Читать книгу: «No Good Deed: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of In a Cottage in a Wood»

1
Nina

The sun still blasts through the restaurant windows at seven pm, showcasing dust on the red plastic table cloths and monochrome movie stars on the walls. Even Sophia Loren is looking the worse for wear as she smiles down on my table-for-two, her picture yellowing and wrinkled in the unforgiving light. Two large ceiling fans churn the soupy air, bringing no relief.

The initial, barbecue-novelty of this heatwave has long passed and most of the passers-by now share the same shiny, bad-tempered patina. There’s a fraught, irritable energy in the heavy air. Earlier, on the bus into town, a young woman had unleashed a barrage of swearing at an old man she accused of hogging all the space on their double seat. Physical contact with strangers is even less welcome than it ever was.

I pluck at my neckline to let in some air; sweat is gathering under the seams of my bra. Because I’ve been living in vest tops, baggy old shorts and flip-flops after work lately, I feel imprisoned by this outfit. I don’t even like this dress that much, nor the sandals that supposedly go with it, which seem to be made mainly from barbed wire and sandpaper.

I bought the shoes and the dress from a shop I normally avoid because it’s so expensive, deciding I needed to be bolder, braver, in my wardrobe choices.

Making any kind of decisions the day after your husband of fifteen years moves out of the family home and in with his new, younger partner, isn’t, it transpires, the brightest idea.

I picture her; reasonable, smiling Laura with her huge, moist eyes and her, ‘I really hope we can become friends, Nina.’

Friends.

Ian posted a picture on Facebook today; the two of them looking tanned and happy outside a pub. Laura’s face was turned to him like a heliotrope seeking sunshine. He seems to have dropped ten years in that picture and it stung, I can tell you. If that wasn’t bad enough, Carmen, my supposed best friend, had liked the post. It was as though she’d forgotten all that stuff about being ‘better off without him’. Forgotten about my broken heart.

So, I’d bashed out a furious private message to her. She’d claimed it was ‘difficult’ because we all ‘went back a long way’ and a load of other rubbish that finally made me snap. I’m pretending not to see the missed calls and four texts she has sent since then.

It’s fair to say that it has been a shitty day.

I usually love this time of year. The thought of six weeks away from the comprehensive where I work as an English teacher should be something to relish. All those weeks without lesson planning, marking and having to mop up hormonal teenage angst. Lots of time to hang out at home. The extended summer holiday usually includes some lesson planning and a couple of meetings, but for now it stretches ahead of me. That is the problem, in a nutshell.

Last night, my twelve-year-old son, Sam, went off to stay with Ian and Laura before travelling with them to visit Laura’s parents, who live in Provence. I’ve seen the pictures of where they’re going. It’s all turquoise shutters and tumbling wisteria. Idyllic. There’s even a small pool. But the icing on the cake is the resident dog, a shaggy-haired golden retriever. Sam has always wanted a dog but Ian’s allergy to pets meant it was a no-go. I can’t help enjoying the thought of Ian spending the whole holiday sneezing. Maybe I’ll get the biggest, hairiest dog I can find while they’re away. That’ll show him.

I pretended to be excited for Sam, however hard it was to mould my mouth and face into the required shapes for a response. I want him to have a lovely time. Of course I do, but the idea of rattling around the house on my own, picturing them all together as they amble down sun-sparkled lanes surrounded by lavender fields, causes a panicky emptiness to swell inside my chest.

Must snap out of this. I take a swig of my tepid white wine and blink hard. I wish I had thought to bring something to read, or at least my iPad. I’d been watching something on Netflix in the bath, and I left it on the side. Ian disapproved of this and now I do it as often as possible in a pathetic act of rebellion.

I look around the restaurant.

There aren’t many other customers. Whether it’s because it is still early, or there is no air conditioning here, it is hard to say. A couple with two small children stoically attempt to eat with one hand each, while simultaneously pushing rising offspring back into highchairs, wiping mouths and occasionally tapping at their phone screens with the other. I remember those days all too well, but how quickly they go. People told me this but I didn’t really believe it then.

I still think a Starbucks might have been a better choice for this blind date, or whatever it is. When he suggested this unprepossessing family Italian restaurant, Gioli’s, it had thrown me a bit. Feels like more of a commitment; harder to make a getaway anyway, should the need arise. But Carmen is always telling me to be bolder, to ‘get back out there again,’ and so I agreed. The man I’m meeting, Carl, is an acquaintance of Stella at work, who assured me he was a) clean b) not mad c) quite good looking, in that order. The order of importance might have been different twenty years ago.

My attention is drawn now to the back of the restaurant, where the manager, a rotund moustachioed man, is having an intense conversation with a waitress who appears to have just arrived. She is tying an apron around her narrow waist, and looking sourly over his comb-over’d head. Taller than him by several inches, she is willow-thin, with jet-black hair only a few midnight degrees up from natural judging by the Celtic paleness of her skin. Her hair is tied up in a tumbling ponytail. Her large features and smokily made-up eyes remind me a little of Amy Winehouse.

As the manager turns away, grim-faced, I shoot her a tentative smile of sympathy. The young woman lifts her fingers and makes a shooting gesture at her own head, which makes me laugh out loud.

The restaurant door flies open then and a man enters with much bustle and energy, carrying one of those foldable bikes. He manoeuvres it past a table, catching a chair that almost clatters over. I hear a murmured grumble.

He’s tall, balding, slim. Not bad looking. Carl, I’m sure of it. I offer a smile but he regards me with a furrowed brow. Like I haven’t quite matched up to expectations. Something deflates inside me.

‘Are you Nina?’ His voice is a little curt. He still isn’t smiling.

‘Yes,’ I reply, feeling my own friendly expression sliding off my face. He bobs his head in greeting and begins fussing with the folded bike, trying to wedge it next to the table up against the wall. This all seems to take an age and he looks increasingly annoyed.

I’m starting to squirm a little in my seat by the time he finally does look up. He manages a brief smile, warming his eyes for a moment like a light flicking on and then off again.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘You must think I’m rude. I’m Carl.’ He holds out his hand and I’m aware that mine is a little damp in his oddly dry one.

‘That’s dedication,’ I say with a grin, ‘cycling in this heat. I almost melt in a puddle just walking anywhere!’

The frown’s back. Maybe I’ve said the wrong thing, or the thought of me sweating is repulsive to him. He picks up the menu and says, rather abruptly, ‘So. Are we eating?’

No, we bloody aren’t, I think, not if you’re going to be like this. But he’s calling Amy Winehouse over and within seconds he has ordered a chicken salad and a Diet Coke.

My eyes dart to my glass of white wine and I take a large, defiant sip.

‘Anything for you?’ the waitress asks quietly, her voice deep and soft. She has a bumpy rash of spots around her chin smeared in concealer. She looks like she needs to eat more fruit and vegetables. A plastic name badge says ‘Angel’ on the breast of her white shirt.

What a pretty, unusual name.

Carl is tapping the Fitbit on his wrist and staring into its face greedily. Heaven knows when he finds time to go walking, what with all that cycling.

This isn’t going to work. But I’m too well brought up to simply get up and leave. On any other day, I’d have probably made a plan for Carmen to ring with a fake emergency. That was out, obviously. I’m just going to have to deal with this on my own. I’m not staying much longer, that’s for sure.

‘Just some olives, thanks,’ I say. ‘And a tap water. With ice.’

Carl looks at me curiously.

‘Ate earlier,’ I lie. I’ll finish my disappointing glass of wine, eat the olives and then pretend I’ve had a text calling me away. Decision made, I feel myself relax slightly.

As the waitress writes down our order, I spot what look like fingerprint bruises circling her delicate wrist, but it’s just a glimpse. She moves and a trio of cheap metal bangles cover the spot with a tinkling sound.

‘So, Nina,’ says Carl, pulling my attention back, ‘you aren’t a cyclist then?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘well, not unless you count using an exercise bike once, before guiltily stuffing it in the garage.’

He regards me blankly.

‘You’re keen then?’ I say, a bit weakly.

Oh yes. He is.

He proceeds to talk at length about the cycling club that saved him from a serious bout of depression. He tells me how many ‘Ks’ he does every weekend and about his plans to enter some race or other in the summer. I tune out and finish my wine miserably, while surreptitiously dragging my handbag onto my lap in readiness to receive the fake text.

He doesn’t even stop talking when the food arrives. I drain the glass of water then robotically pop olives into my mouth, waiting for the best moment to pretend my phone is vibrating.

‘You should try it,’ he’s saying now. ‘Literally saved my life.’

‘Yep. You said.’

He stares at me then, an odd expression on his face. His cheeks redden a little.

The next thing he says is in a lower tone and I don’t catch it at first.

‘I’m sorry?’ I say, sliding the last olive into my mouth.

He clears his throat.

‘I’m not very good at this sort of thing,’ he says, sotto voce, ‘but do you want to come back? For sex?’

I stare at him for a couple of seconds, unable to believe what I just heard. His cheeks are now flaming. A mental picture of him attempting to peel off Lycra shorts in a seductive manner comes into my mind and a surge of hysterical laughter rises in my throat. I inhale sharply and the olive shoots backwards, covering my windpipe. I try to cough it away but my throat just spasms uselessly, silently, failing to budge it. The olive is a solid mass at the back of my throat. There’s a split second of disbelief before I accept that I’m choking. My pulse thunders in my head and there’s a whooshing in my ears.

I can’t breathe … I can’t breathe.

‘I don’t think it was that funny,’ says Carl, his face sour now. He doesn’t understand that I’m dying, I’m actually dying right here, in this shitty restaurant.

Slapping my hands against the table, I stagger to my feet, panic blooming in hot waves as my body strains for air. I try thumping my own chest but nothing changes, nothing shifts. The olive feels vast in my throat as my lungs strain and pull uselessly and my face is wet with tears.

Carl’s mouth opens and closes, fish-like, his shocked eyes wide.

Why isn’t he helping me? Why isn’t anyone helping me?

My vision begins to smear, the floor shifting under me. My mind blooms bright with Sam’s face and I strive even harder to make the air come. But it’s no good.

I’m going to die.

And then arms encircle my body from behind. It feels unbearable to be touched and my panic ratchets higher and higher again. Then a hard fist under my diaphragm jerks upwards – again – again – again – and the olive shoots out of my mouth onto the table, where it sits, glistening with spit.

Air rushes into my lungs. I start to sob uncontrollable tears of relief. I can’t stop them.

There’s a hot hand on the bare flesh of my arm and I’m looking into the face of the waitress, who says, ‘You’re OK, you’re OK.’

It takes me a few moments to find my voice and then I manage to croak, ‘Thank you, thank you so much.’ It’s the strangest feeling but, in that brief moment, I love this waitress a tiny bit.

I wish I could stop crying but I can’t. Carl stands awkwardly in front of me, arms dangling by his sides, and the other diners stare as one.

Thank God, I’m finally out of that place and on the way home.

I pretend to root in my handbag to avoid the curious eyes of the cab driver framed in the rear-view mirror. I know I look a state, with eye make-up migrating down my cheeks and skin all blotchy from crying.

Every time I think about how it felt, my eyes well up again. The precise texture and taste of the terror keeps coming back to me in waves. It was all-encompassing; a drenching horror I’d only ever experienced in my worst nightmares.

I have never come close to dying before, not really. I was in a car accident when I was a teenager, when a boyfriend misjudged a bend and wrote off his car. But all I got was a bit of whiplash.

This was the most frightening thing I have ever experienced, worse than the most intense bits of childbirth when I thought nothing could be as bad. Or the time when I lost Sam at the Natural History Museum for twenty whole minutes until there was an announcement calling for me. I’d thought then that it was the most intense terror I’d ever experienced, but it was nothing like the feeling that I was about to die.

For a moment, standing in that crummy restaurant, I really thought my life was over. I’ll never forget that hot panic and the desperate fight for air, not for the rest of my suddenly-precious life. Oh, here we go again. I swipe my nose with a piece of kitchen towel I find in my handbag. So humiliating too. For this intimate thing to happen, being reduced to my basest self, with all those strangers.

Carl … well, I hadn’t been wrong about him. After a lukewarm, ‘Alright now?’ he had lingered awkwardly as I sat down again and attempted to get myself together.

Perhaps he felt slighted. His bald offer of sex having, after all, almost killed me. Hopefully he’ll sharpen up his chat-up lines before his next date, unless I’ve frightened him off for life.

This, almost, is enough to make me smile inwardly.

The life-saving waitress had been monosyllabic, as if what she’d done was no big deal. Afterwards, she just asked me if I wanted a cab and, gratefully, I’d accepted, hoping there wouldn’t be a long wait. We’d quickly split the bill; Carl throwing down more than enough in his hurry to get away. After he had gone, I had sat there, deflated and wrung out, gazing out at the street and wishing I’d never come out tonight.

When the cabbie arrived, I asked him to wait a minute and hurried to the far end of the restaurant where the waitress was talking to another, older woman who had just arrived. They both regarded me curiously as I approached.

‘I’m sorry. Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I just want to thank you again. You saved my life!’

The waitress hadn’t replied. Flustered, I hurried on. ‘I wish I could repay you in some way. Look, let me give you something. An extra tip.’

I found myself thrusting a twenty-pound note at her. The waitress looked up sharply, a little suspicious, almost as though she was being tricked in some way.

She took it with only a small nod of thanks.

Just before I left, vowing to never come back to this restaurant, I reached out and touched her thin, pale wrist.

‘Your name is apt,’ I said. ‘I can never thank you enough.’

I sniff now and the taxi driver eyes me again.

Please don’t make conversation.

I hadn’t been able to face the bus. My car is in the garage and, even though it feels extravagant to get a taxi all the way out of town to mine, I just want to be home so I can close the door on this terrible evening.

More than anything, I want to grab hold of Sam and squeeze him for all he’s worth. But that’s not going to be possible.

What a disastrous day. I can’t wait for it to be over.