Charlie burst out laughing. ‘Perfect! That’s brilliant! It explains everything! Did you pack up her side of the wardrobe by mistake?’ She leant over and nudged my arm, to soften the tease. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love you already, but you look like you brought your old school uniform.’
Um, that’s because I did? It was the only jacket I owned, and I might need to look smart for an interview or something. I’d picked the school badge off, of course.
‘So, what’s your fact?’ A couple more sips gave me the courage to return the question.
Charlie thought for a while, twirling a strand of hair around one finger. ‘I ended up spending my first night here in the Aston Villa football teamexecutive areain some nightclub. Only I lost my bag, with my phone and bank card in it. I’ve got about three days’ worth of food, if I’m careful. If the farm still had a landline I could call home and ask my parents to send me some money, but nobody bothers memorising mobile numbers, do they?’
‘Can’t you go to the bank and sort something out?’
She shrugged. ‘I can’t remember which bank it is. I just used the app.’
‘Okay. I think we can probably come up with something before you starve to death.’
‘Awesome!’ Charlie topped up our glasses for another toast.
And that about summed up the next three years of our lives, and a good few years after that. Charlie was my first real friend, and it turned out that despite her befriending everyone, I was hers, too. She careened through her first year, always breathless from rushing in late, if she managed to turn up at all. She joined half the clubs in the university, and left them all again. Sang in the musical one term, sprinted in the athletics club the next. Holidays and weekends were one adventure after another, whether that was a part-time job as a roadie for a rock band, or a day trip to London that evolved into a week in Paris. She lived for the moment, making the most of all the ones she could. Because, all too frequently, with shocking speed and devastating impact, the evil brain demons would come crashing in. She’d disappear for days, sometimes weeks, on one occasion two months at a time. Buried under her duvet, her colour extinguished by the darkness. Her eyes empty, words lifeless.
I would call her mum, who’d sometimes come and bundle her back to Damson Farm, the place where she’d always eventually find some peace again, and gradually her joy would return like the apple blossom in her orchard after a long, hard winter.
We swapped her clothes for my lecture notes. Party invitations for study sessions. Towards the end of the first year, she cajoled me out on my first date, followed by my first kiss with a lovely boy who I think only went along with it because he was besotted with Charlie. She spent one Easter and a few weeks the following summer working at the Tufted Duck, charming my parents and grandma along with all the guests, until she was caught in bed with a guest’s seventeen-year-old son.
Before Charlie, I had been a girl who shared bunkbeds with her grandma.
With Charlie, I was a woman who saw life as brimming with endless possibility.
And without her? I would maybe one day try to be the person she believed me to be.
Once I’d stopped crying, put some decent clothes on and found myself somewhere to live, that is.
3
After our brief conversation, baby Hope started crying, so the man, whose name I should really have known by now, spent a while changing her nappy and giving her a bottle and walking up and down until she would settle, just long enough for him to put her back in the baby chair where she’d start bawling again.
‘I think we’ll try a walk,’ he said, after the third attempt. ‘She normally spends Fridays with my mum, and I’m supposed to be in a video call at three. She really needs to go to sleep.’
‘What time is it now?’
‘Two-thirty.’
‘I could take her for a walk?’
He looked me up and down. ‘I’ll see if Ziva’s still in the orchard. She won’t mind.’
Before stuffing Hope back into her ski-suit and wheeling her out in the giant pushchair from the kitchen, he brought me an oversized rainbow jumper and silver leggings that I could tell with one glance belonged to Charlie, and offered me the use of the shower.
‘Help yourself to more tea, and whatever food you can find. Apart from the bananas – they’re Hope’s.’
‘Thank you. And I’m sorry again for wrecking your day.’
‘Yeah. I’m sorry for upsetting you, too.’
And with that, I was all alone in the farmhouse of a man I’d only just met and whose name I didn’t know, about to shower and change into someone else’s clothes. ‘Are you taking the mickey, here, Charlie?’ I whispered into the silence. ‘Landing me in one of your adventures?’
I might have heard the echo of a giggle wafting in from the kitchen, but by then I was crying again, so it was impossible to tell for sure.
My host found me much later, crashed out with my face stuck to the kitchen table. I woke with a start, followed by a yelp as my sore muscles protested at the movement.
‘Has my car arrived?’ I asked, once I’d accepted some painkillers and a glass of water, wincing with the pain of moving my head enough to swallow without spilling.
