Like This, for Ever - By Sharon Bolton Page 0,33

these days. Somehow supermarkets were just too much of an effort.

The Wandsworth Road was busy, people in cars driving home from work, buses offloading, early-evening drinkers making their way to and from the pubs and bars. The Chinese restaurant was quiet, though, she could see through the glass. It was the sort of place that didn’t normally fill till later. The door made a chinging sound and Trevor, the middle-aged Chinese owner with the northern accent, appeared a second later.

‘Alright, Lacey?’ Over the last few months she’d become something of a regular.

‘How you doing, Trev?’

‘Not so bad. Usual?’

‘Please.’

The restaurant was almost empty. A table of students. A couple of men eating alone. In the furthest booth, half hidden by the intricately carved screen, sat a man with his back to Lacey, a man she knew immediately, with broad shoulders and short dark hair. Joesbury.

He wasn’t alone. Directly opposite him sat a child. A boy, around nine or ten years old, with short, dark hair that grew vertically up from his forehead and a heart-shaped face. It was the eyes that gave him away, though. Large and oval-shaped, and even from a distance she could see they were the exact shade of turquoise blue as his father’s. This was Huck. Joesbury had invited her out to dinner this evening. He’d wanted her to meet his son.

Lacey pedalled hard, heading for the river, away from the traffic, hardly aware of how she’d made the decision not to go home, only knowing that four walls around her right now might make her scream.

Trevor would have heard the door chimes as she’d left. All the same, she’d go back later and pay, when she could be sure the two Joesburys had gone. She’d make up some excuse about feeling ill or an urgent phone call. She couldn’t fall out with Trevor. What would she eat?

She rode beneath the underpass, garish with graffiti, where kids were gliding around on skateboards and roller blades, weaving in and out of each other like a strange street-ballet.

Huck? Such a funny name for a child. Why would he call his son Huck? The hair and the eyes had been Joesbury’s but the face was nothing like his dad’s. The boy’s face had been pretty with small features and very fair skin. His mother’s face. Joesbury had fallen in love, married and had a child with a woman whom Lacey had never even thought about before. A woman who would be slim with dark hair and a delicate, heart-shaped face.

Even in the dark, even in the cold, the embankment was busy with pedestrians. Everywhere around her the life of the city was going on. People were crossing the Millennium Bridge, travelling up and down the river on passenger ferries, crossing the water on trains; on the north bank the traffic flow seemed endless. Everywhere around her people moved with a sense of purpose. They knew where they were going and why. No one else looked lost.

The wind seemed to be coming directly from the east tonight, hurling its way up the river, almost throwing her off balance. Lacey tucked her head down and pressed on. Her muscles were trembling, the way they always did when she’d exercised too much, or not eaten enough. Or both.

And she had that feeling again, that sense of a scream building inside. Of something churning and pressing, trying to get out. When it came over her, all she could do was run, or swim, or cycle, or pound the punchbag in her shed until she was too exhausted to think about what it was she couldn’t possibly let come to the surface.

Cycling too fast, but unable to slow down, Lacey passed through an avenue of small trees, their bare branches strung with blue and white fairy lights. Huck had been wearing a blue football shirt with white stripes on the shoulders. What did that make him? A Chelsea supporter? She knew so little about London football clubs. What on earth would she have talked to a nine-year-old boy about?

She was leaving the busiest part of the river behind. Once past Tower Bridge, the lights and colour started to fade quickly. Pleasure craft rarely came this far downstream. The tide was high but going out. When she cycled past boats moored in the water she could see it pulling against them, trying to tug them out to sea. Not so very long ago she’d found herself in the Thames. Twice. The first time hadn’t been intentional,