Читать книгу Someday Find Me - Nicci Cloke - Страница 13

Work was pants but then it was never exactly my highlight of the day. In general it wasn’t all that bad to be truthful – Cadbury, my boss, was pretty decent and it was usually busy enough that the time whizzed by, and even though it was stressful when you were in the thick of it, it was always nice when you suddenly realised your shift was over just like that. Much better than just sitting there watching the clock, which was what I was doing that day, just watching the hands tick tick round slow as you like while the only two lunchers we had were sat there sliding down the plasticky sofas and staring at the last half of the last bottle of wine they’d ordered. The pub next door was heaving but that was because it was a blokey pub and football was on. I just stood there with an order pad and sketched out some set lists. There’s something lovely about set lists – it’s like maths and art all swirled into one because the timings have to fit and you feel dead clever when you work out how to make two songs go together, when you crack the code and slip the two beats together – like the two bits on a zip – whoosh. And when people tell you something was good you feel like it’s a compliment just to you yourself and nothing to do with the songs at all. Not that many people got to hear my mixes, just sometimes at parties if I managed to shuffle my way behind the deck at the late hours when everyone starts to fidget and stare at the ceiling and think about their real lives and get restless and worried and pick at their faces and wonder how they’re going to get home, and nobody’s really listening then anyway. But I did still carry on doing them, and I’d play them to Saf sometimes, in the middle of the night when we were both magically awake, and she’d listen, lying in bed on her front, wiggling her feet with her face propped on her hands, all blue from the glow off the laptop screen and it was in those secret special moments that I thought, Nothing will ever be as brilliant as this, nobody in the world is as brilliant as her.

Cadbury was out the back and he said he was drawing up rotas but he definitely wasn’t, he was snoozing away at his desk with slinky soul playing softly in the background so we couldn’t hear his bear snores from outside the door. The two chefs were sitting outside on the damp step next to the bins smoking away and getting angry about nothing much at all, but they were just working themselves up ready for the dinner shift because the angrier you are the better chef you are or something, seemed like that’s how it worked anyway. Jenny the little waitress was in the kitchen chopping up lots of leaves for the salad garnishes ready for service, and stopping every five seconds to count the number of blue plasters on her fingers, but you couldn’t blame her really after that one time. So it was just me and the two early-peakers in the corner and I was feeling proper restless, and even trying to work out when the optimum point to drop Soulwax’s Krack was and whether putting that and Green Velvet in one set was being too much of a crowd-pleaser couldn’t keep me busy. Staring sadly out the window I watched the blokes spilling out of O’Phalley’s next door for fags and phone calls and so it must’ve been half-time.

Fate Jones was on the telly again. Her parents kept doing these press conferences with the same two fat coppers either side of them, her mum and her dad and her boyfriend, who was all greasy and spotty and tattooed and not anybody you might think would have such a pretty and giggly girlfriend. All the papers reckoned it was him that had done it so when you watched them on telly you knew that everyone was just staring at him and looking for clues, like a drop of sweat on the forehead or a pulsing vein and if you saw one you knew it would be in all the papers the next day. Some of the news channels had started up twenty-four-hour coverage by then, so you could get interactive and press the button for round-the-clock coverage – you know, press red for news, green for sport, yellow for celebrity and blue for Fate Jones, that kind of thing. There wasn’t all that much to report so it was just live round-the-clock coverage of her parents’ front door, which wasn’t much to look at unless the milkman was popping by or the postie but other than that it was a bit pointless. But you still found yourself watching for ages just in case anything happened. Like you wouldn’t want to miss breaking news so you had to watch all the unbroken news just to be sure. The telly was annoying me that day, though, with just the red door staring out at me and not even a pint of milk on the step for a bit of variety, so I turned it off and looked away.

I had a text on my phone when I had a little sneaky check of it under the bar, and there was still nobody around so I looked at it. It was a picture message from my sister, Hannah. It was of her face cos they’d been having another go at it, I remembered then. It did look a bit better even though it was still all red and tight and scarred and her eye still drooped and gaped in a weird way and it still wouldn’t move with the other, I knew that even though obviously I couldn’t tell just from a photo but they’d told her all along that it would never work properly again and I think she’d just got used to that. Her face probably looked loads better but it was hard to judge when the photo had half the normal side of her face in it, half her nose and half her mouth and half her forehead, all normal pale smooth skin and then the jagged monstery part across her cheek and her eye. You couldn’t see the arm in the picture, just a close-up of her face but that didn’t really matter cos they’d done all they could do with the arm, they’d already told her that, and it didn’t look all that bad when it was in her sleeve; it just wasn’t much good for anything any more, that was all.

It was weird, thinking about how it wasn’t all that long before that all the news had been about the bomb and now it was about Fate Jones. In a weird way I sort of knew how Fate Jones’s family felt, but when it was Han’s face on the screen it was with loads of other people’s pictures too, flashing up as they listed the injuries and even worse the dead, and later as they filmed her and other people attending court to testify and to hear the verdict of the inquest and all the other stuff that dragged on and on long after it was over. Fate Jones was on the screen on her own and that must have been a lot worse. I looked up at her front door again and thought about the people behind it and whether their TV was on and showing the same picture and whether they ever pressed blue for Fate Jones.

Thinking about what it had been like back then and the horrible sadness and worry of it all, I felt terrible thinking Hannah’s face still looked bad and that I hadn’t seen her for a long old time, so I texted her back and said nice things about how good it looked and then I put two kisses instead of my usual one. The lunchers were finally staggering out and they’d have headaches by teatime, I reckoned, but I smiled and waved ’bye and then I went over and started clearing their table.