Something to Tell You

I know you said you didn’t want to know, Frankie’s mum Kathy had written at some undetermined point in the past, but just in case you ever change your mind, these are the facts. The letter had been tucked in an album of baby photos that Gareth had put in a box for her when he’d cleared out the family home, after Kathy had died. Frankie might not have discovered the missive for years and years, perhaps never, if Fergus hadn’t disputed the fact that she and Craig had ever been babies themselves, back on a sleety winter’s day. ‘No,’ he had decreed firmly, dark curls bouncing as he shook his head. ‘You are my mumma and daddy. Not babies.’ Laughingly, Craig had found an old photo of himself as a newborn, as the blinking, wobbly-headed proof, and Frankie had been requisitioned to find one of her, too. The letter had slipped out of the photo album, still smelling faintly of her mum’s perfume, and with a deafening crack Pandora’s box had shattered clean open.

A letter? For me? Of course she had opened it at once, photos forgotten, tearing through the envelope with a bubble of joy swelling in her chest. One last surprise from her mother, one final letter that she hadn’t been expecting! What a gift, what a blessing, she had thought, delighted. But then of course she had read those opening warning sentences and had reared back immediately, joy replaced by apprehension, her heart giving a hard, worried gallop. She had looked away, troubled, but felt her attention dragged back, like a driver compelled to stare at a traffic pile-up on the other side of the motorway. Don’t want to look. Want to see. Don’t want to know. But how bad is it?

She had sat there, the letter in her lap, and gazed up in anguish at the bedroom window as if seeking guidance. You were right the first time, Mum: I didn’t want to know. I was happy with you, and then with you and Gareth, and that was enough for me.

But how could anyone ignore the very last letter from their mother? How could anyone fail to be bewitched by the chance to see that sloping handwriting one last time, hear the words spoken in her mum’s own voice? Her eyes fell helplessly down to the paper again and she read on, knowing that to do so would mean there’d be no turning back:

Well, he was handsome and I was young – prettier then, too! – and he was kind and funny and . . . Oh, you know. That old chestnut: I fell for him. Yes, I knew he was married. Does that make me a bad person? Probably, Frank, but it was too late by then. And besides, how can it have been a bad decision, when you were the delightful consequences of our affair?!

He doesn’t know about you, I’m afraid. He already had four children and, when I discovered I was pregnant, I knew he wasn’t about to leave them and his wife for me. It was the end of term and my job at the school had come to an end, so I did a flit before things got even more complicated. I’ve never seen him since.

Sod it, I thought. I can manage alone. I wanted you, see – I wanted you very much. ‘We’ll be all right,’ I said to myself (and you), hitching a ride back to London with my last pay packet rustling in my pocket. I spent the money on the most beautiful white-painted cot for you and a new winter coat for me, and then turned up on your grandma’s doorstep, asking if she’d help me out. And we did manage, didn’t we? We never had much to spare, but you never went without. You certainly never went without my love, Frankie, I hope you always felt it around you, like your very own strong, shining force-field, because I did my best to surround you with it every single day.

Anyway, my darling, his name is Harry Mortimer and he lives just outside York. He may have moved on long ago, he may be dead, he may be onto his seventeenth wife by now, who knows, but if you did have an inkling to meet him, then his address is 12 Penny Street in Bishopthorpe, which is about five miles out of the city. Even if he’s gone, those four kids of his will be grown-up – your sort of age! – so you could meet them. Siblings at last! You always wanted a brother or a sister, didn’t you? I’m sorry I couldn’t give you one myself.

I’m sorry, too, if all this is shocking. I’m sure it is. I can picture you reading it, becoming very still as you try to digest everything, and my heart breaks a bit that I’m not there to put an arm around you, to apologize for the body-blow this must feel like. You know I would rather have told you myself, in person, just the two of us having one of our good old chinwags. I’m sorry if you hate me for telling you like this. It’s just I thought: I can’t die and not say anything. I can’t pop my clogs and leave her with nothing; no clue, not so much as a name. So now you know. You do look like him, by the way. Better-looking, obviously – but that’s thanks to me.

Favourite girl, loveliest person, please know that this was written in love. And whenever you read this, I’ll be blowing kisses from afar, wishing you all the best things and all the happiness in the world.

Love Mum x

One letter, one single sheet of paper, and it had totally pulled the rug out from under Frankie’s feet. She’d felt angry at first – tricked into being told something she had insisted all along that she didn’t want to know. Then she’d felt sad, bereft for the loss of her beloved mother, whose voice and humour and love rang so clear and true through the handwritten words. Finally – eventually – she had felt maddened with curiosity, overwhelmed by the revelations. Those four half-siblings, for one thing. The fact that she looked like her father. Even, stupidly, the fact that she knew his name!

One letter, and it had been as explosive as a stick of dynamite. How could she write to this Harry Mortimer bloke, she had thought at the time, and her own letter not feel like a similar weapon? Hence the whole doomed northern road-trip, which had only served to convince her that a letter probably would have been a better introduction, after all. She would try again, she had decided now, make a better fist of things this time, apologize if she’d wrecked his party. And if he didn’t respond, then so be it. At least she would have given it a go.

And yet each time she set out to write the perfect letter, she found it impossible to find the right tone, worrying about the way she was presenting herself. She wanted to give a good first impression – second impression, rather – but it wasn’t easy. Her first attempt was too stiff and defensive. The next try tipped the balance the other way and was apologetic and timid. The third was over-friendly, sharing far too much detail about her life. The fourth sounded desperate – pleading almost. The fifth was a cringeworthy mixture of all its predecessors. In the end, she chucked the pen and paper to one side in defeat. The perfect letter didn’t exist, simple as that.

It wasn’t only her poor writing skills that were stressing her out. Ever since the unpleasant and unplanned-for visit of Julia the previous Thursday, a subdued sort of atmosphere had settled upon the flat, as if they were all biding their time, waiting for the next dramatic episode to unfold. Frankie felt helpless in the face of the other woman – and in the eyes of the law, too. Previously she’d nursed a private hope that in time she might be able to adopt Fergus as her own child, or at least apply for parental responsibility, but she and Craig had only been together three years; she hadn’t wanted to jump the gun by broaching the subject too soon. Now she wished she’d been a bit more proactive because, as things stood, Julia held a lot more power than she did in the situation.

‘Don’t worry,’ Craig assured her. ‘All that guff she was spouting about a mother’s rights being sacred . . . it’s not really like that any more. Whatever they told her at the Citizens Advice place – if she even went in there – I bet she didn’t give them the full story. Because nobody in their right mind would think her rights to Fergus outweighed mine.’

‘We should probably give her a chance, though,’ Frankie ventured reluctantly in reply. Not because she particularly liked Julia or anything, but because this seemed to her the only decent course of action. Julia had given birth to Fergus after all; he had grown inside her body. Not to mention the fact that Julia’s abandonment of motherhood had been Frankie’s joyful gain. She owed her one, really.

‘It won’t be good for Fergus,’ Craig had said flatly. ‘Julia’s chaotic, all over the place. She doesn’t even know him.’

‘But she did say she felt better,’ Frankie had reminded him, to which he merely snorted.

‘She’s all talk,’ he’d muttered. ‘This will be a whim, you wait. I know her, remember.’

That wasn’t much consolation. Because Frankie didn’t know her, and didn’t know what she was capable of, either. And so, even though she wanted to be fair to Julia and not completely write her off, Frankie found herself sticking close to Fergus when he went to his friend Preena’s soft-play party at the weekend. Usually she’d nurse a coffee in a nearby café, far from the seething ball-pit of frenzied small children – but not today. ‘The things we mums put up with, eh?’ one of the other women had laughed to her, when the two of them ended up scrambling through a shiny red tunnel to haul out a stuck toddler, and the words had stabbed at Frankie like daggers. If Julia took Fergus, Frankie wouldn’t be a mum any more, she realized bleakly. This whole world would become closed to her overnight, the metal shutters abruptly dropping, sealing her off. The thought was unbearable. Fergus had been like the most wonderful gift, the bonus package that came with Craig. She had fallen in love with them both at the same time, and had adored learning how to be Fergus’s mummy. ‘Do you think you two might have a kid together one day? Another kid, I mean?’ friends had asked now and then, and Frankie always felt torn when it came to answering. Yes, of course she’d love to have a baby with Craig – but then she already adored Fergus so absolutely. Was there even room in her heart for anyone else?

She had taken it for granted that he would forever be her child and she his mummy, that was the thing. But she wasn’t really his mummy, was she? She had been acting the part all this time. And now she was in danger of having Fergus – and motherhood – snatched away from under her nose.

‘Aren’t we the lucky ones?’ she replied to the mum who’d spoken to her, forcing a laugh. Inside, though, she felt like clutching at Fergus and never letting him go. Sometimes you didn’t know how lucky you’d been until you were in danger of losing it all.

Monday came around and, having dropped Fergus at playgroup first thing, Frankie was able to turn her thoughts to the work she had planned for the next few hours. She’d been in touch with a possible new client, the head of art at a decent-sized greetings-card company, and had been asked to pitch ideas for new designs. She was currently mulling over the concept of a range of cards featuring a family of dragons, and had been making quick doodles in her notebook over the weekend: of scaly tails and rounded ribbed bellies, magnificent wings and fiery nostrils. Everyone loved dragons, right? Especially the fat, funny ones of her imaginings. Now she needed to translate her thoughts into some preliminary sketches, bold and bright, in the hope that the client would be keen.

The postman must have called while she was out, because there was an envelope on the mat, addressed to Craig. There was something about the thickness of it, the classy starched feel of the paper, that made her glance at it again as she walked through to the kitchen. The postmark bore a north-London code and there was a company name she didn’t recognize franked alongside: Hargreaves and Winter. It sounded like a law firm, she thought worriedly, dropping the letter down by Craig. ‘One for you,’ she said.

He was already at the table, frowning at his laptop as he tussled with the opening sentences of a book review for the newspaper’s Culture section. ‘Ta,’ he mumbled, considering his screen for a moment and then resuming typing again, eyes narrowed.

Frankie hesitated. Her big sketchpad and coloured pencils were calling her, but she couldn’t help flicking another glance at that envelope, about which she suddenly had a bad feeling. ‘Maybe you should open that,’ she said. ‘It looks important. I can’t help worrying—’ She broke off, not wanting to tempt fate by saying the words out loud. She was probably over-thinking things, leaping to the wrong conclusion, after all. Wasn’t she?

Craig glanced across at her in surprise, but did as she suggested, ripping open the seal and unfolding the paper inside. Scanning the contents was enough to prompt a sharp intake of breath. ‘I don’t bloody think so,’ he said, his face darkening. He tossed the letter across to her so that she could read it, and made a growling noise in his throat. ‘Shit. I might have guessed she’d try a stunt like this.’

Frankie’s intuition had been right. The letter was from a solicitor’s office, brief and to the point: due to a change of circumstances, their client, Ms Julia Athanas, was seeking a child arrangement order regarding living arrangements for her son, Fergus Jacobs, initially as shared care, with a view to eventually having him on a full-time basis. They hoped Mr Jacobs would be amenable to this, otherwise they would advise mediation sessions to resolve the situation.

The words danced about mockingly on the page and Frankie heard herself give a moan of pain, as if someone had physically hurt her. ‘Living arrangements,’ she read aloud in dismay. Her arms twitched uselessly, for wanting to hug Fergus’s squirming warm body right then and there, to nuzzle her face into his curly hair and breathe in his delightful goodness. Hadn’t she known? Hadn’t she been right to fear this?

‘She wants to have him,’ said Craig grimly. ‘Have him, when he doesn’t even know her. Well, over my dead body. That’s not going to happen.’

Frankie’s heart was thumping, hard and painful in her ribs, at the terrible, unbearable prospect of Fergus not living with them any more. Of not tucking him into bed at night, of not gazing at his beautiful sleeping face, of not hearing his chuckles and songs and train noises . . . oh my God. No. It was too awful to think about. ‘They can’t . . . I mean, nobody could think that was best for Fergus,’ she said, aghast. ‘He lives here, with us. We’re his family!’

It all came back to family, she thought numbly, as Craig strode around, denouncing his ex. Did the family you belonged to have to be tied together with blood and genetics, in order to have merit? Because this little family of three, which she had come to be a part of, had been built through love – and yet it seemed horribly precarious all of a sudden. Having grown up an only child, with her mum now dead and her stepfather an expat, Craig and Fergus were the only family Frankie had, unless you counted Harry Mortimer and his clan, that was, which she didn’t. It seemed ridiculous that technically, biologically, Harry and those other four children of his could be deemed more of a family to Frankie than the two people she adored most in the world.

‘We will fight for him,’ Craig was saying, jaw clenched. ‘We will take this all the way, if we have to. And she will not win. Absolutely no way. Julia will not take him from us.’

Bunny turned off the engine and unclipped her seatbelt, trying to dredge up some energy after the long drive. Back at the weekend, when it looked as if they might have to put Harry up for another week, she’d been glad that Margaret, the SlimmerYou PR woman, had talked her into coming all the way down to Gloucestershire for this talk – a chance to get away on her own for an evening, she’d thought. Harry was a very nice man, of course, and he was, understandably, in a state over the falling-out with Jeanie, but . . . Well, without wanting to sound mean, he was quite irritating to live with. He complained about her dinners: not enough meat, too few potatoes, he was suspicious of couscous and avocado (‘They didn’t have them in my day’) and couldn’t cope with anything spicy. He never thought to pick up after himself or do the washing up. Plus he sometimes treated Bunny like an idiot – advising her on the upkeep of the flowerbeds in the tiny back garden, and insisting on attempting to explain the rules of cricket to her, several times over, when the simple fact of the matter was: she really did not care.

Bunny was not an idiot. Moreover she was allergic to anyone, particularly men, making assumptions about her and treating her as if she was. Her first husband had been domineering and a bully, and look how that had turned out.

Still, she had kept her temper, she had bitten her tongue, she had listened patiently to Harry every time he bored on about leg before wicket and the length of an innings, reminding herself that he was probably missing Jeanie very badly and that perhaps he thought he was redeeming himself in some way by being helpful. But now – hallelujah – he had moved on to stay with John and Robyn, so he wasn’t Bunny’s problem any more. In fact, now that he’d packed up his bag and left them, she half-wished she hadn’t agreed to schlep all the way down here to this small Cotswold town, when she’d far rather be cocooned with Dave at home, enjoying the peace and quiet.

‘I know you didn’t want to go further south than Birmingham, but the organizer has offered to bring three groups together for the occasion, and they’re willing to pay a bit extra to have you visit,’ Margaret had wheedled. ‘Plus you were born round there, weren’t you? Well, then – they love a local success story. Perfect!’

‘Ahh,’ Bunny had replied apprehensively. ‘The thing is, I’d rather not advertise the fact that I was born round there, to be honest. Just because . . .’ She hesitated, remembering how the local newspapers had printed pictures of her, retelling her story with unnecessary salacious details. ‘Because of . . . privacy issues.’

Margaret wasn’t an easy person to argue with and so, after some toing and froing, Bunny had eventually caved in and said, ‘Okay, just this once.’ But that was it. She would sneak back into the county for one single night, she had decided, do her thing and then slink away again, as if she’d never been there at all. Having deliberately cut her ties with the area, the last thing she wanted was to find herself getting tangled up in any loose threads now.

But in the meantime here she was, parked up outside a secondary school where the slimmers’ meeting was due to take place, a mere fifteen miles down the road from where she’d spent the most miserable, frightening years of her life. It was a part of her past that she deliberately tried to shut down whenever her mind flickered in that direction, and now that she was here, so close to the area, she felt besieged by ambushes of memory that kept bursting through. The small terraced house. The smell of her ex-husband’s aftershave. The moment she’d woken up in hospital, bewildered and disorientated . . .

She shuddered there in the driver’s seat, feeling small and sad and vulnerable. Remembering how broken she’d been for a while, how she hadn’t been able to imagine a way through the darkness. Oh, help, this had been a mistake, she shouldn’t have let herself get talked into coming this far, she thought despairingly. Why had she allowed Margaret to bulldoze her into it, rather than listen to her own instincts?

She put her hand on the key, wondering if she should just turn it again, restart the engine, bail out with some excuse. She could blame a flat tyre, a sudden stomach bug that had erupted on the motorway; she remembered, from all the times she’d phoned in sick in the past, that if you went into enough graphic detail, people just said, ‘Okay, don’t worry about it’, simply to shut you up.

But then a smartly dressed woman walked through the car park, carrying a large bag as she headed for the school door, and Bunny knew this would be Sally Coles, her contact, who’d be leading the slimmers’ group; and – yes, right on cue – just as she was thinking this, the woman turned round, spotted her skulking in the car and changed direction. ‘Hello. You must be Bunny!’ she cried, as Bunny rolled down her window. ‘Excellent, you found us all right, then? We’re so looking forward to your talk. You’re an inspiration!’

No turning back now. Bunny hoped her bright smile of reply was enough to cover up the inner clenching of her heart, the dismay she felt at being there. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’ll be five minutes. I just need to make a quick call,’ she added, which wasn’t actually true, but would at least mean that this woman wouldn’t stand there and wait for her.

‘Absolutely,’ said Sally. ‘Well, we’re very easy to find – straight through the double doors and into the main hall. I’ll be setting up for the next twenty minutes, so you just come on in when you’re ready.’ She beamed, showing neat white teeth. ‘You’re really going to motivate our group. Thank you so much for coming.’

‘Thank you for having me!’ said Bunny in the most enthusiastic voice she could manage. You’re an inspiration, she repeated sternly to herself as Sally trotted away and unlocked the school doors. She had lost over half her own body weight since she lived in this area, she was happier and more confident than she’d ever been. Nobody pushed Bunny around or made her feel worthless any more. ‘You’ve got this,’ she told her reflection as she dusted powder onto her nose and sprayed on an encouraging blast of perfume. ‘Don’t look so scared. It’ll be over in an hour. Think of everything you’ve been through to get here. You’re a survivor.’

She glanced over her shoulder at her broad cardboard doppelgänger, propped faithfully in the back seat as ever, and cringed a little at that wide, fake printed smile, the smile that had never quite reached her eyes back then. In hindsight, it was a smile that said: I’m lost in this big old body, I’m hiding here and hoping things will get better for me. But in the meantime, I’m going to self-medicate with chips and wine until I feel I can cope.

‘You’re not her any more,’ she reminded herself under her breath as she got out of the car, then opened the passenger door and reached in for her old unhappy self, her arms circling the wide cardboard waist like an embrace. ‘You’re Bunny, and you can do this.’

Her mother had started the nickname, back when she was about seven. With a fuzz of fluffy blonde hair, round blue eyes and – yes, okay – endearingly protruding front teeth, the affectionate ‘My little bunny’ soon became ‘Bunny’ or ‘Bun’. Little Rachel would twitch her nose obligingly, just like a real rabbit, and it made her mum laugh and ruffle her hair. Bunnies were so cute! Who wouldn’t want to be called that, anyway? The pet name stuck, for years and years, until she was a self-conscious teenager and suddenly would rather die than stand out from the crowd in any way, let alone with a seriously uncool name. And so ‘Bunny’ went, along with the goofy teeth (thanks to the local orthodontist) and she was Rachel again, ordinary Rachel with spots and a tendency to blush; Rachel who was good at netball and swimming, popular with both girls and boys. She had breezed through school and college and her first couple of jobs, until . . .

Well. There was no need to go into how she’d fallen for charming Mark Roberts and how everything ended up going wrong. Especially not now, when she was standing in front of a room full of people waiting for her to begin.

She tapped the microphone, took a deep breath and then gave them all her best and brightest smile. One more time, with feeling. ‘Good evening, everyone. My name is Bunny Halliday, and I’m delighted to say that nine months ago I was voted SlimmerYou’s ‘Slimmer of the Year’, having lost almost ten stone!’

‘This was me, three years ago,’ she said, gesturing to her portly cardboard twin, propped up beside her. ‘There I am, with that big old smile on my face. Doesn’t she look happy? you might be thinking. But no. Deep down inside, I was not happy. I was bingeing on ice-cream and biscuits. I would think nothing of eating a family-size pizza all to myself for dinner, along with chips, onion rings, chicken wings . . . the lot. Side orders don’t count, right?’

A few smiles of acknowledgement greeted this comment, and she went on, emboldened.

‘So no, I was not happy. I slept badly and had very little energy. The thought of doing any exercise was just so embarrassing, I couldn’t face it. Swimming at the local pool, where I’d have to wobble along, thighs quaking, to the edge of the water? Forget it. Go jogging around my local streets to be smirked at by teenagers or, worse, overtaken by pensioners on mobility scooters? No, thanks. It was all I could do to wheeze my way into the kitchen for another snack and then back to the sofa to watch telly. Even that felt like an effort.’

She paused, trying not to think about how Mark’s voice would become dangerously soft sometimes when he came in at night and saw her there. Fat fucking bitch. Look at the state of you. ‘The irony was,’ she went on, trying to push him out of her thoughts, ‘that I had reached this size and all I wanted to do was shrink away, where nobody could see me.’ She cocked her head, a self-deprecating expression on her face. ‘You’d think I might have twigged that there was a better way of achieving that than getting even bigger, right?’

‘According to my doctor, I was morbidly obese and in danger of becoming diabetic,’ she went on. ‘My blood pressure was high, I was at greater risk of having a heart attack, a stroke – all kinds of alarming conditions. I felt pretty miserable, I can tell you. Pretty defeated. I made excuses not to socialize because I could feel people judging me. I could hardly look at myself in the mirror any more, because I was so ashamed of what I’d become. I felt like a bad person, basically. And yet . . .’

This was always the part when she could feel the audience shift in their seats and lean forward hopefully. Because here, right down at the depths of despair, came the turning point, the moment of change.

‘And yet, there was one small kernel within me that held out,’ she went on slowly. She always felt her fists clench when she reached this bit of the story, that same old determination taking hold of her. ‘One small shred of me that still had some dignity. Which said: Something’s gone wrong here. This is not the person I thought I would be. And do you know what? The only one who can fix the situation is me.’

You’re very good, Margaret had said, the first time she saw Bunny give one of her talks. Very sincere. I’ll see if I can get you some TV coverage, they’ll love you. (‘No,’ Bunny had said immediately. ‘No TV. I want to be as low-profile as possible. If it’s all the same to you.’)

A man in the audience had his hand up and she gave him a quick, pleasant smile. ‘I’ll take any questions at the end, by the way,’ she said as an aside, before continuing down her well-worn path. ‘So I decided I would make a change. To hell with what other people thought. I was going to get fit – but not because the doctor said I should. Not because of those kids shouting “Fatty!” at me in the street. Not because I felt bullied into it by all the many, many unkind remarks I’d heard made about me, either to my face or behind my back. No.’ She let her pause hang in the air for effect. Work it, girl, said Margaret in her head. ‘I was going to get fit and lose weight because I wanted to. Because I wanted to change.’

More nods from the audience. Some people already had that glassy-eyed look of reverence as they listened, although the man with his hand up was still trying to get her attention, she noticed with a flicker of irritation. ‘Excuse me,’ he called, waggling his fingers.

Bunny ignored him. ‘It’s not easy, though, is it? Making that decision and then sticking to your guns,’ she went on. ‘All of you, I can see, have taken up a similar challenge. Just by coming here, you’ve made a commitment, you’re on your own journeys. So you’ll understand when I say that for the first few weeks I found myself wondering if—’

‘Excuse me,’ the man said again, louder this time. He was actually waving his hand from side to side now.

Bunny broke off, losing her thread, glancing round to try and catch the eye of the group leader, Sally, who’d introduced her. Wouldn’t somebody help her out and shut this man up? But nobody was coming to her rescue, so she smiled at him tightly. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to save questions for the—’ she began, but he was already talking over her.

A ripple of astonishment spread through the audience like a Mexican wave, while Bunny stood there, stunned. ‘I . . .’ she stuttered, the ground seeming to rise and tilt beneath her feet. ‘What? I . . .’

‘I never forget a face. It was you, wasn’t it? Married to that Mark Roberts fella? My uncle lived next door to the pair of youse. Bakerfield Road, right?’

Bunny was going hot and cold all over. She swallowed hard, her mouth dry, her mind in freefall. ‘No,’ she did her best to say. ‘You’re mistaken.’ She could feel the audience eyeing her differently all of a sudden; there was a chilliness in the air, a terrible stillness, as every single person began recalibrating their impression of her.

Sally had hurried over to the man and had a hand on his arm, leaning close to him. The spell was broken, noisy chatter bursting out like gunfire amidst the hall. Every survival instinct in Bunny’s body was telling her to run, to get away, forget the rest of her talk and escape in her car, as fast as she could, back up the motorway. ‘Did you really stab him?’ a woman called out from the crowd, with a mix of horror and fascination, and Bunny felt her face turn scarlet, hot and humiliated – the feeling of being unmasked, a disguise ripped off her, leaving her stranded there vulnerable and afraid.

‘I’m sorry about this, everyone,’ Sally said, wringing her hands as a large bloke hauled the man out of the room.

‘I was only asking a question,’ he protested, twisting in his captor’s grip and glaring back at Bunny. ‘Get off! This is assault, this is. Get your hands off me!’

Bunny’s heart was pounding. She was trembling all over. Fight or flight, fight or flight, her body said, adrenalin going berserk through her veins. And then a cool, determined voice in her head said, Fight. Fight on. Keep talking. You were just getting to the good bit of the story. Big smile and keep going. Don’t let that bastard beat you.

So she gave it her best shot. Even though she felt very much like crying, even though she was shaken and unnerved, and sweat was drenching the back of her top, she stood there and rolled her eyes comically and said, ‘Do you know, I must have got one of those faces; it’s a nightmare. Because everyone thinks they know me! This happens wherever I go – someone thinks I am their niece’s friend, or that I used to work in their local pub, or that I was at school with them. Mind you, the response I’ve just had tonight was a bit more dramatic, granted.’ She even managed a tinkling laugh and the audience, God love them, laughed along with her, their faith in her seemingly restored a little bit.

Keep going. Keep breathing. ‘But just in case you were wondering, let me assure you right here and now: my other half is very much alive and uninjured, and is probably sitting at home with his feet up on the coffee table, watching Sky Sport as I speak.’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘Well, that’s what he told me earlier, anyway . . .’ More laughter. Thank goodness. She’d turned the sinking ship around, no matter that she was talking about Dave rather than her ex. ‘Now, where was I? Ah yes. Those difficult early weeks.’ She pulled another funny face. ‘The weeks from hell. My goodness, I’m not going to forget them in a hurry . . .’

On she went, her speech salvaged, her composure just about recovered. Outwardly, at least. Because inside she was on fire with the terror and mortification of what had just happened; she had gone hurtling straight back to the bad old days, to the bleep and whirr of the hospital machines, to the policeman taking notes and asking her to sign a statement, to the stony-faced jury in the courtroom.

Somehow she was still talking on automatic pilot, she was saying all the right things in the right order, she had drawn her audience back so that they were rapt, hanging on her every word. But oh boy, this was it – she was done, she thought to herself as she paused for breath. Just as soon as this was over, just as soon as she was allowed to leave, she was driving back home to Dave and safe anonymity. And whatever Margaret said, however coaxingly she pleaded, Bunny was never doing this again, never, and that was that.