69236538256563

RACHEL
When I got home, Zhang asked me if I wanted her to come in with me but I declined, saying that my
sister would be there, even though I didn’t know if that was true. I still felt detached and strange as if
all my senses were dulled and the only thing that mattered were the thoughts that were at a rolling boil
inside my head.
Nicky was there. She was sitting in the kitchen and her packed bag was by the front door, her coat
draped over it.
‘I waited because I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye,’ she said.
She didn’t notice my disorientation. She did ask me what I was cradling in my arms.
‘Ben’s books,’ I said.
I put them carefully down on the table and then we just stood facing each other and she reached
forward to hug me. It was an awkward hug, just as it had been the first morning at the police station,
although this time it was worse because her body offered none of the softness that it had before. We
were both too wary of each other, and we made do with the minimum of contact, because for the first
time in our lives neither of us knew where we stood with the other. And then, as if she knew that was
inadequate, Nicky stood in front of me and put her hands on either side of my arms, and rubbed them
up and down.
‘Will you be OK?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘I can come back whenever you want, just call me, if it’s too much being on your own.’
‘I can ask Laura to come over,’ I said, and my voice sounded strange, as if I were speaking with a
thick tongue.
She hesitated just slightly before saying, ‘OK, good.’
Then we stood there again and her hands fell away from my arms and she looked at me in a way
that made me want to start screaming with the uncertainty and the awfulness of it all, so with the last
reserves of my strength I said, ‘Just go, Nicky.’
‘Now I’m not sure I should,’ she said. ‘Looking at you now. You’re not OK, are you?’
And I shouted. I shouted, ‘JUST GO!’ because I felt as if I would implode if anybody said anything
else to me, and it shocked her so much that she took a step back, and from her reaction I could tell that
my expression must be ugly.
She stared at me, and then started to say something, but I couldn’t stand to hear it, so I shouted
‘NOW!’ and it was more of a scream than a word, and then I ran up the stairs so fast that they pounded
and I didn’t hear the sound of the door clicking shut behind her, but I did hear the press badgering her
to tell them who had been shouting and why, and if she replied to them she did it very quietly or not at
all, because within minutes all I could hear were the sounds of my empty house.
Laura came to mop me up. I didn’t ask her to, she just arrived. As I went to answer the door I heard
her chatting with one of the journalists on the doorstep. When I let her in she said, ‘How funny. I
trained with one of those guys out there.’ She said it lightly, as if they’d run into each other at a party. I
wondered which one of them it was. There were a few regulars. Most likely, I thought, to be the
youngest of the bunch, the one who could outrun the others and was the last to stop beating on the
windows of the car when I was driven away. I didn’t ask her.
She’d brought takeaway food and a bottle of wine with her. Before she arrived I thought I’d tell her