This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Ilona Bannister
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Two Roads, an imprint of John Murray Press, a division of Hachette UK, London, in 2021.
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DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover paper art by Nina Warmerdam; (background) Elenamiv/Shutterstock
Cover design by Emily Mahon
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bannister, Ilona, author.
Title: When I ran away / Ilona Bannister.
Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2021] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021004 (print) | LCCN 2020021005 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385546171 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385546188 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3602.A668 W47 2021 (print) | LCC PS3602.A668 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021004
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021005
Ebook ISBN 9780385546188
ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Ash
Chapter 2: Gold
Chapter 3: Coffee, Lipstick
Chapter 4: Champagne, Smoke, Diet Coke
Chapter 5: Glue
Chapter 6: Special Sauce
Chapter 7: Blood, Milk, Shit
Chapter 8: Tears, Tea, Rubber
Chapter 9: Dettol, Diazepam
Chapter 10: Wine, Formula
Chapter 11: Butter, Frozen Dinners
Chapter 12: Soup
Chapter 13: Sudocrem
Chapter 14: Steel
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
For my Love, Tim.
For my Life, Leo and Rex.
1 ash A Wednesday in August 2016, 7 a.m. London
Harry’s shoes are by the door. Not in the closet, next to the door, but abandoned, right in front of it. Harry leaves them there the way you leave your bed unmade in a hotel room because you know housekeeping will deal with it later. The shoes by the door tell a truth about him. About us.
Back in the beginning, back in New York, when the dimple in his chin and his accent got me every time, there was the day I found him lying on my fire escape, covered in glass with blood on his shirt, wearing his shoes on his hands like two big pot holders. I said, “Harry, what the hell did you do?”
“I heard Johnny screaming and you were gone for bloody ages, I thought he wasn’t safe, so I tried to get in, but…it went rather badly,” he said to me, and to the super, and to the guy from downstairs who almost called the cops when he saw Harry break the window to my apartment.
I said, “Safe? He was locked in a bathroom in a locked apartment, that’s like the safest he could ever be in Brooklyn. You didn’t have to climb the fire escape and break the window and knock yourself out—”
“But I wanted you to know you could trust me to do the right thing—”
“Well, you sure fucked that one up, buddy.”
And then we all laughed. Because even though Harry put his sneakers over his hands to punch the window he still got cut up on his arm and he fainted and hit his head and that’s when I learned that Harry can’t handle the sight of blood. And also how much he loved me and Johnny.
What had happened was that the bathroom doorknob fell out of the door, the way it had a thousand times before, and Johnny got locked in. And I was just about to use the screwdriver as a handle to get him out like I always did when Harry walked in with the Chinese food. Except he had dropped a container in the hallway and there was fried rice everywhere. So I went to give him the broom in the hall but then the apartment door shut behind us. Click.
Now Johnny was double-locked in the bathroom and the apartment with me and Harry and the fried rice in the hall with no key. So I said to Harry, “Let me go get the super, he has an extra key, give me five minutes.” But if you’ve ever tried to find a New York super you know that he’s never where you think he’s going to be and I was gone for a little while and then Johnny started screaming. Harry didn’t know, though, that he was just doing that because he liked the sound of his voice bouncing off the bathroom tiles. He didn’t know much about kids yet. So Harry took things into his own hands and decided to break in to save Johnny. Of course, all he did was give himself a concussion and ruin his shoes. And break my window.
Anyway, we got Johnny out of the bathroom and wrapped up Harry’s arm and put ice on his head and the three of us ate cold Chinese while the super boarded up the window. Then we put Harry in a cab and he left in his socks because one sneaker had glass all stuck in the fabric and the other one was covered in blood. But later when Johnny had gone to bed and I was cleaning up I saw that he had lined up his school shoes next to Harry’s messed-up sneakers next to my work shoes in the little closet by the front door. All in a line, like a family. A little family of shoes.
Johnny did that, of course, because he’s always known where to put his shoes. I taught him that shoes go in a certain place and that’s where he puts them. But Harry—despite our years together, and our life with Johnny, and New York and London, and now the baby—he just leaves them by the door, the way you leave your bed unmade in a hotel room because you know housekeep— I’ve already said that. It’s hard to keep track of your thoughts when you’re leaving your husband and you trip over his shoes because he left them by the
