“A little break from us,” said Evette gently, tears brimming. “If we don’t have some time apart now, I fear we’ll be looking at something more difficult later.” She reached up and rested her palm softly against Simone’s cheek. “I don’t want that.”
“We promised this wouldn’t break us,” Simone challenged.
Evette smiled sadly. “That was before we knew how hard it would be. For me, Simone. Take a break.”
* * *
Star bumped the drawstring laundry bag down the stairs and rested it against the bulging rucksacks, the battered pull-along carryall, and the scuffed guitar case: her worldly belongings.
“I am sorry.” Mr. Cavell looked pained, and for a moment Star wondered if he was going to cry.
“It’s okay,” she soothed. “I completely understand.”
“But I have other tenants. The noise. The shouting. The older residents are frightened.”
“Honestly, Mr. Cavell, it’s okay.” She gave him her most reassuring smile. She’d never been evicted with so much remorse. And she’d been evicted a lot.
She’d been renting a nice room, one of the better places she’d lived in, in a tall Victorian mansion house share in Bradford. There were twelve other tenants in the building; some of them had bedsits, and others, like her, had rooms with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities. She had enjoyed a peaceful existence in this place; she got on well with the other residents and nobody tried to sell her drugs or get her into bed. Unfortunately, Stu wanted to rekindle their relationship and living arrangements.
“How did a nice girl like you get mixed up with a man like him, anyway?” asked Mr. Cavell.
Star liked the way that Mr. Cavell always referred to her as a “nice girl” even though she was thirty-eight. She still felt like she was twenty—Simone would say she behaved as though she were twelve—and she didn’t look a day over twenty-five; she was like her dad in that way, never looking her age. She huffed out a sigh.
“Because I never learn. And because I thought that if I could make Stu happy enough, he wouldn’t need to use drugs to make himself feel better.”
The way Mr. Cavell looked at her then made her realize why he thought of her as a girl.
She slapped her forehead and shook her head. “Trust me, when I say it aloud, I realize how stupid it sounds.”
“And why did he go to prison?”
“That’s a longer story.” She smiled sadly.
“Cup of tea before you set off?” He smiled hopefully and pushed open the door to his ground-floor flat. Gossip was Mr. Cavell’s lifeblood. If she told her landlord about her disastrous relationship with Stu, it would be all over the building by the end of the week. But what did it matter? In an hour she’d be gone, and if gossiping gave the lonely old man an excuse to talk to people, then who was she to deny him some juicy tidbits?
“Why not?” She smiled.
On the other side of the glass of the communal front door, the red-jacketed postman was trying to force all the post for the building through the letter box at once. The bundle landed with a thud in a crumpled heap on the welcome mat. Star gathered it up and placed it on the shelf by the stairs; some of the elderly residents had trouble bending down to get their post.
“Ooh, look!” she said, delighted to find a letter addressed to her. She didn’t often get mail. “Just in the nick of time too.” She left her belongings in the hallway and carried the letter with her into Mr. Cavell’s flat.
Mr. Cavell set the tea tray down on the small coffee table between two armchairs, which smelled like stale cigarettes and dust, and settled down on the one opposite Star. One of the quirks she had inherited from Augustus was a need to seek out at least one piece of magic in every place she found herself. The flat was run-down; the furnishings bore the mustard and burnt sienna shades of the 1960s, which was probably when it was last decorated. But on the wall above the faux stone fireplace was a massive blown-up photograph of Dave Grohl with his arm around Mr. Cavell, who was making a “rock on” gesture with his arthritic fingers. She smiled contentedly; there was her magic.
“So,” he started, his gray eyes twinkling as he bit into a digestive biscuit, “tell me everything.” Mr. Cavell leaned forward in his chair eagerly. He reminded her of an old tawny owl.
Where did everything begin? she wondered.
“The thing is, Stu has a pretty serious drug habit, as you’ve already guessed. He has to use several times a day to function. About three years ago, things got bad. We were living in Bristol then. He was stealing money from me, and I knew he was stealing from his mum, but Stu is not an easy person to break away from.” What she meant was that she was a soft touch and he was a master manipulator. “When I had no money left, he broke into the café where I worked, one night after everyone had gone home, and stole the takings. That was the last straw for me, so I broke up with him. Love isn’t always enough, as it turns out. He was already on probation, so he got sent down for two months and I lost my job, which meant I lost my flat. But it gave me the excuse I needed to not be there when he got out.”
“Good gracious me.” Mr. Cavell was riveted, and she couldn’t help smiling. “But you said he only went to prison for two months?”
“That time, yes. I went to stay with my sister Simone and her wife in Greenwich for a bit while I got myself together. Only when Stu got out, he came and found me.”
“All the way from Bristol!” he exclaimed.
“We’d been to visit my sister once before, so after having no luck in Bristol, he must have guessed I’d be there. He’d already tried my eldest sister in Rowan Thorp.”
“And then what happened?” His biscuit arm was suspended halfway to his mouth, his crinkly face enraptured.
“He turned up when Simone and Evette were out for the evening. I’d say with hindsight, he’d probably waited for the right moment.”
Mr. Cavell gasped. “What did you do?”
“I told him we were over, for good, and that he had to leave. I didn’t even let him in, kept him on the doorstep. Eventually he got the message and said he would go but that he needed some cash, and could he use the toilet before he caught the coach.”
Mr. Cavell clapped his hands over his mouth, the biscuit dropped onto the plate. Clearly he had better foresight than she did.
“I only let him in for five minutes. He used the toilet while I got him some cash from my bag, and then I chucked him back out onto the street. But when Simone and Evette got back from their night out, they found that Evette’s jewelry box had been ransacked and the holiday money Simone had been saving was missing.”
Mr. Cavell shook his head sadly.
“He got caught the next day trying to pawn Evette’s grandmother’s engagement ring. He got sent down for two years, and my sister hasn’t spoken to me since.”