One Day in Cornwall. Zoe Cook

as they began walking again.

      ‘I don’t think so,’ Lucy said, ‘Dad wanted to take the boat out to “make the most of the weather”.’ She did her best impersonation of her father.

      ‘Richie?’ Tom asked.

      ‘Don’t know,’ Lucy said, ‘Why, are you hoping we’ll have the place to ourselves?’ She nudged him gently and skipped ahead of him slightly. Tom reached out for her hand again and smiled at her. ‘Well, I could deal with that,’ he said. Lucy kissed him again, before opening the gate with a code on the keypad.

      ‘No cars,’ she said, ‘looks like you’re in luck.’

       3

      London, 2010

      In the lobby of the glass and stainless-steel building, home to Scott’s very expensive waterfront flat, Lucy took the lift to the fourteenth floor and knocked on the heavy, dark door. Scott’s face was a more welcome sight than Lucy had imagined, and he held his arms out for her suddenly weary body as she leaned into his arms and let him kiss her hair.

      ‘Hello, darling girl,’ he said, ‘Come in, I’ve cooked for you.’

      In his lounge Scott had set the table and put flowers in a silver-rimmed glass vase. She smiled at the gesture and leant down to smell the purple and pink hyacinths – her favourite.

      ‘Sit down, Luce,’ Scott called from the kitchen, ‘Dinner’s just coming. I hope you’re hungry.’

      He’d cooked what looked like a very good lasagna, which Lucy’s heart dropped at the sight of. She couldn’t eat it. She knew immediately, her body filling with panic at the sight of all that pasta and cheese. She took a slice and filled her plate with salad.

      ‘This looks absolutely delicious,’ she said, looking at Scott and his lovely face, his chiseled jawline and cute, perfect nose. He was so bloody handsome. Lucy acknowledged this often, but he was just a bit too keen to be truly sexy. She knew this thought made her a bitch and she wished she was less of a cliché. The sad truth was that she knew she’d like him more if he didn’t like her.

      She spent dinner cutting up pieces of lasagna and pushing them around her plate and under her salad, listening to Scott talk about his clients, the office politics at his city law firm and about the football match he was looking forward to at the weekend. When he went to get a second bottle of wine, Lucy reached for her handbag, took a tissue from a packet and wrapped as much of her lasagna as she could fit in it, and put it in her bag, praying it wouldn’t seep through. She was drunk, she realised now, her movements were clumsy and it felt like her hands were too big for her arms. It was a feeling she loved, that warm fuzz of wine running through her body, numbing all the sparking connections in her brain, dulling everything down enough to make life feel easy.

      Scott poured her another glass of red before taking her nearly empty plate away.

      ‘You really liked that, huh?’ He kissed her on the mouth, hard, and Lucy realised he was drunk too. He put her plate back down on the table and kissed her again, stroking his hand through her hair, pulling her head back slightly and running his tongue down her neck. Lucy unbuttoned his shirt. He looked good in his work clothes; his body was beautiful. She put her hands on his smooth chest and reached for his jeans. Scott lifted her up from her chair and sat her on the dining table.

      In bed, Lucy wore Scott’s t-shirt, her hair tied up, her neck still hot. She took her phone from her handbag and set an alarm for 6am. She had a missed call, from Nina, and the wine fuzz began to turn to more of an ache as she recalled the email on the train. She leant over to kiss Scott goodnight. ‘I love you, Lucy,’ he said, rolling towards her and putting his arm across her empty stomach.

      ‘Goodnight sweetheart,’ she replied, hurting at her inability to tell him she loved him too. Scott fell asleep with an immediacy that always made Lucy envious. Sleep was not her friend. She lay completely still, staring at the ceiling, trying to make out shapes in the plaster, trying not to think about Tom. This was the curse of her habit. Well, one of them. She needed to stop doing it so late into the evening. No amount of wine could totally take the edge off, and once things were quiet and it was dark, the fear could creep in. Her heart raced and she began to feel hot, as though someone was pressing down onto her chest. She reached for the glass of water on the bedside table and watched it shake as she pulled it to her lips. Lying back down, she tried to calm herself by breathing slowly and steadily. Eventually her heart seemed to settle, she felt her eyelids begin to become heavy, her thoughts start to spiral into sleep.

      They came to her again in her dream. All of them, this time. There was always Richie, and this time he ran towards her, beaming. This time her parents stood quietly behind him, waving. She was so happy to see them, reaching out for Richie’s warm little body, his spindly arms and crazy hair. She kept looking up to check that her parents were still there too, so pleased that they looked happy. She began to realise that it was taking too long for Richie to reach her. She looked again and could see now that he was running almost as if in slow motion. His arms and legs were moving strangely, as if he was being pulled down, wading through something thick. She tried to call out to him, to move towards him, but she was suddenly sinking into the ground too, it had turned to marsh beneath her feet. She felt panic rising as she looked around for her parents now. They were further away than before and their faces were wretched with despair. They weren’t waving any more, they were desperately pleading for her help. But she couldn’t move. Richie was crying now and drifting further away from her. Lucy tried to scream for help but her voice wouldn’t come; instead the screams seemed to stab sharp pains through her chest. Her eyesight began to fail her, as if a thick fog had fallen on them all. She couldn’t breathe now, and she couldn’t see her parents.

      She woke, sweating, out of breath. She reached to her side to feel Scott, still fast asleep, as if touching another human being would confirm that she was real and this was real and the dream was over. She felt sick and her heart ached. She pressed her fingers into her eyes to stop the tears that began to form. She’d been having this dream, or versions of it, for years. It never got any easier to cope with. It always knocked her more heavily than she felt was reasonable after all this time. Looking at her phone she saw it was 5am and decided that wasn’t too early to get up for the day. She’d only had around four hours’ sleep, but that was better than the prospect of closing her eyes and returning to her nightmares.

      She stepped out of Scott’s bed quietly, still shaking slightly and cold now. It was the day of the awards and she felt like utter shit. It was going to be a long, long day.

       4

      Park Lane was as busy as ever, six lanes of traffic coughing out hot fumes into the hazy blue sky. Hyde Park was filled with the usual mixture of tourists meandering and office workers rushing on their way to work. As Lucy stepped out of her Addison Lee car in front of the Metropolis Hotel she had an unwelcome flashback of last year’s awards ceremony and the A-list – well, lower A-list, maybe B-list, really – celebrity getting papped, up-skirt, by the scummy photographer who lay on the floor as she got out of the car. The fallout from those pictures breaking in the red tops the next day had led to some seriously awkward calls from the agent about Spectrum’s ‘failure to safeguard’. Lucy entered the hotel, smiling at the doorman, and was greeted by the familiar smell of marble, dark old wood, and something she couldn’t pinpoint but which, judging by the surroundings, might well have been the smell of money. The atmosphere of the Metropolis still excited her, even after all these years of working on Spectrum’s televised events at the hotel. The bar was littered with small groups of ladies drinking tea, with fine china plates of pastel-coloured cakes decorating the tables, their feet obscured by an assortment of sturdy, ribbon-handled shopping bags from New Bond Street’s boutiques. It felt like a place full of possibilities, of secret meetings, and of a life she’d probably never be able to afford.

      In