We Belong Together

by Beth Moran

  I might have heard the echo of a giggle wafting in from the kitchen, but by then I was crying again, so it was impossible to tell for sure.

  My host found me much later, crashed out with my face stuck to the kitchen table. I woke with a start, followed by a yelp as my sore muscles protested at the movement.

  ‘Has my car arrived?’ I asked, once I’d accepted some painkillers and a glass of water, wincing with the pain of moving my head enough to swallow without spilling.

  ‘Yes. But… you really aren’t fit to drive.’

  ‘I’m not going far. I’ll be fine.’ What else was I going to do?

  ‘Ziva said you needed to be kept an eye on for at least the rest of the day.’ He took a small plastic bowl from the pile on the draining board, peering at it before giving it a wipe with a tea-towel.

  ‘There’ll be people there to keep an eye on me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where is this place, and who are the people there who can take care of you?’

  ‘With all due respect,’ and I owed him plenty of that, all things considered, ‘that’s not really your business.’

  ‘I think you’d best stay the night here,’ he sighed, lifting a banana from a bowl on the table and starting to mash it up, Hope banging out her anticipation on the tray of the highchair.

  ‘I can’t stay here!’ I mustered as much indignation as I could, given my current shambolic state. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’

  ‘I don’t massively want you to stay here, either. But you’re Charlie’s best friend. She invited you. I can’t let you head off in that excuse for a car when we both know that you haven’t a clue where you’re going.’

  ‘Er, have you considered that I might think driving a short distance in my recently garage-inspected car to a nearby Travelodge on the way to my parents’ house is far safer than spending the night in the middle of nowhere with a strange man whose name I don’t even know?’

  ‘Daniel Perry.’

  ‘Daniel?’ I repeated, as another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. ‘You’re Charlie’s brother.’

  ‘Well, yes. Who did you think I was?’

  ‘Hope’s father.’

  ‘I am Hope’s father.’ He took a seat next to her, offering her one plastic spoon to wave about while he scooped banana onto the other one.

  ‘What?’ My brain was too tired to process this.

  ‘I adopted her.’

  ‘So… does she have a biological father?’

  ‘Well, she’s not a clone.’ He bristled, clearly not comfortable with the conversation taking this direction. ‘Charlie never said who it was. I don’t think she ever told him.’

  He didn’t add: if she even knew who it was.

  ‘And you adopted Hope?’

  He shrugged, using the spoon to wipe up a blob of food on the baby’s cheek like a pro. ‘She’d been living here since she was born. I was hardly going to pack her off to social services.’

  ‘What about your mum?’ Charlie’s mum, Billie, who I’d met the few times she’d picked Charlie up from university, and with whom I’d exchanged anxious (me) and resigned (her) conversations a few times since.

  ‘She lives in Ferrington, now. She sold off most of the land and then married and moved out a couple of years after Dad died. She couldn’t fit a baby into her cottage.’ He paused, ran a finger absentmindedly down his scar. ‘She hasn’t been back to the farm since Charlie’s funeral.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I wondered how Daniel had managed it. Juggling work, grieving for his sister, dealing with the aftermath of such tragedy as well as a baby. No wonder the house was a shambles.

  ‘Charlie never mentioned that Billie remarried.’

  ‘She didn’t know until afterwards. Mum wanted a quiet wedding. No drama. Charlie wasn’t in a good place around then.’

  I did some mental calculations. Charlie’s dad had suffered a fatal heart attack not long after we started renting a flat together in London, four years ago. I was twenty-six. So Billie married when we were twenty-eight. I’d moved to a new flat by then. Charlie had left two days before Christmas and I’d given up waiting for her to come back (or pay any rent). I remembered a message on Valentine’s Day:

  Wishing my 1 true love a beautiful V-day, hope U get to spend it with someone special.

  I replied several times, messaging and calling to ask where she was and to let me know if she was okay. One reply arrived, a few days later:

  Yh I’m cool met a guy who got me a waitress job, bit mad out here but fun.

  That was the last time I heard from her until the final messages, sent just over a year ago:

  BACK AT THE FARM. WHY AREN’T U HERE?? PLEEEEEEAAASE VISIT. STAYING FOR GOOD THIS TIME. LOTS OF NEWS, I’LL EXPLAIN WHEN UR HERE.

  I’d sent a brief message explaining that I had work engagements booked out for several months ahead, but I’d see what I could do. She sent one last reply:

  EL I NEED U! It’s different this time. PROMISE. Please come whenever you can xxx

  But I’d grown tired of Charlie’s chaotic interruptions, hurtling back into my life, letting me down and disappearing again. Also, if I’m honest, because I’d become so caught up in my own life – which had morphed into something I’d never had foreseen – I never got around to it. Until now. When I needed her.

  I don’t know quite how or when but, without ever meaning to, at some point I had become a horrible, self-obsessed person.

  ‘So you’ll stay?’ Daniel asked, snapping me back to the present day. I considered this for a moment. Forced myself to acknowledge my aching limbs, bruised chest, the fog still clogging up my thought processes. Then I tried to picture setting off in the car and hunting for somewhere to sleep before I conked out at the steering wheel. I imagined the look on my parents’ faces when I showed up looking like this.

  Damson Farm was shabby and dishevelled, and a little bit dirty, if I’m honest. But this was Charlie’s home, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her yet. Something about this place had wrapped its arms around me and welcomed me in.

  Peace.

  I realised this later that evening, having managed a bowl of cheap tinned soup and more toast, before Daniel showed me to a bedroom where he’d left my bags neatly lined up against the metal bedframe.

  For the first time in forever, despite everything having turned on its head, despite the hideous threats, the turmoil and confusion about my career, I felt cocooned in peace. Maybe because for the first time in forever, I didn’t care about any of those things any more.

  No wonder Charlie had loved it here.

  It was only when I woke up the following lunchtime that I realised I’d never spoken to Lucy.

  4

  I have a secret identity, of sorts. More like a pen name, an alter ego? Except that for the past year this other me has adopted the physical face of my intern and friend, Lucy. It’s a long story…

  After graduation, I managed to get a job working on our local newspaper, the Cumbria Chronicle, earning a generous twenty pence an hour over minimum wage, making tea, running errands and completing all other tasks that nobody else either wanted or could be bothered to do. Other people who’d got themselves an English degree with a dream of becoming a journalist might have worked to make something of this opportunity – chased down stories, left anonymous articles on the editor’s desk, hustled and strategised and begged if necessary for that one big break.

  In my head, I was going to do all those things. Once I’d learnt a bit more, grown a little wiser. For now I was pootling along, helping out at the Tufted Duck to top up my income in order to afford luxuries like socks and petrol, and enjoying living in the most beautiful countryside in the UK.

  And then Charlie came to visit, and everything changed overnight.

  We had eaten out at a recently opened pub on the edge of the town. It was, to put it bluntly, outrageously terrible. The worst meal either
of us had ever eaten, served by the most incompetent staff. And then they had the audacity to drop a card on the table asking for an ‘honest review’ on the Windermere Community Facebook group, in exchange for the chance to win a free meal.

  Oh boy. The wannabe journalist in me was roused, fuelled by a nasty bottle of wine and my best friend. The review was most certainly honest:

  Having lived in Birmingham, my friend and I have enjoyed our fair share of delicious curries. We’ve also had a couple that resemble cat sick. The Gourmet Gannet provides the novel experience of a curry that not only looks like vomit, it smells like it, too. At least, we presumed the lukewarm plate of watery yet gloopy slop – a true scientific marvel! – was the curry my friend had requested. The waiter had previously tried to force a steak on her, insisting that my vegetarian companion had ordered it. ‘You must have got confused,’ he kindly suggested, scarpering away leaving the steak on the table. No, good sir, you’re the one confused if you think we’re accepting a charred lump of burnt shoe instead of the food we asked for. Poor chap, the whole debacle shook him up so badly that when he brought the alleged curry, he fumbled his grip and tipped the accompanying plate of undercooked rice into my friend’s lap. Which, no, was not cleaned up or replaced. Not that she wanted it to be, given that the scattered grains carried a distinctive whiff of rancid fish.

  But on to my food, arriving a mere seventeen minutes after the curry. I was tempted to ask if we could have the steak back. How difficult is it to create an inedible burger? Well, the Gourmet Gannet certainly rose to the challenge. Again, this left me questioning everything I knew about the science of matter, being both rubbery, gristly and mushy all at the same time. At fifteen quid, I wasn’t expecting Michelin star food. I was, however, hoping for something no worse than Ritzy’s Saturday night burger van. You won’t be surprised to hear that the chips were burnt on the outside, raw in the middle, and devoid of seasoning, or that the burger bun was both stale and soggy. I can’t review the accompanying ‘garden salad’, because I didn’t want to deprive the slug of his single lettuce leaf and shrivelled slice of cucumber. He seemed to be enjoying them far more than I would have.

  When I asked for tomato ketchup in an attempt to render the burger at least slightly edible, I was told, ‘We’re not that sort of establishment.’ That makes sense, considering flavour of any sort seemed to be not their sort of thing. either. I won’t bore you with the dirty cutlery or the sticky, dog-eared menus. Neither will I expound on the hairs stuck to the table, or the dead flies in the ladies’ loo. I won’t blather on about the diners next to us, whose beef and onion pie looked as though it had been dropped on the floor and scooped back up again, nor how when they complained the waiter told them that it ‘won’t make no difference to the taste’. Because that’s their review to give, not mine.

  But I will tell you that both my friend and I invented a game called ‘grubby waiter bingo’, including points for things like nose picking, crotch scratching and coughing on the food, and that both of us got a full house before the bill arrived. I tell you this, because it’s not a matter of opinion, as the manager helpfully explained was the reason we disliked the food, but of protecting the health and happiness of the good citizens of Windermere. Gourmet? I don’t think so. A Gannet running the kitchen? That might be an improvement.

  To my utter amazement, and Charlie’s utter delight, the review went bonkers. You could say viral, by Lake District standards. The Cumbria Chronicle editor called me into his office, not to fire me, as I’d expected, but to offer me a part-time job writing reviews for the paper, providing I continued with the humour.

  Back when I’d tentatively applied to study English at university, with the faint, flimsy hope that maybe one day someone would pay me to write something, I would have been horrified at the thought of mocking and criticising people’s livelihoods for a cheap laugh.

  But in the three years since graduating I’d had seventeen rejections for the novel I’d submitted to agents and publishers. All attempts at getting a different job with a less tenuous link to writing had failed. I was broke, bored out of my brains and beyond tired of getting up at 5.30 to cook a dozen breakfasts before going to work.

  And, more to the point, I was still sleeping in a room so tiny that even with bunkbeds, only one of us could move about in there at a time.

  Something needed to change.

  I tried to keep things kind, and fair, but the worse the reviews were, the more people loved them. Once a week I found somewhere different – maybe a backwater pub, or a flashy, up-itself brasserie. If the food was okay, I would say that, and then maybe throw in something amusing about a poor member of staff, or the décor. Perhaps how the menu struggled to cater for allergies. I would rope in someone else from the newspaper, or occasionally drag one of the Tufted Duck staff along on some made up pretext. Every few months, Charlie rocked into town and we’d blitz several places in one weekend. Often, I went alone, which led to me more than once being able to write about a slimy waiter’s attempts to hit on me. In the two years I wrote for the Chronicle, I wrote overwhelmingly positive reviews. I worked hard to find fantastic places to feature as a counterweight to the few necessarily dreadful ones. The first great article was for a restaurant specifically set up to provide training and jobs to those with learning difficulties. The food there was outstanding. Following my review, they were able to open a second restaurant in Kendal. Another was a couple who had a buy-one-share-one scheme, providing a meal for a homeless person for every meal paid for, along with cookery and gardening classes for clients of local foodbanks. One bakery was just so delightful I couldn’t find a single bad thing to say about it. A café run by a Somalian couple who’d arrived as asylum seekers a decade earlier was similar. I also gave a fabulous review for the breakfast at the Tufted Duck. Over the months, their popularity grew. Restaurant owners knew that a positive review would see an immediate increase in custom, and the token ‘although I was somewhat disappointed by…’ mention became like a local in-joke, whereby readers knew if the worst I could come up with was a dodgy ceiling tile in the toilets or a rude fellow diner, then the place was excellent. The power was overwhelmingly terrifying and addictive at the same time.

  And then a national newspaper called.

  Three weeks later I was living with Charlie in Crystal Palace. I had a blog, Twitter account and Instagram set up and an actual company credit card. They also insisted on a name, rather than ‘The Phantom Food Lover’ as I’d been in Windermere. Nora Sharp was born, and she hit the ground running.

  Within a year or so, Nora had branched out into events. I started getting invited to book launches and award ceremonies, slipping about undetected in my uninspiring outfits with my boring hair and make-up, pretending to be someone’s assistant if anyone bothered to talk to me. My followers grew from the hundreds to the thousands, and within a couple of years had reached the tens of thousands. Despite increasing pressure from my editor to focus on the negatives, as again that received by far the most interest, I tried to maintain my balanced approach, keeping the ‘although I was somewhat disappointed…’ section short and as sweet as I could get away with. I even started a blog, as Eleanor Sharpley, writing unfailingly glowing reviews to counteract every negative one the paper printed. Yet despite my efforts, even going so far as to have Nora endorse it, no one was interested in reading it (apart from my parents and grandma, who thought this was my real job). In the meantime, Nora continued to thrive in direct correlation to how heavily my articles were edited to maximise the criticism and downplay the praise. My new editor asked me to launch the YouTube channel, right about the same time that Lucy contacted me asking to be my intern.

  And that was when things really started getting crazy.

  Having charged my phone overnight using the one yellowing socket in the room and a charger borrowed from Daniel, I quickly scrolled through the Nora Sharp social media accounts. Lucy had added a fairly innocuous tweet and Instagram post about Nora looki
ng forward to a restaurant opening later that week. I checked my emails, but nothing urgent had come in since I’d last checked on Thursday evening.

  I called Lucy. I wasn’t about to let her go over the phone if I could help it, but I could at least schedule in a video chat for later on (once I’d changed into a decent top and fortified myself with some breakfast).

  The call went straight to voicemail. I left a brief message telling her I’d gone away for a few days and asking her to call me as soon as possible, following up with a WhatsApp for good measure.

  I also needed to speak to my editor, Miles Greenbank. I definitely needed some caffeine before that conversation, however, and my first attempt at getting out of bed made it clear that I needed painkillers before I could go and get a coffee.

  It took me a long, drawn-out, agonising eternity, peppered with yelps of pain and more than a few tears before I was out of the tiny bed and on my trembling feet. Having made it this far, I thought it best to press on, shuffling the short distance to the door and across the hallway to the bathroom. Eyes scrunched to slits, I did what I needed to do while avoiding looking at the rust, the mould or the cobwebs, and hobbled back to bed. I was still figuring out how to climb back into the bed, when there was a soft tap on the door.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello,’ I croaked back.

  ‘Am I all right to come in?’

  Considering the events of the past couple of days, this was not a time to start worrying about pride. Or appearances. Or how badly my breath stank, given that I’d not had the energy to bother brushing my teeth. Daniel came in carrying a tray bearing a mug of tea, a sandwich and another dose of pain medication. He paused, frowning at me slumped against the bed on one elbow, ratty hair falling over my face like a witless old crone, before dispensing with the tray and backing out of the room again.