The Death of Mrs. Westaway(14)

There had been no time for A levels. She had dropped out of school, taken over the kiosk, and coped in any way that she could—one moment trying to forget, cropping her hair so that she didn’t see her mother’s face in the mirror quite so painfully every day, drinking herself into oblivion when she could afford the alcohol; the next moment holding on to her memories with painful intensity, inking them into her skin.

The person she was now was not the girl she would have been. The girl who had given her pocket money to the homeless, frittered away pennies on the pier, whiled away Sundays eating popcorn in front of bad films—she was gone. In her place was someone hardened, someone who had had to become hardened in order to survive. The laughing confidence of that girl on the beach had been stripped away, but inside, Hal had found a very different kind of strength that she had barely even known was there—a cold, hard core of determination that made her get up on frosty mornings to walk to the pier, even when her nose streamed with cold and her eyes were red with weeping, a kind of steel that made her carry on, putting one foot in front of the other, even when she was too tired to keep going.

She had become a different person.

The person she was now walked past beggars and turned her face away. The TV had been sold, and she never had Sundays off anyway. She was always tired from working, and always hungry, and most of all . . . most of all she was lonely.

A few months after the funeral she had seen a group of her old friends in Brighton town center—and they had not even recognized Hal. They had walked straight past her, talking and laughing. She had turned and opened her mouth, ready to call after them—then stopped. A chasm had opened between them, and it was too wide for any of them to bridge. They would not have understood anything about the person she had become.

So she had watched them walk away without saying a word; and then, just weeks later, they had scattered, to universities all around the country, to jobs and careers and gap years, and now she didn’t see them anymore, even from afar.

But she did not know how to explain all that to the pier worker. No, was all she had said, her throat tight with loss and anger at his casual belief that everyone must have someone to fall back on. No I can’t do that.

She couldn’t quite remember how the suggestion had come about, but at last she had become aware of someone who did loans, no collateral needed. The interest was high, but the lender would accept small repayments, even let you skip a week if you couldn’t keep up. It was all unofficial—no office premises, meetings in odd places, envelopes of cash. But it seemed like the answer to a prayer, and Hal jumped at it.

It wasn’t until a few months in that she had the wit to ask how far she was getting in paying back her debt.

The answer had rocked her back on her heels. Five hundred pounds, she had borrowed—she’d actually only asked for three hundred, but the man had been nice enough to suggest that she up it a little, to see her through any rough patches.

She’d been paying it back at the rate of a few pounds a week for about four months. And now the debt was over a thousand.

Hal had panicked. She had immediately paid back the unspent portion of the original loan, and upped the repayments to the maximum she could afford. But she’d been too optimistic. She couldn’t keep up with the new schedule, and after one particularly bad week at the pier, she missed a payment, and then a month later, she missed another. As the repayments spiraled and the calls from Mr. Smith’s collectors got more and more aggressive, Hal realized the truth. She had no way out.

Eventually, she did the only thing she could do. She simply stopped paying. She stopped answering calls from unregistered numbers. She stopped answering the door. And she started looking behind her when she walked home alone at night. The one saving grace, she had kept telling herself, was that they didn’t know where she worked. On the pier, she was safe. And—up until now—she had at least felt secure in the knowledge that there was a limit to what they could do. She had no goods for them to seize, and she was fairly sure that the arrangement itself was on the shady side of legal. They were highly unlikely to take her to court.

But now it seemed that they had tracked her down, and their patience had run out.

As Hal’s shivering subsided, the words the man had uttered seemed to echo inside her head. Broken bones. Broken teeth.

Hal had never thought of herself as cowardly—or vain—but at the thought of that steel-toe-capped boot casually swinging towards her face, the crunch as it met her nose and teeth, she couldn’t help flinching.

So what could she do? Borrowing money was out of the question. There was no one she could ask—no one who had that kind of funds at their disposal, anyway. And as for turning tricks on the street corner as the man had suggested . . . Hal felt her mouth twist in grim revulsion. Brighton had a thriving sex trade, but she wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

Which left . . . stealing.

You have two roads ahead of you, but they twist and turn. . . . You want to know which you should take. . . .

? ? ?

BACK AT THE FLAT, HAL let herself in the front door and stood silently in the hallway, listening. No sound came from above, and when she reached the topmost landing, the door to her flat was closed, no light showing beneath it.

As she peered at the door lock in the dimness, though, she thought there was something different about the scratches on the plate, as if someone had been at work with a picklock. Or was that just her own paranoia? Surely all lock plates had chips and scrapes on them, from keys carelessly shoved in, clattering against the metal.