Tutting to herself about all sorts, Darby shook her head about it all: the potential of the room, her gathering of furniture, her lack of motivation, her sadness at being alone. An odd little growl sound came out of the back of her throat. She was so low that she was actually annoying herself. Some feat, indeed. Fivelong years of looking at the same peach flowers, hours staring at the peach carpet, way too much time thinking about painting picture rails and walls. A lot of lonely, wasted time.
The worst thing about the house conundrum was the fact that the whole place was dripping in potential, which is precisely why she’d sunk her money into its bricks and mortar in the first place. Once she’d moved, though, and the reality of the wallpaper, the peak 1980s pine wall-to-wall fitted kitchen, complete with its patterned clad extractor fan, had all been too much and so she’d lived with it.
As she sat in silence and pondered it all, she wondered when she was going to get her blooming finger out, sleeves rolled up and get on with it. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had offers of help; her oldest friend, Penny and husband Jack had practically begged her to do something. They’d offered all sorts, but somehow Darby had never had the gumption to follow it through. She hadn't wanted to start a decorating job, get fed up with it, and then have to live with the mess, which was why the whole house, in all its peach rose glory, had remained the way it was on the day she’d bought it. Ditto the garden. All of it needed a whole lot of work, thought, direction and energy. None of which she had at her disposal.
Snuggling up on the sofa, she pressed the remote to turn on the TV shoved in the corner on an old table she’d inherited with the house and waited for it to come to life. Clicking through the apps to YouTube, she waited for the home page to load, leaned forward to the coffee table, snapped off the top from a new bottle of Hendricks and poured some into a glass. At least she had her online friends to see her through the emotions of the eve of a new year. Sometimes it felt as if the women on the screen who beamed into her life were the only people who actually got her. Very good friends indeed. Strangely enough, when with them, Darby somehow felt, without uttering a word, as if she was beingheard. As if they were having a conversation via the blue light of a screen.
On that freezing cold last night of the year, it was the only company Darby would see. Another new low.
3
Settling further under the three-layer blanket situation, Darby clicked through her subscription list on the left-hand side of her screen and perused the women who had accompanied her through many a lonely evening in her house in Pretty Beach. With the glow of the screen flickering light against the peach flowers, she settled deeper into the saggy cushions of her ancient sofa and exhaled a long, slow, not-sure-what-to-think-of-itself breath. Outside, Pretty Beach was preparing for New Year's Eve celebrations, but inside her little abode, there would be no celebration going on; perhaps the odd smile at the opening of a new bottle of gin. She would speak to her three daughters, Lily, Elly, and Molly and her friend Penny, but that would most probably be it.
As Darby helped herself to another portion of tiramisu and scrolled down the sidebar, she started to feel quite a bit better. As if the anticipation of watching other people live their lives through a screen made her less alone. Some sort of masked voyeurism that worked for her and a whole lot cheaper than therapy. Settling deep into the bowels of the sofa and balancing the little bowl of tiramisu on a cushion, she pondered which channel to look at first. Her first stop was nearly alwaysSiobhan's channel. Siobhan liked to play up her melodic Irish accent if and when it might bring her in more views. She’d bought an old cottage in the Irish countryside and spent her days documenting its renovation. Whilst pretending to be full of thrift, she filmed by way of a fancy camera and an even fancier software package and detailed every single little moment of both her own and her cottage’s transformation.
Through many TV dinners for one, Darby had watched Siobhan strip wallpaper, replaster walls, and plant vegetables in what had once been an overgrown Irish bog. Snuggling under the eiderdown, Darby tucked into the tiramisu and read Siobhan’s video title "New Year's Eve in My Irish Cottage - Reflection and Resolutions." Darby relaxed as Siobhan chatted away and the realities of her lonely New Year’s Eve began to drift away. Siobhan, glowing in the candlelight of her beautifully restored kitchen, rambled on about her life, all exposed stone walls, hanging pots, herbs on the windowsill, and restored Aga in a gorgeous shade of clotted cream.
‘Can you believe it's been another year? I was just sitting here with my cup of tea, thinking about all the changes this little cottage has seen since I moved here.’
Darby wrapped her dressing gown tighter around herself and reached for her gin. The contrast between Siobhan's cosy, candlelit cottage and her own air de 1980s surroundings was so distinct, it actually made her laugh. Where Siobhan had fairy lights twinkling around handmade shelves, Darby had a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling rose. The bulb was doing an extraordinarily good job of emphasising every flaw in the 1980s décor she'd been examining from her sloth and meaning to change for years.
Siobhan continued pontificating. ‘And here's where I fixed the leak in the roof. Remember how I was catching rainwater in that bucket and then I learnt how to fix tiles via an online video?Sometimes I think about my old life in the city, working in that awful office, never seeing daylight. I know it sounds mad, but buying this wreck was the best decision I ever made.’
Pausing the video, Darby stared at the frozen image of Siobhan's face. At fifty-two, Siobhan was older than Darby, and there was something luminous about her. As if Siobhan knew a secret or something. She had a dogged sense of purpose about her person, put her head down and got on with stuff. Darby tried to remember the last time she'd felt a spark of excitement about anything much at all.
She clicked on her next favourite: Mirrie's channel, "City Life with Mirrie." Mirrie (probs not her real name) was an ex-morning TV presenter in London who'd built a following by sharing the ups and downs of navigating urban life as a single woman in her forties. Her videos were filmed in a sleek flat, all exposed brick and industrial lighting, a far cry from Siobhan's rustic cottage but enviable in its own posh I’m-trying-so-very-hard-to-be-a-cool-kid way.
‘Happy New Year's Eve, darlings!’ Mirrie appeared on screen, immaculately dressed. ‘I've just got back from an incredible exhibition and I simply had to share it with you all.’
Behind her, Darby could see glimpses of Mirrie's life: fresh flowers in expensive vases, art books stacked on a designer coffee table, a mirror the size of a door. A sophisticated urban lifestyle that felt as foreign to Darby’s 1980s-clad world as life on the moon.
‘I was standing there, surrounded by all this incredible creativity and I had one of those moments where you just feel grateful to be alive, you know? Like the world is full of possibilities if you're brave enough to reach for them.’
Darby did not nod along. Instead, a voice whispered that possibilities weren't for people like her. As she watched, Mirrie began talking about her New Year's resolutions. ‘I've decidedthis year I'm going to say yes to more things that scare me. I've been playing it safe for too long, turning down invitations because I'm tired after work. But comfort zones are overrated, don't you think?’
The irony wasn't lost on Darby. Here she was, watching other people live their lives through a screen, whilst her own life lurched from one day to the next in a horrible blur of nothing much at all. She'd been following both women for ages, watching Siobhan transform her cottage room by room and Mirrie navigate the complexities of modern urban life. In that time, what had Darby achieved? She'd endured the aftermath of relationship breakdowns, moved to a town where she knew virtually no one and watched her children pop off to better things. Her greatest accomplishment seemed to be maintaining her subscription to various channels.
Outside, she could hear the sounds of Pretty Beach preparing for midnight. Voices carried on the cold air, laughter sang out from the pub down the road, the distant sound of music drifted. Clicking on another video, from a woman called Janet who documented her life in a Scottish village, Darby took another sip of her gin. Janet was in her sixties, a recent widow who'd started her channel as a way of processing grief. Her videos were often just her walking through the Highlands with her border collie, talking about whatever was on her mind.
‘I've been thinking about loneliness today,’ Janet’s gentle Scottish accent soothed as she walked along a misty loch. ‘Not the kind where you're desperate for company, but the deeper kind, where you feel disconnected from your own life. I think grief does that to you. It makes you feel like you're observing everything from the outside.’
Darby nodded, continued to watch and wondered if this was how she would spend every New Year's Eve for the rest of her life: watching other women live their lives.
Pouring herself another gin, she turned her head to the side and frowned as a penny dropped. As if a lightning bolt had just struck the side of her head, she sat up and blinked. Would you Adam and Eve it? Push had come to shove. She was on her own and she realised that she only had one person who could help. No one was going to be there to yank her up out of the doldrums she was currently wading around in. Not her children, or a woman on a screen or anyone else at all. There was one person and one person only who was going to be able to make changes in her life. Her name began with a “D” and ended in a “Y”. That person would fight and never surrender. That person was on the way up.
4
It was the dawn of the new year. Darby had continued not to allow herself anywhere near the doldrums, for fear that she might never emerge from them. Indeed, if she had let them, they may well have swallowed her whole. In fact, she’d actively formulated a strategy to avoid them. Have notebook will scheme and plan. That in itself felt good. That morning, she’d had a nice long self-indulgent bath with a coffee as a companion, had spoken to all three of her children and cooked herself poached eggs to go on avocado-topped homemade bread. She’d tidied up the sofa and coffee table, cleaned the kitchen, zapped the bathrooms, hoovered and planned a lovely cosy afternoon with her online friends.
One of the main reasons Darby Lovell liked to get lost in the vortex of her favourite channels was the delicious, mind-numbing escapism her pastime provided. As she settled into someone else's day-to-day, her own thoughts fell away, and she would slowly decompress from what was essentially the reality of her life. It wasn’t rocket science, to be quite frank; watching other people always made her feel better. It really was as simple and cut and dried as that.
Over the years, here and there, she’d had the odd fleeting thought about starting her own channel. Therealityof actually creating a channel of her own, however, was a different thing. It was all very well watching, chuckling, judging, swooning, criticising and analysing other people via the slightly grubby screen of her laptop, oh yes. It was a whole other kettle of fish to put herself out there and broadcast to the depths of the World Wide Web. A part of her wanted some of it. Another part really wasn't sure she was prepared for the fish or the kettle at all. She'd had enough sadness and judgment in her life without adding on the intricacies of strangers who might find her by way of an algorithm.
However, as her mind buoyed and her determination to turn the new year into a fresh start took form, she started to wonder if a channel would provide her with some focus, a reason to get up every day. As she sat, scrolled, flicked, watched and decompressed, she considered creating her own channel and what it could and would be about. It didn’t take her long to work out. Really, there weren’t many things to choose from; she’d just vlog about being Darby. She didn’t have a lot else. Maybe filming a few things she loved would help dig her out of a hole. When the night before, she’d been lying in bed with a hot water bottle under her knees, she’d gone over and over again how she was the only one who would be able to grab her life by the balls, haul it up and get it back again. Would, in fact, documenting her life here and there help her to achieve that? Perhaps.
Taking out a favourite leather-covered notebook, Darby mused a little bit more and jotted down what she could talk about: doing up the house, her love of books and reading, rescuing the garden, recipes and things she liked to cook and eat. How she kept herself looking as good as she could on a budget, how she got around her day-to-day being on her own at her stage of life.
Looking down at what was, surprisingly, a long list, she turned her head to the side, squinted and pondered. The more she thought about it, the more she thought that,actually, there might be other people in the same boat who’d be interested. There were perhaps other people out there who might like to talk about the same things. Turning to a fresh page, she jotted down a few more points. Underlining "YouTube Ideas" with two thick lines and doodling a little heart on the end, she mused. Then, pausing, she felt a tad foolish. Who was she even kidding? She could barely manage to decorate her own sitting room, let alone document the process for the entertainment of strangers on the internet. Something, though, whispered to her that it might be worth having a go. Somewhere in the depths of those doldrums, she could hear the old Darby calling. Waiting and wanting to come back.
