the man in the park? That you’d understood him by instinct?’
‘I did, actually.’
‘And how did she respond?’
I tell Blue Eyes that, again, Lisa didn’t seem at all bothered.
‘That’s a skill you’ve been practising your whole life,’ was all she said, as if telepathy were the most natural thing in the world.
‘How d’you mean?’ I said. ‘Like mind-reading?’
‘Not like Derren Brown, you nit. You’re not a bloody Jedi. But we weren’t born yesterday, were we? We’ve got to a stage in life where we can pick up on things, read people if not minds exactly. We don’t see everything in black and white like kids do. At our age we know nothing and no one is simple. It comes with being older.’
I thought about the chap’s crumpled trousers. When I was young, I would’ve assumed he was a slob. This morning, I’d had the compassion, I suppose you’d say, to think a bit more deeply about why he hadn’t ironed them. Same when I saw an older woman all dolled up like mutton dressed as lamb – before, I would have said to myself, look at the state of her, still thinks she’s twenty-one. Now, I know she doesn’t think anything of the sort. She knows bloody well she’s not twenty-one anymore. And it’s killing her.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said to Lisa.
‘No one gets to our age without living through something that knocks them about a bit.’ She met my eye and a flash of understanding passed between us, the one subject we never talked about. ‘We lose our certainty about things, don’t we? And that’s no bad thing sometimes when you look at the state of the world, people thinking they’re right all the time, that their way is better. We’ve spent most of our lives putting others first, haven’t we, you and me and a trillion other women? Meeting other people’s needs while pushing our own to the side, forgetting what our own needs ever were sometimes, not to mention who we were when we last had them. A tough habit to break, but it must make us more in tune with what others are feeling. It has to, doesn’t it? Stands to reason.’
I nodded. ‘I got eighty-five per cent in Grazia’s “Are You an Empath?” quiz the other week.’
‘There you go. And that’s bloody science, is that.’ She shot me a wicked grin. ‘God knows, if I’d had to discuss my interior life all those years with Patrick instead of you, I’d have thrown myself off the nearest bridge. He’d probably have started talking to me about the football scores. In fact, there’s no probably about it. He did. He used to. That or the mortgage.’
She pushed her once brown hair over one ear. She’d made that tricky transition to honey-toned blondey-grey without ever having the old caterpillar roots situation. Only reason I didn’t have grey roots was because I hadn’t bothered to dye mine at all this last year. My hair was pretty much salt and pepper these days, if you were being kind; geriatric mouse if you weren’t, and if I went back to the original black now I’d end up looking like something from The Addams Family. Lisa wore trendy clothes too, and even though she’d complained of a spare tyre, I couldn’t see one. Silently I vowed to get back on my hip and thigh diet the next day. My diets always start on Mondays. By Wednesday I think I can still turn it around. By Friday I’ve reached sod it I’ll try again next week, pass the chocolate.
‘Rach? Rachel?’ Lisa was staring at me. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Just… you were off somewhere else there for a second. Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘Of course I’m OK – why wouldn’t I be OK? I’m just not sure I’m ready to be invisible, that’s all.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. ‘If no one can see you, you can do anything you want, can’t you? You can get away with murder.’
5
Lisa
Transcript of recorded interview with Lisa Baxter (excerpt)
Also present: DI Heather Scott, PC Marilyn Button
LB: We were just chatting, that was all it was. I thought it was no more than our age, time of life type thing. I didn’t realise she was so fragile until later on, and even then I thought it was the hormones, because I was in the same boat – hot flashes, tiredness and feeling cross about everything all the time. But I should