She didn’t intend to spend much time in her new home and there was no fridge or cooker, but in the small supermarket a few hundred yards up the road she bought ground coffee, tea bags, a small carton of milk, a box of matches and a bag of tea-lights.
Laden now, she carried everything back to the flat and laid it out on the table. She took a bottle of whisky from the holdall and put it out as well. She had brought very little with her – just a few basic clothes, a book of academic essays about psychotherapeutic practice and an anthology of poetry, toiletries, a drawing pad and some soft-leaded pencils.
She filled the kettle with water that spat unevenly from the tap and plugged it into one of the sockets. Once she had made herself a mug of tea, she sat on the sofa, avoiding the suspicious stain at one end, and looked around her. The sun shone through the dirty window, and lay in blades across the bare floor. So this was freedom, she thought; she had cut all her ties and cast herself off.
Fifteen minutes later, back on the high street, she went into what was labelled a ‘camping’ shop: row upon row of extraordinarily cheap tents, wellington boots, 99-pence T-shirts, footballs, children’s fishing nets, zip-up fleeces and waterproof jackets. She found what she was looking for in the dimly lit back of the shop – a sleeping bag for ten pounds.
She had seen the Primark when she came out of the Underground station. She had never been into one before, although Chloë used to buy half her wardrobe there, triumphantly flourishing her haul of sandals and leggings and stretchy dresses that barely covered her backside. She entered the shop now, blinking in the fluorescent dazzle that made everything seem like an over-lit stage set, and was momentarily startled by the overwhelming abundance of things – shelves and racks and bins of clothes. A mirror blocked her way and she stopped to look at herself. A woman in austere clothes, pale face bare of make-up, hair pulled severely back: she wouldn’t do at all.
Half an hour later she left with a red skirt, a flowery dress, patterned leggings, a natty striped blazer, flip-flops with a little flower between the toes, three T-shirts in bright colours, two of which had logos on them that she didn’t even bother to read, and a shoulder bag with studs and tassels. She didn’t like any of the clothes and she particularly hated the bag, but perhaps that was the point: they were clothes that represented a self she was not, a role that she must step into.
There was still one more thing she had to do.
‘How do you want it?’
‘Short.’
‘How short? A bob, perhaps? With a choppy fringe?’
‘No. Just short.’ She glanced around her and pointed a finger at a picture. ‘Like that, perhaps.’
‘The urchin look?’
‘Whatever.’
The girl standing at her shoulder examined her critically in the big mirror. Frieda hated sitting in hairdressers, in the bright lights, seeing the endless duplications of her face. She lay back, her neck on the dented rim of the sink, and closed her eyes. Tepid water sluiced over her hair and trickled down her neck. The girl’s fingers were on her scalp, too intimate. Frieda could smell the tobacco smoke on her, and the sweet perfume overlying that. When she sat up again, she kept her eyes closed. She felt the blades of the scissors snickering their way through her hair and cold against her neck, and imagined the locks lying in damp clumps on the floor. She had not had short hair since she was a young girl, and rarely had it professionally cut – Sasha or Chloë or Olivia just trimmed it every so often. She thought of them now, each in their separate lives. Everything seemed very far away: the world on the other side of the river, the streets she walked at night, her little house in the mews, her red armchair in the consulting room, her old and known self.
She opened her eyes and a woman stared back at her. Short dark hair whose tiny tendrils framed a face that seemed thinner and perhaps younger; large dark eyes. Strained, alert, unfamiliar. Herself and not herself; Frieda who was no longer Frieda. As she left the salon and stepped out onto the unknown street, she took the thickly framed spectacles she had bought from her bag and put them on. They were plain glass, yet the world looked quite different to her.
She walked over the road to a mini-supermarket. In the stationery section she found a small notebook with a picture of a horse on the cover and a small box of pens. She bought them and walked further along the road, past a betting shop and a showroom with second-hand office furniture. On the corner was a shop with a large, bright orange sign: ‘Shabba Travel Ltd. Cheap Tickets Worldwide. Money Transfer. Internet Café’. Taped to the window was a printout of the current conversion rate for the taka. She stepped inside. Frieda hadn’t realized that travel agents still existed, but it didn’t look like any travel agent she remembered. There were no posters on the walls, no brochures. And it didn’t look like a café either. There was an array of tables, each with its own computer terminal. On the left side of the room there was a laminated counter behind which was a wall of box files and a man talking on the phone. He was sweating, even though the day was cool, and his blue T-shirt was tight on him, as if it were two sizes too small. When he noticed Frieda, he looked at her suspiciously.
‘Can I use one of these?’ she said.
‘It’s fifty p for fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘One twenty for an hour.’
She put two coins onto the counter. ‘Which one do I use?’
He just waved vaguely at the room and continued talking. Only one table was occupied. Two young men were sitting at one of the terminals, one of them tapping at a keyboard, the other leaning across him, offering him loud advice. She sat at a terminal at the back, and turned the screen so that it faced away from everyone except her. She went straight to Google and typed in her own name. She looked down the list that appeared and felt a sudden tremor. The first item she saw was ‘Frieda Klein obituary’. It didn’t seem like a good omen. She clicked on a link that really did refer to her and saw the familiar photograph of her that the newspapers had used before:
COP DOC LINKED TO MURDER
INVESTIGATION GOES ON THE RUN
POLICE APPEAL FOR WITNESSES AS
FRIEDA KLEIN GOES ON RUN
Frieda had hoped that a psychotherapist failing to appear for a police interview might be a fairly minor news story, but she was wrong. The story appeared on site after site, always with the same photograph. One link was to a local TV news report. She clicked through and saw a blonde female newscaster mentioning her name. As she felt around the edge of the terminal to lower the volume, she suddenly caught her breath. The newscaster cut to DCI Hussein standing on the pavement at the entrance to the police station. Frieda’s photograph appeared once more and a number for members of the public to call. Then the report changed to footage of a royal visit to a London primary school. Frieda just stared for a few seconds at a group of very small children performing a folk dance in their playground. She got up.
‘You need to switch it off.’
‘What?’
She looked around. The man had finished his phone call and was leaning on the counter. Frieda switched the terminal off.
‘There’s no refunds,’ he said.
Frieda walked out onto the pavement. Which way should she go? Since it didn’t matter at all, she found it strangely hard to decide. She turned right and walked along the road, then right again along a residential street until she came to a small park. At one end was a children’s playground, but the rest was just rhododendron bushes and grass. She went and sat on a bench away from the playground. For a time she found it difficult to organize her thoughts. They felt more like images from a dream than anything coherent. She closed her eyes and saw Sandy, as in a montage, in fragments. Sandy with his slow smile, Sandy lying in bed and watching her while she dressed, driving in the car with her beside him, that last awful walk down to the Thames when she had broken with him. And then the way he had been after, stuck in his anger and distress. Suddenly she felt an urge to hand herself in. It would take only a phone call. Let someone else deal with all of this.