After You

‘The only woman who said she’d meet me looked like my great-aunt Elsie, who kept her keys in her knickers. I mean, she was very sweet and all, but the old girl was so ancient I was almost tempted to check.’

‘Don’t give up, Fred,’ said Marc. ‘It might be that you’re looking in the wrong places.’

‘For my keys? Oh, no. I hang those by the door.’

Daphne decided she’d like to retire abroad in the next few years – ‘It’s the cold here. Gets into my joints.’

Leanne said she hoped to finish her philosophy master’s. We gave each other the kind of deliberately blank looks you do when nobody wants to admit they had actually assumed she worked in a supermarket. Or maybe a slaughterhouse. William said, ‘Well, you Kant.’

Nobody laughed, and when he realized nobody was going to, he sat back in his chair, and it might have been only me who heard Natasha muttering, ‘Hah hah,’ like Nelson in The Simpsons.

At first, Sunil didn’t want to speak. Then he said he’d thought about it and he’d decided that in five years’ time he’d like to be married. ‘I feel like I’ve turned myself off for the past two years. Like I wouldn’t let anyone get close to me because of what happened. I mean, what’s the point of getting close to someone if you’re only going to lose them? But the other day I started thinking about what I actually want out of life and I realized it was someone to love. Because you got to move on, right? You got to see some kind of future.’

It was the most I had heard Sunil speak in any meeting since I had started coming.

‘That’s very positive, Sunil,’ said Marc. ‘Thank you for sharing.’

I listened to Jake talk about going to college, and how he wanted to train as an animator, and wondered absently where his father would be. Still weeping over his dead wife? Or happily ensconced with some newer version? I suspected the latter. Then I thought about Sam and wondered whether my offhand reference to a relationship had been wise. Then I wondered what we were in if it wasn’t a relationship. Because there were relationships and relationships. And even as I mulled this over I realized that, if he asked, I wasn’t sure which category we even fitted into. I couldn’t help wondering whether the intensity of our search for Lily had acted as a kind of cheap glue, binding us together too quickly. What did we even have in common, other than a fall from a building?

Two days previously I had gone to the Ambulance Station to wait for Sam, and Donna had stood by her car chatting to me for a few minutes while he gathered his belongings. ‘Don’t mess him around.’

I turned, not sure if I had heard her correctly.

She had watched as an ambulance was unloaded by the shutters, and then rubbed her nose. ‘He’s all right. For a great lunk. And he really likes you.’

I hadn’t known what to say.

‘He does. He’s been talking about you. And he doesn’t talk about anyone. Don’t tell him I said anything. I just … he’s all right. I just want you to know.’ She had raised her eyebrows at me then, and nodded, as if confirming something to herself.

‘I’ve just realized. You’re not in your dancing-girl outfit,’ said Daphne.

There was a murmur of recognition.

‘Did you get promoted?’

I was dragged from my thoughts. ‘Oh. No. I got fired.’

‘Where are you working now?’

‘Nowhere. Yet.’

‘But your outfit …’

I was wearing my little black dress with the white collar. ‘Oh. This. It’s just a dress.’

‘I thought you were working at a themed bar for secretaries. Or maybe French maids.’

‘Don’t you ever stop, Fred?’

‘You don’t understand. At my age, the phrase “Use it or lose it” takes on a certain urgency. I might only have twenty or so stiffies left in me.’

‘Some of us have never had twenty stiffies in us in the first place.’

We paused to give Fred and Daphne time to stop giggling.

‘And your future? It sounds like it’s all change for you,’ said Marc.

‘Well … I actually got offered another job.’

‘You did?’ There was a little ripple of applause, which made me blush.

‘Oh, I’m not going to take it, but it’s fine. I feel I’ve sort of moved on, just for being offered a job.’

William said: ‘So what was the job?’

‘Just something in New York.’

They all stared at me.

‘You got a job offer in New York?’

‘Yes.’

‘A paid job?’

‘With accommodation,’ I said quietly.

‘And you wouldn’t have to wear that godawful shiny green dress?’

‘I hardly think my outfit was a good enough reason to emigrate.’ I laughed. Nobody else did. ‘Oh, come on,’ I said.

They were all still staring at me. Leanne’s mouth might actually have been hanging open a little.

‘New York New York?’

‘You don’t know the whole story. I can’t go now. I have Lily to sort out.’

‘The daughter of your ex-employer.’ Jake was frowning at me.

‘Well, he was more than my employer. But yes.’

‘Does she have no family of her own, Louisa?’ Daphne leaned forward.

‘It’s complicated.’

They all looked at each other.

Marc put his pad on his lap. ‘How much do you feel you’ve really learned from these sessions, Louisa?’

I had received the package from New York: a bundle of documents, with immigration and health-insurance forms, clipped together with a thick piece of cream notepaper on which Mr Leonard M. Gopnik forwarded me a formal offer to work for his family. I had locked myself into the bathroom to read it, then read it a second time, converted the salary to pounds, sighed for a bit, and promised myself I would not Google the address.

After I’d Googled the address I resisted the brief urge to lie on the floor in a foetal position. Then I got a grip, stood up and flushed the loo (in case Lily wondered what I was doing there), washed my hands (out of habit), and took it all into my bedroom where I stuffed it into the drawer under my bed and told myself I would never look at it again.

That night she had knocked on my bedroom door shortly before midnight.