How Not to Die Alone Read online

  They gathered on the sofas and Cameron doled out cake and tea and tried to engage them with some banal small talk. Keith and Meredith had wedged themselves into the smaller of the two sofas. Meredith was laughing at something Keith had just whispered to her. Just as parents are able to recognize variants in the cries of their newborns, so Andrew had begun to understand what Meredith’s differing laughs denoted. In this particular instance, the high-pitched giggle indicated that someone was being cruelly mocked. Given that they kept very obviously sneaking glances in his direction, it seemed it was probably him.

  “Rightio, lady and gents,” Cameron said. “First things first, don’t forget we’ve got a new starter tomorrow. Peggy Green. I know we’ve struggled since Dan and Bethany left, so it’s super-cool to have a new pair of hands.”

  “As long as she doesn’t get ‘stressed’ like Bethany,” Meredith said.

  “Or turn out to be a knob like Dan,” Keith muttered.

  “Anyway,” Cameron said, “what I actually wanted to talk to you about today is my weekly . . . honk! Honk!”—he honked an imaginary horn—“. . . fun idea! Remember, guys, this is something you can all get involved with. Doesn’t matter how crazy your idea is. The only rule is that it has to be fun.”

  Andrew shuddered.

  “So,” Cameron continued. “My fun idea this week is, drumroll please . . . that every month we have a get-together at one of our houses and we do dinner. A sort of Come Dine with Me vibe but without any judgment. We’ll have a bit of food, I daresay a bit of vino, and it’ll give us a chance to do some real bonding away from the office, get to know each other a bit better, meet the family and all that. I’m mega-happy to kick things off. Whaddya say?”

  Andrew hadn’t heard anything past “meet the family.”

  “Is there not something else we can do?” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

  “Oh,” Cameron said, instantly deflated. “I thought that was actually one of my better ideas.”

  “No, no, it is!” Andrew said, overcompensating now. “It’s just . . . couldn’t we just go to a restaurant instead?”

  “Toooo expensive,” Keith said, spraying cake crumbs everywhere.

  “Well, what about something else? I don’t know—Laser Quest or something. Is that still a thing?”

  “I’m vetoing Laser Quest on the grounds I’m not a twelve-year-old boy,” Meredith said. “I like the dinner party idea. I’m actually a bit of a secret Nigella in the kitchen.” She turned to Keith. “I bet you’d go crazy for my lamb shank.” Andrew felt bile stir in his stomach.

  “Go on, Andrew,” Cameron said, confidence renewed by Meredith’s giving his idea her blessing. He attempted a matey arm punch that caused Andrew to spill tea down his leg. “It’ll be a laugh! There’s no pressure to cook up anything fancy. And I’d love to meet Diane and the kids, of course. So, whaddya say? You up for this, buddy?”

  Andrew’s mind was racing. Surely there was something else he could suggest as an alternative? Life drawing. Badger baiting. Anything. The others were just looking at him now. He had to say something.

  “Bloody hell, Andrew. You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Meredith said. “Your cooking can’t be that bad. Besides, I’m sure Diane’s a fabulous chef, among all her other talents, so she can help you out.”

  “Hmmm,” Andrew murmured, tapping his fingertips together.

  “She’s a lawyer, right?” Keith said. Andrew nodded. Maybe there’d be some catastrophic world event in the next few days, a lovely old nuclear war to make them all forget about this stupid idea.

  “You’ve got that beautiful old town house Dulwich way, haven’t you?” Meredith said, practically leering. “Five-bed, isn’t it?”

  “Four,” Andrew said. He hated it when she and Keith got like this. A tag team of mockery.

  “Still,” Meredith said. “A lovely big four-bed, smart kids by all accounts, and Diane, your talented, breadwinning wife. What a dark old horse you are.”

  Later, as Andrew prepared to leave the office, having been too distracted to do any meaningful work, Cameron appeared by his desk and dropped down onto his haunches. It felt like the sort of move he’d been taught in a course.

  “Listen,” he said quietly. “I know you didn’t seem to fancy the dinner party idea, but just say you’ll have a think about it, okay, mate?”

  Andrew needlessly shuffled some papers on his desk. “Oh, I mean . . . I don’t want to spoil things, it’s just . . . okay, I’ll think about it. But if we don’t do that I’m sure we can think of another, you know, fun idea.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Cameron said, straightening up and addressing them all. “That goes for all of us, I hope. Come on, team—let’s get our bond on sooner rather than. Yeah?”

  * * *

  —

  Andrew had recently splashed out on some noise-canceling earphones for his commute, so while he could see the man sitting opposite’s ugly sneeze and the toddler in the vestibule screaming at the utter injustice of being made to wear not one but two shoes, it simply appeared as a silent film incongruously soundtracked by Ella Fitzgerald’s soothing voice. It wasn’t long, however, before the conversation in the office started to repeat itself in his head, vying with Ella for his attention.

  “Diane, your talented, breadwinning wife . . . smart kids . . . Beautiful old town house.” Keith’s smirk. Meredith’s leer. The conversation dogged him all the way to the station and continued as he went to buy food for that night’s dinner. That’s when he found himself standing in the corner shop by multi-bags of novelty potato chips named after celebrities and trying not to scream. After ten minutes of picking up and putting down the same four ready meals, feeling incapable of choosing one, he left empty-handed, walking out into the rain and heading home, his stomach rumbling.

  He stood outside his front door, shivering. Eventually, when the cold became too much to bear, he brought out his keys. There was usually one day a week like this, when he’d pause outside, key in the lock, holding his breath.

  Maybe this time.

  Maybe this time it would be the lovely old town house behind that door: Diane starting to prepare dinner. The smell of garlic and red wine. The sound of Steph and David squabbling or asking questions about their homework, then the excitable cheers when he opened the door because Dad’s home, Dad’s home!

  When he entered the hallway the smell of damp hit him even harder than usual. And there were the familiar scuff marks on the corridor walls and the intermittent, milky yellow of the faulty strip light. He trudged up the stairs, his wet shoes squeaking with each step, and slid the second key around on his key ring. He reached up to right the wonky number 2 on the door and went inside, met, as he had been for the last twenty years, by nothing but silence.

  — CHAPTER 3 —

  Five Years Previously

  Andrew was late. This might not have been so much of a disaster if on the CV he’d submitted ahead of that morning’s job interview he hadn’t claimed to be “extremely punctual.” Not just punctual: extremely punctual. Was that even a thing? Were there extremities of punctuality? How might one even go about measuring such a thing?

  It was his own stupid fault, too. He’d been crossing the road when a strange honking noise distracted him and he looked up. A goose was arrowing overhead, its white underside lit up orange by the morning sun, its shrill cries and erratic movement making it seem like a damaged fighter plane struggling back to base. It was just as the bird steadied itself and continued on its course that Andrew slipped on some ice. There was a brief moment where his arms windmilled and his feet gripped at nothing, like a cartoon character who’d just run off a cliff, before he hit the ground with an ugly thud.

  “You okay?”

  Andrew wheezed wordlessly in reply at the woman who had just helped him to his feet. He felt like someone had just taken a sledgehammer to his lo
wer back. But it wasn’t this that stopped him from finding the words to thank the woman. There was something about the way she was looking at him—a half smile on her face, how she brushed her hair behind her ears—that was so startlingly familiar it left him breathless. The woman’s eyes seemed to be searching his face, as if she too had been hit with an intense feeling of recognition and pain. It was only after she’d said, “Well, bye then,” and walked off that Andrew realized she’d actually been waiting for him to thank her. He wondered if he should hurry after her to try to make amends. But just then a familiar tune began to play in his head. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone. It took all his concentration to shake it away, squeezing his eyes shut and massaging his temples. By the time he looked again the woman was gone.

  He dusted himself down, suddenly aware that people had seen him fall and were enjoying their dose of schadenfreude. He avoided eye contact and carried on, head down, hands thrust into his pockets. Gradually his embarrassment gave way to something else. It was in the aftermath of mishaps like this where he would feel it stir at his core and start to spread out, thick and cold, making it feel like he was walking through quicksand. There was nobody for him to share the story with. No one to help him laugh his way through it. Loneliness, however, was ever vigilant, always there to slow-clap his every stumble.

  Though somewhat shaken up after his slip, he was fine apart from a small graze on his hand. (Now that he was nearing forty he was all too aware there was a small but visible spot on the horizon where such a standard slip would become “having a little fall.” He secretly welcomed the idea of a sympathetic stranger laying their coat over him as they waited for an ambulance, supporting his head and squeezing his hand.) But while he hadn’t suffered any damage, unfortunately the same couldn’t be said for his white shirt, which was now splattered with dirty brown water. He briefly considered trying to make something out of this and the graze to impress his interviewer. “What, this? Oh, on my way here I was briefly diverted by diving in front of a bus/bullet/tiger to save a toddler/puppy/dignitary. Anyway, did I mention I’m a self-starter and I work well on my own and as part of a team?” He decided on the more sensible option and dashed into the nearest Debenhams for a new shirt. The detour left him sweaty and out of breath, which was how he announced himself to the receptionist at the cathedral of concrete that was the council offices.

  He took a seat as instructed and sucked in some deep, steadying breaths. He needed this job. Badly. He’d been working in various admin roles for the council of a nearby borough since his early twenties, finally finding a position that had stuck, and which he had been in for eight years before unceremoniously being made redundant. Andrew’s boss, Jill (a kind, rosy-cheeked Lancastrian with a “hug first, ask questions later” approach to life), had felt so terrible at having to let him go that she’d apparently called every council office in London asking about vacancies. The interview today was the only one that had come out of Jill’s calls, and her e-mail to him describing the job was frustratingly vague. From what Andrew could tell it was similar to what he’d been doing before, largely admin based, though it involved something to do with inspecting properties. More importantly, it paid exactly the same as his last job and he could start the following month. Ten years ago there had been a chance he might have considered a fresh start. Traveling, maybe, or a bold new career move. But these days just having to leave the house left him with an unspecific feeling of anxiety, so hiking to Machu Picchu or retraining as a lion tamer wasn’t exactly on the cards.

  He tore at a loose flap of skin on his finger with his teeth, jiggling his knee, struggling to relax. When Cameron Yates finally appeared Andrew felt certain he’d met him before. He was about to ask if that was actually the case—perhaps he’d be able to use it to curry favor—but then he realized that he only recognized Cameron because he was a dead ringer for a young Wallace from Wallace and Gromit. He had bulbous eyes that were too close together and large front teeth that jutted down unevenly like stalactites. The only real differences were his tufty black hair and home counties accent.

  They exchanged some awkward small talk in the coffin-sized lift, and all the while Andrew couldn’t tear his eyes away from the stalactites. Stop looking at the fucking teeth, he told himself, while staring directly at the fucking teeth.

  They waited for someone to bring them two blue thimbles of lukewarm water before finally the interview began in earnest. Cameron started by rattling through the job description, barely pausing for breath as he outlined how, if Andrew were to get the role, he’d be dealing with all deaths covered under the Public Health Act. “So that’s liaising with funeral directors to organize the services, writing death notices in the local paper, registering deaths, tracing family members, recovering funeral costs through the deceased’s estates. There’s an awful lot of the old paperwork malarkey, as you can imagine!”

  Andrew made sure to nod along, trying to take it all in, inwardly cursing Jill for neglecting to mention the whole “death” thing. Then, before he knew it, the spotlight was on him. Disconcertingly, Cameron seemed as nervous as he was, switching from simple, friendly questions to meandering, confusing ones, a harsher edge to his voice—as if he were playing good cop/bad cop by himself. When Andrew was afforded a second to respond to Cameron’s nonsense, he found himself stumbling over his words. When he did manage to string a sentence together his enthusiasm sounded like desperation, his attempts at humor just seeming to confuse Cameron, who on more than one occasion looked past Andrew’s shoulder, distracted by someone walking past in the corridor. Eventually it got to a point where he felt so despondent he considered giving up on the spot and just walking out. In among his depression at how things were going he was still distracted by Cameron’s teeth. For one thing, he’d started to question whether it was stalactites or stalagmites. Wasn’t there a thing about pulling down tights that helped you remember? It was at that moment that he realized Cameron had just asked him something—he had no idea what—and was now waiting for an answer. Panicked, he sat forward. “Ermmm,” he said, in a tone he hoped conveyed that he was appreciative of such a thoughtful question and thus needed to give it due consideration. But this was clearly a mistake, judging from Cameron’s growing frown. Andrew realized the question must have been a simple one.

  “Yes,” he blurted out, deciding to keep the answer short. Relief flooded him as Cameron’s trampled Wallace smile reappeared.

  “Wonderful. And how many?” he said.

  This was trickier, though Andrew sensed a lightheartedness in Cameron’s tone so this time plumped for a general, breezy response.

  “Well, I suppose I sort of lose track sometimes,” he said, trying a rueful smile. Cameron reacted with a false-sounding laugh, as though he couldn’t quite tell if Andrew was joking. Andrew decided to fire back, hoping for more information.

  “Do you mind me asking you the same question?” he said.

  “Of course. I’ve just got the one myself,” Cameron said enthusiastically. He reached into his pocket and started rummaging. The thought briefly crossed Andrew’s mind that the man interviewing him for a job was about to pull out a lone testicle, as if he asked this question of every man he met, hoping desperately for a solo-ball owner. Instead, Cameron produced his wallet. It was only when he brought out a picture from within of a child trussed up in winter gear with skis on that Andrew understood what the question had been. He quickly replayed the conversation from Cameron’s perspective.

  “Do you have kids?”

  “Ermmm . . . Yes.”

  “Wonderful. And how many?”

  “Well, I suppose I sort of lose track sometimes.”

  Christ, had he just given the impression to a potential new boss that he was some sort of prolific Lothario who’d spent his life shagging around town and leaving a succession of women pregnant and homes broken?

  He was still just looking at the photo of Cameron’s child. Say so
mething!

  “Lovely,” he said. “Lovely . . . boy.”

  Oh good, now you sound like the Child Catcher. That’ll go down well. You start on Monday, Mr. Pedophile!

  He grasped his plastic water beaker, long since empty, and felt it crack in his hand. This was a fucking disaster. How could he have blown things already? He could tell from Cameron’s expression that he was past the point of no return. Quite what he’d say if Andrew just admitted to accidentally lying about having children he wasn’t sure, but it seemed unlikely that it would suddenly turn things around. He decided his best option now was just to get through the rest of the interview while saving as much face as possible—like continuing to do mirror, signal, maneuver on a driving test having just run over a lollipop lady.

  As he let go of the plastic beaker he noticed the graze on his palm and thought about the girl who’d helped him that morning. The wavy brown hair, that inscrutable smile. He could feel the blood starting to throb in his ears. What would it be like—to have a moment where he could just pretend. To play out a little fantasy all for himself. Where was the harm? Where, really, was the harm in spending the briefest moment imagining that everything had actually worked out fine and not fallen to pieces?

  He cleared his throat.

  Was he going to do this?

  “How old is he?” he asked, handing the photo back to Cameron.

  “He’s just turned seven,” Cameron said. “And yours?”

  Was he actually going to do this?