Too Close For Comfort by Eleanor Moran Read Free Book Online

obviously I’m biased.’
    Helena shook her head, frustrated.
    ‘It’s not natural,’ she snapped.
    ‘I know . . . sorry, if that sounded crass, but . . .’
    ‘None of this is natural.’ She looked at me again, her eyes dark. ‘None of this is normal.’
    Her voice dropped as she said it, and I felt a shiver of unease that I couldn’t pin down. Lysette reared up in my mind – was this the ‘everything’ she was referring
to?
    ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, too quickly. ‘I certainly wasn’t saying that it’s normal for a young woman to kill herself . . .’
    ‘I don’t know when the questions will stop going round my head. Rex has got his hamster – he stinks, but he loves him – Mr Whiskers. He just goes round and round on his
stupid wheel, claws going, can’t stop.’
    She’d nudged slightly ahead, more sure of the winding path than I was, but now she turned to me and pulled an ugly hamster face, her features screwed up tight, her hands clenched like tiny
paws. I laughed, immediately warming to her.
    ‘What’s the one that tortures you the most?’ She didn’t reply. ‘How she could have wanted to do something like that?’
    Helena gave a little snort of a laugh that came through her nose.
    ‘I wish.’ It was an odd response. Her eyes darted towards me, then darted to the ground. The silence prickled and spat. ‘She was lovely, Sarah,’ she added.
    ‘I only met her once, but Lysette can’t stop saying how kind she was. How funny.’
    ‘Yeah. no. She had a sharp tongue on her.’ She saw my expression. ‘She was quick,’ she added, even though we both knew they were totally different things.
    I drew level with her, twigs snapping underfoot. We were going deeper into the green now, the light shaded out of the sky.
    ‘Do you think she was depressed?’
    ‘Stupid word, isn’t it?’ There was a cheeky sort of challenge in the way she said it, like a convent girl swearing in church. ‘We’re all depressed, aren’t we,
every day? If Rex says I’m the meanest mummy in the world in the morning I feel like shit, but then he hugs me goodbye at the gates and I feel amazing.’
    I wondered where her husband figured in her happiness ratio: there didn’t seem to be much mention of him. Was Rex her first, her last, her everything? I didn’t even know if she had a
job.
    ‘So she didn’t seem particularly down to you?’
    ‘She was all of it, Mia,’ she said, tone devoid of warmth. ‘Four seasons in one day, you know?’
    ‘Sort of,’ I said, deliberately leaving a gap in my understanding for her to fill.
    Helena paused, thinking. We took a few paces, going still deeper into the closely packed trees, the path more unruly, less distinct.
    ‘She worked in this café in Cambridge, just part-time, she was a supervisor. It’s really pretentious, you know. All olde worlde, full of tourists. There was a don from Trinity
who used to come in and behave like a total cock. Ordering the staff around like they were his slaves, and wanting his scones all neatly arranged with the jam on the side and his cream all whippy.
Used to leave shrapnel for a tip.’ Helena plunged down a path that took us still further into the density of green. ‘He came in with his wife and kids on his birthday, and laid into one
of the other girls about his tea being cold. Sarah iced you’re a  . . . you know, a C word – on his cake, and put it down in front of him with
candles, and everything. She was singing happy birthday at the top of her voice, making all the staff join in so the whole restaurant was looking over. She got the sack on the spot.’
    ‘Wow,’ I said, trying to imagine it. ‘Good for her, I suppose.’
    ‘Thing was, she was gutted. I mean – of course she’d get fired. But she was furious about how unfair it was.’
    ‘Why, because she’d been standing up for someone else?’
    ‘No,’ said Helena, looking at me, eyes troubled. ‘I think she thought she could get away with