Page 11 of The Key to My Heart

‘Yeah. Yeah, you’re right,’ I agree, and with perfect aim, I pick up and throw the paper bag, and it lands, like a ball through a hoop into the bin.

Chapter Five

Today I’m later to the station than I think I’ve ever been. It’s close to lunchtime when I arrive. And I had all good intentions last night to be up and out the door on time. I set my alarm, I went to bed early, and I even packed my handbag and put it by the front door, which is asupremelyJodie move if ever there was one. I’d wanted so much, an early start. Because today is Russ’s birthday, and I wanted to be with him longer than I usually am, in the quiet, green grounds of the crematorium. I like to go once a week. It’s just a few train stops away, on the bleakest, greyest, busiest road, but the place itself, a pop-up-page burst of nature amongst it all.

But my organised morning went to absolute shit, thanks to nothing more than the antics of Three Sycamore. The frozen external water pipe treated me to its usual cold morning trick, and I’d overslept due to being kept awake until three a.m. by the foxes – ‘the Sycamore foxes’ as Roy next door calls them darkly, like they’re a family of criminals terrorising the town, who, somehow, are always suspiciously able to slip under the police’s radar. That’s another thing about the countryside, and something I didn’t consider once before we movedin: the gaggle of noisy creatures that come out the second the sun sets to collectively conspire to completely mess up your night. ‘It’s country life, Nat. We don’t live in a Goosebumps movie,’ Russ would say as I jumped awake beside him, but I’m sure there’s a horror movie pitch in it somewhere: widowed, clueless city-girl stuck in a ramshackle cottage wakes to find foxes shagging outside her window, and her water pipes frozen.A thrilling caper, says Rotten Tomatoes.

Eventually, I’d arrived at the crematorium in a tornado of fluster and sweat and rain-soaked hair. But relieved to be there, with him. And I don’t think people understand me when I say Iliketo go there, to the crematorium. I get the bewilderment. The only places I used to love to go, was to gigs in sticky, windowless venues, to the studio with Edie, and to IKEA for candles and seventy-five storage baskets I’d never get around to actually using to completely organise my life. But I do. I enjoy watching the tree we planted for Russ slowly grow. I enjoy the no expectations. I enjoy being alone, with him, in the quiet, and talking to him like he’s still here.

I updated him, as always, on the damp wooden bench from beneath my umbrella, and on everything. From Shauna not dancing with dastardly-sounding Don at the wedding (‘I really think he might be a shit-bag, Russ.’), to the dinner with the girls (‘Lucy spoke for seventeen minutes about sinks. Yes, she’s still renovating.’), and the latest episode ofLine of Duty. (We used to watch it together on Sundays in bed with peanut M&Ms and slices of toast.) And I also askedhim about the music, and I laughed, embarrassed as I did, to nothing but the wet grass and his blossom tree. I also wished him a happy birthday. Thirty-three. That’s how old he would’ve been today. So bloody young, yet the sort of age that is so well established. The sort of age that screams ‘smack bang in the middle of living my life’.

I head straight for Goode’s now, and I look like someone who’s just been fired out of a cannon. My hair is frizzy with rainwater, and my clothes are damp and stuck to my skin, and my face, I know without looking, is a hangdog special. Eye bags. Mouth, gasping for caffeine. Like someone exhumed from an ancient tomb and shoved into a pair of skinny jeans.

I pass the piano again, on my way to the escalator. There was no music this morning. I looked the second I got into the station. Practically screeched over to it, like a cartoon, clouds of white smoke from the friction at my feet. But it was empty. And if the rain hadn’t succeeded, the disappointment of an empty piano stool blew out the meagre flame of happiness in my chest with one puff. Ugh.I know. I know I shouldn’t keep looking for music,hopingfor it. But I can’t help myself. It feels too magical finding it. Too exciting.

The station smells like coffee beans and the earthy smell of rain. God, I want caffeine.Need it.I also want enough sugar to take the enamel off a urinal. I want cake for now, cake for later. Medicinal pastries, to fill the huge Russ-shaped hole in my chest and to stop me buying (and consuming) wine. I’m drinking a bit toomuch at the moment, I know I am, if not only because of the state of the recycling bin – it looks like it used to when we’d have a Saturday barbecue and invite our families and friends (and friends of those friends) and Roy would knock and say, ‘The bin men won’t take those if the lid doesn’t shut, you know,’ which, like most things Roy says, was code for ‘I wish you didn’t live next door.’

The escalator carries me upstairs, towards the smell of hot pastries and the damp fug of hundreds of pairs of rain-wet shoes on shiny floor. On the step in front of me, a woman applies a deep-red lipstick using her iPhone camera as a mirror, and I can just about see over the balcony and through the café’s open door. Jason is behind the counter, and sitting inside, as usual, is Piercings Girl and Notebook Guy. And today, Mr Affair and Secretary Girl sit outside. Mr Affair is a stiff, shiny-faced man who wears slick blue suits and sits hushedly negotiating with his Secretary (Secretary Girl, of course.), a beautiful woman who wears incredible shoes, before they kiss passionately, he leaves, and she cries in the loo. (Shauna hates Mr Affair with snarling passion. Sure, we don’t know that they’redefinitelyhaving an affair, but it seems that way, and Shauna talks about him as if it’s fact and as if he deserves fifteen years in some sort of torturous, disgusting love-crime prison).

Oh God.

Fuck.

Is it? It is.

Tom the Target.

Tom from the bar is a stone’s throw away from me. Oh, bollocks. He’s standing, leaning casually on the rail of the balcony looking down at the phone in his hand, a large brown paper bag with a handle in the other.

I reach the top of the escalator and freeze, like someone’s pressed my ‘pause’ button. A man behind me tuts and overtakes me.

He won’t remember me.Of coursehe won’t. It was a sticky, dark restaurant on any old Friday night and he was knocking back whiskies like blackcurrant squash. Plus, Tom the Target seemed to me to be the sort of man in bars who probably chats to random women in bars all of the time. My face probably blurred into a crowd of others in his mind. He would’ve forgotten about me the minute he left for the puking friend at the Burger King. I can whisk past him, if I keep going – keep my head down. Plus, he certainly wouldn’t recognise me today. I look like the underside of a foot; like a doll rescued from a fire. Face the colour of clay, the bags under my eyes like two saggy, dark prunes. When Tom the Target saw me at the bar, I was perfectly turned out. A thick slodge of make-up on my face, my best dress on, my hair, freshly blow-dried and glossy, a night of sleep under my belt, uninterrupted by criminal, ovulating foxes.Foxes.Those bloody Sycamore foxes causing me to look like I got caught in a lawnmower. A lawnmower followed by getting trapped in some sort of waterturbine—

‘Hey?’

Shit.

I stop on the rain-damp tiles, twist my face into faux surprise, and grin out a, ‘Oh! Hi! Hello! Bonjour!’ and Tom straightens, locks his phone. He pushes his phone into his pocket and smiles. He wants to chat. He wants to catch up. With me, the melted doll. Joy. I bypass Goode’s and walk the few paces to meet him.

‘Hi.’ He looks so awake, so clean and together, that I want to put my head into my handbag to hide my own. I know I look dreadful – I caught my reflection in the train window and gave a big shrug.Who cares,I’d thought,it’s not like you’re going to see anyone besides Shauna and maybe Jason, and they’re used to the post-foxes ‘are you quite sure you’re not ill, Natalie?’ face.Sod’s law. That’s what this is. Although he did say hello, so I must sort of look like the Me he met in the restaurant.

‘Hiya.’ My eyes drop to the bag in his hand – at the top is a cake box with a window. ‘And you are—’

‘Tom,’ he says with a smile, putting a large hand to his chest. ‘From—’

‘From the bar. I know. From Avocado Clash. I remember.’

‘Oh.’

‘I was going to say –and you are holding cupcakes. Bright orange ones, covered in …’ I lean to look through the cellophane of the box. ‘Shoes?’

Tom gives a slow smile. ‘Yeah. A gift.’

‘Well, that’s very nice of you.’

‘It’s been known to happen,’ he says, easily. ‘So, did Ipass the test?’

‘Sorry?’

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