Out Late with Friends and Regrets (50 page)

Well, it wouldn’t kill her.
 
It didn’t really matter.
 

The image of a long-ago Christmas tree came to her, a poor, drunken, sagging thing that she had worked all night to restore, to heal of its wounds from the drunken assault it had suffered, cutting away broken branches, retrieving or sweeping up flung decorations, making a pretty good job of it, hanging tangerines in the worst spots.
 
A very late night, that, with having to spirit the long-hidden Christmas stockings into the children’s rooms and remove the empty duplicates.
 
She had been afraid they would wake Christmas–Day-early because she had put them to bed too soon. As soon, in fact, as she spotted the first signs of seasonal triggers being tripped. God forgive her, she had put whisky in their sweetened milk so they would go to sleep quickly.
 

But then it had turned into a wonderful Christmas.
 
How they had all laughed at the strange tree.
 
It had tripped over when it was trying to dance around the room in its finery, over-excited when Father Christmas had appeared in the fireplace, Paul said.
 
It had come a bit of a cropper, poor thing.
 
He had taken over the cooking of the Christmas dinner, supervised and photographed the opening of the children’s presents; the warmth of his humour and his love wrapped them all in Christmas fur.

Fin poured herself a generous drink, and raised her glass in a toast.

“Happy Christmas, Fin.”
 
She didn’t want to think about Marie; her absence felt too sore.

She sat enjoying the drink for a while, contemplating a long lie-in tomorrow, a soak in a hot bath, then a laid-back afternoon in front of the telly.
 
It was at that point she realised that she hadn’t even thought to cater for herself.
 
It would have been easy enough to buy something nice from Marks, but she just hadn’t thought about it.
 
What an idiot.
 
The price of love, ha ha.

She surrendered to a pleasant state of drift, not asleep, but detached from the world and all its demands.
 
Comfortably numb, as the song said.
 
Her body relaxed, and despite an ache up one side where she was slumped untidily, she did not want to move, not for hours and hours and hours.
 
She just sat, and stared, and clutched her empty glass.
 
Then the surreal fog of sleep crept across her stare, and closed her eyes.

She woke suddenly, cold and shivery, and aware of a sound.
 
What sound? A rattle, a metallic sound.
 
Late, eleven, by her watch.
 
And Christmas.
 
Had she managed to get the stockings finished? No, no, no need to worry about that, that was all done.
 
That was long ago.
 

It was the letter box.
 
It could only be-

She was up, and across the room before conscious thought had begun to take shape in rational patterns.
 
She fumbled to unlock and wrench open the front door, steps on the front path still audible.

She gasped at the chill of the night air, and clung unsteadily to the edge of the door.
 
The street appeared to be empty.
 
Imagination?
 
A dream?
 
Nobody out there, in the street.
 
She stood, in a kind of paralysis, for a moment.

Then she analysed the street scene, quartering it with her eyes, back and forth.
 
He was close by, he had to be.
 
She couldn’t close the door, until she knew.

A haze, a curl of breath drifted gently up from behind the waist-high front wall.
 
He was there.
 
And he was focusing on her, getting off on her fear.
 
She could hear the thud of her own heart – surely, he must be able to hear it too?
 
She imagined him crouching there, adrenalin causing a slight tremor in his body, waiting for the sound of her front door closing.

She took a long, slow breath, and exhaled silently, if shakily. Her fear was turning to anger; she could feel its progression, gripping her guts in its hot fingers, generating a searing rage.

It was time, this time.
 

She stepped quietly towards the gate, rolling the sole of each trainer from heel to toe, slow as a hunting cat.
 
She peered over the gate, and along to his position on the other side of the wall.
 
The back was hunched, the hood over the face, one hand over the mouth, presumably to try and conceal the giveaway haze of breath.
 
The back rose and fell slightly, and, yes, there was that tremor, due either to tension or perhaps simply cold.

Fin thought of challenging him, so he would look up, and she would see his face by the light of the street lamps.
 
Then she would say, Right, you bastard, I’ve seen your face now.
 
Don’t bother trying to stalk me any more.
 
You have no more power to scare me.
 
This is the last of your little hobby.

But she didn’t.
 
Without thinking, she put one hand on the cold top course of bricks, and vaulted over the wall, landing on the stalker’s back.
 
In the split second of making contact the word KNIFE! came into her head--

The screech was deafening, the stalker’s body thrust up and rolled towards the gutter, curling into a foetal position, Fin throwing herself on top as the stalker’s scream turned into a weird, prolonged shout.
 
She scrabbled for the wrists, dreading the imagined blade flashing up towards her, found one wrist, lost it, grabbed it again, seized the other one, and managed to force both down to the tarmac.
 
She put her knee on the lower arm, all her weight on it. The stalker struggled, but Fin’s emotions were boiling over. She felt reckless, invincible.
 
With an effort she nudged the hood back.
 
In the moonlight, the wailing face resembled Munch’s Scream.
 
There was a dark smear down one side of the face, perhaps blood.

Fin grabbed the stalker’s shoulders, resisting the temptation to smash the skull repeatedly into the roadway.
 
Instead she put her face down to within inches away from the howling mouth, and shouted, “
Fucking -shut – up
, you stupid,
stupid
bitch!”

It was Cecilia.

“What the hell’s going on?” demanded a man’s voice.
 
Oh, God, her next door neighbour.
   
“That’s you from number ten, is it? What’s happened?”

“I’m really sorry, my friend’s having a – an episode,” called Fin, trying restrain Cecilia without apparent aggression.
 
There was indeed a trickle of blood down her captive’s face, and Fin was now seriously alarmed.
 
What if the girl were concussed?
 
Best get her off the street, and quickly.

“Under control, everything’s fine,” she called, struggling to a kneeling position but keeping tight hold of Cecilia at the same time.

“Are you sure you’re all right, then?”
 
It was his duty to ask, but plainly further involvement was not on his preferred agenda.
 
Fin now had Cecilia upright and was shuffling her towards the house, gripping her arms tightly.

“No problem, sorry to have disturbed you, Mr.Taylor.
 
I’ll see she’s taken care of,” replied Fin, deeply thankful that he had missed the tussle in the gutter.
 
“So sorry,” she said again.

“Yes, all right, dear.”
 
Then, as an afterthought, “Merry Christmas.”

“You too.
 
And Mrs. Taylor of course.”
 
But the door to number twelve had sliced off the seasonal greeting for Mrs. Taylor.

Cecilia was heaving with loud dry sobs, and Fin hustled her swiftly through her open front door, guided her roughly through the hall and almost threw her down on the sofa.
 
There was snot and dribble, now being infiltrated by blood, on her blotchy chin, which she wiped away with a sleeve.

“Stop it, you fucking nasty bastard,” spat Fin, still quaking with anger, but trying to see how bad the injury might be.
 
She pulled Cecilia’s hair aside. Cecilia cowered, raising a forearm.

“I’m not going to
do
anything, you idiot, I just want to look at this cut on your head. Stay
still
, will you?”

Fortunately, the wound appeared to be no more than a graze on the side of her face, but it would need a wash with Dettol and water.
 
Not Fin’s problem.

So far, Cecilia had not uttered a word, but now she snuffled, “I hate myself.
 
I hate my life.
 
It’s all gone wrong.”

Another curd of mucus started the journey down from her left nostril, and Cecilia was about to raise her sleeve to it when Fin thrust a tissue into her hand, unable to bear the sight of the imminent wipe.
 
She suddenly felt quite unwell, and sat in the armchair, trying to conceal the fact she was jumpy with reaction.

“So- why?” she said.
 
Cecilia’s eyes were full and about to spill over.

“I really, really like you.
 
I wanted... I don’t know, to be part of your life...”

“That’s ridiculous, and you know it.
 
What about poor – what’s her name? Ba? And didn’t you have a crazy passion for Ellie? You bloody well need to sort yourself out.”

Cecilia’s voice was a whimper.

“Ba left me.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” commented Fin.

“I had to move out of my flat, because it was too expensive without her.”
 

The tears had begun to run down Cecilia’s face now, and the need for another tissue was all too apparent.
 
Fin rose, and slammed the box down beside her.

“Thank you, thank you. What- what are you doing?” Fin was picking up the handset of the phone.

“Ringing the police, of course, what did you think I was doing?”

An explosion of noisy weeping followed, with hiccupped entreaties emerging through the wet sobs.
 
“
Please, please, please
don’t,” and “Can we talk, please,
please
, I promise I won’t do it again,” were just distinguishable.
 
Fin put the phone down, wondering whether giving her a brandy would be entirely a wise idea; she certainly needed to pull herself together.
 
She glanced at the grotesquely distorted face, then at the heaving body rocking backwards and forwards, and decided to risk it.

“Here.
 
Drink this.
 
Slowly
.
 
Blow your nose and stop crying.”

The effect was not immediate, but the worst seemed to have passed, and Cecilia sat bent over, her head in her hands.

“I’m so sorry.”
 

The little voice.
 

“
Sorry
doesn’t make it right!
” shouted Fin.

God, Paul used to say that, when things were about to escalate.

“Stalking is a vicious, horrible crime, and you’ve put people to a lot of trouble, including the police,” she added, trying to moderate her tone down from its near-hysterical pitch.

Cecilia looked up, chin cupped in her hands like a child, eyes wide and still wet.
 
Fin had to remind herself of the appalling dread she had experienced every time one of those damned flyers had appeared on the doormat.
 
She reminded herself that Cecilia was a liar, a cheat and a manipulator.

“Anyway, what are you still doing in Harford over Christmas?” she asked, “Why aren’t you at home with your parents?”