The Piano Man Project (36 page)

Someone was banging on her head. They had to be, because it was loud and it hurt. Honey roused from her bed on the sofa, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes and groggy with the need for more sleep. She’d slumped down as soon as she’d walked through the door last night, not even bothering to take off her shoes. The fact that she was now barefoot and had a pillow and a blanket told her that Tash had stuck around long enough to see her off to sleep. The world needed more Tashes, unless of course she was the person banging on the front door, because whoever that was clearly had no respect.

‘Stop banging, I’m coming,’ she yelled, standing up and rubbing her hands through her hair in a vague attempt to straighten herself up. Not that it mattered, because she had no intention of going anywhere today, not unless she ran out of wine or the house burned down. Maybe not tomorrow either, or even the next day. Honey had officially shut up shop, pulled the shutters down on life and declared herself gone fishing. She was exhausted, and she couldn’t rely on her legs to hold her up or her brain to string a sentence together that didn’t include the word Hal.

‘Hal!’

Honey frowned. The hammering hadn’t stopped, but now she was finally awake she realised that it wasn’t her own door being assaulted, it was Hal’s, and from the sound of it the assailant was female.

‘I know you’re in there, Hal. Damien gave me your address.’

Honey inched along the hallway, drawn like a cobra from its wicker basket by a snake charmer.

‘Please, Hal. Open the door.’

Whoever was out there didn’t sound as if they were going to take no for an answer. They obviously hadn’t counted on Hal’s belligerent, stubborn-as-a-mule attitude. She cricked open her door, hoping to sneak a look at Hal’s visitor before they realised she was there.

Wow. They were good shoes. Honey started at the bottom and worked her way up, letting go of her shoe envy to take in the skinny hips in dark skinny jeans, and the slick, buttery leather jacket that clung to the woman’s slender body as if it had been peeled directly from a newborn calf and moulded around her. Gleaming, honey-blonde hair hung poker straight to her shoulder blades, swishing violently as she rapped her knuckles on the door yet again.

‘For God’s sake, Hal,’ she called out. ‘I know you can hear me. Half the street probably can.’

‘He won’t answer it,’ Honey said, surprising herself as much as Hal’s visitor.

The stranger swung around, and for a couple of seconds the two women took each other in. As glossy from the front as she’d been from the back, everything about her screamed money. She looked like a woman made to sip champagne on the deck of a footballer’s yacht, utterly out of place in Honey’s hallway.

The cool look in her grey eyes seemed to assess Honey, and then recognition dawned.

‘Aren’t you that woman from the TV yesterday?’

Honey shrugged.

‘Hal won’t answer his door. He never does.’

‘Maybe not to you,’ the woman said, folding her arms over her small-but-perfectly-formed chest. ‘But he will for me. He’s probably sleeping.’

‘Or drunk,’ Honey muttered.

The woman narrowed her eyes.

‘Don’t you have a key to his door?’ she said, and then added, ‘for emergencies or anything?’ to unnecessarily reinforce the fact that she wouldn’t expect Honey to have a key for any other reason.

Honey shook her head. ‘Don’t you?’ she snapped back, sure by now that this must be Imogen. The brief flicker of uncertainty in Imogen’s eyes didn’t make Honey feel as contrite as it might have done on a more normal kind of day.

‘I can tell him you came by if you like,’ Honey said, leaning on the doorframe and mirroring Imogen’s cross-armed pose.

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Honey lifted one shoulder, going for disinterested even though the woman in front of her had come to take Hal away. She flicked a glance at his door, wondering what was going on on the other side of it. If she knew Hal at all, he’d be passed out from too much whisky after fleeing the home last night. For once, she was glad to see his door stay closed.

‘Then you’re in for a long wait,’ Honey said, and stepped back to close her door.

‘Wait.’

Against her better judgment, Honey didn’t close the door. She was tired and ratty, but she couldn’t bring herself to be downright rude. She lifted her eyes to Imogen’s and waited for her to speak again.

‘I sent him a letter,’ she said, the uncertainty Honey had glimpsed in her eyes now apparent in her voice too. ‘Do you know if he got it?’

Honey wished she’d closed the door. She wasn’t sure she had the strength for this conversation.

‘He got it.’ She swallowed, a painful sound in the quiet lobby.

Imogen nodded.

‘How’s he been?’

Annoyance flashed hot in Honey’s brain. She had no right, not after months of not caring.

‘Up and down. He gets lonely.’

She didn’t feel any thrill of victory at Imogen’s troubled expression, and she certainly hadn’t counted on the girl bursting into tears.

‘Shit,’ Honey muttered, and pulled out some scrunched-up tissues from her dressing gown pocket and handed them over.

As Imogen patted her cheeks, Honey noted the lack of mascara streaks and silently envied her smart waterproof choice.

‘He shouldn’t be stuck here in this hole,’ Imogen gulped, and Honey suddenly lost all sympathy again. ‘Do you know who he really is? I suppose you must after yesterday.’

Honey nodded.

‘I know who he is.’

Imogen shook her head. ‘He was a different man before the accident,’ she said. ‘Smart. Sexy. The talk of the town. Wow, was he going places.’ She ripped the tissue to pieces as she remembered, dropping tiny shreds like wedding confetti on the floor. Honey glanced down and tried not to let her knees crumble at the sight of the huge rock glinting on Imogen’s left hand.

‘You should have seen him in the kitchen, he was a wizard,’ Imogen sniffed. ‘He was always the coolest guy in town.’

Honey could feel her temper running through her fingers like sand through an egg-timer.

‘He caught the bus with me yesterday,’ she said, limbering up.

Imogen yelped as if she’d been nudged in the ribs with a poker. ‘Hal caught the bus? As in the public bus?’

Honey nodded.

‘And he’s still a wizard in the kitchen. He’s been running the kitchen in the residential home for a while now. The residents can’t get enough of his shepherd’s pie.’

Imogen’s fingers flew to the necklace around her neck, and the tilt of her chin warned Honey that her opponent had realised that she was being needled.

‘I’m sure you’ve all been very sweet to him,’ Imogen said, smiling her princess smile. ‘And we all really appreciate it, but he needs to come home now and pick up his life again.’

Honey didn’t doubt that he would, but she wouldn’t give this woman the satisfaction of the upper hand.

‘He’s smart. Just about the smartest man I’ve ever met,’ she said quietly. ‘And the sexiest, too. Still the coolest guy in town. Just not your town anymore.’

‘You didn’t know him beforehand,’ Imogen said, pulling rank.

‘And you don’t know him now.’

They faced each other down, one immaculate, the other bedraggled with dark circles around her eyes.

‘I love him. I love him for the man he is right now,’ Honey said. There was little to lose, and nothing to gain, but she said it anyway and saw the fury harden Imogen’s pretty features.

‘He’s marrying me.’

‘I know.’

‘He could never love someone like you,’ Imogen spat, rattled by Honey’s honesty.

‘I know that too.’

Imogen shook her head, as if she were disgusted. She had every reason to be. The man she’d pinned all of her hopes on had fallen down a mountain and taken all of her dreams down with him, and now a ratty-haired blonde had the nerve to make her feel bad for wanting to resurrect them.

‘I’ll tell him you came by,’ Honey said a second time, and this time Imogen stalked out of the lobby on her fabulous heels without looking back, leaving only the trail of her perfume and a bad taste in Honey’s mouth.

Had Hal heard them? Honey ran a bath and immersed herself beneath the water, wishing she could stay under there forever. Just wallow forever in the warm, peaceful solitude. Life had been a waltzer ride lately, and there under the bubbles it finally stopped spinning. No campaign. No love rivals. No blind dates. And no Hal. In the absence of a desert island, her own bathtub would have to do.

As the morning slid into afternoon, Honey replied to texts from Nell and Tash to stop them from racing into the breach with wine and shoulders to lean on. Oddly enough, she didn’t need any shoulders today. What she really needed was to stand on her own two feet and prove to herself, more than anyone else, that she could cut it at life as a grown up. She was proud of the way she’d handled Imogen, and she was beyond proud of the way things had turned out where the campaign was concerned.

Lots of people had tried to give her advice yesterday about Hal, and actually they’d all said the same thing in a different way.
Tell him
. Make damn sure he knows that you love him before he walks away. And they were right. Honey didn’t want to be a passive voice waiting for him to cast judgment. She had a part in this play, although it probably wasn’t going to be leading lady.

Squaring her shoulders, she opened her door and crossed the lobby.

‘Hal,’ she whispered, tapping her knuckles on his door. It didn’t surprise her when he didn’t respond.

‘Hal,’ she said again, louder this time. ‘There’s something I need to say to you, and this time I’m not prepared to say it to your closed door.’

Pin drop silence, and Honey felt her serenity start to slip.

‘Open the door, Hal. I mean it.’

Nothing. She waited a full minute, counting in her head to keep her nerves steady.

‘Jesus, Hal, you infuriate me! Open the goddamn door!’

Okay, so her serenity had left the building. After another couple of failed attempts, panic started to edge its way under her skin. Even in the early days he’d rarely ignored her so blatantly. He’d sworn, called her names, even thrown things at the door on occasion, but at least she’d known he was okay. Not knowing he was okay wasn’t okay.

‘Don’t make me break this door down,’ Honey called out loudly, expecting him to laugh at the idea. She hadn’t been able to turn off a smoke alarm the first time they’d met; the chances of her breaking down his door were slim to none. Given the fact that she knew that, she ought to have known better than to take a run at it from her own doorway anyway. All she ended up with for her trouble was a jarred shoulder, a still-closed door and a growing case of full-on panic.

‘Hal!’ she shouted, battering on his door with her fists. Christ. He had to be hurt, she was yelling loud enough to wake the dead. She opened the door and walked out onto the pavement barefoot, pressing her face against his front windows with her heart in her mouth. His wooden blinds were half open, and squinting, she could make out the clinically tidy room. She let out her breath and leaned her back against the window for support, winded by the relief of not seeing him sprawled on the floor. Turning back to look again, she watched the empty space for a few minutes.

‘Come on, Hal,’ she whispered. ‘Walk in with bed hair and whisky in your hand. Walk in, scowling. Just please God, walk in.’

The possibility that he’d fallen and banged his head in the bathroom or asphyxiated himself in bed tortured her. Should she call the police to break in? Would they even bother to look for a grown man who’d been seen less than twenty-four hours previously? She made her way around the back and shouldered the scarcely used side gate open with a hard shove, more frightened than she’d ever been in her life.

His bedroom blind was unhelpfully drawn and his bathroom window was opaque, but his backdoor handle turned freely in her hand.

It wasn’t locked.

‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ she whispered, stepping inside, as terrified as the heroine in a horror movie even though it was broad daylight and she knew better than to make the schoolgirl error of running up the stairs. Scanning the lounge and kitchen quickly, she confirmed what she already knew. They were empty. Returning to the hallway, she looked at the bedroom and bathroom doors, both of them closed.

Placing her clammy hand over the bedroom door handle, she turned it slowly, and then at the last moment threw it open and almost jumped inside in her haste to speed up the agony.

Empty.

Honey almost doubled over with relief, gasping, able to put away the horrific images she’d conjured of him lying ghost pale on the bed.

And then she remembered the bathroom.

Stepping back into the hallway, she stood still outside the final door.

‘Please don’t let him be in here,’ she said out loud. ‘Please no.’

She turned the handle and pushed the door slowly, all the time expecting resistance from his body on the floor in the small room. It swung easily, all the way back. Only when she was one hundred per cent certain that he wasn’t in there did she let the air back into her lungs and the tears rain down her face.

She’d spent the last half an hour terrified that she’d find him, and now she at least knew he wasn’t dead, she was even more terrified that she wouldn’t.

A silver people carrier pulled up outside the home a couple of mornings later and a dark-haired care worker wheeled her charge into the building.

‘Could I possibly speak with Lucille and Mimi please?’ the man in the wheelchair asked the care worker walking through reception.

Nikki smiled. ‘Of course. Who can I tell them is calling?’

The man straightened his shoulders.

‘Please tell them it’s their brother.’

And so it was that Mimi, Lucille and Ernie sat down together for the first time in their lives that morning and shared a pot of tea.

Mimi found herself stripped of any lingering anger or reticence by the kind, frail man who so resembled her, and when he held both of their hands in his trembling ones and his tired eyelids drifted down midway through their conversation, she held on to him until he woke again and apologised for his terrible manners.