My first reaction was to run, but I’d trained myself to think calmly, to react to any crisis with a measured response, so I took a moment to identify the noise and where it was coming from. It was an alarm, that was clear enough; not a smoke alarm either. A burglar alarm. It was coming from above and close by – the flat over the nail bar, I thought, so directly over my head, but when I turned I couldn’t see a box or any flashing lights, so it was possible it was one of the newer systems run off motion and temperature and a free app on a smartphone. If that was the case, it was probably a false alarm and almost certainly nothing to do with my presence here, but a cautious woman wouldn’t stick around to prove it, and the cautious side of me was beginning to reassert itself. I spent ten seconds with my back still to the glass, looking carefully in every direction I could, but I still couldn’t see anything. I took a step forward, and the noise suddenly doubled in volume.
I stepped back again, as if it had been my forward motion that had set things off and my return would put them back the way they were, but nothing changed. It was a different pitch, the newcomer, and louder, and coming, I realised, from a different direction entirely – somewhere further from me, somewhere just down the alley. The notion of a false alarm that had comforted me a moment earlier had fled. One false alarm, a single coincidence, that was fine. Two alarms, two coincidences, me here, alone, in the dark – it wasn’t looking good. I edged towards the alleyway and poked my head around the corner, and sure enough there was a box on a wall above the bin, blue lights going nineteen to the dozen, a traditional system that might well be wired to a monitoring service or even the nearest police station.
It was time I left.
I pulled the hood up around my face. I’d have taken off the gold belt, too, but I didn’t have anywhere to put it – it wouldn’t fit in my bag – and a woman clutching a large gold belt in one hand and holding up her skirt with the other would stick in a witness’s memory. Instead I just set off, back the way I’d come, head low and pace steady, not slow, not fast, just normal. A normal person coming home from a normal evening of normal activities with normal friends.
I tried to remind myself I hadn’t actually done anything wrong, not this time, at least. It didn’t matter. The last thing I needed was some nosy bastard in uniform taking an interest in me. I tried to calm myself, but the pictures unfurled in my mind anyway, from the nosy bastard to the court date to the questions I couldn’t answer, and the cell, and superimposed on all of them Simon, somewhere else, somewhere I wasn’t. I took one breath every six steps, as if I could force some kind of sense into the world when I couldn’t even force it into my own head. I was panicking.
I stopped ten minutes later, just a few minutes from home, pulled out my phone, dialled the number that had messaged me. It took a moment to connect, but when it did, there was no ringing tone – just a woman’s voice, a message I’d feared hearing but convinced myself I wouldn’t.
The number you have dialled has not been recognised, it said. Please check and try again.
I tried a text – Where were you? – but nothing came back, no reply, no bounce or undeliverable, and there was no reason it would. I stood there, in a place I knew, on a street I walked every day, in my city, just a short stroll from my flat and my son, and I felt like a stranger.
I shouldn’t have gone. For all I didn’t know who the right me was, Belinda was definitely a wrong one. She wasn’t Lisa or Anna or even Penny, she wasn’t a part of my life, of any of the lives that came close to being real, but I’d let her take over and make my choices for me, and look where that had landed me.
Lisa Atkins was who I was, for now, at least, and Lisa Atkins didn’t trust strangers. Lisa Atkins was a liar, and Lisa Atkins knew what another liar looked like, even from the other side of an anonymous text message. Lisa Atkins was a creation, an orphan in the making, and she should have been able to spot a fellow creation in an instant. She’d done it often enough in the past.
But, I reflected, as I took a long breath out, rolled my shoulders, and started walking home, I’d got away with it. No one had seen me. The camera had been set high with a poor view of the corner I’d been standing on, and the dark wouldn’t have helped. I’d disappeared before the police could show up. I’d got myself up to the jaws of trouble and backed away before they could bite.
I’d dodged a bullet, I decided. I’d be more cautious in future.
9: 1990
TODAY I TOLD a lie.
I’m not supposed to lie, but I’m not supposed to disobey Mummy and Daddy either. I didn’t like not knowing which thing I wasn’t supposed to do I should do, and I thought maybe it was a test and somehow I was supposed to do neither of the things I wasn’t supposed to do and I’d failed.
It had been a normal day. Daddy is back – he went away again, for another few days, but came back last week, quiet again, then angry again. Daddy kicked a door. Mummy shouted at Daddy, Daddy shouted at Mummy, I stayed in my bedroom for as long as I could but eventually the blue sky and the birdsong called me out, and I gathered together the soldiers and the little Polly Pocket doll Daddy had given me last month as a present for starting school.
It’s been cloudy and grey and wet for the last few weeks, so this was the first chance I’ve had to be outside in the sunshine. I’m still not sure about the other children at school. They don’t shout at me, but most of them don’t want to play with me, either. Some of them I know from the Children’s Centre, some of them I used to play with, some of them used to be my friends, but at school they won’t even talk to me.
Miss Harkness talks to me, at least. I like her. She shouts, but not at me. She shouts at the boys who push people over in the playground and the girls who hit people and call them names. One day Sadie Johnson, who is in my class but much bigger than me, told me to go away when I walked over to the corner of the playground where she was talking with some other girls. I turned and started to walk away, but then she shouted after me.
“You smell, Penny Haslam!” she shouted, and I don’t know how it happened, because really I just wanted to run away and cry, and maybe she was right, maybe I did smell, but instead I walked right up to her and kicked her leg. I kicked it hard and she fell over and cried, and when I looked up I saw Miss Harkness walking over and I thought this would be the time she shouted at me. But instead she told me to wait there while she dealt with Sadie, and she took Sadie by the hand and led her inside, and ten minutes later she took me by the hand and led me inside, and she told me she knew what had happened and she understood that I was angry, but I couldn’t go around kicking people like that, so I would have to say sorry to Sadie.
I wanted to argue and say it was Sadie’s fault and I was only sorry I hadn’t kicked her harder, but Miss Harkness is so lovely and I really didn’t want her to shout at me, so instead I nodded, and a moment later Sadie was in front of me, and Miss Harkness was standing beside us both. I opened my mouth to say sorry, but Sadie had opened her mouth first.
“I’m sorry I was mean to you, Penny,” she said, and I just stood there with my mouth still open because I really hadn’t expected Sadie Johnson to say sorry to me, of all people.