* * *
It was five o’clock, and a distinct nip had settled in the air when we decided to down tools for the week. Luke was also finishing up. We went to inspect the progress and found him packing up the last of his equipment. We now had the bare bones of a bathroom and two single bedrooms. On Monday, the shower and other fittings would arrive, and we would be able to start painting the bedrooms.
‘Wow, you’ve done loads!’ Becky said from where she stood by the window. Given that she was contained in a small room with Luke, her voice was impressively close to normal frequency. ‘You must be ready for the weekend.’
‘Yep.’ Luke nodded as he checked through his toolbox.
‘Any plans?’
‘Heading to the Boatman.’
‘I’ve always wanted to try the pie at the Boatman. Alice says they’re amazing.’
‘They’re not bad.’ Luke clicked the toolbox shut.
‘Like, with a pint.’
Luke did one last visual sweep of the bathroom. It was a good job he scanned straight past Becky because she looked about ready to melt in a pile of molten mortification.
‘They probably go really well together.’
‘It’s a classic combination.’ Luke picked up his toolbox and walked the three steps to the doorway, where I stepped back to allow him past.
‘I heard they do an offer. On Fridays?’
He twisted back to face Becky, one eyebrow raised, the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. ‘I’ll save you a seat.’
And then Luke Winter swung down the stairs and into his van before Becky had time to collapse into the space where the toilet was supposed to be.
* * *
In between jumping at every sudden noise, thrashing about in my duvet all night and going over increasingly disturbing scenarios involving the bee killer’s return, I did my best to spend the weekend immersed in weeding, and talking to Alice about her plans for the Rebuilding Committee meeting on Sunday evening. Daniel was trying to pretend he was totally chilled out about his girlfriend being on the receiving end of multiple sinister messages from someone who had broken into his orchard and stolen a hive of bees, but he always seemed to coincidentally be drifting about wherever I found myself to be. At one point I had to turn around and tell him that I was going to the toilet and really didn’t need a chaperone.
On Sunday, once Alice arrived, we spent an hour sorting out the barn before the meeting was due to start. This meant dragging in whatever makeshift seating we could find – a few garden chairs, followed by some crates, boxes and a couple of logs. We had no idea who – if anyone – would come, but both Alice and Ziva had been working hard at promoting the message on each side, and we were buzzing with anticipation that we were on the brink of seeing Ferrington history in the making.
A few minutes before seven the first few people began to arrive, with a fairly even mix of wariness and enthusiasm, and by five past it was standing room only. As expected, the Old and New Sides had naturally drifted to different halves of the barn, and so the first thing Alice did was instruct everyone to find someone from the opposite side to them and say hello.
‘That’ll wheedle out the troublemakers,’ she whispered, eyes scrutinising the stilted interactions now taking place.
Once she’d called everyone to order and gone through some ground rules, most of which involved trying to prevent violence from breaking out, the first item on the agenda was to agree the purpose of the committee.
Alice nodded at the manager from the Old Side off-licence, who was waving his hand in the air.
‘Can you state your name and then make your point, please?’
‘DJ Vapes.’ He paused, glancing around to absorb the room’s admiration for his cool name before realising that it didn’t exist, and hastily carrying on. ‘Er, isn’t the purpose to rebuild the bridge? I thought that was obvious,’ he said, revealing a remarkable change of heart since he’d thrown Alice out of his shop.
‘Surely that’s only part of it?’ Ziva replied. ‘There’s no point rebuilding the bridge if the village is still divided.’
This elicited a murmur of approval.
‘Well, yeah, but we have to start somewhere,’ DJ Vapes said. ‘You can’t just tell people to get over it, forgive and forget and that’s that. We need a project like the bridge to get people working together again.’
‘We aren’t planning on building the bridge with our own bare hands!’ another man said.
‘Why not?’ an older teenager called, huddled at the back with a small group of similar aged boys. ‘Save us some money.’
‘Raising the money, applying for planning permission or whatever else needs doing, that’ll be where we work together,’ Ziva said.
