Cloudy with a Chance of Love

by Fiona Collins

  Every cloud has a silver lining when it comes to love…

  Daryl Williams never minded the fact that she had a big bottom. It’s always been behind her. In fact, it was one of the things that her husband loved about her. Until he ran off with her best friend, Gabby.

  Daryl knows that she needs to get back in the dating game, she just doesn’t know how. So when her friend suggests taking a fortune forecast, she reluctantly agrees. And it looks like Daryl’s luck is in, by Friday she has a 99% chance of falling in love!

  Only, even when it’s written in the stars, finding the one after the one is never easy…

  The laugh-out-loud, uplifting story from Fiona Collins, bestselling author of A Year of Being Single. Perfect for fans of Jane Costello, Helen Fielding and Fiona Gibson.

  Also by Fiona Collins:

  A Year of Being Single

  Cloudy With a Chance of Love

  Fiona Collins

  www.CarinaUK.com

  FIONA COLLINS

  lives in the Essex countryside with her husband and three children, but also finds time for a loving relationship with a Kindle. She likes to write feisty, funny novels about slightly (ahem) more mature heroines. Fiona studied Film & Literature at Warwick University and has had many former careers including TV presenting in Hong Kong; talking about roadworks on the M25 on the radio; and being a film and television extra. She has kissed Gerard Butler and once had her hand delightfully close to George Clooney’s bum. When not writing, Fiona enjoys watching old movies and embarrassing her children. You can follow Fiona on Twitter @FionaJaneBooks.

  To Matthew

  Thanks go to my amazing editor, Charlotte.

  To Elizabeth Davies and Mary Torjussen, always!

  To Matthew and my children for letting me shut the study door and get on with it!

  Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Book List

  Title Page

  Author Bio

  Dedication

  Acknowledgement

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Excerpt

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Imogen

  Chapter Two: Frankie

  Chapter Three: Grace

  Endpages

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Sunday

  I have a large bottom. If I had to quantify it, I would say it was somewhere between the size of a space hopper and a meteorite. It’s pretty big, and it needs quite a bit of upholstery to keep it in check. Big knickers. Spanx. Industrial scaffolding like you might see on buildings in major cities. But I like it. I’m used to it. It has always been behind me.

  It’s a relief to find that it’s very fashionable to have a big bum these days. It never used to be. Women used to spend hours in the gym trying to whittle the damn thing down to nothing; now they’re trying to build it up. Make it round and firm and sticky-outy. Women have operations where things are stuffed into it: fat from other parts of their body, cotton wool, sandwiches… A big behind has recently become an asset and I finally find it’s something to be quite proud of. I could definitely give Kim Kardashian a run for her money, in the backside stakes, although I’m not sure I could ‘break’ the internet (unless I sat on it, of course) – I’m in my mid-forties for god’s sake. I no longer resemble the mildly sexy goddess I once was. But I do have a fashionably big bum.

  My big bottom is currently coming in very handy. I’m sitting on it, on the cold ground, in Trafalgar Square, and laughing my head off. The denseness of my large behind means I probably won’t feel the cold for another – ooh – three minutes and I’m laughing because I’ve just chucked my wedding ring in one of the fountains. Yes, it’s gone, just like that. I stood up, on the edge of the fountain and, without fuss or war cry, just lobbed it in. I thought it might land with a satisfying clunk, but it didn’t. I couldn’t hear anything, which was a bit of a disappointment. It just sank to the bottom, without ceremony, and now it sits there, rather forlornly, with all the pennies and the euros and the ring pulls from cans of Coke. Still, it feels wonderful, getting rid of it like that. It’s gone. I feel light, I feel free. I also feel slightly drunk; I may have had three or more cocktails in a bar off The Strand.

  I’d struggled to get it off. Well, it has been on my left hand for fifteen years. Sam had to lend me her little blue tin of Vaseline, so I could lubricate my finger.

  ‘Rub it all around the knuckle, that’s it, then wriggle,’ she’d said.

  ‘It’s bloody stuck!’

  ‘Wriggle it a bit more. Keep trying. You can do it, Daryl.’

  I kept trying. I smeared on a bit more Vaseline and wriggled it a bit more and finally the damn ring was free of my knuckle and off my finger and at the bottom of the fountain. Thank goodness for that. Let a Portuguese language student have it, for all I care. Let it fund some eagled-eyed teenager’s first Nissan Micra. Let it languish there for ever. It was nothing to do with me any more.

  ‘Well done,’ said Sam. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Oh god, Sam,’ I said. ‘I feel giddy and bloody wonderful!’ She hugged me and we did a little Fagin-ish jig, right there and then, in front of a group of Japanese tourists who were huddled together offering the peace sign to the world and taking selfies.

  I’ve been wonderfully giddy since this morning, to be honest, when I received my divorce papers.

  People don’t normally receive notice of the end of their marriages on a Sunday. Divorce papers come in the post, usually, along with everything else and if mine had arrived with Saturday’s post, they would have just plopped on my mat in the same yellow envelope as all the other boring solicitors’ missives I’ve received over the last year. I wouldn’t have noticed anything special about this particular envelope. Nothing would have alerted me to the fact that its contents were anything much different to all the others – no klaxon would have gone off; the envelope wouldn’t have flashed red, like the Batphone; there would have been no thunderbolt from the sky with accompanying, dramatic timpani music. But this particular envelope didn’t even land on my mat. My neighbour – my new neighbour, I’ve only lived in my new house for a week – smilingly handed me my decree absolute over the doorstep this morning.

  ‘Your hunky new neighbour’ said Sam, when I told her. He is quite hunky, which is not quite what I need when I’m embarking on a new start and don’t need any distractions – especially in the male form – but what can you do?

  Will, my hunky new neighbour, said there was a relief postman on at the moment obviously making all sorts of rookie errors and sorry he hadn’t noticed it yesterday, but he had some post for me. I thanked him in the embarrassingly gauche way I seem to have adopted with him (he is very good looking) and opened the envelope in my kitchen, expecting another drily-worded, highly expensive and baby-step advance in the slow-grinding cog of torture that was the dismantling of my marriage… It should have been simple – our daughter Freya is twenty-one and has left home, so there hasn’t been need for disputes over child maintenance or anything
like that – but I don’t think it ever is simple, is it? The whole process was dreadfully and soul-crushingly slow.

  It had been so slow that I was really surprised to discover, via the ponderous words of my bumbling and rotund solicitor (too many cakes, not enough time), that the deed was done; Jeff and I were divorced.

  I did a little whoop, then had a little cry, then gave another whoop. It was done, it was over. I was divorced – Jeff and I were no longer married and he and my very-much-former best friend, Gabby, were free to do whatever the hell they liked.

  I immediately called Sam; we got the Tube up to central London from Wimbledon, where we both live, and we’ve been here since half eleven, in a bar since quarter to twelve and it’s not yet three o’clock and we’re really rather tiddly and my ring is at the bottom of a fountain in Trafalgar Square.

  ‘So let’s have it, Daryl,’ Sam says, stretching out her legs in front of her and admiring her new boots (dark tan, riding in style; something a Jilly Cooper character would be proud of), ‘What are your plans for the future? What do you want to do?’

  I’m full of daiquiri so I can only think of four things.

  ‘Date but not fall in love.’ I start counting them off, on my fingers. ‘Enjoy my freedom. Make it up to Freya, who’s had to mother me for the past twelve months, when it should be the other way round. And decorate my new house.’ I stretch out my legs, too, which only reach to about Sam’s knees. I’ve got my favourite ankle boots on, the black suede ones with the glittery bits on the toes – I might make it into a Jilly Cooper novel too, as a dumpy, blinged-up stable hand. ‘Apart from that, who the hell knows?’

  ‘Sounds like a plan to me,’ says Sam. ‘But it’ll all be written in the stars, anyway.’ I look at her and shake my head. I’m not into mumbo jumbo and pie-in-the-sky pseudo-psychic jiggery-pokery, but Sam is. She’s into it all: horoscopes – Virgo with Sagittarius rising in a lunar coulis or whatever – tarot cards, Feng Shui, reiki, cosmic ordering, crystals and tea-leaf reading. She adores all that stuff. She pulls those long legs up to her chest, slaps both knees with her manicured hands and says, ‘Let’s do your fortune!’

  ‘What? How? Are you going to read my palm?’

  ‘No. Online fortune teller. Let’s stand up, though. My bum’s gone numb.’ We haul ourselves to our feet. I really am about four foot shorter than Sam, and with a much larger bottom, so it takes me a bit longer. ‘We just go on my phone and use my new app.’

  ‘Online fortune teller…’ I groan. ‘As it’s you, I’ll indulge you, but I bet it’s a right load of rubbish.’

  It’s not!’ says Sam, flicking her glossy brown ponytail from side to side. ‘You know my friend from Pilates, Jan?’

  ‘Jan with the thighs? The one who’s been on a hundred dates and is still single?’

  ‘The very same. Except she’s not single any more. She went on the same app two weeks ago – Madame L’Oracle’s Love Fortunes, it’s called – and Madame L’Oracle told her she was going to meet a man that night and she did! She met a guy from DelightfulDates.com that very night and now they’re engaged!’

  I dust down my backside. It has a leaflet explaining the Tower of London stuck to it. ‘After only two weeks? Come on! He’s a conman or a nutter, he has to be.’ From what I’ve heard, the only people who are ‘successful’ on DelightfulDates.com are men who manage to achieve sex with a stranger two hours after messaging them. It’s not for finding long-term love. Not that I’m looking for that, ever again. It’s going to be fun, flirting and frivolity for me, all the way now. I’ve done all my moping and my crying; it’s high time for me to be fabulous.

  ‘No, he’s a proper bloke! A nice bloke. One of the few. He’s turned out to be amazing. That’s what Jan said.’

  ‘But I don’t want a bloke, do I? All I want now is to go on a few dates and have some fun.’

  ‘It’s just a laugh,’ says Sam. ‘We’ll do mine first.’

  I suspect Sam hopes it’s a little more than that. She always does. She’s definitely on the lookout for a man and love. She’s been divorced for five years now, from Graham who she met at school; they consciously uncoupled when they realised they didn’t really like each other any more and hadn’t noticed each other’s haircuts for over three years…

  ‘How much is this nonsense?’ I enquire.

  ‘It’s free, but Madame L’Oracle, the Psychic Queen, guarantees she’ll be uncannily specific.’ There’s a picture of Madame Oracle on the app. Sam shows me. She’s in pink fur and pearls, her hair bigger than RuPaul’s.

  ‘Just give me a second…’ says Sam. I wait as she taps away at her phone. ‘Right. Now we wait two minutes. Accurate predictions take time, it says.’ I poke her playfully in the ribs and try not to roll my eyes as I focus on the screen. It’s all pink and white. On a jacquard background a picture of a crystal ball is oscillating whilst white cloudy stuff swirls in it, and an old-fashioned clock counts down the minutes. What laughable hocus pocus. Still, Sam’s one of my best friends; I’m going with it because I always do.

  One of the Japanese tourist peers over Sam’s shoulder.

  ‘Oi, nosey! Bog off! Right. Here we are. Ooh, okay, this is mine: You have an eighty percent chance of heat bringing you love.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes! Heat will bring me love! Simples!’

  ‘But that could mean anything! I thought it was supposed to be specific! That’s totally vague and really random,’ I laugh.

  ‘It could be specific. I just have to focus. Heat, heat…what could it mean? Should I book another trip to Lanzarote?’ She pulls her wool coat more tightly round her. It’s really cold for the end of October and the skies are darkening already. Rain is due in about an hour, I know. ‘Right, your turn.’

  ‘If I must.’

  ‘You must.’

  We both stare at the phone again. Finally the shifting white fog in the crystal ball shifts and a pink heart flashes up. Inside, in black scroll-y writing, are the words, ‘You have a 99% chance of falling in love by Friday.’ Sam raises her eyebrows at me and grins. I burst out laughing.

  ‘How exciting!’ she exclaims.

  Now I do roll my eyes. ‘Ooh, Friday,’ I say. ‘I think I’m busy that day. Let me check my diary…’ Actually, I am busy that day. It’s Freya’s graduation. Jeff and I are both going. It’ll be okay… I hope. We’ll be a civilized divorced couple… I hope.

  Sam grabs my arm and looks all bog-eyed. Her dark hair is whipping all over her face in the wind. ‘Daryl, it might happen!’

  ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘And I don’t want it to. Love is for mugs. From now on I’m all about friends and a bit of flirting. That’s it.’

  ‘You say that,’ she says, ‘but if love came along…’

  ‘It won’t come along!’ I insist. ‘Look, it’s a giggle, all this stuff, but it’s a load of old guff. Let’s go and get another drink.’

  ‘Don’t mock,’ pouts Sam. ‘And you’d better be careful. What if this means you’re going to fall in love with the first man you see, or something…?’

  ‘Yeah right,’ I say. We look ahead of us and both catch sight of a skinny man in a cycle helmet and bicycle clips, with no bicycle in sight, walking past us wearing an ‘I’m With Stupid’ sweatshirt. ‘There you go, there’s the first man I’ve seen. What’s the probability of me getting it on with him?’ We start giggling.

  ‘Whatever,’ insists Sam, ‘you can’t leave these things completely to chance. I would suggest a date a night until Friday, just to keep your options open.’

  ‘A date a night? Who the hell with?’

  ‘I dunno. People.’

  ‘People. And where would I find these people?’ This was the part of my four-point plan I hadn’t really grappled with yet. Where the hell to find men to date. Everyone seemed to meet people via online dating these days, but it wasn’t for me. The whole thing terrified me. And as for Tinder, I couldn’t bear the thought of it. All those predatory men swiping left, over and ov
er again…

  ‘Who knows! Just look around you, my friend.’

  We look around us. Five hundred tourists and a man selling hot dogs, but not a hottie amongst them. We shrug at each other and grin, then I looked up at the clouds which are ominously black and in the mood for rain.

  ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘We’ve got more celebrating to do. Let’s hit another bar.’

  Chapter Two

  Monday

  Oh god. I was on the ground again, wasn’t I? A very cold ground, that was also very wet and quite stony. A ground that was far too close to my face. And I wasn’t sitting on my bottom this time. No, that would have been respectable and acceptable, especially if I’d still been in Trafalgar Square. People often sit around the tourist bits of London, eating stuff, chatting and taking photos; it’s expected, they do it all the time. What nobody does is lie on their fronts, with their coat twisted all round them like a straitjacket and one boot off, face down on the drive they share with their next door neighbour in a quiet residential street in Wimbledon. In the middle of the night.

  Yes, the hunky neighbour. Yes, the neighbour who’d given me my divorce papers yesterday morning. Yes, the neighbour who was currently standing over me and looking concerned.

  Oh god. My mind flashed through how I got here. London. Trafalgar Square. Drinking cocktails with Sam. Dancing on the table in that Vietnamese restaurant which inexplicably turned into a disco at ten o’clock. Squealing home on the District Line. Inviting Sam in for vodka and cranberry and one hopeless, spilt-all-over-the-kitchen-worktop coffee – a vain attempt to sober us up before I sent her home in a taxi. Trotting out to put a bulging black sack in the bin – mostly full of empty bottles I couldn’t be bothered to recycle – and tripping coming back up the drive… Oh bloody god. I grimaced, as far as I could grimace with my face planted on the drive… Giggling and thinking it was really funny and that I’d just lie here for a while and have a little sleep…