Here's the updated cover art for Neil Randall's new novel Three Days with Adrianna. Watch this space for more details about the release date for this truly twisted revenge thriller.
For now, why not enjoy the opening chapter:
The Part About Adrianna
As soon as she walked into the shop, he knew she was Angie’s daughter.
The likeness was scary. He could’ve been back at his old flat twenty-odd years
ago, staring at her mum through a late-night cloud of second-hand smoke.
“Are you Gary Talbot?” she asked, straight
out.
Instinct told him to say, ‘No, sorry, he’s
away for a week’. But something held him back; something he could never really
explain – over the years he’d always been such a convincing liar.
“Yeah,” he said as casually as possible,
placing the LPs he was about to price up down on the counter. Jesus, he thought
to himself, she really is the
spitting image of Ange, with the shiny coal-black hair, dark eyes, that rich
Mediterranean colouring, she was even the same sort of height, not particularly
tall but not particularly short, and had the same shapely, curvy figure. “How
can I help you, love?”
At first, she didn’t say anything. She just
stood there, in this stylish navy-blue trouser-suit, looking all shy and unsure
of herself.
“Well, it’s not the easiest thing to…” she
trailed off and lowered her eyes. “What I mean to say is I – I wanted to talk
to you about – about…” and she broke down in floods of tears, just like that.
Gary didn’t
know what to do, whether to let her get it out of her system, or whether to try
and comfort her in some way.
“Hey,
don’t cry.” He walked around the counter and tentatively put a hand on her
shoulder. “Look. Why don’t I turn the closed sign ’round, eh? Pop the kettle
on, and you can tell me all ’bout it, get whatever it is off’a your chest.”
***
“Yeah, you don’t half look like your mum,” he said, warily, unsure of
how to approach the situation, how to act – friendly, serious, or defensive –
he had no idea how much this girl knew, and what kinds of questions she wanted
to ask. “And you say your name’s Adrianna, right?”
She nodded and took a sip of tea from a
faded Manchester United mug that had been through the dishwasher one time too
many.
“That’s right. Named after my
great-grandmother, so I’ve been told.”
After he’d brought the tea through, she’d
confirmed what he already suspected: that she was Angie’s daughter. Now she’d
pulled herself together, she came across as a really well-spoken girl,
educated, polite, classy, a little intimidating, in the way attractive women
can, without really trying. And in no way could he tell if she was hostile
towards him or not.
“Thing is, Gary, I never knew my real mum. I
was brought up by foster parents. It was only a year or two back that I got in
contact with my real grandmother. Since then, we’ve got to know each other
quite well. I visit her every other week. And she’s told me a lot about my mum,
important stuff, because it’s hard not knowing where you come from, not having
any proper family, like reference points. All my adult life I’ve felt like
there was something missing, you know?”
And she went on tell Gary about her
education and plans for the future, a first-class honours degree, something to
do with the sciences, laboratory research, and how she’d landed herself a dream
job in Melbourne, Australia, how she was going to emigrate, how this was
literally her last few days in England. As she spoke, Gary nodded his head,
said Yeah a few times, and smiled
encouragingly, not really knowing why he was listening to all of this, or where
it was heading.
“So, as you can imagine, I might not be
coming back to England any time soon. And I guess I want to know more about my
mum before she died, what kind of person she was, what interests she had, what
she did at weekends, just ordinary, everyday stuff. Here.” She reached into her
slim, stylish leather handbag and pulled out an old cassette. “I bet you
recognise this, right?”
Gary took the cassette and turned it over in
his hands.
“Yeah,” he said, staring at his own scruffy
handwriting on the track-list scribbled on the inlay cover. “Bloody wars! You’re
going back a few years here. Look: Prodigy – Your Love, Zero B – Lock Up,
Joey Beltram – Energy Flash, 2 Bad
Mice – Bombscare, Krome and Time – This Sound is For the Underground. Ha!”
“And you remember doing this tape for my
mum?”
Of course he remembered. Back then, Ange
could only have been fourteen or fifteen years old. It was around the time they
first started knocking about together, when she’d walk along the beach from
town, where Gary and his best mate Goosey used to hang out, light a camp-fire,
drink and smoke themselves silly, and blast out music on a battered old beat
box. Ange knew they were bad boys, small town rebels, was attracted to older
lads with a dubious reputation, always in trouble with the police. At first,
they didn’t really like the idea of her leeching onto them. It could only lead
to trouble, they told themselves, bring unwanted attention – an under-age girl
cramping their style like that. But gradually, they got used to having her
around, to seeing her trudging along the beach in her school uniform, got used
to having a laugh and a joke (usually at her expense), getting this young bird
so pissed and stoned she’d puke or pass out, taking advantage of her. ‘This music’s
ace,’ she said to Gary one summer evening. ‘Can you do me a mix tape, one I can
listen to at home?’ At the time, he was big into dance music, him and Goosey
used to go to illegal raves up and down the country, and like most lads bang
into his tunes, Gary prided himself on putting together the best mix tapes
around.
“You even wrote a little message on the
back,” said Adrianna, pointing to the cassette in Gary’s hand. “If you turn the
inlay cover over, you can see.”
He did as she said, taking the cassette out
and finding: To my very own little raver,
Ange, E is the way forward. Drop as often as you can. Feel the love. Gaz scribbled
inside. Gary almost winced at the
blatant drug reference, sensing that this was perhaps the moment Adrianna would
flip, go into one about the dangers of drugs, how this proved that he was
somehow responsible for what happened to her mum.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said slowly, putting the
cassette back in the case and closing it. “They were, erm…different times back
then, love, different music, different attitudes to stuff.”
But she didn’t bring it up, shout at him, or
appear in any way angry or upset.
“Last year, I bought an old stereo at a car
boot sale, one with a tape deck in it, just so I could listen to the tape.”
“Really?” He handed the cassette case back
to her. “What’d you think?”
Adrianna shrugged and rolled her eyes. A
light, friendly, amused, maybe even warm gesture, which made him feel a whole
lot more comfortable.
“Not really my kind of thing, a bit manic, a
bit out there.”
“Yeah, I s’pose. Then again, it’s probably
generational. If you liked the stuff people my age were listening to back then,
music would never move on, would it? It’d be stuck in a rut.”
She nodded, shifted her weight, and slipped
the cassette back into her handbag.
“Look, Gary, the reason I came to see you is
that I want to ask a favour. Like I said earlier, I want to know more about my
real mum. I want to try and get a clearer picture of her in my head. I know she
was no angel. And I know she did a lot of mad stuff before she had me, but it wouldn’t
feel right – leaving the country, leaving everything behind, my roots and all
that – without learning more about her life, where I came from.” She shot him a
quick, anxious look. “So, what I’m going to suggest is this: I’m staying at a
small hotel in town for the next few days, and wondered if you’d give me a tour
of the area, you know, places my mum used to visit, her old haunts, if you
like.”
Gary tried to think of all kinds of excuses
– work commitments, a family do up North, a fictitious doctor’s appointment –
but none of them sounded particularly convincing in his head. Besides, Adrianna
had a certain charm, a way about her that made it hard for him to refuse. For
that reason, he found himself agreeing, saying that, although he hadn’t got
much free time at the minute, with the shop and everything, he could take a few
hours off here and there, could find a spare evening maybe, to do just that, to
show Adrianna around town, to talk to her about her mum.
“Really?” she beamed, flashing the whitest,
straightest teeth he’d ever seen. “That’s so kind of you, Gary. It would mean
the world to me.”
“No problem.”
“So, we can meet here, at the shop,
tomorrow, late morning, yeah? And you’ll show me around?”
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