite blatantly braless. Freddie was trying not to look, he really was. But it was hard not to look when her nipples appeared to be staring straight back at him.
‘Carmen?’ Freddie tried again. Her eyes narrowed as she appraised him, suspicious.
‘We are closed,’ she replied in accented English, nodding her head up to the clock. ‘We open at midday.’
‘No, we spoke on the phone? My name is Freddie?’ he heard his voice doing the upward inflection thing before he had a chance to control it.
‘Looking for the black bag?’
‘Yes?’
Carmen disappeared out back, leaving Freddie lingering at the bar. He looked over at the wrapped-up man doing the hoovering, attempted a nod of recognition, but was ignored. Freddie turned and let his eyes drift around the pub. They were such weird places when they were empty and closed, like a theatre devoid of an audience.
His eyes fell on a nearby cork noticeboard, and seeing as Carmen didn’t seem to be hurrying back to him, Freddie wandered over to see what was going on. There was a poster for the Rocking Horse’s monthly karaoke night, and a couple of those posters with tabs at the bottom, some already torn off, advertising English-language tutoring and guitar lessons. Then a few boring business cards, a couple of less boring ones hinting at some adult services, and finally a pink notecard, the kind Freddie used to use when he was revising for exams, with a title that hit him like a punch to the gut.