‘DoIlook like a dud?’
We reached a deal. I would help Sarah out on Saturdays for the next three months, in return for free coffee and all the mega-cobs I could eat. I knew that probably translated as less than minimum wage, but right then having a friend and proving myself useful felt priceless. And hopefully by the time Sarah’s mum returned I could eat in my kitchen without risk of catching a deadly disease.
4
I settled into something of a routine over the next few days. Sleeping in a bath was not ideal, even one as luxurious as the one that the bathroom had been endowed with. The growing crick in my neck pushed me to brave clearing out a bedroom. I picked the smallest, on the basis that it had the least stuff to get rid of, and the least foul stench, but even my plan to simply relocate most of the contents and sort them later proved pointless. The rest of the house was so chock-a-block that I soon ran out of places to move them to.
Some things I could easily bag up and put outside in the ‘complete rubbish’ pile. Others I was more unsure of. With no one yet phoning me up out of the blue and offering me a job – which was how I’d got my previous, and only so far, employment – I felt all too aware of my empty pockets. Anything that could be sold, would be.
Afraid of unknowingly throwing out a priceless antique – or a cheap bit of tat that might fetch a couple of quid online – I held onto most of the bedroom’s treasure, squishing it between random gaps in the stacks. So far, I’d sorted: half a dozen lamps, about four million wooden coat hangers, eleven plastic bags stuffed with other plastic bags, crates of assorted glass containers, piles of mouldy linen and a complete shop mannequin.
I dressed the mannequin in a moth-eaten paisley dressing gown to preserve her modesty and found a spot for her at the end of the hallway. I called her Diana. Besides Sarah, on my twice-daily trips for coffee, and then soup or a jacket potato (it turned out my capacity for unlimited mega-cobs was pretty limited, so Sarah kindly agreed to broaden the scope of my pay), Diana was the only person I had spoken to in four days. There were plenty of mice, woodlice, spiders and moths to shriek, swear and hiss at, but they weren’tpeople. Despite my self-imposed solitude, I could still tell the difference, and Dianaalmostcounted.
Mack had disappeared back into his non-abandoned side of the house. Fine by me.
I received no messages from the world beyond the forest. This shouldn’t have surprised me. I had always been a hanger-on, a shadow, firstly in my family, then more recently in the elite world of Dougal and Duff. And, given how things had ended, I could hardly blame my colleagues for not staying in touch.
And as for Zara and her shiny new fiancé, Richard the Richest. Well. They had made their choice. I tried not to compare what they had chosen to my current situation. Especially not when picking the mould off cheese while sitting on a toilet lid, as this was the cleanest, most hygienic seat in my new home. I didn’t at all imagine them dining at the fancy restaurants he’d taken me to, sipping one-hundred-pound bottles of wine and slurping oysters. Barely crossed my mind.
Eventually, the room was empty, save for a large pine wardrobe and a bed. I kept the iron bed-frame, but dragged the mattress through the hoard-tunnel and into the garden with the rest of the irredeemable rubbish. To my joy and amazement, one of the eight vacuum cleaners scattered throughout the house actually worked. I ripped up the carpet and took down the curtains, then vacuumed every surface before sucking all the dead insects out of the wardrobe.
After scrubbing every surface raw, I left the room to air and decided to celebrate by cycling into Middlebeck to stock up on supplies. Maybe I would happen upon a brand-new mattress discarded by the side of the road, still in its cellophane packaging. Or a washing machine. Or a fridge – oh, imagine it, a lovely, shiny, clean fridge! With a little freezer section at the top!
As lost as I was in this daydream, it took me a good quarter of a mile of pumping through the trees before I realised the bike was moving a lot faster than usual. Had my ham-fisted attempt at patching up the punctures mysteriously started working four days later? Or had all the exercise, humping furniture, carrying boxes downstairs, finally kicked in?
Stopping at the Common, I checked out the tyres. The fat, rock-solid, unworn, brand-new tyres. I wiped my glasses on my top and looked again.
Either my fairy godmother had paid a visit, or somebody, no doubt after watching me huffing and straining, red-faced and sweaty, through the forest, had taken it upon themselves to replace my tyres. Isowanted to be furious. This was my independent, fend-for-myself, need-no-one-and-trust-nobody new start. And who even knew about the bike? I always left it tucked behind the café. Either a stranger had been spying on me, then snuck over to the cottage and found the bike in the shed before risking the switch. Or else, someone who wasn’t quite a stranger, who knew where the bike was kept, had done it.
Mack had fitted brand-new tyres on the bike.
I now owed him a window, a saw and two tyres.
I wondered if he’d take two hundred thousand coat hangers in payment. Or a lawnmower with no motor.
I let out a laugh and pedalled on, unfortunately coming across no household appliances along the way. Wondering if I should invest in a padlock now that anyone making off with the bike stood a decent chance of a getaway, I propped it beside the store entrance and hurried around the aisles, sweeping items into my basket. I had rapidly become an expert on what food a person without a kitchen should buy. No to the cheese, yes to the dehydrated soup and noodles that only needed boiling water to be transformed into, and I quote the packet, ‘a delicious, heart-warming and nutritious meal’.
I thought about the juniper and burnt-butter hare I’d eaten in a private dining room overlooking the river Forth – and before I knew it, I found myself next door in the bakery, buying a cream tea.
Sitting by the window, I nursed a lukewarm cup of tea and pretended I didn’t regret spending a stupid proportion of my remaining pennies on a grey scone covered in strawberry syrup that I felt too depressed to eat. As I prepared to take the plunge, the door to the bakery burst open and Ellen, who I’d met in the forest, came hurtling through, her three youngest boys swarming round her skirts.
She skidded to a stop at the counter, dumping several bulging carrier bags on the cheap carpet. ‘Bread, please!’ she barked, plucking one boy off the nearest table. Another one squeezed behind a display of home-made chutneys (they didn’t say they were home-made, but you could tell, and I don’t mean that in a good way), causing the tower of jars to rattle dangerously. The third triplet dived under his mum’s skirt, lifting it up and pointing two fingers in the universally acknowledged gun shape at his brother.
‘Excuse me?’ the woman behind the counter asked, furrowing her brow. The boys drowned out Ellen’s reply with their chorus of pows, bangs and explosions. The one she’d lifted off the table struggled as he tried to turn upside down and pull his mum’s skirt up higher.
Ellen pointed to a loaf of sagging French bread, before calling out, ‘CEASEFIRE!’
The boys instantly froze. A split second later they all scurried towards a table and sat down. Ellen then asked for six doughnuts to go. By the time the shop assistant had slowly picked up the items with her pastry tongs and put them on a sheet of paper, folded a box out of cardboard, lined it with a doily, carefully placed the doughnuts inside, managed to close the box and add a sticker to keep it shut, worked out six times sixty-five pence, then started the sum again including the price of the bread, the ceasefire had ended.
Ellen, flicking the curls out of her eyes, grabbed the shopping bags and ordered her children to fall in line. ‘Soldiers! Qui-i-ck …march!’ They wouldn’t have won any parade medals. As they wriggled, jostled and argued about whose turn it was to go at the front of the line, Ellen herded them towards the door. She paused by my seat, dropping one of the bags.
‘Jenny! Great to see you again.’
Was it? ‘Hi.’
She looked at the scone. ‘Aren’t you eating that?’
I pushed my glasses back up my nose. ‘Um. No.’
