It still felt the same. The same smell in the stairwell. The same cooking fumes from the flat below theirs. The same voices on the same TV – still on too loud – escaping from under the same door on the second floor. The same baby crying, except it must be a different one by now, and the same person putting rubbish outside the same flat, instead of taking it down to the same bin in the same bin store out in the same back yard.
It surprised her, but as she climbed the stairs it was slowly starting to feel okay. Then as Louie was opening the door, she felt her nerves scratching away at the lining of her stomach. But it was a good nervous.
Maybe.
‘Oh wow. You’ve still got her,’ Karin said, laughing.
The mannequin was dressed in some of her clothes that she had left behind. Karin remembered carrying it all the way home that day, having spotted it in a skip outside a shop that was closing down, and had struggled with it through town, people staring. But it was worth it because she knew Louie would love it. They dressed her in outfits and stood her at the window. Or lay her down on the sofa. One time, Louie had put her in bed under the duvet and scared the life out of Karin. Louie liked to paint her, and it became a special theme in her work. They would go on days out, just so they could create a particular scene with it.
Karin removed the hat from the mannequin, straightening up the wig, and put the hat on her own head. ‘Hey, that’s my silk scarf I lost on the beach,’ she said, tugging it free. ‘I thought I recognized it when you wrapped it round my hand that day. When you kidnapped me the first time.’
Louie gave her a guilty grin. ‘Yes, but I’ve washed it now,’ she replied, choosing to ignore the kidnapping reference. ‘I wanted to hold onto it, hoping you’d be back here one day and I could return it to you. But if that didn’t happen, well at least I had that, didn’t I?’
Karin returned it to the mannequin. ‘You hang onto it then. Until I get out.’
‘Out of where?’
‘Prison.’
Louie stomped across the floor and flopped down onto the sofa. Karin noticed there were no chairs in here now. The table was still in its rightful place but with nothing to sit on. Not much seemed to have changed apart from that. It was untidy, like Louie said, and the studio part seemed to have spilled out into the rest of the space. That old screen she had made wasn’t anywhere visible. The bed was messy, the duvet not straightened and things piled on top of it. Karin had always kept that tidy too; she liked a neat bed. ‘It’s a bed, not a desk,’ she would say.
‘I can’t let you do it, Karin. I’d rather die than see you go to prison.’
Karin sat down beside her. ‘You’ve already done that once,’ she said. ‘Died, I mean. I don’t want that to happen again. Look Lou, you’re a brilliant artist and you need to focus on that. And maybe you should move away from here. Maybe there are too many memories for you in Morecambe.’
‘For me or for you?’
‘I have to take what’s coming to me and let the courts decide. That is what I need to do. And when I come out, we can decide if we want to be together. Things might have changed by then. But if not—’
Louie was crying. She never cried. She would rather inflict physical pain on herself than shed tears. Karin held onto her, rocking her back and forth. It was tender and sweet. Despite there being plenty of joy and laughter in the relationship at one time, their love was underpinned by a rawness. There was a kind of rough fragility to it. The passion that burned between them, driven by their own separate rage. They were two damaged pebbles washed up on Morecambe beach.
But this felt different.
Maybe they had grown up.
They sat for a whole hour in each other’s arms. Afterwards, they took a stroll along the promenade. Karin said she didn’t want to go onto the beach. Not this one. Too many memories on Morecambe beach. So they sat on the end of the pier with a cheap bottle of wine, huddled under a blanket.
‘Meet me in Morecambe,’ said Karin, holding the bottle up before tipping it to her mouth.
She handed it to Louie.
‘To Morecambe,’ Louie replied. ‘And growing old together.’
A thought suddenly struck Karin. ‘Tell me one thing, Lou. Did you really take copies of my mother’s letters?’
‘What do you think?’ said Louie, laughing. ‘I would have let you go, if that’s what you’d really wanted. If I’d thought you really loved that guy, or just didn’t want me. I would. I’d have returned the money and let you go.’
Karin gave her hand a squeeze.
‘But not without a fight, and not until I understood what went wrong.’
‘I was wrong,’ said Karin. ‘I should never have left you.’
They began pushing each other towards the edge of the promenade, their laughter and screams going all the way out to sea.
Later on, Louie drove Karin to the station to get a train back to Leeds.