Page 39 of Famous Last Words

Eventually, she puts her down and walks to her own room, where Libby is sleeping, too. She watches her sister for just a few seconds, her face at rest, then gets on the bed and lies down the wrong way, fully clothed. She should sleep, andmaybe she will, right here in her jeans. She begins to slow blink. She’s alone now. Untethered. Suddenly, she craves the siege, the hostage negotiator, the structure of it. What is she supposed to do now?

Libby must feel her presence because she stirs, opening her eyes.

‘Hi,’ she says softly. The dawn has the bedroom in grey fuzz.

‘Hi,’ Cam says.

Libby sits up. Next to her, on her pillow, Polly’s baby monitor whirrs softly. Something about it turns Cam’s heart over. How hard this would have been for her sister, yet she did it anyway, to help her.

Cam lies there on her back, looking down her body at her sister, topping and tailing like they used to do as children. ‘I’m so sorry this has happened,’ Libby says, a simple sentiment, but one that Cam appreciates. ‘I can’t even think of …’

‘There’s nothing to say.’

Libby reaches over and rests her hand on Cam’s knee.

‘I mean …’ Cam says, her brain just starting the most tentative beginning of processing. ‘Like – even if he came back now, he’d go to prison for life.’ She stops. How could anybody begin to talk about this or truly absorb it?

‘What have they said happens now?’ Libby asks.

‘It’s a manhunt. He escaped out the back like someone in – I don’t know –Mission Impossible?’

‘I know … Do they know who the hostages are yet?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cam says.

‘I think you should get some sleep,’ Libby says gently.

‘Maybe.’

Libby rolls on to her side, her body close to Cam’s, and they stay like that for a long time, awake but silent.

Cam’s eyes close completely. The months of sleep deprivation catching up, the past day’s adrenaline. She lets herself sink into sleep like a deep, tepid bath, as comforting as childhood. She dreams of Luke, that he’s outside, on the street, that he comes back for her, shouts to her –Tell my wife that I love her– but when she wakes, she’s alone in the afterworld.

Act Two

SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE SIEGE

20

Cam

Libby: What number date is this? I’ve lost count? Gooooood luck!!

Cam: Thanks.

It’s the evening, but it’s not busy in Côte Brasserie. It’s just Cam, Charlie, an old couple in the corner, and a few young people wearing headphones and working at miniature laptops, people who nomadically acquire any old place for the day or night as their office.

There’s something plush and nostalgic about it, the quiet and the dimness like a hotel bar or an art gallery. ‘Hook me up to some alcohol. Please. And some fun,’ Cam says to Charlie.

They are sitting at a table with four place settings, right in the window. Charlie, looking at his phone, glances up at Cam as she says this. He’s a newish freelance research assistant, had a career change in his early forties, wanted to try something completely different. They met at a work do in her agency’s office, three and a half months ago, right after she made some initial enquiries to sell the house. He walked into their office and she overheard him say, ‘There’s somebody actually sitting reading a novel just in your foyer! Are they on display?’ and something in Cam liked that cynicism about publishing, after a lifetime with writers. Charlie is a personfirmly in the establishment, not outside of it. He believes very much in working hard. He runs at the weekends. He would never sit and ponder what it was all for. Cam likes this. Someone who’s good at life. Who won’t put a foot wrong in it. She’s enjoyed attending work things with her dark new friend, who says things like, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but I hardly ever read.’

Cam smiles broadly at him and plays with her hair, a short messy bob these days, lightened, too, as a way to cover the greys. Sometimes she doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror, which she finds kind of thrilling: that was the point.

‘Alcohol and fun, you say?’ He rocks the chair back on its legs, his eyes on her.

‘One hundred per cent.’

He catches a waiter’s attention, then raises his eyebrows to Cam in a question. ‘The strongest cocktail,’ she says. ‘I could – I don’t know. I could stay out all night.’

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