Eggshell Days Read Free Page B

“Carriage C, Carriage C.” She could even remember the way his hand burrowed frantically in his inside jacket pocket for the tickets to prove his point. “All right, all right,” Sita had snapped. “We believe you.” But nobody believed it really, still didn’t.
    â€œMy God, we should be dead,” they kept saying to each other in the days that followed. “Why aren’t we dead?”
    And the only answer they could come up with back in London, as they’d watched repeated television footage of the mangled lump of metal dangling from the crane’s teeth, was that it hadn’t been their time.
    â€œIf it had been our time, would we have died happy?”
    It was that terrifying question which had started the whole ball rolling, from hermetically sealed sitting room to drafty manor kitchen in less than seventy days.
    Admittedly, it helped that they had all had such a stress-laden two months, during which time the ball had careered relentlessly through their lives, apparently hell-bent on collecting every possible reason for them all to seek pastures new.
    First, Niall’s flat had been burgled as he lay under his duvet playing with Kat. His CD player, his tape deck, his computer and his TV all yanked from their sockets, his credit cards, mobile phone and the keys to his motorbike gone for the third time in as many years. He’d been initially furious, and then, when he found a spattering of what looked like blood across his bathroom sink, frightened.
    Not as frightened as Sita had been when she witnessed a mugging at the end of their street, though. Three men, two of them standing over a third, kicking him. She, a doctor, had run for her life. For nights and nights afterward, she could not forget the clicking of her heels on the pavement, racing blindly for home in the dark, round the corner and up the steps to safety, knowing that she should have offered her help. Later, she read in the paper that the victim had died in the ambulance, of a punctured lung.
    Jonathan had lain awake next to her all those nights, too, taking deep, measured breaths and feigning sleep, too depressed to ask his wife why she was troubled, too obsessed with his boss’s newly cold shoulder and his secretary’s suspicious sick leave to take on anyone else’s pain. All he needed to ask was “Are you okay?” but they were three little words he couldn’t muster.
    Things could hardly have been worse between them but then Jay’s persistent truancy came to light, when they were in the grip of the worst bout of flu either of them had ever experienced, and they hardly had the energy to get down to the school to discuss it. In fact, for the first appointment, they didn’t.
    In the end, there was no contest. There was no point in hanging on to their sanity for dear life. Life was simply too dear. If Emmy was brave enough to give it a go, so were they.
    â€œIs it socially interesting that the women take an entirely different view from the men on this?” Niall asked now, taking an unlit cigarette from his mouth for the second time and dipping the tip in and out of the candle flame.
    Emmy didn’t know whether she couldn’t believe they were living under the same roof again—a leaky moss-lined slate roof with missing tiles, from which you could see the sea one way and green fields the other—or whether she had always known it would be so. It was just a shame Kat was such a wrench in the works.
    â€œWe don’t.”
    Niall raised his eyebrows. Both knew damn well he’d only asked the question to get an argument going.
    â€œWould ye come out of denial? Jonathan and I are totally fatalistic about it, whereas you and Sita keep going off on some great romantic journey about the what ifs.”
    â€œSita has never gone on a romantic journey in her life,” Jonathan said affectionately, “have you, darling?”
    â€œDon’t have time,”