Sophie Hannah - Hurting Distance

She looked at Simon’s mobile number on the screen and pressed the call button, rehearsing what she would say as soon as he answered: ‘I thought I made it clear I didn’t want any interruptions on holiday.’ She wouldn’t say it too harshly, though.

10

Thursday, April 6

IT IS TWO in the morning. I am downstairs, curled in a tight ball on the sofa in front of the television, heavy and disorientated with tiredness but afraid to go to bed. I know I wouldn’t sleep. I pick up the remote control and press the mute button. I could turn the TV off, but I’m superstitious. The flickering images on the screen are a link to something. They are all that’s keeping me from slipping off the edge of the world.

All my cowardice comes out at night, all the weak and helpless feelings that I spend all day every day beating down.

My lounge window is a big square of black, with two gold globes of light reflected in it and, under those yellow discs, a washed-out counterpart of me. I look like a woman who is all alone. When I was little, I used to believe that if you let darkness into a well-lit room, it would become dark, just as it becomes light in the morning when you let the light in. My dad explained to me why it was different, but I wasn’t convinced. Usually I close my curtains as soon as the sky starts to turn from blue to grey.

Tonight there’s no point; the darkness is in the house already. It’s in Yvon’s absence, and the mess the police left, though I’m sure they think they tidied up after themselves, just as Yvon believes she’s tidied up if she puts torn-up envelopes, squashed tea bags and sandwich crusts on the lid of the kitchen bin.

She’s left most of her things here, which I am forcing myself to see as a good sign. All night I’ve wanted to ring her, but I’ve done nothing about it. Concealing what happened to me three years ago was easy. Walking into a police station and accusing an innocent man of rape was easy. So why is it so hard to phone my best friend and say sorry?

Yvon will think I don’t care; that I might be scared would never occur to her. Of the two of us, I’m the frightening one. She teases me about it. It’s true, I can be intimidating when I want to be. One pointed look from me is enough to make Yvon wipe up all the crumbs on the kitchen counter or put the lid back on the butter dish after she’s used it. I like things to be tidy. I can’t think straight if they’re not. Tools are never left out in my workshop overnight; I always put them back in their proper place on the shelf: my dummy mallets next to my diamond whetstone, which lives next to my chisels.

You’d understand. At the Traveltel, you arrange your clothes neatly on the back of the sofa before getting into bed. I’ve never seen one of your socks on the floor. When I told Yvon this, she wrinkled her nose and said you sounded like a geek. I said it wasn’t like that at all, she was imagining it wrongly if she thought that. You’re cool about it, quick too. You must have practised, because you always make it seem as if you just happened to drop your clothes exactly parallel to the edge of the settee.

Do you remember, I once said to you that if Yvon ever disappeared, the police would be able to list everything she had recently eaten without too much trouble? To think of this now that you’re missing makes the hairs on my arms stand up. But it’s true. Dried pink flakes stuck to the underside of a frying pan would point clearly to salmon for dinner the previous night. A pan of congealed white fat with burned black bits in it would be evidence that she’d had sausages for lunch.

You told me I should insist that she clears up after herself. When I do, she accuses me of tyranny. ‘You’re turning into a monster,’ she says, reluctantly removing a three-week-old empty milk carton from the fridge.

I’m so used to it now, my nobody’s-going-to-get-away-with-anything attitude, I don’t think I could change back. I have become —deliberately at first, though it soon stopped feeling like an effort—a person who makes an issue out of any small thing. ‘Go with the flow,’ Yvon is always telling me. But to me, going with the flow means marching obediently, at knifepoint, towards a stranger’s car.

If I hadn’t become a monster, you might never have noticed me that day in the service station. I don’t know how much of the row you saw or heard. Nor have I ever managed to extract from you certain crucial pieces of information, such as whether you too were eating in the food court that day. Perhaps you were in the shop, on the other side of the covered walkway, and you only came over when you heard me shouting. I’d like to know, because I love the story of how we met and I want it to be complete.

I was on my way to see a possible customer, an elderly lady who wanted somebody to restore the cube sundial in her garden, which she said was eighteenth century and in bad condition. I’d told her I did mainly original commissions and very little restoration work, but she’d sounded so despondent that I’d relented and agreed to go and look at her dial. I realised I was hungry almost as soon as I set off, so I stopped at Rawndesley East Services.

No sane person expects decent food from a service station, and I was quite prepared for my chicken, chips and peas to be lukewarm, greasy and flavourless. I’m not like you; I don’t mind mediocre food sometimes. It can be comforting to eat junk. But on this occasion, what was handed to me on a tray was offensive. Did you see it? Were you close enough, at that point, to get a proper look?

The chicken was grey and reeked of old dustbins that have never been washed. The smell made me retch. I told the man who was serving me that the meat was off. He rolled his eyes, as if I was being difficult, and said that I hadn’t even tasted it yet. If it tasted bad, I could bring it back and he’d give me a new meal, he said, but he wasn’t prepared to take it back when I hadn’t even tried it. I asked to speak to the manager and he told me, sullenly, that he was in charge, the boss wasn’t in yet.

‘When will she be in?’ I asked, hoping he was the sort of man who would hate to have a woman as a boss.

‘It’s a he,’ he said. ‘Not for another two hours.’

‘Fine. Then I’ll wait. And when your manager arrives, I’ll advise him to fire you.’

‘Suit yourself.’ The man shrugged. His name was Bruce Doherty. He was wearing a badge.

‘You only need to take one look at this chicken to know it’s bad! It’s rotting! You taste it if you don’t believe me.’

‘No thanks.’ He smirked.

I took that as an acknowledgement that the meat was past its sell-by date and he knew it; he was gloating, showing me he didn’t care. ‘I’m going to make sure you get sacked, you wanker!’ I yelled in his face. ‘What’ll you do then, hey? Brain surgeon? Rocket scientist? Or maybe something that’s better suited to your talents: wiping shit off toilets, or selling your arse to visiting businessmen round the back of Rawndesley Station!’

He ignored me. There were people queuing behind me and he turned to the first of these, saying, ‘Sorry about that. What can I get you?’

‘Look, I’m very busy,’ I told him. ‘All I want is a plate of food that isn’t poisonous.’

A frumpily dressed middle-aged woman, waiting to be served, touched my arm. ‘There are children here,’ she said, pointing to a table across the room.

I shook her hand off me. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Children who, if it was up to you and him and everyone else in here, would be fed rotting chicken and die of E. coli!’

Everybody left me alone after that. I phoned the woman that I was on my way to see about the cube dial and told her I’d been held up. Then I sat down at the table nearest to the serving counter, with my tray of stinking food in front of me, waiting for the boss to arrive. Rage bubbled inside me, but I think I did a pretty good job of appearing calm. I can’t control everything, but I can make sure that no stranger is able to guess how I’m feeling simply by looking at me.