Critical Incidents. Lucie Whitehouse

van to collect from London last week, the room was unchanged since the day she’d packed her bags for university sixteen years earlier. The same blue gingham curtains, chosen by Christine as gender-neutral and successfully, to be fair, given that she and Luke had both hated them; the same pale blue carpet with – yes – the old stain where she’d dropped a leaky ballpoint and deliberately left it. Free-standing wardrobe in white vinyl veneer, the side that abutted the tiny desk still covered with her brother’s Villa stickers circa 1994 and her own picture of Robert Smith in his heyday, all leather jacket and Scissorhands hair.

      A vibration in her back pocket. Gid? She’d texted him from Warwick Services, not because she expected anything new today – he wouldn’t be at work; he’d be home with Efie and the boys watching football, cooking, regrouting the bathroom – but for morale, the feeling that on this shittiest of days she still had a line back. Hope.

      Not Gid but Corinna: How’s it going over there? What’s the body count?

      She thumbed a reply: Nil – for now. Waiting til Amazon deliver acid for bath.

      Seconds later, Good thinking. Booze/takeaway/debrief at ours Tues eve? Tell Len Peter has new Xbox game he’s dying to show her.

       Wilco and YES. Feed me gin. By the pint.

      She slid the phone back into her pocket feeling fractionally better. Corinna the human night-light. When she’d come down to London last month, Robin’d gone to meet her at Marylebone. She’d looked like a beacon as she’d stalked down the platform in her tangerine canvas coat with its fern-print pattern. Black polo neck, indigo skinny jeans tucked into shiny black knee boots – even Rin’s hair had been kinetic that day, cut into a new bob that seemed in perpetual motion.

      Len had had a sleepover at her friend Olivia’s house, and so they’d got hammered, absolutely wasted, Robin swinging between rage, incredulity and grief, Rin listening, matching her drink for drink. The next day, they’d staggered up the road like Mick and Keith and eaten their way through spring rolls and meatballs and Vietnamese curry in an effort to staunch the nausea. Afterwards Corinna had done her thing, advising and problem-solving in a way that, coming from anyone else, would have driven Robin round the effing twist. ‘You’ve started looking for your own place?’ she’d said.

      ‘Online, yeah.’

      ‘Want me to help? I can while away a dull hour at work on Rightmove.’

      ‘It’ll have to wait for a couple of months.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘No deposit.’

      Corinna had frowned. ‘What do they ask for, a month’s rent? Or a month and a half? Can you take it out of savings? It’s worth it, isn’t it, even if there’s a penalty for early withdrawal?’

      ‘If it was just a question of taking it out of savings, do you think I’d be moving back? I’m flattered you think I even have a savings account – how long have you known me?’ She’d watched it dawn on Rin that she wasn’t joking, then the volley of silent questions: hadn’t she had a steady job for years? A salary, not massive but solid? ‘My rent here’s a ton,’ she said, ‘and Lennie’s school, even with the scholarship. Then there’ll be a lot of other stuff – you know, moving. A storage locker, maybe.’

      ‘How much will that cost?’

      ‘Also, I had some parking tickets.’ She’d hesitated. ‘Which I hadn’t paid, so they’d doubled. Twice. And then there’s the credit cards …’

      ‘Robin!’

      ‘I know, I know, I’m an idiot – tell me something I don’t know. The lottery numbers, preferably.’

      ‘Can I lend it to you? No, don’t get funny, I’d like to. I’ll even charge you interest if it would make you feel better.’

      ‘No. Thanks but no. I got myself into this mess, I’ll get myself out of it. What I really need you to do is rewind the clock. Make me nineteen again, will you, so I haven’t screwed up my life yet.’

      ‘You haven’t.’

      ‘It’s different this time.’ As she said the words, she’d felt them settle on her shoulders like a lead poncho. ‘I haven’t lost my job before, have I? We know I’m relationship poison but I’ve always been able to count on the rest. Work.’

      ‘You managed before.’ Subtly, Corinna had tipped her head at the next table where a man of about forty moved an expensive-looking pram back and forth with his foot. Going by his wife’s hollow eyes and limp hair, Robin had guessed their baby was weeks old, even days, this one of their first tentative forays back out into the world. Corinna had done that for her, too, back then, broken her circuit between the crib, the changing table and her thesis, and taken her out, to places like this, to the park, a pub by the river. On the surface, the world had looked exactly the same but for her, it had been reconfigured, fundamentally changed. A bomb had gone off in her life, she’d thought, and no one except Corinna had heard a thing.

      ‘You made a success out of a tough situation,’ she’d said.

      ‘Yeah, well, this time I’ve done the opposite, haven’t I?’

      Back in her childhood bedroom, Robin felt a bead of sweat run between her breasts. Christine had finally got the full set of replacement windows she’d been craving and the room was nursing-home hot. Going over, she shoved one open. Like punching the lid off a Tupperware box. She sucked in as much air as her swollen stomach allowed. Below, dull little portions of garden stretched away on either side, rectangles of winter grass and anonymous shrubs, Homebase panel fencing. The Richardses, their immediate neighbours, had a Little Tikes slide and sandbox in chunky red-and-yellow plastic that confused her until she remembered her mother saying that Karen had ‘given John and Brenda grandchildren’. The right way, Robin had heard: house bought; wedding reception at a hotel in Solihull; tiny feet only thereafter. Rather than too young, out of wedlock, father never disclosed. Not so much given as foisted.

      She turned and faced the bunk beds – the fact of the bunk beds. Back then, Luke used to lean over the side and flick snot-balls between the rungs of the ladder as she was falling asleep; now, at the age of thirty-five, she was going to share the beds with her daughter. Everything she’d struggled for in her adult life lay in pieces around her – how had it happened? How the fuck was she going to sort it out?

       Chapter Two

      If you were really on the edge – and who was to say she wasn’t? – a wet February morning on an industrial estate in Stirchley might be enough to tip you over. Beyond the windscreen, a leaking grey sky bulged over a huddle of building-supply megastores and a near-empty car park, stacks of lumber, sodden nylon holdalls of shingle and sharp sand. In the twenty minutes they’d been here, they’d seen two people, and one of those had been a member of staff pulling a trolley out of the scrubby hedge in front of Toolstation. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. At this hour on a Monday morning her Murder Investigation team would be at full hum, the insect chatter of keyboards and phones stopping only when Freshwater, in all his ferrety majesty, swept in for the briefing, clutching the Starbucks cup he thought made him look au courant and dynamically caffeinated. She felt a swell of deep-tissue yearning that she quickly suppressed. She’d check in with Gid again later, see if anything new had come up.

      The wipers made a grudging sweep of the windscreen and Maggie shifted, sending over another waft of her spicy perfume. Shalimar, was it, or Opium? Robin couldn’t remember. At this stage, it was basically her essence, anyway – getting into the car this morning, she’d breathed it in and felt a wave of comfort. Maggie was solid, unchanged in the thirty-five years she’d known her, from the eyeliner and jet-black hair, once natural, now courtesy of L’Oréal, to the revolving collection of chunky silver jewellery set with tiger’s eye and turquoise that she bought on her regular tanning trips