Dark Corners: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

– which she, like the rest of the country, called M&S – had their flagship store?
    ‘Go in the car,’ she said. ‘It won’t take you more than half an hour there and back.’
    As if saving time was one of his priorities. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you were a driver.’
    Instead of the car, he took the tube, Willesden Green to Bond Street on the Jubilee Line. On a Tuesday morning, Oxford Street wasn’t crowded. He bought his socks and walked back towards Bond Street station. If half empty of people, Oxford Street carried a load of buses, so many that Tom fancied their weight would be too much for the road surface and any minute it would crack and sink under this scarlet mass of metal. Where did they all go to? Or come from? Why did they come here, queuing up like animals in a line heading for a water hole? He paused at a bus stop and saw that many buses, six and more if you counted the night ones, were scheduled to stop here. The first on the list was a number 6. He was standing in front of the timetable, which was on a pole and encased in glass, wuhen a bus came looming out of nowhere and bearing down on the bus stop, its light on. The number 6 was on the front of it, and so was its destination: Willesden.
    That was the beginning of it, the start of his new occupation. He refused to call it a hobby. Climbing aboard, he waved his pass at the driver, who mimed a touching of this card in a plastic case on to a round yellow disc that squeaked when contact was made. It was easy, it was rather nice. He got a seat near the front and settled down to be driven home for the first time since he’d come to live in Willesden Green.
    That was a year ago, and in that year he had ridden at least half of London’s buses, been everywhere and become an expert. This afternoon he was coming back from Barnes and in the Marylebone Road had changed on to his favourite number 6. A most interesting afternoon it had been, and outside the sun had come out brilliantly.
     
    Most parents would be delighted to come home and find their grown-up daughter paying an unsolicited visit. Dot evidently was, plying this vision in jade green and rose pink with cups of tea, plates of cakes and now something that was obviously a gin and tonic. Since her late teens, when Tom had expected Lizzie to change, to grow up and behave, he had viewed his daughter with a sinking heart, only briefly pleased when she got into what she called ‘uni’. But her degree in media studies was the lowest grade possible while still remaining a BA. Gradually, as she moved from one pathetic job to another, ending up with the one she had now – teaching assistant, alternating with playground supervisor of after-school five-year-olds killing time until a parent came to collect them – he felt for his daughter what no father should feel: a kind of sorrowful contempt. He had sometimes heard parents say of their child that they loved her but didn’t like her, and wondered at this attitude. He no longer wondered; he knew. Walking into the house in Mamhead Drive, he asked himself what lie she would tell that evening, and how many justifications for her behaviour she would trot out.
    Dot never seemed aware of her lies and prevarications. They had talked about it, of course they had, but such discussions usually ended with Dot saying that she couldn’t understand how a father could be so hard on his only child when that child was so devoted to him. As if to prove it, Lizzie got up and kissed him, letting her scented face rest for a moment against his cheek.
    Believing he had chosen a subject for conversation unlikely to lead to lying, exaggeration or fantasising, Tom said that Stacey’s death had been a sad business. ‘I remember her of course from when she was a child in the neighbourhood. You and she used to walk to school together. You and Stacey were good friends.’ His wife brought him a glass of wine. ‘You’ll miss her.’
    ‘Oh yes, I do,’ Lizzie said. ‘So much.