Читать книгу The Day I Died - Polly Courtney - Страница 10

‘Afternoon! Tickets, please…thank you…lovely…Tickets, please…’

Jo’s heart fluttered up into her mouth as she offered her ticket up to the inspector, her palms sticky with sweat.

‘Errrr,’ he squinted for several seconds and then handed it back. ‘Lovely, thank you.’

Jo pushed the ticket back into her pocket with a shaky hand, trying to steady her breathing. It was ridiculous, this anxiety. She had to get it under control. It wasn’t as though she’d done anything wrong; she had paid her three pounds, she was sitting in Standard Class, she wasn’t playing loud music…But that wasn’t the point.

The point was, the inspector was in a position of authority. He wasn’t a policeman, but almost. He reminded her of the people she’d run away from two days before. His voice was like that of the paramedic’s: firm but kind, with the propensity to turn officious. Any small reminder of that scene outside the club was enough to make her skin crawl. She alighted from the train with relief.

According to the map outside, Oxford station was a little way out of the city. Jo assessed the commotion by the bus stop–screaming brats and stressed mothers and pushchairs–and looked up at the near-cloudless sky. The walk would do her good, she thought.

She had a vague plan: to wander round town, looking at people, seeing things, trying to remember something about her life. She had come into Oxford because she needed to see something that wasn’t a pensioner or a cat or a well-kept lawn, or an irate commuter on his way into London. If Jo was right about being a London girl–and she felt strangely sure she was–then the comings and goings in Radley village weren’t going to be enough to trigger any memories from her past.

She knew she was being impatient, expecting things to come flooding back after only a few days. But, as she was beginning to realise, impatient was just the way she was. She hated queuing, she didn’t walk slowly and she wasn’t a fan of the slow pace of life. That was one of the reasons she felt so sure she’d been a Londoner before. Londoners didn’t stop at the checkout to talk about yellow lines or lampposts or letter box sizes like the ones she’d seen in Mrs Phillips’ shop that afternoon. Jo wanted to remember things now–or at least, she was pretty sure she did.

Oxford city centre was a typical mix of old stonework, sixties breeze blocks and modern, all-glass storefronts. The pedestrian zone was teeming with Saturday afternoon dawdlers: ambling couples, spotty teenagers on skateboards, bored-looking fathers with boisterous children on reins, frazzled mothers laden down with a hundred plastic bags. Jo lapped it up, inhaling the smells–jacket potatoes and coffee and sun cream–and picking out fragments of conversation perforated with peals of laughter.

Towards the edge of town, the streets turned into cobbled lanes that meandered between tall, sandstone buildings lined with bicycles and occasional students. It was August, so the undergraduates were on holiday, Jo guessed. She stopped in an archway and looked out at the vast, sun-lit courtyard that lay beyond. It was like looking through a secret door into another world: fountains, lawns, turrets and gargoyles…Jo watched as a pair of girls her own age wandered past, clutching folders and books, wondering whether she had seen this world before. Maybe she’d even lived in it.

‘Can I help you?’ A small man in a bowler hat stepped out of the shadows and smiled at her kindly.

‘Oh. Um, I was just…’

The man continued to look at her, and from the corner of her eye Jo could see his eyebrows lift. But she didn’t reply. Something else had caught her attention. Along the street, propped up on the pavement, was a small black sign: ‘QUIET PLEASE. EXAMS IN PROGRESS.’

Jo couldn’t breathe. She felt nervous and sick. Exams. It was something to do with exams, only she didn’t know what.

‘Are you a student, ma’am?’

‘Er…’

‘A prospective student?’

‘Um…No.’ Jo looked at the man. ‘No, sorry. I was just, um, waiting for someone. But I guess they’ve…gone.’

‘Right you are.’ The man dipped his head politely and disappeared back through the arch.

Jo walked on, past the sign, trying to form a sensible explanation for her sudden twitchiness. She felt nervous at the idea of exams. So what? No one liked doing exams. They were horrible things. But…Jo tried to dig deeper, but the reasoning became flaky and brittle. She couldn’t draw any conclusions. Except perhaps that she had done badly in exams at some point, or cheated, or failed…

Jo continued her random circuit, turning left and right at will and trying to quell the anxiety inside her. Eventually, she heard the bustle of the high street and followed the sounds back into town.

In the hour that followed, Jo wandered and watched people’s faces: old, young, black, white, smiling, scowling. Sometimes, someone would catch her eye. Occasionally, on making eye contact, a shudder would pass through Jo’s body and she would dart into a shop or a drift of pedestrians, fearing recognition–or worse, acknowledgement. She spoke to no one.

A blackboard outside one of the large chain bookstores promised ‘Half-price iced coffee and cool, comfy sofas’. A few doors down, a J D Wetherspoon advertised double shots for two pounds. Jo hesitated. Her mouth was already watering at the thought of the cold, sour liquid ripping through her insides. She could taste the vodka on her tongue.

Jo stepped past the doors of the bookshop and headed for the pub, then stopped. The special-offer bunting fluttered over the entrance, inviting her in for her two-pound shots. She tracked back and tried to feel tempted by the half-price iced coffee.

It was no good. Jo didn’t want iced coffee. She wanted alcohol. She turned again and then came to another halt, feeling her addiction pulling her forwards and the reins of her willpower holding her back–a tug of war where both sides were so strong that neither could win. Then finally, her willpower gave a final tug. She spun round and marched into the shop towards the stairs that led to the second-floor café.

The ‘cool, comfy sofas’, it turned out, were all taken. So were all the other seats except for a couple of wooden chairs hidden amongst large family groups that looked neither comfy nor cool. Jo hovered by the window, clutching her half-price iced coffee and waiting for someone to leave.

‘Wanna sit down?’

Jo realised that the bald, bespectacled man with a laptop was talking to her.

‘Um…’ She floundered. Of course she wanted to sit down; she just didn’t want to sit down with him. ‘Yeah, thanks.’

She perched on the vacant seat and smiled to show her gratitude. The man grinned back in a rather creepy way. She looked out of the window.

‘You went for the special offer too,’ he remarked in a mechanical monotone.

She nodded civilly and sipped her drink.

‘Not so special, really, is it?’

Jo forced a laugh.

‘You wanna know what I think?’

No, thought Jo. She looked at him briefly, so as not to appear rude.

‘I think they double the price for a day, then they put it on “special offer”–’ he indicated quotation marks with his pale, bony fingers–‘at the usual rate. Ha.’

Jo grunted, turning her head pointedly towards the window. The man took the hint and started tapping on the keys of his laptop. When she was sure he was fully engrossed, she reached into the plastic bag that was serving as her handbag and drew out a chocolate digestive.

It would have been nice, she thought sadly, to have someone to talk to–someone trustworthy and practical and sensitive. She wouldn’t feel quite so alone, so vulnerable, if there was someone else in the world who knew her secret. What would be really helpful, of course, would be a friend who had known her before the bomb, but of course there was no way of finding such a person without coming clean to the world.

She still wasn’t entirely convinced that hiding herself away like this, pretending to be dead, was the best thing to do. There was a police station down the road; she had walked past it an hour ago. If she wanted, she could go in there and declare herself a victim of the Buffalo Club explosion. She could let them contact her family and wait while some probing shrink asked questions she couldn’t answer, then she could sit in an interview room, or cell or whatever, and hear from other people what sort of a person she really was. But even as she contemplated the idea, she felt sick with fear.

Something drew her attention at the edge of her field of vision. A headline. She had seen it earlier that day, in Mrs Phillips’ shop, but hadn’t dared stop to read the article in front of her landlady in case she aroused suspicion. Mrs P had already caught her trawling the newspapers for clues the day before, and she’d had to invent a ridiculous story about an old acting friend.

‘SINGLE LINE OF ENQUIRY FOR BUFFALO CLUB BOMB,’ read the headline. The woman reading the newspaper was directly behind her bald companion, so Jo could only just read the text without letting speccy think she was trying to make eye contact.

‘A group of young, radicalised Muslims are thought to be…’ The newspaper was lowered as the reader sipped her drink. Jo drank some of hers and waited. ‘…at the centre of the only line of enquiry for the explosion that claimed fourteen lives last Thursday. The bomb, thought to have been planted in a rucksack and left in the cloakroom of the…’ Baldy looked up from his typing. Jo gazed randomly around the café until she could hear the tap-tap of his fingers again.

She glanced at the newspaper and was perplexed to read ‘GIRL RESCUED BY INFLATABLE LOBSTER’. The woman had turned the page. Jo stirred her drink. Perhaps she’d slip into the shop and grab a paper when Mrs Phillips wasn’t around, or pretend to be looking for something else. Or maybe she should actually spend eighty pence or whatever and buy a newspaper, instead of sneaking around stealing things from people who were trying to help her. Jo sighed. She didn’t want to be like this. She wanted to be honest and kind, to put others first. But it was hard to put others first when…well, when her own survival was at stake. She had to think about herself, to stay on her toes–that was the reason for all this deceit. Or at least, she hoped it was.

Surreptitiously, she pulled out the notebook from her makeshift handbag and jotted a couple of things down under the heading ‘Bomb details’. She flicked back a couple of pages and stared at her messy scrawls from the other day. Then the typing stopped and she could feel the man’s eyes boring into her again through his thick-rimmed glasses. She shut the book.

‘Still using pen and paper, eh?’ He glanced proudly at his silver laptop and for a dreadful moment, Jo thought he might try to show her what he was working on. ‘I’ve practically forgotten how to write!’

Jo grunted politely and took a long swig. A vodka would have slipped down more easily, she thought. But that was the problem. She didn’t like the fact that alcohol had such a minor effect on her, that she was conditioned to use it. She hated that her body craved the stuff, that it functioned better with it than without it.

She looked out at the bustling high street below. Across the road, a middle-aged woman was standing, her handbag tucked under one arm and a giant box-shaped present on the ground beside her, all shiny red paper and curly ribbons. Anxiously, the woman looked left and then right, then checked her watch. Jo scanned the street, wondering which person or people, of the hundreds she could see from her elevated viewpoint, the woman was waiting for.

Like a character in some elaborate cuckoo clock, the woman went through her routine again. Look left, look right, check watch. Wait. Jo could see the anxiety on her face. She scanned the crowds again, then turned her attention back to the woman. Look left, look right, check watch. Wait.

Jo felt sorry for her; someone was clearly keeping her waiting, making her worry. But it wasn’t pity that she was feeling, five minutes later when the woman was still standing there, her head scanning the crowds even more frantically. It was shame.

Jo was making someone worry. Jo–or whatever her name was–had let herself become ‘missing, feared dead’, and there were people–or at least she guessed there were people–who were worrying about her, waiting, hoping.

Eventually, the woman’s stony face melted into a smile and even through the double-glazing Jo could hear a muffled cry as the two women threw their arms around one another. It was her daughter, thought Jo, watching as the younger woman emerged from the embrace and pointed gleefully at the red shiny parcel, her stylish white coat flapping in the breeze. It was her daughter who had been keeping her waiting.

The women moved off, laughing frivolously and making animated gestures with their hands. Jo felt a fresh wave of uncertainty wash over her. She couldn’t say why, but she felt quite sure that somewhere, right now, her mother was waiting for her, worrying.

She finished her drink and thought again of the police station down the road. That was the right thing to do. She had to turn herself in. She had to own up, for her mother’s sake. Whatever she’d done before, whatever the reasons for the paranoia, whatever the consequences, the only fair thing she could do was walk into that police station and come clean.

Jo stood up and took one final look out of the window, even though she knew the mother and daughter were long gone. In the spot where they had hugged, a man was sitting–or rather, lying. Jo peered down at the scene. Two people in uniforms were crouching over the man, who was dragging himself along the pavement like a slug.

A clearing had formed in the crowds as shoppers gave the crawling man a wide berth. It was only when Jo saw the dog–skinny, mangy and limping–that she realised. The man was a beggar. He was being ‘moved on’–only slowly, because he was drunk. Or disabled. Or ill. She didn’t know, and clearly the policemen didn’t care.

She watched as the man sloped off into the shadows and the crowds flowed back into the area. She picked up the pen and stared at her notebook. Yet again, she had convinced herself that coming clean was the right thing to do. She had gone right to the edge and looked over. And yet again, she was talking herself back down. She might have been right about her mum being out there, worrying. It was perfectly likely that she had family and friends who cared about her. But she’d been wrong to believe that their reunion would be like the one she’d witnessed outside.

Her role wasn’t that of the daughter in all this; she wasn’t an innocent latecomer. She was the tramp. She was the outsider, the one who didn’t belong. Maybe she did have friends and family, but so too did the homeless guy, presumably. For different reasons, they had left them behind. Jo didn’t even know what the reasons were, in her case, but she knew one thing for sure: she was on the run. And until she had worked out what exactly she was running from, she had to keep running.

Jo slipped the notebook into her bag and caught sight of the two words on the back that she’d copied from the scrap of paper. ‘SASKIA DAWSON.’ For the hundredth time, Jo strained to summon her memory. For the hundredth time, she drew a blank.

She bid her table companion farewell and walked out, having made her decision. It was time to put the only clue she had to good use.