The Retreat(22)

‘That’s all I need,’ Julia said. ‘People seeing things. You should all lay off the weed.’ She tugged at her gardening gloves. ‘I’d better get on.’

I was going to defend Karen, but Julia had already knelt by the flowerbed and picked up the little fork. She jabbed it into the dirt, grabbing handfuls of weeds and yanking them from the earth. A strand of hair fell over her face and she pushed it away with a gloved fist before attacking the flowerbed again.

She caught me watching her and I looked away, embarrassed. I’d been imagining her taking off those gloves and laying her hands on me. Inviting me to lie down on the grass with her.

I walked back to the house on shaky legs, face burning. Not because I thought it was wrong, per se, to be attracted to Julia or to fantasise about her.

No. It was because it felt like a betrayal.



‘What are you up to today?’

‘Nothing special. I’m just going to carry on making notes for this new idea.’

‘The Sweetmeat one? It sounds good.’

Priya kissed me goodbye and said something else, but I wasn’t really listening. My mind had already strayed to my book, to this idea that wouldn’t work, that I was on the verge of abandoning, along with my whole writing ‘career’. The ideas, the words wouldn’t come, and half an hour after Priya left for work, I put the TV on, pretending to hope it might stimulate my brain.

I was watching a phone-in about neighbours from hell when the landline rang. It was Priya’s boss at the insurance company.

‘I just wanted to check that Priya’s okay,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to call in if you’re sick. It’s an important rule.’

‘But she left for work . . .’ I checked the time. ‘Almost three hours ago.’

I hung up and tried her number. It went straight to voicemail. I texted her, asking her to call me urgently, and tried to phone her again. There was a knot in my stomach that grew bigger with every passing second.

She cycled to work every morning, even though I told her it was dangerous, that the roads in London were insane and choked with rage-filled lunatics. She always laughed off my concerns.

‘It’s the most exciting part of my day,’ she said.

Once, I would have said, ‘What, more exciting than coming home to me?’ But I knew the answer. I knew that coming home to her morose, waster, has-been boyfriend was probably something she dreaded. She had been coming home later and later recently, going out for drinks with her colleagues frequently, going to bed early. Our sex life was in a coma. It was all my fault, but I was unable to do anything about it. I was in a pit, wallowing in self-pity, and I wanted to dig myself out but the shovel was too heavy, my limbs too weak. Everything was too much effort.

Now, though, as I continually redialled Priya’s number, fear jerked me to life like a defibrillator.

I knew the route Priya took to work. Through the park and down a maze of backstreets before crossing the Thames and hitting the manic main roads of North London. I called the police and the hospital. They told me not to worry. It had only been a few hours.

But I knew. Something terrible had happened.

I was about to go out to look for her when an idea struck me. Priya’s iPhone. I knew her Apple password, so quickly opened the Find My iPhone app and logged in as her. A map appeared on the screen, a blue dot pulsing and telling me that her phone was on a quiet street between Clapham and Battersea. It wasn’t moving.

I almost caused an accident on the Elephant and Castle roundabout, driving across two lanes in my haste to get to that motionless blue dot. Horns sounded. A woman gave me the finger. I checked the map as I rounded Clapham Common, turning off into the leafy residential streets that Priya and I had wandered together numerous times. One day we were going to buy a place around here and raise a family. One day, when I was a bestselling author and we had enough money.

I found the place where the blue spot pulsed on the map and pulled over. There was no sign of Priya or her phone. There was a shabby mansion block on one side of the road. On the other, a jumble of run-down houses and a dry-cleaners that had gone out of business. A railway bridge crossed the road a little way ahead, covered with graffiti; there was a pile of fly-tipped junk on the pavement. Gentrification hadn’t quite reached this section of the street.

I opened the Find My iPhone app and hit ‘Play Sound’. At that moment, a car went by, but when it had receded into the distance I heard it. A faint pulsing up ahead, near the bridge.

I saw the phone first. It was lying beside a pair of wheeled Biffa bins, to the left of the pile of rubbish. I approached the phone slowly, and then I saw the wheel of a bicycle protruding from behind the bin. The sun was out but I couldn’t feel it. Right then, I didn’t think I’d ever be warm again.

Priya’s body against the brick wall, next to her bike, both of them concealed from view by the bins. There was blood on her face and her left leg was twisted beneath her. Later – after someone heard me yelling and called the police, after the ambulance arrived, after they took her away – a kind young policewoman told me they believed Priya was the victim of a hit and run, that whoever had knocked her off her bike had stopped and dragged her from the street before driving away.

‘We’ll find them,’ she said, as if that would make it all right. As if that would make me and all the other people who loved Priya – her mum and dad, her sister, her best friend, her aunts and uncles and cousins – feel better. As if there could be justice.