I lay on the bed, and Joe fussed with pillows so I was comfortable. I had a flask and a mug of tea, a couple of books, and a new mobile that was fully charged. I picked it up.
“All your numbers are on there,” he said, as he sat beside me.
“How?”
“The cloud, my lovely. Anyway, tomorrow, we debrief.”
“Before you go, what’s going on with you and Danny?” I asked.
“Oh, Lizzie. I don’t know what happened. I just…I connected with him in a way I’ve never done before.”
“He’s bi?”
“No. He’s full-on gay. The woman you saw him with was just a friend. He told me that he’d pretended they’d…whatever.” He waved his hand dismissively. “He has a strange sense of humour. I’ll agree with you on that. But, Lizzie, when you get to know him, like, really get to know him, he’s absolutely nothing like you think.”
I glared at him in disbelief. “He has a dead cat…”
“Pat’s brother. He thought Pat was mourning so much he stuffed him, or whatever they call it. That’s why he lays it on the bed so Pat can snuggle up against it.”
I went to speak, and Joe held his hands up. “I know, it’s fucking weird, and I told him that.” He shrugged his shoulders.
I felt my eyelids begin to droop.
“I’m going to leave you now, but I’ll be back in the morning, okay? We’ve got a lot to sort out, your new house being one.”
I wasn’t sure I heard him leave the flat. I’d snuggled down, felt my body sink into the mattress, and I slept.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Breaking my ankle was a blessing in disguise and the worse thing possible to have happened. Instead of spending the time packing up the flat and going through the items in storage, I simply employed the removal company to come and box my life up. However, that gave me many hours of thinking time. I missed Ronan, for all his faults. I missed Maggie and Charlie. The note that Maggie had left in my holdall had asked that I keep in touch, but I just couldn’t at first. However, after a while, we started to text. After the initial ‘how is he?’ and the, ‘he’s struggling but agreed to speak to someone,’ conversation, any further chat about Ronan was avoided.
I saw a side to Danny that I hadn’t before, but I was still wary. I just wasn’t convinced that someone could be so different to me than he was with Joe. I rarely had time alone with him, and I wondered if Joe made that deliberate so I couldn’t grill him. He did, however, confess to his warped sense of humour over the blow-up doll but was mortified to know he’d left the gay wank mag lying around. He thought Mrs Dingle might not know what the doll was, and was grateful I’d removed the mag before she saw that. If I hadn’t been so grumpy and irritated at the blasted cast on my leg, I might have also accepted that perhaps I’d had that humour bypass Danny suggested had happened.
“Let’s raise our glasses,” Joe said.
Danny, Joe, and I were sitting on the floor in the empty flat after the removal company had taken the last of my items. First thing in the morning, they were to be delivered to my new home. We weren’t just celebrating my move, but Danny’s as well. Joe had let slip, although I don’t know why he’d want to keep it quiet, that he’d leased the flat to Danny.
I’d been thrilled at the speed the barn purchase had taken. I guessed no chain either side saved a lot of time. I revisited the house with Danny and Joe—they were a permanent item and therefore stuck together—the day before the money changed hands. Sally, the owner, was tearful but also excited to be moving on with her life. I wished her all the luck in the world and hoped that she had a good lawyer. She showed me how the alarm system worked, the appliances that were being left in the utility room, the ovens, and hob. We stood outside on the patio and drank a cup of tea. She sighed, wiped a tear, and then we left. She, to her new flat, and me, to my old one.
“To new beginnings,” I said, finally raising mine.
Danny was moving into my old flat the following day. That night, I was to stay with Joe although Danny had offered his sofa. I’d pointed to my cast and explained that I wouldn’t be sleeping on a sofa, and I most certainly wouldn’t be sleeping in a bed with handcuffs and whatnots.
With our champagne drunk, they helped me to my feet, and I handed my glass to Danny. He took them to the sink, rinsed, and then left them on the drainer. I adjusted my crutches, and with Joe holding my handbag, I took one last look around before handing the key to Danny and then leaving.
“Are you sad?” Joe asked as I dabbed at my eyes.
“Yes, and no, of course. Thank you, Joe.”
“For what?”
“For the loan of the flat, the job, even if you didn’t really need to employ me, no rent for two years,” I said, with a laugh.
“Ah, but you kept my investment property nice and clean. I could have had squatters in there,” he replied.
He was the kindest person I knew and the one most likely to have the piss taken out of him. We walked, or rather, he walked, and I hobbled, down the road to his house.
“What’s going to happen with you and Danny?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He has job interviews lined up in London and Surrey. He has savings to live on, so he’s insisting on paying rent. Lizzie, he’s seriously intelligent, he has two degrees, so I don’t think he’ll be unemployed for too long. And, he told me, he has a whopping redundancy package to come.”
“Are you happy?” I asked.
“I am. It’s odd—how I feel about him is so very different to anyone else, including Rich, although I know now, it was just about the sex with him. Danny is different. Sure, he’s strange, but aren’t we all? Strange is good, right?”
“Strange can be good, yes. If you’re happy, that’s really all that matters.” I smiled at him as we approached his front door.
I was emotionally exhausted and physically drained. Hopping, constantly, was bloody difficult, and if I didn’t end up with some trace of stomach muscles by the end of the eight weeks I had to wear the thing, I was going to be mighty pissed off.
“I’m going to head to bed. I know it’s early, but I need to lie down,” I said.
Joe helped me to the bedroom and promised to return with a cup of tea a little later. I wasn’t aware if he did bring me that tea. Once I’d washed, changed into my PJs and climbed under the duvet in the spare room, I was gone. I woke a little before seven the following morning. I smiled—it was finally moving in day.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Joe sang as he brought in a fresh cup of tea.
He theatrically swished open the curtains, and the winter sun streamed into the room.
“It’s going to be a perfectly dry day,” he said, waving his arm for some reason.
“That’s handy. Nothing like moving furniture in the pissing down rain.”
He sat at the edge of the bed. “Now, I don’t want you to get all silly but, as soon as Danny is settled with a new job, I’m going to propose.”
I nearly choked on my tea. It was the most unexpected thing I could have heard that morning. “Wow, you feel that deeply?”
“I do, and I believe he does as well.”
“Have you actually asked him?”
“Of course,” he said, snorting his words in a way that would suggest that was a big fat lie. “Sort of.”
“Well, I’d be sure of how he feels before you do anything dramatic. Now, let me get dressed, and we can get over to the house.”
I was dressed casually, and even though my stomach rumbled to remind me I’d eaten very little the previous day and it believed my throat had been cut, the three of us piled into Joe’s little Mini.
“I need refresher driving lessons,” I said, remembering that I was completely screwed for getting about now I wasn’t up the road from Joe.
“You might just need to get behind the wheel. I’m sure you won’t have lost it all,” Joe said, not quite paying attention to me while he navigated the London traffic.
We chatted about my impe
nding driving lessons and all the terrible things that could go wrong. Danny and Joe laughed, they finished each other’s sentences, and I, rather shockingly, realised they were so similar. For as strange as Danny was, Joe was his equal. I chuckled. I remembered a time when he’d balanced a bucket of water on top of the door, ruining my new hairdo and soaking my carpet. I thought, not too fondly, of the time one Halloween, when he’d bashed on the back door of my house, covered in blood, with a knife in his side and real lamb’s heart in his hands. It had been midnight, and I’d been hiding from all the trick or treaters that targeted my street. It was such a shock that I’d peed myself.
“What’s funny?” Joe said, looking at me in the rear view mirror.
“I just remembered that Halloween when you turned up with a real heart in your hands,” I said.
“A what?” Danny asked.
Joe recounted the story of how I’d peed myself in fright, and I laughed when Danny reprimanded him for such an awful prank.
“No different to you having me…wait, no, you didn’t, did you?” I said, cryptically.
Danny turned in his seat. “Huh?”
“Lizzie thought Pat was dead on your bed, so she called Ronan to come and help her dispose of it. Ronan thought a person was dead on your bed and Lizzie was trying to dilute the body with bleach. I decided I wanted to see the dead cat, so I picked it up, it meowed, I dropped it, its eye fell out, and we had to glue it back together. And then we found out Pat was, in fact, alive and downstairs,” Joe said, so matter of factly that I screamed with laughter from the rear seat.
Danny looked between us. “His eye fell out?”
“Yes, when fake Pat meowed, I dropped it, its eye fell out,” Joe repeated.
For a moment I thought Danny was going to cry! The look that crossed his face was one of surprise, bordering on shock.
“Oh my God. You put his eye in the wrong way,” he said, and then he laughed. He laughed so hard that we all joined in and Joe had to pull over onto the hard shoulder of the motorway.
“No, we put his eye in so he was looking left, or was it right. Anyway, he wasn’t boss-eyed anymore,” Joe said.
“You…thought…Oh my God. You thought I’d had you feed a dead cat?” Danny could hardly get the words out. All I could do was nod in return.
“And you did. You pretended to feed the dead cat, all the while Pat was downstairs!” He screeched the words out. “Oh, Lizzie! I fucking love you,” he said.
Tears rolled down our cheeks, and my stomach hurt so badly.
“I thought you were pranking me. I was so annoyed with you,” I said when I was calm enough to speak.
“I bet you were. That has to be the funniest thing ever. Pat, according to the vet, not my diagnosis, was depressed because his brother had died. I had the bright idea of using the tools my uncle had left me when he died—he was the taxidermist—to…well, keep Pat happy.” Danny shrugged his shoulders. “Trust me. It’s not something I’m going to do again. I need to get rid of all the items in the spare bedroom, but I just can’t bring myself to throw them out.”
By the time Danny had told us about his favourite uncle, we were closing in on the village. Just ahead, I could see the first of two lorries that contained all my things. I was as much looking forward to reuniting and reacquainting myself with my life, as I was moving in.
Boxes had been labelled with the appropriate room the items had been taken from. I just had to tell the removal company which of the three bedrooms the ‘bedroom’ boxes had to be stored in. I opted to have them all placed in one, and I’d spend some time going through each one. There wasn’t as much as I’d originally thought. I had a sofa that was minuscule in the large living room, and a wooden dining table that looked completely out of place in the high-tech and modern kitchen. My bed fitted in, simply because it was a plain divan with a cream headboard.
It took only the morning to have the two lorries unloaded and off they went. Joe, Danny, and I started to unpack. We dealt with the kitchen first—that was the easiest. There was a large utility room, which I was thankful for because it proved to be a useful storage room for the empty boxes and packing material.
Danny headed off to find us something to eat, returning with two carrier bags of food from a supermarket he’d been directed to. I appreciated his thought. I was also pleased to know the supermarket delivered to my house.
My house. It seemed strange to use those words after so long. I took pictures that I sent to Maggie and was rewarded with oohhs and aahhs.
By the time the sun had set, we had some semblance of normality. What we hadn’t managed to unpack was stored behind closed doors.
“We need to get going,” Joe said, checking his watch.
“Thank you so much for helping me,” I replied, hugging them both.
I waved them off, and for the first time in a while, I was alone. I closed the door softly, and I just hobbled around, room to room, smiling. I loved the barn, and I immediately felt at home. I found a stack of logs in a small shed down the side of the house, and I lit the log burner. I sat on my sofa with a couple of wall lights on, and I sipped on wine. I raised my glass to my new life.
It took two full days to unpack every box and then rebox half of it. I had wedding photos and wondered why I’d decided to keep them. I didn’t want them, yet couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. I was left with four boxes that would need to be moved to the loft or the shed, and three boxes of items to be sent to the charity shop. I’d taken a taxi to Tesco and stumbled around with crutches and a shopping cart. Eventually, the Wi-Fi was reconnected, and I could order online. I stocked up on all the heavy items, bulk buying where possible, as I knew, until I sorted out a car, I wasn’t going to be attempting a shop on crutches again. I praised modern life when I was able to register for the doctors online, found a new dentist, discovered there was a beauty parlour in the village and made an account with a milkman. Country living seemed to make me keen to recycle more and cut down on my plastic use.
I had kept busy for the first week and then started to grow a little bored. It was the plaster cast that was keeping me confined. The weather wasn’t good enough to venture out into the garden, I was afraid of slipping over, my toes were only covered by a sock, and there was so bloody little I could do on crutches. I abandoned the crutches when I was indoors, sure that bones knitted pretty quickly, and I wasn’t harming my ankle by walking on the plaster cast by that point.
By the end of the fourth week, I was going nuts. Joe and Danny visited a lot, they stayed over, and it was wonderful to have their company, but I was lonely and hadn’t realised just how much I would be. I knew it was because I was restricted. Once that cast was off, I could walk to the green, and join the various clubs I’d been given leaflets about. I could drive to the supermarket, to London, and further out into Kent.
While I was confined, I thought more and more about Ronan.
Maggie and I had taken to calling each other, and I was always delighted to hear from her. She told me they had a new estate manager, the cottages were rented out, the students had been out and about, and the log cabin was finished for the art group. I could picture the spaces as she spoke about them. We still avoided talking about Ronan.
When it came time for the cast to come off, I was as excited as a child in a sweetshop. I declined the offer of keeping the cast and ignored the advice that I would be weak on that side. I slid too quickly from the bed I’d been laying on and stumbled sideways. The one thing I was over the moon about was being able to scratch my very hairy leg.
“Fuck me, you look like a yeti,” Joe had said as he watched the cast come off. “And it stinks!”
There was an unpleasant odour, and I was looking forward to getting into the bath as soon as I got home.
“Lizzie, can we talk about Christmas?” he said, as we climbed back into his car so he could drive me home.
“Yes! I meant to tell you. I think I might visit my mum and dad, do you mind?” I asked.
“I know. I haven’t seen them in ages, but they’re getting on. They wanted me to come.”
It was an out and out lie but judging by the look on Joe’s face, the perfect response to his question. Danny had let slip a couple of weeks back that he thought he and Joe were spending Christmas with his parents. They were desperate to meet Joe, by all accounts. Joe knew I’d be alone, and that would cause him anxiety. We’d spent the past couple of Christmases together.
“If you’re sure,” Joe said. “Maybe we’ll head up to Danny’s parents then,” he added.
I smiled as we continued on our way home. It was one month to Christmas, and I was looking forward to decorating a tree in my living room—to sit with just the twinkling lights for company. I wasn’t worried about spending the day on my own at all. In fact, I was quite looking forward to it. I would cook. I would sit at the table to eat and drink wine. I would watch the Queen’s speech, maybe doze a little, and I would sit with a blanket and more wine and cry at a soppy movie. I could walk to the pub. I could join the church choir on the green and listen to them singing carols. I could wrap up warm and take a walk through the woods—it would remind me of Ronan. I wasn’t sure, but maybe it was the same wood that connected our villages.
“Here you are,” Joe said as we pulled on to my drive.
Joe seemed anxious to get going, and I knew it was only to avoid the rush hour traffic.
I leaned over to kiss his cheek. “My new car comes tomorrow,” I said.
I had finally bought a second hand car from the local dealership, even though I hadn’t even test-driven it. The sales team thought I was mad, and many offered to take me out in their vehicles for practice. I had my lessons booked with the landlord of the pub.
“Fantastic! I wish I were going to be here to see it. Will you send me pics?”
I laughed and nodded. “It might be a pic of Harold in a bush,” I replied.
Limp Dicks & Saggy Tits Page 31
