1
Darby Lovell waited until her third daughter, Molly, had finished waving from the train. She then walked across the near-deserted waiting area of Pretty Beach train station, smiled briefly and said hello to a staff member coming the other way, and made her way to her car. Once safely out of the station but battered by a freezing cold biting wind, she crossed her fingers and pressed the button on her key fob. Saying a silent prayer, she looked up at the sky for a second and hoped her car or “old banger” as she referred to it, would start. Luckily for her, it didn't let her down. Thank goodness for that.
As it started, she let out a sigh of relief, pressed the clutch in and putting it into gear, she tapped the steering wheel as if saying thank you to an old friend. The relief of not being stranded in freezing temperatures on New Year’s Eve in the car park of Pretty Beach train station prompted Darby to let out a ginormous sigh and brought something else with it, too. Something that had been bubbling under the surface for months. It was far from pleasant. Swallowing as she felt herself get averysudden,veryhorrible,veryemotional fizz in the bottom of her nose, she tried to remain in control. She’d kept the fizz at bay all over Christmas, along with her jolting up and downemotions. She’d been strong, contained, and had performed, as ever, for the family. Always being the adult as she’d always had to. Now she was on her own and her tight grip on performing happy mum duties had waned and fast. Swiftly following the bottom of the nose fizzing, a prick at the corner of her eyes made itself known and a lump appeared in the back of her throat. A bubble of emotion in her chest. Not great. At all.
Driving very slowly, things were not good. Not trusting herself or her emotions whilst in control of an old banger, Darby pulled over not far from the ferry wharf and sat watching a ferry come in. Around her, Pretty Beach sparkled in a layer of frost; on the roof of the ferry cabin, along the top of the railings running along the side of a calm, inky dark sea, kissing the lighthouse in the distance and along the top of the clock tower to her right. Darby tried to let the beautiful sight of Pretty Beach cheer her. It didn’t really work.
Before she knew it, she’d turned the engine off, slumped back into her seat and burst into a flood of tears. The gates had opened and oh my how they let the tears flow from deep within. She'd just about made it through Christmas, and without a doubt, it had been a lovely time, but now it was over, she was low. So very horribly, disgustingly low. The lowest she’d ever been, which was saying something because for sure Darby Lovell had had some low points in her life. Plus, there was more; it felt as if there was no possibility of ever coming back. A new year loomed and the worst thing was that she couldn’t give a stuff. About trying not to be low, about staying upbeat, about trying to be okay, about anything. For all she cared, as the fresh new year made its way in, it could take a running jump. She might do the same, too.
Tapping her head on the steering wheel a few times, she tried to somehow quell the flood of emotion that had engulfed her after watching Molly leave. Her attempts, however, werefutile and deciding to just roll with it, she howled. Oh, how she howled. She’d learnt a few things about grief over the years, especially when her mum had suddenly passed away when she was nineteen, and the best thing she’d done was to give in to the feelings if and when they’d arrived out of the blue. She’d always told her three girls to do the same, too. Letting emotion, tears, and downright, sorry-for-herself woefulness sabotage every single little part of her, she sobbed. Like every single little part of her participated in the howling, and boy, was it not pretty. From the hairs on her head to the tips of her toes, every part of her being seemed as if it were crying. Sobbing, snivelling, sobbing, shivering. Blinking and sniffing. A heap of patheticness. She almost felt as if she was outside her body looking down; the creased-up woman in the front seat wasn’t a pretty sight. Just so very lonely, woeful and definitely a trillion per cent sorry for herself. What went deep: she felt she had therightto feel sorry for herself. For once in her life.
The crying was not attractive, if crying ever could be. Her sobs not the sort of delicate little puffs you see in films when the heroine is sad. The ones where the movie star’s make-up remains in situ and she stays in control as tiny little streams of perfectly formed tears stream down the sides of impeccably blushered cheeks. Where mascara remains on lashes. This wasn’t movie-star crying or even Netflix-level crying. Oh no. It was real girl sitting in a freezing cold old banger of a cardesperatecrying. Long, big, heavy, ugly, snotty, crying. Throw in some gasping, lots of shoulder heaving and deep self-pity thrown in for good measure. Add a bit of amateur dramatics via a crumpled-up face. Very ugly, messy, not at all pleasant. Quietly, deliciously cathartic. A long time coming.
After letting the crying completely engulf her, Darby Lovell tried to recover herself, but didn't find it an easy ask at all. Frantically looking around for a tissue in her ginormous basket,eventually the sobs began to subside all of their own accord. Changing from huge gulps of garbled air and strange noises to little pops and hiccups, she gathered herself together a little bit. Not able to find a tissue, she tutted: nothing in her pocket, nothing in the centre console and nothing in her gigantic basket on the front seat. Flicking the button for the glove compartment to see if some long-lost tissue in there would make itself known to her, she immediately regretted it. Groaning at forgetting that the glove compartment was broken, she heard a strange, forlorn, cow-esque wail exit her mouth as the glove compartment door dropped out of its slot on the left-hand side. It landed lopsidedly with a funny little squeak and Darby rolled her eyes. To get it back in would require a fair amount of fiddling to make it fit back snugly in place. Now she’d have that to sort out, too.
The broken black plastic was like her life, really; a bit forlorn, somewhat lopsided, definitely worse for wear, not in quite the right position, tired both in body and mind and all at odds with the world. Someone really needed to rejig Darby, that was for sure. Yes, that would be fantastic. Someone could jiggle and fuss with her until she too fit snugly back in place, because, absolutely, right at that moment, she didn’t feel as if she fit anywhere at all.
Rummaging around in the glove compartment, she found a long-discarded, horribly plastic, thin napkin. Clearly left over from some terrible idea of getting fast food on a motorway somewhere. Opening it to its full width, she blew into it unceremoniously. Like the crying, it wasn’t pretty nose blowing. Nup. Rather, the sort of nose blowing you do when no one is around, not the gentle little poof of a nose blow when you were in company and thought that you might have something visible in your nostrils. More a big, fat, ugly hooter of a nose blow that, when she heard it done by someone else, made Darby shudder. Like a foghorn in some forgotten coastal town.
Trying to stop the last lingering remnants of crying, she shivered, took some deep breaths and blew her nose over and over again until the little bits of skin on her nostrils were sore. Wondering if blowing out all the rubbish in her system would help, she blew again. It didn't. Ten minutes later, she was still sitting in the same place, staring out the window in the abyss of a mostly deserted ferry wharf area. Hopeless, strange, upset, sad and out-and-out, kill-me-now lonely. The doldrums did not make her feel good. The freezing cold temperatures weren’t helping, either.
Exhaling a big blow of air, Darby tried to get a grip. What in the world had happened as she’d started the car after dropping off Molly? She didn’t know, but it didn’t bode well. Her head felt like a football that had been pumped and pumped and pumped and was about to explode. But it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t only that she was hormonal and tearful with an overfull, over-inflated football head about to be kicked around at Wembley. She was sick of everything to her core - not sick enough to make her stop eating to stop the spare tyre that was slowly creeping onto her middle, just sick enough to constantly make her feel that all was not well in her world. As if everything around her was falling apart.
As she finally stopped blowing her nose and the sobbing had turned into an every now and then shuddering, she restarted the engine, put her car into reverse, swept her hair out of the way, looked over her shoulder into her blind spot and reversed carefully out of the icy, sparkling car park. At least it was a beautiful night, there was that. Pretty Beach, the little coastal town she’d moved to five years before, doused in an ever-so-barely-there sprinkling of frost, had nipped and tucked its way into and onto everything. On the old footbridge over the inlet near the wharf, on the branches of a gigantic Christmas tree notfar from the gate to the ferry, on the bonnet of her old banger of a car.
Driving at a snail's pace through the icy town, Darby shivered and let the last of the crying ebb away into the sparkling night and concentrated on the road. There was no way she needed the expense of a car accident in her life. She had not the energy, money, time or brain power to deal with her car getting crumpled. Every time she got into the car and it started without a hitch, she thanked the gods of mechanics looking down on her from above. She didn’t know what she would do if her car gave up the ghost. After giving a small, little salute-type wave to a man in a flashy BMW who had generously pulled to the side to let her pass, she inched her way carefully, waited at a set of traffic lights and managed to keep another round of wailing at bay.
Driving through Pretty Beach to the Old Town, where the street lights were less and less frequent, she turned onto the street that led to her road and squinted to watch for black ice. With the world around her twinkling with frost, her nose feeling as if it might fall off from the cold, and trying to remain calm, she followed the bright beam of the headlights through the thick night air. Hoping that she would get home without one, slipping on the ice, and two, having her overfull football head brain, in fact, explode, she clung to the steering wheel for dear life.
Inching along, she attempted to look on the bright side, but failed. All she could think about was how almost everything in her life had changed. She'd moved to a completely different area of the country, her financial circumstances were dire, and she had very few friends, make that one friend. Her children were off doing their own thing, she had three serious and very failed relationships behind her and she was living in a small town, wondering what was next.
Most of all, Darby Lovell felt so very lost. Waiting for the heater to warm up, she mulled everything over as she kept her eyes glued to the road and the stretch of a New Year pulled out in front of her. Yes, that was it. It was the New Year looming that had tipped her over the edge of a cliff she hadn’t even known she’d been balancing on. As Molly had left and she’d realised, yet again, that she’d be spending New Year’s Eve on her Jack Jones, she’d been hit by a tsunami of snivelling, snotty, self-pity. Quite pathetic, really, for a forty-one-year-old woman who had a mostly okay life.
However, the promise of another year rolling around was not shiny, happy, full of excitement or anticipation, as it was on the shows getting ready for the New Year parties on the TV. Not at all. For Darby, it just flagged up questions and emphasised that her life had ground to a bit of a halt. Up until that point, she hadn’t had any choice in which way she went. Quite frankly, three children, one salary, three useless partners and one death had not given Darby Lovell time to be low or to be worrying about which way she might go.
She hadn’t actually realised when it had been there in her face every day that the gift of having no time had been an unknown, unseen, good one. The ups and downs, lack of hours in the day and keeping her head above water had very much kept her on the straight and narrow. Now, with her relationships gone, her children gone, her old home gone, her friendships gone, a bit of her felt as if it had gone too. Where in the name of goodness was she going to end up?
Turning into a narrow cobbled street leading to her house, Darby smiled. At least the road looked pretty. There could be worse places in life to be low. Lovely windy cobbled pavements where little terraced pastel painted cottages butted right up to the road, a shop on the corner, a little café with the best coffee, a couple of detached Georgian villas squashed together, her nextdoor neighbour’s three storey brick house and then wedged in beside a narrow public bridleway-cum-lane with a listed wall, just as the road turned to the right was her house.
As she parked in her small parking spot to the side and gathered up her things, she got out, gasped at the icy air, stopped for a second and looked up. The moment she’d set eyes on her house, it had spoken to her and now here she was five years later calling it her own. An odd shape with uneven bricks, beautiful old sash windows, a wind of wisteria, gorgeous old front door, funny little porthole window in the attic and sweet cobbled paths to the side.
Sighing, Darby swallowed: the house was supposed to have been a new start, a fresh, lovely place by the sea to bring her back to life. And in a way, it had been. She’d made a few acquaintances in Pretty Beach for sure, she’d found a little job and loved her new garden, but, really, it hadn’t been a new start. More what was looking like a dead end. At least that’s how it felt in her about to explode football head.
2
Acouple of hours later, Darby was no longer snivelling or shivering, but she still had sore bits on her nose. She was very deliciously clean in her pyjamas and dressing gown with washed hair and a moisturised face. Things were looking up. Tucked on the left-hand side of her sofa under triple layers of blankets, and her doggie Lola, by her side, she’d self-soothed by way of fresh pasta doused in a lemon sauce and a ginormous smattering of Parmesan cheese. There may have been a homemade dish of leftover tiramisu ready by her side. In Darby Lovell’s world, tiramisu solved a lot of things in life. It was that cold in the house in Pretty Beach that she needed a throw, an eiderdown and a quilt just to stop her bits and bobs from dropping off. Overall, compared to how she’d felt in the car, she was slightly better. A plateful of carbs and a slab of tiramisu did that for a girl.
A freezing cold night in Pretty Beach greeted the arrival of a new year and outside the window, startlingly pleasing to the eye, frosty sparkles twinkled. However, despite breaking her own rule and having both the heating cranked up and the woodburning stove jumping with flames, neither of them were doing their job at keeping Darby particularly toasty. In the deepdepths of her old house, it was very, very cold. So blooming well cold. That tended to happen when you bought an old coastal house full of drafts, made of thick walls, with single-paned windows, and heating that wasn’t up to much. It didn’t really help that Pretty Beach was having an unusually cold patch where it was not only threatening to snow, but locals were saying that a storm was brewing and wouldn't they know about it. Darby had shuddered when she’d heard that. Although not being what was referred to as a “True Blue” resident of Pretty Beach, she’d been around long enough to know that if and when the locals said that a storm was on its way, it was a good idea if you took note.
As she looked around the sitting room, feeling softened by the soothing properties of the carbs but stillridiculouslyandpatheticallysorry for herself in just about equal measure, Darby nodded her head up and down quickly and gave herself a stern talking to. Shehadto get a grip. She wasnotgoing to let herself drop back down into the well that had swallowed her whole when she'd got back in her car after dropping Molly at the station. She would not be beaten by the loneliness and the looming desperation of a very empty new year. She had a lot to be grateful for in her life. She must focus on that.
However, as she sat alone marooned in a cocoon of blankets on the sofa, it was hard to remain upbeat. Despite how much she tried to force herself to look on the bright side of life, it was New Year’s Eve and here she was again, not only alone in the house, a real-life Billy No Mates, but she was cold to boot and categorically lonely, too. Sitting staring in front of her, she tried to look for positives and realised that there was one good, undisputable thing; pretty much the only way was up. Am I right?
Letting out a huge sigh, Darby attempted to self-massage the little nook under her jaw bone; she’d read that a lot of tension, stress and trauma were often locked up there. As she pressedher thumb and wiggled, she looked around the sitting room and chastised herself for her procrastination in not decorating it. She’d just not been able to get her act together. Like the rest of the house, the sitting room had not been touched in terms of decor since the 1980s. It wasn’t that it didn’t have potential, because for sure, it had it in spades. No, it was just that despite all her very best intentions, she hadn’t been able to face the job of doing it on her own. Meaning that the new start hadn't happened. In fact, the house, and she really, had stayed precisely the same as the day she’d walked in. Hello, 1980s decor. Hello, needs a reinvention.
For five years, she'd sat on the past-its-best sofa and looked at the peach flowers on the 80s wallpaper that had winked at her from above the wood-burning fireplace. She’d traced the pattern on the flowers so many times that sometimes when she closed her eyes, enormous, imposing flower heads sat imprinted on her eyelids. Staring at the matching peach, in places threadbare, carpet, Darby tutted and thought about the fact that she knew that underneath their cloak of peach lay gorgeous, wide, thick, floorboards made by craftsmen from another time.
As she sat under the layers of blankets, she lifted her chin, squinted and pondered painting the picture rail and how it might look without its coat of peach. Ditto the ceiling as she looked up and stared at the same cobweb that had made itself at home in the corner for oh, about two years. Letting her eyes drift down to underneath the picture rail, Darby sighed. Pretty depressing all around, really, it had to be said. Comfy though and safe, so there was that.
