Once the flow from my tear ducts had dribbled to a stop, I decided to look for an answer in the June sunshine. Leaving the bike in the shed, I paced through the trees, letting my feet carry me wherever they felt like, roaming deeper through the dusty trails, overgrown with prickly branches and bracken. For the first time in weeks I was able to push on without even a whisper of fear. The mood I was in, I was ready to face the Beast of Middlebeck head-on. Nothing could be worse than what I’d already faced that morning. Bring it on.
By the time I’d reached the village, hungry, thirsty and about ready for a long nap on the Camerons’ sofa, I had narrowed it down to the same two options I’d started with.
One. Spend a week salvaging what I could from the Hoard and then swap my house, my history and my dreams for one of Fisher’s soulless flats. Two: I could fight.
I was plumping for option two.
I just needed some sleep first.
Mack came round that evening, letting himself in before I’d had time to take my shoes off.
‘Seriously? After what’s happened we aren’t back to knocking?’
‘Nope.’ He slid onto a kitchen chair.
I busied myself making two cups of tea, ignoring how glossy and glowy and (ugh) happy he looked.
‘She’s gone back to London?’
‘Yes.’
Ooh – maybe he was happy because she’d gone?
‘She’ll be back next weekend.’
‘Lovely. You’ll have to introduce us properly.’
Mack leaned back on two legs of the chair. ‘Not until you’ve lost that manic glint in your eyes.’
‘Why are you here again?’ I took the chair opposite.
‘To help. I don’t know if the estate agent contacted Environmental Health, but it was nothing to do with us.’
Mack was an us again. Good for him.
‘I can take a few days off work, help you get through the last of the Hoard, sort a skip, find storage for the stuff you want to sell and start work on some of the other problems.’
‘I don’t want your help.’ If I gripped my mug any harder the handle would snap off.
‘Maybe not, but you need it.’
‘How does your wife feel about you taking time off to rescue the woman next door?’
He looked away, rubbing one hand across the back of his neck. Then I realised.
‘You’re doing this so you can sell the house! Did she send you round?’
‘No.’ He swallowed, uncrossed his arms, took a sip of tea and put it down again. ‘Yes, it will help sell the house if the garden’s cleared. But that’s not the only reason. Not even the main reason. I would hope, after the past few months, you wouldn’t find it too hard to believe that.’
‘Thanks for the offer. I’ll think about it.’
I didn’t want Mack’s help. I didn’t want him scrubbing mould or catching mice or replacing rusty pipes. I didn’t want him here, using his rumpled T-shirt to wipe the sweat off his brow. Flexing and fixing and making things beautiful. Being generous and capable and kind.
I didn’t want to need Mack.
New Jenny didn’t need anyone.
New Jenny was an idiot.
Feeling overwhelmed by the day’s events, lost and more than a little forlorn, instead of getting stuck into sorting or tidying or photographing for eBay, spurning the idea of investigating skip hire, I chose a mug of hot chocolate and my grandmother’s diary.
Picking up where I’d left off, a few pages into the third journal, I continued to read the stark notes that followed the birth of my mother, and the loss of her brother.
Feeding – how often, how long for. Nappies. Sleeps. A few acquaintances brought round meals, or helped with laundry. On one date the simple line:
Funeral, 2 p.m.
But within days the entries became sparser, the handwriting more erratic, and the tone entirely different.
The girl won’t sleep. Cries. What can I do to make her sleep?
Mary Robson came today, pretending to drop off a meat pie. I know what she really wanted. She’s not taking the girl.
The girl wouldn’t stop crying and I know they’re listening and waiting for their chance. I won’t let them take my girl.
He’s at work again. Never here when they call. Does he want them to take her? Is he sending them?
I see him plotting with the doctor. I hear them whispering. I won’t let them take you.
Whew. It carried on. In amongst haphazard lists about eggs and washing and trips to market, my grandmother’s sickness and paranoia staggered through the pages. Her rants about her husband grew fiercer and more explicit. It sent chills down my spine.
And then, about eight months after her daughter was born:
He’s gone. It’s just me and the girl now. Good riddance to him.
As I read the remainder of the journals, it felt as though some of the fuzzy edges surrounding my mother came into focus. Remarks about how difficult things were without a husband’s income, the shame of being abandoned, combined with the continual struggle to keep their hardship secret, drove Charlotte into an increasingly isolated and obsessive existence. I couldn’t discern whether her belief that the villagers were judging, mocking and seeking her ruin was true, but either way her bitter response to it could not have made life easy for her daughter.
For the first time I began to feel sympathy for my mother, to understand something of why she’d left and couldn’t face going back. The journals were depressing enough to read, let alone actually living through it.
As I wrestled with the ghost of the little girl I now pictured in every room, as my imagination lingered on the woman she’d become, my own resentment began to waver. It didn’t undo the damage she’d inflicted. I still felt angry as I dwelt on how her strange childhood had affected mine. On the pain caused and love lost and how it was all so wretchedly unfair. But it made me realise that running away was not the answer. Not for her, and not for me.
And weirdly, this feeling began to grow that I’d not had in a long time. An ache inside that confused and scared me. I didn’t want to see or speak to her. I was anxious and filled with dread about what she might say. Yet, despite all this, I just really wanted to give my mum a hug.
Friday night, as I stuffed some very depressed soft toys into a bin bag, someone knocked on the door. Wiping my hands on my jeans, I opened it to find Ashley, wearing walking boots and carrying a dog lead.
‘No,’ I said, as firmly as I could, removing a piece of fake fur from my mouth.
‘Come on!’ Ashley pleaded. ‘You promised you’d help. We can’t give up after one go.’
‘I think one go was enough to demonstrate that, yes, we can and most definitely should give up.’
‘Rubbish! We just need to learn from it, so we don’t make the same mistakes again.’
‘No, this time we would only make new ones. We don’t know what we’re doing, Ashley.’
‘Wrong!’ She pulled out a piece of paper from her pocket. ‘I know exactly what we’re doing. This time I have a cover story all planned out and everything.’
‘An innocent dog-walker, by any chance?’
‘Who’s lost her dog, and thinks her poor Labrador has strayed onto the property of Birch House!’
‘Birch House?’ Birch was the name of the hero in Hillary West’s latest book.
Ashley looked smug. ‘Precisely! Plus, it is bordered by two streams, each heading in different directions.’
Birch’s childhood home had also been bordered by two streams. The book was called The Space Between the Waters.
‘It sounds a real contender. I don’t think you need me,’ I replied. ‘Which is good, because I’m in the middle of something.’
‘Well, that’s not a problem. I’ll help you finish it off and then we’ll go.’
There was the sudden sound of high-pitched laughter, and Mack and his wife appeared around the corner of the building. She was hanging onto his arm, a straw hat perching merrily on her apple head.
I jumped back out of view. ‘Fine, I’ll come. I just need to get changed and brush the worst of the grime out of my hair.’
Five minutes later, I scurried past Mack’s kitchen window, tugging Ashley behind me, and set off on another Hillary hunt.
Birch House was just a few miles away. At the end of a long, unpaved track. It was clear nobody in their right mind would walk a dog in that direction.
‘We’ll say she spotted a rabbit and was off before we could stop her.’ Ashley started marching up the track.
We arrived at another high wall, this one brick, with a broad pair of iron gates sporting a perfectly dog-sized gap at the bottom. ‘Florence!’ Ashley started shouting. ‘Come here, girl! FLORENCE!’
She leant close to whisper at me, ‘The best lie is the one closest to the truth. If anyone asks, we’re walking the dog for our poorly friend.’
We yelled a couple more times, before I got bored and tried the gate. To my surprise, and dismay, it creaked open.
‘Let’s knock on the door and ask if they’ve seen Florence,’ Ashley said, way too loud. ‘Frances will be devastated if we’ve lost her.’
We made our way across the large, circular driveway, making a slightly ridiculous show of looking for the dog, no doubt currently curled contentedly at her owner’s feet.
With no street lights or other illumination the garden was already a mass of jumbled shadows. Ashley took a fortifying breath, stepped up onto the porch and banged the brass knocker on the large black door.
‘Oh, no!’ She gasped, horrified. I clutched her elbow, spinning around in alarm.
‘What?’
‘I forgot to touch up my lipstick!’
My clutch turned into a shove. ‘For goodness’ sake. I thought you’d spotted something awful.’
‘It is awful!’ She pouted. ‘I’m about to meet my heroine. She’s not going to invite us in if we look like riffraff.’
I looked pointedly at Ashley. ‘She is not going to invite us in, full stop.’
Ashley ignored me, swiping a bright pink slash of lipstick across her face, about half of which she managed to get on her lips.
At that point, the door flew open. Ashley jolted in surprise, stumbled and took a backwards dive off the porch.
A man hurried out of the door and joined me in helping Ashley to her feet.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, brushing her chest down a little more thoroughly than strictly necessary, given that she’d landed on her bottom. He looked to be somewhere in his forties, his thick black hair and white T-shirt vaguely reminding me of someone.
‘I landed on my dodgy ankle,’ she groaned. I tried to manoeuvre myself in between her and the man, who, despite being shorter than me, and considerably flabbier, was remarkably strong.
I looked down when he trod on my foot, and, spotting his pointy blue shoes, I realised the person he reminded me of was Elvis.
‘Come on, then,’ he said in a reedy voice. ‘Let’s get inside and sort you out.’
Ah, Elvis in looks only, it would seem.
‘I think we can manage,’ I said, as the Elvis took hold of one arm, leaving me pulling on the other in a human tug-of-war. ‘Our car isn’t parked too far away.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He smiled, teeth glowing. ‘You shouldn’t be roaming about anyway, two young women, this time of night. If you were my wives I wouldn’t allow it.’
Ashley made a not so subtle attempt to wrangle her arm back. ‘I’m fine, honestly. Sorry to bother you. This ankle thing happens all the time. Thanks for your help!’
She gave another yank and the Elvis let go. ‘Why did you knock on the door, anyway?’ he asked, raising one unnaturally smooth eyebrow.
‘We were looking for our dog,’ I gabbled.
While at the same time Ashley said, ‘Does Hillary live here?’
He curled his mouth in what I feared was meant to be a sexy, enticing smile. ‘Yes!’ Elvis opened his arms wide. ‘Forgive my rudeness. You know how Hillary values her privacy and she hadn’t mentioned visitors. But come in, come in, we’re about to mix martinis.’
And before I could ask ‘Hillary who?’ my partner in crime hobbled up the step with weird Elvis.
Ashley’s obsession had blinded her to the fact we were willingly entering the house of a complete – and seriously unnerving – stranger. I pulled out my phone as I followed Ashley, who was limping down a wide corridor with zebra-print walls. Unsurprisingly, out here in the wilds of Sherwood, I had no signal. As we entered a large room, I scanned the plush interior for potential weapons before taking a seat as close as possible to the crystal bowl on the coffee table.
Elvis hustled over to a bar in the corner. In the light of the chandelier dangling from the ceiling, his face was startling. Like a doll left too close to the fire.
Ashley gaped at me, her face as white as that famous jumpsuit. ‘Hillary abhors plastic surgery,’ she hissed. While I knew she really meant unnecessary cosmetic surgery wasn’t generally portrayed in a positive light in Hillary West’s novels, I wasn’t about to argue with her.
‘Here we go, lay-deeeeze.’ Melted Elvis placed two very large, very full glasses on the table. ‘Now, how about we get a little more comfortable?’ He snapped his fingers, and the lights dimmed at the same moment as ‘The Wonder of You’ began tinkling out of invisible speakers.
‘I thought Hillary was here?’ I asked as he squeezed up beside Ashley on the sofa. ‘You only got three glasses out.’
‘Oh, she’ll be here soon. She’s probably freshening up somewhere. You know Hillary. But I’m much more interested in you two lovely lay-deeeze.’ He put one hand on Ashley’s thigh, making her flinch.
‘Shhh,’ he whispered, picking a drink up off the table and handing it to her. ‘Relax.’
‘Which of her books is your favourite?’ I asked.
‘Oh, how could I choose?’ Melted Elvis purred into Ashley’s neck. ‘That’s like asking me to pick between the two of you. Why narrow it down when you can enjoy them all?’
‘Right, we’re going. Thanks for the drinks.’ I stood up and moved to grab Ashley’s hand. Melted Elvis leant one arm on her leg, preventing her from getting up. ‘I thought you were here to see Hillary? She’ll be down any second. HILLARY?’
There ensued a brief tussle while I tried to dislodge Ashley, forcibly inserting myself under his arm and creating enough space for her to wriggle out. He then pulled me into his lap, and stuck what felt like a warm slug in my ear. As I fought against his clamped arms, my heart galloping, a mounting scream wedged in my throat, I wondered for a brief, horrible second if something utterly hideous was going to happen. Then, a dull thunk and Melted Elvis went limp. I scrabbled off, yanking his arms off me as I would a poisonous snake, and sprang back to catch sight of Ashley, face stricken, holding the crystal bowl.
‘Shuttlecocks!’ she squeaked. ‘I’ve killed him!’
He let out a long, shrill whimper and a considerably manlier fart.
‘Go, go, GO!’ I yelped.
We went.
Following our second Hillary West hunt, we did not laugh all the way home.
SquashHarris.com slowly began to gain more likes. Dawson lent me the next episode, with several insistent requests for me to guard it with my life: ‘I mean, don’t look after it like you do us.’ People liked it even more than the first one. They asked for a hard copy. Merchandise. Someone had, in fact, made a Squash Harris T-shirt. I needed to find out about copyright, trademarks, intellectual property. My reluctance to do this might have been due to me potentially breaching all three.
Maybe one more episode? A few more followers?
Dawson seemed to be doing better. He saw Lucas and Erik at least once a week. His teacher had set up a lunchtime art group. Lily, Kiko’s eldest, had started going. Dawson casually mentioned, about forty-seven times, that she ‘doesn’t think I’m a total loser’.
In the latest episode of Squash Harris, the hero met a girl with shiny black hair.
I was aware that Lily might find out about the website herself, now more kids at school were looking at it. Given Adam’s shambolic state, I felt pretty sure her mind would be on more important things than a comic. Like, whether she had any clean clothes to wear or three meals a day. Or if her mum would be on next Thursday’s flight from Nepal, as promised.
Which gave me a bit of stalling time before I confessed. Soon. I would tell him soon.
The last Friday in June, despite having had no return visit from that charming Environmental Health inspector Darren Smith, I bit the bullet and hired a skip. The pile in front of the house had grown to a towering, festering mess. I’d sold, given away and recycled what I could. That still left a lot of junk that had nowhere to go but landfill.
Sarah’s mum agreed to manage the café for the morning, and by some strange coincidence Jamie had the day off. Ellen, having ditched her essay on something to do with snipping during labour, which caused my ears to fold in on themselves long before she’d finished explaining, brought Frances to oversee proceedings. Lucille had stopped me at school the day before to say she would have helped, had she not been indispensable at her very important, astronomically successful, marvellously well-paid and teeth-grindingly tedious job.
I had wondered if Mack might join us, but there was no sign of life from behind the windows. For a brief millisecond I imagined sending them all home and struggling on alone, until I got myself into an idiotic jam like falling in the skip or being crushed beneath an avalanche of toppling rubbish and needing to be rescued by the only person within a two-mile radius.
Then I remembered I was New Jenny, and Mrs Apple Mack was returning this weekend. I stuck my Sellotaped-together glasses back up my nose and gave my brilliant friends a big grin.
Working together meant that only a couple of hours later we were sitting in the sunshine toasting the shabby relics of a lifetime poking out from the top of the skip. I hid my sadness as the others mused on Charlotte Meadows and the disbanding of her Hoard.
Then Jamie remembered he’d brought a box of pastries, and the shadow of the past dissipated in a delicious cloud of icing sugar and flaked almonds.
‘You’d better have the last pastry, Jamie. You did more than the rest of us put together,’ Sarah said. ‘No wonder you’re so buff.’
Jamie sloshed half his tea down his jeans. When Sarah jumped up and started brushing at the wet patch with a cloth, I honestly thought for a moment he was having a stroke.
‘I’m fine,’ he garbled, eyes darting everywhere.
‘Oh, of course you are, tough guy.’ Sarah draped the cloth over his head and sat back down in her garden chair. Jamie left it there, obscuring his face.
I pointed at Sarah, trusting he couldn’t see through the cloth. ‘You’re flirting!’ I mouthed, and she shrugged.
‘What’s going on?’ I mouthed again.
‘Nothing!’ she mouthed back, rolling her eyes. ‘Grow up!’
I wondered if Jamie had made any progress with handing over the operation of his business. I wondered about Sarah’s conversations with the guy online. I wouldn’t have to wonder for long, I hoped.
The weekend was spent working on the now much emptier house. To my amazement and delight, the skeleton of a home was emerging from the chaos. I was falling in love. Good solid walls, original fireplaces. The staircase would be beautiful once I’d replaced the broken bannister and stained it. I pictured the kitchen with new cabinets, the dining-room dresser painted duck-egg blue. A real oven. Flowers in a cheery jug on the windowsill.
And I knew, with absolute conviction, that if Fisher, the Environmental Health Officers or anyone else, were going to take my home they’d have to starve me out first. I had enough furniture to construct a solid barricade, after all. And I’d got used to being hungry in recent months.
Monday lunchtime, an envelope with the DVLA logo plopped through my door. A reply to the form I’d completed – and long forgotten – about the Mini’s registration. A waste of time and money, since I now knew it was Mrs Mack’s.
Only now I got to discover her name. Which meant I could spend the rest of the afternoon looking her up on the Internet.
Which would be a stupid, pathetic and humiliating waste of time.
I put the envelope in the bin.
But if Mack shared her surname, I could Internet stalk him. Find out his job. Get some background information in case anyone asked at the wedding. As Ashley so very rightly said – the best lie was one closest to the truth.
I picked it out of the bin. Tossed it in again. Then took it out, scrumpled it up as hard as I could and shoved it underneath a heap of teabags and an empty tin of tomatoes. I went back into the dining-room and picked up some sandpaper. Gave the table three half-hearted strokes, threw the paper down, ran back into the kitchen and yanked the envelope out of the bin like an addict.
‘I’ve paid good money for this information,’ I called up to Mannequin Diana, who was, as usual, judging me from the top of the stairs. ‘I might as well read it. You never know when it might come in useful. What if Mack has a heart attack and I need to give the paramedics his details?’
Ripping it open, I scanned the form for information.
Blinked. Shook my head in case adjusting my brain would make the letters rearrange themselves.
Sat back down at the table.
Shook my head again, this time in wry acknowledgement at the twists and turns life brought, and the smallness of this crazy world.
I had only gone and found Hillary West.
And it looked as though she (sort of) lived next door.