The Girl You Left Behind

father. Caroline has left
     me. I am bereft. I have decided to have nothing more to do with women. Call me if
     you can spare the time.
Hi Liv
    Everything okay for Thursday? The kids
     are really looking forward to it. We’re looking at around 20 at the moment,
     but as you know this figure is always fluid. Let me know if you need anything.
    Best regards
    Abiola
Dear Ms Halston
    We’ve tried several times to
     reach you by phone without success. Please could you contact us to arrange a time
     whereby we can discuss your overdraft situation. If you fail to make contact we will
     have to impose additional charges.
    Please can you also ensure that we have
     your up-to-date contact details.
    Yours sincerely
    Damian Watts,
    Personal accounts manager, NatWest
     Bank
    She types a response to the first.
Dear Mr Blank. I would love to drop my
     prices to accommodate you. Unfortunately my biological make-up means I also have to
     eat. Good luck with your brochure.
    She knows there will be somebody out there
     who will do it more cheaply, someone who doesn’t care too much about grammar or
     punctuation, and will not notice that the brochure copy contains ‘their’ for
     ‘there’ twenty-two times. But she is tired of having her already meagre
     rates pushed down further.
Dad, I will call round later. If
     Caroline happens to have returned between now and then, please make sure you are
     dressed. Mrs Patel said you were watering the Japanese anemones naked again last
     week and you know what the police said about that.
    Liv x
    The last time she had arrived to comfort her
     father after one of Caroline’s disappearances, he had opened the door wearing a
     woman’s Oriental silk robe, gaping at the front, and wrapped her in an expansive
     hug before she could protest. ‘I’m your father, for goodness’
     sake,’ he would mutter, when she scolded him afterwards. Although he hadn’t
     had a decent acting job in almost a decade, Michael Worthing had never lost his
     childlike lack of inhibition, or his irritation with what he called
     ‘wrappings’. In childhood she had stopped bringing friends home after
     Samantha Howcroft had gone home and told her mother that Mr Worthing walked around
     ‘with all his bits swinging’. (She had also told everyone at school that
     Liv’s dad had a willy like a giant sausage. Her father had seemed oddly untroubled
     by that one.)
    Caroline, his flame-haired girlfriend of
     almost fifteen years, was untroubled by his nakedness. In fact, she was quite happy to
     walk around semi-naked herself. Livsometimes thought she was more
     familiar with the sight of those two pale, pendulous old bodies than she was with her
     own.
    Caroline was his great passion, and would
     walk out in a giant strop every couple of months, citing his impossibility, his lack of
     earnings, and his brief, fervent affairs with other women. What they saw in him, Liv
     could never quite imagine.
    ‘Lust for life, my darling!’ he
     would exclaim. ‘Passion! If you have none you’re a dead thing.’ Liv,
     she suspects privately, is something of a disappointment to her father.
    She swigs the last of her coffee, and pens
     an email to Abiola.
Hi Abiola
    I’ll meet you outside the Conaghy
     building at 2 p.m. All cleared this end. They are a little nervous but definitely up
     for it. Hope all good with you.
    Regards
    Liv
    She sends it then stares at the one from her
     bank manager. Her fingers stall on the keyboard. Then she reaches across and presses
delete
.
    She knows, with some sensible part of her,
     that this cannot continue. She hears the distant, threatening clamour of the neatly
     folded final demands in their envelopes, like the drumbeat of an invading army. At some
     point she will no longer be able to contain them, to fob them off, to slide, unnoticed,
     away from them. She lives like a church mouse, buys little, socializes rarely, and still
     it isnot enough. Her cash cards and credit cards are prone to spit
     themselves back at her from cashpoints. The council had arrived at her door last year,
     part of a local reassessment of council taxpayers. The woman had walked around the Glass
     House, then had looked at Liv as if she had somehow tried to cheat them of something. As
     if it were an insult that she, a virtual girl, lived in this house alone. Liv could
     barely blame her: since David’s death she has felt a fraud living here.
     She’s like a curator, protecting David’s memory, keeping the