Chapter Seventeen

Sorcha was trying very hard to remember how she usually behaved when she opened the door to her flat, and failing dismally. She was cross about it because she particularly wanted to do it like a grown-up, although she hadn’t the first clue why that suddenly mattered. The keys seemed to think that it was funny to try jumping out of her hands, and just wouldn’t listen when she told them off. And it didn’t really matter in the end because the sun got her anyway. Although it was still early, it was streaming relentlessly through her sitting room and into the hallway, with sufficient force that she felt compelled to turn away from it as she finally stepped through the doorway; hitting her head on the door as she did so.

After that she stood for a while, her forehead against the back of the door, holding her head on with both hands just in case. She tried telling herself she was silly, but that made her giggle and then her hands moved and her head might fall off, so she told herself to shush instead. There was something very nice about a very long shushhhhh, so she did it several times. But then it made her feel fuzzy, so she stopped; almost.

She’d forgotten quite how useless she was at drinking, especially when she was out of practice, and she hadn’t wanted to admit to Norman just how out of practice she was. That had been a very, very, very bad idea, but at least she’d escaped, and she was still drunk enough to have forgotten how much she wanted to be with him in the first place. She also had a scrape on her arm where she had tripped over a flower pot while climbing out of his dining room window. A sunflower, tied to a large cane, had suddenly lunged at her and scared the life out of her. The stupid sunflower had made her scream. Remembering it made her scream again, still leant against the door, before deciding that it was probably better not to scream unless she really needed to, and shushing herself again.

Sorcha tried to turn her arm around to have a proper look at the scrape, but it was round the back and in kind of a hard place to get at. It looked like there was only a teeny, tiny bit of blood. Janey would tell her off again if there was a lot of blood, but this was OK. She rubbed at it, in the hope that it would go away, but it started bleeding again. She rubbed it some more, which didn’t help, and then tried shushing it, but that didn’t seem to work either. In a moment of relative clear-sightedness, she went through to the kitchen and went to get some ice out of the freezer. Bending down wasn’t so good, though, especially when she tried to stand back up again. It was as if she had suddenly been sucked into a large vacuum cleaner which was sucking her away from the freezer and into a large, squishy black hole. She just about managed to lower herself onto the floor before she finished passing out.

She wasn’t sure how much later it was when she came round. The tiles underneath her felt cold and odd, and there was a wailing alarm going off somewhere near her head. It took her a moment to realise that the alarm on the freezer was going off because the door was ajar. It seemed safer just to go to bed. It was Saturday. At least, she thought it was probably still Saturday. She could go to bed and stay there for a long, long time. She managed to wedge the duvet into the back of the blinds to cut out the rest of the light, before passing out again, only slightly more deliberately this time.

She no idea at all what the time was when the door buzzer went: by this point she would only have been guessing in assuming that it was still Saturday. She was suddenly aware that she was lying face down, diagonally across the bed, still fully clothed apart from the fact that she only seemed to be wearing one shoe. Her head hurt, and her arm hurt, and she just wished the buzzer noise would go away so that she could pass out again. But it didn’t. Eventually, she levered herself upright: it had to be Pip. Absolutely everyone else she knew would have given up long before this. She walked to the front door mostly keeping her eyes shut, promising herself not to remain upright for very long.

“Can’t it wait, hun? I drank way, way too much last night, and I’m not feeling good.”

“Sorcha? Sorry, is that Sorcha Brompton?”

Sorcha jumped slightly, and then groaned inwardly. It was a man’s voice. She should have just stayed in bed.

“Yes, I think so, although it’s not easy to tell at the moment. Who is it?”

“Jake McDonald.”

Ha, ha, ha. Very funny. Very, very funny; although probably funnier on almost any other day at almost any other time. Whoever it was deserved to be shot.

“Sure you are hun, and I’m the Queen of Sheba. Who are you, and what do you want?”

“Look, I’m sorry about coming round and bothering you and everything, but it really is me. Jake, I mean; it really is Jake. There’s something I need to ask you, and I tried calling but your phone seemed to be off.” The fact that whoever it was had seemed to be tying himself in knots was at least Jake-like, but the mention of her phone almost obliterated any other thought. Shit. Not only was it off, she had absolutely no idea where it was. She glanced round the room but couldn’t even see her handbag, and completely forgot to say anything.

The entry phone crackled back into life

“Look, I’m no good at this stuff, but isn’t this a video thing. Isn’t there some way that you can see that it’s me, or something?”

This time he sounded slightly exasperated, and she groaned out loud. He was right, although the entry system was only slightly less complicated to operate than the space shuttle if you didn’t just ignore most of its functions most of the time. She switched the screen part on, and at the second time of asking managed to get it to pull up a rather grainy image which, perhaps inevitably, bore a remarkable resemblance to a rather tired looking Jake McDonald.

Why didn’t life come with a rewind button? She didn’t need to be able to go back months, or years: about fifteen minutes would do the trick.

Failing that, why the hell couldn’t he ever manage to show up when she was in at least a vaguely presentable state?

“Oh God. Look, sweets, I’m sorry. I had a really heavy night last night. I thought it was someone playing a trick on me, although why they’d pretend to be you, heaven alone knows.”

“Are you actually going to let me in, now you know that it’s me?”

“Give me ten minutes. I’m not currently fit to be seen by man or beast. Or pop star.”

Sorcha hunted hopelessly for her bag and phone for a couple of minutes, trying and failing to remember how she’s got home in the hope that it would jog her memory, before downing some alka seltzer and stepping gingerly into the shower. The water stung on the graze on her arm, and while it washed away part of the debris left by her encounter with the cobbles she didn’t seem to feel any cleaner. As she turned the shower off, she was hit with a wave of nausea which didn’t quite come to anything, but still made her retch.

She was standing naked over the toilet bowl, hoping that her stomach contents were going to stay put, when she heard the front door open. She checked her instinct to yell out to whoever it was: she was somewhere between too drunk and too hungover to think particularly straight, and her best hope was that whoever it was would just go away and leave her alone. She pulled on the shorts and vest which she usually wore in bed, which had been hanging on the towel rail, and listened for sounds of motion in the flat but could hear nothing. She edged towards the door, trying not to make a noise, and waited for what seemed like an age but was actually about twenty seconds, and still she heard nothing. Eventually she opened the bathroom door a fraction, and saw what looked like Jake standing in the sitting area.

“How the hell did you get in? You scared the living daylights out of me!”

He turned round, and she could see that he was holding her keys and handbag, and wearing a slightly odd expression.

“Concierge recognised me and took pity on me. I came up here figuring I would just hang about on the landing for a bit, because it was less public and stuff you see, but your bag and things were all over the floor and your keys were in the door.” He hesitated, but then felt the need to add. “So I picked it all up and let myself in.”

She’d figured out the last bit by about half way through the speech, but managed not to tell him so. Sorcha wanted quite badly to vent her anger and confusion at the concierge: the whole point about this place was that it was meant to be safe, and people weren’t meant to be able to get in. Whatever else Jake was, he was still people, and he should have been kept out; but she knew that she didn’t have the energy for a fight. She groaned, as loudly as she could, before taking the bag which he held out to her and checking for her phone. Her relief on seeing that it was there, and in one piece, was huge, and made her slightly less inclined to think of Jake as the personification of doom. He was wearing a battered old T shirt, which had a large hole under one arm where the side seam had come undone: she wanted to believe that doom would be better dressed.

“Shall we try starting this one again, too?”