‘She didn’t know until afterwards. Mum wanted a quiet wedding. No drama. Charlie wasn’t in a good place around then.’
I did some mental calculations. Charlie’s dad had suffered a fatal heart attack not long after we started renting a flat together in London, four years ago. I was twenty-six. So Billie married when we were twenty-eight. I’d moved to a new flat by then. Charlie had left two days before Christmas and I’d given up waiting for her to come back (or pay any rent). I remembered a message on Valentine’s Day:
Wishing my 1 true love a beautiful V-day, hope U get to spend it with someone special.
I replied several times, messaging and calling to ask where she was and to let me know if she was okay. One reply arrived, a few days later:
Yh I’m cool met a guy who got me a waitress job, bit mad out here but fun.
That was the last time I heard from her until the final messages, sent just over a year ago:
BACK AT THE FARM. WHY AREN’T U HERE?? PLEEEEEEAAASE VISIT. STAYING FOR GOOD THIS TIME. LOTS OF NEWS, I’LL EXPLAIN WHEN UR HERE.
I’d sent a brief message explaining that I had work engagements booked out for several months ahead, but I’d see what I could do. She sent one last reply:
EL I NEED U! It’s different this time. PROMISE. Please come whenever you can xxx
But I’d grown tired of Charlie’s chaotic interruptions, hurtling back into my life, letting me down and disappearing again. Also, if I’m honest, because I’d become so caught up in my own life – which had morphed into something I’d never had foreseen – I never got around to it. Until now. When I needed her.
I don’t know quite how or when but, without ever meaning to, at some point I had become a horrible, self-obsessed person.
‘So you’ll stay?’ Daniel asked, snapping me back to the present day. I considered this for a moment. Forced myself to acknowledge my aching limbs, bruised chest, the fog still clogging up my thought processes. Then I tried to picture setting off in the car and hunting for somewhere to sleep before I conked out at the steering wheel. I imagined the look on my parents’ faces when I showed up looking like this.
Damson Farm was shabby and dishevelled, and a little bit dirty, if I’m honest. But this was Charlie’s home, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her yet. Something about this place had wrapped its arms around me and welcomed me in.
Peace.
I realised this later that evening, having managed a bowl of cheap tinned soup and more toast, before Daniel showed me to a bedroom where he’d left my bags neatly lined up against the metal bedframe.
For the first time in forever, despite everything having turned on its head, despite the hideous threats, the turmoil and confusion about my career, I felt cocooned in peace. Maybe because for the first time in forever, I didn’t care about any of those things any more.
No wonder Charlie had loved it here.
It was only when I woke up the following lunchtime that I realised I’d never spoken to Lucy.
4
I have a secret identity, of sorts. More like a pen name, an alter ego? Except that for the past year this other me has adopted the physical face of my intern and friend, Lucy. It’s a long story…
After graduation, I managed to get a job working on our local newspaper, theCumbria Chronicle, earning a generous twenty pence an hour over minimum wage, making tea, running errands and completing all other tasks that nobody else either wanted or could be bothered to do. Other people who’d got themselves an English degree with a dream of becoming a journalist might have worked to make something of this opportunity – chased down stories, left anonymous articles on the editor’s desk, hustled and strategised and begged if necessary for that one big break.
In my head, I was going to do all those things. Once I’d learnt a bit more, grown a little wiser. For now I was pootling along, helping out at the Tufted Duck to top up my income in order to afford luxuries like socks and petrol, and enjoying living in the most beautiful countryside in the UK.
And then Charlie came to visit, and everything changed overnight.
We had eaten out at a recently opened pub on the edge of the town. It was, to put it bluntly, outrageously terrible. The worst meal either of us had ever eaten, served by the most incompetent staff. And then they had the audacity to drop a card on the table asking for an ‘honest review’ on the Windermere Community Facebook group, in exchange for the chance to win a free meal.
Oh boy. The wannabe journalist in me was roused, fuelled by a nasty bottle of wine and my best friend. The review was most certainly honest:
Having lived in Birmingham, my friend and I have enjoyed our fair share of delicious curries. We’ve also had a couple that resemble cat sick. The Gourmet Gannet provides the novel experience of a curry that not only looks like vomit, it smells like it, too. At least, we presumed the lukewarm plate of watery yet gloopy slop – a true scientific marvel! – was the curry my friend had requested. The waiter had previously tried to force a steak on her, insisting that my vegetarian companion had ordered it. ‘You must have got confused,’ he kindly suggested, scarpering away leaving the steak on the table. No, good sir, you’re the one confused if you think we’re accepting a charred lump of burnt shoe instead of the food we asked for. Poor chap, the whole debacle shook him up so badly that when he brought the alleged curry, he fumbled his grip and tipped the accompanying plate of undercooked rice into my friend’s lap. Which, no, was not cleaned up or replaced. Not that she wanted it to be, given that the scattered grains carried a distinctive whiff of rancid fish.
But on to my food, arriving a mere seventeen minutes after the curry. I was tempted to ask if we could have the steak back. How difficult is it to create an inedible burger? Well, the Gourmet Gannet certainly rose to the challenge. Again, this left me questioning everything I knew about the science of matter, being both rubbery, gristly and mushy all at the same time. At fifteen quid, I wasn’t expecting Michelin star food. I was, however, hoping for something no worse than Ritzy’s Saturday night burger van. You won’t be surprised to hear that the chips were burnt on the outside, raw in the middle, and devoid of seasoning, or that the burger bun was both stale and soggy. I can’t review the accompanying ‘garden salad’, because I didn’t want to deprive the slug of his single lettuce leaf and shrivelled slice of cucumber. He seemed to be enjoying them far more than I would have.
When I asked for tomato ketchup in an attempt to render the burger at least slightly edible, I was told, ‘We’re not that sort of establishment.’ That makes sense, considering flavour of any sort seemed to be not their sort of thing. either. I won’t bore you with the dirty cutlery or the sticky, dog-eared menus. Neither will I expound on the hairs stuck to the table, or the dead flies in the ladies’ loo. I won’t blather on about the diners next to us, whose beef and onion pie looked as though it had been dropped on the floor and scooped back up again, nor how when they complained the waiter told them that it ‘won’t make no difference to the taste’. Because that’s their review to give, not mine.
But I will tell you that both my friend and I invented a game called ‘grubby waiter bingo’, including points for things like nose picking, crotch scratching and coughing on the food, and that both of us got a full house before the bill arrived. I tell you this, because it’s not a matter of opinion, as the manager helpfully explained was the reason we disliked the food, but of protecting the health and happiness of the good citizens of Windermere. Gourmet? I don’t think so. A Gannet running the kitchen? That might be an improvement.
To my utter amazement, and Charlie’s utter delight, the review went bonkers. You could say viral, by Lake District standards. TheCumbria Chronicleeditor called me into his office, not to fire me, as I’d expected, but to offer me a part-time job writing reviews for the paper, providing I continued with the humour.
