The Next Forever

by Alix Kelso

  “Do whatever you want,” Keith said, scowling. “The fresh towels are in the hall cupboard. You know where the spare room is, so just put your stuff in there.”

  He once more stepped towards the door, but Janice quickly moved forward and caught his arm.

  “Would you mind bringing my luggage upstairs, Keith?” she said with a pained expression on her face. “I can’t bear going back down there right now and having everybody looking at me.”

  Keith sighed. “Fine, I’ll bring up your suitcases. Now if it’s okay with you, I need to get back to work.”

  Janice held up her hands in surrender and Keith strode downstairs to the pub before she could decide she wanted him to do something else for her. He looked around for the suitcases and saw that either Aiden or Sophie had thoughtfully moved them behind the bar to prevent some poor customer falling over the top of them. He was about to grab the luggage and haul it upstairs when he thought better of it.

  “Aiden, come here a minute,” Keith said.

  The young barman set down the empty glasses he’d been collecting and darted over. “Yes, boss?”

  Keith gestured to the suitcases. “Take those up to the spare room, will you?”

  “Right away, boss.”

  Keith leaned against the bar counter and let out a long breath. In fewer than fifteen minutes, he’d found himself with his ex-wife back in his life and lodging in his spare bedroom. How had that happened?

  But he knew how it had happened. It had happened because he was a pushover where women were concerned – a pushover and a fool.

  7

  All the way home, Chrissie thought about the glass of wine she’d pour. And then drink. It was a pricey bottle of red she wouldn’t normally fork out for, but she’d been swayed by the description of soft red berry fruits and vanilla notes. It had sounded like pudding with the added benefit of being wine. She could almost taste the first mouthful going down like nectar.

  Her level of enthusiasm for this wine, she reflected, was possibly unhealthy.

  Chrissie thought about how she’d have the house to herself for the evening. Alison and her family were going to Gregor’s mother’s house for dinner tonight, so there would at last be some peace and quiet. She’d pour her red wine. Cook something lovely at the stove. Put on her slippers and turn on the television and vegetate there with her meal and her alcohol.

  It would be pure bliss.

  She turned the key in the front door, stepped inside and stood for a moment, listening. Everything seemed still. Unbuttoning her jacket, she cocked an ear upstairs and then towards the kitchen at the back.

  Silence. Stillness. Peace.

  A smile crept to her lips as she hung her handbag on the wall hook and thought about how she was finally all alone in her own house.

  “Hi, Chrissie!”

  Chrissie jumped in surprise and turned to see Gregor stepping out of the dining room, his huge smile in place as usual.

  “You gave me a fright, Gregor!” Chrissie scowled. “I thought no one was here. Aren’t you supposed to be at your mother’s for dinner?”

  “We got held up,” Gregor replied, still smiling. “And then Poppy did a poop-poop and Alison had to change her.”

  Chrissie silently groaned. ‘Poppy did a poop-poop’ was one of the more grating ways in which Gregor liked to describe his daughter’s toilet habits. As she tried not to wince, she noticed the young man held a hammer in his hand.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  Gregor nodded towards the dining room. “Thought I’d make myself useful while Alison dealt with the poop-poop and put up that shelf you wanted for your special plates and knick-knacks.”

  “Oh,” Chrissie said, dismayed that the young man had taken it upon himself to tackle yet another DIY task that was almost certainly beyond his abilities. “You didn’t have to do that. I can put up my own shelf.”

  But Gregor waved a hand. “It’s no trouble and—”

  He was interrupted by the sound of the kitchen smoke alarm beginning to screech. Chrissie’s face creased at the ear-splitting racket as she threw a panicked looked towards Gregor before hurrying to the kitchen.

  “Is there something on the hob?” she asked frantically.

  “Um,” Gregor said, following her. “I think maybe… oh.”

  In the kitchen, a pot sat on the hob with dark smoke belching out from beneath the lid.

  “Oh my God!” Chrissie shouted. Turning off the hob ring, she grabbed a tea towel and seized the pot handle and pulled it from the heat. “Open the back door, Gregor!” she yelled as she scuttled to get the pot out of the house before the smoke grew any more intense.

  Once the pan was safely on the ground, Chrissie dashed back inside and soaked the tea towel to help smother the heat. Within seconds, the situation was under control, but at the cost of Chrissie’s heart thundering inside her chest like a galloping mustang.

  “Sorry, Chrissie,” Gregor shouted as he hauled a chair into place beneath the smoke alarm and jumped up to turn off the racket. “I think what happened is that—”

  “What’s going on?”

  Chrissie turned to see Alison rushing into the kitchen with Poppy balanced on her hip. Gregor waved towards the hob with the hammer as he poked at the smoke alarm buttons.

  “That bolognaise sauce you were making almost caught on fire,” he said. “You must’ve forgotten to turn it off.”

  “Oh no!” Alison said. “Is it okay?”

  “No it’s not okay!” Chrissie shouted, wafting the door back and forth to clear the smoke from the kitchen. “The bottom of the pan’s nearly burned through. We were moments away from a kitchen fire, Alison! Again!”

  “My God, I’m so sorry,” Alison said, walking to the window and peering outside to where the pan still smouldered on the patio. “I thought I’d turned the hob off. I don’t know how this happened.” When she turned around, her lip was quivering. “I’m so sorry, Mum. I felt bad about wasting your lie-in this morning, and then you had to go into work on your day off, and I wanted to make a special dinner for you to come home to. I didn’t mean to end up making everything worse.”

  Chrissie sighed, seeing the obvious upset on her daughter’s face. Poppy was staring at her mother as if she was about to join her on the brink of tears. Closing the kitchen door, Chrissie walked over and squeezed Alison’s arm, and then kissed Poppy’s warm little cheek.

  “What’s going on with you just now, Alison?” Chrissie said. “It’s not like you to be so careless.”

  Alison’s lip quivered again. “Oh Mum, I’m sorry, it’s just…”

  As she had that morning, Alison seemed to clam up right in front of her. Chrissie was aware of Gregor looking on, his expression concerned.

  “I’m just trying to say thanks for letting us stay here, that’s all,” Alison finally said.

  Chrissie studied her for a moment. “You don’t have to say thanks. I’m not going to toss the three of you out on the street, am I? You’ll all stay here until you can sort out a place of your own. But please don’t burn my house down while you’re here.”

  Alison laughed and nodded. “Okay, I’ll try.”

  “Good. Now, after all that excitement, I think I’ll open my bottle of wine.”

  Alison’s face paled and Chrissie saw her cast a nervous glance towards the counter.

  “What is it?” Chrissie said.

  “Um… are you talking about that bottle of wine?”

  Chrissie turned and saw that the expensive bottle of wine she’d been looking forward to now stood open and almost empty on the counter.

  “The recipe said I needed wine in the bolognaise sauce,” Alison said. “That was the only bottle I could find. And then I spilled some of it – well, quite a lot of it, actually. And then I realised I’d put too much into the sauce because I got confused with the jug measurements. And, um, that’s all that’s left.”

  There were barely a few sips at the bottom of the bottle. Chrissie suppressed a s
igh. Suddenly, she felt incredibly weary. “Never mind. I’ll pick up something at the takeaway for dinner and swing by the minimarket and treat myself to another bottle of wine.”

  “I’ll fetch something for your dinner, Chrissie,” Gregor said. “You stay here and put your feet up.”

  “Well—”

  Just then, there was a terrible crashing noise in the dining room. Chrissie glanced at Gregor as horrible understanding dawned. When she dashed through, she saw two big holes in the dining room wall, and on the floor beneath them lay the shelf and the brackets, along with broken shards of two of her serving plates.

  “Oh no,” Gregor said as he appeared at her side and looked at the mess before picking up one of the bracket fixings and peering at it. “Chrissie, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

  Chrissie knew, though. She could see as plain as day that the young man had managed to drill into plasterboard only, and that the fixings weren’t long enough to reach through to the brickwork. And now her lovely serving plates lay shattered.

  Alison pushed through into the dining room and stared in horror at the disaster. “Gregor! What have you done?”

  “I’m an idiot,” he said, scratching his head as he surveyed the mess.

  “Yeah, you are!” Alison said.

  Gregor’s usual smile faltered. “At least I didn’t almost burn the house to the ground twice in one day!”

  Poppy began crying just then.

  “Look, you’ve upset Poppy!” Alison scowled.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you!”

  Chrissie stepped out of the dining room. She knew she ought to help clear up the mess and see if her plates might be salvageable with the aid of some glue. She probably ought to go outside too, bring that bolognaise pot in and find out if it might be possible to scrub the burned food from the bottom, or whether it was now fit only for the bin. And she really should try to calm things down between Alison and Gregor and stop this flare up between the two of them from getting Poppy any more upset than she already was.

  But Chrissie didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she found herself walking down the hallway, pulling her coat from the hook and stepping out the front door. Wisps of apricot-coloured clouds were dappling the deepening blue overhead. She began walking. To where, she didn’t exactly know. But right now, anywhere had to be better than being at home.

  8

  The Crooked Thistle was busy with punters, but Keith wasn’t paying much attention to them as he hovered by the optics and scowled at his whisky distillery VIP tour pamphlet.

  It had all sounded so nice when he’d made the booking – the romantic scenery, the glorious single malts, the delicious food, the cosy hotel. Now he wouldn’t get to enjoy any of it, because there would be no trip. No VIP tastings. No afternoon walk in the glen. No nothing. His careful preparation and packing had all been for naught.

  He couldn’t set off tomorrow and leave Janice to her own devices upstairs in his flat. She was a woman on the brink and Keith didn’t like the idea of her roaming around free and unsupervised, either in his home or in his pub. Who knew what she might get up to? As Keith had learned from bitter experience, the woman couldn’t be trusted.

  With a sigh, Keith laid down the pamphlet on the bar, pulled his phone from his pocket and stood with his fingers poised over the keypad. He was still staring at the photographs of the distillery’s alluring array of single malts and the mist-shrouded glen when Sophie appeared at his side.

  “If your face was any longer, you’d trip up over it,” she said, setting down a handful of dirty glasses she’d collected. “What’s wrong?”

  Keith flicked a nod in the direction of his upstairs flat. “What do you think?”

  Sophie gave him a look somewhere between sympathy and pity. “How long will Janice be here?”

  Keith laughed. “She says a couple of nights. But if I know Janice, and I do, she’ll be here a damn sight longer than that.”

  Sophie frowned. “If you don’t want her here, why let her stay? She’s not your wife anymore. You don’t owe her anything.”

  Keith gave her a smile. “It doesn’t really work like that.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “That’s because you’re young,” Keith said. “Once you get to my age, you’ll see that things aren’t so black and white.” He waved a hand. “I know this weekend was supposed to be your first stint as bar manager, but we’ll have to postpone. I’m cancelling my trip to the distillery.”

  Sophie looked appalled. “What? But you’ve been looking forward to this trip for ages.”

  “I can’t leave Janice here alone.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “You don’t know Janice. She’s a lot to handle. I’m not leaving you by yourself to deal with her.”

  Sophie shrugged this off. “If I can take on bar manager duties here, I can take on anything.”

  Keith laughed, amused at her youthful enthusiasm, but his laughter quickly died when Janice suddenly swept into the bar from the back corridor.

  Gone was the sobbing, puffy wreck with the pale face and trembling mouth. In her place was the glamorous siren with whom Keith had once fallen head over heels in love. The transformation was astonishing. She wore a sparkly top and tight leather trousers and heeled boots. Her hair was in heaped curls on top of her head and she wore so much make-up that she was almost unrecognisable.

  Clearly, the long bath she’d taken had done her the world of good.

  Janice beamed in Keith’s direction, then rubbed her hands together and looked around the bar. “Okay, Keith, I’m here to help. Tell me what needs to be done.”

  Keith walked over. “There’s nothing to be done, Janice. Go back upstairs and relax, I think that’s best and—”

  “Nonsense, I don’t expect to stay here for free. I’ll pay my way in hard graft.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Keith said and closed his eyes.

  Janice pouted. “What do you mean? I’m a good grafter, Keith McGraw, and you know it. I used to keep this place running like clockwork when we were married.”

  “I kept the place running like clockwork,” Keith said. “You spent all the takings.”

  Janice waved a hand in his direction and laughed and squeezed his arm before turning to Sophie. “And who are you?”

  “I’m Sophie, the assistant bar manager,” Sophie said, straightening her shoulders.

  “Well good, in that case, why don’t we find something for you to do?” Janice glanced around the bar and pointed to a table in the corner that had just been vacated. “Make yourself useful and clear that table, and I’ll see to these customers at the bar.”

  When Sophie just stared, Janice tilted her head as if she was addressing a small child.

  “Off you go. Those glasses won’t clear themselves, will they?” Janice turned to the customer waiting at the bar. “Right, what can I get you?”

  Keith saw the thunderous disbelief in Sophie’s expression. “See, I told you I had no choice but to cancel my trip.”

  Without another word, Sophie walked off to clear the table Janice had pointed out. As Janice laughed cheerily with a customer, her voice a pitch of high sing-song, Keith walked off into the back.

  He dialled the number of the distillery and spoke with the visitor manager. It was a depressing and brief conversation. Yes, he was sorry not to be able to make it for the VIP tour. Yes, he understood that the late notice meant he would lose the full payment he’d made. No, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to rebook anytime soon. No, there was nothing else the visitor manager could help him with. Yes, he’d have a good evening.

  Not bloody likely, Keith thought and hung up.

  When he stepped into the bar, Janice was still laughing and joking with the punters at the counter. She looked so comfortable there behind the lager taps, it was as if she’d never left. What had happened to the distraught woman who’d been begging him for help an hour ago? Had it just been an act? Or was this Janice –
this one behind the bar, laughing and flirting with the customers like she’d done back in the old days – was this the act?

  One of the punters said something and Janice let out an ear-splitting cackle. Keith winced.

  “I’m going out for a minute,” he said to nobody in particular as he grabbed his jacket and headed for the door. As he stepped outside, he heard Janice emit another shrieking laugh.

  What have I done? Keith thought as he turned on to Shaw Street. What in God’s name have I done?

  The fresh air outside enveloped him like a soothing balm. The evening was turning to dusk and the blue sky overhead was dipping into twilight. Keith drew in a deep, cooling breath and looked up and down Shaw Street.

  He was preparing to cross the road when music drifted from further down. Curious, he kept walking until he came to Couper Park, a small square of greenery just off Shaw Street, where he found a couple of buskers sitting in the cast iron octagonal shelter outside the entrance gates, strumming guitars as passers-by tossed coins into their instrument case. It was nice to see people enjoying the impromptu music and the lovely atmosphere it created.

  Keith reached into his pocket and pulled out a note and tossed it into the case. One of the young lads gave him a grin as Keith stepped back to the edge of the shelter and tapped his foot to the music.

  As one tune ended and the musicians prepared to begin another, Keith glanced into Couper Park. It looked pretty this evening with the cherry blossoms in bloom and the spring daffodils nodding in the planters. A few people were even sitting on the benches, despite the chill in the air.

  Keith found his gaze settling on a woman sitting alone whom he thought he recognised. It only took a second for him to place her as the woman from the cake shop. She had a distant, thoughtful expression on her face.

  After a moment’s consideration, Keith walked over.

  “Chrissie from Chrissie’s Cakes, right?” he said and offered a smile.

  She looked up and stared for a moment, as if trying to figure out who he was, and then gave a smile of her own.