Waiting for Wednesday

now she was towing a tiny
boy by the hand. At her heels stomped a slightly older girl, stocky like her. Even
though she was wearing a pink nightgown, and pushing a toy buggy in which a doll was
swaddled, she reminded Karlsson of Yvette.
    Louise Weller gave him a brisk nod.
‘Families should rally round,’ she said and, like a general leading a
reluctant army, she marched her children into the house.



THREE
    At twenty-five past three in the morning,
when it was no longer night but not yet day, Frieda Klein woke up. Her heart was racing
and her mouth was dry, her forehead beaded with sweat. It was hard to swallow or even to
breathe. Everything hurt: her legs, her shoulder, her ribs, her face. Old bruises
flowered and throbbed. For a few moments she did not open her eyes, and when she did,
the darkness pressed down on her and spread out in all directions. She turned her head
towards the window. Waiting for Wednesday to end, for the light to come and the dreams
to fade.
    The waves came, one after another, each
worse than the one before, rising up and crashing over her, pulling her under, then
spitting her out ready for the next. They were inside her, thrashing through her body
and her mind, and they were outside. As she lay there, greyly awake, memories mixed with
fading dreams. Faces gleamed in the darkness, hands reached out to her. Frieda tried to
hold on to what Sandy had said, night after night, and to haul herself out of the tumult
that had invaded her:
It’s over. You’re safe. I’m here
.
    She stretched her hand out to where he
should have been lying. But he had gone back to America. She had accompanied him to the
airport, dry-eyed and apparently composed even when he gathered her to him with anguish
on his face to say goodbye; had watched him go through into Departures until his tall
figure was no longer visible; had never told him how close she had come to asking him to
stay, or agreeing to go with him. The intimacy of their last fewweeks,
when she had let herself be cared for and felt her own weakness, had stirred up feelings
in her that she had never before experienced. It would be too easy to let them sink back
into the depths. It wasn’t the pain of missing that she dreaded but the gradual
easing of that pain, busy life filling up the spaces he had left. Sometimes she would
sit in her garret-study and sketch his face with a soft-leaded pencil, making herself
remember the exact shape of his mouth; the little grooves that time had worn into his
skin; the expression in his eyes. Then she would lay down the pencil and let the memory
of him wash through her, a slow, deep river inside her.
    For a moment, she let herself imagine him
beside her – how it would feel to turn her head and see him there. But he was gone, and
she was alone in a house that had once felt like a cosy refuge yet, for the last few
weeks – since the attack that had nearly killed her – had creaked and whispered. She
listened: the pulse of her heart and then, yes, there was a rustle by her door, a faint
sound. But it was only the cat, prowling the room. Sometimes, in this pre-dawn limbo,
Frieda found it a sinister creature – its two previous owners were dead.
    Had something woken her? She had a muffled
sense of a sound entering her sleep. Not the distant rumble of traffic that in London
never ceases. Something else. Inside the house.
    Frieda sat up and listened but heard nothing
except the soft wind outside. She swung her feet to the floor, feeling the cat wind its
body round her legs, purring, then stood, still weak and nauseous from the night
terrors. There had been something, she was certain, something downstairs. She pulled on
tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt and made her way on to the landing, then, step by step,
gripping thebanisters, down the stairs, stopping halfway. The house
she knew so well had become unfamiliar, full of shadows and secrets. In the hall, she
stood and strained to hear but there was nothing, nobody. She turned on the lights,
blinking in the sudden dazzle, and then she saw it: a large brown envelope lying on the
doormat. She stooped and picked it up. It had her name written in bold letters across
it: Frieda Klein. A line slashed underneath diagonally, cutting into the final
n
.
    She stared at the handwriting. She
recognized it, and now she knew that he was near – in the street outside, close to her
home, to her place of refuge.
    In a fever, she pulled on a trenchcoat and
pushed her bare feet into the