by Beth Moran
He reached down for more nails. I completely disregarded how his back muscles stretched the T-shirt. ‘Why wouldn’t they search my house first?’
‘Because kidnapping me would be more fun?’
He laughed then. A loud bark that made tea slop out of my mug when I jerked in surprise.
‘Fun. Right.’ He brushed off the dust from his hands, and picked up his drink. Taking a slow sip, he watched me, the smile still lingering in his eyes. ‘I’m not a spy.’
‘What, then? Holed up by yourself all day working on secrets. Are you an inventor? Or a computer hacker?’
‘What I am is late. This’ll hold for now, but you need to get a roofer to tile it properly. Thanks for the tea.’ He downed the rest of the mug, and left.
Still embarrassed by Mack seeing the state of the kitchen, and my makeshift food-preparation area upstairs, I decided to forego my morning walk to the Common and spend the day working on the cupboards and counter-tops. I lugged the fridge an inch at a time outside, dumping it next to the mattress, and began sorting through the stacks of pots and crockery, deciding what to keep and what could be sold. Scouring, sorting, dumping anything that was chipped, cracked or broken and plunging the rest in scalding-hot water turned out to be a great way to scrub away some shame at the same time. I kept going until my arms couldn’t lift another pan.
Had many of my thoughts drifted towards the cottage next door? Maybe. A little. Until I felt sick and tired of my mind’s refusal to stop wondering about him. I had ended up here, in a home unfit for livestock, friendless and skint, through wondering about a handsome face and clever repartee. I needed to learn some DIY skills, fast, so that visits from the mystery man next door could stop.
Only the discovery of another photograph succeeded in switching my thoughts to something less frustrating. My grandmother again, an enormous baby bump stretching her cardigan as she pressed her hands against her back. She stood, grinning, several metres in front of the cottage. There was a chicken pecking at the neat gravel path by her feet, to the side a vegetable garden, runner-bean vines wrapped around a row of canes. Overflowing hanging-baskets either side of the door.
Tears pricked my eyes as I gazed at the hopes and the dreams contained in that picture. The cottage had been a home, back then. Without a single weed or crack or smear. I propped the photograph up against the kitchen window, more determined than ever to make it a home once again.
Saturday, after a morning bustling with walkers wanting to make the most of the sunshine, I helped Sarah clean up the café.
‘Got any plans this evening?’ Sarah asked.
‘Um… a cosy night in with a book and a packet of crisps. Maybe a bath?’
I didn’t add that the book, a heart-thumping bestseller by author Hillary West, was curling from damp, the crisps would be my evening meal and the bath wouldn’t have any water in it.
‘Fancy a girls’ night?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been on one. What happens?’ I swiped the hair out of my eyes with one arm.
‘We’ll have a drink and eat pizza. Crank up my girl-power playlist. Discuss why we don’t need duds in our lives. Or, I dunno. Whatever you want. I’ve never been on one either.’
Another night away from Grime Cottage? Yes, please.
I cycled back to said cottage, hurrying past Mack’s side. Going straight upstairs to look for potential girls’-night snacks, I took a moment to realise that the bedroom was different. With a start, I spun around and stared, goggle-eyed, at the bedstead.
Or, should I say, the mattress on top of the bedstead. The thick white duvet on top of the mattress. The brightly coloured patchwork quilt on top of the duvet. The massive pillows.
I touched the duvet. Smelt it. Leant over and pressed my cheek against the pillow. Turned it back and found a crisp white sheet underneath. Climbed on top, my muscles trembling, and lay staring at the ceiling, tears trickling into my ears.
This was exactly what I was talking about. A man who said nothing to my face about discovering my circumstances, but broke into my house and made me a bed with a trillion thread counts and the scent of vanilla. Who was this man? Did he like me, or feel sorry for me?
Right then, I was finding it very hard to care.
I sprang awake several minutes later, jumped in and out of the shower, flung on a nearly clean pair of jeans and jumper and used my rested and refreshed muscles to power myself to the Common in record time.
I sat at the breakfast bar in Sarah’s little flat while we sprinkled cheese on homemade pizzas, chatting about nothing much.
Once we’d taken our glasses of wine to the squishy sofas, she got serious. ‘So, what about this bloke who broke your heart, then?’ Sarah counted the questions off on her fingers. ‘How did you meet? Why did you fall for him? How long were you together? Why did it end?’
I took a gulp of wine. ‘Do you want GCSE grades and medical history, too?’
‘Not unless it’s relevant. I’ll go first, if you want.’
I nodded. ‘I do want.’
‘Edison’s dad – Sean – wasn’t bad-looking before he turned into a slob, but reckoned himself to be a demi-god. And, being sixteen and an idiot, I believed him.’
She went on to describe how, after a turbulent, on-off relationship, she became pregnant, ditching her college plans and moving in with Sean in the hope that they could make a go of things. That lasted until the day Edison was born when, during a flaming row in the hospital, she told him it was over. With her mum’s help she just about balanced motherhood with working at her grandma’s café, becoming manager after her gran retired and moving into the flat. By that time, the food was ready. We ate in comfortable silence for a while before Sarah decided it was my turn.
‘Okay.’ I took a deep breath, and a large bite of carrot cake. ‘Richard was my boss.’
‘Oh, no.’ Sarah shook her head. ‘That is never going to end well.’
‘It certainly didn’t. I’d been a PA at the law firm where my sister worked for a few years, when he joined. He was the youngest partner, and all the clichés – charismatic, arrogant, flashy. He took about four months to make a move. I couldn’t believe the office hunk had kissed me of all people. So I didn’t protest about spending the next eighteen months sneaking around, meeting up in secluded restaurants, fumbling behind locked office doors.’
‘Yuck.’ Sarah grimaced. ‘Eighteen months?’
I puffed out a sigh. ‘I wanted to believe he really cared about me. I clung to every glimmer of hope: the expensive gifts; secret looks across the conference table; the times he called late at night because he had to see me; saying he couldn’t manage without me.’
‘But you wised up eventually.’
‘Yeah.’ I let out a laugh. Not a pleasant one. ‘Him proposing to my sister was a pretty good hint.’
‘Shut the front door!’ Sarah leant forwards. ‘What happened?’
I took a deep breath and told her.
A team from the office had spent two months working in Paris, on a big case. For reasons I now knew to be Zara’s evil schemes, I wasn’t part of the team, but Richard fabricated excuses for me to fly over a couple of times, and we were in contact most days about work. I’d never told Zara about my relationship, but we shared an apartment, so she must have at least suspected. When she decided it was time to snag herself a man, Richard was an obvious choice. I didn’t know what happened in Paris. But then a ring box arrived on the day of the office Christmas party, and the gossip quickly spread. Richard was going to propose.
‘And you thought… Flip, Jenny. That is so crap.’ Sarah took hold of my arm. ‘Hang on a minute, I’ll just check on Ed before you tell me the rest.’
She topped up our glasses on the way back, the buzz of wine after several weeks’ abstinence probably contributing to my ability to continue the story.
‘It all happened as you’d expect. Me, sweating in my best dress, trying to catch his eye across the room. Champagne, a speech about h
ow much this person meant to him, how he admired their ambition and the success they’d achieved against the odds. And, to clarify – the only odd my sister ever had to deal with was me. I stood there, a total fool, clutching my glass and grinning away, subconsciously inching closer to the front ready for my big moment. And when it finally came, and he got down on one knee…’
‘Wait.’ Sarah flapped her hands in disgust. ‘He proposed at the office party?’
‘It’s hard to explain, but Dougal and Duff is more than a workplace. It’s their whole lives. Like something out of a John Grisham novel.’
‘Remind me never to read one of those. I’m more of a Hillary West fan.’
‘I love her books. This was nothing like that.’ I pulled a tissue from the flowery box on the coffee table and blew my nose. ‘So, anyway. At first, I thought he’d got flustered, when he knelt down facing the opposite way. I even waved to get his attention. Which unfortunately meant I got a load of other people’s attention instead. He had eyes for one person only.’
‘You poor thing,’ Sarah whispered. ‘You must have been properly gutted.’
‘Weirdly, no. Not at the time.’ I shrugged. ‘As I realised what was happening, I saw Zara flick her eyes over to me, with this look, and something inside me, like, burst, you know?’
She nodded.
‘Twenty-eight years of jealousy and insecurity. That’s another story, really, but pressure to keep up with Zara led to a nervous breakdown when I was nineteen. And then I’d had to accept her handout job and spare room after screwing up my future. I’d lived in her shadow my whole life. Felt grateful when she passed on her barely worn clothes, or the rare times she let me sit in on her dinner parties. Worked my butt off in that firm because I owed it to her. Tidied, ran errands, apologised, bowed and scraped. And then she took the one thing I’d managed to earn myself. And, yes, I do know how wrong it sounds that I thought I’d earned Richard’s attention. So, basically, I flipped. Violence ensued, hair got yanked out, food tables toppled – and I broke her new plastic nose. The police were called…’
‘Wow. You got arrested?’
‘She decided not to press charges – for the firm’s sake, not mine.’
‘But you lost your job.’
‘Yep. And for obvious reasons, I moved out.’
‘It sounds like you’re better off here.’ Sarah gave my hand a squeeze. ‘I know me and Ed are better off having you here.’
‘Sure you don’t mind a violent criminal who beat up her sister working in your café?’
‘Are you kidding?’ She snorted. ‘You sound like a handy woman to have around.’
I wobbled back home at around half-ten, the bike’s lamp casting a weak silver glow on the path in front of me. The woods around were so dark that the black seemed to have texture – like treacle. I mumbled the rap we’d composed earlier about all the reasons we were better off single, but it made a poor job of drowning out the snaps and creaks of the forest, the rustles and hoots. I felt properly spooked by the time I reached home, and grateful for the soft yellow light peeking from the edge of Mack’s blind. I tramped upstairs, wondering whether, if I did manage to sleep in my lovely new bed, my dreams would be about the man who lived next door, and whether they would be dreams, or nightmares.
8
Sunday, after what had been quite possibly the best sleep of my life, my weary bones enjoying the mattress way too much to bother about where it came from, I asked Ellen if I could borrow her kitchen. She agreed, offering to provide baking ingredients if I borrowed some kids at the same time. This worked out perfectly, as my cash had dwindled to a miserably tiny amount, and I feared I might be surviving on mega-cobs and soup until my first pay day as it was.
That afternoon, ready as I’d ever be, I lined up my volunteers, wishing that sensible Dawson hadn’t excused himself to do homework.
‘Right, team. We have two important missions today. One big cake, not for you, and lots of little cakes, which you can keep.’
‘How many little cakes?’ Billy asked, ‘A hundred?’
‘A thousand?’ Hamish asked, jumping up and down.
‘A billion?’ Jonno squealed. ‘A billion little cakes! No! Three billion, one billion for me and one billion for Mish and one billion for Billy and one cake each for Maddie and Mummy and Daddy and Jenny and—’
‘That’s more than three billion already,’ Maddie said. ‘And don’t be stupid. A billion cakes wouldn’t fit in this house.’
‘It would if I ate them all up really fast!’ Jonno mimed shovelling cakes into his mouth.
‘Well, what about cooking them? The baking trays make twelve cakes each. That’s, like, millions of times we’d have to use each tray.’
‘So?’ Jonno frowned. ‘I can do it really fast.’
‘No, you can’t.’
‘I can!’ He lowered his head, prepared to charge.
‘Right!’ I put one hand on his shoulder. ‘We are making thirty-six fairy cakes, because that’s how many the ingredients will make.’
‘I don’t wanna make fairy cakes,’ Hamish said. ‘Wanna make monster-cakes.’
‘That sounds about right.’ I pulled Ellen’s apron strings a little tighter round my waist, wondering if a biohazard suit would be more appropriate.
Oh, boy.
Three utterly exhausting hours later, my pores clogged with icing sugar, having left behind three boys in the bath, a pile of very monstrous-looking cakes, and Maddie reading her microbiology book to calm herself down, I cycled carefully back home, balancing an old biscuit tin in the bike basket.
Reaching the cottage as twilight crept beneath the forest, I peered inside the tin, hoping somehow the effects of three rambunctious boys and their fretful sister would seem less prominent in the dusk.
No. I felt tempted to leave the squishy, lopsided, shall we say enthusiastically decorated lump on his doorstep and make a run for it. But that would defeat the purpose. Plucking off one of the chocolate fingers sticking haphazardly out of the top, I chomped it down, marching up to Mack’s front door.
Several knocks later, he warily eyed me on the doorstep.
‘Can I come in?’
‘I’m in the middle of something.’
‘A nap, by the looks of things.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘What do you want?’
‘I brought you this.’ I held out the tin. ‘I had some, um, help, so it isn’t quite how I planned, but it should still taste good.’
He looked at me, waiting a few moments before slowly taking the tin.
‘It’s to say thanks. And that, well, I really appreciate you fixing my bike, and lending me the saw, and sorting the roof, not hassling me about the broken window and everything…’ I was still too embarrassed to mention the bed. ‘But, as I said before, I’m fine sorting myself out. I don’t need help. I feel horrible that I won’t be able to pay anything back for ages. So, please stop.’
‘I had to fix the roof – it was damaging my office.’
‘Yes, well. That won’t happen again.’
He quirked one eyebrow. I ignored my pathetic fluttering heart.
‘It won’t! And I could have fixed it if you’d given me the chance.’
Mack leant on the doorframe, still holding the tin. I resisted the urge to poke his bicep and see if it felt as solid as it looked.
‘I could have! Look, I said I appreciate it, but I really don’t need help.’
‘I disagree.’
‘What?’ I spluttered.
‘Why do you have a problem with me helping you?’
Good question. How long had he got? ‘Because I want to do it myself! I don’t want to owe anybody anything, any more. I can manage on my own, and would like a chance to prove it. It’s weird, someone I don’t know giving me bedding. Some would think it’s extremely creepy. Fixing things without asking or even telling me! Sneaking into my house when I’m out. That’s not just creepy, it’s trespassing. How are you even getting in? How often are you s
neaking in? Are you rummaging through my stuff? Looking for valuables to steal in the Hoard? You clearly don’t like me. It’s weird. I don’t buy that Mystery Man stuff one bit. If I need help, I’ll take it from someone honest, open and respectful of my privacy, and me. Thanks very much. But no, thanks!’
I spun on my heel and stalked away. Mack didn’t follow me, which of course I was pleased about! But the next day, cycling back from the Common, icy puddles crunching beneath the tyres, morning coffee and banana in my basket, I found him leaning against the wall by my back door, all wrapped up in a thick jacket and beanie hat.
I watched him suspiciously. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’ He pushed himself away from the wall. ‘I thought you might like some cake with your coffee.’
I adjusted my glasses, trying to figure out his angle.
‘I can promise you it isn’t poisoned. I tested it last night, with no repercussions.’
‘Did you think it might be?’
His beard twitched. ‘I considered the possibility.’
My stomach, unable to face another mega-cob, rumbled loudly at the thought of that cake. I coughed, in a belated attempt to mask the sound.
‘Come on. It isn’t accepting charity, since you made the cake.’
I remembered the thick layer of creamy fudge icing, the smell of melted chocolate chunks, choco-balls nestling in between the chocolate fingers. ‘Okay. Thanks.’
He sat down at the picnic bench a couple of minutes later, with two slices of cake and a coffee for himself.
He also had a key, which after a while he took out of his pocket and pushed across the table. ‘I should have returned this earlier. But I didn’t think you’d be staying.’
‘A spare key?’
He nodded. ‘The guy I bought the house from used to keep an eye on Mrs Meadows. After she died, he kept hold of it in case he needed to access the other side. It seemed sensible for me to do the same.’
‘Okay.’
