Page 8 of The Key to My Heart

‘It’s fine that you’re not ready, Natalie,’ says Shauna. ‘And listen, you don’t have to be anything. You know? You can just bethisperson for a while. This Natalie, in front of me, here. What’s wrong with that?’

I grimace.

‘Well,Ilike her,’ she says, taking a glug of tea.

‘But this Natalie is no fun,’ I reply. ‘This Natalie’s grumpy and doesn’t like having dinner with her friends and doesn’t fancy tall and handsome strangers who have amazing teeth. I can’t evenimaginewhat it’d be like to feel like that. And that’s who they want.’

‘They being your friends?’

‘They being pretty much everyone I know. My friends don’t say it, of course they don’t. But I think they all want me to be who I used to be. Single Natalie Fincher from university. Single Natalie Fincher who had one-night stands and chatted guys up at house parties and snogged them in the understairs toilet.’ Lurch had been a good kisser to be fair. Tender, passionate.

‘But … you’re bereaved, my love. Surely they must understand that.’

And I swallow at that.Bereaved.Me. It still seems completely incomprehensible that I would be bereaved. A widow. A widow at thirty-two. Widows wear black and wail at gravesides. Widows crochet the days away and wait for their grown-up daughters to call. Widows fall out of lofts getting their Christmas lights down because their grown-up sons are too busy in business meetings to pop in. I’d said that to Lucy once, who dropped her voice low, as if we were surrounded, and said, ‘That issostereotypical, Natalie. And not to mention bleak. Besides, crochet is very trendy now. I follow someone on Insta who crocheted themselves a three piece suite.’

Shauna gulps down her tea again, as if it isn’t steaming like a jacuzzi bath. ‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘regardless of what they might want, Natalie, nobody can turn back the clock, be who they used to be. And, believe me, I’d love to. I miss mywaist.I miss having so much energy I’d skip a night’s sleep. Karaoke. Watching the wrestling at our old civic hall. Going to work on an empty tank butgetting through it with a coffee and a cigarette. Gosh.’ She smiles as if she can see it in moving pictures on a private screen. ‘But you just … you can’t. Things change, and people change. We have to just keep waking up and moving forward. Right?’

I nod. ‘Right,’ I say. I don’t add that I don’t feel like I’ve moved forward a single pace in two and a half years. Longer, if you count the months Russ was in hospital after his accident. Life stopped then, for me. And that I have no desire really, to take another step. Stagnant. That’s what I am, I guess. The opposite of what I used to be, not so long ago.

‘Like this sandwich for example.’ She lifts a slice of the bread in front of her as if it’s a snotty tissue. ‘If I could turn back the clock, I’d tell Jason to take his bloody eyes off the girl with all those piercings and listen to me when I say cheeseandtomato. I swear to God. Brains are in his knackers.’ Shauna slides out her chair, pats my shoulder with a chubby hand. ‘Better go back in, sort my sandwich, get back to work.’ And she disappears back into the coffee shop, the toastie in her hand.

I stay for an hour and grab some milk, wine and cereal from the little M&S, and it’s when an icy blast of wind ruffles my hair that I realise, I’m not wearing my bobble hat. I definitely arrived with it. And I definitely had it at the piano. I left it in the lid of the beaten-up stool – where I hope it still is. See, this is what happens when you start the day thawing out pipes in your dressing gown and odd socks, and catapult yourself out of the house far too early, far too tired, in the far-too cold.By mid-morning, your brain turns to a giant useless joint of ham.

‘Fuck,’ I say to nobody but my bag of Coco Pops and bottle of red, and I whisk down the escalator. Panic rises in my chest. Actual panic. I’ve been late for flights. I’ve played to crowds of five hundred people. I’ve posed topless with nothing but antlers covering my crotch for a charity project Roxanne ran in uni fighting for Greenpeace. Didn’t break a droplet of sweat. But ahat.A hat is what makes me panic these days. A hat that had cost fifteen euros ninety nine as part of a set. A hat that makes my hair stand on end like I have my hands on some sort of device in the Science Museum. But Russ chose them. He picked them off the rack, he’d wrapped the scarf around my neck, pulled me towards him holding each end, and kissed my forehead. We were in Barcelona, a year before his accident, and it hadsnowed.The Beast from the East, as the media had called it, and I had a suitcase full of nothing but jeans and T-shirts and after-sun lotion. He’d walked for blocks as I waited in a café, found a shop that sold hats and scarfs and climbing gear and, as sleet fell and fell outside, and I’d sulked, he’d returned, a purple set for me, and charcoal grey for himself. I can still remember him appearing at the glass door of the café, laughing at me shivering through the window, the edges steamed up, holding the scarf high like a trophy. And I can’t lose it. He traipsed across snow to get it for me. He chose it for me.

The piano is empty when I get there, nobody playing, no tourists holding fingers down on bum notes, tryingto remember the tunes they learned in school, nobody posing for photos. And I’m relieved to find that my hat is right there, in the shabby donated stool that most people don’t realise opens. But – there’s a piece of music there too, resting on top of it.Anotherone. A piece of glossy paper, the same squeaky, shininess as the last, with sheet music printed on either side – a piece of music that wasn’t here when I started playing this morning.

I pull it out, flip it over to the headed title page, heart drumming in my ears.

And then it stills. The music in my hands – it’s Russ’s favourite song.

Chapter Four

‘Will you just hold her hands, Natalie?’

‘Huh?’

‘It’s just, I’m trying to tie this thing on the jumper and every time I do, her head falls off, and you’re just sort of … standing there.’

The mannequin between Priya and I wobbles, its dead eyes fixed on me, judging.

‘Sorry, Priya. Sorry, I’m just—’

‘You’re daydreaming, I know,’ she says. ‘Physicallyatwork, but not actually mentallyhere.And meanwhile I’m … I’m …’ Priya grits her teeth, ties a ribbon at the back of the mannequin’s hard, shiny neck and its big, plasticky head shudders. ‘Seconds from tying this ribbon around my own neck. I know she’s your sister and I know she says they’re in demand, but fuck –ribbons.When will it end? When?’

It’s Friday today, and because it’s the last one of the month, it’s also what my sister Jodie has pennedFreshen-up Friday. (She was proud of that. Announced it like she’d discovered penicillin on an old mouldy coat out the back.) Freshen-up Friday is the day of the month we re-dress the mannequins with something new. Andmy sister Jodie is all about ribbons at the moment, and so her little clothes shop in Camden Town, Tina, is packed with them. Everything for sale has a ribbon on it. Jumpers with bare backs and criss-cross ribbons, bags with ribbons as tassels, ribbons as shoelaces like we’re selling footwear to Noddy and nobody else. And Priya and I, as mere employees, have no choice but to love ribbons. Worship ribbons.Becomeribbons. And I daren’t question Jodie’s fashion know-how of course. Last time I did, she froze, like I’d casually informed her that I’d just discovered her new mannequins were a collection of freshly embalmed corpses.

‘But I’ve researched,’ she said, her eyes wide. ‘Florals are veryspecificallyin, Natalie. So are the seventies. Flares, blouses –beards.’ She’d bought a copy of Vogue in with her the next day. ‘See,’ she’d said, slapping a magazine down in front of me on the counter. ‘Florals.Stick that up your arse.’

Tina is Mum and Dad’s shop – they have three of them. Clothing boutiques they started in the eighties. They retired, moved out of London to the Dorset countryside three years ago and my big sister Jodie quit secondary-school teaching and took on the Camden shop when they moved. I work here four days a week and have done since Russ, and my best friend Priya, works five days. And Jodie – well, Jodie just works, with no start, and no end, just one endless cycle. She lives and breathes Tina. Talks about it in her sleep too, according to her husband. I’m not sure she’d ever admit it, but it’s as if she’s still waiting for the day Mum tells her shedoesn’t know enough about fashion to run it, and she just can’t let that happen. Three years in, though, I can’t imagine her doing anything else but this. (I’d never tell her I bet Russ a packet of Twixes that Jodie would last six months before quitting in a Season Finale levels of dramatic showdown with Mum, though.)

Priya nudges my arm now. When I look up, she’s grinning at me like she’s posing for a photo I’m about to take.

‘What?’

‘I know that dreamy face like the back of my hand,’ she says. ‘This is about Tom, isn’t it? Oh my God, itis.’

‘What?’

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