‘Tell me about your date,’ I say to Wilf, partly to distract my mind from wandering too far down that particular road.
‘Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk toyouabout something.’ Wilf leans against his worktop, cheeks rosy from the hob steam. ‘Do you fancy investing in the pill?’
I frown, silently apologising to the lobster as I snap off a claw. ‘Investing?’
‘That’s what I said. I’ve been thinking of pitching the idea to a couple of pharma companies. Maybe including mine. I’m not sure yet. I’ve registered a business, just in case.’
I know Wilf’s had conversations with a lawyer recently. He seems confident he’s in the clear as far as intellectual property and ethics and all that other stuff is concerned.
‘Thought you might want to put in some of your advance,’ he says.
Last November, I got a publishing deal for my fifth novel, a standalone thriller about an amateur detective. It made me feel, in some small way, as if the breakdown of my marriage hadn’t completely spelt the end of life as I knew it.
‘I didn’t get much,’ I say, wiping lobster flesh from my fingers.
‘Well, don’t take too long deciding. You’d need to come on board early doors.’ He turns back to the pile of herbs he’s massacring with a knife so blunt it’s almost bladeless.
‘Wilf. Do you... still think it was the right thing? Taking the pill.’
He chucks the herbs into a pan simmering with cream, white wine and garlic. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
Because, sometimes, I find myself wondering... what if I wasn’t destined to die young?
The fear of it had subsided in a way I never thought it would, almost as soon as I took that pill. But it was replaced, unexpectedly, by the kind of doubt I hadn’t foreseen.
What if all those deaths in my family were purely coincidence?
It’s slightly unnerving, stepping back from your problems and watching the light slowly shift. The transformative effects of breathing space.
‘Regret is a fallacy,’ Wilf states, as though life is simply a series of right or wrong answers, as if we’re all just living inside one long, ongoing maths equation. ‘You have no way of knowing what would have happened if youdidn’ttake that pill. So, actually—’
But then the doorbell sounds its town-hall chime, signalling it’s time for me to leave.
‘Do you mind going out the back?’ Wilf says. ‘I don’t want her to think... you know.’
Deciding not to ask what he means by this, I do as he requests, then stand out on the main road for a long time.
The thought returns to me that nobody has said Rachel is dating at the moment. Maybe I should go round to her place. Ring the bell, just to see if she’s there. I could apologise again for having cornered her at Darren’s party, for the ill-advised stuff Isaid. Maybe – who knows? – we would even end up laughing about the fact that it’s Valentine’s and we’re both alone.
I turn in the vague direction of her flat, stick my hand out for a cab.
32.
Rachel
April 2003
I dream that Josh has come to my flat to tell me the pill was just fancy talcum powder, that Wilf butchered the science, that he faked all those Mensa certificates and scammed his way into Cambridge. Lawrence informs him, with a shove to the chest, that it’s too late, that we are in love now. He orders Josh to leave.
I wake abruptly, gasping for air as if I’ve been pushed without warning into a midwinter sea.
It is the third time, now, that I have dreamt this.
I need to call Josh. Just to check it’s not real.
But as I sit up, and start to cast around for my mobile phone, I realise Lawrence is also awake. He is perched, fully dressed, on the mattress next to me. This in itself isn’t too surprising – Lawrence isn’t one for languishing in bed, even at weekends. He doesn’t see it as an excuse to talk and touch and kiss, the way Josh and I used to. He’s the kind of guy who thinks if you’re not up and about by six a.m. you’re wasting your life.
He is freshly showered, smothered in his favourite cologne. ‘You were dreaming about Josh just now. Saying his name. Over and over.’ His dark eyebrows are raised, affecting amusement, though I suspect he’s more nettled than he’s letting on.
