Page 3 of The Next Chapter

So, I try to lock it away. I try not to wonder whether Daisy had done everything she wanted to do, achieved everything she wanted to achieve. Or whether she had things left unsaid or undone.

Obsessing about things like that, well, therein lay the path to madness.

‘God, we need a drink tonight. Red, white or rosé?’ Seb asks an hour later. I’m acting on autopilot and pulling on my raincoat while he waits by the door. It’s July and it’s particularly hot, but it’s also Manchester, so it’s fifty-fifty whether we’ll get sunburnt or soaked.

‘Rosé,’ I say, aiming to sound like someone who hasn’t been obsessing about the death of a centenarian she met twice.

He flicks off the lights and follows me down the stairs through to the chip shop below.

We pass Angus battering his fish behind the counter.

A line of customers weaves their way out of the door.

‘Night, Angus,’ I call over the counter. See, I am breezy, cheerful. Unencumbered by thoughts of death and dying.

‘Night, Seb, night, Lily love.’ He pulls a long piece of fish out of some wet batter and sets it aside. ‘Our Jenny loved that blanket you made for the baby.’ Angus has to shout to me over the crowd. ‘You didn’t need to go to so much trouble.’

‘It was nothing,’ I call back, ‘really quick to make.’ I dig deep for a smile even though this isn’t exactly true. The blanket had taken me three weeks and one online knitting course to pull together.

‘She’s a good egg, this one,’ Angus tells Seb.

‘Yeah, she’s a real people pleaser. Tragically so,’ Seb replies as we exit onto the street out front.

Bloody Seb.

‘Come on.’ Seb guides me towards the tram that’ll take us to Dad’s house.

My house.

Because it’s mine now, this typical Manchester redbrick terrace. It’s a two-minute walk from the park where Mum and Dad’s memorial bench is. Argh, I still need to order the plaque polish.

I unlock the red front door and go through the hallway to the kitchen, Seb following behind. Elton, Dad’s Persian cat, stalks out from somewhere and starts wrapping himself around Seb’s feet, purring loudly.

Traitor.

I haven’t redecorated since Dad died. Which really is a testament to how much I loved him.

Because Dad had… interesting tastes. He also had a completely unfounded belief in his ability to do DIY.

Such is how I find myself in a chaotically colourful kitchen, where the cupboard doors are as likely to fall off as open.

There’s a whole bedroom filled with a mishmash of Mum’s musical instruments that I avoid like the plague, and I’ve thrown an extra-large throw over the piano at the other end of the kitchen.

Extra-large throws seem as good a coping mechanism as anything.

At least I’m managing to keep Dad’s house plants alive.

I water them by rota and put them in the bath through winter.

I also inherited Elton, the geriatric cat Dad got a year after Mum died.

Like I said, he’s Persian, so there’s just SO much fur.

So much. Suffice to say, Elton has never forgiven Dad for dying and seems to suspect that I had a hand in offing him.

He hates me on principle. Seb thinks I’m being dramatic, but I’m not. That cat has it in for me.

I peer down into Elton’s bowl in the kitchen, sighing as I spot the two pills that I’d hidden in his food this morning. They’re for a thyroid condition and come hell or high water, that cat is having those tablets. Not a chance that Elton is shuffling off his mortal coil on my watch.

‘You’re having your tablets, Elton,’ I tell him. He’s over by the radiator now, padding away in his deluxe, fleecy bed. He turns and shows me his bum as he lets out a particularly vociferous purr.

‘I need this.’ Seb has followed me into the kitchen. He’s busy uncorking a bottle of wine with well-practised ease.

‘Is everything okay?’ I ask him, remembering the muttering of the team meeting.

I lean against the countertop, looking away from the fridge.

Yes, I am a person who tries to avoid my own fridge.

Not for any weird reason. I don’t have a fridge phobia or anything strange like that.

It’s just that on the fridge is pinned the ‘Dad death admin list’ that he’d left me last year.

I think he knew that an unfinished list would haunt me. And it does. I haven’t ticked off the last item. ‘Read letter about Lola.’ So, like I said, it’s nothing weird, or anything like that. Just your run-of-the-mill to-do list from my dead dad.

‘Come on, let’s go sit down and we can talk about it properly.’

I nod. Seb’s poured us two glasses of wine already. Large glasses of wine, even though I told him we need to watch our alcohol intake. The government announced new guidelines and too often we’re worryingly close to the recommended units.

We make our way through to the front room, which unfortunately didn’t escape Dad’s ambitious DIY attempts.

He’d lived just long enough to see the return of wood panelling and so each wall has some fake wood halfway around it.

All painted in different bright colours.

Dad didn’t believe in spirit levels, which probably tells you all that you need to know about how successful his efforts were.

If I dwell on the wonky wood for too long, my heart starts to palpitate.

Still, I just can’t bring myself to get a decorator in to fix his mistakes. It’s like a really dull episode of Black Mirror : highly strung woman lives for ever in house where nothing even remotely matches.

I sit on the other end of the couch to Seb. He’s staring at the wonky panelling under the window. I take a drink of my wine and try to ignore the sense that there’s something he isn’t telling me.

‘Is it business?’ I ask. ‘Only we’ve had dry spells before.’ I’m doing such a great job of giving the pretence that I’m fine. ‘Plus, you had that meeting with Kitty this week, didn’t you? I thought you did. It was on the shared calendar.’

Seb looks at me for a long time.

‘You know that business has been slow this quarter,’ he starts.

I reach over and squeeze the top of his arm.

‘But are things really bad?’ The business can’t go under. It can’t. It’s all I have. Well, aside from Seb and Elton. It’s all Seb has too.

Plus, how would I pay for Elton’s vet bills? Or for his special food? The rest of my bills are cheap and the house is paid for, so I won’t lose my home, but I might have to cancel my Spotify Premium. My podcasts, oh Jesus, my podcasts!

‘What we need is some ghost writing work. Just one, like, big client.’ Yes, I do always start to strategize in moments of crisis. ‘Remember when we got that EastEnders actress. That memoir sold in actual shops. Kept us going for a year.’

‘I remember, Lily.’

It really was a good year, 2018.

‘We just need someone famous. Or better yet, someone rich. What did Kitty say?’

Seb’s looking at me now and there’s this feeling that the world is tilting. That things are coming to a head.

‘She said there’s a potential client.’

‘Well, that’s great!’

‘But that it’s all very hush, hush.’

‘Did you tell them we’re discreet? Did you mention our cast-iron GDPR policies?’

‘Mm-hm.’

He’s back to not looking at me.

‘It would be huge, if we got the gig. It would solve all of our problems.’

‘Okay, well, this sounds perfect. Why the stress?’ I ask.

‘It’s Lola,’ he says.

And for a second, his words don’t register.

‘Come again?’

‘The person who wants their memoirs ghost-written. It’s Lola Starr.’