again before she allowed her emotions to get the better of her. Sitting down on the bed and idly picking at the seam on the pillowcase as she debated what to do next, she fought an almost overwhelming urge to climb under the covers and go to sleep, reminding herself that even if she did that, even if she woke up in the morning in Mack’s bed, it did not mean that Mack would be there beside her.
The flat was small, only the lounge/dining room, a tiny (and, of course, immaculate) kitchen, Mack’s bedroom and an en suite bathroom. There was nowhere to hide anything, should a person wish to do that. She thought about her own overflowing drawers of all life’s essential paperwork – bills, certificates, instruction booklets, letters from the days when friends still wrote to each other on pieces of paper. She refused to believe that Mack did not have at least some of that stuff around here somewhere. Nobody could have reached the age of thirty-three, could have lived a proper grown-up life without bringing with them some sort of paper trail, surely?
Going back into the lounge, she went over to the chest of drawers where Mack usually left his laptop and started to look through the drawers.
The top drawer was evidently the ‘receipts and instruction manuals’ drawer, everything piled neatly. The second one was filled with utility bills and other official correspondence, all filed according to subject and date, but the bottom drawer seemed more promising. It was stuffed to the brim with papers of differing sizes, none of it apparently in any particular order.
Simone lifted out the whole pile and put it on the rug before she started to sift through, still not sure what she might be looking for. Near the bottom of the heap she spotted some pieces of thick, cream paper with a crest at the top. They looked like exam certificates or something equally irrelevant but she glanced briefly through them out of a sense of thoroughness, mindful of what Jazzy had told her. ‘We need to concentrate on the parts of his life we don’t know about,’ he had said. ‘The things that happened before we knew him.’ The top certificate was his BA, Third Class from the University of Glasgow. That, she thought, at least chimed with what Mack had told her and Jazzy. And then, she caught herself. Could she already distrust Mack this much? Had she thought, even subconsciously, that Mack would have been lying even about his degree? Nobody, surely, would pretend to have got a third in their degree. If he had got a first or a 2:1, then Mack was not the type to have kept that quiet. And if he had been lying about having a degree at all, then he would surely have lied about having a better one.
Underneath the university certificate were his GCSEs and A-levels. The GCSEs were from a St. Aidan’s RC Comprehensive in New Cross, which sounded exactly the sort of place Mack had described to her in his anecdotes about smoking behind portacabins, sneaking out to the chippy at lunchtimes and high times on the altar boys’ trip to Rome. The A-levels though were from a different school. And not even a school in London. Chignall School, Essex was all it said at the top of the sheet. Simone had never heard of this place. Mack had never told her anything about living in Essex or changing his school. As Simone scanned the rest of the page she raised an appreciative eyebrow. Four A-levels in English Literature, History, Politics and French, all awarded at grade A. Seemed like Mack had been quite the star pupil before things took a dive during his university days.
She remembered her initial, instinctive, reaction to Mack’s degree certificate, her relief (or surprise?) that he had been telling her the truth. Had she always sensed something slightly off when Mack talked about his youth, some details being fudged or held back? What was this Chignall School? Something about the elegant crest with its Latin motto underneath and the heavy-duty writing paper of the
The flat was small, only the lounge/dining room, a tiny (and, of course, immaculate) kitchen, Mack’s bedroom and an en suite bathroom. There was nowhere to hide anything, should a person wish to do that. She thought about her own overflowing drawers of all life’s essential paperwork – bills, certificates, instruction booklets, letters from the days when friends still wrote to each other on pieces of paper. She refused to believe that Mack did not have at least some of that stuff around here somewhere. Nobody could have reached the age of thirty-three, could have lived a proper grown-up life without bringing with them some sort of paper trail, surely?
Going back into the lounge, she went over to the chest of drawers where Mack usually left his laptop and started to look through the drawers.
The top drawer was evidently the ‘receipts and instruction manuals’ drawer, everything piled neatly. The second one was filled with utility bills and other official correspondence, all filed according to subject and date, but the bottom drawer seemed more promising. It was stuffed to the brim with papers of differing sizes, none of it apparently in any particular order.
Simone lifted out the whole pile and put it on the rug before she started to sift through, still not sure what she might be looking for. Near the bottom of the heap she spotted some pieces of thick, cream paper with a crest at the top. They looked like exam certificates or something equally irrelevant but she glanced briefly through them out of a sense of thoroughness, mindful of what Jazzy had told her. ‘We need to concentrate on the parts of his life we don’t know about,’ he had said. ‘The things that happened before we knew him.’ The top certificate was his BA, Third Class from the University of Glasgow. That, she thought, at least chimed with what Mack had told her and Jazzy. And then, she caught herself. Could she already distrust Mack this much? Had she thought, even subconsciously, that Mack would have been lying even about his degree? Nobody, surely, would pretend to have got a third in their degree. If he had got a first or a 2:1, then Mack was not the type to have kept that quiet. And if he had been lying about having a degree at all, then he would surely have lied about having a better one.
Underneath the university certificate were his GCSEs and A-levels. The GCSEs were from a St. Aidan’s RC Comprehensive in New Cross, which sounded exactly the sort of place Mack had described to her in his anecdotes about smoking behind portacabins, sneaking out to the chippy at lunchtimes and high times on the altar boys’ trip to Rome. The A-levels though were from a different school. And not even a school in London. Chignall School, Essex was all it said at the top of the sheet. Simone had never heard of this place. Mack had never told her anything about living in Essex or changing his school. As Simone scanned the rest of the page she raised an appreciative eyebrow. Four A-levels in English Literature, History, Politics and French, all awarded at grade A. Seemed like Mack had been quite the star pupil before things took a dive during his university days.
She remembered her initial, instinctive, reaction to Mack’s degree certificate, her relief (or surprise?) that he had been telling her the truth. Had she always sensed something slightly off when Mack talked about his youth, some details being fudged or held back? What was this Chignall School? Something about the elegant crest with its Latin motto underneath and the heavy-duty writing paper of the
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