Chapter 2 of A Net Too Wide To Break His Fall, by Matt Boothman
I wrote this story chapter by chapter, without outlining first. It was an experiment in writing consistently, producing a chapter once a month, without fail, for the Foggy Outline newsletter. So don’t expect something polished or finished; but what it does have is momentum, and a fluidity that came from wanting to change things up enough to keep myself interested enough to write more.
If you’d be interested in a properly edited, fleshed out, finished version of this story, let me know!
Vivian Hithercombe shut the front door of the house on Bronze Street and hustled her new party arrival through the hall and into the kitchen. Callum perched on the first step of the stairs, out of both their way. Neither of them was going to notice him, but he could still get under their feet in the narrow hall.
He rifled efficiently through the new arrival’s purse. It would be best to get it back into their bag before they realised it had gone, to avoid problems later. Marielena could also be counted on to give him one of those looks if she turned up and found him with it. She understood he had to do things like that sometimes, but this night was meant to be different.
Autumn Wray Benjamin, said the expired provisional driver’s licence. Half the payment cards were expired as well. The purse was well insulated with frayed and crumpled receipts. Callum spotted a smudge of blue biro on one and smoothed it out on his knee. The receipt was for two bolts of cloth, and the subtotal made Callum bite his lip. The biro addition loop-de-looped the length of the paper. Maybe with a bigger sample of Autumn Wray Benjamin’s handwriting, Callum would be able to decipher it, but with only this one scribble to go on, his best guesses were ’high element’ or ‘knife divert’, and they weren’t confident guesses. He thought about pocketing it to puzzle out later, but caution won out. Assuming Marielena ever turned up, he was here to make a good first impression, and even an outside chance of being caught with the contents of someone else’s purse wasn’t worth taking.
In the kitchen, Autumn Wray Benjamin still had their bag over their shoulder. They hovered on the periphery of a loose group of guests gathered around the kitchen island. Vivian Hithercombe was putting one of them sharply in his place about the details of something her father had supposedly done in Dubai. The important work of correcting the record had clearly interrupted Benjamin’s introduction, leaving them with one foot in and one foot out of the conversation, unable to politely leave but unwilling to step in fully with Hithercombe holding court. Callum recognised a couple of the faces around the island from Mari’s planning, but no one in the room acknowledged him; no one there was capable of it. He lowered Benjamin’s purse back into their bag, carefully, without jarring their shoulder, and slunk out of the kitchen.
Callum did a circuit of the ground floor of Vivian Hithercombe’s house, though without holding out much hope of catching anyone’s eye. If there was anyone at the party he’d been introduced to before, they would have heard him knocking at the door. Though maybe if they saw their host was ignoring the sound, they wouldn’t have had the gall to answer in her place.
The houseguests had sifted into two groups, the one in the kitchen and another in the firelit lounge, already working their way through Vivian Hithercombe’s wine rack and her vinyl shelf. No one in the lounge so much as flinched when Callum rapped on the door frame. That was good in its way; if there had been anyone here who knew him already, a lot of Mari’s planning would have been wasted effort.
All of it would be wasted effort if Mari never bothered turning up.
Callum was starting to be pissed off with her, an anger that was twisted up with worry.
He stomped up the stairs. It was a huge house for one person to own, a terrace that had resisted being subdivided and had in fact been extended upwards. Upstairs seemed to be off limits to the party guests, at least for now. Maybe the rest of the house would open up floor by floor as the night went on.
On the first floor, Callum found a bathroom tiled in deep red, with gold fittings. Everything gleamed like the room had just been scrubbed to remove fingerprints. All traces that the toilet, sink and shower had ever been used by a functioning human body, efficiently scoured. There was a second lounge above the first, this one lined with bookshelves. In the window, two armchairs faced each other across a small round wooden tea table. The shelves were neatly stacked with books on international trade, economics, history, geopolitics, all hardbacks in dust covers. The covers weren’t having to work hard; it looked like dust was no more welcome in this room than biological creatures were in the bathroom.
On the next floor up, the extension, the rooms were smaller. Another bathroom, a bedroom, an office, and another lounge, all more casual and used than the rest of the house. This had to be where Vivian Hithercombe actually lived and worked, a storey above her neighbours, above the house she showed to guests.
For Callum and Marielena, the purpose of this whole occasion was for Callum to make a friend of Vivian Hithercombe and, as a bonus, as many of her set as possible. Only Marielena could make the introduction, but only Callum could seal the deal. Because of the way he was, Callum didn’t get to practise making a first impression very often, and whenever he did the stakes were always high. Mari had briefed him as thoroughly as she could, but it was unlikely Mari had seen this part of Vivian Hithercombe’s life. Based on the briefing, Callum thought it was unlikely any of Hithercombe’s personal friends downstairs had seen it either.
Mari would tell him not to. But it was Mari he needed to do it for. So she wouldn’t have to be the one he always called on. And if she’d got here when she said, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity.
Careful to leave as little trace of himself on Vivian’s rooms as he’d left in her mind so far, Callum took in everything. He studied the jewellery tree on the windowsill; she went for delicate wirework, pieces that looked like you could snap them with the slightest pressure. Precious metals, no gems. He pulled open the wardrobe and noted colours, cuts and fits. The lounge on this floor had a TV facing an unevenly plumped sofa. Callum paged through the past couple of months’ streaming history. He put the pieces of a person together in his mind. None of them fit perfectly, but there were edges that echoed each other. The immaculate red bathroom and the intimidating dresses were fragments of the same whole. The most used parts of the make-up palette definitely belonged to the same person who watched two-star slasher movies in the darkling hours. There was an obsessively managed image of Vivian Hithercombe, and then there were the ways she rewarded herself for keeping it up, for not allowing anyone to see a speck of dust or a fingerprint on her polished surface.
Callum paused in the door of the office. Taking shortcuts to the kind of intimacy that builds a lasting friendship – that was one thing. The office was another. Knowing how Vivian organised her receipts wouldn’t help him make the connection he needed.
But it would help him understand what else that connection could bring him. If it was even worth the effort and frustration. If it was worth trying again, if Mari didn’t make it tonight.
Callum woke up Vivian Hithercombe’s laptop.
He looked at the screen for what felt like a very long time.
He retreated to the first floor lounge. Took a book off the shelf at random and sat in one of the armchairs to look intently at the turning pages and not read a word.
An hour later, Callum’s sister Marielena arrived at the house on Bronze Street.