Back to life

Is the passion of the lecture theatre still there after 30 years?

One minute you’re sitting in the office wondering whether to have fish fingers for tea, the next you’re standing on a street in Bath, peering across the road at his shop.

This is how it started. A lecture theatre in the late 1980s. Perms and scarves. Leggings. A man in a brown jacket standing by a projector, boring you silly. And then you looked down, past heads, and there he was. A sharp nose, aquiline. A sharp haircut to match. Your eyes bored into the back of his skull. Be mine. Be mine.

Thirty years later and you’re at work. Bored. Tapping away. Pretending to be doing something oh-so-important.

Your body is seizing up from inactivity – your mind too. So you Google him and up he pops. He’s been there all along and you never knew it.

Or maybe you did. Maybe you kept him like a lucky charm in your pocket. Maybe you knew that one day you would meet again. And he would be yours.

He stuffs dead things for a living. You snort when you think about how he’ll be drawn to you – you’re a dead thing, aren’t you? Maybe he’ll stuff you. A double entendre.

How did he get from majoring in French to taxidermy? Still, it’s no surprise. Others’ lives have had peaks and troughs after all. There have been other lovers, jobs, other countries. Children. Mortgages. Life. It’s only yours that flatlined.

The wind sends your skirt whirling up as if you were a 50-something Marilyn Monroe. You snort again. No one has ever described you as a sex bomb. No one has ever tried to seduce you.

Except Him. He, the big man, must have wanted you, for you were drawn to him. While others took up high-flying careers, drugs or with friends’ partners, you took your vow of celibacy. He was all you needed.

Until a year ago. Your parents died and it was safe to leave the convent. Safe to go out into the world and not worry that they’d be there, telling you how useless, hopeless, unworthy of love you were.

The wind whips a crisp bag into the air and you watch it whirling on the current, higher and higher. They won’t be waiting for you up there. Not because you think they’ve gone to Hell, but because you know they haven’t gone anywhere. There is no anywhere.

You realised that a long time ago.

You wiggle your foot in your shoe. You have on high heels. Well, high for you, anyway. Two and a half inches. They’ve pinched and rubbed and chafed since you put them on. You slip your left foot from the shoe and pull at the back of your tights. They’re stuck to the skin on your heel, matted with blood.

The shop door opens and a teenager lumbers out, sleeves of a hoodie rolled up, a cap pulled down. His son? You haven’t been able to find out anything about his private life.

You’d slammed your hand on the desk when you realised the world wide web, that giver of all knowledge, was suddenly holding out on you. Your colleagues had looked up, smirked at each other.

He’ll have a wife. Of course he’ll have a wife.

She’ll have a name like Imogen or

Chloe or Amber. She’ll be all lipstick and powder, a pinched-in waist, sleek, bobbed hair. She’ll have her own business, a cleaner and a penchant for champagne.

She’ll be so busy that she won’t be able to look after him properly. Oh, you know it’s an old-fashioned view, but there won’t be a hot meal on the table when he gets home and she most certainly won’t iron his shirts.

And not only will she not ask him how his day went – she won’t even care how it did. This is where you have the upper hand. You have nothing to do. Nothing at all. You’ve given up your mind-numbing job, you’ve sold your parents’ house. Got rid of everything.

Even their beloved cat.

And so now here you are on a street in Bath. Looking at his shop. You wonder if his hair has thinned, if his waist has thickened. If he has lines where once smooth skin covered his cheekbones. If his nose has the same spidery veins that criss-cross yours.

You reach into your pocket and draw out your father’s hip flask. It’s the only thing you took. You uncap it and put it to your lips, gulping at the whisky, enjoying

the fieriness of it in your mouth, your belly, your head.

The blast of a horn makes you jump as you step into the street. You snort again. Imagine that. Imagine if you’d been knocked over. Here. When you were – what? – 30ft away from him. You look up. If there were a God, he’d be laughing at that. You push open the door. The bell lets out an old-fashioned tinkle.

The stench takes your breath away. Dead things. Feathers. Something chemical, sharp.

And, over it all, a lavender air freshener, thick and cloying.

There’s a cough and the swish of a curtain at the back of the room. And there he is. He looks exactly the same as he did 30 years ago. He peers at you over half-moon glasses. “Do you have an appointment, Mrs…?”

You shake your head and step closer to him. There will be the raising of an eyebrow, the smile as he realises it’s you. You.

After all these years.

“What a coincidence,” he’ll say. “Fancy. After all this time.”

You’ll agree. “Of all the taxidermists in all the world…”

But there’s not a flicker of recognition. No matter. It will come. It will come. He smiles at you. “How can I help?”

You put your holdall on the counter and lift out your parents’ stiff-as-a-board cat.

“I hear you’re good at bringing things back to life,” you say, as he stares at you, the smile not so much slipping as running from his face.

Your eyes bored into the back of his skull. Be mine…

BY MANDY BYATT (AVON, £8.99) IS OUT NOW