Page 24 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
Six months later
Vivienne
Pushing open the front door of her cottage, Vivienne’s senses are immediately assaulted.
Her nostrils are hit by a mixture of fried onion and garlic, with a pinch of char.
Cat is “cooking” again. Music blares from the direction of the kitchen, accompanied by two out-of-tune backup singers.
Stepping into her lounge, she can see the place is in chaos, LEGO bricks scattered like confetti, several fancy neon-colored dress costumes just stepped out of, and miniature vehicles of every color and size on every surface.
Despite the mess, she smiles to herself and considers how her life has changed in the last few months. Since Cat and Charlie had moved in.
In the same week that the magazine closed its doors for the final time, Cat’s landlord increased her rent.
Over the years, Vivienne had toyed with the idea of getting a lodger in her loft conversion.
It had a large bedroom with an en suite shower and bath.
She’d rather liked the idea of a young (male) Italian or Spanish student moving in; she’d help him with his English, offer herself up as a London tour guide.
It had all seemed like too much effort in the end, too little return at the cost of her privacy.
Yet there she was, suddenly offering up the loft to Cat, a coworker whom she’d only just really gotten to know.
Following Matthew’s memorial, the discussion of the numbers, and Janet’s words as she’d stormed out— Your number’s coming —Vivienne found herself looking at her life differently.
What if her number was sixty? That would give her three months to live.
Sixty-one would be fifteen months. Whatever her number, her time was ticking down with every second.
She’d had years of living alone, years of sitting quietly reading her books, watching her detective programs. Now was the time for a new phase in her life.
Cat’s immediate response was “No thank you, we’ll find somewhere.
” But Vivienne insisted that she at least come and look at the place.
Once Cat climbed up the steps into the airy attic room, scanned the large space as Vivienne pointed out where Charlie’s bed might go, it was clear she was won over.
“Vavi!” a voice yells, and a bright-orange dragon bursts out of the kitchen and charges toward her, hopping easily over the various obstacles and propelling itself into Vivienne’s middle.
She flops back onto the sofa, giving in to the bear hug.
A bolt of pain shoots up her spine and spreads out to her shoulders, closely followed by a feeling of dread.
She’d noticed these new aches in her back and hips lately; could they be a sign that her number had come knocking? She bites her lip until it passes.
“Well, hello, Charles,” she says finally. “I’m pleased to see you too.”
Charlie turns his head and presses his ear against Vivienne’s chest. Lately, he’s become interested in how the human body works and loves to “check heartbeats.”
“Your heart is fast today, Vavi,” he whispers, his long, blond lashes fluttering over eyes the exact same shiny brown of conkers.
When they’d first met, the name Vivienne was quite a mouthful for Charlie’s three-year-old mouth, and so he called her Vavi , which she’d come to like.
Vivienne dips her nose into his soft hair and breathes in the combination of baby shampoo, garlic, and the toffee-apple essence of Charlie.
Feeling his strong little arms squeezing her, she wonders yet again how she’d gone for so long without properly touching another human.
There would be the odd handshake at meetings, a brief hug when she met old friends, but she hadn’t held someone close in years.
Within minutes of meeting her, Charlie climbed onto her knee, handing her a worn copy of That’s Not My Lion.
The sudden closeness of him disoriented her for a moment, but his own nonchalance brought her back, and by the end of the story, his weight was reassuring and his little moist hand on her dry, older one felt right.
She was sorry when he climbed off and went back to Cat.
Living with Charlie had been a crash course in raising children.
Up until then, it was something Vivienne had craved for a number of years, and then a vague and general annoyance in shops, restaurants, and at weddings and parties.
But never a living, breathing, shouting, and mess-creating reality until now.
Charlie was an impatient teacher, demanding Vivienne understand his garbled words, hold him when he needed it, and entertain him with whatever whim held his attention in that moment.
It was all at once draining and life-enhancing.
He would throw his arms open and ask for a “ruddle” over the smallest thing, like if she told him no, he couldn’t have another biscuit, or if he’d seen something scary on a cartoon.
Or just because he felt like it. She marveled at the toddler’s ability to express his emotions and tell her what he needed back from her.
“What’s Mummy cooking?” she asks Charlie, booping his freckled nose.
“She burned it,” he says, his eyes wide with horror and humor. “It smells ex-gusting .”
Then he jumps off her knee, picks up a small red car, and races back into the kitchen, announcing Vivienne’s arrival.
Vivienne chuckles to herself as she takes off her coat and throws it onto the sofa, adding to the chaos.
Cat is always trying to help around the house—making dinner, doing some laundry, cleaning the bathroom—but she isn’t naturally inclined toward domestic work, it must be said.
“Pizza tonight?” Cat says, emerging from the kitchen looking rather sheepish, with Charlie trailing behind.
“I’ll throw together some green spaghetti,” Vivienne reassures her. “Won’t take long.”
“Yummy!” cheers Charlie, who picks up the remote from the sofa and expertly switches on the telly.
Twenty minutes later, the three of them are sitting at the kitchen table, slurping up pesto-covered pasta.
Between mouthfuls, Charlie tells them about the bit in Roald Dahl’s The Twits where “Mr. Twit eats worms, not spaghetti!” He can hardly finish the sentence, he throws his head back and opens his mouth wide, revealing half-chewed spaghetti and a mouthful of tiny, perfectly white teeth.
“Are you feeling better today?” Cat asks when Charlie’s giggles die down long enough for them to have a conversation.
“Much, thank you,” Vivienne says with a brisk nod. “That’ll teach me not to have that extra glass of wine.”
As well as these pains in her back and hips, she’d also experienced another fugue state.
On Saturday she met an old friend in the West End.
They took in a show and went out for a glass of wine afterward.
Vivienne hailed a taxi at around 11:30 p.m. Poor Cat had such a shock when she heard knocking on the front door just after 2:00 a.m. and found a confused Vivienne on the doorstep.
She didn’t want to make a fuss and have to explain the fugue states, so she put it down to too much alcohol.
But inwardly, this sudden resurgence of fugue states is a worry for her.
Serendipity’s seems to have started it. Those numbers again.
Like seven little time bombs preparing to blow seven different lives apart.
Though Vivienne had been distracted by her new flatmates, that dinner party still nagged at her.
Those two young lives cut short. Most nights she sat in bed, flicking through her notebook and her piles of printouts.
Had she been right about Janet? If she had, then surely the deaths would stop now.
At Matthew’s memorial, Melvin promised to look into her theory, but she hadn’t heard a thing from him.
The Serendipity email group had gone quiet too.
So she sent him an email directly, asking if he’d found out anything, to which she had no response.
She makes a mental note to chase him down again.
“How’s Tristan?” Cat inquires as she wipes Charlie’s green-stained chin.
“He’s doing better, I think,” says Vivienne, nodding. “The counselor seems to be helping, and he meets up with his university friends every week now.”
After Matthew’s memorial, Tristan retreated. He canceled their Sunday meeting and then tried to cancel a second one, but Vivienne was having none of it. She emailed him:
I’ve got an interview for an online editing role. I need your help!
Vivienne hated using exclamation marks almost as much as she hated begging to see someone, but she’d sensed this was an emergency.
She recalled his haunted expression at the memorial.
He wouldn’t say what had happened, but from where Vivienne was standing, it had looked like a full-blown panic attack.
He hadn’t been friends with Matthew, yet his suicide seemed as though it had really affected Tristan.
When he turned up at Café Bleu to meet her, he looked awful.
He was hardly a vision of health at the best of times, but his skin had taken on a waxy tone, and there was a subtle unwashed odor emanating from him.
Perhaps, she wondered, Tristan’s number had been haunting him, as hers had her.
“Right, so, when’s your interview?” he asked, sitting down at their usual table, squinting over at Vivienne, bringing to mind a vampire who’d been forced to step into the sunlight.
“There’s no interview,” Vivienne told him bluntly. “I needed to get you out. What’s going on? You can talk to me. Did you have a panic attack?”