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Location: 23 (a) Parker Street, Leeds
Radio station: Aire FM
Track playing: ‘I Want to Dance with Somebody’ by Whitney Houston
Miles travelled: 0
Miles until Captain Poldark: 543.5
Lisa closed her front door – hard enough to hear the click of the latch – and then turned the deadlock key. She heard the reassuring clunk of the bolt slide into place. She pushed against the door once, twice and a final third time. She then crossed it off her list in her notebook.
‘This is it,’ she said aloud into the quiet calm summer morning. Standing on her doorstep, she took a moment to notice how beautiful Parker Street was – at least when there were no other people in it, cluttering it up with their lives.
Lisa reached her tired but reliable little lilac Nissan Micra. She checked in the back seat, as she always did, just to make sure there were no axe-murderers waiting to pounce. Of course Lisa knew in her rational mind that the chances of there being an axe-murderer waiting in the back of her Micra were slim to none. However, she still had to check.
At some point, some years ago, Lisa had become very frightened of almost everything. She wasn’t just frightened of axe-murderers and terrorists or war or an outbreak of an unstoppable zombie virus. She was also terrified of her next-door neighbour, the guy who got the bus every morning at the stop across the road, old Mrs Rashid in the corner shop, the checkout girl in Asda … pretty much everyone and everything she could think of. And Lisa spent a great deal of time thinking of new things to be afraid of. She reasoned, in a very unreasonable way, that if she could think of it, then it might not actually happen.
Lisa knew that most ‘normal’ people would think of her as really very odd. But knowing that didn’t seem to help at all. It could be worse, she often thought to herself. You could be mad, and not know it.
And then she’d wondered if actually that wouldn’t be better.
As it was, there was only one way Lisa had found to get by from day to day without spending it under her bed. This was to check and double check, secure and triple-secure her life in every single way she could think of. Otherwise she would be gripped by terror that seemed just as real to her as her bedside table, or the pot plant she’d inherited from her mum. However, the effort to try and keep herself safe meant that – up until today at least – she spent most of her time locked in her house, her own prisoner.
Keeping the world out was the only thing that worked, and reading books helped too. In books Lisa became a hundred, a thousand different people, who were all more brave, more clever and more beautiful than she. They were people who had a future, people who had a happy ending. She had thought that perhaps that might be the pattern for the rest of her life and she was coming to terms with that.
And then out of nowhere, this had happened.
And it had been her idea. Lisa wasn’t sure whether it had been a moment of madness, or possibly a moment of sanity. She was only sure that she seemed to be going through with it. And she felt kind of … excited.
Chucking her bag into the boot, Lisa slipped into the driver’s seat. She slotted her key into the ignition and put her road atlas on the passenger seat. (Satnavs were one of the many modern things Lisa was scared of.) She had carefully plotted the route in black marker pen, each relevant page flagged with a different coloured Post-it note. She took a deep breath. In through the nose, one, two, three. Out through the mouth, one, two three.
She looked at the purple troll that hung from the rear-view mirror. ‘Don’t think about it, Lisa,’ she said aloud. ‘Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it.’
Strangers from the Internet.
Of course the moment she tried not to think the thought, it appeared. And it was massive and neon green in colour and flashing like the lights outside a strip club.
‘I’m going to meet people from the Internet,’ Lisa said to Troll, hearing her own voice, high and tense. ‘Strangers from the Internet. These are people I have only ever known on the Captain Ross Poldark fan forum, poldarlings.com. STRANGERS FROM THE INTERNET. They are the very people who everyone knows are most likely to be crazy, perverts and murderers.’
Her breaths started coming in short tight bursts. She clenched the steering wheel so hard she could see the whites of her finger joints.
‘I’m going to meet strangers from the Internet. Strangers. From. The. Internet.’ The big, scary thought made Lisa feel very, very small, like a bug that could be so easily crushed under foot.
‘Don’t think about it, Lisa,’ Lisa said aloud once more. She turned the engine on and opened her road atlas to the first page of the journey. ‘You want to do this. You want to go to Cornwall and find Captain Poldark in real life. It’s your dream. The only one you’ve had since … Remember that’s why you are doing this, you want to find Captain Poldark. And you’d be far too scared to do it alone. You don’t have any friends in real life that would travel over four hundred miles, mostly along B roads, to see a man in a three-cornered hat with a scythe.
‘The only people that would come with you are these people, people you’ve been chatting to almost every day since the first series of Poldark was on TV. I mean, yes, technically they are strangers. But they are strangers that you know. So don’t think about it, Lisa. Just do it. For once in your life just do it. This is the only way you are going to find Captain Ross Poldark, also known as Aidan Turner, and tell him what he’s meant to you. You are not an idiot, Lisa. You know he probably won’t even care, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you will have done something you’ve dreamt about doing, something that seemed impossible. And maybe, Lisa, just maybe, if you can do that then … well, everything else can seem more manageable too. And you won’t have to be so afraid anymore.’
Lisa took the handbrake off, and pulled out of her parking space.
At last she was on the road. The first stop was Dudley where she was going to pick up her first passenger, username: @I_AM_DEMELZA.
Of course it was going to take her much longer to get to Dudley than it would take most people, more than twice as long. But that was the trouble when you were too scared to drive on anything but a B road, it always took a long time to get anywhere.
‘It’s not the destination,’ Lisa said. ‘It’s the journey.’
And then she remembered Captain Poldark, and his dark and stormy eyes, and thought that in this case, it was the destination. It was totally the destination.