We Belong Together

by Beth Moran

  ‘Becky?’ Daniel nodded around his mouthful of pizza. ‘Ziva mentioned she’d left her job, was around a lot more. You know, in passing, once or twice,’ he added, eyes sparkling. ‘Just in case I was interested.’

  Oho! ‘And are you?’ I asked coyly, hiding behind a sip of raspberry lemonade.

  ‘I am not. Everyone knows that Becky Adams has been in love with the same man since primary school. And it’s not me.’

  ‘So who is it, then? Does he know?’ Now this was interesting. And if everyone knew, it wasn’t even gossiping.

  ‘Luke Winter. He’s heard the banter, but doesn’t really believe it. Brushes it off as a childhood crush. Becky’s intimidatingly successful, has spent the past few years jetting around the world with her job. She was one of the popular kids at school. Popular because she worked hard to make sure that people genuinely liked her, not because they were scared of her not liking them. She was always looking out for everyone, especially those who didn’t quite fit in. She could throw a wicked spin ball, too.’

  ‘Sounds like Luke doesn’t know what he’s missing.’ I helped myself to another slice of garlic bread. Nora Sharp would have given this grease-riddled feast a 0.5 out of ten, pronouncing that the rats wouldn’t bother scavenging it out of the bin. Eleanor Sharpley, after a day of positively frenetic activity compared to the recent slump-fest, declared it perfectly delicious.

  Daniel shrugged. ‘He works as a tradesman, has never lived anywhere but Ferrington. Spends every Friday night with a pie and a pint at the Boatman and isn’t interested in anything different. Rumour has it he won six figures on the lottery a couple of years ago and apart from buying a couple of tools and a new fishing rod, he gave the whole lot away. He’s not exactly… your typical ladies’ man. But he was the first person I called when Charlie went missing, and he was the last one to stop looking. It’s obvious to everyone but Luke why Becky’s smitten.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Ziva steamroller them together?’

  ‘Oh, because Luke grew up on the New Side of the river.’ Daniel offered me the last piece of pizza. I wrestled with being polite, but instead picked up a knife and indicated that we’d share it.

  ‘What does where he grew up have to do with anything?’ I asked, deliciously stuffed to the brim. Was the New Side of the river some sort of local double entendre?

  ‘Round here, which side of the Maddon you grew up on means everything.’

  ‘So, what side are we?’ I asked, baffled, but before Daniel could answer the whiffles and squeaks that had been intermittently emanating from the baby monitor crescendoed into poignant cries, and Daniel went to investigate, leaving me wondering if every baby that cried in the night sounded like their world had come crashing down, or just those who’d lost their mother.

  7

  The next day, Hope came to visit me at eight. Daniel knocked and waited for me to get up and answer the bedroom door this time. ‘I thought I might go for a quick run before I drop Hope at Mum’s, if you don’t mind watching her?’

  I wouldn’t mind watching you. That thought, unbidden, got smacked back down into the secret depths where it belonged. Daniel suited the fitness look, and a man holding a baby while dressed in running shorts and a hoody seemed somehow extra appealing. But that would be a mixed-up, complicated place to head towards, even if I hadn’t just come out of a relationship. Or was hiding my secret, shameful identity. Or was on the run from a vengeful stalker.

  I took Hope from him, busying myself with kissing her fluffy head and saying hello while he disappeared down the stairs.

  Later that morning, I remembered that I’d been meaning to ask Daniel about the bees.

  ‘Is the orchard still part of the farm, or did it get sold off with the rest?’ I asked as he tried to coax Hope into eating her toast rather than squash it into her ear.

  ‘Yeah. We still have the orchard, and the meadow on the far side that borders the river. But it’s fallen fallow the past few years, if I’m honest.’ He gave up with Hope’s breakfast, shoving the last jammy soldier into his own mouth instead. ‘Ziva does a bit of pruning, stops the weeds from taking over, but leaving it to run wild has been great for her bees.’

  ‘Is she there a lot?’

  ‘She comes most weeks, depending on the time of year. More often in the busier bee season. It’s only a twenty-minute walk from the edge of Ferrington, where she lives. In the quieter times, like now, that’s when she does a bit of gardening. It’s an excuse to get away from the village for a while. She’s been retired six years but still can’t walk down Old Main Street without several people asking her to have a quick look at their rash, or diagnose their cousin’s cat.’

  ‘I bet the orchard’s beautiful in spring.’

  Daniel smiled, lifting Hope out of her chair and glancing around for her coat. ‘And in the late summer, when the trees are in fruit. And the autumn, of course.’

  ‘I’m sorry I won’t be here to see it.’

  ‘Well, that’s totally up to you,’ Daniel shrugged, grabbing his keys and Hope’s bag as he prepared to take her to his mum, Billie’s. ‘I’ve said you can stay here as long as you like. Would be a shame to miss the leaves changing colour.’ He threw me a glance then that sent a prickle of electricity zipping up my spine. Did Daniel want me to stay? That look suggested that if he did, it might be as more than a cleaner, cook and babysitter.

  ‘Charlie would have loved you to have seen it,’ he added, voice softening. And at the same time as I realised that of course that warmth in his eyes was for Charlie, an accompanying shard of guilt and misery wedged itself firmly in my windpipe, preventing me from replying.

  I spent most of that day cleaning the rest of the kitchen. Okay, that’s not quite true. I spent some of the day cleaning and sorting. The rest I spent stressing out, worrying, lolling on the sofa daydreaming, obsessively checking my phone in case I’d missed a call from Lucy, snoozing, grieving and ordering myself to go back to the kitchen and do some more cleaning.

  It was a busy day. I virtually fell asleep face-first in the pie I’d cooked for dinner. Daniel, if anything, looked more tired than I felt.

  ‘The kitchen looks amazing,’ he said, once Hope had been picked up from Billie’s and tucked into her cot for the night. I had to agree with him, but it was ninety percent down to the gorgeous farmhouse kitchen, and only ten percent down to me having cleaned and polished and tidied the whole thing, including some finishing touches like lining up a row of pretty, mismatched jugs and vases on the high shelf running along one wall. I’d also removed the grubby blinds from the two large windows – what was the point of having blinds when the view was nothing but an overgrown lawn and the fields and woods beyond? I’d taken the piles of random papers, tools, packets of lightbulbs and batteries and other unsightly mess crammed on the dresser and stuffed it into the cupboards instead, taking out the beautiful set of crockery, dusting it down so that the daisy pattern shone, and displaying it on the dresser shelves. Having cleaned the rest of the room, it now looked like a kitchen rather than a disused garage.

  ‘And this tastes amazing!’ Daniel added, nodding his approval. ‘Where did you get the pie from?’

  ‘I made it,’ I admitted, somewhat abashed. I was a food critic who had grown up in a B & B. I knew how to cook, even if I’d hardly needed to bother in recent years. ‘I found some frozen meat in the freezer, chucked in some floppy vegetables lurking in the pantry, not much else to it.’

  We ate in silence for a while, me too weary to bother talking, Daniel apparently lost in thought.

  ‘Your parents ran a hotel or something, didn’t they?’

  ‘A B & B. The Tufted Duck. In the Lake District.’

  ‘I remember Charlie worked there for a while. She loved it. Said out of all the hundreds of places she’d worked, it was her favourite. She said it was more than a home from home, because homes can be hard work, and this place was a sanctuary, somewhere she could just be.’

  ‘Well, that might explain
why my parents kept having to fire her, then.’ I laughed, even as my throat had swollen with the beautiful words. For me, the Tufted Duck had meant never-ending hard work, and being bossed about, and feeling like a perpetual child. But I could see how for Charlie, whose life was an exhausting torrent of chaos, the decades-old routines and simple, straightforward order to how we did things would have offered her some peace.

  ‘Speaking of hard work, what is it you do all day, with your meetings and white shirts and all those spreadsheets?’

  Daniel rolled his bloodshot eyes, stabbing at another piece of beef. ‘It’s boring and complicated and you look on the brink of nodding off as it is.’

  ‘I’m interested! You can at least give me the general gist.’

  ‘I’m a transmissions and distribution forecasting manager for East Midlands Energy.’

  ‘Okay. Wow.’ I nodded as if impressed and/or interested.

  Daniel wasn’t fooled. ‘Don’t wow! It’s even more boring than it sounds.’

  ‘If it’s so boring, then why do you do it?’

  ‘I’m not really in a position to be considering a career change. More importantly I can do most of it from home in evenings and nap-times, and it pays enough to keep things going. That takes precedent over thrills and spills these days.’

  ‘Well, I suppose someone has to be a trans-forecasting… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten it already.’

  ‘We can’t all work in the glamorous world of food critics.’ Daniel looked at me pointedly.

  ‘Um. What?’ My last mouthful of potato became wedged in my throat, as the rest of the meal threatened to rise up and join it.

  ‘I had a nosy at your website. It’s good.’

  I was too busy freaking out to appreciate the warm glow in his eyes as he said this, although somewhere below the building panic I did feel a squeeze in response to his deep, soft voice.

  ‘I have to admit, I was sceptical as to how anyone could make a living out of it. But I can see why advertisers would want to be associated with yours.’ He smiled. I tried to smile back, but my face was numb with horror. Outside of a select few at the newspaper, I’d thought Charlie, Lucy and my ex-boyfriend Marcus were the only people who knew what I did for a living. If one or two extras knew, I could live with it, but if Daniel knew, I couldn’t keep living with him. This was meant to be a fresh start, a place where I could be me again, a me I actually liked. I didn’t want people to think I was capable of being the horrible person Nora had evolved into.

  ‘That one you wrote on the dementia patients from Sri Lanka, and how cooking food from their heritage helped them. I have to admit that coincided with a speck of dust blowing into my eye.’

  Oh. Oh! The relief unseized my windpipe, and I sucked in a huge gasping breath.

  ‘Don’t look so surprised.’ Daniel topped up my water glass. ‘It was really good.’

  I shook my head, as if dismissing his compliment. ‘I didn’t think anyone read that blog.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘I thought that was your job.’

  ‘Um, yes. It is. Partly. I do other pieces as well, reporting on current events. Things like that. They’re much more popular.’

  ‘Well, either way, I’m sure it beats spreadsheets.’

  ‘It does. Well. It did.’ I took another deep breath. ‘I’m not sure it’s me any more. So I’m taking a break to consider my options. That’s one reason why I was coming to see Charlie.’ I smiled, ruefully. ‘She’d have had loads of ideas.’

  Daniel nodded in agreement. ‘All of them even more glamorous than flouncing about in fancy restaurants.’

  ‘I think she once mentioned working on a fishing trawler? The pay was terrible but you got herring for breakfast.’

  Then we were both laughing, and then I was crying again, and Daniel reached across the table and took hold of my hand, in a nice, older-brother-of-my-best-friend type of way, and that made me cry even more, because I really liked it here. I was starting to really like this man too, but now, with one throwaway lie-by-omission, I’d erected a firm barrier between us. As safe as this place might feel, as much as how Charlie inviting me here had been about regifting what the Tufted Duck had been to her – a sanctuary, somewhere I could simply be me – it was now the opposite of that. A place where, once again, I had to hide, and lie, and keep my shameful secret squashed away in the dark.

  There was no one left alive who knew the truth and still loved me. The one person who’d claimed he did had turned out to be a big, fat fake. How could I expect Daniel to know the kind of things I’d written and tweeted and posted about people and still like me? Let alone want me here?

  Was Nora Sharp going to haunt me for the rest of my life?

  8

  I’d met Marcus last June at the opening of a new ‘nutritional experience’ in Shoreditch. Crammed into a venue which could have once been the shoebox for the ergonomically designed trainers the manager-owner had sent me as an inducement to attend, it made room for three tables, a ‘rejuvenation zone’, containing yoga mats, kettle bells and stretchy rope things, and the ‘rejuicination zone’, which to my professional eye looked like a bog-standard takeaway counter.

  Lucy hadn’t come, seeing as she hated anything sports related. I’d intended to pop in for a quick taste of the menu samples, a slurp or two of their beet latte and cheese tea, which I fully anticipated would taste like liquidised toe-fluff, and as in-depth a conversation with the owner as I could manage without arousing suspicion. I hadn’t worn the trainers, as that would be a dead giveaway, but had splashed out on the kind of outfit I thought women who attended nutritional experiences at nine o’clock on a Monday evening would probably wear: black and silver leggings, a sleeveless running top artfully cutaway to reveal my sports bra, and Lucy’s smartest trainers.

  I sidled in and began ambling around, feigning studious interest in the information posters and nodding appreciatively as the owner made his rambling speech about optimal performance and micronutrient replenishment, repeatedly interrupting himself by punching the air and shouting, ‘Fit don’t quit!’

  ‘Nora Sharp, I presume?’ Someone whispered in my ear, causing me to clutch my biodegradable juice carton so hard that the juice spurted out of the top and left a fluorescent green stain on the trainers.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I flicked my hair and smiled sweetly. Glancing to my left, I saw a man with a huge shock of prematurely grey hair framing dazzling blue eyes and a mischievous grin.

  ‘Come off it. No serious fitness freak would be caught dead in those trainers. And, no offence, but you’ve not got the physique of a woman who considers carbs to be nutritional cyanide.’

  ‘Maybe I carb-cycle!’ I tittered, still trying to act as un-Nora like as possible, while simultaneously resisting the urge to squirt my drink in his face.

  ‘No. You’ve got the look of a woman who knows how to actually enjoy food. A real woman, not a haggard cyborg held together with stringy tendons and overly sculpted muscle.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I mean, look at them.’ He nodded at a pair of women standing nearby, who I had to admit did appear semi-bionic beneath their tiny bralettes and cycling shorts.

  ‘Are you always this rude about people’s appearances?’ I hissed, while simultaneously feeling my shoulders de-hunch. I had felt more than a little overwhelmed by the rest of the guests, and it was a relief to know not everyone here was horrified by my clear lack of fitness finesse, or ‘fitnesse’, as Nora Sharp would call it in her review.

  ‘Compared to you, Nora, I’m an absolute gentleman.’ He winked, waiting a few seconds before adding, ‘I don’t mean it about the women, I’m just jealous and intimidated and wanted to crack your legendary iron shell.’

  At that point, the speech was over, the crowd broke into a smattering of applause, more cheers of, ‘Fit don’t quit!’ and, in my case, a whoosh of relief.

  ‘Want to get out of here? Go and get some chips or something?’

  Misinterpretin
g my hesitation as something other than nervousness and disbelief at a real-life man asking me to hang out with him, he held out one hand. ‘Marcus Donahue-Black. I’m only here because the owner is my cousin. I hate exercise and I love doughnuts. And I apologise for my demeaning comments. I use humour as a safety net when I’m out of my comfort zone, and I was trying to impress you by being mean. I also apologise for assuming that you in any way resemble your online persona. I can immediately see that you are far kinder and more lovely than the memes would suggest. Can we start again?’

  Given how lonely and tired I was of pretending to be someone else, the thought of eating chips with someone who seemed to understand my predicament after just one brief interaction made it an offer impossible to resist.

  A handful of dates later, Marcus was my boyfriend. He was someone else who could come to meals and events with me, and it turned out he moved in the kind of circles where he was often already invited, so I could go as his date and no one would be any the wiser.

  He lived in a swanky chrome and white apartment near the river on the Southbank, although we spent far more time out and about than in either of our homes. His job seemed to involve a lot of networking, and long lunches, and offering to connect people with other people who knew people, but he was fun, and we had a good time, and if the conversation remained on the lighter side, the relief at being with someone else who knew the truth about me was priceless. He’d throw me secret winks at opportune moments, make cheeky comments about the food we were eating – ‘What do you think of the crab, darling?’ – and it created an intimacy between us that I’d been craving without realising it. I could almost be myself with Marcus, as long as that was London Eleanor – a few shades classier, more content and more confident than I really felt – and with him, like with Charlie, I believed I could be my best self. Or at least a better one.