by Abbie Walton
Kate slept in the next morning, as she almost always did. She didn’t have to be into work until just after eleven when she was on the lunch and afternoon shift. Frankly, she didn’t really have much reason to be up and about early and doing so usually only reminded her that she didn’t have much to do. She did leave slightly earlier that morning, though, as she had planned to pop into the Spa for another quick chat and update Liz on the previous night’s escapade, mainly to gloat over the fact that Colin had asked her out for dinner. She planned, understandably, to gloss over the truth that he had done so, at least in part, to apologize for accidentally forcing her into a muddy puddle.
But it turned out that she didn’t have time to get to the Spa in the end, because she spotted Fred Yates in his garden as she cycled past on the way down the hill. Normally, a cheery wave would have been quite sufficient as she went by, but Kate realized that there was an opportunity here, if she played her cards right, to do a bit of snooping about Colin. The trick was going to be thinking of a plausible reason to stop and then find a way of bringing Colin into the conversation. Fortunately, Kate was (not by her own choosing) quite an experienced barmaid and so she was quite used to making small talk off the top of her head and, at the same time, convincingly charming her customers into believing that she actually gave a damn about what they were talking about.
Fred, never missing a thing that went by his house in either direction, had spotted Kate arriving in the distance on her bike and had stopped his garden work momentarily to acknowledge her as she went by. However, to his surprise, instead of cycling past as he expected, she gradually slowed down and came to a halt right by him.
“Morning, Fred! How are you this morning?”
“I’m not too bad, actually. To what do I owe the pleasure of you stopping for a chat?”
“Well, I was a bit worried about you, to be honest Fred,” she lied.
“Really? Why ever would that be?”
“Well, I didn’t see you at the pub last night, Fred. Very unusual, that. You’re one of my best customers.” She was lying again. She quite liked Fred, but her best customers were those who drank four or five pints a night and left a healthy tip at the end of the evening. But Fred was buying this hook, line and sinker.
“I just wanted to check you were OK; that you hadn’t fell under a bus or something.”
“No, nothing quite like that, although the reason is probably almost as painful.”
“Oh? I’m sorry to hear that.” Kate was in full fabrication mode now.
“Lumbago,” said Fred simply, as if no other explanation was needed, nor was it.
“Ah…”
“It’s a bugger when it strikes. Right out of the blue it is, and then it’s gone again. I’m fine this morning. Hopefully, I’ll be back out again tonight to prop up your bar again as usual.”
“Very glad to hear it, Fred.” It was time to move the conversation along to her original purpose. She made a motion with her head to indicate Ashton House across the road.
“How are you getting on with your new neighbour, then? Keeping you awake at night with lots of all-night parties, is he?
“Not a bit of it. Quiet as a mouse, he is. Hardly see him at all most days.”
“Ha, I bet you find that a bit of a disappointment. Nothing to gossip about then, is there?
“Are you calling me a gossip, young lady?” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “Just call me your unofficial Neighbourhood Watch Scheme – always looking out for what’s going on for the good of the community. Any road, I don’t see him much at all, but there are people coming to the house almost every day, and more than once a day sometimes.”
“Really? I wonder why?”
“No idea, love. The odd thing is though that almost all of them are women, nice-looking women as well, I might add. Dressed up to the nines a lot of them. Each of them stays for a few hours - but here’s the really strange bit. They never seem to come out wearing the same clothes AND they always seem to come out with wet hair. Beats me, it really does. “
“Yes, that is odd, really odd.” Kate secretly wondered if these women were all arriving to provide Colin with a form of personal service that she would be far too embarrassed to mention to Fred. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t something she really wanted to think about.
“Anything else funny going on at Ashton House, Fred?”
“Hmm, not much. But whatever he is doing in that house is causing a huge amount of rubbish, that I do know. He put six bins out last week for collection – six! I live on my own, as you know, and I can barely fill one bin every two weeks. Still, it’s really none of my business, I suppose. As long as what he is doing isn’t illegal or hurting somebody, then I suppose it’s up to him, isn’t it?
“Yeah, you’re right. We’re just a bunch of nosy beggars, aren’t we Fred?
“Speak for yourself, love. You seem more interested in Mr. Love than I am, I reckon. You don’t fancy him, now do you?”
“Fred! What a thing to say! He’s not my type, if you must know. You know what these Southerners are like, don’t you? Bit too big for their boots and looking down on us simple folk. Give me a local every day.” She was, of course, lying again and doubly so. Colin was tall, handsome, charming and articulate, which was right up her street. As a rule, the locals were short, ugly, rude and could barely string three sentences together and she had long written them all off as potential candidates for walking her up the aisle.
“Anyway, I’d better be on my way or I will be late for work. See you later, Fred?”
“Aye, if my lumbago doesn’t start playing up again.” Fred shrugged his shoulders as if to say that his health was really in the lap of the gods these days.
Kate continued on to work, feeling quite content with life. Tomorrow was something exciting to look forward to – a nice meal at a restaurant was something she didn’t get chance to do much of these days, and of course it was a “first(ish) date” with Colin. Today seemed just like a regular day with nothing memorable in store. Wrong!
CHAPTER SIX: A CHANGE OF PLANS
The shift at the pub was completely uneventful. On the one hand, this was a good thing because it meant that nothing had gone wrong. On the other, it meant that it had been a really, really boring day, the kind of day were every glance of the clock advances the fingers by only five or, at most, ten minutes when you were sure that twenty or thirty minutes had passed. It was the kind of run-of-the-mill shift that made Kate question again what she was doing with her life. Question wasn’t really the right word as it implied that she had made a conscious choice to live the life she was living. As much as she hated to admit, if this state of affairs carried on, she was going to be one of those “Failure to Launch” people like in that movie a few years back.
She was an intelligent person, she told herself, with a qualification as well. She could do better. She must do better. She would do better, she resolved. But how, and where, to start? For the first time, Kate began to seriously consider the prospect that she might have to move away from the place where she had spent all of her life, except for the time that she had spent away at University, and even that was only just over half of each of those years. People did that all the time, move away in search of work, or in search of some kind of meaning and purpose to life, or even just for the hell of it. Perhaps she needed to move to London, the big smoke, where there were supposed to be a lot more jobs and opportunities. But was that really true? Would she just find herself on her own, with even more bills to pay, and even worse off than she was now? Better the devil you know, some people said. Maybe they were right. It was a bit ironic that Colin had only just moved in the opposite direction from London to here and he didn’t seem too thrilled about what he had left behind. The grass is always greener on the other side perhaps.
These were pretty serious thoughts to be having on a bike ride home and they were disturbed by the sound of a text message arriving on her mobile. Kate would normally have not bothered to get
the phone out of her pocket to read the text, because the entire trip home was uphill in varying gradients and any lost momentum was very hard to get back as she laboured up the slope. But this time, she didn’t recognize the message tone. Kate was one of those overly-organised people who had set up her phone so that she could tell who was ringing or texting her by the unique ringtone that had been attributed to it. Her boss had one, her parents each had one, and Liz did of course. Beyond that, there were three or four friends from University that she still kept in touch with now and again and that was about it.
But this was not any of their ring-tones; it was a general “unallocated” one. Very few people had her number and somehow Kate had so far managed to escape the pain and suffering of spam texts. So when the unallocated tone sounded, Kate immediately was curious as to who it could possibly be and took her right hand of the bike to fish for the phone that was in her pocket. Her phone was not the latest model so she had to press a few buttons to find the text message. It was from a number that she did not recognize at all…she scrolled down the message and soon discovered that the texter was none other than Mr. Love. She had forgotten that she had given him her number. Once she realized who it was, Kate was no longer concerned about maintaining her speed and came to a halt as quickly as she could and shuffled off slightly to the side of the road, just in case a car driver didn’t spot her and sent her into the middle of next week.
She found that she was trembling slightly for some reason and in a bit of a tizzy. She could not for the life of her get the little stand on the bike to work and she gave up in the end, letting the bike fall to the ground with a crash. What did Colin have to say?
The message was quite short and quite cryptic. “Change of plan. RU free tonight? Pick U up @7. Put your best togs on! CL.” Somewhat bizarrely, Kate’s first thought was one of surprise that Colin should descend to using that awful text-speak that she hated. She hated it even more when people used it on Facebook and even proper emails. She bet some people even used it when they were writing proper letters, for job applications and such. She hadn’t thought that would be his style, for some reason. Anyway, what was far more important was the content of the message. It looked as though tomorrow was now cancelled and replaced by something tonight instead? Presumably it was somewhere different than the Indian restaurant as Colin had asked her to dress up, something that really wasn’t necessary for the original location.
Fortunately, thought Kate, there was no other plan for that evening, other than watching the telly with her mum and dad, so there was no reason not to respond that she was, indeed, free. Kate had never been the best at texting, mainly through lack of experience, and was no match at all for someone like Liz who seemed to have bionic thumbs and could probably have written a text essay in the same amount of time that Kate could type a few words. Kate was even more hopeless than usual and she was all fingers and thumbs in her haste to type a message – the blasted auto-correct feature was doing her head in as well. She began to understand why text speak was actually a sensible idea – the less characters you had to try and type the better. In the end, she reluctantly decided writing in text speak was going to be the best approach and that the shorter the message was the better:
“OK! CU soon! KB”
As soon as she pressed the send button and got the confirmatory message that it had been sent successfully, Kate took a quick look at her watch. Yikes. It was going to be a race against the clock now. Colin would be at her house in about 55 minutes. By the time she got home, she would probably have only about 40 minutes to get ready. Although that seemed in theory to be quite a lot of time, she knew she had to have a quick shower, do her hair, select her clothes and do her make-up. It was going to be tight. By the time she got home, she was absolutely knackered, breathing heavily and dripping with sweat. In 40 minutes, she had to be transformed into a fragrant vision of beauty and poise. Fragrant? That reminded her that she needed to put on the posh perfume that she had got for Christmas. She had barely used it as there never seemed to be an occasion that merited it. Well here, surely, was the opportunity she had been waiting for.
Kate decided to pick out her clothes first, before the shower, as she wanted to make sure she didn’t leave the selection too late and find out that she hadn’t got a thing to wear. Underwear first. The bra was an easy choice; she had a fantastic underwired one that gave her a cleavage that any man would happily get lost in for hours. In fact, she had once accidentally dropped a peanut down there at the Christmas party at the pub, and there were no shortage of volunteers to help out with the rescue mission.
The knicker selection was a trickier decision though. The obvious choice was a G-string, of which she had a couple. But that wasn’t going to be the most comfortable option and Kate was absolutely sure that tonight was not going to lead anyway where her choice of lingerie would be an issue. Liz called her old-fashioned, but she was very firmly not a believer in sleeping with a first date, or a second date for that matter. So that meant she could choose a more comfortable undergarment, what Liz had memorably once called her “bloody granny knickers”. That was a bit unfair as it wasn’t as though they were saggy and baggy. They had a satin finish to them, rather than cotton, although she did have to admit that the cut was a bit on the “mature” side. Well, she wasn’t a teenager anymore!
The next question was stockings or bare legs? It looked like it was going to be a cooler evening, so bare legs would be a risky choice. Besides, here was a great opportunity to wear those seamed stockings with suspenders that Liz had bought her for a bit of fun. They would make her feel sexy, even though Colin wouldn’t be getting the full benefit of them. Of course, that choice meant that a skirt was logical rather than trousers. She opted for the new pencil skirt that she had only bought last week; she hadn’t even got around to taking the price off yet. That left the top. She dithered over that for a good five minutes for realizing that she was running out of time. In the end, she selected a white top which fastened at the cleavage – it was one of those tops that you had to keep an eye on to avoid an unexpected exposing but it really did make the most of her assets. Kate stood back and looked at the clothes laid out on her bed. She was going for a sexy, confident, yet relatively classy look. Had she achieved it? Well, it was going to have to do because there was no time for anything else.
She hopped in the shower and frantically massaged the shampoo into her hair. There was no time for conditioner. She rinsed out the suds as best she could while soaping herself down at the same time. Good enough. Out of the shower and in front of the mirror. Get dressed first or do her hair? Hair first, she decided – she could put it in rollers for at least a few minutes to give a bit of shape and body to her long, brown hair, otherwise it could end up looking like a frizz-bomb. She used the hair dryer to dry her hair and her body at the same time, the heat of the air on her nipples making her wince every now and again. This was not exactly a model for how preparation for a first date should occur, she thought to herself. Perhaps she should not have been so quick to agree to the switch of days. Well, it was too late to do anything about that now.
Her hair dealt with for the time being, she moved on to put her underwear on. The silky underwear felt nice against her skin. The bra did its usual heavy lifting in pushing her boobs together and up – not the most comfortable feeling, but the result was worth it even though unlike her mother (who joked that her bra size was now “38 Long”) the negative effects of gravity had yet to really get seriously to work on her chest.
The stockings needed some care as she knew that one stray fingernail would put a huge ladder through them and she didn’t have another pair. The suspenders also proved problematic because they were quite fiddly to try and attach and this was the very first time that Kate had ever worn suspenders, so she was guessing a bit as to how they were supposed to work. As soon as she thought she had cracked it, she turned around to look at herself in the mirror. “Pretty hot stuff, even if I do say so myself,” she said out
loud, more to try and bolster her self-confidence rather than it being out of genuine conviction.
Kate threw on the rest of her clothes, being as careful as she could be not to dislodge all the rollers from her hair as she put the top on. It was only then that she realized that, inexplicably, she had overlooked the most important element of any women’s wardrobe – her shoes. What sent her into a panic was that it dawned on her that she had never got around to taking her dressy shoes to the cobblers to get fixed. The heel of one had come lose, and was hanging on by a thread – she couldn’t risk going out with it like that and she didn’t have time to hunt through her dad’s toolbox in the garage for some superglue as a quick fix. She cursed her own laziness. There was some justification – there was no cobbler in town, so it required a special trip to Bridgemount, which was a round trip of about thirty minutes, depending on exactly when the bus decided to turn up in each direction. It wasn’t really such a long way, but the task never seemed urgent enough to get it done.
Well, there was nothing else for it. She was not going to borrow a pair of her mum’s shoes – she still had some self-respect left – so it was going to have to be the boots with the stiletto heels. It wasn’t the end of the world as they were a really nice pair. But they didn’t really match the suspenders – her sexy high heels would really have done them justice. There was no point in crying over spilt milk at this point. She just had to put it behind her and finish getting ready. As she thought of Colin, who would be arriving any minute, she envied men who could be ready in less than five minutes and still look fantastic. It really wasn’t fair.
