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“How many times do I have to tell you that you can’t just show up at my house?” Alison hissed, opening the basement door just enough for Sarah to squeeze through the gap.
“Bloody hell, calm down. I did call,” Sarah snapped back.
“Well, as I didn’t answer it, I’d say my original point still stands,” Alison replied. She stopped for a moment or two, specifically to glare at the other woman, before speaking again. “What do you want, anyway?”
“If you’re finished, I found this in Beth’s desk. I thought you might want it back,” Sarah said, reaching into one of the pockets of the long coat she was wearing and pulled out a (now slightly crumpled) birthday card. She had known it was from Alison as soon as it caught her eye, all the pink and patterns standing out amongst the bottles of pills and emergency snack bars. She hadn’t read the message (reading things like that that just felt too much like an intrusion, where sleeping in Beth’s bed and wearing Beth’s clothes and living Beth’s life somehow didn’t), she’d just opened it to check for the ‘Love, Ali x’ at the bottom, and then pocketed it until this moment.
Alison quickly took the card from Sarah’s outstretched hand and ducked into her craft room to put it away, the distance giving her the opportunity to disguise the breath catching in her throat as a series of coughs.
“Thank you,” she said mock-brightly, once she had composed herself. She panicked a little then, her brain scrambling for a conversation, until confusion hit her. “Wait, you’ve been to the station? Are you supposed to be Beth now?”
“Well, yeah,” Sarah said. Her brain wanted to continue with ‘I wouldn’t choose to wear this shite’, but fortunately she managed to change it before it came out of her mouth. “It’s not exactly my choice of outfit.”
Alison let out a snort of laughter and then waved her hand apologetically.
“Want to share the joke?” Sarah asked.
Alison laughed again. “It’s not funny, not really. It’s just that you look nothing like her.”
“Oh yeah? How’s that then?” Sarah said, raising her eyebrows.
“For a start,” Alison said, her eyes scanning over Sarah. “The coat is all wrong. Beth would never wear this one with a skirt anyway, but regardless...” She reached for the belt of the coat, pulled it until there was an equal length in both hands, and then retied it. She worked her way up the garment, fastening the occasional button which Sarah had missed, picking off bits of fluff as she went. She moved to adjust the collar, which was slightly higher on one side than the other and as she did it was distracted by the scarf, which she looped another of couple of times around Sarah’s neck. She glanced up at the other woman’s hair, slightly matted on one side. “Do you have a hairbrush?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said gruffly, slightly annoyed by the criticism. She had looked at those photos closely. She knew she was good. She knew she was passing, but also she was intrigued about what was missing from her performance, the details that she hadn’t noticed, that apparently no one else in Beth’s life had noticed, but that Alison picked up on the absence of.
Alison watched her take her hairbrush (Beth’s hairbrush) out of her handbag (Beth’s handbag) and scrunched her eyes closed for a moment. When she opened them again it was to see a section of freshly-brushed hair sitting smoothly on top of the scarf, in a way which was so reminiscent of another time that she wished she could look away, or never stop looking.
“You’re wearing too much eye make-up,” Alison said, forcing herself to return to efficiency, leaving the room whilst Sarah finished brushing her hair and returning with a face wipe. “She wore mascara, sometimes. That’s all,” she explained, as the eyeliner came off on the cloth, trying not to think too much about how closely, how often, she’d looked into eyes like these ones. “Lipbalm?”
Sarah reached into the front pocket of Beth’s handbag and pulled out a small silver tin. “This one?” she asked, offering it out to Alison.
It smelled like strawberries. To Alison, it smelled like escape, like whispers and like kisses. She skimmed a finger across the surface and then dabbed it against Sarah’s mouth.
“Together,” she said, and Sarah did as she was told, her lips when she moved them apart again making a soft ‘pop’.
Alison glanced at her, and her stomach flipped, but a glance was all she could have. After that, all she could see was bad posture, chipped nail varnish on one hand, and eyes with the wrong sparkle.
“There you go, you shouldn’t get arrested for impersonating a police officer now,” Alison said, not quite believing it. Sarah looked better, certainly, but she couldn’t help but think that anyone who fell for it had never really looked at Beth.
“Thanks... I think,” Sarah said.
“Thanks for bringing the card,” Alison said, smiling weakly and moving to adjust her ponytail, still not meeting Sarah’s eyes.
Sarah heard the chime of a wine glass on the table before she had even left the yard.