The Day I Died. Polly Courtney
‘Um…No.’ Jo looked at the man. ‘No, sorry. I was just, um, waiting for someone. But I guess they’ve…gone.’
‘Right you are.’ The man dipped his head politely and disappeared back through the arch.
Jo walked on, past the sign, trying to form a sensible explanation for her sudden twitchiness. She felt nervous at the idea of exams. So what? No one liked doing exams. They were horrible things. But…Jo tried to dig deeper, but the reasoning became flaky and brittle. She couldn’t draw any conclusions. Except perhaps that she had done badly in exams at some point, or cheated, or failed…
Jo continued her random circuit, turning left and right at will and trying to quell the anxiety inside her. Eventually, she heard the bustle of the high street and followed the sounds back into town.
In the hour that followed, Jo wandered and watched people’s faces: old, young, black, white, smiling, scowling. Sometimes, someone would catch her eye. Occasionally, on making eye contact, a shudder would pass through Jo’s body and she would dart into a shop or a drift of pedestrians, fearing recognition–or worse, acknowledgement. She spoke to no one.
A blackboard outside one of the large chain bookstores promised ‘Half-price iced coffee and cool, comfy sofas’. A few doors down, a J D Wetherspoon advertised double shots for two pounds. Jo hesitated. Her mouth was already watering at the thought of the cold, sour liquid ripping through her insides. She could taste the vodka on her tongue.
Jo stepped past the doors of the bookshop and headed for the pub, then stopped. The special-offer bunting fluttered over the entrance, inviting her in for her two-pound shots. She tracked back and tried to feel tempted by the half-price iced coffee.
It was no good. Jo didn’t want iced coffee. She wanted alcohol. She turned again and then came to another halt, feeling her addiction pulling her forwards and the reins of her willpower holding her back–a tug of war where both sides were so strong that neither could win. Then finally, her willpower gave a final tug. She spun round and marched into the shop towards the stairs that led to the second-floor café.
The ‘cool, comfy sofas’, it turned out, were all taken. So were all the other seats except for a couple of wooden chairs hidden amongst large family groups that looked neither comfy nor cool. Jo hovered by the window, clutching her half-price iced coffee and waiting for someone to leave.
‘Wanna sit down?’
Jo realised that the bald, bespectacled man with a laptop was talking to her.
‘Um…’ She floundered. Of course she wanted to sit down; she just didn’t want to sit down with him. ‘Yeah, thanks.’
She perched on the vacant seat and smiled to show her gratitude. The man grinned back in a rather creepy way. She looked out of the window.
‘You went for the special offer too,’ he remarked in a mechanical monotone.
She nodded civilly and sipped her drink.
‘Not so special, really, is it?’
Jo forced a laugh.
‘You wanna know what I think?’
No, thought Jo. She looked at him briefly, so as not to appear rude.
‘I think they double the price for a day, then they put it on “special offer”–’ he indicated quotation marks with his pale, bony fingers–‘at the usual rate. Ha.’
Jo grunted, turning her head pointedly towards the window. The man took the hint and started tapping on the keys of his laptop. When she was sure he was fully engrossed, she reached into the plastic bag that was serving as her handbag and drew out a chocolate digestive.
It would have been nice, she thought sadly, to have someone to talk to–someone trustworthy and practical and sensitive. She wouldn’t feel quite so alone, so vulnerable, if there was someone else in the world who knew her secret. What would be really helpful, of course, would be a friend who had known her before the bomb, but of course there was no way of finding such a person without coming clean to the world.
She still wasn’t entirely convinced that hiding herself away like this, pretending to be dead, was the best thing to do. There was a police station down the road; she had walked past it an hour ago. If she wanted, she could go in there and declare herself a victim of the Buffalo Club explosion. She could let them contact her family and wait while some probing shrink asked questions she couldn’t answer, then she could sit in an interview room, or cell or whatever, and hear from other people what sort of a person she really was. But even as she contemplated the idea, she felt sick with fear.
Something drew her attention at the edge of her field of vision. A headline. She had seen it earlier that day, in Mrs Phillips’ shop, but hadn’t dared stop to read the article in front of her landlady in case she aroused suspicion. Mrs P had already caught her trawling the newspapers for clues the day before, and she’d had to invent a ridiculous story about an old acting friend.
‘SINGLE LINE OF ENQUIRY FOR BUFFALO CLUB BOMB,’ read the headline. The woman reading the newspaper was directly behind her bald companion, so Jo could only just read the text without letting speccy think she was trying to make eye contact.
‘A group of young, radicalised Muslims are thought to be…’ The newspaper was lowered as the reader sipped her drink. Jo drank some of hers and waited. ‘…at the centre of the only line of enquiry for the explosion that claimed fourteen lives last Thursday. The bomb, thought to have been planted in a rucksack and left in the cloakroom of the…’ Baldy looked up from his typing. Jo gazed randomly around the café until she could hear the tap-tap of his fingers again.
She glanced at the newspaper and was perplexed to read ‘GIRL RESCUED BY INFLATABLE LOBSTER’. The woman had turned the page. Jo stirred her drink. Perhaps she’d slip into the shop and grab a paper when Mrs Phillips wasn’t around, or pretend to be looking for something else. Or maybe she should actually spend eighty pence or whatever and buy a newspaper, instead of sneaking around stealing things from people who were trying to help her. Jo sighed. She didn’t want to be like this. She wanted to be honest and kind, to put others first. But it was hard to put others first when…well, when her own survival was at stake. She had to think about herself, to stay on her toes–that was the reason for all this deceit. Or at least, she hoped it was.
Surreptitiously, she pulled out the notebook from her makeshift handbag and jotted a couple of things down under the heading ‘Bomb details’. She flicked back a couple of pages and stared at her messy scrawls from the other day. Then the typing stopped and she could feel the man’s eyes boring into her again through his thick-rimmed glasses. She shut the book.
‘Still using pen and paper, eh?’ He glanced proudly at his silver laptop and for a dreadful moment, Jo thought he might try to show her what he was working on. ‘I’ve practically forgotten how to write!’
Jo grunted politely and took a long swig. A vodka would have slipped down more easily, she thought. But that was the problem. She didn’t like the fact that alcohol had such a minor effect on her, that she was conditioned to use it. She hated that her body craved the stuff, that it functioned better with it than without it.
She looked out at the bustling high street below. Across the road, a middle-aged woman was standing, her handbag tucked under one arm and a giant box-shaped present on the ground beside her, all shiny red paper and curly ribbons. Anxiously, the woman looked left and then right, then checked her watch. Jo scanned the street, wondering which person or people, of the hundreds she could see from her elevated viewpoint, the woman was waiting for.
Like a character in some elaborate cuckoo clock, the woman went through her routine again. Look left, look right, check watch. Wait. Jo could see the anxiety on her face. She scanned the crowds again, then turned her attention back to the woman. Look left, look right, check watch. Wait.
Jo felt sorry for her; someone was clearly keeping her waiting, making her worry. But it wasn’t pity that she was feeling, five minutes later when the woman