She gets off the bus and walks at pace. Checks her phone. A post, two minutes ago: Second coffee of the morning. Too addicted, but I need a vice!
She waits across the road. Leans against a red-brick wall. Some foul dark liquid has pooled and is drying in a treacling mass where the brickwork meets the pavement.
She sees Scott emerge from the café.
He was worn his duck-egg-blue trousers. Leather satchel, latest phone, the best hair – one coffee just isn’t enough for a man with such an appetite for fashion and caffeine and other people’s bodies.
She hates him and is a little afraid of him.
She feels unprepared for how quickly his digital pixel existence has become him in flesh and blood.
She tells herself, come on. This will be an end to not knowing, an end to never being certain. She needs to hear him tell her what happened.
She does not want to end his life. Not now. What she wants is for her chosen words to have the impact of a weapon, to be a blunt instrument that will cause irreversible harm to his psyche, his emotional wellbeing, his mental fucking landscape. What she wants is an apology. An admission. An explanation of the crime committed, in full, with nothing left out. Evidence and atonement and closure.
If he denies it, she will take the proof she needs.
She feels the scissors inside her pocket and crosses the road, looking directly ahead. She is so fixed on where Scott has disappeared into an office building three doors down, at the same time checking her phone for how many ‘likes’ his dull caffeine habit has attracted, that a taxi swerves to avoid her. A teenage girl in tracksuit and wellingtons grasps her phone flat to her chest, having stopped her call to look at the woman who nearly died. But when she sees that Becky is OK, that Becky seems barely to have noticed, she continues her conversation.
Becky steps through the revolving doors and says to the man at reception:
‘Karin Styles. I have a meeting with Scott Allen, Simpson Financial?’
The man nods and calls through on a flashing landline, to an office upstairs.
She made this appointment yesterday. Of course Scott will be delighted to meet with her to discuss how she might invest her spare capital. It was easy.
‘Third floor,’ says the porter. ‘Just head to reception there.’
On the third floor, Scott’s PA shows her into a white and glass and grey meeting room. ‘Just hold on a moment,’ she says, ‘Scott’s just finishing up on a call. Can I get you some tea or coffee or water?’
Becky declines, sits and waits, leans her elbows on the glass meeting table then at the sight of a greasy smudge draws them away immediately, as if electrified. What if that streak of cells comes from Scott’s greasy fingerprints? Or his elbows lathered in the Kiehl’s body cream he so loves to buy in bulk in case it’s discontinued? How disgusting, she thinks, to have him touch her like this, in such a manner that she can’t control. And she nearly retches as another thought occurs, that he has been in this room many times before, perhaps recently, talking and breathing, and that it’s possible she is now inhaling the sour spittle from his enthused conversations about Birmingham and Cannes and his life’s fucking achievements.
She is overwhelmed and stands up to leave, unsure whether she can weather this assault, this way of taking him in after all these years. But then the door opens and he sweeps in, bringing a strong cloud of clean laundry and pepper-spiked citrus. Her heart stops. She knows this smell, has inhaled it on tester strips in the basement of Selfridges once, maybe twice: Dior Sauvage, his choice of aftershave.
But that smell is just strong enough to drown out the will to fly and instead light the touchpaper to fight, anger in her veins bolstered with the knowledge that confrontation is, and always has been the only true way to get him out of her system.
‘Sorry!’ he says, not yet seeing her, not properly. ‘Having a mental morning already! Anyway …’
Becky stands and they shake hands, and Scott recognizes her while his hand is still in hers.
‘Becky?’
‘Hi, Scott.’
A long silence. She wonders if he will run, or call someone to drag her out. But instead he frowns, then laughs. There are no dark circles or creases under his eyes. Underneath the duck-egg blue of his jacket, this well-tailored jacket, is a white T-shirt – cellophane packaging removed only that morning, she bets, crumpled and discarded on the floor of his luxury apartment for someone else to collect and throw away. God she hates him.
‘I was expecting someone called Karin. You haven’t changed your name, have you?’
‘No,’ says Becky.
‘OK. Well … this is unexpected! Um … Did you want to discuss investment stuff or …?’ He leaves the question trailing for her to fill in.
Where does she begin?
‘How long’s it even been?’ he says.
‘A bit over sixteen years since I last saw you.’
‘Wow. You haven’t changed.’
‘I think I have.’
‘Well … you look good.’ He is being bright and sparky, the Scott of a named house plant and pretty coffees and hangin’ with his big sister Gemma. Still, she can see that he is unnerved. Well, good.
‘Do you remember that party we were both at in Hampstead?’
He squints, remembers. ‘At that girl Amy’s house? Do you want to sit down?’
‘No I don’t want to sit down. I don’t know whose house it was.’
‘OK,’ he says cautiously. ‘The same party we did a pill in her parents’ amazing wardrobe room kind of thing?’ He has dropped his voice, like he might be overheard.
‘Yes. I wanted to talk about what happened between you and me.’ Her voice wobbles a little and she digs her fingernails into her palm.
‘Like what?’ says Scott. He has dropped all the peppiness. Now he is nothing but anxious. She can’t quite bring herself to say it though.
‘After Spin the
