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Chapter one
.......
Today started like any other, but then... veered off course. It all derailed pretty quickly, to be honest. Little things snowballing, building up to an avalanche. Like that poem about the horseshoe nail: "For want of a nail . . ." I can't remember it now-God, brain fog again-but it starts small and before you know it a whole kingdom is lost and you're screwed. All for want of a tiny nail. On Thursday, June 16th, I should have been in my office looking online for nice places in Padstow, but for various reasons I called my boss a prick and had some sort of episode, and here we are.
A headache came on last night, creeping up the side of my face like a dark force, prodding me awake. Ordinary painkillers do nothing, and I've long given up asking the doctor for something stronger. Last time, as I hunched, whimpering, on a vinyl chair that reeked of disinfectant, he suggested I try meditating, and turned away to tap something on his computer. I panicked it would be one of those coded notes medics use, calling me malingering or making sure I didn't get any more sleeping tablets, so I backed out, saying I'd download the Calm app. I did download it, but the sound of rain made me fret that the leak in the loft dormer had opened up again, so it didn't really work.
Unable to get back to sleep, I got up early and pottered round finishing jobs from the night before, folding washing, reloading the machine, blinking as the colors danced in front of my eyes. Scraping dried tomato off the base of the casserole dish, fetching lamb out of the freezer for later, mentally adding naan bread to my shopping list, giving Grizelda her breakfast, which she lapped at fastidiously. The fridge door was a seething mass of Post-it note reminders, scrawled by me, ignored by my family: Cancel milk, Call roofer, Hima's birthday, Jonathan's birthday, Dry-cleaning Tuesday, Cat flea treatment, Ethan inhaler, Order garden waste bags, Book Pap smear, Fix landing light, Pay Lottie, BDD WRAP??
Those booming capitals reminded me, as they were supposed to. I started checking emails and got sucked into one about the work party later, a viewing of a show we'd made. I had nothing to do with it, didn't want to go, didn't want to be involved, but Vince, my boss, had insisted we all turn up. Now Imogen, Vince's PA, was sending me guest lists and asking me to check in case anyone on it was someone he hated: CLOVER, YOU'RE A LIFESAVER!!!! Not even 6 a.m., and I found myself scrolling down a list of names to see if they'd included a showrunner Vince had offended or a former employee with a grudge.
Names, names, mostly unfamiliar, one I recognized here and there, and then a particular selection of letters seemed to balloon and scatter in front of my eyes until the pain took over and I couldn't look anymore. I slapped the laptop shut, pressing my hands to my face to push away the ache, banish it. Who cared who was going to the party, I certainly wasn't, so it didn't matter either way, just forget it, put it out of my mind, none of my business. After pinching the bridge of my nose for a second, trying and failing to do some mindful breathing, I decided to get on with the day, to see if ignoring it would make it go away.
My head was still pounding as I unloaded the dishwasher. Robbie always loads it wrong, fork prongs down, probably to make sure it remains my job. I mean, I pretend I can't understand council tax for the same reason, but the balance of things we both pretend we can't do seems unfairly uneven. When everything was sorted and put away, I rooted about in the ceramic chicken that lives on the windowsill in the kitchen. It's supposed to hold eggs, but who decants eggs? Instead, it's a repository for random tablets-indigestion, constipation, congestion-you name the "tion" and we've got a tablet for it in the chicken. I like to be ready for any development-steeling myself for disaster, Robbie says.
There they were: two leftover Vicodin pills, the last of a packet he brought back from a work trip to the U.S., where he wrenched his shoulder getting his bag down from an overhead locker. Robbie said they made him high for a week, and he had to stop taking them because he was starting to enjoy it too much. He dropped the last two into the chicken, saying, "These are not to be taken, under any circumstances," and I said, "Why are you putting them in there then?," and he said, "As insurance against those circumstances." Like, if they were there, no one would need them. But I did need them, and they were bound to be out of date, so I was doing everyone a favor by getting rid of them. It was basically tidying up, hoovering pharmaceuticals, being useful. But there was also a hint of rebellion there, consuming forbidden fruit-fruit forbidden by my husband, whose loading of the dishwasher should be criminalized. I took them with a swig of tea, and immediately felt better. Well, I felt much the same physically, but had the sated feeling I get after decluttering. Pills, with added jam.
Except... what if I was allergic to Vicodin? It's American; they put different substances in stuff over there, like chlorine and pesticides. I pulled up my sleeves to check for hives, the beginnings of anaphylactic shock, then noticed ancient antihistamines nestling at the bottom of the hen-bingo. I took three to finish the blister packet and chucked it in the bin, figuring that at the very least, this medicinal mix should achieve some degree of numbness. Those letters, that name, still dancing in front of my eyes, stabbing at my skull... I needed the drugs to delete them.
That done, I started laying out breakfast things: the cereal library the twins require every morning to get them up and running, a cafetière for Robbie's coffee, which he mainlines as soon as he gets out of bed. I love coffee, but it makes me twitchy as hell, so I gave it up in favor of tamer tea-caffeine. Seems lately I react to everything one way or another. Bloated after carbs, queasy after meat, gassy after vegetables. Can't even drink a sip of water without peeing every five minutes. Sometimes I drink wine in the evenings just to dehydrate myself so I won't be up every hour in the night, heading to the bathroom, quaking in the dark at the sighs and grinds of our creaky old house. But wine gives me a headache. In my twenties, I could sink a bottle and come up smiling the next morning; nowadays I can feel my brow tighten just looking at the glass. An anticipation of undoing. The older you get, the more things stop being fun and just become a chore. Music festivals, flights abroad, wrap parties-someone always has to prepare for eventualities, deal with the mess.
The headache had receded by the time Robbie came down just after seven, in his MAMIL gear, ready to cycle to work. No point in telling him about the drugs, he probably forgot they even existed, it would only cause a fuss. For the same reason, I didn't mention the forks, or the plates thrown in every which way so that they came out flecked with Bolognese. My husband began making his coffee with the concentration and precision of a lab technician studying embryos, while I put another tea bag in a cup and picked up my book. I've been reading The Blind Assassin for about eleven years and have never got past page 48. Sure enough, as the words blurred before my still-prickling eyes, the washing machine beeped. I got to my feet.
"Don't worry, I'll do it," said Robbie. He pressed the plunger down slowly, focused on the rolling granules. We both knew he had no intention of emptying the washing machine. I prefer to do it myself, since he once took the wet clothes out and left them in a pile gathering crumbs on the kitchen table, while he went off to fetch the New European from the front doormat. He didn't come back.
My husband isn't deliberately unhelpful, or one of those men who thinks it's a woman's job. Just absent-minded, and better-probably deliberately-at other things. He tends to favor building shelves in seventeenth-century nooks, and fixing the constantly on-the-blink boiler, leaving me to take care of . . . well, everything else. You tend to settle into these roles without either of you meaning to-the school calls the mother when the child is sick, the plumber tells the man the valve is faulty. It can grind you down, but there are bigger battles to fight, like getting Robbie to agree to book a nice cottage in Cornwall for our October half-term holiday, rather than some dodgy Airbnb in Athens so he can visit the Parthenon. On some level, though, the prongs of those forks were needling, reminding me it was my job to put them the right way up so they would be properly cleaned.
After breakfast, the usual hassle of getting everyone up and out, hauling Ethan out of bed, telling Hazel to switch off her straightening iron, wiping down worktops, dashing upstairs to slap on some semblance of a face, despairing at the eye bags, age spots at my temples, thread veins around my nose. Downstairs again, grabbing an overstuffed tote, shouting at everyone to get a move on. Of course, as soon as the front door closed, I had to go back to check that the straightener was off. I have to do this every day-we live in a lovely old farmhouse and I really don't want it to burn down. The ancient wiring worries me enough as it is.
It's the morning dance routine of a million households, we're nothing special. No exceptional circumstances here, unless you count twins, and that's only one in 250. Or is that two in 250? Whatever. The four of us were out of the house by ten past eight, and I was on a train to Bristol by eight thirty. For a while after we went back to the office, post-pandemic, everyone had staggered starting times, but somehow it all fell away. Vincent began scheduling 9 a.m. meetings again and no one, least of all me, raised any objections. Like the Great Fire of London. After it razed everything to the ground, they said they were going to rebuild the city better, get rid of that higgledy-piggledy layout and plot big wide streets in grids, but in the end, they just built the roads where they'd always been, same as before. That pretty much went for everything, really. All this talk of making everything better, greener, fairer, came to nothing. Back to how it was, waiting for the next fire to strike.
On the train I was trying to read my book again but felt dozy and distracted, probably because of the pills kicking in, those letters still scrambling under my lids, so I let it fall to my lap, as a thousand and one abstract concerns crowded my brain, vying for attention. Shopping lists and guest lists; cleaning tasks and sorting out messes; nails, emails, and migraines; eye bags and emotional baggage. So much to do, so many people to placate, circling, jabbing at me like the prongs of the forks. I closed my eyes, then opened them, staring into space, vision swimming and refocusing.
That was when I saw the case. The case with the bomb in it.
Chapter Two
.......
Just to back up a bit here, I have a thing about suspect packages. Like, you know, planes or wasps. Or snakes. I have a thing about all those too, but they're farther back in the phobia files. Suspect packages are a more recent fear. You might argue that everyone has a thing about them, but it's not true, because I asked my friend Susie and she just looked blank.
"What?"
"Are you ever scared? On public transport?"
"Why would I be?"
"In case, you know, you see something odd. Like, See it. Say it. Sorted, or whatever."
She shrugged. "Dunno, I'm just looking at my phone. Probably wouldn't see it."
So it seemed it was just me. In an average week, I spot at least one questionable item on my carriage and have to react accordingly. I see it, but I don't say it or sort it, just move down the train until I feel like I'm out of the danger zone. Sometimes I get a later, quieter service. Better safe than sorry. Better late than dead. Vince stares at me as I shuffle in to morning catch-ups, muttering, "Sorry, sorry, bloody trains," which is never a lie, because that's my nightmare. One of them. Some people fantasize; I catastrophize. It's extremely time-consuming. My younger sister, Maz, who's had extensive therapy, says my phobias are a distraction-i.e., irrational fears divert from the rational. But I'd rather not think about that.
Since our mother refused to pay for driving lessons when we were teenagers and I'm too neurotic to learn now, Robbie is the driver in our family-another reversion to stereotype. But we don't have a car because of the environment, and he likes cycling to work because unlike me he doesn't think getting on a bicycle is a surefire shortcut to an early grave. I'm not even sure I can ride a bike, despite learning as a child. They say you don't forget, but I'm definitely more unbalanced now, wobblier with age. Anyway, since I can't drive, it has to be the train. It's only about ten minutes from Keynsham, the market town where we live, to Bristol Temple Meads, where I work, but it's an intense experience.
Why do suspect packages preoccupy me so much when they clearly don't perturb the Susies of this world? It just seems like such an awful way to go. And since this is the thing that worries me the most-more than wasps or planes or snakes-I've decided that guarantees it will happen. Because irony. You're more likely to be crushed by unstable furniture than killed by a bomb, statistically, but in the story of my life, Susie's looking at her phone because there's nothing else to look at, whereas I glance up and see the deadly bag ticking, seconds before the timer hits zero. Susie ends up being killed another way. Falling wardrobe, probably. So I'm always on the alert, as if vigilance can fend it off, and this morning there was a prime candidate, much better than last week's dubious parcel, which turned out to be an empty shoebox.
This was properly suspicious. It was huge, and black, and a very odd shape, propped up against one of the seats. Maybe it was some sort of music case. Really big though; big enough for a cello, or some sort of terrible device. I mean, it was the shape of a cello, but who knew what was really in there? And why was there nobody with it? Who left an expensive instrument just sitting there on its own? I tried to concentrate on my book again, but the words swam in front of my eyes like the names in the email: "this morning . . . woke . . . dread . . . a feeling . . ." All my dread focused on this looming receptacle, packing every one of my worries into a black box. If I could just avoid whatever was in there, banish it, run away, then I would be safe.
Looking up, I decided that if no one rejoined the case in the next two minutes, I would have to change carriages, get outside the death radius. Out of sight, out of mind, out of danger. In fact, it was barely thirty seconds before I made my move. I wanted to give the other passengers the impression I was answering the call of nature, rather than being threatened by a cello case, so getting to my feet, I caught the eye of a woman opposite and said ‘Are the toilets that way, do you know?’ and she said "Clover? Clover Ashton?!"
"Um, hi! How are you?" It’s actually Clover Hendry now, but I didn’t like to correct her because there was no way I could take the slightest stab at her name.
"Oh, you know, can’t complain. It’s been ages! You look great!" Did I? I thought I probably looked dishevelled and harassed, and maybe a bit overweight. She looked completely unrecognizable, but I couldn’t betray a hint of confusion. Forgetting an acquaintance is the height of rudeness.
"So good to see you! You look fabulous too!" In fact, she was a little overdressed for a commute.
She grimaced. "I’m tarted up for a work do later. You still in TV?"
"Um, yes. Still at the coal face . . ." I mumbled, desperately trying to recall when we’d met. She’d used my maiden name, so it must have been a very long time ago. Had we worked on a show together? I’d moved about three feet further from the case, but we were still in the blast area, even if I used her as a shield. "How about you?"
"Same old, same old. I really must move on, but life gets in the way, kids get in the way . . . Have YOU got any little ones?" She put her head on one side, as if she could read my offspring in the lines under my eyes. I often don’t mention my kids, because talking about twins always provokes strong reactions from people, inevitably leading to long-winded conversations along the lines of double-trouble, two-for-the-price-of-one, was it IVF, etc. And I didn’t have time right now, what with the imminent threat.
"Not that I’m aware of!" I floundered. Denying my own progeny. That definitely destabilized my karma. Now I had two reasons to get away: the bomb, and this woman. Infuriatingly, the train had stopped just outside the station, waiting for a platform. I wondered if I could prise open the doors and pick my way along the track.
