To Dare

Legend Press Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ

[email protected] |www.legendpress.co.uk

Contents © Jemma Wayne 2020

The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

Print ISBN 978-1-78955-9-835

Ebook ISBN 978-1-78955-9-828

Set in Times.

Artwork by Sarah Whittaker | www.whittakerbookdesign.com

All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

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Jemma Wayne is the author of two previous novels: After Before and Chains of Sand. She has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for both The Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize and the Waverton Good Read Award.

Jemma’s journalism has appeared in The Spectator, National Geographic, The Huffington Post, The Evening Standard, The Independent on Sunday, Red Magazine, The Jewish Chronicle and The Jewish News, among others.

Born to an American musician father and English mother, Jemma grew up in Hertfordshire and lives in North London.

For my parents Jeff and Geraldine, who taught me to dare.

Simone

They are so quiet.

Others might not notice that.

Others might see his flash BMW, and her perfect, unscratched arms struggling under the weight of boxes, nails cut sensibly, not plastered with gelled glamour. They might see the easy way they touch each other around the waist, the sharp contours of his rugby-chiselled frame, and the way that her eyes look outwards as though she intrinsically knows she is allowed to do this, entitled to see everything. Except, of course, they are both blind. They haven’t even noticed Simone, standing, watching, from the other side of the tree-lined street. If she wanted, she could already have swiped one or two of the smaller boxes without anybody blinking. The ones right at the opening of the removal van would be easy, or a couple from the pile balanced by the front door. But she doesn’t want their boxes. It is their quiet she is absorbing.

Simone stubs out her cigarette and starts another. It’s not that she minds noise. When she was a teenager, lack of noise was one of the things she despised – the silences over dinner, the closed door to her father’s small study behind which there came only the scratching of pencil on paper, the muted moments when she let herself in after school and there was no music, no laughter, nothing to pull her back. But Terry’s noise is so robustly noisy. It swirls around him like a cyclone, sweeping away everything not chained to the ground. He won’t be pleased that she’s got herself a job. It’s only part-time, just a little bit-work on reception at the gym down Camden High Street. She’s opening barriers and arranging leaflets on counters. There’s no glitz to it. But it’s money. It’s legal. And it’s doing. Doing something.