Thursday 7th December 2023
Georgie
‘So, when are you coming back?’
Georgie sighs into her phone as she pushes through her front door. ‘We’ve been through this, Lo!’
‘And you never answer.’
‘Because I don’t know.’ In her narrow hall, she eases off her knee-length boots. There is a small hole in her sock and she twists it round out of sight, even though there’s only her here. ‘Perhaps never, if things … work out.’
‘What things? The tombola at the village fete? The morris dancing championships?’
‘Very funny, Lo.’ Georgie wanders into her kitchen and flicks on the kettle. She’s glad her sister can’t see the poky dimensions and twee décor of this cottage. She pictures Lola in her own kitchen in South London, its polished marble island the size of this whole room.
‘Seriously, George—’
‘I like it here, okay! And I’m doing great things with the local pub.’
‘You were doing great things in London. Proper things.’
‘People here need me. My marketing experience …’ She catches sight of her reflection in the mirror as she heads into the living room with her coffee. There is extra colour in her powdered cheeks, and she knows it’s not the country air.
‘But it was just all so sudden! And I miss you, Gee! Can’t I come and visit?’
‘When I’m settled,’ Georgie says too quickly.
‘How are you not settled by now?’
‘There’s been a lot going on.’ She pauses, reflecting that this is an understatement, then continues in her breeziest voice: ‘I’m getting a spare room sorted – with facilities you’ll find acceptable – and then I promise, Lo, I promise you can come.’
‘Or we could top-and-tail like old times.’
Georgie allows herself a smile. ‘Can’t say I recall ever actually doing that.’
‘No, neither do I, come to think of it. You’d take up too much room. Beanpole.’
‘You’re not so tiny yourself …’ Georgie almost blurts out something about Alice, who is even taller than her, but she bites her tongue. The fewer details she gives her sister about the people here, the better. Unease stirs and she hurries the conversation to a close. ‘Anyway, I’ll let you go …’
‘Sure, sure … You’ve probably got cow pat to clean off your front step or something.’
‘Get over it, Lo. I live in the country now.’
‘But why?’
‘Hanging up!’ She almost does so in a huff, but blows a conciliatory air-kiss down the phone at the last minute.
Her sister’s ‘why?’ echoes long after the call is done. Georgie closes her eyes and Alice comes back into her mind. Always so tightly coiled, so brittle and wary. Different from how Georgie imagined her, before she came here, yet not so hard to reconcile with what she’d been told. Will Leo’s release unravel her? Unravel everything? Will Georgie be able to grab at the fraying threads as it does?
A shiver darts through her and she strides over to make the fire in her wood burner. She’s become pretty skilled, by now, at arranging the newspaper and kindling, getting the logs to catch. There’s something therapeutic about building the framework, about watching the flames spark and spread.
Sitting back down, she tucks a blanket over her knees in a way that would make Lola snort with laughter and check it for a Burberry label. The days are lonely here, she has to admit. At least in London she could bury her demons inside liquid lunches and work. She picks up her phone and checks the RSVPs to Robbie’s memorial. People are confused that she’s organising it, she can tell, and her own doubts keep swimming to the surface. But it’ll be a chance to draw the whole village together, to be in the thick of things, inside yet outside. A chance she might not get again. She notes down a few new attendees and then strays over to Instagram, scrolling through her city friends’ posts. Cocktails and client dinners; perfect families and new holiday homes. When she sees a photo of her old team celebrating ‘targets smashed!’ in her favourite sushi restaurant, she switches over to the Instagram page she set up for Cromley’s pub.
It’s a brand-new era, raves her latest post. We hope you’ll love our FRESH new look! Georgie always tries to make the takeover seem like a cleansing, in the eyes of the village, even though she knows that, in Alice’s vision, it’s more like an annihilation.
She’s no idiot. No clueless London lightweight like some people in Cromley clearly think. She knows Alice isn’t trying to ‘give the village back its heart’, as the official line goes, but to break Chrissy’s heart in the only way she knows how. Tearing down the Raven sign with its beady-eyed bird; erasing every trace of Chrissy or Leo or the time before.
But is there more to it, even, than that? And if Georgie can see through Alice, can Alice see straight through her?
Draining her coffee, she tabs over to Facebook, where all the pub’s social media used to sit. Where she can lose herself for hours, some nights, poring over the old photos, the years of history. She homes in on the few pictures that remain from the night of the tragedy. New Year’s Eve 2021. Alice in a green velvet dress, her black hair pinned, her lipstick dark. An intensity to her expression whenever she’s caught by a camera unawares. Chrissy red-faced as she works to serve her punters, with a pucker of anxiety in her brow, as if some shadow of foreboding was already creeping in.
The two boys, Leo and Robbie, are glimpsed mostly in the background. Sometimes helping behind the bar; other times sitting together, strumming guitars, or mingling separately in the crowd. There is one photo Georgie always lingers over. They’re standing at the dartboard, Robbie poised to aim, Leo watching him with a brooding expression that sends waves of complicated feeling through her every time. She zooms in on his dark eyes, the clench of his jaw, his features switching between familiar and strange.
Does he have the answers she has failed, so far, to find? Now that he’s free, could he help unlock the next part of her plan; could he tell her – would he tell her – what she came here, to Cromley, to understand?