1. The Beginning After the End

1

The Beginning After the End

The roadworks on Winchester Road were like an unwelcome friend. Some kind of mains-pipe disaster judging by the signs, Josie Roberts could literally see her front door from her position in the queue, but in twenty minutes she’d moved exactly fifteen feet, if you could judge distances by the length of the concrete stones that lined the pavement edge.

She had wanted to make tonight special, perhaps open a glass of wine in her little kitchen for the last time, gaze out at the tiny garden she had so treasured, admire the line of shrubs she had grown from seedlings quietly nurturing into mature plants that framed a small but peaceful patio she had designed herself. She wanted to sit in her bath one final time, listen to the chirping of the birds on the telephone wire outside the window, perhaps feel the soft plush of the pile carpet on the stairs as she descended, sliding her feet in that almost childlike way she always did, enjoying the press of the softened corners on the underside of her soles.

Up ahead, the light turned to green. Josie waited for the traffic to move, but it stayed stock still, until finally someone a few cars up leant out of his window and hollered at the person in front to get off his phone. With a sudden jerk, the front car lurched out of its position, and the others slowly moved forwards.

Two from the front, Josie ground to another halt.

She supposed she ought to savour her last moments in the car, too, the old Volvo she had owned for fifteen years, and had never really treasured until the moment she was told that selling it was her only option. What difference would three-hundred quid make? She still had a load of her junk in the back, stuff she either had to now throw away or rehome: the umbrella Hilda had given her for her fortieth birthday, which now had a broken spoke but she couldn’t bear to throw it away; the box of Scottish biscuits she had bought for Mrs. Gleneagles two years ago before finding out she had died of cancer; the box of nineties indie CDs by bands like Terrorvision, Shed Seven, Reef, The Cranberries, and Sleeper, which she could no longer play because the CD player in the car was broken, and she could never play in the house because her now officially ex-husband was a vinyl enthusiast and considered everything else a sell-out.

Then, somewhere back there, perhaps squashed into a seat pocket, was the thank-you letter from one of her private students who had credited Josie’s tutoring for getting her a place in university. She had kept it in her car because it was the kind of treasured keepsake that had tended to go missing during her marriage, and even after her ex had moved in with her replacement, she had never quite felt confident enough to move it into the house.

The light changed again, the person in front immediately hitting the horn almost by default, just in case the owner of the front car dared make the same mistake as the last one. This time, to Josie’s relief, she got through the light, and drove the extra couple of hundred yards up the road to her own narrow driveway.

She sighed as she parked outside her house and got out. The drive, once used regularly by two cars, had plenty of space on either side of her Volvo now, but even so, she still found herself cracking open the door gently as though afraid of bumping the other car or the fence that had once belonged to Mrs. Gleneagles. Another of her ex’s quirks had been to choose at random which side of the drive he parked on, and despite how frustrating it had been, as she walked up to her front door for possibly the last time, Josie couldn’t help but feel a pang of nostalgia.

There had been good days, of course there had. Her ex had never been abusive—unless she counted the times she had slept in the car after being locked out of the house, and that was only because he slept more than the average house cat, and once asleep wouldn’t have been able to be woken with Big Ben pealing outside the bedroom window—and he had always treated her well. If there was a way to describe him that made sense it was … fleeting.

She unlocked her door for the last time, looked at the post on the mat for the last time—although she supposed she could still drop round if necessary, but it would hurt too much and she wanted a clean break—then hung her coat up on the hook for the last time.

In the kitchen, she made what was possibly in the single digits of her final coffees at her beautiful old mahogany kitchen table—ten by tomorrow morning would probably be a stretch but she couldn’t rule it out—then pulled out her phone and called Hilda.

‘It’s over, isn’t it?’ her best friend said by way of greeting. ‘You’ve finally cut off the infected branch?’

‘If you’re meaning, has my divorce been finalised, then yes,’ Josie said, sighing into her phone, leaning close enough to the coffee for the steam to mist up the screen. ‘Everything’s official as of today. The house goes on the market tomorrow, and thanks to a little bit of legal shafting, he gets two-thirds of everything.’

‘He really pulled a trick on you, didn’t he? I told you right at the beginning, that’s what you get when you marry a verb. You should always marry a noun.’

Josie couldn’t help but smile. Reid. Hilda, twenty years older than Josie and already with two marriages behind her when they had met, had disapproved of her now ex-husband from the start.

‘I should have listened to you.’

‘I made recordings of all my advice so you can play it back whenever you like.’

‘Did you really?’

‘No, of course not. Although you’d have nothing to play it on, would you?’

‘The first thing I’m going to buy once I get my share of the house is a hammer. There won’t be a vinyl record within a hundred yards of me that isn’t in pieces.’

‘Look on the bright side. You get your name back. Josephine Euphrates made you sound like some kind of invasive vine. Josie Roberts, now that’s a tulip name.’

Josie smiled. Hilda Lewisham was a botanist, famous in plant people circles for developing a new variety of rose. Selling it had made her a fortune, which she had promptly donated to tree-planting projects in sub-Saharan Africa. At sixty-five years old, she had travelled the world, appeared in National Geographic , chaired international conventions, and won top planty-type awards from a dozen planty-type institutions for both her research and her donations. And yet, for some reason, after a chance meeting at a Pilates class, she had chosen Josie—a tired, troubled schoolteacher with a failed musician as a husband—to be her best friend.

‘I’ve been using Roberts since he left me,’ Josie said. ‘And to be honest, I never really felt right using his stage name.’

Hilda chuckled. ‘What was his real name again?’

‘Euphrates-Barnacle.’

‘I wouldn’t wish that name on a weed. Why don’t you go to the press? Surely there’s a story to sell?’

‘He’s not famous enough. And you know, I’m just glad it’s over. I mean, I know he moved on years ago, but now I can, too.’

‘Have you spoken to Tiffany?’

Josie felt a pang of regret at the mention of her daughter. Off at university in Leeds, Josie was lucky to get a monthly phone call. Reid, who had promised to support their daughter using the divorce settlement, had boasted at the court hearing that he was called once a week.

‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s no real point until the poison’s run its course, is there?’

She moved out on a blustery April morning. She packed everything she owned that the cost of her legal bills didn’t require her to sell into the back of the Volvo and drove across Bristol from Redfield to Knowle West, where a distant cousin had offered her a flat for a month until she could get herself back on her feet.

The rubbish strewn in the tiny front garden downstairs didn’t bode well, and the damp stains on the wall in the kitchen were worryingly fresh, but Josie couldn’t stand to stay in her old house while she waited for it to be sold. Too many memories, too much turned sour, and too many regrets. She needed to make a clean break, even if ‘clean’ was a misnomer, judging by the dust collecting in the corners of the flat’s poky living room. The view through the grimy window of the charred frame of a burnt-out townhouse was hardly memorable either, but with no curtains, all Josie could do was pull the threadbare sofa around so that it faced the inner wall. That she quickly discovered the corpse of a mouse underneath was probably a good thing; she was able to dispose of it before she needed to go hunting for the source of the smell.

Still, she had to be grateful. She had a roof over her head, even if it was leaking in a couple of places, and the heating worked, even if the immersion heater in the hall gave off a gassy smell. Just in case, she opened the kitchen window a crack, brushing away a few dead flies in the process. The water in the taps ran brown for a few seconds before going clear, but that was okay: she had brought a bottle of wine with her to toast the end of her marriage.

Covering the sofa with the blanket she had kept in the back of her car for those times Reid had locked her out—just in case there were any mice nests hidden down among the springs—she poured a glass of wine, sat down in her new—old, very, very old—lodgings, and lifted the glass.

‘To the future,’ she said to no one, trying to sound positive while refusing at the same time to cry.