Death of a Bookseller, page 27
“Fabulous,” I said, in clipped, cool voice, in Laura’s voice, and I snatched the lapel of Sam’s leather jacket and dragged him towards the marble staircase.
“Ah, they’ve let you out for the night, have they?” I heard the bookseller croon to the girl in line behind me.
LAURA
I feel calmer as I put some distance between myself and Roach. The rooftop terrace is bathed in a honey glow from strings of market lights. One of London’s best-kept secrets, it hums with booksellers and the vibe is decadent, boozy, and relaxed. Over the years, I’ve attended many Christmas parties here, smoked many cigarettes, swallowed many free cocktails. Kissed more than one bookseller, cloaked in the anonymity of the shadows.
I weave my way between guests and spiky yuccas in square planters towards the bar. Space heaters warm the chilly evening air, and women in evening dresses wear men’s jackets draped over their bare shoulders. Familiar faces bloom from the crowd, and while I exchange sporadic greetings with the odd bookseller I recognise from other shops, I don’t let anyone slow me down.
The bar is lined with rows of pre-poured Prosecco and bottles of beer, but there’s a chalkboard of cocktails on offer too. I scan the menu, can’t decide what I want. Something strong.
“What’s that?” I ask the stranger beside me, a dark-haired man with the rosy cheeks of an overgrown schoolboy. He holds a tumbler of amber whiskey up to the light. It glows like a lantern, punctuated with a curl of orange peel, and there’s a silt of un-mixed sugar at the bottom of the glass.
“Old Fashioned,” he says, in a rich baritone. His eyes dart to my décolletage as he turns away.
I order an Old Fashioned from the bartender, and the glass feels solid and heavy in my hand. Prim little champagne flutes are for girls, I think. I’m drinking whiskey tonight.
The sound of my name slices through the ambient noise of the party and floods me with a rush of nerves, but it’s only Noor. She pushes through the crowd towards me, in a little black dress and too much gold highlighter, a long piece of black leather cord wrapped several times around her throat.
“Laura!” She throws her arms around my neck in a loose hug that suggests more than one visit to the open bar already. “I didn’t think you were coming! What happened to you today?”
“Oh, yeah—there was a mix-up.” I swallow a mouthful of my drink with a wince.
“Oh no,” she says, covering her mouth with both hands. She looks mortified on my behalf. “Yeah, Sharona was really pissed. We’ve been calling you all day.”
“My phone’s broken,” I say. The lie comes naturally. “Don’t worry, it was an innocent mistake. Everything’s fine, she knows I’m here.”
Noor grabs a Prosecco from the bar, and then takes my hand and leads me through the crowd to find the rest of our team. Anxious butterflies flutter in my belly, and I kill them with a sweet swallow of whiskey.
“Look at you, you look gorgeous,” Sharona says to Noor, and then she catches my eye and the warmth behind her eyes chills, just a little. “Laura—well, you look lovely too.” I must look terrified, because she reaches over and squeezes my arm. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“Roach!” Noor squeals. “Your hair!”
We turn around and the little rat is right behind me. A blaze of rage burns in my belly. She’s clutching an empty champagne flute and holding hands with a rough-looking man in a leather biker jacket. The amethyst around her neck catches the light, and I blink at the familiar crags and cracks. It looks so much like mine, like my mother’s. Had I taken it into work? Had I worn it one day, and lost it? No. I’d never wear it to work. On the other hand, you can buy raw amethyst like that anywhere. Every crystal shop sells necklaces just like it. Sharona has one in citrine.
It’s uncanny, though, uncanny. I want to ask her about it again, see if she sticks to the same story in front of her boyfriend, but the look of disappointment on Sharona’s face when she first saw me is enough to keep me meek, and I can’t bear the thought of causing a scene. I’m too tipsy to let it go entirely, though.
“This your boyfriend, then?” I say, cocking my head at the stranger beside her.
“Yeah, this is Sam,” she says, and he says hello and they all say hello back and I narrow my eyes.
“You have good taste,” I say to him, and I’m referring to the necklace, but he grins and Roach glows and that’s my mother’s fucking necklace, I’m sure of it. A chilling image of Roach in my space, Roach going through my things, my books, my clothes, helping herself to my necklace. Impossible, but I feel like the party is closing in on me and a sense of panic rising in my chest.
“Have you guys met Charlie?” Sharona asks, and I realise the woman beside her with black-framed glasses and a blue-black pixie cut is not a bookseller from another shop but her girlfriend, and the man with the gun-metal-grey handlebar moustache laughing with Martin must be his husband, and that means—I crane my neck, and yes, there they are, Eli and Lydia.
Red alert.
She is small and pretty, with an upturned nose and a face that breaks into an easy genuine smile. She’s wearing an expensive-looking leather jacket, a bohemian maxi-dress and chunky boots. A delicate gold chain twinkles around her neck. Elegant and cool, with a tumble of beachy brunette curls, she accepts a glass of Prosecco from Eli’s outstretched hand. It’s strange to finally see her in the flesh, and I flinch at the memory of my drunken fumbling thumbs pressing the like button one of her old Instagram photos. I wonder if she even noticed. She pops on to tiptoes to deliver a thank-you kiss, and I see the angry bubble of a blister on Eli’s pale white cheek. A fresh wave of shame creeps over me.
“I’ll go to the bar, shall I?” Sharona says to Charlie.
I knock back my drink in one sharp sweet swallow, steeling myself. Eli turns as Sharona squeezes past him and catches my eye. He looks like he’s going to ignore me, but then thinks better of it. Instead, he steers Lydia towards me.
“Lydia, this is Laura,” he says, wrapping a comfortable—protective? possessive?—arm around her waist. “Laura, this is—”
“Lydia,” I say.
“Nice to meet you.” She raises her glass in my direction, a quick and elegant greeting teamed with a polite smile, like she has no idea who I am. She smells clean and citrussy, and her makeup is barely there and perfect. I can’t breathe.
Sharona and Charlie reappear with a bunch of drinks gripped precariously in their hands. Sharona passes two glasses of Prosecco to Roach and Sam, and I hold my hand out expectantly, but she turns to ask Lydia about her short-story collection. They chat with ease, like old friends, and I stand there feeling foolish with my empty glass, the coarse grit of sugar catching between my teeth. Eli studiously avoids catching my eye.
“You all right?” I say to him, but the words sound stiff, pointed and mean.
“Yep,” he replies, jaw tight. “You good?”
Roach and her creepy boyfriend just stand there, emanating a heavy, awkward silence, listening but never saying anything, never contributing. Her presence is like a stone around my neck, like the fucking amethyst around hers, and I resent her more and more the longer she stands there, until finally I can’t bear it any longer.
“Come with me to the bar,” I say to Eli. It isn’t a question and I don’t wait for his response, just carve a path through the party and find a quiet spot on the other side of the terrace. I’m riffling through my clutch bag for a cigarette when he appears behind me.
“Can we talk?”
“What’s there left to say?” he replies with a forced nonchalance, accepting one of my cigarettes. He picks up a candle from a nearby table to light it, and his hair falls over his eyes as he bows his head to dip the tip into the flame.
“Look, I’m not really sure what happened last night,” I begin.
“Makes a change,” he says, with a cold expression on his face, placing the candle back onto the table without offering me a light.
“But you kissed me,” I say, blinking back tears.
“You kissed me,” he says, and it comes out like a hiss, like he’s unable to contain a sudden rush of anger. “I just kissed you back. And then you attacked me—do you at least remember that?”
I do remember that. The violence of it overwhelms me. I raise my hand as though to reach for his cheek, think better of it. I wish we weren’t here. I wish we were anywhere but here.
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t fucking get it, mate,” he says.
“Mate. Don’t call me mate.”
He exhales a long stream of smoke into the sky and runs his free hand through his hair, tousling his curls.
“Look, let’s just draw a line under the whole thing,” he says, eyes sweeping over the party, at the faces in the crowd, as though he’s afraid we’re being watched. “We both regret it, we’re both sorry. Let’s just leave it there.”
“I don’t want to leave it there, I want to talk about it.”
“What, like we did last time?” he says with a hollow laugh, stubbing his cigarette out into the soil of a nearby yucca.
He’s referring to that first, awful kiss, the way I ghosted him afterwards, ignored his texts, moved shops to avoid him. Shame blooms within me, and I touch the corners of my eyes with my fingertips to stop myself from crying.
“I don’t really remember much about that either,” I admit.
A pained expression crosses his face, and his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.
“Right,” he says. “Well. It’s old news, right? Yesterday’s weather.”
I remembered saying that to him, all bullshit and bravado back in October, as we’d walked home from the Nib. That feels like a lifetime ago. I blink back tears.
“I didn’t mean that,” I say, and my voice cracks.
“I’m with Lydia, and I love her. I really love her. I think me and you—we just need to take a step back, cool off. Okay?” Something softens in his face. “The drinking doesn’t help,” he says, with the lightness of someone who knows they’re delivering a message of significant weight.
“I’m just really sorry, okay?” Hot tears spill down my cheeks, and I cover my face with my hands. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Laura—” he says, and he reaches for me.
“I need a minute,” I gasp, and I stagger a little as I push through the crowd of booksellers and publicists, editors, and writers, all toothsome laughter and greasy fingers clutching black napkins of miso aubergine vol-au-vents and truffle arancini.
I grab another drink and swallow it, then slip through the crowd, eyes averted, to the bathroom. Locked in a stall, I press loo roll into the corners of my eyes to blot away my tears, stop them from falling in earnest. Head pressed against the cool metro-tiled wall, I think about how many times I’ve found myself here on a night out, alone in a bathroom stall either crying or vomiting or both.
Is it too early for a French exit to be chic? I’ve made an appearance, had a row, and cried in public. Isn’t that enough? I check the price of an Uber from here—too much, way too much—and think about getting another drink instead, or finding someone else to talk to, but everyone here hates me, and I’m already too tipsy to make a sensible choice, so I flush the loo and wash my hands and head straight back into the hell of my own making.
Back on the terrace, the cold air slaps me and alcohol burns in my blood. Roach is standing in my place, next to Eli, and he’s smiling down at her, his face a mask of tender encouragement as she talks. Her dress really does remind me of the old scoop-necked Elvira dress I wore on Halloween, although she doesn’t have the curves to fill hers the way I filled mine. Is it my dress? I know it can’t be, but an irrational hatred is bubbling through my veins. My vision blurs, and her image fans into a monstrous tryptic, three faces, like the three-headed hound that guards the entrance to Hades.
As I rejoin the group, I catch a look of concern flash across Sharona’s face. Lydia is talking and everyone has turned towards her, their petalled faces orientated to the sun.
“I’ve been doing so much grim research for my novel,” she says. “I’m the girl at the party that everyone’s, like, oh my God, don’t talk to her, all she wants to talk about is cold cases and autopsies.” She laughs a pretty laugh, and Roach beams with rapt attention and Eli smiles, his face radiating love.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I say, and it comes out too loud and too belligerent to be anything other than a sneer.
Lydia blinks. She looks up at Eli through perfect lashes, her jawline sharp and lips plump, her skin shining with a natural pearly glow. She looks fresh and sweet and so untroubled, so untouched, so unbothered by the weight of the world that a spiteful streak of anger bolstered by booze flares in me and I have to ruin her.
“My mother was murdered by a serial killer,” I say in a rush of blurred words. “How do you think it makes me feel to see you stand there and joke about autopsies? She was strangled to death and she pissed herself as she died. Is that the kind of thing you like to hear? How does that make you feel, you stupid fucking bitch?”
A shell-shocked silence from the surrounding partygoers. A ringing in my ears.
“Laura—” says Sharona, eyes wide.
“Fuck the lotta you,” I say, and my tongue is thick and my words curdle in my mouth as I turn and push my way through the crowd, and my heart thumps and sweat trickles down my back, and then another drink appears in my hand. I swallow it and the world is off-kilter, spinning, spinning, spinning and the whole evening is one massive fucking cock-up.
I drift in and out of the moment as things come into sharp focus and then decline. Eli sneers, his arm around Lydia, hot breath against her cheek, the smell of his sweat and her perfume mingling in the air. Fade to black, lights up, and Sharona, scowling as she tries to give me water that I refuse, lips pursed against her insistent glass. A man with thick, wiry eyebrows talks to me about Proust, and I burp abruptly in his face, slopping Prosecco down myself, surprised to see I’m not wearing the dress I thought I was wearing—didn’t I put on the long black one, the tight Elvira one, the one with the slit? Is my lipstick okay? The print on the glass is the wrong colour, a muted dark red instead of bold scarlet. I reach for my throat, and my amethyst necklace is missing.
Someone asks me to repeat myself, reassurance that I’m okay, meandering into the night, still clutching my Prosecco glass. Someone flagging a cab and we get inside together, and I keep babbling about a half bottle of Prosecco in my fridge, and then I’m falling asleep in the back, the lights of London gliding over my face while I sit outside of myself, watching this girl, asleep with her mouth open, her face plain, and ugly, and she’s utterly alone, alone, alone, and beside her there is
there is
there is
Roach.
ROACH
Sam and I watched Laura stagger around the party, getting increasingly wasted and making a fool of herself, spilling drinks, snapping and being unpleasant to people, sharing strange and intimate details about her mother’s death, details that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Details that I could use. It was like she’d twisted a kaleidoscope, and the fragments of our shared experience had morphed and separated. I was no longer thinking about what we had in common, but instead what separated us. What I could learn from her, if only she’d let me in.
“She’s smashed,” Sam muttered under his breath, amused by the whole spectacle.
Sharona was watching too, but her expression was forlorn. She had already tried to coax her into sitting down, into drinking some water, into calling a cab, but Little Miss Laura Bunting wasn’t in the mood to follow instructions.
“I’m going to have to take her home,” Sharona said at last, knocking back the last of her Prosecco.
“Doesn’t she live near the shop, though?” Charlie said, face pinched into a grimace. “That’s bloody miles away, Shaz. Isn’t there anyone who lives a bit closer that can take her?”
Eli glanced at Lydia with the reproachful eyes of a kicked dog, and she returned his look with a hard, glassy glare. He dropped his face and said nothing.
“Just stick her in a cab, then,” Charlie said. “She’s an adult, she’ll be fine.”
Charlie and Lydia both seemed to see through Laura’s Pollyanna veneer, which I found curious. Her true nature—her insincerity, her alcoholism, her vanity, her attention-seeking—was really shining through. In fact, Laura’s true self was shining so brightly, Kofi and Noor had vanished into the crowd, washed their hands clean of her, and Martin and Barry and their respective partners had disappeared too.
“Nah,” Sharona said, brows knitted together in a frown. “Someone needs to make sure she gets home okay.”
“I can take her,” I said. “I live in Walthamstow. It isn’t a big deal.”
Sharona looked unsure, but the silence of her indecision was broken by the jarring crash of smashing glass. Laura had bumped into a server and sent an entire tray of champagne flutes hurtling on to the concrete floor. Broken glass and bubbles fizzed around her feet.
“Whoops,” she said, with a belligerent sneer, swaying on the spot.
Sam sat in the front and plugged in his headphones, glad for an excuse to leave the party early. Laura plonked herself in the backseat behind the driver, took off her beret, and fluffed her dishevelled hair. Eyeliner bruised her eye sockets. She unlaced her wet, Prosecco-soaked Converse and kicked them off, and I was greeted by a brief, sharp smell of feet before she opened her window and closed her eyes.
As we drove through London, Christmas lights illuminated her face in gold and green and pink as she slipped in and out of consciousness.
“Fee if she’s sick,” the driver said, eyeing her in the rearview mirror.
“She’s not going to be sick,” I said, churlish. I knew the situation called for me to distract him from the state she was in but unfortunately charisma had never really been my strong point.
