SIX

As Spencer Phillips was standing in line for his ticket, and Mickey Breeze was flipping his coin, and Pat was hurtling towards them all on his final, strange journey, Clara Gallagher was feeling sick. She was sitting in the furthest corner of the McDonalds opposite the station, trying to look engrossed with a glossy magazine. Strangers sat elbow-to-elbow at the larger tables in the middle, focusing on their food. Bacon fat and coffee and the rustle of paper bags.

There were two things that worried her. One was something small. Lots of something smalls actually, and maybe that added up to something big. The other was pretty big all on its own. Someone had once told her that worrying was just praying for the worst and Clara had tried to heed this advice whenever she felt herself gnawing at things she couldn’t change. Today however, she just kept on chewing things over. She could not ignore the petty irony of this situation, because it was her eating that made part the small worry. Not the amount of food (Clara had inherited her Mother’s slim figure no matter what she ate), but the kinds of food that she had been... hankering after. Face the facts Clara, this isn’t hankering, she thought, but could not bring herself to find the mot juste for how she felt. Clara knew that putting things into words makes them true.

A waitress that looked like she applied her make-up by repeatedly headbutting her compact walked by and glanced at Clara’s tray. Clara felt the heat of embarrassment rush up to her face. She had ordered an Egg McMuffin , hash browns and a coffee. A pretty average breakfast. Nothing to cause that look of intrigue on the waitress’ pancaked face. However, scattered around the crumbs of her meal, was a smattering of ketchup packets. Clara quickly counted them. Shit. Ten packets. Things were getting bad, then.

She had first noticed her growing reliance on ketchup two weeks ago, when she had made an old family favourite- pasta with cheese and ketchup. She had ended up with more ketchup than pasta on her plate. She had just kept squeezing and squeezing, her mouth watering in anticipation of the sweet vinegar tang.

And now there she was, at 7.30 in the morning, in a shitty McDonalds in Wood Green, surrounded by office workers and single mums catching breakfast, with ten packets of ketchup on her tray. She didn’t know for sure (and it was funny how things kept slipping her mind recently) but she feared that the last two ketchups hadn’t served as condiments at all, no, those last two were the main course; she had literally slurped them down.

Clara felt her phone vibrating in her bag and went to answer it. It was Casper calling. Fucking Casper, he of the wandering prick. This was all she needed. She rejected the call, turned off her phone and stuffed it back into her handbag. Wanting to be out McDonalds, out of Wood Green, preferably out of Everywhere, Clara cleared the table and left. As she passed, the lovely young pancake-face flashed her a fake smile. Yeah well, fuck you too, Coco, Clara thought.

That wasn’t nice. But Clara had never felt so scared and alone, so consequently mean, in all her life. She passed the 99p store (yes, everything just 99p), the cinema, the off-license and a few newsagents on her way to the tube. She overcame the temptation to pop into the newsagent for a bottle of ketchup, just a small one, small enough to fit snuggly in her handbag and nobody had to know anything about it. But no. No.

Clara hurried to the station, turning her mind away from worry in her usual way: There is a path through the woods, bare brown earth under her feet, and overhead hangs a pristine sky like a curve of coloured glass. Through the trees, the sea sparkles in the sunlight. She breathed it in. This kind of self-hypnosis was to some people a hard-won skill, but it came to Clara naturally, without thinking. The woods are lovely, green and deep.

She rode down the escalator, hearing the soft rustle of leaves and sweet birdsong in her head and not once noticing the hard-faced man one step behind her, sucking at her scent.