Page 21 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
“Matthew, you’re a young man. You’ve got years ahead of you…” Melvin says.
But Matthew isn’t listening. He’s lost in a maze of fear.
“Stella’s number was twenty-three, and look what’s happened to her!” he cries, streams of sweat rolling down his face now. “If my number’s correct, then I’ve got three months, max. This whole thing has made me realize how much time I’ve wasted. I thought I’d have years to, you know, get serious about life…”
Melvin sees that the cocky character from the dinner party had been a mask, hiding someone else—someone vulnerable—underneath.
“Listen, we’ve had a bit too much to drink. Stella’s death was simply a tragic accident; I really believe that. It’s just a coincidence that her number was twenty-three,” Melvin tells Matthew, usinghis practiced voice-of-authority tone that proved effective with raucous teenagers and overexcited football fans.
Matthew’s hands drop from his face, and Melvin sees he’s getting through to him.
“Do you really think so?” he asks, just like a child asking to be reassured that Father Christmas does exist.
“I really do. Now, get yourself home, have an early night, and maybe take a lovely lady out for lunch tomorrow.”
They say goodbye outside the wine bar’s entrance. As he walks away, Melvin pulls his phone from his pocket, writes a text to Mary—On my way—and presses Send.
The Restaurant
March 2015
Three months later
Vivienne
“Weeeee…” A blur of red and blue shoots past Vivienne as she peruses a rack of blouses.
“Careful!” she calls after the speeding child, who is dressed in a Spider-Man outfit, nimbly swerving around the clothing racks on a Batman scooter.
Shaking her head, she wonders when children were suddenly allowed to ride scooters around M&S—and wearing a superhero costume, no less. As a child, she’d been expected to walk sensibly alongside her mother around the shops, warned to keep her shoes clean and make as little noise as possible.
“Bam, bam, bam,” the tiny terror cries, now shooting Vivienne from his wrist and then laughing hysterically while he leaps behind the twinsets.
Honestly, where are his parents?All Vivienne had wanted was to pop into town and pick up something to wear for her interview next week. After the month she’s had, is it really too much to ask? The last thing she needs is to be terrorized by a knee-high superhero whose parents have apparently abandoned him—perhaps in the hope that a kindly older lady will take him off their hands.
“Charlie, where are you?” the voice of a frazzled mother calls out. A familiar voice. Vivienne is stuck to the spot, her eyes wide as if she’s been caught. Just in time, she ducks behind some turtlenecks.
“There you are, you silly billy. Why are you always running away from Mummy?” The relief in Cat’s voice is evident. She scoops up the little blond-haired boy and rains kisses down on his curls. Despite her aching knees, Vivienne’s heart throbs at the sight of a love she’ll never know.
“Bam, bam, bam!” He giggles.
“Oh no, you got me!” Cat laughs. “Now, would Spider-Man like a slice of chocolate cake at the café?”
“Yay!” he cheers.
As the pair walk off, Cat awkwardly carrying Charlie in her right arm and the scooter in her left, Vivienne can hear their happy chatter fade away. Standing up, she frowns as her bones creak and complain. Lately, every movement feels like an effort. As a young woman, she took her supple body for granted. Now, with every twist and shift, she is painfully aware of her joints, her muscles, her aging bones. God, it’s depressing, getting older. Vivienne leaves the store without an interview blouse, makes her way back to thetube station and onward to Teddington with the image of Cat and Charlie framed in her mind. There is no mistaking that he is her son, not a nephew or friend’s child; she’d referred to herself as “Mummy.” And they had matching dimples, like brackets around their mouths. Cat has worked for Vivienne for two years and never once mentioned that she has a son. Charlie looked to be around three, so he can only have been a baby when she started at the magazine. Vivienne can’t make sense of it.Why wouldn’t she tell me?Did Cat think she would treat her differently if she knew she was a mother? Was it because Vivienne was childless herself and Cat felt she wouldn’t understand? Suddenly, she starts to spot clues that she’d blindly missed in the last two years. The time when Cat interviewed a woman whose young son had leukemia, and Cat sobbed her way through the phone call. Vivienne gave her a right rollicking afterward, lecturing her on professionalism. The times Cat dashed off with her mobile and told Vivienne her friend was going through a rough patch with a difficult boyfriend. Those mornings she turned up with dark circles under her eyes and Vivienne presumed she’d been out partying late with her friends.
And last week, when the editor announced that the magazine would be closing in a month’s time, Vivienne saw Cat’s crumbling face as a typical overemotional reaction.
“What are we going to do? I need this job,” Cat cried, and Vivienne dismissed her concerns. She was in her twenties, had her whole career ahead of her. It was Vivienne herself who was bound to struggle, at her age and having worked at the same place for years. Now Vivienne sees that Cat has a little boy who’s dependenton her, while Vivienne just has her two cats, who mostly ignore her anyway. Plus, the mortgage on her cottage was paid off years ago.
Closing her front door behind her, Vivienne is greeted by piles of papers on her living room floor. Despite her meticulous system, she managed to accumulate an extortionate amount of paperwork over her many years at the magazine. Perching on the end of her old sofa, she grabs a handful of papers and pulls them onto her knee. As she flicks through, a yellowing photo floats to the floor. Bending over to pick it up, she catches her breath at the image of the impossibly young version of herself, James’s tanned arm draped casually over her shoulder, the leftovers of calamari and chips on the table in front of them. Closing her eyes, she can almost taste that moment again, the lemony, salty seafood and the start of something new, the hope that she may have found her forever. Then she remembers the tears, the physical pain of a broken heart, of a broken body, and the catalyst for her first fugue state. Pushing the picture to the bottom of the pile, she continues her search and finally finds what she’s looking for. An article Cat wrote not long after she’d started at the magazine. It is covered in Vivienne’s signature red pen, tattooed with crossings and capital letters saying things likeWATCH YOUR SPELLING!andTHIS MAKES NO SENSE!Vivienne’s comments remind her of something. Then she realizes—Stella’s parents arguing outside the church. Her furious mother shouting,She lived for your approval and all you did was criticize. Regardless of the wealth her father had bestowed on her, Stella had only heard his disapproval. She’d ended up feeling inadequate and turned that negativity toward her rival vloggers. Which—in turn—had endedin her death. Reading over her notes, Vivienne sees that she’s been “trolling” Cat in her own way. She looks now at Cat’s writing and sees a certain flourish, an effortless style that made for easy reading. But Vivienne’s comments didn’t refer to it—or say anything positive at all. Slumping down on the sofa, Vivienne feels ashamed. She’d seen herself as an inspiring mentor; yes, she was tough, but only because she wanted Cat to improve. Now she sees that she’s been overly critical at every turn, passing on her own feelings of inadequacy to Cat and hammering down the girl’s confidence. Cat must have been miserable at work, and then gone home to look after her young son alone.
***
The next day, Vivienne sits at her desk, watching her colleagues moving with purpose around her, filling cardboard boxes with old magazines for new portfolios, freebie beauty products, and handfuls of pens.
“Could you look at thisfeaturefor me?” the editor asks, dropping a sheet of paper onto her desk, then winking with all the subtlety of an early ’90s boy band ballad.
