The House of New Beginnings

by Lucy Diamond

  Well, if she had, so be it, she kept having to reassure herself. Better to be emotional than unfeeling, surely. And, okay, so perhaps she did have a tendency to over-react, but she also had a streak of sheer determination that acted as a counterbalance. She would see this through, come what may. She would take the gruelling shifts and physical exhaustion on the chin, she wouldn’t let other people’s doubts eat away at her. Besides, she only had to taste whatever she had cooked that day – a Thai green curry with home-made puffy naans, a damp rhubarb cake with just a hint of ginger, a seared tuna steak with tongue-zinging salsa verde – and she would feel her equilibrium return.

  A change is as good as a holiday, her gran had always been fond of saying. And even though working for Brendan did not quite equate to holiday bliss, Rosa just had to keep clinging on to the thought that she was doing the right thing.

  It was a twenty-minute walk along the front from the hotel to her flat and there was a stiff breeze, whipping the sea into frothy white peaks, flapping at the striped awnings of the souvenir shops and sending the postcard racks spinning dizzily in a blur of colour. Rosa freed her hair from its ponytail and shook it loose around her shoulders, breathing in appreciatively as she passed a fish and chip restaurant. Hot chips and beer and ice cream, the rush and suck of the waves – those were the smells and sounds of her adopted city, and they already felt like home.

  Aside from the fact that her heart had been ripped in two, and that everyone clearly thought she was having a breakdown, starting again had turned out to be the best kind of distraction. Her new home was a stone’s throw from the seafront, on a Regency square with a large grassy lawn in the middle. The rent wasn’t cheap and the landlady seemed rather overbearing (and kept going on about her handsome son in a heavy-handedly suggestive sort of way) but Rosa loved the house’s proximity to the city centre and the prom, plus her new kitchen was a generous size and well equipped. What was more, the shabby grandeur of the old building felt a million miles from Max’s sleek modern Islington bachelor pad that she’d moved into far too quickly – which could only be a good thing. Rooms of her own; Virginia Woolf would definitely have approved.

  Turning off the promenade and up the slight hill towards the house, she could see a family having a picnic on the long sloping grass in the middle of the square, a golden Labrador flopped beside them, keeping a close eye out for dropped crusts or stray crisps. A safe distance away were two studenty types lying in each other’s arms, ‘canoodling’ as her mum would have said, all pale angular limbs and tousled hair. She felt the familiar tightening in her throat that still came when she thought about Max and hurried on. The last time she’d spoken to him was after she’d done her flit; he must have come back to the flat and discovered her gone. I can explain, he’d grovelled and her fingers had trembled on the phone at his voice. I fell in love with you and things got out of hand. I’m sorry. She was on the pier, of all places, and the December wind was lashing, raw and merciless, in her face, making her eyes stream. So you bloody well should be, she’d replied, then promptly hurled the phone out into the sea, a flash of silver arcing against the gunmetal sky, before it dropped like a stone beneath the surface.

  Her mind would turn to that phone sometimes, on the bottom of the seabed, gradually becoming buried by the sand and silt. Maybe one day it would wash up on the shore. Maybe it had been pulled further out to sea and was now halfway to France, tumbling silently along the soft muddy sand at the mercy of the undertow. She wondered how many times Max had tried calling again, if he’d left a series of apologetic messages, or if he’d just deleted her number, his bluff called, giving her up as a bad job. Maybe he was on to his next conquest already, who knew?

  Lost in her thoughts, it was only as she reached her building that she noticed there was an ambulance parked outside and that the front door was wide open. What on earth . . . ? With a jolt of alarm, she hurried up the front steps, just in time to see her neighbour Jo emerge from her flat, supported by two paramedics, one male, one female.

  ‘Jo!’ Rosa cried in shock. The other woman’s face was deathly pale against her vibrant crimson hair and her eyes were glazed. ‘What’s happening? Are you all right?’

  ‘Rosa,’ Jo said, her voice gasping and weak, her eyes rolling back in her head as she spoke. Rosa didn’t really know her, as they both worked shifts – Jo as a cancer nurse, she seemed to remember – although she had seen her a couple of times, accompanied by a sullen-faced girl with a lot of messy red hair she guessed was Jo’s daughter. ‘Rosa, I need . . .’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes?’ cried Rosa anxiously. Christ, what was wrong with her? ‘What is it?’

  ‘I need . . . Bea. Can you look after Bea?’ Jo panted, sagging like a rag doll against the paramedic, as if it had taken every ounce of strength left in her to get out the words. ‘Please?’

  Bea? That must be the scowling teenage daughter. ‘Um . . .’ Rosa said uncertainly, wondering what this would entail, not to mention whether she was up to the job. But Jo’s eyes were pleading, her face desperate. ‘Sure,’ she mumbled eventually, because how could she reply otherwise when the poor woman in front of her appeared on the verge of death? ‘Where is she?’ she asked, glancing about as if Bea might be lurking, kohl-eyed and mutinous in a doorway.

  ‘School.’ Jo’s eyelids were falling like blinds, the words puffing out slower and fainter. ‘Back at . . . three-thirty.’

  ‘Come on, love, we need to get you out of here,’ the male paramedic said, hauling Jo up so that her thin bare legs dangled over his arm. One of her pink flip-flops swung away from her foot as if trying to make a break for it and Rosa darted forward and slotted it back on. ‘We’re going to the Royal Sussex,’ the paramedic told her, bundling his limp human charge away towards the front door.

  ‘Right,’ Rosa said, hurrying after him. The second paramedic was already flinging open the back doors of the ambulance and Rosa felt a lurch of panic. Jo would be coming back, wouldn’t she? ‘What’s wrong, anyway? What’s happened?’ she blurted out. Her neighbour looked so poorly, her eyes were no longer even open. ‘Will she be all right?’

  ‘We’ll know more at the hospital,’ the female paramedic replied without looking round, which sounded worryingly vague and not remotely reassuring. And then they were loading her into the back and slamming the doors, and Rosa stood there dumbly on the dusty pavement as, seconds later, the ambulance started up, complete with siren wailing woo-woo-woo-woo as it accelerated down the road. Even the canoodlers paused mid-smooch to look up and watch it go.

  Rosa went back inside the house, the lobby cool and dark after the bright sunshine outside, and she blinked dazedly before heading towards her flat. That had all been a bit dramatic, she thought, frowning as she slotted her key into its lock. What had happened to Jo? When would she be back? And – shit. How was Rosa going to cope with Jo’s silent, surly daughter in the meantime?

  Chapter Three

  Georgie had been in Brighton for a week now and in that time had flung herself wholeheartedly into her new city, pounding the streets like the most hardcore of tourists. The weather had been unseasonably warm – more like summer than spring – and she loved the way the place crackled with energy, the streets teeming with life. Every café and pub worth its salt set up pavement tables, there were buskers and street performers on each corner, and music floated out from open windows. Georgie enjoyed getting lost in the warren of alleyways known as the Lanes, browsing in one funky boutique after another, eyeing up the many gorgeous clothes she couldn’t afford, and breathing in the scents of the artisan bakeries, the Vietnamese restaurant, the retro ice-cream parlour and all the rest. It was a city bursting with flavours and experiences, and she felt by turns dazzled and delighted, seduced by its charms.

  But then, inevitably, she would return to the flat – the small, dingy flat which still looked depressingly bleak, however hard she worked to make it feel homely – and the emptiness of her life would enclose her again. It was lonely and quiet
– too lonely and too quiet – even when she had the radio on and sang along in an attempt to cheer herself up. By the time Simon came home, she would be desperate for company, practically wagging her tail like a dog as she heard him clumping up the stairs. She was not a shy person, Georgie, but chatting to friendly baristas in cafés when she ventured out for a coffee or sandwich had so far been the extent of her socializing here in her new home. It didn’t feel like nearly enough.

  Lucky you!!!! her friends Amelia and Jade replied whenever she posted sunset beach photos on Facebook, and updates about how much she was enjoying being a lady of leisure. (Well, come on. She was hardly going to tell the truth and confess to feeling bored and lonely on social media.) JEALOUS!!! they sighed as she photographed a cool pair of shoes she’d spotted or a quirky interior design shop.

  The words might lift her for a few seconds each time she saw their cheery messages but then she’d end up feeling sick inside with deceit. Especially as Amelia and Jade were both busily posting photos of wedding venues and bridesmaid dresses, or nights out down the Shepherd’s Crook, and actually it was all Georgie could do to stop herself from replying Lucky you!!!! JEALOUS!!! in reply to them. She would just have to make the best of it, she told herself whenever homesickness stole in. Six months wasn’t that long, was it?

  The most discomfiting thing, though, was how the move had changed her relationship with Simon. She’d always viewed the two of them as equal partners in a team – both independent and free with their own friends and routines, yet committed to one another at the same time. Now the dynamic had completely shifted. Simon had people to see, a job to go out to every day, appointments and meetings and a whole other life outside the flat. Georgie, by comparison, had nothing. There was only so long you could kill time wandering around shops taking photos of burnished jewellery and arty lampshades before the assistants started to eye you as a potential shoplifter. Similarly, there was only so long you could eke out a coffee in a café before the waiting staff began pointedly scrubbing the table.

  Thank goodness for the weekend when they had two whole days together and she felt, for the first time, as if they were a couple again. They’d started with a proper Saturday brunch in the nearest greasy spoon diner, before driving out to a local beauty spot, Devil’s Dyke, where they watched people leaping off the steep side of the hill to paraglide. That evening they’d gone to an amazing Indian restaurant near the seafront and ended up in a cocktail bar, getting completely hammered on mojitos and laughing themselves senseless. Sunday had seen them hiring bikes and heading out along the seafront to blow away their hangovers before stopping for lunch in a pub and a leisurely browse through a pile of newspapers. It had all been perfect. This is more like it, she’d thought happily, feeling the wind in her hair as they pedalled home. He’d glanced over his shoulder to grin back at her, his sandy hair flopping about, his body pleasingly muscular under his T-shirt, and she’d felt a burst of joy, as hot and pure as the sun above their heads.

  But then had come Monday morning with Simon slipping out of the flat before Georgie had even opened her eyes, and the week had yawned ahead of her all over again with absolutely nothing on the horizon. Back to square one and the long lonely silences.

  Simon had not been terribly sympathetic when she voiced her feelings a few evenings later, telling him how she felt like a housewife all of a sudden. He’d not specifically said the words ‘Well, why did you come here, then? What did you expect?’ but she suspected an equivalent response might be fairly near the tip of his tongue. She had ended up laughing and making a joke of the situation – ‘I’ll have your slippers warming by the fire and dinner on the table when you get home at this rate!’ – so that he wouldn’t think she was complaining. Because she wasn’t complaining, obviously. Well, okay, maybe just a little bit.

  So much for Amelia telling her that the eleventh house was one of friendship and all the rest of it; she hadn’t met a single one of their neighbours yet although she had seen a few letters arriving for a Ms Charlotte Winters in Flat 4, and a Jo Spires in Flat 2, and she’d heard some grungey music coming from one of the lower-floor flats too. And then, the other day, after having forced herself out for a jog along the seafront, she came back to the house and caught a fleeting glimpse of a much older woman vanishing up the stairs ahead. The woman was dressed in a tailored black dress and a boxy cerise jacket, her hair cut in a neat silvery bob, with a trail of jasmine perfume in her wake. First appearances: impressively glamorous, especially compared to Georgie, who was there with sweat patches under her arms, her blonde hair falling out of its messy bunches and a shiny red face. Still, she couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to introduce herself after all those days of silence.

  ‘Hi!’ she’d called, hurrying after the woman. She hoped she didn’t smell too ripe. ‘I just moved into number—’ Then she realized the woman was in the middle of a call on her phone and oblivious to the scarlet-faced jogger behind her.

  ‘Well, I don’t care, I don’t want to see this doctor,’ the older woman was saying imperiously, a trace of a foreign accent audible in her voice, and Georgie stopped short, not wanting to interrupt. Maybe another time, she told herself, crestfallen.

  A job. That was what she needed: something to get her up and out of the flat, something to chat about with Simon in the evening other than how his day had gone; a purpose in life again, where she could hopefully make a friend or two as well. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

  ‘What do you think you’ll do?’ Simon said, poking a fork rather dubiously into his pork chop as she told him her idea over dinner that night. (Georgie had experimented with a mustard sauce for their chops and it hadn’t been an overwhelming success.) ‘Look for another library job?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, although without any real conviction. Since leaving her old place of work she’d come to realize that her favourite thing about it – aside from the quiet days of boiled sweets and paperback thrillers – had been compiling the monthly newsletter that she sent out to all the library members. It was her own creation, born out of sheer boredom one particularly dreary afternoon, but she had come to love writing it each time: detailing new arrivals on the shelves, occasional author events, book group meetings and a chatty little intro that often strayed into observations about the weather, whatever she might be reading herself that week, and sometimes, if she was desperate to fill up the space, photos of her parents’ cockapoo Reggie and his latest exploits. ‘Maybe I’ll get some kind of writing job,’ she replied impulsively, as much in the hope of impressing Simon as anything else.

  Unfortunately his phone beeped in that moment and he stopped to scrutinize the new message – yes, at the table; yes, even though they were still eating – but she went doggedly on, embellishing as she spoke. ‘Yeah, I could set myself up as a freelancer,’ she said, trying to drag his attention away. ‘Roving reporter, that kind of thing. I’ve always quite fancied it, to be honest. Or maybe I’ll just be an astronaut. Simon.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, finally putting his phone down. ‘Good idea.’

  She rolled her eyes in frustration. Well, she’d show him. With or without his encouragement, she’d make him see he wasn’t the only one who could nab himself an interesting job. So there.

  The writing idea might have floated out of her brain on a whim but the more she thought about it, the more she fancied giving it a crack. Why not? She was a good writer, people had always said so. Her hit rate on the library newsletter had been impressive and she always got lots of chatty emails in reply, which had been very pleasing. (Even if half of them were from dog-lovers requesting more pictures of Reggie.) As a kid, she’d written little newspapers for her mum and dad: The Stonefield Times and The Hemlington Road Gazette, filled with scintillating items about her pet rabbits, her brother’s most recent telling-off at school or whatever gossip she’d overheard her mum discussing with the neighbours. Later, as a teenager, she’d been offered work experience at the local newspaper during the fi
rst summer of sixth-form, and had enjoyed it so much she’d flirted for a while with taking on an apprenticeship there after her A-levels. This plan had lasted right until Simon had announced he was applying to Liverpool University – at which point Georgie had promptly applied there too, plumping for an English degree instead.

  She sighed as she lay in bed that night, thinking about this and its parallel with her current situation: how she’d followed her boyfriend to Liverpool, and how she’d followed him to Brighton. Was that all she was good for, tagging along, being the subordinate sidekick? Was it enough? Was she enough? ‘Simon,’ she whispered, suddenly needing reassurance but he was fast asleep and unresponsive beside her. What would she have said to him anyway, she thought glumly, turning over and trying to get comfortable. Hey, sorry to wake you up, just wondering, how do you see our roles in this relationship? Because I’m feeling a bit uncertain of mine right now.

  Listening to his deep, even breathing failed to soothe her. In fact, it only made her feel more awake than ever. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t enjoyed her English degree, she reasoned, finding herself on the defensive now. She’d loved it, actually, all those books to devour, whole days swallowed up prone on her bed with a play or novel, as well as the occasional midnight essay to scrawl. Still, every now and then she would read a particularly good newspaper or magazine article that stirred something inside her, and she’d remember again that fleeting teenage dream of being a journalist herself, writing sparky, spiky copy in a busy, exciting newsroom with occasional trips out to interview film stars or politicians. The power of words; the bricks with which you could construct a story.

  Well, then, she told herself firmly, wrangling with the pillow one last time. There was her answer. She might have followed Simon to Brighton, but maybe now was the time to revisit an unfulfilled ambition, to take the tiller of her own life and steer it in a brand-new direction, wherever she wanted to go. Hell, yeah.