Summer with the Country Village Vet

by Zara Stoneley

  He never came. Gran told her to forget him; he’d remarried. Her lovely bedroom belonged to somebody else now, and there was no going back.

  Amy never replied to her letters – her mother probably wouldn’t have let her visit their scruffy new home anyway. And the kids at her new school laughed at the way she spoke and wouldn’t let her join in with their games, turning their backs on her if she ever dared pluck up the courage to edge her way over to them. She gave up in the end.

  Life got better when she moved to high school and found friends. In the big impersonal city school she felt less alone, there were more people like her – struggling to find a place to belong.

  But she still lived on the roughest estate, in the scruffiest house. And she promised herself that one day she would have a decent job, and a house of her own. A clean tidy home, on a clean tidy estate where she felt in control, a home that nobody could take away from her.

  And the sacrifices had seemed worth it. Until now.

  How could this have happened to her? She’d done everything right, she’d worked hard, she’d had a plan – and had been discarded, thrown out because she was too qualified. Too expensive.

  She wiped the fresh tears away angrily. Except this time it was different. She was in control, she wasn’t some kid who had no say in the matter, and she did belong here. She did.

  She fished into the box that represented her time at Starbaston and pulled out a pen pot (empty), a packet of ‘star pupil’ stickers, a box of tissues, a spare pair of tights, an assortment of plasters, notepad and then spotted a slip of paper. Which had been placed so the eagle-eyes of the headmaster’s secretary didn’t spot it.

  ‘Can’t believe they did this to you, don’t know how I’ll cope without you Miss Crackers. Love Sarah x’

  The lump in her throat caught her unawares and Lucy crumpled up the note in her fist and hung on to it. It had been one of their many jokes, she was Miss Cream Crackers after little Jack, he of the hand-me-down uniform and mother with four inch heels and a scary cleavage, had declared on her first day at the school that ‘he could only eat them Jacobs cracker things with a lot of butter spread on them or they made him cough’ and did she make them when she got home from school?

  Jokes got them through the day.

  She didn’t know how she was going to cope either. The feeling inside her wasn’t just upset, it was more like grief, as though a chunk of her hopes, her future, had been torn from her heart.

  The cup of tea wasn’t making her feel better. Halfway through her drink the feeling of grief had subsided, but it had been replaced with something worse.

  She thought that she’d left the waves of panic behind – along with the spots, teenage crushes and worries that she’d never have friends or sex – but now they started to claw at her chest. She closed her eyes.

  She just had to breathe. Steadily. In, out, the world would stop rocking, her heart wouldn’t explode, she wasn’t going to die. Everything would be fine.

  She would think about this logically. Sensibly. With her eyes shut.

  The redundancy money would cover the bills for a while, but she urgently needed to find another job before it ran out. There was no way she was ever, ever, going to go back to living in that horrible neighbourhood she’d been brought up in. It hadn’t been her mother’s fault that she hadn’t time to keep on top of the house or garden, and that they could never afford anything new, but Lucy wanted her life to be different.

  Putting her mug of tea on the table, she flipped open her laptop. She wasn’t going to mess around, or waste another second.

  She’d show David bloody Lawson. She’d get another job, a better job, a job where the headmaster wasn’t a self-satisfied arse who didn’t give a monkeys about his staff or his pupils. Blinking away the mist of unshed tears she typed two words into the browser ‘teaching vacancies’, and hit the enter key with an angry jab.

  ***

  Lucy opened her eyes with a start. It was dark. One cheek was damp and plastered to her keyboard. She probably had an imprint of the keys on her face. She sat up slowly and blinked.

  The outside security light, which must have woken her up, went off and plunged the kitchen into darkness.

  She sighed and stood up, wincing as a pain shot between her shoulder blades. Her back felt stiff as a board, she had a horrible dry taste in her mouth and her hair was sticky against her cheek from either dribble or tears. Or both. So, life was going well. She’d only been jobless for a few hours and look at the state of her.

  So much for the no tears strategy, she’d failed there as well. But did crying in your sleep count?

  This would look better in the morning. It had to. Before falling asleep she’d looked at every conceivable (and inconceivable) teaching vacancy website and come up with a big fat zero. The trouble was, teachers were being laid off faster than they were being taken on. And even supply jobs were thin on the ground, as an increasingly large number of people (many with more experience than she had) competed for them.

  She looked into the biscuit tin. My God, had she really emptied it, eaten every single one, even the broken bits? She was going to be fat as well as jobless.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow would be better. She’d be thinking clearly. She’d find a new job. She’d be back on track.

  Chapter 1

  Lucy slowed the car to a halt. Did the satnav really want her to turn down this road?

  Turn left. Yep, it did. Turn left.

  ‘Okay I heard, but you’re kidding me?’ The stern voice didn’t reply, but her phone did. It buzzed. Maybe it was a last minute reprieve, the agency with a much better job offer back in civilisation.

  She picked the mobile up. No reprieve, more a reminder of her old job, the challenges that came with working in a city centre school.

  The life she loved.

  She suppressed the groan, and smiled. Didn’t they say the positivity of a smile was reflected in your voice?

  ‘Hi Sarah.’ She really didn’t have time to chat, but she knew what the classroom assistant from Starbaston was like. Persistence was her middle name. If she didn’t answer now she’d be getting another call mid interview.

  ‘How are you doing, babe?’ Sarah’s normal sing-song happy tone was tinged with concern. Okay, so maybe her megawatt smile wasn’t having the desired effect.

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  ‘Really? Then why haven’t you rung?’

  ‘Well no, well yes.’ Fine was relative after all. ‘I’ve got an interview, in fact I’m just on my way.’

  ‘That’s fab.’ Her words hung in the silence. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘I think I’m lost.’

  ‘You always were crap at following directions, babe. Why aren’t you using that satnav you got?’

  ‘I am.’

  Sarah giggled. ‘And you put the right place in and everything?’

  ‘I put the right place in and everything. It keeps telling me I need to turn left here for Langtry Meadows and it’s this tiny lane.’

  ‘Where? Lang what?’

  ‘Exactly.’ The back of beyond. ‘Some village not even my satnav has heard of. Oh God, I’m throwing what’s left of my life away.’

  ‘No, you’re not, you’re making a new one, a better one. Away from this stink hole and loser Lawson.’

  ‘But I don’t need a new one.’ She’d quite liked the life she already had. New house, nice car, job.

  ‘Yes, you do, Lucy. The old one’s gone.’ That was telling her.

  ‘Thanks for reminding me.’

  ‘You know what I mean, Loo. There’s something better out there. Believe me,’ she sighed dramatically, ‘lots of better things.’ But Sarah didn’t have a mortgage to pay, bills. She lived with her mum. ‘You’re the one that always tells me everything happens for a reason. I miss you, you idiot, but you’re better off somewhere else.’

  ‘I know I am Sarah.’ She gazed through the car windscreen. Right now all she could see were fields and it was making her fe
el uneasy. Not a lump of concrete, or even person, in sight. ‘But maybe not buried up to my armpits in cows.’ She had passed plenty of cows, and was pretty confident there’d be some in Langtry Meadows – if she ever found the place.

  ‘Better than being buried in this shit. We’ll be back in special measures while twat face is still busy working out which politician to invite over for dinner next.’

  ‘Should you call your boss twat face?’ Just talking to Sarah made her feel more positive.

  ‘You will never guess what he’s just spent a huge chunk of our bloody budget on.’

  ‘Probably not.’ Lucy glanced at her watch. ‘Not teaching staff, that’s for sure.’ She needed to get to this interview, seeing as it was actually the only thing between her and eating nothing but baked beans for a very long time.

  ‘A metal detector.’

  ‘What, for the kids to look for money?’ The parents would be battling to borrow it every weekend.

  ‘No, you idiot, a scanner type thing to check them on the way into school.’

  ‘You cannot be serious? Okay Starbaston is a bit rough, but the kids are still more into flicking paper planes than knives.’ She paused. ‘They’re kids, innocent.’ Well maybe not all that innocent. But…

  ‘But he doesn’t know that, does he? He’s a wanker. The man buys a frigging metal detector. In a primary school when he won’t even give us any more money for tissue paper and glue.’

  ‘Or teachers.’ Lucy couldn’t help adding that, and sounding bitter.

  ‘Aww babe, I know, he’s an arse. But that’s what I mean, there just has to be somewhere better than this.’

  ‘I know.’ Lucy sighed. ‘But am I ready to be buried in the countryside? I’m not brain dead, just redundant.’

  Sarah giggled. ‘So it’s a proper village, in the countryside and everything?’

  ‘In the countryside and everything, I think.’ It looked very countryside from the picture on the website. ‘If I ever find it.’

  ‘You can join the WI and bake cakes.’

  ‘How old do you think I am you cheeky cow? Anyhow I can’t bake to save my life, watching Great British Bake Off is the nearest I get to making a cake, I kill every plant I touch—’

  ‘Apart from cress heads.’

  ‘Apart from cress heads,’ she was good at that, she could grow cress in an eggshell or on scratchy green paper towels as well as any five year old, ‘and the only time I tried to knit I ended up cross-eyed with my needles knotted together.’ She’d thrown the whole lot in the bin and wondered how on earth she’d ever thought yarn-bombing was a sensible thing.

  ‘So you’re not doing an escape to the country, then Loo?’

  ‘I’ll be planning my escape out. I’m glad you’re finding this so hilarious.’ It was cheering her up though. ‘Anyhow I haven’t got the job yet, I’m just going for an interview.’

  ‘You’ll get it, they’ll snap you up. You go girl.’

  ‘And it is just a cover job for next half-term, so you can stop imagining me in a headscarf and wellies.’

  ‘Spoilsport. You never know, you might meet some phwoar farmer and want to make babies with him and breed cows and stuff.’

  ‘Sod off Sarah.’ She was grinning, she knew she was. ‘Thanks though. I love you.’

  ‘Love you too, babe. Let me know how it goes.’

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Don’t tell Lawson about this.’ Not that he’d even remember who she was.

  Welcome to Langtry Meadows. Lucy breathed a sigh of relief as she passed the sign, and checked her watch again. She’d made it, with ten minutes to spare.

  Not that it looked exactly promising. So this was it. Fields to the left, fields to the right, oh and hedges. And more fields. Shades of green she’d forgotten existed. Oh yeah, and cows.

  No. Be positive. She was having a new adventure. A nice, restful temporary job while she recharged her batteries, jiggled her life plan a bit, before taking the next step.

  She’d served her apprenticeship, sailed through her Newly Qualified Teacher year, been promoted and was soaring up the ranks heading for Senior Leadership Team and eventually Head and this was all just a blip.

  David Lawson would have never had her on his leadership team, he hated her. So she’d had a lucky break.

  A holiday in the sticks. Yep, that was how she’d have to look at it. A holiday. A six week break filled with spring flowers and chubby-faced village children.

  As the road narrowed she slowed down and felt some of the tension ease away. She had to admit that the second she’d entered the village even the hedgerows seemed prettier. The green was broken up with frothy white hawthorn blossom, and the grassy verges were sprinkled with yellow, pink and violet flowers. Something inside her lifted, and all of a sudden she felt more positive.

  The road narrowed slightly more, if that was possible, and then curled round to the left. She held her breath as she rounded it, gripping the steering wheel, half expecting to collide with a tractor coming the other way. But what hit her was something quite different.

  Lucy leant forward until her chin was practically balanced on the steering wheel, and stared at the scene ahead.

  She’d been following the winding country lane, concentrating on the road, for what seemed like miles, and now all of a sudden this had opened out in front of her, bringing an unexpected lump to her throat.

  The perfect picture-postcard village green.

  Ahead the road forked to the right and left, cupping the pond, green and cascading willow tree in a gentle embrace. Drawing up at the side of the road, she pulled the handbrake on and got out of her Mini, stretching out the kinks that had settled into her back and shoulders.

  Right now it didn’t seem to matter that she didn’t actually want to work in the countryside. She felt like she’d slipped Alice-in-Wonderland style from her own busy life, into a different world. Except in her case it was like being thrown back to her childhood. The good bit, before it had all gone so disastrously wrong.

  The happy times were just a cloudy, indistinct memory though, buried under the weight of unhappiness. And now she’d been forced back, into the type of world she’d happily avoided until now.

  The narrow lanes, with high hedges and dappled shade had demanded a level of concentration which didn’t mix well with the jitters that had been building in the pit of her stomach, and if she hadn’t been so doggedly determined to make this work she would have ignored her satnav and done an abrupt U-turn back to the safety of the city. But she hadn’t, and now she wasn’t quite sure if she was happy, or wanted to curl up and cry.

  She’d done a very efficient job of blanking out her early childhood and the village she’d grown up in. And now this blast from the past had knocked the wind out of her sails even more effectively than redundancy had.

  When they’d moved she’d missed her home, not the village. All her friends had gradually drifted away, apart from Amy, leaving her marooned on an island made for one. They’d stopped inviting her to their parties. Dad had said she was like her mum – a city girl – and would never fit in properly, but he’d make sure she was okay. Then he’d abandoned her too.

  She bit down on her lip. The week they’d left the village of Stoneyvale had been the worst of her life. She’d thought that being the only girl in the class not invited to Heather’s party had been bad. She’d run all the way home from school, then rushed up to her bedroom with Sandy, shut the door and cried into his fur until her face was all blotchy. But then it got worse. Two days later Sandy had gone, and her mother had taken her to a new, horrible place.

  She could still remember that feeling in the playground. The pain in her stomach, the ache in her throat. Knowing that Dad was right. Everybody hated her.

  There was a giggle and Lucy blinked, dragging her thoughts back to the present. A little girl, her arms wide like a windmill was chasing a duck across the green. A woman was watching her, and even at this distance Lucy co
uld sense the proud smile on her face. It could have been her, once, with her own mum. Before things had changed.

  Now, this gentle reminder of how it had once been was hurting far more than the gruesome thoughts that often interrupted her sleep.

  She didn’t want to go back to not belonging. To being the odd one out. She wanted to be that little girl again, happy, secure.

  The view misted over before her eyes and Lucy wiped her arm angrily across her face to get rid of the threatening tears, gulping down the upset that was bubbling up in her throat.

  Okay, maybe it wasn’t as simple as the picture she’d painted for Sarah, the story she’d sold herself. Working in a village wasn’t on her life plan for a purpose, and it wasn’t just down to promotion opportunities. It was down to control. Being able to live the life she wanted. Going forward not back. Not feeling shunned by a close community that didn’t like outsiders.

  The old familiar feeling of panic started to snake up from her stomach, wrap itself around her heart and throat, making it hard to breath. This was not the village she had been brought up in. She clenched her fists and tried to stop the trembling that was attacking her whole body. She’d gone from calm and admiring the view, to feeling agitated and out of control in seconds, which was why she never looked to the past. She had to get a grip.

  All villages weren’t full of small-minded petty people. They didn’t all hate people they’d decided weren’t good enough, didn’t belong. Places like this could be restful, pleasant, not bathed in an undercurrent of foreboding. She closed her eyes, counted slowly, willing herself down. Her mother had always been on edge back then, just before they left, expecting the worst, and that fear had grabbed hold of her as well. Leaked into the corners of her life.

  She’d never found out what that worst was, but whenever she thought of country life she thought of that. Unease.

  Lucy wanted to jump back into her car, head back to her nice safe home and the life she’d made for herself. The anonymity of city life. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t an option right now.

  She took a deep breath. It would be an option one day soon. This was just a temporary solution until she got life back on track. Which she would do. She wasn’t her mother.