I looked down at her palm but all I could see was a white envelope.
‘Cradle cap?’
She tutted at my ignorance and began to shuffle whatever was inside the envelope onto the table.
‘I kept it all these years. It came off in one piece, perfectly intact. It’s meant to be lucky when it does that and so we kept it.’
Finally, a round patch of thin skin with a smattering of fine blonde hairs still attached emerged from the envelope.
I thought of the package at the bottom of my handbag. The hair samples still inside. Sending it off had seemed important. Critical. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
‘Do you want it?’ she asked, picking the edge of it up between her forefinger and thumb. I moved back in my chair.
‘Why would I want that thing?’
‘I just thought …’
‘Throw it away.’
‘It’s meant to be lucky, that’s the only reason I kept it,’ she said, putting it back in its envelope. ‘It’s meant to be lucky.’
We were sitting watching the Six O’Clock News when I decided to go home. Jason was due to come and collect me at the weekend, but there was no way I could last till then. I brought up the train times on my phone. If I was quick, I could make the express. Slipping out unnoticed to my bedroom, I used one hand to start throwing clothes into my suitcase and the other to dial for a taxi.
Chapter Forty-Six
I watched the landscape go from plucked fields to ridged furrows, frosted solid by the night. Resting my head against the train window, I’d just closed my eyes when my phone rang. I answered expecting to hear Mum and Dad, calling to check on me again. Instead, I was greeted by a soft Glaswegian burr.
‘Hello Heidi.’
Tommy.
Despite a number of increasingly irate voicemails, since that night at the fireworks display, I had neither seen nor spoken to him. Still, I’d thought that if I ignored enough of his calls, he’d give up. I was wrong. If anything, it seemed to make him more persistent.
‘I’ve been thinking about you.’
I cut into his words. ‘I don’t want you to think about me.’
He paused and I imagined him on the other end of the line, his sleeves pushed up over his tattooed forearms.
‘I’m not sure you get to decide that, Heidi,’ he said eventually, a new bite to his tone.
‘I took your call just now out of common courtesy.’ I kept my voice low. ‘I could have continued to ignore you, but I thought this was the right thing to do. Seems I was wrong.’
‘I think you’ll find things have gone too far for common courtesy,’ he said. ‘That you’ve gone too far.’
I’d expected him to be difficult – I’d led him on a merry dance and now I was telling him things were over – but the way he was talking unnerved me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sick of his constant, confusing allusions to something I wasn’t party to. ‘Please don’t contact me again.’
Chapter Forty-Seven
It was after midnight when the taxi pulled up outside our house. I paid, grabbed my suitcase and got out. I hadn’t told Jason I was coming home early and so it was no surprise to see all the curtains closed. He must have already gone to bed.
Closing the front door quietly so as not to wake him, I was about to creep upstairs when I heard voices coming from the living room. He was still awake and, from the sound of it, he had company. The door was open a crack and so I peered through before going in. The TV was the only source of light in the room and it was showing an old video, recorded on a mobile phone.
One of Jason’s favourites (I’d seen it countless times), it featured a two-year-old Barney and a younger, less tired-looking Jason, both wearing aprons and silly white chef’s hats, baking cookies together. Their hair and faces were covered with flour and the video had just reached the point where Jason had made a moustache out of dough and stuck it to his face. Barney couldn’t stop giggling. From behind the camera came Vicky’s voice.
‘Make sure to give the mixture a good stir.’ Barney struggled to move his wooden spoon through the thick batter and so she offered more words of encouragement. ‘Look how strong you are. Just like Daddy. My two big strong boys.’
It was because of this, because of Vicky’s voice coming out of the