Someday Find Me by Nicci Cloke Read Free Book Online Page A

the wall. It had been full-length, once, if you balanced it at the right angle and stood far enough back, but one night when we were drunk and silly and happy and kissing thekind of kisses you can’t stop, when you keep raining kisses like butterflies on each other until you can’t breathe any more, we’d stumbled into it and smashed it right in half. I had been frightened at the time that it was bad luck, that maybe we’d be cursed, but Fitz had said that if you didn’t look in the pieces you were all right. And so I’d sat on the end of the bed as he picked up each of the pieces, looking at the ceiling the whole time and humming, because he always did that when things were good or okay, and there was one piece left, almost a whole half, which wasn’t cracked, so we kept that.
    Looking at it then, alone and quiet, I’d wondered if we had been cursed all along. A draught blew in from the hall and I shivered, trying to shake the thought out. I turned away and went to the wardrobe. I ran the clothes hanging there between my fingers, denims and jumpers and soft dresses. When I looked down, my favourite lacy dress was in my hand. That happened sometimes; I’d told Fitz once that it must like going out, but secretly I wondered if sometimes I made it jump out of the wardrobe just by thinking it.
    I’d pulled the lovely, frothy loveliness of it over my head and wiggled it down. Kneeling back in front of the mirror, I drew on fat lines of black liner without really looking at my face. I stuffed my hair up into a kind of knot and stuck some pins in to hold it up, and then I fluffed at my fringe a bit until it started going static in my fingers and I had to stop. I bounced on the bed a few times, but it wasn’t fun with nobody there, and the creaking of the springs echoed around the room, so I flopped down and lay in a heap of duvet. My phone was hidden in a little coil of the smoky quilt and I picked it up and checked the time. Three thirty. Still two hours before I could go to Lilah’s because she was at work, and nothing left to do.
    I hadn’t wanted to go to Alice’s party all that much. I didn’t even like her really. She was always shouting and burping and talking about sex or shitting. She made me feel or seem shy,which I wasn’t. Always wearing leggings and tops that were too short, so that all you could look at was her crotch, which was perhaps the point. She wore her hair in a tight bun on the top of her head, held up with chopsticks, which made her face look huge. I could never say these things out loud because she was a good friend to Fitz and he loved her. She wanted to fill Hannah’s spot, to support him and care for him when he had suddenly had to become so many things to so many people. And, really, I wanted to be everything to him. And she was in the way.
    I’d sat up and fiddled around in the duvet some more until I found the packet of tobacco and papers. Then I sat on the edge of the mattress and rolled a cigarette in my lap. Alice threw parties all the time, like she was Father Christmas or Hugh Hefner, so this one wasn’t exactly special. But with the quiet house and all the time to wait, I felt full of a weird curling anticipation and baby butterflies started circling in my belly.
    I had sat out on the front step to smoke the cigarette. The concrete was cold on my feet, and rain was slowly colouring the steps dark. It was beautiful rain, the soft misty kind that hangs in the air and sits in your hair in tiny diamonds. I’d looked up at the pavement but there was nobody there, just the occasional swish-splash of a car driving past on the other side of the road. They only ever drove past on that side of the road, out of the city, and never on the other, never on the way in. Sometimes it seemed like the city must be getting empty, all the people leaving and nobody coming to take their place.
    I wondered what Fitz was up to at work. He’d be making up set-lists, probably, bent over an order pad on