Be Careful What You Wish For

She had only brought a few basics with her, food-wise. Biscuits to eat on the way, a sandwich she’d eaten last night before bed, a couple of bananas already turning black, some chocolate, and the last two mini boxes of cereal from a variety pack that had been hanging about for months in the pantry. Any more would have been too much to carry on the train and she knew London would be choc-a-bloc with shops, many of them probably open late into the evenings. Madi had told her to help herself from the kitchen cupboards and, as promised, had left her some milk and a few other bits and pieces in the fridge, including a bottle of white wine, which she probably wouldn’t drink, but it was a generous gesture and one she wished she had thought to reciprocate.

After a long hot shower, a bowl of cereal and a cup of tea, she went looking for her raincoat. It was odd, but she could have sworn she had left it drying on the back of a dining chair but now it was hanging on the coat hooks by the door. How could that have happened? She shook away a shiver of unease. She’d never had a problem with her memory before. It must just be the new surroundings, so much to take in, or she’d been more tired last night than she’d realised. The coat was still slightly damp but she pulled it on, locked the door behind her and headed down the stairs to get some air and start exploring the neighbourhood.

It was a lot easier going down the two steep flights than it had been going up, and Prue quickly found herself back in the dusty communal hall. The postman had already been and someone must have sifted through the letters as there were now three in the box marked 9 that hadn’t been there before. Should she forward them on to Madi at Snowdrop Cottage, or just leave them alone? She and Madi hadn’t discussed things in that much detail but, thinking about it, she would probably quite like to have her own mail sent here. A month was a long time to risk ignoring anything that might be important. What if there was a bill she’d forgotten to pay, or a photography commission she’d kick herself for missing out on? She’d have to email Madi later and make some arrangements. It would give Prue the excuse to ask after little Flo as well. The poor thing might be feeling a bit uneasy, finding a stranger tucked up in her mistress’s bed, especially if Madi threw her off onto the floor or shut her out on the landing. Not everybody liked the idea of an animal, and its shedding fur, sharing their bed.

It was a bright morning. Prue had done her homework before leaving Norfolk and had printed off a street map covering the immediate area. London was a huge place, pretty daunting for a girl like her, and the last thing she wanted was to get lost. She’d looked up the local bus routes too, to find out what landmarks might be within easy reach. But first she fancied a stroll along the main road outside and a peek down a few of the side turnings, to get her bearings and track down the nearest shops and cafés.

She closed the front door and hovered for a moment on the steps. Should she try to the right first, or to the left? A bus was coming into view. A real, red London double decker, so different from the little green local bus that came through the village just twice a day, and went into town and back again on Saturday nights. She gazed at it in awe, whipping her small digital camera out of her pocket and taking several photos in quick succession and from different angles as it came closer. Although the bus was red she could already imagine how it might look in black and white, an iconic, unchanging image of a city she had only ever seen in pictures. Oh, wow! There was going to be so much here in the capital that she would love to capture, as a reminder, a record. Who knew when, or if, she would ever spend time here again? Next time she came out she would bring her bag with her proper camera, and some of her lenses, although just the thought of it made her shoulder ache after yesterday’s struggle with the suitcase.

She watched the bus sail by, the occupants mostly staring ahead or busy reading papers, just one small face pressed against the glass and sticking its tongue out at her as it passed. She laughed and stuck her own tongue out in reply, then stepped down onto the pavement and set off in the same direction.

There was a row of shops on the first corner she came to. An off licence, currently closed, but it was only half past nine. A newsagent’s cum post office and card shop, with a pillar box outside. A small Co-Op, with a lottery advert on the door. An old-fashioned hairdresser’s with a price list stuck to the window, offering cheap cuts for pensioners and half-price perms on Tuesdays. And, across the road, a kebab place with faded pictures of its meal choices, showing that they did chips and burgers too. She didn’t stop, but it was good to know that anything she was likely to need in a hurry was within yards of her door.

Five minutes later she came to the first of several coffee shops, dotted among lots of larger shops and offices. She went into the third one, which looked cleaner and brighter than the rest, and bought herself a cup to take away, baffled by the enormous range of what, when it came down to it, was just coffee by different names, in varying strengths and degrees of milkiness, and shocked at the prices. She chose a bun with icing on top to go with it, the filling effect of her meagre portion of cereal having already worn off. A black iron gate to her left led through to a small square park, hidden away behind the buildings, mostly laid to grass with some cut-back rose bushes in neatly weeded beds and a series of wooden benches placed at regular intervals along the circular path. She sat down on one at the far end and shared some crumbs from her bun with a hungry pigeon and a couple of sparrows brave enough to venture right up to her feet.

She had always loved animals. From the old spaniel, Molly, who had been such an important part of her childhood, but now long gone, to her parents’ latest dog, a little white poodle called Noodle. And there was Flo, of course, the twelve-year-old sweetheart of a cat she had taken on after her gran died. In between, there had been a pair of green budgies, Chirp and Cheep, that they’d kept in a cage in the kitchen, and a goldfish who came home in a plastic bag from the funfair and never did get itself a name. It had only lived for a few weeks but had been given a proper shoebox funeral in the garden, just the same. And, of course, all the village pets that had come through the doors at her dad’s old vets’ surgery tacked on at the back of their house, and the farm animals in need of visits, when she had spent her school holidays helping her dad out around the place or, to be honest, mostly just getting in the way.

Prue was no scientist. She loved English and art. From the day she had been given her first camera, she had known she wanted to become a photographer and that’s exactly what she’d done, even if so far it was only working for the local paper, with the occasional wedding job at the weekends. Much to her dad’s disappointment, she had never wanted to study chemistry or biology and follow in his footsteps to become a vet but, slowly and surely, as her friends spent more and more time hanging about at the surgery with her after school and in the holidays, it became clear that her school friend Ralph Barton did. Her dad had taken Ralph under his wing, given him work experience and paid him to help out during his holidays from uni, sat with him for hours at a time, helping with revision and essays and practical tasks, then taken him on as his assistant. By the time Ralph was qualified, her dad had been more than willing to accept him into the business as a junior partner, getting him ready to take over one day when the joys of retirement started to beckon, which couldn’t be that far off now he was in his sixties.

It had caused a lot of jealousy between the brothers when their father had invested so heavily in Ralph’s future, mortgaging the family home to help Ralph raise the money to bring the practice into the modern world with a website and brand new premises. Prue could see that Joe had felt side-lined, as if his own accountancy career, and perhaps even he himself, was regarded as less important when measured against his big brother. Perhaps if their mother had still been alive it might have been different, but she had died when the boys were still at school. Their dad just didn’t seem to have the same natural intuition when it came to his sons’ feelings, finding it easier to concentrate on the practical side of things, as if chucking his money around, buying bigger and better Christmas presents and bikes and computer games, and then ploughing so much cash into the vets’, could somehow compensate for the loss of a mother’s love.

Prue had seen Joe’s initial hurt turn to anger and resentment as he moved out of his dad’s home and took on the tenancy of the small self-contained flat that had once been the surgery behind her mum and dad’s house. Her heart had gone out to him. As an only child, and an only grandchild, she had never had to vie for attention, never had to share, certainly never seen herself as second best, and she found it hard to imagine how it must feel. Poor Joe.

He’d lived away from the village long enough, he’d said, what with uni and then that job up north that he’d left only a year ago. Why had he come back home? Certainly not to spend more time with his brother and his dad. Had something gone wrong with his job? His life? Prue wondered why he had never explained, or even tried to. Still, he was back in Norfolk now, where he insisted he belonged, and he wasn’t going to let his family problems drive him away, even if it meant living alone. She’d foolishly allowed herself to believe that she might be the reason he had come back home, that his heart was telling him he belonged with her, but of course that wasn’t true. She knew that now.

Why was it that her thoughts always came back to Joe? Because she loved him, she supposed. Or had thought she did. She had felt safe with him, and comfortable, but that wasn’t love, was it? It was friendship and familiarity, and gratitude. An acceptance of what she had and a fear of letting that all go if she were ever to take that scarily dangerous step and reach out for something more.

They had been friends for as long as she could remember. Her and Joe, Ralph and Sian, their own little gang of four, until, somewhere along the way, as they all got older, things had started to change. Sian and Ralph had fallen for each other. In an innocent, teenage way at first, but it was clear sometimes that they just wanted to be by themselves, just the two of them, leaving Prue and Joe behind, forced to find a way to rub along together, more and more often, without their partners in crime.

In time, with teenage hormones doing their thing, Prue had begun to look forward to being alone with Joe. She’d started to notice his eyes, his hands, what he was wearing, the smell of him, the feel of him. There had been a gradual, gentle move towards the holding of hands, tentative experimental kisses on the way back from school, out of sight, on the corner, before she turned into the lane that led her home. How much of it had happened simply because the others were doing it, she could never be sure, but they’d gone to the cinema together too, her and Joe, sharing tubs of popcorn, her head resting sleepily on his shoulder on the way home on the bus, and sometimes, once they were old enough, he would ring and ask if she fancied a drink and they’d meet in The Brown Cow, have a game of darts, a bag of crisps, a laugh. Looking back now, she couldn’t help wondering if that was all it had ever been to him. A laugh? A casual thing. Not the romance she had imagined it to be. Needed it to be. Not the real thing at all.

The bun was gone now, every crumb pecked up greedily from the path, and the birds flew off, their eyes fixed on an old man who had just arrived on the next bench, providing another likely source of food. Prue screwed up the paper bag and dropped it inside her empty cup, popped the lid back on and took it to an overflowing rubbish bin. It was no good dwelling on what was gone. She was twenty-four, and she had let too many years slip by. There was no her and Joe. Not any more. Not in the way she had wanted anyway. She had watched him go off to uni, been proud of him, and excused his long absences and his long silences as necessary if he was to do well, work hard, study hard. Had he played hard too? She would never know. She had believed only what she’d wanted to believe, seen only what she’d wanted to see, and heard … well, what? She had certainly never heard him say he loved her. Because he didn’t love her, and he probably never had. That was so blindingly obvious now.

She went back out through the gate to the street and spotted another bus approaching. Without any time to work out where it might take her, she ran to the stop and jumped on board. What was the point of being in London and telling herself she was going to change her life if she couldn’t act on impulse and just hop on a passing bus and see where she ended up?

‘Sorry, love.’ The driver sniffed at the fiver she held out towards him. ‘We don’t take cash these days. Oyster?’

Prue shook her head. She hadn’t had time to think about getting herself a travel card, but no cash? Really? How could a bus not take cash?

‘Or a contactless card’ll do. Got one of those?’

She rummaged about in her purse, feeling her face redden, wishing her research into bus routes had expanded into working out how to pay, but thankful at least that there was no queue behind her waiting impatiently to board. She found her bank card and touched it on the round yellow pad the driver was pointing at. The beep noise seemed to satisfy him. He nodded, and she walked down the bus and found herself a seat as he drove back out into the traffic, narrowly missing a cyclist who stuck two fingers up in the air as he clung to the handlebars one-handedly and wobbled out into the centre of the road.

The man sitting in front of her was tall, his head bent over a newspaper, his dark brown hair skimming his collar at the back. She caught her breath. He looked so much like Joe she had to fight the urge to reach out and touch him. But as he turned his head to look out of the window she saw that he really didn’t look like Joe at all. He was about ten years older for a start, and dark skinned, and he was wearing glasses. Prue shook her thoughts away. Silly, silly, silly … Joe was miles away, and she couldn’t conjure him up at will, much as she might like to.

She turned her attention away from random passengers and towards what was going on outside the window, lifting a finger and wiping a little patch of the glass clean. Was that Trafalgar Square looming up at her? Yes, it was. The big stone lions, the fountain, and all those people! This was where she would start her first London adventure. Checking that her compact camera was still safely tucked in her pocket, she jumped up so excitedly that she almost tripped over her own feet, and rang the bell.

Chapter 5

MADI

When Madi woke up, to the sound of a far-off cockerel announcing the morning, it was still dark. She turned over onto her back, her scar sore where she had rolled onto her side in her sleep, and lay for a while, listening to the unfamiliar creaks of the old cottage.

When she was sure she was not going to be able to get back to sleep, she made her way slowly down the stairs, pulling her dressing gown tightly around her against the chill, and went into the kitchen, hoping to find that the cat had returned. The bowl of food she’d left on the floor was empty, so at least the little truant was around somewhere, not run off in disgust at the new living arrangements or trapped in someone’s shed. Well, you heard such stories about animals going missing when an owner moved house or went on holiday, and she’d hate to be the one to have to explain to Prue that she’d let her down and lost the poor little mite.

The water that emerged from the hot tap was, if anything, even colder than the water coming from the cold one and she remembered, too late, about the immersion heater. Oh, well, no bath or shower for her this morning. At least there was a kettle, so she could enjoy her first coffee of the day and make herself some porridge.

Madi ran her hand over her head. With nobody here to see her, and the curtains still closed, she had not bothered wrapping one of her many coloured scarves around it this morning or resorted to hiding beneath that nasty, itchy wig. Her fingers played with the short stubbly covering of new hair that was starting to emerge and she couldn’t help wondering what colour it would turn out to be. It had been a very long time since she had last seen her natural chestnut colour, having veered between various reds and browns and even the occasional blonde over the years, depending on changing fashions or her mood or what role she was playing at the time. At sixty-two, the chances were that it would end up grey, of course. Or, at best, a sophisticated shade of silver. Still, having hair back at all was a relief, and there was always the dye bottle to fall back on again if what nature decided to provide needed a helping hand.

As she sat at the kitchen table, a clack of plastic at floor level alerted her to the return of the missing cat.

‘Ah, so you must be Flo,’ she said, lowering her hand and feeling pleasantly surprised when the little tabby walked towards her, tipped her head and started rubbing it round and round against her fingers, her tail pointing straight upwards as she arched her back and purred loudly. ‘Well, I can see we’re going to get along just fine, aren’t we, sweetie?’ She tried to remember which cupboard held the clean cat bowls and found them on the third attempt. Her memory, quite worryingly, wasn’t as good recently as it had once been. ‘Now, let’s find you some breakfast, shall we?’

The first day in any new place always felt a bit unsettling. Not knowing where things were, or how things worked. She’d moved around a lot as various theatrical productions she’d been involved with had toured the country. It was a life she had chosen long ago and had grown used to. Two or three nights in one town, then maybe a week or two in another and, if she was lucky, a few days back at home in between. Different dressing rooms, different guesthouses and hotels, different rules. A changing circle of colleagues and crew members and friends, some of whom she would come across often and some she would never meet again. Her face and her name on the posters outside greeted her at every theatre they went to, sometimes in a leading role, sometimes (and more frequently as she grew older) just as one of the supporting cast, but she always made a point of keeping a programme to add to her vast collection. She had even been in a TV soap once, although only for a dozen or so episodes, and still had the Radio Times to prove it.

This, she told herself, peering through the curtains at the lane outside, was going to be just the same. A new place to explore, a new bed to sleep in, new people to meet, and then home again to touch base and await whatever opportunities might follow. Was there any call for a damaged ageing actress without a full head of hair? She hoped so, but it had become all too easy lately to look at life more pessimistically. Just four months ago she had been utterly oblivious to what was going on inside her own body, those horrid little rogue cells gathering together and ganging up on her, determined to do their worst. But she was rid of them now and, despite the surgery and the chemo, she was still here. She had survived and, apart from occasional visits from Betty next door to check she was doing okay or to get her heavier bits of shopping in, she’d done it alone. And from now on it was all about recovery, regaining her strength and her positivity, making time for herself for a change. She fought back the tears that so often threatened to overwhelm her. What good would it do to cry? It would change nothing and, besides, the worst was surely over now. Life could only get better.

She had told nobody of the seriousness of her illness, just blamed a bad bout of flu, withdrew from the play she had been rehearsing in favour of an understudy, and slipped out of the loop for a while. The last thing she needed was pity. Best that nobody knew. Not even George. Especially George.

While she was here, just as if she was acting a part, she did not have to reveal anything of her real life or her true self if she chose not to. In Norfolk she could be anyone she wanted to be. In this little corner of the world, she could be whole again. No cancer, no scars, everything still in its place. That, more than anything, was what she needed right now. That anonymity, that normality, the chance to re-adjust to her new self, before going back to face whatever life decided to throw at her next.

One thing she could not do, try as she might, was lie to herself. As soon as she took off her dressing gown and opened the wardrobe to select an outfit for the day, the full-length mirror reminded her of that. It still came as a shock, seeing her newly altered body, so unfamiliar, so lopsided, her scars still raw and so difficult to look at. The easiest thing, the safest thing, was simply not to look at all, to select something to wear, something loose and all-concealing, cover herself up and shut the door on the mirror as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t do it. Every mirror she approached seemed to compel her to look into it, as if it was forcing her to confront the truth.

The cat was rubbing around her legs now, almost tripping her as she stepped into her trousers. She bent down and picked her up, holding the thin little body close and listening to her purr. ‘It doesn’t bother you, does it, sweetie? What I look like, whether I have one breast or two, as long as I give you cuddles and fill your bowl.’

People were a different matter though. In a business like hers, appearance was everything. It was a world of costumes and camouflage, make-up and make-believe, where its players came on stage for a while, fooled the audience into believing just about anything and then left again through different doors, a world where nobody was entirely who they seemed. Perhaps that was the best way to live, given a choice. Just pretending all the time. Avoiding real life altogether, because real life, as George would no doubt say, sucked.

She wondered, briefly, where George might be at this moment, what he was doing and who he was with. It had been almost five months since she had last seen him, at the small party she had held for her birthday, backstage in her dressing room straight after coming off stage. She hadn’t known about her cancer then. The lump lurking in her left breast had not yet made itself known, and life was still busy, hectic, normal. George had wanted to take her out for dinner, said there was something he wanted to talk to her about, but she had already made the arrangements. Assorted bottles of booze and a cocktail shaker were lined up beneath her mirror, the lights positioned around it sparkling off the glass, and the cast were elated after a successful opening night. George had hovered in the corner, out of place, and had left early. As far as he was concerned, he told her afterwards, it was yet another snub, proof that she preferred the company of her fellow actors and had never put him first. Oh, how wrong he was. If only she had taken the time to notice his distress and give him the love and attention he needed, but she had been caught up in the buzz all around her and it had never occurred to her that there might not be a chance the next day to put things right.

When she had called him in the morning, he had told her that Jessica had left him. That everyone he had ever loved always left him. The sting in his voice left no doubt that he was talking about her. His hurt ran down the phone line like treacle she had no idea how to wade through. Her heart went out to him but she couldn’t find the words she needed to say how sorry she was. She knew only too well the pain of being abandoned, but that didn’t mean she had the answers, or that she had ever had the right to abandon him too. But she had had her career to think about …