The Butterfly Effect (6 page)

“Well,” said Olga, “I suppose that’s the price of fame and you’ll have to learn to live with it, but I’ve still got a pile of marking to do, even if you are Little Miss Organised. I’ll see you on Sunday if not before, and thanks for the laugh!”

Nothing else happened for two or three days. I went to school, taught my lessons, came home. More often than not I fell asleep in front of the television as soon as I’d eaten, before waking up and forcing myself to work for another hour or two and collapsing into bed. I had seen Richie looking at me across the staffroom once or twice, but then I also saw him sharing a joke with one of the PE teachers – him leaning in and her tossing back her raven hair – so I guessed he was keeping his options open. In any case, I was too tired to worry about him, and the experience with Greg had put me off relationships altogether, at least for the time being.

It was later in the week that I sat down with my laptop just before bed. I tended to use my phone to keep on top of things, but this was the first occasion I’d had time for a proper browse. I deleted my emails – almost all of them were junk – then turned to Facebook. There were two new friend requests, so I accepted them both, almost without thinking. It seems like madness now, knowing what I know, but in those days it all seemed so benign. I had hundreds of friends, many of them people I had never met, but they were friends of friends and what possible harm could it do?

Then I saw what I had done and my stomach lurched. Gregory Payne. If he’d called himself Greg I may have paused long enough to think about it, but now it was done. I really didn’t want him seeing my posts, checking out my photos or worse still, messaging me, but what could I do now? I could hardly unfriend him again that quickly, it would look strange, so maybe it would be better to go along with it for a while. He’d probably lose interest before long – after all, he was a good-looking guy, smart, well-dressed. He may not have been my type, but surely some other girl would like what she saw and enjoy his company?

I went to bed, but now the uncomfortable feeling was there again, lurking in the background. I told myself not to be so stupid, after all, he’d waited all this time before making contact. If he had been thinking about nothing else I would have received the request long before this, but the feeling didn’t recede. It was like waking from a dream in which something has gone horribly wrong but you can’t remember what it was – a tight, anxious feeling, dissociated from reality but difficult to shift. I didn’t know it then, but if this was a dream it would turn out to be a nightmare from which it would be very hard to awake.

He didn’t come. I don’t know how, but I fell asleep eventually, and – although my dreams were all about that door, and how I managed to open it, or how somebody came and let me out with a garbled explanation that made perfect sense at the time – I seem to have slept for hours. There is a morbid, grey light seeping through the window and I think it must be dawn, so that would make it about 7.30 or 8am I suppose. This time yesterday, I was waking up with an excited feeling in my stomach, like a little girl going to a party. My first trip into town for months, and I was going to buy Nat something nice for being so fantastic. Now he will be half out of his mind with worry, and I doubt he will have slept even as well as I did. He probably spent half the night at the police station hassling them to get a move on and find me, but they haven’t, not yet.

So what do I make of this? Does it mean that Greg has been arrested but won’t say where I am? That is scary, as if he never tells anyone, I suppose I will die of starvation, eventually. There is enough food to last for a couple of months, especially if I ration it, and running water, so it would take a long time to die, but it is possible. A slow and horrible death.

Then there is the possibility that he did not return home after bringing me here. I still don’t remember a thing about it as I must have been heavily sedated after the initial attack, but he could be somewhere in this building, biding his time, or somewhere else where nobody knows him and the police will never find him. Then, providing he is careful, he will be able to come to me whenever he wants, and I will be at his mercy. Would that be a fate worse than death? I don’t know.

And I must consider the possibility that it was never Greg at all, not since Richie died, anyway. Could it really be that the police were right and Nat was wrong all that time? Could it be some random stranger? If that is the case, I have no idea what I could be facing, and that prospect is worse than the other two. I have to stop thinking about that, so I think about the good things that may be about to happen. Any minute now, I may hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs, or a door somewhere below being forced open with a crash, and then they will be here. Greg will have told the police where to find me, or they will have found out somehow, and I will be free. Nat will be here too, and I will throw myself into his arms and he will look after me.

How strange it is, to sit here and compare these possibilities. If my life was a book, and somebody was reading about me, they would say, oh, that wouldn’t happen! She wouldn’t be sitting calmly on the bed working out the relative merits of dying of starvation or being attacked by different men. She would be screaming and crying at the door, throwing things at the windows, anything to get out. But they would not know how strangely normal it feels to be here. I have been a prisoner in my own home for so long, have spent so many hours in minute examination of any number of awful futures, that this is not as strange as it should be. I hate myself for my passivity, but a lot of my fire has been stolen, slowly, imperceptibly over the past two years, and now, when I really need it, it is hard to summon it up.

One thing is certain, I won’t be in any fit state to fight or even to resist if I don’t eat, so I force myself to choose a breakfast. There is a box of granola – a brand I have enjoyed at home – and even frozen mushrooms, but there is a toaster on top of the freezer so I defrost a couple of slices of bread and nibble away at toast and marmalade. There is no pleasure in this, and I am feeling full and queasy before I have finished, so I push it away and lie back on the bed, waiting for the nausea to pass. For a second, I look around for my laptop, as if I were at home and lying on my own bed. This is what I would do, sometimes for hours, when I lacked energy or when the weight of it all stopped me doing anything else. My laptop was my solace, although, as it turns out, it may have been my downfall too, although I could not have guessed that then.

***

I may have been careful about what I posted for a day or two, but, pretty soon, I almost forgot about Greg’s friend request. There was absolutely no evidence that he was even looking at Facebook, and he certainly never posted anything or made any attempt to contact me. So, I had been worrying about nothing after all, and Christmas was only a few weeks away, with its round of parties, meals and other social occasions, so I was upbeat and happy. I had one more gig with the band to look forward to, and the only cloud on the horizon was Christmas Day itself, when I would have to sit in the crossfire whilst my parents sniped at each other from their respective armchairs. I was trying not to think about that, as there seemed to be no escape, but at least I could enjoy the rest of the season.

The final gig of the year was back at The White Horse on the second Saturday in December. The landlord had phoned Anton a couple of days after my debut and asked if the band could fill a cancellation, so that was an unexpected bonus and it was likely to be an even better crowd than before, with Christmas so close and everyone getting into party mode. I was a little nervous about singing to what could be quite a large number of people, but Olga told me not to worry.

“To be honest, most of them won’t even be listening. They’ll be drinking and chatting, laughing and messing about until about halfway through the second set, when everyone will get up and dance. We’ll have some fun, but there won’t be any music critics there. Just enjoy it. You’ll be fine!”

I pretended to agree with her, but I was quite anxious by the time Friday came and the gig was only the next day. Normally, I didn’t talk a lot about my personal life in the staffroom, as I didn’t want to be like some of my colleagues who walked in every Monday morning and regaled anyone who would listen with the dreary details of their weekends. The barbecues they had hosted, the dinners they had cooked, the many and various antics of their children, all of whom were either highly talented in some field or other or driving them mad. There was no way I was going to be like that, but when Alisha, who was a Maths teacher and also in her first year, sat down beside me and unwrapped her sandwiches, it seemed quite normal to talk about our weekends and of course it all came out.

“Wow, I had no idea you were a singer! You’ve been keeping that quiet,” she said. Obviously, I played it down, said it would only be two or three numbers and that Olga was the real star, but she was clearly impressed and kept coming back to it, even though I tried to steer the conversation towards her. I guessed that must have been when Richie found out about it, as I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else and I don’t think we had any mutual friends at that time. I wasn’t aware of him being close by, but it was the best explanation for how he came to be at the gig the next day, as all the posters I’d seen still showed the band who had cancelled.

I didn’t see him at first. I was getting quite good at setting up the equipment by then, and I was genuinely busy, rather than hanging around trying to be useful as I had been in the early days. I had put my coat over a chair at the same table as before, but I didn’t leave the stage until the band were ready to start, as we’d taken our drinks back there to hold a last-minute discussion about the playlist. The pub was getting busy even at this early stage, and Anton thought we should replace a couple of the slower songs with others that were more conducive to dancing. I offered to drop one of mine, but nobody agreed to that, and we settled on Anton’s suggestions without much more debate.

So, with some trepidation but an overall feeling of excitement, I climbed off the stage and headed to my table. That’s when I saw him, standing quite near to the front with a typical Richie smile on his face and a pint in his hand. My heart leapt, but then it crashed again almost as suddenly, as there, a little behind him, was Greg. I had realised, in that split-second, that I actually did care about Richie being there, and Greg being around was going to mess it all up. He would be watching me, I was sure of it, so how could I talk to Richie, smile the sort of smile that I wanted to, with those eyes on me? I sat down and pretended not to have noticed either of them, forcing myself to concentrate on the music, but without much success.

When the time came for my first song, there was a shrill whistle from somewhere in the audience but I couldn’t enjoy it. How could I be sure it had come from Richie? It might have been Greg and that unnerved me. It didn’t stop me singing, and there was warm applause as I finished, but I felt as if I had performed with my foot slightly on the brake. I could have given it more and it was all his fault, that stupid, stupid man. Why did he have to come and spoil everything?

Then it was the interval, and we headed for the bar but, unfortunately, a lot of other people had the same idea, and it was ages before we were served. There was certainly nowhere to sit. I looked around for Richie, hoping that he would beckon me over, but he was nowhere to be seen, unlike Greg, who waved and smiled far too enthusiastically. I noticed he was not wearing his glasses, and I wondered if he had an array of unusual lenses to choose from. Maybe his eyes would be bright blue tonight, or green, like a cat’s. Hopefully, I would never be close enough to find out.

I could see that Olga thought it was strange, but she agreed to come to the toilet with me when the break was nearly over.

“I haven’t done this for a while,” she said, as we made our way down the corridor. “Do you want a girly talk?”

“No, it’s him – Greg. He’s here, and I was worried that he would follow me and want to talk to me. I’m probably being silly, as I know he’s been to other gigs, but there’s just something about him. The way he smiled at me.”

“Bloody hell!” said Olga. “A stalker!” But she was only joking, and I made myself join in with the joke. Of course it wouldn’t turn out to be anything that serious. It was just awkward.

My next song was first up in the second set, so we both went straight to the stage. There, I’ve done it, I told myself. He won’t be able to catch me alone now. He was still there, of course he was, but somehow I felt more relaxed now that I’d told Olga and we’d laughed about it together. Richie was there too, and he gave me a thumbs–up. Then the stage lights came on, the wall lights were dimmed and, strangely, for this had not happened before, a hush descended on the room. OK, there were still the sounds of people ordering drinks and a bit of conversation at the back of the room, but a lot of the audience were quietly waiting. Waiting for me to sing.

This time it was the old Lynyrd Skynyrd classic, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ – again in the chilled out, dreamy style that Anton seemed to like for my songs. It’s a pub band classic and I knew that, but I was not expecting what happened when I got to the first chorus. People were singing along with me – not in the shouty, football-song way that they do sometimes, but properly singing – and this made me tingle. It also gave me a huge boost of confidence, and I really threw myself into the rest of the song, allowing myself to include a couple of things I had tried at home but not in practice; a little pause here, a little throaty ‘yeah’ there. Looking back, it was probably hopelessly cheesy, but the audience loved it and there were more than a few shouts of approval at the end.

“More from Amy later,” said Anton, introducing the next song, and then Olga joined me and handed me a tambourine.

“You may as well stay on stage,” she said.

Later, as I lay in bed, far too wired to sleep, I kept replaying that moment. It was the acknowledgement that I brought something to the band, that it wasn’t about them indulging Olga’s friend and her delusions about singing. The rest of the set had got better and better as the evening progressed, with a great crowd at the front, dancing and cheering wildly at the end of each song. Naturally some of that was down to drink and some of it was down to pre-Christmas bonhomie, but the art of a good pub band is to maximise the goodwill in the room, so Anton said, and that’s what we did that night.

And that wasn’t all. Richie pushed his way right up to the stage when the encore was over and caught my eye. He crooked a finger and mouthed ‘please?’ so I sat down on the edge of the stage whilst the others put down their instruments and turned off the amps. After all, a tambourine doesn’t need a lot of maintenance.

“You were fantastic,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“I’m so glad I came. I nearly didn’t. I thought you might not want me to, but then I thought, oh, what the hell. I’ll hide at the back.”

“You didn’t hide at the back though,” I replied. There was a little smile hovering around my lips and it matched the one on his.

“No, would you have preferred me to?”

“It’s a free country,” I said, but I was smiling properly now. I couldn’t help it.

“Does that mean I can buy you a drink?” he said.

I couldn’t see any reason to refuse. The others were trooping off to the bar and there was nothing to do for a while, so he bought drinks and we stood by the stage as there was still nowhere to sit. I won’t say that I had completely forgotten about Greg. I did scan the room for him from time to time, but mostly I was still on such a high that nothing could spoil it. It was only a drink and a chat, but I could tell that Richie did like me after all and, there was no denying it, I liked him too.

Nothing more had happened. The time came to clear up, and Richie had said goodbye, see you on Monday, in a fairly casual way, but it was enough. There would be no more avoiding him in the staffroom. No more awkward moments or pinched smiles. What would be would be, but I had that warm feeling inside that told me life was good. Greg had obviously been there to see the band rather than harass me, and the fact that he had smiled so broadly simply meant there were no hard feelings. Result.