2000
He always comes in on a Tuesday and she walks to work more quickly on those days as if by getting there earlier she’ll see him sooner, which she knows is stupid but she does it anyway. It’s not as if she talks to him. Not properly. She doesn’t know what to say, so she mutters answers to his polite questions and blushes and clumsily sets whatever he needs to print. Still, she likes Tuesdays best. Tuesday is her Saturday.
Some days, when the winter sun is shining and the sky is bright and clear, days like today, she can almost believe the past doesn’t belong to her at all. She imagines her legacy life as Joanne, her probation officer calls it, as an invisible tattoo imprinted on her skin, slowly soaking through and becoming part of her. She looked up ‘legacy’ in the dictionary. A gift. A gift of a new life. She likes to think of it that way. It makes her feel special. She was in care since she was small. A series of foster parents. She doesn’t like to talk about her real parents and has no contact with them. It’s all so close to the truth she can almost believe it herself.
Sometimes, when a moment of old daring comes back to her, she embellishes her new life with stories made up from the photos she develops. The pictures are part of why she likes this job so much. Seeing all those happy memories coming through the machine. Pictures of lives she’ll never know. Holiday snaps from the seaside. Children’s birthday parties. Teenagers out having fun in bars and clubs. She studies those sometimes. The make-up, the clothes, the smiles. Arms flung around each other. Bright shining eyes. She practises the poses in the mirror at home even if it makes her feel silly.
She found some ‘other’ photos once – very different pictures. Mr Burton told her there was nothing illegal in them however distasteful they might be and to package them up like the rest. He marked the envelope though, and made sure he served the customer when he came in, and she knew he’d had a ‘quiet word’ about how he didn’t like his young assistant having to see things like that and to perhaps invest in a digital camera where he could print his own photos at home. Mr Burton is a good man.
Her days are routine and she likes that too. Even the overwhelming terror of the first few months of trying to catch up with the world has faded, and she’s been in her small flat above the video rental shop for a year and she pays her rent and manages her money and hasn’t asked for a single handout. Everyone is, apparently, ‘very happy with her progress’. Even the Home Secretary. He’s a dark cloud. She doesn’t like that the Home Secretary has a special interest in her progress. It reminds her who she is in the meat of herself, the sticky red flesh under the skin. Under the legacy life she wears like the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter.
She loses herself in the routine and likes the blandness of it. Up, work, home, tea, bed, repeat. She likes the budgeting of what’s left of her meagre wages when the rent’s paid. What she can spend on food. Deciding which tin to take from the shelf. Adding it all up. Counting the pennies left over. There’s a solid satisfaction in it.
She hasn’t woken to wet bedsheets in nine whole months, although she keeps the plastic sheet on the mattress. She’s not sure she could sleep without the familiar rustle. She’s nearly twenty-three and she’s finally stopped wetting the bed. Of all things; the job, the college certificates, these markers of her new self, this is the one she’s most proud of. Joanne says it’s a very good sign that she’s integrating into her new life. Integrating. Like the world has shuffled up to make space for her, Lego squares locking her in.
She likes Joanne. Is she a friend? She feels like a friend. She’s been there through all the ups and downs since her release. Joanne getting a new job or moving away is one of the fears.
The fears are worst in the days after the dreams come. She has the dreams more now that she’s trying not to take any of the pills they gave her. Pills to keep her calm, pills to help her sleep, pills that all left her half-empty. She didn’t have the dreams so often in those days, but although she now wakes from them filled with horror and dread, she also thinks it’s what she deserves. She can’t imagine not having the dreams. It would be worse than having them. They’re a reminder of the past, yes, but they’re also like photographs she doesn’t have. A way of seeing Daniel that isn’t from a newspaper picture. A way of holding his hand.
Oh, but they leave her with so much fear, like clingfilm across her face. Always the fears. Joanne leaving. Being recognised. Letting something slip. Becoming Charlotte again. Doing something terrible again, even though she’s sure she wouldn’t, she couldn’t.
At the beginning, when each step outside of the sheltered accommodation made her freeze and tremble, and she hesitated every time she went to open a door herself, Joanne told her something that made the fears ease. It’s become her talisman. Joanne said the cells in the human body are constantly regenerating. She said it takes seven years for all a person’s cells to be different than they were before. So basically, by the time she was released, she was an entirely different person from when it happened. She clings to that in the dark moments. She is not the person she was then.
Today is Tuesday though, and not a day for dark thoughts. Today is a different kind of knot in her stomach. Not the slicing pain of her worries, but bubbles like Babycham. Tuesday is his day. Ten minutes of bright colour in the bland greys of her life.
This time, when he comes in for his flyers, he lingers a little at the desk. She can’t bring herself to look at him directly as he tries to make polite conversation and she nods and mutters her answers while worrying at a strand of hair behind her hot ear. She can see Mr Burton watching from his office. He’s not concerned though, or annoyed. He’s smiling indulgently. Like he’s known this was coming, which is a shock because she didn’t know at all. He asks her then, when the tension between them has become almost unbearable. Nothing big. Just would she like to go for a drink sometime. Fireworks go off in her head. He doesn’t ask her for dinner and she’s glad about that. That would be too much and she’s not sure she’d know how to do ‘going out for dinner’. A drink is fine. She’s done that before with Annie, who comes in on a Saturday to help. Her skin burns bright as a beacon as she nods. Her blush fits into the colours of the world. He smiles and his eyes light up and they set a time for Friday.
She doesn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day. These are all new cells, she tells herself. It’s the start of a new century. She needs to embrace the gift of her new life. New beginnings. For the first time in such a long time, she feels happy.
30
NOW
MARILYN
Simon Manning’s a charmer, not like Toby wants to be, but the kind of man who smiles because on a subconscious level he knows how to make other people feel good. At ease. It’s a rare skill. But today, when he comes out of Penny’s office, every crease in his face is visible. He doesn’t look at anyone, although he must know all our eyes are on him. It wasn’t a scheduled meeting. Penny would have booked a meeting room to keep it out of the way of prying eyes as best she could. He’s caught her unawares with this visit.
He’s already in the lift by the time I make my sudden dash to go after him, but the second one is empty and waiting and on our floor. I grab it and hit the ground-floor button. The doors take an age to close and my heart thumps. I’ll probably miss him. I don’t know what I’m going to say if I do catch up with him, but I need to say something. The lift pings and I rush out and across the shiny tiled floor to the rotating doors.