Two Years After ; Friends Who Lie ; No More Secrets

by Paul J. Teague

  ‘What a lovely name for a cottage,’ Katy said. ‘What does it mean?’

  Paige admitted with a giggle that the cottage had been called Paige and Brian’s originally. After the divorce was finalised and she realised that she’d need the extra income, she came up with something that would work better for the tourists. She’d gone for the name of a Runrig song. It meant ‘the morning light.’’, and played well with visitors.

  It wasn’t long before they were chatting away about anything and everything. Katy felt a fresh breeze sweeping into her life as she sat in Paige’s small garden, the cats brushing against her legs while she sipped her first-ever camomile tea. It tasted terrible, but she forced herself to drink it – she didn’t want to offend her host.

  Eventually Katy went up to her room. It had an ensuite, that was good. She’d be able to settle in overnight and stay self-contained. She was looking forward to the chance to shower properly after her night on the train. Paige had sternly told the cats to stay out of her room, which as every cat owner knows is all that’s required when it comes to laying down the law to their pets. Katy couldn’t resist the comedic value of a Facebook post announcing that she’d just let Mr Pitt into her bedroom.

  Feeling fresh and invigorated after ten minutes under a power shower, she pulled on some fresh clothes and gave her knickers a rinse out in the basin. She reckoned there would be a lot of that in the weeks to come, she’d have to get used to it.

  Paige was a thoughtful host. She’d placed a desk and chair at the bedroom window and a small armchair in the corner of the room. Katy sat in front of the window and contemplated her next move. She was eager to explore Fort William, but she didn’t want to risk running into Olly. It was only a small town and the sort of place where a familiar face would stand out a mile.

  Much as she hated having her movements dictated by a man again, she decided to give him some time to move on ahead of her. He’d proudly announced that he wouldn’t be walking the official Great Glen Way, but would be loosely following the proper route and making several longer stop-offs along the way.

  Katy decided to study the Polaroids while she had some time to kill. The sight of Spean Bridge flashing by on the train had whetted her appetite for the journey ahead. She pulled up her rucksack and felt in the pocket for the photos. The colour was terrible, faded and pallid, and she couldn’t believe that they’d ever been so excited about the technology. Looking at them made her feel old. She was still slim, and even she thought that she was wearing okay, but there’s nothing quite like the oblivious skinniness of youth. There was nothing on her in those days, but she was too self-conscious to appreciate it.

  And there was Emma. Her hair was longer now, and she’d actually improved with age. Elijah looked like the boy he was, but he’d felt like a man to her then, so mature and sure of himself. Nathan hadn’t worn quite so well. She hadn’t seen him for years, but his social media profiles depicted a man hurtling towards middle age and rapidly losing his hair. It was clear he had money though, as he always looked sharp and well-groomed. Life was so cruel to some guys, like Nick Kamen turning into Telly Savalas in front of your eyes.

  It seemed like yesterday to Katy, and she felt herself getting emotional about the lost time. What had she done with her life? Nothing. She’d studied and got a job. At best she’d occupied herself. Most of her youthful dreams had perished in that fire too.

  Katy moved the image closer so that she could see it better. Isobel and Sarah’s faces were a little blurred. She sifted through the photos for a sharper image. The door slammed downstairs as Paige returned from her expedition to buy cat food. She was chattering excitedly about something or other. Katy wondered if the cats had a clue what she was saying to them.

  There was Isobel. Poor Izzy. Katy wondered if she was still so severe. Her drama degree had been her one shot at shaking off the shackles of her mother’s strict Brethren upbringing, but after returning to help save the village shop, it had never come to anything career-wise. Katy examined the photo again. It looked like Isobel and Emma were holding hands – was she seeing that correctly? They were all of them very touchy-feely back then. She cringed as she recalled the group hugs and air kisses that accompanied their youthful exuberance.

  Paige was heading up the stairs. Katy shuffled the pictures into a neat pile and placed them back in her bag. She took one out, the picture which had caused her to look twice, and quickly slid it into her wallet. That was another thing the travel blogs had suggested: no fussy purses for her while she was travelling on the road.

  There was a cautious knock at the door.

  ‘Come in!’ said Katy, it’s just me and Brad Pitt in here.’

  She heard a little giggle.

  ‘Can you get the door?’ came Paige’s voice. ‘I’ve got my hands full.’

  Katy darted towards the door handle, expecting Paige to be carrying a tray, hopefully without a pot of camomile tea on it.

  ‘You’re a popular lady!’ Paige said as Katy pulled the door open. ‘I hope a bit of it rubs off on me.’

  There was no tea tray. Instead, Paige was standing on the landing with a huge bunch of flowers.

  ‘There’s no name,’ she said, obviously enjoying the mystery of it all. ‘All the card says is Have a safe journey.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Damn!’ said Katy. ‘What’s wrong with these guys, can’t they take no for an answer?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Have I done something wrong?’ asked Paige. Her face had changed from a bearer of good news to don’t shoot the messenger.

  ‘Sorry, it’s not your fault. It’s some guy I met on the train journey up here. How does he know I’m even here?’

  Paige placed the flowers on a small table which was positioned on the landing outside Katy’s room. She moved the empty vase that had been on it to the side.

  ‘We won’t be needing that then,’ she said. ‘Anything I can do to help?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Katy said, preoccupied with how Olly might know her whereabouts. Had he looked in her bag? At her phone? ‘Let’s put it this way, I need to take much more care about the men I speak to. I’m seriously beginning to question my judgment.’

  ‘Amen to that!’ Paige replied, chancing a small smile to see if she could coax Katy out of her worries. ‘My ex was okay for years. Well, he could be a bit of a prat and he did love a bit of mansplaining, but when he hit forty, something happened to him. He turned into a middle-aged old bore. He was always moaning. He drove me spare but he clearly appealed to someone, because he ran off with some young totty. Bastard!’

  ‘They’re not all the same,’ Katy replied, in spite of her annoyance unwilling to tar an entire gender with the same brush. ‘But some of them are idiots, you’re right!’

  ‘What you need is a night on the town. There’s not much of a town, mind you, but a girl can get a good meal, a nice drink and a bit of live music. What do you say?’

  Katy hadn’t intended to eat out in restaurants, not wanting to blow her budget, but what the hell. How could one night out on the town hurt? And she liked Paige. They were completely different people, but she was nice – a bit whacky, but she’d be fun to go out with.

  ‘Let’s do it!’ she said. ‘Show me what Fort William has to offer. How about we head out for six? I can’t be out too late, I have a 20km walk to do tomorrow, and we can’t go anywhere too posh, I’ve only come prepared for hiking.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Paige smiled. ‘Anybody without a beard looks attractive in this place. Even better if you’re a woman without a beard. You’ll be fine, they’re used to tourists.’

  So that was that. They went their separate ways to get changed and reconvened at the front door at the appointed time. It wasn’t long before Katy found herself sitting in a seafood restaurant admiring the views of the loch and squinting to see the Camusnagaul Ferry across the water. For the first time since she’d left London she felt a sense of freedom and release. Louis was hundreds of miles aw
ay, and she had her whole life in front of her.

  She watched Paige manoeuvre some revolting looking shellfish out of its black enclosure. Fortunately, it being Scotland, there was nothing too exotic on the menu. She played it safe and stayed with seared salmon. Paige looked as if she was preparing to ask something.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but who sent you those flowers? They looked very nice, they’ll have cost a bob or two.’

  That had been troubling Katy too. They were expensive flowers. Olly was an internet entrepreneur – he could have been a millionaire as far as she knew. She’d seen enough rich people come into the accountancy firm looking as if they didn’t have a penny to their name. However, he had opted for the cheap seats on the train. If he was loaded, surely he wouldn’t have endured a night with his head dropping forward every five minutes and drool leaking from his mouth in public? But then, he hadn’t. He’d found himself a bed for the night. Katy’s. Had she been really stupid?

  ‘I’m pretty sure it was this guy I met on the train. He helped chase my ex away before we left London. It’s a long story.’

  There was no way that Paige was going to leave a yarn like that untold. Before long they were sharing the details of their lives. It felt great to unload about Louis to someone who wasn’t sick to death of hearing about him. And Paige had had her own share of misfortune. Her husband had run away with a twenty-three-year-old who worked at one of the bars in the town.

  Katy could only imagine how much that would hurt. What did a middle-aged woman have to fight back with when there was some toned and beautifully waxed young woman on the scene? But it was clear to Katy that Paige knew how to get revenge. That’s why she was living in the comfortable home they’d bought together and he was living in a crappy bedsit in the town centre. Paige said she hoped the perfectly threaded eyebrows and delightfully manicured bush were worth it.

  As the plates were cleared and a second half-bottle of wine demolished, Paige suggested moving to one of the pubs to listen to ceilidh music. Katy knew she should refuse, but she’d had too much wine and her defences were low. She was in that delightful state of drunkenness where her inhibitions were fast disappearing but she wasn’t yet destined to spend the next day with her head perched over the toilet. If she had a couple of soft drinks next, she reckoned she’d be fine.

  Paige was a laugh when she got warmed up. They howled at her stories of a marriage going off the boil, even though they were laced with the sadness of a failed relationship. She told how he’d started behaving differently when he met his new woman – this was before Paige caught them in the marital bed and threw him out.

  He’d taken up cycling and shaved his legs for increased speed, only he’d made a mess of it and his skin ended up looking like a plucked chicken that had been dragged through a hedge. Paige also revealed how he’d started taking Viagra. Things had not been good in the bedroom for several months, but who was Paige to complain? She had her own struggles with hot flushes, and periods which went AWOL for months at a time. He’d decided to double-dose one evening and spent the entire night in the local hospital with priapism and an irregular heartbeat. It had terrified Paige who’d thought he was dying. Then she told Katy how she realised that he wasn’t taking the pills for her benefit, and wished he’d been stuck with that indestructible erection for the rest of his life. It would serve him right.

  Katy kept it light. Paige’s stories were funny, even though she could tell that her new friend was desperately sad things had ended the way they had. She’d expected to spend the rest of her days with the grumpy old fool, not find herself alone at her time of life. Katy glossed over Louis’s violence, but it felt good to mock his intricate personal grooming regime. She enjoyed telling Paige about the time she put his expensive boxer shorts in the wash with her new red knickers and ruined £200 worth of designer underwear in one fell swoop. Laughing at him like that made her feel as if she was fighting back at last.

  It was a great evening. The ceilidh band put her in the mood for a stay in Scotland. She’d always loved it up there, since the moment they’d first seen the mountains as they drove through Glencoe.

  Then, out of nowhere, things took a sudden turn. Paige had popped off to the toilets and Katy was watching the band, wondering how many blankets could be knitted out of the facial hair sported by the musicians. They had some serious beards – she’d never seen anything like it.

  Someone was moving towards the table. She knew the deal; guys making a move on a woman when she’s alone in a bar, it’s an occupational hazard. Only she knew this man already.

  ‘Hi Katy,’ he said. ‘Fancy running into you here.’

  It was Olly.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Katy was aware of the text arriving on her phone, but was more preoccupied with the man in front of her.

  ‘Look, Olly, this is too much. You need to get lost, right now. Those flowers were plain creepy.’

  ‘Hey, I was only saying hello. We’re not teenagers. I don’t have to ignore you.’

  ‘After the way you’ve behaved, you’re creeping me out. I want you to leave me alone. I’m grateful for your help on the train, and I enjoyed spending the night with you, but that’s it. Okay? No relationship, no second night together. And no more flowers.’

  ‘Whoa, hang on a minute. I didn’t send you any flowers. We went our separate ways this morning, like you asked. Yes, I tried my luck again – what guy wouldn’t? You’re an attractive lady, and I had a great time with you. But I’m a big boy and I know how it works. You say no, I take it on the chin. But I didn’t send you any flowers. In fact, I even changed my plans after what you said. I’m staying here for a few days because I wanted to give you a headstart. I’m no bloody weirdo.’

  ‘So who sent them, Olly? Nobody knows I’m here except you. Did you look at my phone when you found it in the toilet? Are you following me?’

  ‘Jesus, Katy. Do you know how crazy you sound right now? Come on, that man of yours has screwed you up. I was taking a shit this morning, okay, and I saw your phone when I was washing my hands. It had to be yours, it was your bling. I didn’t look at your bloody phone. In any case, it’ll have a password on it, won’t it?’

  Katy’s face reddened. That was another thing Emma had warned her about, another security tip she’d ignored. ‘You have fingerprint recognition on that thing, so why don’t you use it?’ Emma had scolded. She wished she had now, but all that password nonsense had seemed too much trouble. Besides, there was nothing on her phone that would be of any interest to anyone else. So no, it was not password protected. She wasn’t going to admit that to Olly and changed the subject back to the flowers.

  ‘Then you must be following me. There’s no way anybody else could have sent the flowers. How did you do it if you didn’t look at my phone?’

  Katy knew that she was sounding like a bunny boiler, but she was getting desperate – what with Louis at Euston, the mysterious letter in the post, and now the flowers. So what if she was being paranoid? She had good reason to be.

  Paige came back from the toilets and was immediately alerted to the tension in the air.

  ‘Everything alright here?’ she asked, her eyes flitting between Olly and Katy. ‘I know John the barman. If you need any help, just tell me.’

  ‘It’s fine, it’s okay,’ Olly said, looking hard at Katy. He hadn’t put her down as a crazy. He was beginning to re-evaluate.

  ‘Look Katy, I’m sorry you think I did something. You’re a nice lady, a lot of fun. But you need to ditch this idea that I’m following you. I’m not. Fort William is a small town. This is the best place to go for a pint and some live music. It’s no big deal that I ran into you here. It’s coincidence, that’s all. And I didn’t send you those flowers.’

  Olly walked away. Katy felt like crap. She wouldn’t have put Olly down as that type of guy either, but she’d made mistakes before. Look how wrong she’d been about Louis. He had to have sent the flowers. She’d made the Airbnb swi
tch at the last moment, and he was the only one who could have known. She wanted to scream. Paige saw her frustration.

  ‘Let’s move on and leave him to his pint. There’s a coffee bar up the road which should still be open. We can get something to keep us awake and talk about it. How does that sound?’

  Katy didn’t particularly want to rake over the coals, but she did want to get out of that pub. All of a sudden the sound of a Scottish jig was annoying the hell out of her. She stood up to leave, scanning the room for Olly. He’d retreated into the crowd and was nowhere to be seen.

  As it turned out, a coffee was what Katy needed. It knocked back the last remnants of alcohol that hadn’t been diluted by the soft drinks and helped her to think clearly. As Paige waited at the counter for top-ups, she remembered the text that had come in while she was ranting at Olly. It was from Emma.

  Hi hun, didn’t want to ring you on your first day in Scotland, but I had a message on Facebook from Elijah’s old tutor. He teaches in Dundee now and saw you were in Scotland. He asked if it’s okay to contact you. I said I’d need to check. You okay with that? He wants to meet with you I think. Hope you’re having fun! Em x

  Katy considered phoning – she really wanted to hear Emma’s voice. But Paige was heading back to the table and it would be antisocial. Instead, she texted back, brief and quick.

  Sure, give him my mobile number x

  ‘I got you some chocolate brownie. I know it’s late, but what the hell! We deserve it.’

  ‘Thanks, Paige. I’m sorry I’ve been such a pain in the arse. I hope all your guests aren’t like me.’

  ‘It’s no trouble. I haven’t had as much fun in a long time. I normally get hill walkers and wildlife lovers – you’re different from my regular guests. I’m pleased I met you.’

  ‘Paige, I want to show you something. It might seem weird, but I want to see what someone who wasn’t around at the time makes of it.’