Blink of an Eye (2013) by Cath Staincliffe Page B

complaining how they never got it right.
    The door opened and Cynthia Stiller came in. Shit! Her daughter and Naomi had been friends at high school. I wanted to run. To sink from view. I wasn’t ready to face people, brave the topic, accept expressions of sympathy or shock or anything else. But she couldn’t help but see me, and we always stopped to swap the latest news about the girls.
    I took a breath, tore my eyes away from the shopping list and turned to greet her. She looked away, studiously staring at the meat behind the glass, her face flushed pink.
    Unnerved, I dropped my list, then bent to pick it up, straightened as the woman in front of me left and I ordered my fillets. While the butcher weighed and bagged them, fetched my change, I could feel Cynthia there: her censure, her refusal to acknowledge my presence like a miasma heavy in the air, making my chest tight and my ears whine.
    Walking home, I felt hurt and indignant. She’d blanked me; that was the term the girls used when such situations were part of the currency of teenage feuds and alliances.
She blanked me, Mum.
    What would my mum’s generation call it? Sent to Coventry? Would I have done the same if our positions had been reversed? And how did Cynthia know? Naomi’s name hadn’t been in the newspaper. Who could have told her?
It could have been you
, I cursed her in my mind.
It could happen to anyone.
    Of course neighbourhoods like ours are interconnected; people talk to each other, share the gossip and the news. One of Alex and Naomi’s friends or someone Monica knows tells a friend, who tells her brother who mentions it to his wife, who tells the girls at work and soon the whole of south Manchester knows that the twenty-five-year-old driver in the Lily Vasey road death was actually Naomi Baxter.
    I told Phil when I got in and he shook his head. ‘Maybe she didn’t know what to say,’ he suggested. ‘She was embarrassed.’
    ‘
Sorry
would do,’ I said. ‘
Sorry to hear what happened
.’
    ‘Yeah, but you’ve done the training, love.’ He tried to lighten my mood.
    I swore at him in jest and began to cook, slicing garlic and ginger, spring onions, carrots and chicken for a stir fry.
    ‘I’m thinking of going into work tomorrow,’ Phil said. ‘Archie needs some time off.’
    ‘That’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll go in to visit in the afternoon and you can come with me in the evening.’ The last thing we wanted was for the business to go under on top of all our troubles. It had been a long haul – Phil’s life’s work really. In the mid nineties Rock Records was teetering on the brink of insolvency. When his dad, Ian, died after a miserable year fighting cancer, Phil inherited his estate. The house sold very quickly, and once the bills were paid there was just under forty thousand pounds left. A small fortune for us.
    At the same time the shop next door to Phil’s, called Dolly’s, which sold wool and haberdashery supplies, ceased trading and the property went up for sale.
    Phil was making more money from the musical instruments than from the records and CDs. It made sense to grow that side of the business. If he invested in buying Dolly’s, at least he’d have some capital, and if the business didn’t thrive, he could sell the property and rethink.
    Phil closed Rock Records at the end of August, having spent weeks supervising the alterations and improvements for next door, including a sign:
Baxter’s Music.
    I went with him to help with the move and for a last look around. The upstairs was no longer a flat but was used for storage. There were still things I remembered there, including the ancient red sofa, now only fit for a skip. And when we moved boxes away from the corner of the kitchen, I found one of Petey’s cartoons stuck to the wall: me and Phil in caricature, arms and legs entwined, seeing stars.
    Suddenly I was back in those days, giggling with Petey. He was never still. If he wasn’t tapping out percussion