The following is a sample story from At the Bottom of the Stairs by Chloe Banks, available to buy from our online bookshop.
‘Everything After Now’ by Chloe Banks
Tomorrow they will laugh about this. In the hotel restaurant, while Tommy piles his plate with bacon, and Rachel spoons fruit compote onto her yoghurt, they will glance sideways at each other. They’ll laugh at how two glasses of house white could have made them forget fifty-two years, two happy marriages. It was nothing, they’ll say. A moment of madness. And Rachel will take a table by the window, and Tommy will take a table by the door.
On Sunday night, Tommy will lie next to Anabelle in their super-king-sized bed, wide-eyed in the dark. She will turn to him and say, How was the exhibition? Did you sell any pictures? What was the hotel like? And he will say, Fine. Two. Full of retired tourists. When Anabelle wants to know why he is so quiet, he’ll tell her that he met a friend from long ago who made him realise how old he is. She will laugh and reach for his hand beneath the covers.
Sometime next month, Rachel will be baking Spider-Man cupcakes with her granddaughter. As she presses the rice paper shapes from their sheet and passes them into buttercreamed fingers, she will find herself wondering if, in another life, Olivia might have had Tommy’s cowlick instead of Francis’s curls. That evening, as Francis snorts over The News Quiz while they peel potatoes together at the sink, that other life will haunt her. The life where she took Tommy’s ring instead of her mother’s advice will hover at the edges of her vision, dissolving as she turns to look.
In October, Tommy will catch sight of Rachel again across the foyer of the National. She will be laughing with a man who can only be her son. The sight will bring Tommy to a standstill, breathless, until Anabelle touches his arm, draws him towards the usher selling programmes. Tommy and Rachel will spend three hours sitting three rows apart, and Rachel won’t see him until they are about to step into adjacent taxis. Her hand will touch her lips in shock and, although he’ll know it was involuntary, he will catch the kiss anyway and hold it hot in his memory.
Nine months from now, Rachel will see an obituary in The Times: Renowned artist. Devoted husband. It will say nothing about his childhood sweetheart; no mention of his second-hand mohair jacket or the way he whistled The Entertainer as he waited at the end of Station Road, a bunch of daffs in his hand. Private funeral for close family only.
But now there is none of that. In the hotel bar, with Francis at the vintage car rally and Anabelle eighty miles away, there is no future, no past. Five decades slip away in one chance reunion. Rachel is seventeen again, and her parents have not yet cajoled her into setting aside a man who draws in pen and ink and who has no money and no prospects of making any. Tommy hasn’t yet failed to convince them of his worth. Age and expectations have not painted their words with caution.
I’m happily married, but…
I love my husband, but…
It’s always been you.
I still miss you.
For one afternoon – one drink in the bar, one walk on the terrace – they can be the dreamers they once were. Let’s run away together. And everything before now has disappeared. And nothing after now matters.
By Chloe Banks from At the Bottom of the Stairs (£10.99)
