She got closer to the station, passing the garish red-and-yellow zigzags of La Cantina, like a Mexican migraine, with a waiter inside taking chairs off tables. And String eory too, closed, with a handwritten notice on the door:
Alas, String eory is no longer able to trade in these premises. Due to an increase in rent we simply couldn’t afford to go on. anks to all our loyal customers. Don’t ink Twice, It’s All Right. You Can Go Your Own Way. God Only Knows What We’ll Be Without You.
It was the exact same note she had seen with Dylan. Judging by the date, written in small felt-tip letters from Neil’s hand, it was from nearly three months ago.
She felt sad, because String eory had meant a lot to people. Yet Nora hadn’t been working at String eory when it got into trouble.
Well. I suppose I did sell a lot of electric pianos. And some rather nice guitars too.
Growing up, she and Joe had always joked about their hometown, the way teenagers do, and used to say that HMP Bedford was the inner prison and the rest of the town was just the outer prison, and any chance you had to escape you should take it.
But the sun was out now, as she neared the station, and it seemed that she had been looking at the place wrong all these years. As she passed the statue of prison reformer John Howard in St Paul’s Square, with the trees all
around and the river just behind, refracting light, she marvelled at it as if she were seeing it for the first time. It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
Driving back to Cambridge cocooned in her expensive Audi, smelling almost nauseatingly of vinyl and plastic and other synthetic materials, weaving through busy traffic, the cars sliding by like forgotten lives, she was deeply wishing she had been able to see Mrs Elm, the real one, before she had died. It would have been good to have one last game of chess with her before she passed away. And she thought of poor Leo, sat in a small windowless cell at a Bedford police station, waiting for Doreen to come and collect him.
‘is is the best life,’ she told herself, a little desperately now. ‘is is the best life. I am staying here. is is the life for me. is is the best life. is is the best life.’
But she knew she didn’t have long.
