CLEANER II: Prologue - Part Two

KATHERINE

Katherine’s landline handset was on the outside ledge of the kitchen window and when it started to bleat it took four or five rings before she even registered it was hers. That made her hurry to snatch it up, creaking her back as she got back up to her feet from the kneeling pad she’d been using in front of her roses. For all nine steps from the flowerbed to the back wall she knew that it was Dahlia, finally, calling her back (it had, after all, been twenty one missed calls now), but the number on the little grey screen wasn’t Dahlia’s mobile, nor was it a local number. It had a London area code.

“Hello?”

“Katherine?”

Her brow contracted towards what would have become a frown as she tried to recognise the voice from that one spoken word, then it came to her. “Tommy? Is that you?”

“Yep. Sorry to bother you.”

Tommy was Dahlia’s agent and the jolt of quickening Katherine had felt at the belief that Dahlia herself was calling was accelerated still further. Tommy had been in regular contact back in the not too distant heyday of Dahlia’s modelling career, but nowadays he didn’t tend to call. Especially in these troubling times, Katherine’s first assumption was that it was bad news. The photo shoot had been yesterday. Dahlia’s career was meant to be getting the bump it needed to jump back onto the tracks and hurtle back toward prestige and stardom, but with the current decline of her mental state and her overeating, it couldn’t have gone well and Katherine feared the worst. With the morbidly pessimistic route her worrying had carried her lately, if anything, she feared calamity.

The phrases pounced out of her, one after another without a beat between them for inhalation. “What’s wrong? Is Dahlia okay? What’s happened?”

Tommy exhaled in a generous enough rush of air to carry the sound down the phone line. “She’s okay as far as I know,” he said. “I mean, she drove off okay yesterday after the... Well, we didn’t really have a photo shoot in the end.”

Katherine allowed herself a little nod at the confirmation of her supposition. “What happened?”

“It was a disaster. She may have burned her boats, at least with that magazine. It would have been better if she didn’t turn up at all.”

“What did she do?”

“Have you seen her lately?”

Katherine pictured her worn and desperate face again, shouting at her in the hospital corridor. “Not for a few days.”

“Well she’s really let herself go. It was shocking. She must have been at least a stone heavier. Her clothes weren’t on straight. Her hair and make-up were... Well, she looked terrible.”

“You know about her brother, Steven? Did she tell you?”

Pause. “Yeah. Yeah, she did. So I understand, you know? I do understand. She should have cancelled. Nobody would have blamed her for that. She could have salvaged something then – set up another shoot.”

“Tommy, I don’t mean to be obtuse, but at this point, my lowest concern is whether Dahlia can restart her modelling career. I think it was the increasing pressure of that that got her in the state she’s in in the first place.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m being a dick. It’s just instinct. My mouth blabs on about the business without me even knowing. You’re right. And I’m just as concerned about her as you are.”

Katherine knew that couldn’t be true, but she said nothing. She was thinking.

“Tell me what’s going on,” said Tommy. “What else do you know? I know losing her brother must have been bad but Dahlia hasn’t been right for... well, since...”

“Since her parents were killed.”

“Yeah. I guess.” A moment of silence as the pieces slotted into place in his mind. “When she... flipped.”

“Her breakdown.”

“When she went into hospital.”

“Yes.”

“Another long silence.

“What happened at the photo shoot?” asked Katherine.

“She... They said she couldn’t do it. Weren’t too nice about the fact she’d put on weight. It didn’t help that she was so late. And she looked... Her face... I talked to her afterwards, at the car, and... She isn’t right. Is she?”

“No.” Katherine regarded her roses. The wind was picking up, knocking them backward and forwards.

“I tried to talk to her; you know; offer some help; but she drove off. I’ve been trying to call.”

“No answer.”

“No. Sent some texts. No reply. I thought I’d call you.”

“She hasn’t been in touch.”

“Have you been up there?” asked Tommy. “I’d nip round if I was local but...”

The question pinched Katherine between two great guilty claws, and suddenly the justifications she’d had for not driving up to Summertop seemed vacuous and poorly constructed. “No. She... Dahlia told me to stay away.”

“So she’s all by herself?”

Again, the justified pinch, sharp this time; cutting deeper. She thought of Melissa. She thought of Melissa agreeing to help divert Dahlia from her descending path of withdrawal from the outside world, smiling at Katherine as she promised to do her best and then very obviously went inside the house to do the opposite.

“I’m not sure,” said Katherine.

There was another silence but it was all too clear what bristled within it: the stark condemnation from Tommy that Katherine was wasting time in her garden while Dahlia needed her and the anger Katherine levelled at herself for doing just that.

“Don’t you think that...”

“I have to go up there. I shouldn’t have put it off.”

“Well if you see her—”

“Sorry Tommy. I have to go. Sorry. I have to go now.”

He said something else but Katherine didn’t hear and she didn’t care what it was. She ended the call and hurried inside, dropping the handset down so carelessly that she didn’t even realise that she’d done it.

She found her handbag, didn’t bother with her coat; checked the car keys were inside; didn’t bother changing out of the grubby gardening clothes she was wearing; didn’t even think to.

She ran out the front door, not noticing that the lock didn’t fully engage and again, not caring, and rushed to her car.

All she could think about was Dahlia’s red-rimmed eyes; her desperate and tattered expression in that hospital corridor; and the image she’d conjured in response to Tommy’s description.

Her instincts were working again, hurling up new worst case scenarios made material from dread and pessimism. She had the sense that something momentous and awful had happened already; that she had already missed the one chance she had to divert it; but she also knew that she had to try. She had to get up there to Summertop and try to divert whatever dreadful new turn of events must surely be unravelling before it was too late.

Even if it was already far too late and nothing could be done.