The Day I Died

When she reached the convenience store, she headed straight for the bottled water.

‘Evening,’ croaked the elderly woman behind the till. Despite the wizened face and white hair, she had incredibly sharp-looking green eyes.

‘Hi.’ Jo hardly dared ask the question. ‘Could you tell me, is there a bed and breakfast above this shop?’

The woman looked slightly taken aback. ‘Goodness! Who told you that? There used to be.’

‘Used to be?’ Jo’s hopes fell away. She had walked up another dead end.

‘Well, yes. About ten years ago!’

‘Oh.’ Jo paid her for the water. ‘And are you sure it’s not running any more?’

The woman laughed. ‘Quite sure! It was my little business, until they made me shut up shop.’

‘Oh, right.’ Jo nodded and broke open the bottle of water. ‘I don’t suppose you know of any others around here, do you?’

The woman looked at her. Jo could feel her eyes roaming the cheap clothes and knotted hair.

‘I’m new,’ Jo explained. ‘I–I arrived this evening. I was supposed to be staying with a…a friend, but that didn’t, er, happen.’ She could hear the lack of conviction in her voice and tried to assert herself. ‘We fell out. And I’ve got a job in Radley that starts early in the morning so I have to stay nearby.’

The woman raised an eyebrow. Jo held her breath. She had gone into too much detail.

After a long pause, the woman spoke. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know of any this side of Abingdon,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Jo nodded and made to leave.

It was a last-ditch effort, but as she leaned on the door, she looked back at the woman. ‘Who made you shut up shop?’

The shrewd green eyes narrowed for a moment. ‘The council. You know: rules, regulations, paperwork, fire hazards. That sort of nonsense. They don’t like me because I blocked the ringroad development going through my shop–but that’s another story.’

Jo nodded, seeing an opportunity. It was a long shot, but her only one. ‘Do you…still have the rooms and everything?’

The woman’s expression slowly changed to a sceptical smile. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Jo.’

‘I’m Pearl. Pearl Phillips. Are you really stuck for somewhere to stay?’

‘Totally. I’ve tried everywhere. There’s nothing this side of town–I’ve looked,’ she gabbled. ‘I can pay. I’ve got money. Like, twenty, maybe twenty-five pounds a night? I’m desperate! I wouldn’t tell anyone. D’you think maybe—’

The woman smiled and held up her hand. ‘Calm down, Jo. Let’s call it fifteen.’

Chapter Four

‘Cornflakes or toast? That’s all there is, I’m afraid.’ Mrs Phillips looked at her expectantly from behind the kitchen counter.

‘Toast, please,’ Jo replied in a daze. Her head felt heavy. It was half-past six and she had slept badly, despite her exhaustion and the comfortable bed. Her mind had been racing with anxious, panicky thoughts that became less and less rational as the night wore on. Then at two a.m., having finally drifted off, she had woken with a jolt, her breathing shallow, covered in sweat, her pulse racing. The nausea had taken hold as she lay there willing her brain to shut down, ebbing and flowing for what seemed like hours. Sometime around dawn she must have dozed off again, only to be woken by the sound of birds and a blocked nose, which, on later inspection, turned out to be a nosebleed.

The landlady started ferrying jams and spreads onto the table and arranging them in an arc around her guest. Jo mumbled her gratitude, distracted by the incredible number of cat replicas that covered every shelf and surface in the room.

‘You like cats, then.’

There were china cats, furry miniature cats, cat teapots, cat postcards…Even the woman’s slippers were shaped like cats.

Mrs Phillips looked up and smiled. ‘Very observant. Yes. I’d get a real one if I knew it wouldn’t outlive me.’ She whipped the toast from under the grill and slid it onto a plate. ‘There you go. Gone are the days when a full fry-up came as standard, I’m afraid…Mind you, the marmalade’s home-made.’

Accepting the slightly burned toast, Jo’s eye was drawn to the stack of newspapers on the table–presumably copies that would later be sold in the shop. Her stomach flipped as she considered the possibility that the explosion she’d run from the day before might warrant coverage.

‘Pick a channel.’ The landlady pushed the remote control over and nodded at the small TV. ‘I like to see my news in print, but you probably prefer the television.’ She started flicking through the first of the papers.

Jo scrolled through the stations in search of some news, eventually settling for a mindless chat show. She buttered her toast, trying to guess Mrs Phillips’ age. Physically, she looked quite old, maybe seventy, but her mannerisms belonged to a younger woman. She was lithe and full of energy.

‘So, what brought you to Radley?’ She aligned the pages of the first newspaper and moved on to the second.

Jo jiggled her head, implying that she had too much toast in her mouth to talk. A bus. A night bus on its way to the depot. She couldn’t tell the truth, and she’d already told Mrs Phillips about the job at Trev’s Teashop. Nobody would move to Radley in order to work in a place like that.

‘A friend,’ she said finally. ‘I, er, wanted to get out of London for a bit–change of scene, you know.’ She took another bite to buy herself some time. ‘Um…my mate offered to put me up for a while, so I found myself a job–the job at the teashop–and then…’

‘Then you fell out with your friend,’ finished the woman, nodding. ‘And this friend–was it…a male friend, by any chance?’ She raised an eyebrow.

Jo looked at her. With a surge of relief, she realised that Mrs Phillips had assumed the most plausible story of all: that Jo had just split up with the boyfriend who she’d been planning to live with. She nodded.

‘I see. Ooh, kettle’s boiled. Tea or coffee?’

Jo opted for coffee, relieved. Mrs Phillips was a perceptive woman, she thought. And nosy, too. Jo knew she’d have to stay on the ball to avoid getting caught out by her own lies.

‘Have you always been a waitress? I’ll leave you to add milk and sugar.’

Jo stuffed a large piece of toast in her mouth and made a winding gesture with her hand. Why hadn’t she thought about this? She should have invented a background. Sooner or later, people would start asking–of course they would. And she had to stick to a story. She’d already told Trevor her parents weren’t English–what other nonsense would she come up with?

‘No,’ she said, still chewing. For some reason, she could only think of one possible career path that involved part-time waitressing, and she wasn’t sure it would stick.

Eventually, it was time to swallow.

‘I’m an actress.’

‘Goodness! Really? Would I have seen you in anything? What sort of acting?’

Jo shrugged modestly. ‘It’s just minor parts, mainly–nothing big.’ She was trying to remember the name of a low-budget film or series that would seem plausible for a small-time actress. Nothing sprang to mind.

‘Go on,’ the woman goaded excitedly. ‘Try me. I might’ve seen you in something.’

Jo shook her head. This really was testing her acting skills. ‘No, really–it’s been mainly screenplays and short films, like…’ She thought frantically, trying to make up a name that sounded like a title but wasn’t likely to be one already. ‘The Goose,’ she said finally.

Mrs Phillips was still looking at her expectantly.

‘And…’ God, this was hard, ‘Jim’s…Secret…House.’ Jo poured some milk into her coffee and stirred it ferociously. She could feel her cheeks burning.

‘Hmm, I’m not sure I know them,’ Mrs Phillips said tactfully.

Jo sipped her coffee and reached for the remote control, hoping that the TV would stave off any more questions.

‘Never anything worth watching in the mornings,’ the old lady commented woefully. Jo wondered whether she was like this when she was on her own, or whether this endless chatter was simply her way of making up for her ten-year break from hospitality.

As if to prove Mrs Phillips’ point, one of the presenters got up from his multicoloured couch and started enthusiastically demonstrating some sort of home steam-cleaning machine. Jo flicked to another channel, where a red cartoon character with a hook on its head was pushing a wheelbarrow across the screen.

She had nearly given up on finding anything informative when her grip suddenly tightened on the remote control. She stared at the TV in horror.

‘…don’t know any more about the motive behind the explosion, but police tell us they’re pursuing multiple lines of enquiry.’

The reporter pressed on his earpiece as the studio presenter asked him another question. Jo’s eyes were fixed on the screen. She couldn’t even blink. A strip of red and white police tape fluttered in the breeze behind the reporter’s head but other than that, the scene hadn’t changed since yesterday morning. She could even see the spot on the pavement where the paramedic had left her to wait. One word was echoing round and round in her head: motive. Someone had wanted the explosion to happen. It had been some sort of bomb.

‘Very little is known about the guests or staff present on the night of the explosion, so the death toll isn’t clear. But we understand that at least fourteen people are missing, feared dead, and there are twenty-one seriously injured in hospital.’

The camera panned back to the studio.

‘Thank you, Jamie, reporting from the scene of the Buffalo Club blast in Mayfair, London. And now, the renowned Turner Prize has created fresh controversy, this time not over a pickled cow but a pickled egg…’

Jo stopped listening and looked down at her coffee. Mrs Phillips scooped up the newspapers and prattled on about the state of modern art today but Jo could barely hear it. A bomb had gone off. A bomb. But bombs were what happened to other people, usually in the Middle East, not in her world–whatever world that 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.’

Chapter Five

‘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 you a student, ma’am?’

‘Er…’

‘A prospective student?’

‘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.