Sweet Sorrow(96)

‘If you could lift this, please,’ said Mr Howard. The counter was separated from the office by a hinged panel, secured from below by a sliding bolt on the cashier’s side.

‘One moment, I just need to …’ I slipped sideways into the office, and locked that door too.

‘Come on, Mr Lewis, stop fucking us about,’ said Mr Howard.

‘Hold on! Just need to—’

‘Charlie, come on, mate,’ said Mike, siege negotiator. ‘It’s just a chat.’

I pulled the rucksack carefully onto my back as if it contained explosives, which in effect it did, and pushed sharply on the bar of the emergency exit.

And now I was out in the chill of the evening air. In this light, the bright shop interior looked like a cinema screen and I could see Mike’s legs sticking out horizontally into air as he struggled with the hatch in the counter. Hands shaking, I locked the shop door too, sealing them inside. Catching the movement, Mr Howard ran to the door, banging at the glass, but I was already on my bike and across the forecourt.

I powered out onto the long straight road that led back towards town, empty at this time. If I could just get to Murder Woods, dump the glasses, wait in the undergrowth for Mike and Mr Howard to give up the search, then rush back to the gatehouse, kiss Fran and tell her everything, explain that I’d done something stupid but that I loved her … If Juliet could forgive Romeo for murdering her cousin, then surely, surely a scratch-card scam was redeemable too. There’d be tears but we’d make sad, poignant love, just as Romeo and Juliet do the night before his exile, and argue about larks and nightingales, and in the morning I’d find Mike and tell him I’m sorry, Mike, I panicked and yes, I took a couple of glasses but no money. Or if there was evidence against me, then I’d pay it back; I still had most of the cash hidden in my room, and I’d work off the rest or borrow it from … I don’t know, my sister’s bank account or Harper or someone but not my parents, my parents must not know. Mike would tell my mum, but my father couldn’t know. It would kill him.

I pounded towards my hiding place, another future beckoning now, life in exile. If I could get my hands on my passport, there was nowhere I couldn’t go. I’d buy a donkey jacket and a kit bag, join the merchant navy, whatever that was, and write beautiful, yearning letters to Fran from Singapore and Vladivostok and Mantua and perhaps some day, on the jetty of some distant port beyond the reach of law—

I heard a car behind me and waited for it to overtake but instead saw it pull alongside. I’d presumed that I’d been travelling at extraordinary speed but the big, black Range Rover was barely in second gear, Mike close enough to lean out of the window and rest his hand on my forearm.

‘Pull over, Charlie,’ he said.

‘I can’t talk to you now. I’ve got to be somewhere.’

‘Just stop pedalling, pal, we only want a chat.’ But beyond Mike, I could see Mr Howard hunched over the steering wheel, laughing, and so I stood and powered down into the pedals. I would run into the woods and lose them there, I’d set out cross-country and in darkness to the gatehouse. Hadn’t she said she loved me? I turned off the road but I’d misjudged the angle needed to mount the high kerb and the bike juddered for a moment and then stopped entirely, sending me over the handlebars and onto the footpath.

And here it was again, the strange, elastic nature of time, allowing me to note the neatness and completeness of the somersault and how I’d stubbornly refused to let go of the bike, bringing it with me so that it might have made a fine circus trick. Most memorably – or did I imagine this? – time even allowed me to register the crunch of the champagne flutes that were, in their own way, breaking my fall, to feel them hold their shape for a split-second and then collapse like an egg squeezed in a fist, the chain reaction, pop, pop, pop, the glass returning for the most part to sand, but also to diamonds.





Scars


‘Where did you get these from?’

‘Get what?’

‘On your back. These marks.’

‘Those? Shark attack.’

‘Oh, is that right?’

‘Garage glasses. I fell on a whole load of cheap champagne flutes when I was sixteen.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘The scars are where they picked out the little chunks of crystal.’

We were on the beach when Niamh noticed them for the first time, the scattering of smooth, raised scars that were more likely to be felt than seen, except in the summer when they showed up white like invisible ink under a lamp.

‘Okay. I know it should be obvious, but …’

‘I’d stolen the glasses from the petrol station and they found out, and I did a runner and I came off my bike.’

‘Motorbike?’

‘Bike-bike. Pushbike.’

‘Christ. Your dark past. Garage glasses and a pushbike. You’re like Jason Bourne.’

We were island-hopping in Greece, our first holiday together, at that stage in a relationship when an opportunity to show each scar is something to leap at. I’d seen the tear between her second and third finger from the edge of a catering-sized can of chickpeas, the neat grid of stitches on her shoulder from the removal of a mole, and now it was my turn. The broken glass had peppered my back like buckshot, and I lay on the hot sand and let Niamh’s fingertips trace the constellation.