Offcomer by Jo Baker Read Free Book Online Page B

didn’t work. Perhaps that was half-past two on a sunny afternoon in nineteen-fifty-three when the clock had seized up, stopped for good, and no one had glanced up there for years to tell the time. Perhaps it was half-past two on an entirely different night, years ago, in winter, when the frost had bitten into its workings and frozen the hands in place. Claire glanced around her, shivered.
    She couldn’t go to Conroys. Not now.
    A side street opened off to the left. She turned down it.
    The street was darker than the main road. It was lined with thick-trunked lime trees. She got a vague impression of red brick, bay windows, hedges. The street ended, and without much consideration, she turned left.
    Side streets opened off the new road. She glanced down them vaguely as she passed. A sense of exhaustion came down over her, overwhelming her. The night’s long work, the din and press of the bar. By now it all seemed like weeks ago, because of afterwards. She paused at a junction. Neat little Victorian terraces snaking downhill. Downhill, towards theriver. They had crossed the river earlier, in the taxi. She had seen the water rippling underneath the bridge, reflecting back the city lights. Stranmillis, and Grainne’s house, were on the far bank. She had her door key in her pocket. If she got back to Grainne’s house, at least she could take off her shoes, bathe her cut, go to bed. Grainne would not be back till Sunday. Breathing space, at least. She could at least lie down and close her eyes. She turned down the narrower street.
    It sloped gently downhill. The houses clung to the pavement, no gardens between her and the front walls, the dark windows. She heard her footsteps echoing down the street. She knew the echo was her own, but the possibility of someone following, or waiting up ahead, crept out of a corner of her mind. She pushed it aside.
    The close-set terraces ended abruptly. The houses were now concrete and clapboard and cold. They were silent, no windows lit. Above her, the lamp-posts were linked with bunting, their pennants hanging dead and heavy in the still air. And underneath her feet, the kerbstones were painted three different shades of grey. Marking out territory.
    She slowed down, stopped. Sodium streetlamps and the moon bleached out all distinction. She could pick out no images, no letters that would force the faded bunting and paint to blossom into colour. And around her, in batteries of little rooms, tracing the length of unknown streets, she knew that people were sleeping. The flickering translucent eyelids of the elderly, children stacked in bunkbeds, discrete dark heads of couples on paired pillows: a community in sleep. And she was there awake in the middle of them all, washed up on their pavement, alone.
    Maybe not alone. The echo had stopped with the terraces,but the idea of being caught there, where she should have known not to be, still lingered. She had to get out onto unpainted, unpennanted streets before she was spotted. She set off again at a shambling, uneven trot, shoulders hunched and arms wrapped around her.
    The street ended, butted on three sides by low blocks of flats. A grass forecourt and a stocky flowering cherry tree, a few clusters of blossom hanging half-rotten. Dark alleyways between the buildings. She slowed, stopped. She was lost. She cast around her. She wasn’t sure of the way she had come, couldn’t remember the turns and loops and half-guesses that had ended her up there. The squat blocks loomed up above her. Windowpanes reflected back the night. A clot of cherry blossom broke up into platelets and drifted onto the grass. She breathed in, stepped into the darkness of an alley.
    Eyes straining to define the edges and content of the deeper dark: no movement. Above her, the sky a narrow strip, starless. Beneath her feet, flat paving stones. She ran her fingers along the roughcast wall. Vague light-edged forms, as she approached, gradually resolved themselves into council