Page 237 - The Midnight Library

www.urdukutabkhanapk.blogspot.com
www.urdukutabkhanapk.blogspot.com

An Incident With the Police

She stepped back out onto Shakespeare Road with her bag and her chess set

and she really didn’t know what to do. ere were tingles through her body.
Not quite pins and needles. More that strange, fuzzy static feeling she had
felt before when she was nearing the end of a particular existence.
Tr ying to ignore the feeling in her body, she headed in the vague direction
of the car park. She passed her old garden flat at 33A Bancro Avenue. A

man she had never seen before was taking a box of recycling out. She
thought of the lovely house in Cambridge she now had and couldn’t help but
compare it to this shabby flat on a litter-strewn street . e tingles subsided a

little. She passed Mr Banerjee’s house, or what had been Mr Banerjee’s
house, and saw the only owned house on the street that hadn’t been divided
into flats, though now it looked ver y different. e small front lawn was
overgrown, and there was no sign of the clematis or busy lizzies in pots that
Nora had watered for him last summer when he’d been recovering from his

hip surger y.
On the pavement she noticed a couple of crumpled lager cans.
She saw a woman with a blonde bob and tanned skin walking towards her

on the pavement with two small children in a double pushchair. She looked
exhausted. It was the woman she had spoken to in the newsagent’s the day
she had decided to die. e one who had seemed happy and relaxed. Kerr y-
Anne. She hadn’t noticed Nora because one child was wailing and she was
tr ying to pacify the distressed, red-cheeked boy by waving a plastic dinosaur

in front of him.
Me and Jake were like rabbits but we got there. Two little ter rors. But worth
it, y’know? I just feel complete. I could show you some pictures . . .