The Death of Mrs. Westaway

There had been no time for A levels. She had dropped out of school, taken over the kiosk, and coped in any way that she could—one moment trying to forget, cropping her hair so that she didn’t see her mother’s face in the mirror quite so painfully every day, drinking herself into oblivion when she could afford the alcohol; the next moment holding on to her memories with painful intensity, inking them into her skin.

The person she was now was not the girl she would have been. The girl who had given her pocket money to the homeless, frittered away pennies on the pier, whiled away Sundays eating popcorn in front of bad films—she was gone. In her place was someone hardened, someone who had had to become hardened in order to survive. The laughing confidence of that girl on the beach had been stripped away, but inside, Hal had found a very different kind of strength that she had barely even known was there—a cold, hard core of determination that made her get up on frosty mornings to walk to the pier, even when her nose streamed with cold and her eyes were red with weeping, a kind of steel that made her carry on, putting one foot in front of the other, even when she was too tired to keep going.

She had become a different person.

The person she was now walked past beggars and turned her face away. The TV had been sold, and she never had Sundays off anyway. She was always tired from working, and always hungry, and most of all . . . most of all she was lonely.

A few months after the funeral she had seen a group of her old friends in Brighton town center—and they had not even recognized Hal. They had walked straight past her, talking and laughing. She had turned and opened her mouth, ready to call after them—then stopped. A chasm had opened between them, and it was too wide for any of them to bridge. They would not have understood anything about the person she had become.

So she had watched them walk away without saying a word; and then, just weeks later, they had scattered, to universities all around the country, to jobs and careers and gap years, and now she didn’t see them anymore, even from afar.

But she did not know how to explain all that to the pier worker. No, was all she had said, her throat tight with loss and anger at his casual belief that everyone must have someone to fall back on. No I can’t do that.

She couldn’t quite remember how the suggestion had come about, but at last she had become aware of someone who did loans, no collateral needed. The interest was high, but the lender would accept small repayments, even let you skip a week if you couldn’t keep up. It was all unofficial—no office premises, meetings in odd places, envelopes of cash. But it seemed like the answer to a prayer, and Hal jumped at it.

It wasn’t until a few months in that she had the wit to ask how far she was getting in paying back her debt.

The answer had rocked her back on her heels. Five hundred pounds, she had borrowed—she’d actually only asked for three hundred, but the man had been nice enough to suggest that she up it a little, to see her through any rough patches.

She’d been paying it back at the rate of a few pounds a week for about four months. And now the debt was over a thousand.

Hal had panicked. She had immediately paid back the unspent portion of the original loan, and upped the repayments to the maximum she could afford. But she’d been too optimistic. She couldn’t keep up with the new schedule, and after one particularly bad week at the pier, she missed a payment, and then a month later, she missed another. As the repayments spiraled and the calls from Mr. Smith’s collectors got more and more aggressive, Hal realized the truth. She had no way out.

Eventually, she did the only thing she could do. She simply stopped paying. She stopped answering calls from unregistered numbers. She stopped answering the door. And she started looking behind her when she walked home alone at night. The one saving grace, she had kept telling herself, was that they didn’t know where she worked. On the pier, she was safe. And—up until now—she had at least felt secure in the knowledge that there was a limit to what they could do. She had no goods for them to seize, and she was fairly sure that the arrangement itself was on the shady side of legal. They were highly unlikely to take her to court.

But now it seemed that they had tracked her down, and their patience had run out.

As Hal’s shivering subsided, the words the man had uttered seemed to echo inside her head. Broken bones. Broken teeth.

Hal had never thought of herself as cowardly—or vain—but at the thought of that steel-toe-capped boot casually swinging towards her face, the crunch as it met her nose and teeth, she couldn’t help flinching.

So what could she do? Borrowing money was out of the question. There was no one she could ask—no one who had that kind of funds at their disposal, anyway. And as for turning tricks on the street corner as the man had suggested . . . Hal felt her mouth twist in grim revulsion. Brighton had a thriving sex trade, but she wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

Which left . . . stealing.

You have two roads ahead of you, but they twist and turn. . . . You want to know which you should take. . . .

• • •

BACK AT THE FLAT, HAL let herself in the front door and stood silently in the hallway, listening. No sound came from above, and when she reached the topmost landing, the door to her flat was closed, no light showing beneath it.

As she peered at the door lock in the dimness, though, she thought there was something different about the scratches on the plate, as if someone had been at work with a picklock. Or was that just her own paranoia? Surely all lock plates had chips and scrapes on them, from keys carelessly shoved in, clattering against the metal.

Her heart was beating fast as she inserted her key, unsure of what she might find on the other side, but as the door swung wide and she groped for the light, her first thought was that everything was miraculously untouched. There was the post where she had left it on the table. There was her laptop. Nothing broken, nothing stolen for part payment.

Hal’s heart slowed, and she let out a sigh, not quite of relief but of something close to it, as she shut the door behind her and double-locked it, then shrugged off her jacket. It was only when she went across to the kitchen counter to turn on the kettle that she noticed two things.

The first was a pile of ashes in the sink—ashes that had definitely not been there when she left. It looked as if a sheet of paper had been burned . . . perhaps two. Peering closer, Hal made out letters on one of the scraps that had not yet crumbled to fragments, silvery against the black background. . . . u’re fina . . . she made out, and beneath it . . . ll again. . . .

Hal knew what it was, even without glancing behind herself at the coffee table, where she had left the letters from Mr. Smith, neatly stacked beside the bills. She knew they would be gone, even before she looked around. But still she could not stop herself from checking, from moving the pile of final demands aside, searching desperately in case they had gusted off the table when she opened the door.

It was no use. The letters were gone—and with them any evidence she could have shown to the police.

And something else was missing too, she realized with a lurch. The photograph on the mantelpiece, the picture of Hal and her mother, arm in arm on Brighton beach, their hair gusting in the sea wind.

As she stepped towards the shelf where it should have been, something crunched beneath her boots, and when she looked down, there it was—the frame faceup on the hearth, the glass smashed to smithereens by a stamped foot, the picture scratched and torn by the grinding of a heel into the broken frame.

Her hands shaking, eyes swimming, Hal forced herself to pick it up, cradling it like some small, broken animal, picking out the shards of glass from the paper. But it was no good. The picture was ripped and ruined, and the laughing faces of that girl and her mother were gone for good.

She would not cry. She refused to. But she felt something huge and bitter and wild with grief rise up inside her. It was the injustice of it that stung so, like acid in her throat. She wanted to cry out with it, scream with the unfairness of it all.

I want a break, she wanted to sob. Just once, I want something to go my way.

She found herself sinking to her knees, bowed down beneath the weight of it all, and for a moment she crouched over the broken shards of glass, her head bent, hugging her knees to her rib cage as if to make herself as small and safe as possible. But there was no safety anymore, no one to hug her and clean up the mess and make her a hot cup of tea. She was going to have to deal with this herself.