by Rosie Blake
‘Well, there’s nothing much to take in the corridor, apart from leaflets for pizza delivery, and I suppose if they brought along their own screwdriver they could make off with the coat hooks. Effort, though,’ Lauren mused, looking at Clara and grinning. ‘Sorry, I was just walking to pick Rory up from nursery – he does a few hours every day now. Am I a terrible person for admitting that sometimes they’re the best hours in my day?’
Clara smiled. ‘Of course not, I can imagine you’d need the break.’
‘I do need the break,’ Lauren said, following Clara into the shop. ‘That series of The Crown isn’t going to watch itself!’
Clara laughed. ‘I haven’t seen it.’
‘It’s historically very accurate and interesting and you learn lots about the royal family. And also: Matt Smith. Hmm.’
‘Do you mostly watch it for Matt Smith?’
Lauren hung her head so her strawberry-blonde hair fell forward. ‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know him. Not sure he’s big in Denmark. We’re more into Viggo Mortensen.’
‘Um…’
Clara raised an eyebrow, ‘Are you saying you’ve never watched Lord of the Rings? You are missing out. He was Aragorn.’
‘Isn’t that all about elves?’ Lauren’s nose crinkled. ‘I’m not really into pixie folk.’
‘He’s not a pix – Look, he’s good-looking, take my word for it.’
Lauren was already distracted anyway, had picked up a large foam finger from a basket and was putting it on. ‘I wonder if Rory would get the message better if I wore this when I’m telling him off.’
‘Not sure it would have the desired effect,’ Clara admitted, looking at Lauren and her oversized hand. ‘This, however’ – she pulled out a plastic policeman’s helmet and popped it on her own head – ‘this could do it.’
Lauren nodded. ‘Definitely. It would give me that extra authority.’ She pointed a hand in front of her as if signalling traffic. ‘So are you looking after the shop?’
Clara nodded. ‘I’m house-sitting for Louisa and running the shop in return.’
‘How brilliant. Yay, a friend!’ Lauren said, waving the foam finger around.
‘I want to open it up.’ Clara shrugged. ‘But first I need to do something to attract attention. And, well…’ She felt heat fill her face, removing the policeman’s helmet as she said, ‘I think I’ve got an idea. Want to hear it?’
She felt lighter climbing the stairs back to the flat. She’d spent the rest of the day in the shop after Lauren left, feeling buoyed by her reaction. She’d started sorting through the stock and had only called a halt when her stomach had rumbled so loudly she thought she had set off some vibrating toy. It had got dark already and she pushed open the door to the flat, nudging her rucksack out of the way.
She knew she needed to sort the flat out, but at that moment all she had the energy to do was get ready for bed.
She obviously made a mistake by not acknowledging the parrot, who called out, ‘IS IT BECAUSE I IS BLACK? IS IT BECAUSE I IS BLACK?’ as she made her way into the bathroom.
She stood in the doorway, smiling at the sight of the large iron claw-foot bath littered with towels. She whisked around the room as quickly as she could, piling up towels, clothes and more into a heap for washing, and scrubbing the enamel. Searching the bathroom cabinet for something suitable, she reached to the back for a glass bottle of rose-scented oil, pouring droplets into the bath and hearing the clank of the pipes as water gushed from the tap. As the bath filled, she unearthed a tea light from a side pocket of her rucksack and, lighting it with the flame from the hob, sat it on the windowsill, turning the bathroom light off so that the room now flickered with shadows.
As she stepped into the bath, she felt the silkiness of the water, the scent rising off the steam, felt comforted by the yellow glow of the walls. Resting her head back, she felt her muscles unwind, giggling as Roddy the ginger cat padded into the room, immediately curling up in the middle of the heap of towels. Clara shut her eyes, enjoying her first bath in over a week. It was the thing she missed most about her old home; many bed and breakfasts or hostels only had showers. This was blissful, she thought as she allowed her brain to slow down, returning to the day’s discoveries, the shop, her plans.
Then the fog cleared, and one single idea leapt out at her, so strong that she found herself lurching into a sitting position and fumbling for a towel. Stepping out of the bath, hair dripping onto her shoulders, she left the bathroom and walked across the flat, too focused to think to find her slipper socks, rushing back down the staircase to the shop, practically dropping the key in her excitement to get back in, knowing where she was headed, what she wanted to see.
She passed the till and the cupboard in the corner and then pushed open the door to the back room. It was a large room, with two bay windows, window seat cushions lost underneath piles of paper, looking out over the square of garden outside. Even in winter the lawn looked lush and green, bordered by hedges and pots filled with evidence of flowers and herbs. A large table sat in the middle of the room, chairs scattered around the edges, and Clara walked around it slowly, skirting empty cardboard boxes and broken toys and leaving wet footprints on the floor as the idea that had begun in the bath became fully formed. This was it, the heart of her plan, and she felt a familiar fizz of excitement. She bit her lip, impatient now to get dressed and get to work.
‘Louisa. LOUISA.’
Clara froze in the doorway of the room as the voice echoed in the space.
‘LOUISA.’
She moved tentatively through the shop, towards the voice. Just as she emerged through the side door and into the corridor, an eye appeared in the blank space of the letter box.
‘Louisa, is that you?’
‘Um,’ Clara said, pulling her towel tighter as the eye swivelled her way.
‘You’re not Louisa,’ the voice said, stating the obvious. The letter box snapped closed again.
‘No,’ Clara said, feeling stupid talking to the back of the door.
The letter box opened again. ‘Who are you and where is Louisa?’
The eyes were outlined in black kohl and were narrowed in suspicion. Clara had a sudden urge to laugh. She stepped across to the door, her bare feet cold on the tiles of the hallway.
‘Hold on.’ She pulled on the latch and opened the door to find Roz standing up, one arm behind her back, the other hand smoothing her auburn hair.
She pointed at Clara. ‘Your hair is wet,’ she said, as if Clara wasn’t aware.
‘I was having a bath,’ Clara explained, feeling absurd lingering on the doorstep in a towel. Not wearing knickers was a surefire way of making her feel vulnerable.
‘A bath?’ Roz arched a thickly pencilled eyebrow.
‘Do you want to come in?’ Clara said, desperate to get back to the flat and into some clothes. She was already assessing the best way to climb the stairs without flashing her first guest.
‘I wanted to speak to Louisa,’ Roz said, folding her arms across her chest.
‘She’s not here.’
‘And who are you?’
Clara frowned. ‘I’m Clara.’
‘Well, Clara, when will she be back?’
‘Back?’
‘Louisa.’ Roz tapped a long nail on her palm in impatience.
‘Oh, she’s gone,’ Clara said. ‘Spain, you know, like she said last night.’
Roz’s eyebrows lifted. ‘She left.’ That seemed to unfreeze her, and she marched across the threshold and straight up the stairs, leaving Clara to close the door and run up after her.
Roz was standing in the doorway, her face twisted as she took in the carnage inside the flat. Louisa’s belongings on every surface, Clara’s rucksack spilling its contents on the carpet, Roddy’s orange hairs covering everything else.
‘YOU ARE THE WEAKEST LINK, GOODBYE.’ Lady CaCa was parading up and down her perch, looking at Roz, head thrown back intermittently to shout the words. Clara stifled a giggle with one hand,
the towel slipping just as Roz turned so that she found herself flashing one breast at her.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, covering her escaped boob, the Anne Robinson impression still on a loop behind her. ‘Sorry, um, how can I help?’ she asked, not doing very well at disguising her giggles. She hiccoughed.
‘You haven’t explained what you’re doing here. Have you broken in?’
Clara hiccoughed again. ‘Broken… No, of course not,’ she said, drawing herself up to her not-very-substantial height. ‘Louisa asked me to house-sit for her, look after the animals,’ she said, pointing at Roddy, who was curled up in the middle of the bed in a nest made of tie-dye clothes, and Lady CaCa, who was now shaking her foot out, ruffling her wings.
‘NO LIKEY NO LIGHTY.’
Clara pretended she hadn’t heard the parrot, feeling the sides of her mouth twitch again.
‘So she’s just swanned off and left the shop to fester, has she?’
‘No, no actually, I’m going to open it up,’ Clara said, her previous excitement bubbling up, her smile wide. She was about to launch into an explanation, her latest big idea. She wanted to share it with someone. She knew it would work.
She was about to start when Roz cut her off. ‘What do you mean, open it up? You can’t just open it up. How absurd.’
Clara snapped her mouth shut.
‘You don’t know a thing about it, and I’m sure even Louisa wouldn’t just hand over the keys and the till…’ She paused, looking at Clara as if she was about to slope off with a massive bag labelled SWAG, ‘to a total stranger.’
Clara was too shocked to interrupt. A breeze from the open door was making her skin break out into goose bumps as she watched Roz park herself on a bar stool at the kitchen counter.
‘It’s outrageous. Bad enough that she’s just LEFT, but handing over the shop to a nobody, someone not from the village, or even England…’ Roz arched an eyebrow.
Clara wrapped her towel more firmly around herself. Was her Danish accent that obvious? Did others see her as a stranger? She thought of Louisa, whirling around the place; had she really stopped to think? Had Clara bullied her into a rash decision she would live to regret? She felt her previous certainty that she was doing the right thing shaken as Roz continued to talk.
‘I wanted to discuss things with her. If she’s not going to run the place… well, I’m not talking it through with you. When is she back?’
‘I’m really not sure,’ Clara said, feeling her fists curl as she stood in bare feet watching this rude women stomp about the flat.
‘It’s so typical of her, no thought at all, just swanning off leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces…’
Clara noticed a red light flashing on a side table behind Roz, as if emphasising her next sentence.
‘And now you want to open up the shop without her. It’s preposterous. You have no idea what this village needs, no idea at all.’
‘I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to work it out,’ Clara said, drawing herself up to her full height as she readjusted the towel. She wished she was wearing clothes. She’d be taken a lot more seriously in clothes.
Roz sniffed. ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said. As she passed by the kitchen counter she dropped a slice of carrot cake into a piece of kitchen roll and folded it up. ‘She won’t be needing it,’ she said, not having the decency even to blush. Striding across the flat with one last sharp look at Clara, she headed to the door.
‘NICE TO SEE YOU, TO SEE YOU NICE, SHITHEAD,’ squawked Lady CaCa.
When Clara heard the door below bang shut, she rushed into the bedroom to quickly towel-dry her hair and find her clothes, pulling on every layer she had to warm herself up. What an unpleasant woman. No wonder she’d fallen out with Louisa; she was utterly vile. Well, Clara wasn’t giving up because of this setback.
As she pulled a jumper over her head, she was distracted again by the red flashing light. It was an answerphone on the table, an old-fashioned one attached to a wire that led into a half-closed drawer and to the missing phone. A red number 3 blinked in the small screen. Three messages. They must have arrived while she was in the shop.
She pressed the button, searching quickly for a pen and paper to write down any message for when Louisa returned, stepping back when she heard a booming male voice fill the room: the smooth, confident man from the voicemail earlier, who now seemed a lot louder and angrier.
Lady CaCa had started yelling, ‘MASTER OF THE HOUSE, MASTER OF THE HOUSE, LOVE ISLAND JOE,’ so Clara struggled to hear the first few sentences, but there was no mistaking the tone of the message.
‘… I don’t know who you are, but you can’t just leave a message saying you’re living in my mother’s flat after packing her off to Spain. I haven’t even spoken to her yet, and running the shop? We don’t know you and…’ The offensive message continued, but Clara had heard enough. She sank onto a bar stool, her head dropping onto her chest, her arms heavy. Did no one want her here? She felt gloomy as she let the voice ring around the flat.
Then she thought of Lauren’s reaction, Gavin, the toys downstairs, the ideas she had. It wasn’t all hopeless. And she’d seen the village: it needed something to change. She wanted to help. She needed to help. She lifted her head and spoke into the silence.
‘I’m not going to just give up,’ she said.
And a scream from above added, ‘DO YOU FEEL LUCKY, PUNK? WELL, DO YA?’
Chapter 6
Joe slammed the mobile down on his desk. No reply and another message left. What had his mother been thinking, just leaving like that, without any kind of warning?
He rubbed the sides of his head with his thumbs, massaging his temples and trying to focus on the screen in front of him. London was lit up in the window opposite, the East End below, people milling in pubs, moving to restaurants, bundled up against the cold. He could make out the outline of his own reflection in the glass, his tie loosened, his jacket over the chair, his sleeves rolled up. The central heating in the office was always set to tropical, and he felt beads of sweat on his hairline as he threw himself down into the chair.
He’d ordered them all dinner. It was being couriered over and the team were due back in any second. They’d have to eat it at their desks, as Joe had lined up a big night ahead, going through the finer details of the deal they needed to pitch first thing. They needed this one, it was big. He pictured his bonus cheque a few weeks away: this would swing it.
A strip light overhead was humming, dead flies collected beneath its glare, their dried-up bodies incongruous in the pristine office. He should call maintenance and get them to remove them. His hand hovered over the internal phone. Well, they should all be here, so why not? He pressed the number for reception and got them to redirect his call. He knew they’d have to come running. An MD called up in this company and it was more than your job was worth to ignore the request. He felt a flicker of satisfaction, purpose.
Pam appeared at his desk. ‘I’ve finished the filing for the Hache merger and have franked all the mail to go out first thing,’ she said, looking back at her coat draped over her desk. ‘So if that’s all…’
Joe leant back in his chair, pen in his mouth. ‘You’ve done all the filing, and typed up the minutes from the meeting today, you’ve proofread Mercer’s report for Andrew – it’ll need triple-checking…’
She nodded at each sentence, unable to help another glance back at her coat. She’d been here all day, arriving just after Joe. He knew he should let her go, but the anxiety was making him edgy, needing everything to be absolutely right. Pam was a steadying influence, a mother figure. He could rely on her.