Forty-nine

Essex, 2017

Maggie decides to celebrate Aimee’s incarceration with a curry.

It’s been three years since she had her gastric band fitted, and that little silicone belt changed everything. She had let herself go in her thirties; it was a difficult time. She’d given up on life ever being what she’d hoped it might be, and she turned to food for comfort in the absence of anything else. But then, in her forties, she found Aimee.

The best thing to ever happen as a result of joining all those dating websites was finding her again after all those years. What a surprise that was. Aimee’s face might have changed a little, but Maggie would have recognized it anywhere; she saw those eyes whenever she closed her own. That’s when she started her self-improvements. The NHS paid for her gastric band, but she’s paid for all the other work herself, not that she minds; Maggie thinks investing in yourself is the smartest use of a person’s assets.

She calls ahead to place her order, so that she doesn’t have to wait when she gets to the Indian restaurant. She doesn’t like the way they look at her in there sometimes, like she is some kind of loser. Maggie is not a loser. She proves it by correcting the man with the Indian accent on the other end of the phone when he says the total cost of her meal will be £11.75. She has already calculated that the amount should be £11.25, according to the prices listed on the current takeaway menu. The man agrees that her maths is correct without an argument. It might only be fifty pence, but it’s her fifty pence, and Maggie does not like thieves.

Maggie thinks that all immigrants are illegal and crooks. She reads stories about them in the newspapers, and it makes her worry about the future of this country. She is Irish by birth, but does not consider herself to be an immigrant, even though some people might say that she is. She is not like them.

She puts on her coat, ties a giant silk scarf around her head, securing it tightly under her chin and tucking it into her collar, until she is sufficiently wrapped up to be seen by others. She pulls on her boots and picks up her keys. She has quite a large collection of them, all different shapes and sizes, but they are not all her own. Most of them are for the houses of the deceased that she has been commissioned to clear—keys to unlock the secrets people think they’ll never have to share.

Her food is ready when she arrives to collect it.

“Chicken Madras, plain rice, garlic naan, and chips?” says the man behind the counter as soon as she walks through the door, as though that were her name. He sounds the same as the man she spoke to on the phone, but she can never be sure, and he looks so much younger than she imagined, little more than a boy.

“Beef Madras. It should be beef, not chicken.” Her voice sounds strange, deeper than it should.

“It’s beef, yes, sorry. Beef Madras.” He hands her the flimsy white plastic bag containing her celebration supper. She tuts, mumbles that she can’t eat chicken, then shakes her head at the boy’s accent while he continues to apologize for his mistake. Maggie wonders why nobody taught the boy to speak proper English. She pays the £11.25 using the exact change, so that there can be no further confusion.

She watches the news while she eats, hoping to see something about Aimee’s arrest on the television. She records it, pressing the red button on the remote, just in case. Sometimes she talks at the screen, maybe because there is nobody else to talk to. Maggie has never had much luck meeting the right people, even with the help of dating websites.

She still remembers the first time she came across Ben Bailey. She didn’t think much of him initially, had no idea of the role he was going to play in her life and the story of Aimee Sinclair. Sometimes, at our lowest moments, life lends us a signpost, and Maggie was smart enough to follow its directions, once she’d thought the journey through and realized where it might lead. She’s glad that she did, very glad indeed.

Ben Bailey was the kind of guy who kept himself to himself. Didn’t have any family or friends to speak of, at least none that Maggie could find after trawling the internet. His house was a mess. Shame really. Neglectful even, given its value and location on a nice street in Notting Hill. She thought it was strange that he didn’t tidy up after himself a bit more, didn’t seem to mind that people would see all his clutter when they came to the house, but then, there are some strange folk out there, people who are actually comfortable wearing the skin they were born in.

Ben Bailey’s garden was the biggest travesty of all. It had the potential to be a beautiful, secluded oasis, in the middle of an overpopulated city. But instead, it was a jungle of overgrown grass, dirty white plastic chairs, and an ugly patio. Maggie had always been keen on gardening and right from the start thought decking would be much easier on the eye.

It was obvious that Ben Bailey was a clever man; there were lots of fancy-looking books on his shelves. Most of them looked as if they’d actually been read, too, not like when you visit some people’s homes and you can tell it’s all for show. He didn’t have a single photo on display, not one. She still sometimes wonders what he did to push everyone around him so far away that he seemed to be completely alone in the world. But she tried her hardest not to think ill of the man; he had helped her in ways she had never previously dared dream possible.

The planning had to be meticulous: one mistake and the game would have been over before it ever began. It was so hard keeping it all to herself the whole time, but she knew she couldn’t tell anyone what she was doing if she wanted the plan to work. And Ben Bailey couldn’t tell a soul either.

He’d lost his job.

Gross misconduct the letter on his desk had said. She felt bad reading it, as though she were intruding during that first visit to his house. But then she figured he’d left it out knowing it would be read, as though he wanted her to see it. She’d googled gross misconduct when she got home that night; she had felt embarrassed to not really know what it meant. She didn’t enjoy feeling as if she knew less than other people just because she didn’t have a fancy education and hadn’t been to university.

Maggie had worked hard for everything she had; she might not have a degree, but she was smart in ways that couldn’t be learned in any school. Anything she didn’t understand, she taught herself, with the help of the internet.

Gross misconduct is behavior, on the part of an employee, that is so bad that it destroys the employer/employee relationship.

The definition reminded her of Aimee straightaway. Aimee had behaved badly and destroyed their relationship. Aimee and Ben were both guilty of gross misconduct in Maggie’s eyes, the only difference being that Ben had been punished for his behavior, and Aimee had got away scot-free. Until now.

Maggie couldn’t stop thinking about Ben Bailey those first few days; it was like an obsession, and she wanted to know everything about him. She visited the building where he had worked as a journalist and took one of his shirts home with her after her second visit to his house. She wore it in bed that night, thinking about him and everything he was going to help her do to teach Aimee a lesson she’d never forget.

Maggie puts down her knife and fork, feeling very uncomfortable now that she has eaten everything on her plate. She should not have ordered rice and chips. She turns off the television, disappointed that there was no mention of Aimee or Ben, and makes a mental note to watch the later bulletin on a different channel, hoping they might have better news judgment.