The Day I Died. Polly Courtney
was.
Mrs Phillips started making noises about opening up the shop. Jo just nodded into the steam of her coffee. She knew she should probably be leaving for the teashop, but the reporter’s words were still swirling around in her mind. Fourteen people missing, feared dead. It was only now that the implications were starting to trickle through. People had died. They could have been her friends. Fourteen, out of…How many did a nightclub hold? Three hundred? That was one dead in every twenty people. It was possible–probable, in fact, depending on how many she’d been out with–that not all her mates had escaped alive.
An unpleasant feeling swept through her. It wasn’t just the realisation that her friends–whoever they were–might have died in the blast. It was the realisation that she had died in the blast; that she was one of those ‘missing, feared dead’. And if she didn’t give herself up soon, then she would officially be dead. As far as her loved ones were concerned–assuming she had loved ones–she had died.
‘…I don’t suppose you know yet, do you?’
Jo looked up. Mrs Phillips was peering at her.
‘I’m sure everything’s a bit up in the air at the moment,’ she said. For a moment, Jo thought the woman might have guessed her connection to the Buffalo Club blast. Then she realised.
‘Er, yeah. A bit up in the air,’ she repeated vaguely. ‘Not sure about anything just yet.’
Mrs Phillips nodded and started shifting all the pots and jars back onto the shelves. ‘Well, if you’re OK with the arrangement and you keep it all quiet, then I’m more than happy for you to stay for as long as you like.’ She gave the table a brisk wipe and threw the cloth into the sink.
Jo nodded and drained her cup, still in a daze. ‘Thanks.’
She should have come clean. Yesterday morning, with all the paramedics and policemen and noise, she should have stayed put, and then told someone about her amnesia. But she hadn’t. And she still couldn’t. Nor could she quite fathom why, but she knew that coming clean wasn’t an option–not until she’d shrugged off this horrible black feeling of guilt or whatever it was.
‘Nice to have company again, actually,’ said the woman, lifting the apron from round her neck and looking about the place.
You don’t say, thought Jo. Then she felt bad. The woman had picked her up off the streets and offered her homemade marmalade, for God’s sake.
And then it came back to her again, that sinking feeling. This wasn’t the first time she’d felt bad about Mrs P. It had started this morning, when she’d woken up and seen the half-empty bottle of wine next to her bed, pieces of cork floating inside and the biro all splintered and leaking onto the carpet beside it.
She had stolen from her landlady. Last night on her way up the stairs, Jo had slipped the wine off its shelf and shoved it into her plastic bag while the woman waffled on about fire extinguishers and smoke alarms. It seemed almost surreal–as if it hadn’t happened, or it had happened to someone else. She’d been drunk, but it had happened. Or rather, Jo had made it happen. Stealing wasn’t a passive thing. It was something you chose to do. Jo had chosen to steal from the person trying to help her–again.
‘You’ve got your door key, haven’t you? Not that you’ll need it, unless you’re back late. You can just come through the shop. I’ll be there.’
Jo nodded and jangled the keys she’d attached to Joe Simmons’ wallet. She was still thinking about what she had done. And how she was starting to hate the person she thought she was.
She waved mechanically and set off down the stairs. Then she stopped and looked back. ‘One more thing. I don’t suppose you’re online here?’
‘On what line, dear?’
‘Uh…’ Jo nearly went on, but decided it was too early in the day for explaining the concept of the World Wide Web. ‘Never mind.’
‘Afternoon! Tickets, please…thank you…lovely…Tickets, please…’
Jo’s heart fluttered up into her mouth as she offered her ticket up to the inspector, her palms sticky with sweat.
‘Errrr,’ he squinted for several seconds and then handed it back. ‘Lovely, thank you.’
Jo pushed the ticket back into her pocket with a shaky hand, trying to steady her breathing. It was ridiculous, this anxiety. She had to get it under control. It wasn’t as though she’d done anything wrong; she had paid her three pounds, she was sitting in Standard Class, she wasn’t playing loud music…But that wasn’t the point.
The point was, the inspector was in a position of authority. He wasn’t a policeman, but almost. He reminded her of the people she’d run away from two days before. His voice was like that of the paramedic’s: firm but kind, with the propensity to turn officious. Any small reminder of that scene outside the club was enough to make her skin crawl. She alighted from the train with relief.
According to the map outside, Oxford station was a little way out of the city. Jo assessed the commotion by the bus stop–screaming brats and stressed mothers and pushchairs–and looked up at the near-cloudless sky. The walk would do her good, she thought.
She had a vague plan: to wander round town, looking at people, seeing things, trying to remember something about her life. She had come into Oxford because she needed to see something that wasn’t a pensioner or a cat or a well-kept lawn, or an irate commuter on his way into London. If Jo was right about being a London girl–and she felt strangely sure she was–then the comings and goings in Radley village weren’t going to be enough to trigger any memories from her past.
She knew she was being impatient, expecting things to come flooding back after only a few days. But, as she was beginning to realise, impatient was just the way she was. She hated queuing, she didn’t walk slowly and she wasn’t a fan of the slow pace of life. That was one of the reasons she felt so sure she’d been a Londoner before. Londoners didn’t stop at the checkout to talk about yellow lines or lampposts or letter box sizes like the ones she’d seen in Mrs Phillips’ shop that afternoon. Jo wanted to remember things now–or at least, she was pretty sure she did.
Oxford city centre was a typical mix of old stonework, sixties breeze blocks and modern, all-glass storefronts. The pedestrian zone was teeming with Saturday afternoon dawdlers: ambling couples, spotty teenagers on skateboards, bored-looking fathers with boisterous children on reins, frazzled mothers laden down with a hundred plastic bags. Jo lapped it up, inhaling the smells–jacket potatoes and coffee and sun cream–and picking out fragments of conversation perforated with peals of laughter.
Towards the edge of town, the streets turned into cobbled lanes that meandered between tall, sandstone buildings lined with bicycles and occasional students. It was August, so the undergraduates were on holiday, Jo guessed. She stopped in an archway and looked out at the vast, sun-lit courtyard that lay beyond. It was like looking through a secret door into another world: fountains, lawns, turrets and gargoyles…Jo watched as a pair of girls her own age wandered past, clutching folders and books, wondering whether she had seen this world before. Maybe she’d even lived in it.
‘Can I help you?’ A small man in a bowler hat stepped out of the shadows and smiled at her kindly.
‘Oh. Um, I was just…’
The man continued to look at her, and from the corner of her eye Jo could see his eyebrows lift. But she didn’t reply. Something else had caught her attention. Along the street, propped up on the pavement, was a small black sign: ‘QUIET PLEASE. EXAMS IN PROGRESS.’
Jo couldn’t breathe. She felt nervous and sick. Exams. It was something to do with exams, only she didn’t know what.
‘Are