The Other Side of the Door, Nicci French [new reading .TXT] 📗

‘I don’t think I can make it today, Guy.’

‘It’s at your flat. In half an hour.’

Of course it was. I looked around me in despair. It was as if burglars had broken in and turned a building site into a bombsite, with me at the centre of the explosion.

‘It’s all a bit of a mess,’ I rasped.

‘No one minds that,’ Guy said heartily. He lived in an immaculate house, everything in its proper place. I think he liked other people’s chaos. I stooped down and picked up a piece of the broken cup. ‘But you’ll be there to let me in.’

‘I’ll be there.’

As soon as I put the phone down I started clearing up the kitchen, mopping the milk with a cloth I kept having to squeeze into the sink, and gathering up all the broken china. It’s amazing how far china travels when it’s smashed. My feet were bleeding now as well as my leg. But then I suddenly grasped that I was concentrating on the wrong task: the mess of the flat didn’t matter, the mess of myself did. No one could see me like this.

I hurried into the bedroom. The shorts would do, but not the T-shirt. I had to find something high-necked. I pulled clothes out of boxes until I found a Victorian blouse that I must have got in a vintage shop years ago. I couldn’t remember ever having worn it before—it wasn’t really my style. I pulled it on carefully, wincing as it brushed against my neck, then stood back from the mirror to examine myself. I looked like a girl who’d been through her mother’s dressing-up box. More to the point, the bruise showed above the collar. It seemed to be spreading higher and higher.

I went into the bathroom and opened my sponge bag, where I kept what small amount of makeup I owned. There was some old foundation cream in there and I unbuttoned the shirt to smear it liberally over my neck and up to my jaw. It was darker than I’d expected. I must have bought it when I was tanned, except I was never tanned. I had a milky skin against which the bruise flared vividly. I rubbed in more. Now the bruise was almost obscured, but my neck was a browny orange that ended abruptly at my jaw line, like a tidemark. Above it, my face was whiter than ever. I rubbed some of the cream into it and smoothed it in, making sure it went into my hairline. Then I looked at myself carefully.

My neck and face were almost the same colour, which was an odd kind of bronze. I rummaged in the sponge bag, but there was nothing very useful in it, so I went back into the bedroom and found the box of toiletries I’d been going to throw away. There was a stick of very pale makeup that I vaguely recalled had been used in a school production of Grease. I used that to whiten the bronze. Now my face looked thickly tan-coloured and slightly streaky; if I ran a nail along my skin, a thick line of paler skin emerged. I completed the effect by covering the whole lot in Grease face powder. I put on some mascara, because my eyes seemed small and sunken in my matt, pasted face.

To complete the effect, I dabbed gloss on my lips and sprayed some perfume an aunt had once given me down my cleavage, onto my bloody feet and into the air of the room. There. I buttoned up the shirt and wrapped the scarf round my neck.

I had about five minutes. I put a plaster on my leg, laid newspaper over the kitchen floor to soak up the last of the milk and protect people from the broken china, swept anything that was on the table into an empty box that I pushed against the wall, then took Hayden’s note and put it in my underwear drawer. I was picking up damp towels when the doorbell rang. It was Joakim.

‘Hello, Bonnie,’ he said, and blushed. ‘You look very pretty today. Have you caught the sun?’

After

‘Hello, Bonnie.’

When Joakim appeared at my door, carrying a guitar case, smiling, it felt as though he had stumbled on me in a car crash, surrounded by crushed metal, broken glass, covered with blood, and he simply hadn’t noticed. I let him in and wondered if I had forgotten about a rehearsal. Then I thought he might have come to tell me in person that he had to drop out of the performance. What a relief that would have been. Then we really couldn’t have continued.

But he wasn’t pulling out. He told me he thought we needed another song, something people could dance to, but he wanted to try it out on me before he sprang it on the others. He had the sheet music with him and I had barely closed my door before he had got the guitar out and was strumming the chords for me. At any other time I would have been caught up with his enthusiasm. I got out my own guitar and played along with him but it was like watching someone on television being enthusiastic. I hardly felt I was in the same room.

What I was trying to tell myself was: It’s over. Or, at least, it’s as over as it ever will be. Finally it made sense. Neal had put himself at terrible risk for me and so, in her own peculiar way, had Sonia. In fact, she had done it a second time, when she had come back to the scene to save me from my hopeless self. There was more. The question I hadn’t been able to get out of my head ever since I’d realized the truth was whether I should be grateful to Sonia on a whole different level. Had she done what I would have done if I’d had