Then You Were Gone. Claire Moss

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       Chapter Three

      Simone could not afford to live in Winchmore Hill, and her post did not arrive before she set off for work, so in fact she saw Mack’s letter to Jazzy before she saw the one he had sent her.

      She had been working on a complicated project that morning, a restoration of a series of seventeenth century maps involving a lot of fine, detailed work which normally would have absorbed her to the point where she forgot to eat or go to the toilet. That morning though, she had been unable to switch off the rest of the world in the way she usually did and, most worryingly, had found her mind wandering even as she was using her tiniest, sharpest scalpel to lift away layers of the paper. Scared that her inability to think of anything other than Mack might cause irreversible damage to priceless ancient manuscripts, she took an unaccustomed break and went to the canteen for a coffee.

      It was then that she checked her phone and saw four missed calls and a voicemail message. She puffed out a heavy breath and closed her eyes, half-laughing at the thought of how worried she had been. It would be something quite simple, she felt sure. Mack had been unavoidably detained. His phone had been stolen. He had temporarily lost his memory. He had had a minor accident in which his belongings had been mislaid. Whatever it was, the problem was clearly now solved and Mack had been ringing her to let her know he definitely did love her and he was coming home. Only when she pressed the screen to list the missed calls, they were all from Jazzy. And when she listened to her voicemail message, that was from Jazzy as well. He wanted to meet her for lunch, he said. And he did not sound as though he would be bringing her good news.

      Simone loved her job. She did not think she was quite insane enough to say she would still come to work even if she won the lottery, but certainly she felt lucky that this, of all the things it could have been, was the thing she did to pay the bills and buy food. Whenever she told people she worked in book preservation and restoration at the British Library, they would always use the word ‘fascinating’. ‘Oh, how fascinating’, ‘Oh wow, that must be fascinating’. But the word Simone would have used was ‘soothing’. The first time she walked into the building where she worked she had felt everything that she carried around with her in the course of her everyday life fall away. The room where she did her work was entirely white – the walls, the floor, the ceiling – and the light was carefully controlled to allow them to do their fine work without exposing precious treasures to too much damaging sunlight. The air was cool, kept at a constant temperature with no breeze, no disturbance, no noise. People often commented about Simone that she had a certain quality, a certain stillness, that they found calming – although she had sometimes suspected that when they said ‘calming’ they actually meant something else. Something more along the lines of ‘unnerving’. But the truth was, you spend a lot of your life at work. And Simone needed her work to be somewhere that was perfectly and entirely safe. She needed to be able to walk into her place of business and know that the outside world could not reach her, that nobody could hear her or see her, that nobody could come barging in off the street and start shouting and throwing things and grabbing the shift supervisor by her hair and pushing her out of the way because she had allowed one of the customers to ‘flirt with’ (speak to) Simone. This was not something that Simone had ever explicitly articulated, to anyone else or indeed to herself, but anyone who really knew her, that small collection of people who understood, never questioned why she loved to spend her days in the cool white light of this room.

      The only downside – really, the only downside Simone could think of – to her place of work was that, since all the poshing up had been done, there were too many choices of places to eat near St Pancras. Jazzy wanted sushi – Jazzy always wanted sushi. ‘OK, we know, you used to live in Japan; it was ten years ago, stop going on about it!’ Simone always wanted to say. But she understood that, even back in England, to Jazzy eating sushi meant something else. It meant you lived in London, you were young and surrounded by other young people, and you weren’t scared of a little bit of raw salmon. You could not buy sushi in Redruth – or at least you had not been able to when Jazzy was growing up round there. Simone did not care for sushi. She wanted pasta or, failing that, something that came with chips. She had barely eaten over the weekend, her stomach acidic with worry, and she needed some heavy, refined carbohydrates to settle it. Eventually they settled on a Greek place down a side street where Simone ordered moussaka and chips and Jazzy ordered deep-fried baby octopus with a side of taramasalata.

      ‘You do know you’re going to stink?’ she said to him as the food arrived.

      He shrugged, batting a baby octopus from one hand to the other as he waited for it to cool down. ‘Doesn’t matter, got no one I need to impress after this.’

      ‘So,’ Simone said, unable to wait any longer. ‘Why did you want to meet?’

      Jazzy pulled an envelope from his laptop case and handed it to Simone. ‘It’s from Mack. He says he’s sent one to you too.’

      Simone took it from him and read it, wishing she had wiped the aubergine grease from her fingers first.

      ‘What do you think?’ Jazzy asked when she had finished.

      Simone СКАЧАТЬ