‘Rach?’ I say.
‘Yeah.’ In the lamplight, her body looks almost completely gold.
The words are out of my mouth before I’ve even really thought what it is I want to say. ‘You should know... I still have the second pill.’
Her eyes swim a little, then refocus. ‘The second pill,’ she repeats.
‘I thought you might want it now. Given how your mum died, I mean.’
Her brown eyes dart back and forth across my face, as if she’s trying to work out when I started shedding brain cells. ‘You said you were going to look for an antidote. To reverse the effects. But now you’re offering it to me?’
‘That was before... this stuff with your mum. I thought you might want to take something to prevent it, before it—’
‘I should go.’ She sets down the coffee and gets to her feet, wobbling a little.
I feel a lurching sensation inside me. Like a car hitting ice, the misjudgement all my own. After the last time, I swore to myself I would never offer her that pill again. But, having heard this about her mum, I couldn’t not.
‘Please don’t. You can stay. Please. Have my room, I’ll take the sofa.’
She shakes her head, fishes around for her bag. ‘I’m sorry I came here. I shouldn’t have.’
My heart clenches, hard. ‘Rach, forget I said that. Please. I should never have suggested it. I didn’t think.’
But in the time it takes me to shut my eyes and punch out a breath of pure frustration, she is gone.
49.
Rachel
September 2007
I have paid to take a stall at a county fair, exhibiting my artwork. All day, the autumn sky has been mineral-blue, the air clean and clear as a rockpool.
It’s gone well, but these shows are mostly for browsers. Exhibitions help to raise my profile, getting my name out there and my card into people’s hands, but I rarely come away from them with a pocket full of cash.
I am about to start packing up when a silver-haired man approaches and begins to examine my canvases.
‘So,’ he says, after a short while, turning to face me. ‘Financial services’ loss really is the art world’s gain. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d say.’
I frown and smile at the same time, shading my eyes with one hand, trying to get a better look at him. He is tall and olive-skinned, hair smartly cropped, a pair of sunglasses hooked into his collared shirt. He looks slightly incongruous in my part of the field; I imagine him feeling far more at home over in the champagne tent.
He smiles back at me, extends a hand. ‘Oliver Danvers.’ He smells suave, of cedar and rainfall, and has immaculately white teeth. His hair colour doesn’t quite tally with the rest of him, in that I wonder if he went grey at an early age.
His name – or is it his voice? – strikes a chord in my brain, but it’s hard to know which one, or why.
As our palms lock, I remember. ‘Oliver Danvers Recruitment?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘We used to talk on the phone—’ I say, then break off, because the women in my department at the bank would always argue over who got to speak to Oliver Danvers when he called, on account of his melted-molasses voice. We even decided at one point he must have missed his vocation manning phone sex hotlines.
‘We did,’ Oliver says, his smile expanding, so perhaps he’s already aware of the sex hotline thing.
I feel my neck begin to redden slightly. ‘I hope I was impeccably polite.’
‘Oh, you were. In fact, I distinctly remember you giving me the most courteousget lostI’ve ever received.’
I laugh. ‘Sorry. Budgets. You know how it is.’
