‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s the right thing. I feel happier already.’

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said.

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Of course I will. Look, Daisy. I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m really fucking sorry about how things were. I’ve been a fucking idiot.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I don’t really know what happened.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s done. You don’t need to say anything else.’

  ‘No, but I do.’ He turned to face her. ‘Look, you were right. I freaked out, at the hospital. I lost the plot, completely. Seeing you like that, thinking you might be, you know, dying, and your family, they’re so different to mine. You know, fucking bassoon players with the fucking philharmonic whatever. I left that hospital feeling like I’d been on another planet.’

  ‘So, why didn’t you just say? I would have understood.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘We were in the tea room, all those blokes in there. And I hadn’t worked out how I felt yet. I didn’t know myself what I wanted to do. But then, seeing you the next day, up there –’ He pointed at her floor of the Condé Nast building. ‘And you were so cold. We were like strangers. It just tore me apart. And I realized then that I have to give this a chance. Because, you know, love’s not always convenient, is it? Sometimes it’s just a pain in the arse. But if you don’t try, then you don’t know. And I want to try. And I want to know. Because otherwise I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what happened to the first girl I ever cared about, what happened to you. And that would tear me up, totally.’

  It was silent for a moment. Con put his untouched sandwich back in the bag.

  Daisy sighed. ‘I don’t really understand. What exactly are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that I love you and that I’m sorry for what I did and that I want to be with you.’

  ‘Oh, Con. Christ. It’s too late now. I’m moving away. It’s all too late.’

  ‘No’ he said, ‘it’s not. Toby’s offered to pay for my flying lessons. I’ve spoken to a couple of schools in South Africa that have got places, where I could start next month. But if you say that you’ll forgive me, if you say that you’ll let me into your life, let me be there for you, look after you, I’ll wave goodbye to South Africa in a flash. There are flying schools in this country. They’re more expensive, but Toby’s said he’ll lend me the money. As much as it takes. I could be anywhere. Anywhere that you are.’

  Daisy sighed again. ‘But I’ll still be ill. My parents will still be my parents. My sister’s boyfriend will still be a bassoonist.’

  ‘Yeah, I know all that. But I won’t be me. I won’t be a post boy who shares a room with his mum in a jumped-up squat. I’ll be a trainee pilot. I’ll have my own place. I’ll be, you know, going somewhere. Being someone. I’ll be good enough for you.’

  ‘But, Con,’ she said, ‘that’s the whole stupid bloody point. You already were.’

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘I wasn’t. I really wasn’t. But meeting you and knowing you, you make me want to be everything. I want to look after you. I want to make you proud.’

  Daisy smiled then, and picked up his hand. ‘There’s a flight school two miles up the road from my parents’ place,’ she said. ‘I hear it’s a good one.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll pick you up a brochure, if you like.’

  ‘Cool.’

  Con nodded and smiled. Then they both picked up their sandwiches and ate them in silence, their hands firmly grasped together on the bench between them.

  67

  Toby put a bowl of tortilla chips on the coffee table and glanced at the time. It was just before eight, two minutes until the house meeting was supposed to start. Ruby was the first to appear. She was due to play a set at a pub in Tufnell Park at ten o’clock and was all dressed up in her stage gear – pointy boots, sheer black sleeveless shirt, tight pinstripe jeans and a diamond choker.

  ‘Nice necklace,’ he said.

  She collapsed on the sofa and scooped up a handful of tortilla chips. ‘Tim gave me it,’ she said, biting the tip off a chip. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it?’ She ate the rest of the chips in quick succession, licked the crumbs off the palm of her hands, then grabbed another handful.

  ‘Don’t eat them all,’ said Toby. ‘Save some for the others.’

  She tutted. ‘Look, I’m the only person who bothered to get here on time. I get snack privileges.’ She munched on yet another chip. ‘So – this is all very mysterious. House meeting. Hmmm…’ She put her index finger to her lip and adopted a sarcastic tone. ‘I wonder what it could possibly be about?’

  Footsteps on the staircase behind them heralded the arrival of Melinda and Con. They both sat down on the other sofa and Con helped himself to a handful of chips. ‘Oh, look,’ said Ruby, ‘it’s the happy couple. How’s married life?’

  Con raised his eyebrows. Melinda shot her a look, then ignored her.

  The last person to arrive was Joanne, fresh from work and clutching a Jane Norman carrier bag. She popped her head round the door. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I just need to go to the loo. Start without me if you have to.’

  Toby perched himself on the edge of the coffee table and tapped his fingers against his knee. Nobody talked. The only sound was the crunching of chips. Joanne came back and Toby stood up. He glanced round the room. Four pairs of eyes gazed back at him. This was it, the moment he never thought would come, the scenario he’d never been able to envisage. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he began. ‘I know you’ve all got busy lives.’

  Ruby snorted, like a teenage girl in the back row of the classroom.

  ‘Anyway, the reason I’ve brought you all together tonight is because I have an important announcement to make, one that will impact on all of you. As you know, my father bought me this house fifteen years ago, as a place for me to live with my wife. As you also know, my wife left me three weeks later and I haven’t seen her since. Since then I have used this house as a place for people to stay for a while, when life isn’t on their side, a place for people to work out their dreams and hopes, and hopefully find a way to move on. I would probably have gone on using the house for those aims indefinitely, but for two events that occurred within two days of each other. First Gus, my sitting tenant, died, then I received a letter from my father, announcing that he was coming back to the country and wanted to see how I was doing. Three days later I was left a sum of money by Gus, with specific instructions that I use it to refurbish this house. And to, er… well – to get on with my life. Because Gus felt, as I now feel, that I’ve got rather stuck in a rut, rather lost my way. So I will be putting the house on the market as soon as the renovations are complete. And, I’m afraid, I will have to now give you all four weeks’ notice, as of today.’

  Toby stopped and lifted his gaze from a stain on the carpet he’d been addressing.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Ruby, her hand against her chest, ‘what a shock.’

  The other three just stared at him blankly.

  ‘Well,’ said Con, eventually. ‘I think that’s cool. I do.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Melinda, ‘good on you Toby. You deserve it.’

  Toby looked at Joanne. Her face was blank. She placed her hands slowly on her kneecaps, then rose slowly to her feet. Then she left the room, her footsteps silent and unfathomable.

  ‘Joanne, it’s Toby.’

  The door opened and Joanne’s face appeared. She’d been crying.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About what happened just now. About moving out.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said.

  ‘Well, no, it’s clearly not fine.’

  ‘It is,’ she said, starting to close the door.

  Toby stuck his foot in the gap and waved a bottle of white wine at her. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘share it with me. Let’s have a drink and a talk.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but thank you.’ She squeezed the door against his shoe. He pushed his shoulder against the door.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said, ‘until you let me in.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ She pulled open the door and regarded him. Her eyes were red and swollen. ‘I really don’t want to talk. It’s your house. You can do what you want with it. It just would have been nice if you’d given us all a bit more notice. Evidently you’ve known about this plan of yours for a while. I assume since Gus died. I don’t understand why you’re only telling us now.’

  Toby smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps if you let me in, I could explain.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s a tip in here,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to your room.’

  Joanne looked like a small, rather unwell child with her white-blonde hair, her red eyes and pinched nose.

  Toby handed her a glass of wine and she took it gratefully.

  ‘I understand,’ he said, ‘that it might seem strange that I’ve only just given you all notice, but there’s a reason why I didn’t tell you sooner.’

  She nodded wanly and sipped her wine.

  ‘I felt as if you were all my responsibility and that therefore I couldn’t just kick you out without ensuring that you were all ready to go. So I’ve been trying to get to know you all a bit better. Which, I have to say, I’ve found rather hard. It’s not in my nature to snoop or interfere. You and I are quite similar in that respect. We like to keep ourselves to ourselves, keep the world at bay. But I’ve also found it strangely exhilarating at times, the journey over the past few weeks, the things I’ve learned about the people with whom I live. I really feel as if I’ve made an impression, as if they’ve moved on in some way. But you, Joanne, I don’t know. You’re… impossible.’

  A small wry smile cracked her deadpan face. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know.’

  ‘I haven’t a clue who you are, where you’re from, what you want, why you’re here. So I’m resigned to having to let you go out into the world as I found you. A mystery. An enigma. A lost soul…’

  ‘I am not lost.’

  ‘Oh, Joanne. Of course you are. You’re nearly middle-aged, yet you have no profession, no home, no friends. You change your image with the frequency of an immature teenage girl, you spend all your money on clothes and cosmetics, and yet you never go anywhere. And then this man arrives, this sad man with tears in his eyes, a man you used to love, who still, it seems, loves you. He leaves you a letter that makes you cry, yet you ignore it. You carry on as if it never happened. I mean, Joanne, what is it that you left behind when you came here? What could be so bad that living with strangers is preferable? Why have you allowed yourself to become a peculiar, unlovable ghoul when clearly you have known love in your life, when clearly you have known more?’

  ‘Oh, Toby,’ she said, ‘do you hear yourself? Do you hear?’

  He threw her a questioning look.

  ‘Turn that question round. Ask it of yourself.’

  He sighed. ‘But that is the point, Joanne. I have asked that question of myself. And I now know the answer. I allowed myself to become a peculiar, unlovable ghoul because first my mother left me, to be raised primarily by the public school system and secondarily by my father, who hated me. Then my father left me, to start another, I assume better, family abroad. But I didn’t mind because I had love, a beautiful new wife, a beautiful new home. And then my wife left me and I decided that I no longer wanted to be left. I wanted to stay in one place and keep my soul safe. I shut my door; I kept the world out. I grew my hair; I made myself physically unappealing. I stayed in my room and on the odd occasion that I needed to venture down the street I knew that I was safe, that no one would try to know me because I was the strange bloke with the hair and the hats and the boots full of holes. I made a freak of myself, Joanne, to keep everyone away.

  ‘I saw a documentary once, about Siamese twins, and these women, these twins, were discussing their love lives with their boyfriends, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Like the sort of bloke who wants to have sex with a woman who has another woman attached to her by the head was just a regular bloke. And I just thought, how sad that these women will only ever get to have relationships with sick fucks and weirdos. And that’s how I’ve felt about myself for years – that anyone who’d want to be with me, the way I am, the way I was, the way I’m trying not to be any more, was, by definition, a weirdo. And it’s only now, it’s only because of this house, that I’ve begun to leave the little hole I’d dug for myself. It’s only now that I can acknowledge my freakdom and move on. But what about you, Joanne? When will you acknowledge what you’ve allowed yourself to become?’

  Joanne gulped and rolled her wine glass between her hands, disconsolately. ‘Is that what I am?’ she asked, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘A freak?’

  Toby nodded. ‘Yes.’

  She sighed and let her head fall into her chest. ‘I just, I don’t know what else to be. I can’t remember how to be me any more.’

  ‘You?’ said Toby. ‘What was you?’

  ‘Me was…’ she sniffed. ‘Me was someone who’d lost their way in life, then found it again. Me was in love. Me was happy. Me was…’ She paused, stared into her wine glass then looked up at Toby, her eyes luminescent with sorrow, ‘a mother.’

  68

  Joanne Fish was born in Ipswich in 1968. Her parents split up when she was five years old and she moved with her mother to Norwich. Her mother died in a car crash when Joanne was ten and she moved to London to live with her father and his girlfriend in Lewisham. Her father was an actor, an alcoholic, always out of work and spending his dole money in the pub. He loved Joanne. She was his only child and the only child he would ever have after a vasectomy went wrong and resulted in the removal of both his testicles. His girlfriend was called Drew. She was twenty-one and a drug user. Joanne’s father left the two of them alone most nights when he went to the pub. Joanne would watch Drew in fascination, fixing up her drugs, tying off a vein, flicking the needle, sticking it in. She’d been living with her father and Drew for nearly two years before the inevitable happened and Drew offered to let her try it for herself. Joanne had just turned twelve.

  Drew moved out when Joanne was thirteen and took her drugs with her. That was when Joanne started stealing. She stole clothes mainly, which she sold to girls at school. Then she started stealing from girls at school because it was easier. She was expelled six months later and put into care shortly afterwards. Between her fourteenth birthday and her eighteenth birthday she spent a total of eighteen months in juvenile detention centres and she was given her first proper prison sentence a week after her eighteenth birthday – three years for aggravated burglary. It was at Holloway that she finally found something she loved to do. Acting. Her teacher was a tall, thin man called Nicholas Sturgess, ten years her senior. He proposed to her the day she was released and she moved straight into his house, a three-bedroom terrace in New Cross.

  She got a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama, completed a BA in Acting in Film and graduated when she was twenty-five. Her father died of liver failure two years later and Joanne nursed him until the end. Shortly afterwards, she and Nick started talking about having a family. They tried for three years without success, then embarked on a course of fertility treatment. Joanne’s years of drug abuse had damaged her reproductive organs, but finally, six months after starting treatment, Joanne’s period was late and a test revealed that she was indeed pregnant. Her pregnancy went smoothly and she delivered an eight-pound baby girl on New Year’s Day, the first girl to be born that year in the borough. They called her Maisie and took her home. Joanne had never felt so happy in her life. For once she hadn’t made a mess of things. For once she had everything a person was supposed to have. A career. A home. A lover. A family. Maisie was a good baby. She fed and she gained weight and she slept as well as could be expected. But Joanne was tired. Very tired. The labour had taken her through two nights of sleep and she still hadn’t recovered. So Joanne slept when she could, snatched moments, here and there. She slept when Maisie slept, either next to her on the double bed or on the sofa while she fed.

  One Thursday afternoon, when Maisie was three weeks old, Joanne put her to her breast, her small soft body resting on a pillow on her lap. She switched on the television and she flicked until she found a programme she wanted to watch. It was Bargain Hunt. She watched for a while. Two married couples who’d met on holiday dashed round an antique fair, with one hour to find three antiques. The last thing she remembered was a woman looking at a cut-crystal decanter, buying it for twenty-five pounds. She adjusted Maisie’s head slightly, angling her nipple back into her baby’s warm mouth. And then she fell asleep.

  When she woke up, Bargain Hunt had finished and Maisie was still and cool on the pillow. She put her hand to her cheek, gently, not wanting to wake her. Her skin felt icy. She looked blue. Joanne picked her up, and held her to her chest. Maisie flopped from side to side. She patted her back. She laid her back on the pillow and stared at her. Her heart pounded in her chest. What had been only a faint sense of discomfort had grown into a sickening certainty. Her baby wasn’t breathing. She rested the pillow on the sofa and got to her knees on the floor. She opened Maisie’s mouth and tipped back her head. She breathed into the sweet milk-scented cave of her mouth, once, twice, three times. She put her ear to her baby’s tiny ribcage and listened for her heartbeat, that sound that she’d listened to every month at the antenatal clinic while she was pregnant. She couldn’t hear it. A sob caught in her throat and she choked. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came.

  She called the ambulance. She told them what had happened; she told them where she lived. She put down the phone, then she rested her cheek on her dead baby’s stomach until they came and took her baby away.

  Nick met her at the hospital. Asphyxiation. Her baby had been suffocated to death, by her. She’d crushed her against the pillow, with the weight of her tiredness and the depth of her sleep.