Page 64 of All the Things We Never Knew

She didn’t answer, but stepped aside with a welcoming gesture, and I followed her through the house to the kitchen at the back. The glass doors to the garden were open. In the fading light I could see a profusion of flowers, both wild and tended, and the smell of wet foliage drifted in. Two cats, one tortoiseshell and one tabby, came hurrying to meet us with eager mews.

On the kitchen table were a white jug of roses, a frosted bottle of wine and a loaf of bread, still fragrant and steaming on the metal sheet it had been baked on.

‘Stop complaining, you two,’ she scolded the cats, scooping food into two bowls. ‘What will Laurel think of your manners? There you are then.’

Orla put the bowls on the floor and the cats buried their faces in them, crunching noisily. She pulled the cork out of the wine and poured two glasses, and I sat down on one of the wooden chairs.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘You must tell me how you’ve been.’

I took a breath and a sip of wine. ‘Okay. But also not okay.’

She nodded, turning to the kitchen sink and beginning to wash some lettuce. ‘Grief is like that.’

There was something about the tranquillity of that kitchen, something about Orla herself, that made it easy for me to talk. I found myself telling her how I’d become consumed with the need to know about the recipient of Gray’s kidney transplant, how it had led me to my encounter with John Smith earlier that evening and the doubts that had arisen in my mind about Gray himself as a result.

While I talked, Orla made salad, sliced bread and arranged butter and cheese on plates. We finished our wine, and she refilled our glasses. Then she joined me at the table.

‘I knew Gray for a long time,’ she said. ‘But it also felt like I barely knew him at all. There were so many parts of him that were closed off – that I don’t think he ever opened up about, even to Anna.’

‘Did he ever speak to you about his friend – Joel, the transplant recipient?’

‘Only very briefly. Enough for me to form the impression that they’d been close, but weren’t any longer. Not that there’d been a rift, more that Gray had moved on. Or moved away – not just literally but emotionally, as if he needed to put distance between himself and whatever Joel represented.’

‘But you don’t know what that was – or why?’

She shook her head. I spread butter on a piece of warm bread, the nutty fragrance rising from it as the butter melted and soaked into the crumb.

‘There may have been something,’ she said, her head tilted to one side as if she was trying to dislodge a buried memory. ‘Something he said to me once – or didn’t say. It was connected to music, I think.’

‘Gray hated classical music.’

She smiled. ‘That and bananas. It’ll come to me, Laurel, and when it does I’ll let you know.’

After that, we talked about other things. Mostly, I just sat, basking in the comfort of that house as if I was a cat myself, until I started yawning hugely and realised that it was time for me to go home.

I was unchaining my bike from the railings when I heard voices approaching, one soothing, almost wheedling, the other raised in shrill anger. The voices themselves were familiar but the tones were so foreign it took me a moment to realise who they were – Anna and Lulu.

‘I’m not being unreasonable,’ Anna was saying. ‘Come on, darling. You know what you did was⁠—’

‘Literally the crime of the century, according to you,’ Lulu snapped back. ‘Because you never stayed too long at a friend’s place and you never lost track of time and you never ran out of charge on your… Oh wait, you didn’t even have mobile phones then. Which is why you just don’t get it.’

‘Lulu, come on. I was sixteen once. Okay, I didn’t have a mobile. But I had friends and parents and rules I did my best to break. And boyfriends. And if I⁠—’

‘God, why do you have to make everything about sex? For fuck’s sake, Mum. That’s just gross.’

‘I’m not making everything about sex. And don’t swear at me.’

‘What else am I supposed to do when you’re trying to ruin my life?’ Lulu’s voice was trembling now, at the pitch of emotion where anger was about to give way to tears. ‘I hate you. I wish Dad was here.’

I heard the sound of running feet and she appeared round the corner, her hair flying and her face already streaked with tears.

When she saw me she looked startled, then embarrassed, then muttered, ‘Hi, Laurel,’ before slotting her key into the door, bursting in and slamming it behind her.

There was no way to escape before Anna saw me. My stomach dropped – I’d been caught on her home turf, and I’d overheard her fighting with her daughter.

Anna approached number eight more slowly, almost wearily. She was looking down at the ground, and for a second I considered ignoring her and hoping she wouldn’t spot me after all. But that was cowardly and pathetic.

I stepped away from the railing, wheeling my bike like a barrier between us. ‘Good evening.’