balled into the toe. “Try them on,” she said. “It says they’re a five but you never know.”
I pulled off my sneakers and my socks and slipped my feet into the shoes. They fit well. It felt strange standing in heels again. I looked down at my feet. How weird this all was. How strange to be wearing shoes like this and feeling all right—a little light-headed perhaps, but all right.
“I’ll take them,” I said.
Taking the top home, and the shoes, in a large bag, was strange too. I thought about Erin’s present and how I’d had to get rid of it without so much as touching it. Now I’d gone and actually bought a top, a red silk top. The bag felt heavy and I put it on the seat next to me on the bus. I didn’t look at it. I would have to be brave and take it with me when the bus got back to High Street and I got off it. All the way home, my anxiety levels were high, probably about forty or fifty. I waited for them to subside, but they didn’t go down by much.
I took a detour through the alley, but I didn’t linger. I just looked. I was scared now, scared of what I’d done. I checked the front door, Mrs. Mackenzie’s door, all the while my shopping bags sitting on the bottom stair waiting for me. I could picture the red top, throbbing like a living thing.
I was just fabric, I thought. It couldn’t hurt me.
Nevertheless I took the bag all the way up to the top floor, to Stuart’s flat, and left it just inside the door.
When I got home and checked, everything was fine. Already I felt better. I left the silverware drawer alone, left the bathroom unchecked, had a drink and a cookie, and felt all right.
It was a start.
Sunday 13 June 2004
I didn’t sleep much. I was so cold. No position was comfortable; every part of me ached. When I saw the light behind the curtains I realized I must have slept a little, but I didn’t remember it.
I sobbed, quietly, for the person I’d become. I’d lost the will to fight. I wanted to give in now, I wanted it all to be over with. I was covered in shame.
And now, as if things weren’t dreadful enough, all I could think about was Naomi.
“Naomi?” I’d said.
“She was a job. A source. She was married to someone we were after. I recruited her—sweet-talked her into working with us. She was going to feed us information so we could bring him down.”
He looked down at his knuckles, the bruising on them, flexed his fingers and smiled. “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I was supposed to be working on her, but instead I fucked her and fell in love with her. They didn’t know, they thought I was just doing what I was being paid to do, but after the first time I couldn’t control it. I was going to leave the job, I was going to buy her a house, miles away, somewhere she’d be safe from that shit of a husband.”
“What happened?” I whispered.
He looked at me as though he’d forgotten I was there. Flexed his fingers back into a fist, looking at the skin around his knuckles turning white. “She was screwing me over as well as screwing me. All the time she was giving me intelligence about what he was up to, he was busy telling her what to say.”
He leaned his head back against the wall with a heavy sigh, then banged it back against the brickwork. And again. “I can’t believe I was that fucking stupid. I fell for everything she said.”
“Maybe she was too afraid of her husband,” I said.
“Well, that was her mistake, wasn’t it?”
I considered this for a moment. “What happened to her?”
“There was an armed robbery, just like we’d been waiting for, except we were waiting for them on the wrong side of town. We were all sitting there parked up like idiots, while another jeweler lost a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of stock and an assistant got her skull opened up with a baseball bat. Just when I was wondering what the fuck had gone wrong, I got a text from Naomi asking to meet me. I went to the usual place, opened her car door, and there inside was her old man. He was having a good old laugh