Jail Bird

‘Right.’ Becks was quiet again. ‘It’s…nice to hear from you, Lils.’

‘Yeah.’

Becks didn’t sound as if it was nice to hear from her old friend Lily. She sounded like Lily had just put the kibosh on her whole day. Desperation seized Lily suddenly. She wanted to go back to a time when their friendship had been an easy, cosy thing; back before Leo had died and she had been sent down. She wanted to feel normal again.

‘Maybe we could meet up?’ she suggested. ‘Do lunch with the girls, like we used to?’

Lunch with the girls. The ladies who lunched. That’s what they had all been, back in the day. Blowing their husbands’ ill-gotten gains before the taxman got wind of too much cash hanging about the place. How carefree and shallow and stupid they had been, living the high life with all their designer gear and moody sports cars and spa treatments, but without a doubt it had been fun. Lily had bought into the luxury lifestyle big-time. After the upbringing she’d had, that chilly, repressive, hand-to-mouth life of proud poverty, it had been like release from a cage. But now…oh, now she knew she’d just exchanged one cage for another. It had been a comfortable one, but a cage nevertheless.

‘Monday?’ suggested Lily, hearing the eagerness in her own voice but unable to suppress it. ‘We always met on a Monday, didn’t we, at Luigi’s?’

‘Um,’ said Becks, ‘Luigi’s closed down.’

‘Oh!’ Lily felt foolish, wrong-footed. ‘So where do the girls meet now?’

‘Well…Le Soleil,’ said Becks doubtfully. ‘In Cheap Street.’

‘There, then,’ said Lily. ‘One o’clock? All the girls? You, me, Hairy Mary…’

‘What about Maeve?’

It was true that Maeve had once been among Lily’s circle of friends. Now she was among her circle of enemies.

‘Does she usually come?’

‘Yeah, she does. Usually.’ But if you’re there, it’s going to be tricky.

Lily heard the unspoken words as clearly as if they had been telegraphed to her over the wires.

‘Um…Becks. I don’t think she’ll want to come if I’m there. And…I don’t really want to see Adrienne there, if that’s okay with you?’

‘Oh yeah. Sure,’ said Becks quickly. ‘I understand, Lils. Totally’

‘That’s a date then, yeah?’ asked Lily, trying to ignore the part about Maeve, trying to ignore Becks’s obvious unease with this call. She was trying to start afresh; why would no one let her start over like she wanted to?

‘Yeah,’ said Becks, clearly making an effort. ‘Yeah. Great. Sure.’

Lily rang off, wondering if it was really safe to go out and about after what had happened with Nick outside the restaurant. But bollocks to it. She’d done with all that, skulking in corners, hiding away from the world. Now she was going to come out in the open.

Then the phone rang, and she picked up.

‘Hello?’ It was probably Becks again, wanting to alter something.

Breathing.

‘Hello?’ said Lily again, her heart starting to speed up, her mouth drying to dust. ‘Who is that?’

But they didn’t answer.

Lily put the phone down with a shaking hand and sat there staring at it.

It rang again.

This time, she didn’t answer.

43

Alice was feeling a bit better. The staff were pleased with her; she was talking to them, just a bit. She even talked to her mother–she despised her mother–when the old witch visited, and to her hated brother too. She doled out a few words to them, made her mother happy that she was ‘coming along’, made her brother jealous of the attention; it was all fine, no problems.

Mostly she talked to Jem, one of the cleaners, who was Malaysian and had come over here to be near her boyfriend. With Jem, she could rattle on a little, because Jem wasn’t interested in anything she had to say, not really. Jem just smiled a lot, and understood only bits of what Alice was saying to her, and that was just fine as far as Alice was concerned.

‘This is my boyfriend,’ she said to Jem, and showed her the crumpled photo of Leo that Lily had left with her when she visited.

‘He handsome man,’ said Jem obligingly, glancing at the shot while mopping the floor.

‘Yes, he is.’ Alice ran her fingers lovingly over the photo. ‘He’s so good to me, he buys me presents.’ Alice felt that this was true, but she couldn’t really remember them. There had been a Tiffany bracelet…hadn’t there? But she didn’t know where that was.

‘Yeah,’ said Jem with a brilliant smile, remaking the bed.

‘He used to take me to his club. He owned a club,’ said Alice thoughtfully.

What had the club been called? She couldn’t think. Only that they had been there together, and all the girls had flocked around Leo, but he had been with her, Alice. So many lovely women, and his wife was lovely too, she knew this, she had seen Lily…King.

Lily King.

The club was called Kings.

And Lily, his wife’s name was Lily, and wasn’t that strange, because the woman who had called to see her, who had brought her his photo, her name had been Lily too.

The buxom nurse came in, frowning at the cleaner, who was taking her damned time; she should have been way along the hall by now.

‘We went to his club, called Kings,’ said Alice to the nurse, brandishing the photo at her.

The nurse glanced at it and then away. She was up to her ears in work, and suddenly Alice had stopped being silent and started chattering on to anyone and everyone. She preferred Alice silent, really.

‘Did you,’ she said. ‘You done the loo yet?’ she snapped at Jem.

Jem shook her head, no.

‘Well, get a bloody move on, chop-chop, yeah?’

‘All the women wanted him, but he only wanted me,’ said Alice. She remembered all the women, even the one who had come on to Leo while she was there with him, the one he had laughed at; oh, how they had laughed at the silly cow…

But Leo…wasn’t he dead?

Hadn’t she heard that somewhere?

Alice fell silent, and turned and stared out of the window at the lake. Later, maybe after lunch, maybe sometime today, she wasn’t sure, she would go for a walk by the lake. She liked that.

Alice was down there in the evening. It was chilly, she’d put on her cardigan. She liked this time of day; everything was quiet. The light was starting to fade into dusk and the sky was tinged with soft, peachy pink. It would be a fine day tomorrow. She walked around, getting her trainers muddy again, the nurse would complain, but to hell with her. She walked along to the lake’s farthest edge, out of sight of the main building; once it had been a private home, a mansion; a wealthy family had owned it before it became a psychiatric clinic. The lake had been excavated way back in the past, and it was beautiful: big plants there, leaves big as umbrellas, rushes whispering in the breeze, coots and ducks squabbling for territory, and she remembered, she remembered now, yes, Leo was dead; and she pulled out the photo from her pockets, fingered it, caressed his face.

A tear slipped down her sunken cheek.

Leo was dead.

A woman was walking toward her. Blonde. Smiling.