by Beth Moran
It turned out to be significantly less exciting, and far more depressing, than I’d anticipated.
‘We got married four years ago, six months after meeting at a conference. Both in the same industry, both sharing this dream of working from home, in a cottage in the woods. She chose Sherwood Forest. Had this Robin Hood thing going on since that old film.’
‘Prince of Thieves or the Disney fox?’
Mack looked at me sternly.
‘Sorry. Not important. Carry on.’ I took a sip of wine.
‘We bought the house straight away. I liked it here. She didn’t. My career took off. Hers didn’t. She got resentful, bored and finally went back to London.’
‘I find it hard to believe you didn’t follow her.’
He grimaced. ‘Oh, I did. Stalked might be a more appropriate description. But she wasn’t having any of it. And neither was her boyfriend.’
‘Ouch. So, you came back?’
‘I did.’
‘So why had you planned to see her this weekend?’
He topped up our glasses. ‘She emailed me. The day after we met Brenda.’
‘Ah.’ I tried not to let what I was thinking show on my face. What I was thinking was not very nice. Particularly considering it was pretend-Christmas.
‘And, given my career’s currently in the crapper, that solves the jealous and bitter issue.’
‘Your wife was jealous of you?’
‘Yeah.’ He sighed. ‘She wasn’t perfect. But it was a tough time, moving up here. We barely knew each other, really. No social life, no career. She’s not exactly the Yellow Mickey’s bingo type.’
‘Still though—’
‘No. No still. The only still is that she’s still my wife. We’re still married. I take that seriously. I take the vows I made seriously. If there’s a chance we can make it work, I have to try. This is bigger than my ego or where we live or the mistakes we’ve made. Better or worse. As long as we both shall live. I meant it.’
‘I don’t know a lot about marriage.’ I pulled a face. ‘But for it to work don’t both parties have to mean it?’
Mack was quiet for a few moments. A wave of grief passed over his face, so raw and desolate my heart ached. ‘She invited me to visit her.’
‘Well.’ I sucked in a deep breath, stuck on a big, cheery fake-Christmas smile and lifted my glass in a toast. ‘To your marriage. Sorry you had to spend today stuck here with me. I really wish you all the best.’
We clinked glasses. ‘Why don’t you give her a call while I clear up?’
And with that, I swiftly scuttled back into the friend zone. And I was not complaining. I didn’t have a lot to compare him to, but Mack was turning out to be an awesome friend.
That evening, having drunk probably more Baileys than was wise, following several hours of films and a nap on the sofa, and Mack’s brief conversation with his wife, my Baileys-soaked brain decided to show Mack the wedding invitation.
It was worth it just to see the haunted creases on his face lift. When he reached the section on guest etiquette, he even laughed. ‘Who are these people? Please tell me you aren’t going to this spectacle.’
‘That—’ I pointed to one of the photos of Zara ‘—is my twin sister. And that—’ pointing at another photo ‘—is my ex-secret-boyfriend, who was also my boss. So, yeah, I’m going.’ I took another slurp of Baileys. ‘And I told them you’re my plus one.’
‘What?’ Mack gave me a sharp look.
‘Not that I was really going to ask you to come! But Martha Marsh needed a name and I panicked. Because, really, was I going to admit that I didn’t have a date? Particularly given that I’m hardly going to pass by unnoticed, thanks to the whole breaking-the-bride’s-nose-at-the-engagement-party incident. And, like I mentioned before, no friends. So I told her my plus one was Mack Macintyre.’
‘Hang on, let me get this straight. You were in a relationship with your boss, who is now marrying your twin sister?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you broke her nose.’
‘It was plastic. Less robust than bone.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I need a black-and-white, high-res photo of Mack Macintyre by Wednesday. My plan was to send a random photo off the Internet and then have him suddenly get a horrific stomach bug on the day. But Martha Marsh is already suspicious. I bet she’ll do a search and find out I’ve made the whole thing up.’
‘You did make the whole thing up.’ Mack frowned. Then he looked at me, and his eyes glinted silver. ‘I think Mack Macintyre needs to come with you to this wedding, Jenny.’
‘Yes, I’ll send him a text, shall I? Join Sarah’s dating agency and hunt down all the Mack Macintyres until I find one who’ll be my plus one? I can’t bring just anyone. It has to be someone… reasonable.’
He waited for me to get it.
‘You aren’t coming with me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because as soon as the road’s clear you’re driving your wife’s Mini to London. I don’t think she’d take kindly to you hopping off to Scotland with me a few weeks later to be my wedding date.’
‘Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but—’
‘However, if you have any photos, that would be great. Then I can tell them you’re sick, and if everyone spends the whole day thinking I made up a boyfriend, well, I’ve spent more humiliating days.’ I flopped back onto the sofa cushion.
‘Really?’ He looked at me, eyes wide. ‘I’ll swap you a photo for hearing about one of those even more humiliating days.’
‘Okay, deal. But if you really want to hear stories about a woman at her most pathetic, that says more about you than it does about me.’ I rolled my eyes, then elbowed him in what I hoped was a friendly manner. ‘But thanks for offering. That was incredibly kind of you.’
‘Why are you going? Wouldn’t it be easier to stay away?’
‘Yes. But I’m trying to stop taking the easy way out. And I want to talk to my mum about something. Believe me, this will be less torturous than visiting her. Even if I could afford it. Which I can’t.’
‘This something must be important. Can you tell me about it?’
And that took us on to a whole other topic of conversation. Which made us hungry, so we ate cheese on toast and made hot chocolate. And before I knew it, it was one in the morning, my pretend Christmas birthday had finished and Mack now knew my whole life story.
It was only after he’d dragged himself home, and I’d tumbled into bed, I realised I still didn’t even know his last name.
Presuming it wasn’t Macintyre, of course.
27
The only contact I had with Mack over the next week was an emailed picture on my phone. I clicked open the attachment and every nerve in my body sprang to attention. He looked like Mack, but not Mack. Healthy and happy and fun and alive. As if this were the real Mack, and the man I’d met was just the old exoskeleton floating about. A professional shot: he looked slightly off-camera, eyes crinkling as if someone had caught him about to burst out laughing. His beard a faint shadow. Posture relaxed, chin up. This was either a very ancient photo or I was looking at Mack pre-broken heart.
Wowzers.
I wanted to kiss him and slap his stupid, selfish, ungrateful wife round the face.
A message accompanied the attachment:
Thanks for Christmas Day. Your stories were a perfect distraction. Still smiling every time I think about you wrestling your sister onto the buffet table.
Mack Macintyre.
I made that sad, solitary, lovely man smile.
He had been thinking about me.
Yes, Jenny. He said it himself: you are a distraction.
I walked to the Camerons’ house that Friday for a significantly scaled-down, late birthday celebration. I would have driven the Mini, but it had gone.
No bouncy castle or pass the parcel, and Dawson was sleeping over at Lucas and Erik’s, so the magic show would have to wait, but a ba
rbeque with my new friends, sitting out under the stars with a glass of Prosecco and a fudge cake topped with birthday sparklers, a choreographed alien koala fight as entertainment and smashing a bacterium-shaped pinata to smithereens was by far my second-best birthday celebration ever.
I didn’t even wonder for too long how my twin had celebrated our birthday. Or felt too sad that she would not have been wondering about me.
Inevitably, word had spread about the Beast of Middlebeck. Everyone at the party wanted to know if it was true, I’d been attacked. Chased? Fought off a would-be abductor?
At one point in the evening, Fisher slithered up. ‘The Beast of Middlebeck, eh?’ He winked. I managed not to vomit up one of Kiko’s delicious sushi rolls. ‘But, of course, an intelligent young woman like yourself wouldn’t be bothered about nonsense like that, would she?’
A prickle ran up my spine. I felt a lot more bothered by Fisher turning up uninvited to my party and breathing alcohol fumes in my face.
‘You don’t seem the type to get spooked when in the woods alone, wondering what’s hiding behind every tree. Who or what is following you home.’
‘Excuse me.’ I took a step away. ‘I’m going to talk to someone else now.’
He snickered.
I turned around. ‘You underestimate me if you think kids mucking about could drive me away from my grandmother’s home.’
Fisher’s eyes narrowed. Flabby lips still curled in a smirk. ‘Kids? Are you sure about that? My offer’s dropped by five grand, by the way.’
I left him and his slimy grin to it.
The next day, despite being so knackered I felt full of sand right up to my eyeballs; as soon as I got up I headed to the attic.
Rummaging around in a sweltering hot, filthy attic, the only light an old camping lamp, was not a pleasant way to spend a day.
Disintegrating bin bags full of mildewed clothes and bedding, boxes rotten and mouldy, the contents a black, stinking mush. Animal droppings, a bird skeleton, spiders running for their lives every time I moved anything. It was all heading straight to the skip pile. Until I found a metal box, about one by two feet, rusted and bent with age. When I brought it into the light for closer inspection, I could see what appeared to be a hardback notebook through a corroded crack.
The box was locked, of course. But I had about a thousand hairgrips. However, after spending thirty minutes scanning videos on amateur lock-picking, I discovered the keyhole was so full of rust I couldn’t get the pin in properly.
I tried banging, stamping, throwing the box down the stairs and prising it open with a screwdriver. Nothing was going to get that box open save a blowtorch – which would destroy the contents – or perhaps a tiny saw, one of the only objects on planet earth not found in the Hoard so far.
I left it on the kitchen worktop, making a mental note to ask either Jamie or Mack if they could help, whichever one of them I saw first. It might well be nothing, anyway. A book of accounts, or my mum’s maths homework.
In the meantime, I had leftover party food to eat and my good deed for the day to complete. The Camerons had given me a laptop as a birthday present. And no matter how many times Ellen tsked that it was only small, cheap, and nothing worth crying about, I felt as though they’d given me a window to the world.
Fortified with a plate of mini-quiches and a huge dollop of dip on one side, I fired it up, clicking impatiently through to the Internet.
Four hours, one accidental snooze with my face plastered on the keyboard, a dangerous number of canapés for any one woman to consume and a million hits of the delete key later, I had finished.
Without a scanner it looked disappointingly rough – the laptop camera was okay but the comic pages were obviously photographs – however, the Squash Harris website was up and running.
I started the publicity campaign by emailing Kiko and Sarah a link, with a note saying I thought their kids might like it, and why not leave a comment if they did. And then I couldn’t think of anything else, so, too tired to bother climbing the stairs, I rolled up in a blanket on the sofa and conked out before I could worry about where all those attic spiders had run to.
The first thing I did when I woke up, after trying to get blood back into my right leg, was to check the website. No comments. None at lunchtime, or that evening after a day of hauling decomposing bags and boxes of gunk down two flights of stairs into the garden. I spent the rest of the evening researching how to get traffic onto websites until my eyes were too blurry to read the screen any more.
By Monday morning there were still no comments.
I barrelled up to Kiko in the playground, giving the tiniest nod to ‘hello’ before launching straight into it: ‘Did you read the comic?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The link I sent you. Squash Harris.’
‘Squash what?’
Hannah threw her stuffed rabbit out of the pushchair and into a puddle. I waited for Kiko to retrieve it, shoving it into a carrier bag while Hannah wailed in protest.
‘Never mind.’ I turned and started to trudge away.
‘Wait!’ Kiko skidded up next to me with the pushchair. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been sort of distracted.’
‘You seemed a little twitchy at the barbeque. I thought it was because Adam was there.’
Adam had managed a whole two hours of the party. Having built him up in my head as a thoughtless, neglectful dud who took his wife and kids for granted, I had been surprised by his open face, easy nature and the way one hand had stayed glued to Kiko’s back the whole time.
Kiko’s face dropped. ‘Yeah. He was really nice. He even let me have a lie-in.’
‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’
She flicked her silky fringe out of her eyes. ‘He’s been working nearly every hour since. I think the only thing he’s said to me is, “Sorry, something came up.” And, “Where are my keys?’’’ We left the playground and started across the green. ‘I have better conversations with Hannah, and she can only say five words. I’m so lonely, Jenny. It’s lonelier with him there than when he’s away.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I wrapped one arm round her as we walked. ‘Let me buy you a doughnut.’
‘That sounds awesome, but I can’t.’ She straightened up, tilted her chin. ‘I’ve got packing to do. Preparations to make. Flights to check in.’
‘Are you kidding me?’
She sucked in a huge breath, eyes boggling. ‘I’ve booked the base-camp trek. I leave on Friday.’
‘What did Adam say?’ I asked, when I’d picked my jaw back up off the muddy pavement.
She looked at me worriedly, biting her lip.
‘You haven’t told him!’
‘He hasn’t asked.’
‘Not a normal question to ask, is it? “Oh, by the way, are you planning any trips to the Himalayas in the next week or so?”’
‘No, but, “How are you?”, “What have you been up to this year?”, “Why are there piles of outdoor gear in the utility room and a suitcase on the bedroom floor?” are.’
‘You have to tell him.’
‘I will. It’s all in the instruction manual I’m putting together. Which he’ll find in the freezer, on top of all the meals I’m leaving him. It’s three weeks. His parents will be around to help out so he can get some work done. What’s the worst that can happen?’ At that, she let out a huge hybrid snort-sob, gripping onto the pushchair so tightly I thought the handle would snap.
I gave her a squeeze. ‘They’ll be fine. Me and Sarah’ll keep an eye out.’
‘Keep an eye out on what?’ Sarah asked, back to doing the school run now her mum was around to open up the café.
‘Give me one of Jamie’s caramel doughnuts and I’ll tell you. Kiko’s got packing to do.’
‘You are kidding me.’ Sarah’s face broke into an enormous grin.
‘That’s what I said.’ I steered her towards the Common. ‘And afterwards you can leave a lovely comment on the comic-book website I told you abou
t and which you so rudely ignored.’
28
The Christmas Book Club Challenge met that Friday. Kiko wasn’t there, having phoned Adam from the airport to say, ‘Please pick up the kids from school, and by the way I’m not coming back for three weeks.’
I decided to cycle, daring myself to face the journey home in the dark. Brenda had confirmed there’d been no further signs of anyone making mischief. With the word spread that the police were keeping an eye out, the Beast of Middlebeck was sure to have gone to ground. Or back to harassing imaginary people on his Xbox, according to Brenda’s professional opinion. Given that the Mini was still gone, and for all I knew it was never coming back, or if it did then its rightful owner might well come back with it, I felt determined to get back out there alone without the need for a chaperone.
I arrived just as Ashley drove up, Frances in the passenger seat. Frances wasn’t driving as, she said, ‘The medication those meddling doctors have put me on is clogging up the messages from my head to the rest of me.’ The way she jerkily climbed out of the car and leant on her cane as she plodded inside made my heart weep.
We knew it wasn’t the pills making Frances tired, or slow. She had been slender when I met her back in January, but the hollows in her cheeks and the wrist-bones jutting out of the end of her jacket sleeves revealed what brave words and a spunky attitude tried to conceal.
‘Did you go on the camel-trek?’ Ellen asked, avoiding the obvious.
‘I did.’ A hint of a twinkle returned to Frances’ bleary eyes. ‘It was quite possibly the most uncomfortable, ridiculous thing I’ve ever done. I almost met my match with that ugly great brute they put me on.’ She showed us a photograph. ‘Reminded me of my Great-Aunt Jocelyn.’
She described to us what it had been like, bumping along the trail. ‘I will tell you this, though, I felt rather like a queen. Which was some consolation for all the bottom bruises.’
‘So, is that the end of your adventures?’ Ashley asked, unable to keep the hope out of her voice.
Frances glowered. ‘I’m not dead yet!’ She broke out into a fit of violent coughing, leaving the rest of us exchanging worried glances.
