Page 24 of A Slow Fire Burning

“That’s right,” Irene said, her eyebrows knitting together. “I take it you heard about what happened to Daniel, then?” she asked, and Laura nodded.

“Yeah. Yeah, you could say that.”

“It’s been all over the news, hasn’t it, and they haven’t caught the people who did it.”

“Early days, I suppose,” Laura said, her gaze slipping away from Irene’s, gratefully casting her eye over the list that the woman had given her, frowning as she did. “Is this your list? Did she write this?”

Irene nodded. “Oh, yes, she didn’t have the patience to wait for me to think of the things I needed, she just went into the kitchen and looked in my cupboards anddeduced.”

Laura rolled her eyes. “Muesli?You don’t like muesli, you like crunchy nut cornflakes.”

“I did tell her that,” Irene said, “but she wasn’t having it.”

“Wild rice? What the actual... JesusChrist.” Laura ripped up the list, tossing the pieces into the air like confetti. “What you should do, yeah, when you think of something you need, is make a note on your phone—”

“Oh, I can’t type on those things, it’s all too small and I can’t see what’s going on even with my glasses, and half the time the damn thing changes your words without you asking, so you end up with gibberish—”

“No, no,” Laura protested, “you don’t have totypeanything. What I do, see, is record stuff. I’ve got a terrible memory so as soon as I think of something I need to do or buy or whatever, I just use the voice recorder so you don’t need to type, you just need to say stuff—”

Irene shook her head. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. I’ve no idea how that works. I’m not even sure I have one of those on my phone.”

“Course you do.” Laura picked up Irene’s handset and swiped the screen. She located the voice recorder app and clicked on it. “Crunchy nut cornflakes,” she enunciated, loudly. “Not soddingmuesli.” She winked at Irene. “Then, see here, you can play it back.”Crunchy nut cornflakes, not sodding muesli, the phone intoned.

“Oh, that does look easy,” Irene laughed. “Show me again.”

After they’d put together a new list, Irene told Laura to take a twenty-pound note from her purse to cover the shopping. Irene paid her five pounds per time to fetch her groceries, which was pretty generous since it generally took her all of fifteen minutes, but this time Laura helped herself to two twenties anyway. She spent fourteen pounds and pocketed the rest, losing the receipt on the way home.

While she unpacked the groceries, she filled Irene in on what had been going on—how she’d lost her key and had to break into her flat, how she’d hurt her arm and then lost her job on top of that. She left out the part about Daniel. Irene didn’t want to hear about that, didn’t want to hear about the fucking and the argument and the getting arrested.

“I’m really sorry I didn’t get in touch earlier,” Laura told her, once she’d finished putting everything away, once she’d made them both a cup of tea and laid some chocolate biscuits out on a plate. “I’ve just been all in a spin, you know?” Irene was sitting in her favorite chair and Laura was leaning up against the radiator under the window, her legs stuck out in front of her. “I didn’t mean to let you down.”

“Oh, Laura.” Irene shook her head. “You didn’t let me down, I was just worried about you. If something like that happens again, you must let me know. I might be able to help you.”

Laura thought of the money she’d taken and hated herself. She should give it back. She should slip it back into Irene’s purse, and then just ask her, straight out, the way a normal person would, fora loan. For help, just like Irene said. It was too late now, though, wasn’t it? Irene’s bag was right there next to her chair—she couldn’t put the money back now; there was no way she could do it without Irene noticing. And anyway, if ever there was a time to ask for help it had just passed, a few seconds back, when Irene offered it. She stayed for a little while longer, time for another cup of tea, a couple more biscuits, but she’d barely the appetite for it; her dishonesty curdled within her, souring everything.

She made her excuses. She left.

On her way out, she noticed that the door to number three—Angela Sutherland’s house—was slightly ajar. She pushed it open, very gently. Peering inside, she saw Carla Sutherland’s coat draped over the banister, the expensive handbag hanging from the newel post, and the other bags, the shopper and the tote, just slung on the floor. Just lying there, within reach of an open door! Fucking rich people. Sometimes they just asked for it.

•••

Back at home,she emptied the contents of the tote bag onto her living room floor, her heart racing as, along with the crappy old scarf and the decent but ancient Yves Saint Laurent jacket, came tumbling two small leather boxes. She grabbed the first, the smaller, purple box, and opened it: a gold ring, set with what looked like a large ruby. In the second, the smaller, brown leather box, there was a Saint Christopher’s medal, also in gold, with the initials BTM engraved on the back, along with a date: March 24, 2000. A christening present, maybe? Not for Daniel; the initials were wrong. Some other child. She snapped the box shut. It was a shame about the engraving, she thought, it made the medal less sellable. But the ring, if it was real, that must be worth a bit.

What a piece of shit she was.

In the kitchen, she emptied her pockets and counted out all the cash she had to her name: thirty-nine pounds fifty, twenty-six of which she’d stolen from her friend Irene.

What a lying, thieving lowlife.

Laura listened to the voice recordings on her own phone, listened to her own voice reminding her to contact the council about her housing benefit, to contact the building’s maintenance people about the boiler (again), to call the nurse at the doctor’s surgery to talk about refilling her prescription, to buy milk, cheese, bread, tampons...

She paused the recording, exhausted at the very prospect of all the things she had to do, at the obstacles she could already see rising in front of her. She scrolled quickly through her messages, from boys she’d been chatting to, prospects she’d been cultivating in whom she now had no interest and for whom she had no energy. She listened to her voicemails, one of them a cold call about insurance, the other a message from her psychologist.

You’ve missed two appointments, Laura, so I’m afraid if you don’t make the next one we’re going to have to take you off the service, do you understand? I don’t want to do that because I think we’ve been making good progress and keeping you on a nice, even keel and we don’t want all that hard work to go to waste, do we? So I’m expecting to see you on Monday afternoon at three and if you can’t make it, please ring me back today to reschedule....

Laura slid lower into her chair. She gently massaged her scalp with the tips of her fingers, squeezing her eyes shut, tears sliding out from under her lids and across her cheekbones.Stop stop stop, she said quietly to herself.If only it could stop.

Laura had been referred to the psychologist after the fork incident. She was a nice enough woman with a small face and large eyes; she reminded Laura of some sort of woodland creature. She told Laura that she needed to stopreacting. “You seem to spend yourentire life firefighting, Laura. You keep lurching from one crisis to the next, so what we need to do is to find some way to break this pattern of reaction. We need to see if we can devise some strategies...”

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