She just half waved and pretended to laugh as she climbed the stairs to her apartment.
And there on the door was a notice taped roughly with sticky tape at each corner.
Intention to sell. Eviction notice. Thirty days.
2
Simon
Simon adjusted his helmet and looked in the side mirror on his motorbike, waiting for a car to pass, and then took off with a roar. The roads heading north were not as busy coming into early summer but he knew it would be crowded as holidaymakers made their way towards Newcastle upon Tyne. He was planning to settle there for the summer. It was a perfect place, as he knew no one and he could get some odd-job work until he could get his head around what had happened.
Finding work was easier than he had expected since he had fled London three months earlier. He had found work in Cambridge as a pot washer at a busy café and painting some of the punts on the River Cam for summer. But Cambridge was where his ex-girlfriend Anika went to college and he hadn’t wanted to bump into any of her old friends if they were still there, so he was on the road again quite quickly. He went to Cornwall and painted boats for a while and rented a room from an old man who had too many cats and a drinking problem. That ended when the man’s daughter came and put him in a nursing home and surrendered the cats to the local pet shelter. Simon needed to stay still for a while and gather his thoughts but he had the feeling that wherever he went, the shame and humiliation was in his emotional sidecar.
The motorbike was his first purchase when the investment company had taken off. Charlie had the contacts and Simon had the knack of picking great stocks, based on the software he had created that analysed stocks and determined if they were a good investment for long or short term. Soon he and Charlie had more money than sense. He had paid for the motorbike in cash, and Anika had taken photos of him next to it, looking flash and successful. He cringed to think of it now. Those pictures would haunt him for as long as they existed on the cloud somewhere. He looked like a complete wanker, the young rich man with his toys. He wished he could access the photos now but Anika had changed all the passwords before he knew anything of the bomb that was about to blow up his life.
Simon realised there was something worse than death… and that was humiliation.
He tried to stay focused as he rode the motorbike but his mind kept replaying the day of the wedding. Still, after all these months.
Apparently, the affair had been going on for a year.A year?he had yelled from the side room of the church.
There had been a rustling from the restless guests outside.
A year – he still couldn’t understand it.
A year of Anika choosing flowers and canapés and the band for the wedding. A year of toasts and invitations and table plans.
A year of betrayal.
Concentrate, Simon,he reminded himself.
The trip to Newcastle was about four hours, give or take. He had worked it out on the map, and he had planned to stop somewhere for lunch but when it was lunchtime, he wasn’t hungry. He couldn’t remember the last time he was hungry. Anxiety is one hell of a diet, he’d told his mum, but she told him he needed to eat anyway – just a little, she had encouraged. Now he ate because he was supposed to but not because he wanted to, enough to get through the day but not enough that he had any fat left on him.
Simon twisted the throttle on the powerful bike and took off towards his destination. The sooner he could get to Newcastle the sooner he could look around the area for a small village to settle. He could find a cheap rental room and look for work and try and forget about everything for a while.
Sometimes it made him laugh to think that just three months ago he was living in Kensington, renting a beautiful house and living with Anika who was the new weekend weather girl on ITV.
As he passed an Aldi truck, he gave a little laugh to himself.
Once he was Simon Herald, the King of Investments and now he was Simon Herald, the odd-job man, flat skint and whose girlfriend left him for his business partner.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
He wondered if the people in the cars he passed knew his fiancée had left him at the altar. Did they know he stood like an idiot in a suit with his shoes polished, nervously looking up the aisle waiting for Anika to emerge in a cloud of white on her father John’s arm?
Did they know that her father had rushed up the aisle, his normally ruddy face now redder than a cricket ball, beckoning to Simon to come with him?
An accident?he had asked.
No. Not that, thank goodness.
Instead it was public shaming like nothing he had ever imagined.
He didn’t even miss Anika now. How could he after such deception? He just wanted to disappear and never matter to anyone or have anyone matter to him ever again.
*
Foxfield village was perfect for his stay, Simon decided. He had arrived in Newcastle and had asked the woman at the library if she knew of any villages where people might need some odd jobs done before the summer rush.
