Dying for Christmas by Tammy Cohen Page B

cried out with longing.
    ‘Actually, just the fruit salad would be perfect.’
    The hand holding the knife froze.
    ‘The fruit salad is for me. I’ve made you pancakes. I told you.’
    I used to have a teacher at school everyone was terrified of, even though she never raised her voice. In fact the quieter she was, the more afraid we were. I can still hear her now: ‘Have you anything to say, Jessica?’ Hardly more than a whisper.
    Dominic was like that.
    The pile of pancakes, when it arrived, was towering. We were sitting at the dining table now. Dominic was opposite me with his bowl of fruit salad.
    ‘ Bon appétit! ’ he said, raising his glass of Buck’s Fizz.
    I lifted up my own glass, but kept my eyes down. Even so, I felt his gaze burning through me and the force of his expectancy as I cut into the first pancake. Afterwards, he smiled at me like I was a dog who’d learned a new trick.
    ‘You know, Jessica, I love looking after you. I love feeding you up and watching over you when you sleep. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since we met and yet already I can’t imagine life without you.’
    Eight years I’ve been with Travis and he’s never said anything like that. Travis is all about the passive. ‘You make me happy,’ he might say. Or, ‘I feel good when I’m around you.’ Sonia Rubenstein had once advised me to frame complaints in terms of how something made me feel so that it didn’t come across to the other person as a threat. So instead of telling my mother she’s an interfering old bag, I should say, ‘Your concern for my well-being sometimes makes me feel undermined.’ It occurred to me now that Travis has done that all the time. Framing the world in terms of how it affects him. Framing me in terms of how I affect him.
    If circumstances had been different I might have enjoyed the novelty of being for once the subject instead of always the object.
    But they weren’t. And I didn’t.

Chapter Eleven
    ‘So she’s been missing since yesterday afternoon, as far as you’re concerned?’
    Kim saw the twitch around the man’s mouth at that last phrase. He didn’t like the idea that his version of events might not be the only version.
    ‘She said she was going to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. In Wood Green, just down the road from where we live. I was out and wasn’t home until after six. Like I said, at first I didn’t really worry about it, but when it got to the time we were supposed to be meeting friends and she still wasn’t back, I started to get worried.’
    ‘But you didn’t call the police then? In fact, you went out to meet your friends.’
    ‘I thought she might turn up there. She is twenty-nine years old. She’s not a child.’
    ‘Though she is childlike in some ways.’
    The mother had been hovering the whole time, hungry to join in. Kim recognized that expression – the need to be doing something, anything, even if it was just talking.
    ‘In what way childlike, Mrs Gold?’
    ‘She’s not as … worldly as other young women of her age. She is a bit of a …’
    ‘Misfit.’
    That was one of the brothers. Kim had forgotten which was which as soon as they’d introduced themselves. It didn’t help that they looked so similar, both swarthy, muscular types with prematurely receding hair and dark probing eyes. She’d practically had to wipe the testosterone off after she’d shaken their hands.
    ‘Not “misfit”. That’s not the right word at all.’ The mother again, her green eyes flashing. She was sitting on a chair at the end of the wooden table that dominated the kitchen. Her legs, in their black tights, looked thin enough to snap. ‘She’s her own person. She doesn’t follow the crowd.’
    ‘How do you mean?’ Kim wanted to know.
    ‘Well, she’s not really one for going out clubbing or parties. And she has these episodes where she, well, hears voices.’
    Kim paused then, her biro poised over the notepad in which she’d been scribbling,