‘Go, go,GO!’ I yelped.
We went.
Following our second Hillary West hunt, we did not laugh all the way home.
* * *
SquashHarris.com slowly began to gain more likes. Dawson lent me the next episode, with several insistent requests for me to guard it with my life: ‘I mean, don’t look after it like you do us.’ People liked it even more than the first one. They asked for a hard copy. Merchandise. Someone had, in fact, made a Squash Harris T-shirt. I needed to find out about copyright, trademarks, intellectual property. My reluctance to do this might have been due to me potentially breaching all three.
Maybe one more episode? A few more followers?
Dawson seemed to be doing better. He saw Lucas and Erik at least once a week. His teacher had set up a lunchtime art group. Lily, Kiko’s eldest, had started going. Dawson casually mentioned, about forty-seven times, that she ‘doesn’t think I’m a total loser’.
In the latest episode of Squash Harris, the hero met a girl with shiny black hair.
I was aware that Lily might find out about the website herself, now more kids at school were looking at it. Given Adam’s shambolic state, I felt pretty sure her mind would be on more important things than a comic. Like, whether she had any clean clothes to wear or three meals a day. Or if her mum would be on next Thursday’s flight from Nepal, as promised.
Which gave me a bit of stalling time before I confessed. Soon. I would tell him soon.
* * *
The last Friday in June, despite having had no return visit from that charming Environmental Health inspector Darren Smith, I bit the bullet and hired a skip. The pile in front of the house had grown to a towering, festering mess. I’d sold, given away and recycled what I could. That still left a lot of junk that had nowhere to go but landfill.
Sarah’s mum agreed to manage the café for the morning, and by some strange coincidence Jamie had the day off. Ellen, having ditched her essay on something to do with snipping during labour, which caused my ears to fold in on themselves long before she’d finished explaining, brought Frances to oversee proceedings. Lucille had stopped me at school the day before to say she would have helped, had she not been indispensable at her very important, astronomically successful, marvellously well-paid and teeth-grindingly tedious job.
Ihadwondered if Mack might join us, but there was no sign of life from behind the windows. For a brief millisecond I imagined sending them all home and struggling on alone, until I got myself into an idiotic jam like falling in the skip or being crushed beneath an avalanche of toppling rubbish and needing to be rescued by the only person within a two-mile radius.
Then I remembered I was New Jenny, and Mrs Apple Mack was returning this weekend. I stuck my Sellotaped-together glasses back up my nose and gave my brilliant friends a big grin.
Working together meant that only a couple of hours later we were sitting in the sunshine toasting the shabby relics of a lifetime poking out from the top of the skip. I hid my sadness as the others mused on Charlotte Meadows and the disbanding of her Hoard.
Then Jamie remembered he’d brought a box of pastries, and the shadow of the past dissipated in a delicious cloud of icing sugar and flaked almonds.
‘You’d better have the last pastry, Jamie. You did more than the rest of us put together,’ Sarah said. ‘No wonder you’re so buff.’
Jamie sloshed half his tea down his jeans. When Sarah jumped up and started brushing at the wet patch with a cloth, I honestly thought for a moment he was having a stroke.
‘I’m fine,’ he garbled, eyes darting everywhere.
‘Oh, of course you are, tough guy.’ Sarah draped the cloth over his head and sat back down in her garden chair. Jamie left it there, obscuring his face.
I pointed at Sarah, trusting he couldn’t see through the cloth. ‘You’re flirting!’ I mouthed, and she shrugged.
‘What’s going on?’ I mouthed again.
‘Nothing!’ she mouthed back, rolling her eyes. ‘Grow up!’
I wondered if Jamie had made any progress with handing over the operation of his business. I wondered about Sarah’s conversations with the guy online. I wouldn’t have to wonder for long, I hoped.
The weekend was spent working on the now much emptier house. To my amazement and delight, the skeleton of a home was emerging from the chaos. I was falling in love. Good solid walls, original fireplaces. The staircase would be beautiful once I’d replaced the broken bannister and stained it. I pictured the kitchen with new cabinets, the dining-room dresser painted duck-egg blue. A real oven. Flowers in a cheery jug on the windowsill.
And I knew, with absolute conviction, that if Fisher, the Environmental Health Officers or anyone else, were going to take my home they’d have to starve me out first. I had enough furniture to construct a solid barricade, after all. And I’d got used to being hungry in recent months.
* * *
Monday lunchtime, an envelope with the DVLA logo plopped through my door. A reply to the form I’d completed – and long forgotten – about the Mini’s registration. A waste of time and money, since I now knew it was Mrs Mack’s.
Only now I got to discover her name. Which meant I could spend the rest of the afternoon looking her up on the Internet.
