‘Patrolling the playground?’ Joel said, when he came to pick Sam up. ‘Yeah, I’m up for that, so long as I can get a sitter.’
‘I can always have Sam overnight when it’s your shift, if you want,’ said Lauren. ‘From what we can tell, a lot of the damage occurs around 10 p.m. That does make it rather late.’
‘That would make life easier,’ admitted Joel. ‘Have you got many other takers?’
‘Quite a few,’ said Lauren. ‘I’ve even persuaded Sally and Andy behind the bar to do a stint, by promising to do a couple of extra shifts for them.’
‘And don’t forget, I’m doing one.’ Troy emerged from the kitchen, holding a spanner and looking very dishevelled.
‘How could I?’ said Lauren drily. ‘Joel, you remember Troy?’
‘Of course,’ said Joel. What was he doing here? For some reason, Joel felt put out. He knew Troy visited the girls, but Lauren had been very specific about the fact that he only came to see them, not her. He hadn’t realized that Lauren had started asking Troy for help around the house. He had no right to let it bother him, but he couldn’t help it, it did.
Troy was rubbing the spanner with a cloth.
‘That’s all fixed for you, Lauren,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have any problems with that pipe now. I don’t think it will leak again.’
‘Thanks, Troy, that’s brilliant,’ said Lauren. ‘That leak has been driving me mad for ages, and my landlady keeps promising to do something about it, and never does.’
Joel had no idea that Lauren had had a problem with a leaky tap. In fact, he realized he had very little idea of any problems Lauren might have. She never confided in him any more. He suddenly wished she would.
‘You should have said, Lauren,’ he said. ‘I’d have fixed that for you.’
‘Would you?’ Lauren looked at him in surprise. ‘It never occurred to me to ask.’
‘No job is too small,’ he said, wondering why he was so determined to prove his usefulness to her.
It was something about the way that Troy was arrogantly strutting around the place that he found frustrating. Troy had dumped Lauren in it, left her to it, and now seemed to have slotted straight back into her life, as if nothing had happened. It didn’t seem right, and Joel liked and respected Lauren too much to want to see her being hurt again.
Who are you to judge? a little voice in his head said. You were no better with Claire.
But at least I stayed, he thought.
‘It’s OK, mate,’ said Troy, whispering in a conspiratorial manner as Lauren busied herself getting Sam’s things ready. ‘Now I’m back on the scene, I can do all Lauren’s little jobs for her. I appreciate your concern for her, but you don’t need to worry about Lauren any more, she’s got me to help her now.’
‘I think Lauren’s managed pretty well on her own so far,’ said Joel bluntly. ‘You’re not the only one looking out for her, mate.’
He took Sam from Lauren’s arms, feeling more furious than he could remember ever feeling before in his life.
‘Thanks, Lauren,’ he said. ‘Please don’t feel you can’t ask me for help, you always can, you know.’
‘Bye, mate.’ Troy sat down on the sofa and picked up the paper. He really was making himself at home. Joel was seething when he got in the car. Who did he bloody well think he was? Lauren deserved so much better. But, depressingly, it was clear which way the land lay and Joel couldn’t understand why that made him feel so edgy.
Chapter Nineteen
‘Right, buckets and mops at the ready,’ said Lauren to the crowd who had gathered outside the Memorial Gardens as they posed for a photo for the local paper. She had been amazed at how easy it had been to get people galvanized to come and clean up the mess that the vandals had made. She’d put the word out with the school-run mums, and once the jungle drums began to roll everyone was keen to get involved. Lauren felt a renewed sense of vigour and optimism as she looked at the number of people who’d come to help. Even the newly appointed local MP, who had a young family of his own and a keen eye for good PR, was eager to be seen at the playground. This was great from Lauren’s point of view as it brought the added bonus of the local TV covering the story.
‘We could do with more of this sort of community spirit in Chiverton, where I live,’ the MP was saying. ‘It’s exactly the sort of thing the government want to promote.’
He was so enthusiastic he was even prepared to take the mop and bucket he’d used for his photocall and put it to use. His minders had to persuade him to stop scrubbing before getting him to his next appointment.
‘Well, look at you,’ said Kezzie, who was taking a break from working on her website to offer her services. ‘Hobnobbing with MPs and appearing on national telly.’
‘Hardly national,’ said Lauren, ‘we’ll be lucky if we get a minute on the local news bulletin.’
‘Whatever. I’ll make a campaigner out of you yet!’
Lauren grinned.
‘Do you know, I’m enjoying all this. It feels like the first time I’ve properly used my brain since the girls were born.’
‘You’ve certainly gathered a willing workforce,’ said Kezzie, looking around as Lauren’s friends swept up glass, scrubbed off graffiti and disposed of chip wrappers.
‘They’ve been great,’ said Lauren. ‘Do you know Rose Carmichael?’ She pointed at a small, rotund woman, who was laughing and joking while she swept up. ‘Her husband works for B&Q in Chiverton and he got us a whole load of paint so we can make the playground look better until we get a new one sorted.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Kezzie. ‘And I’ve got some more good news for you. A gang of my mates are coming down in a few weeks to help plant out the borders that Joel and I dug over. In no time at all we’ll have the place looking fantastic.’
‘I just hope we can keep the vandals away,’ said Lauren. ‘Locking the gardens at night doesn’t seem to deter them.’
‘Well, a locked gate has never deterred me,’ said Kezzie, ‘but if we surprise them by being in the gardens, they might think again.’
‘What if they’re six feet tall and wielding an axe?’ said Lauren, wondering if she’d bitten off more than she could chew.
‘I’ll run like hell,’ said Kezzie. ‘But I reckon they’re just kids, and if we could only get them on our side, we might be able to turn it round and persuade them to help us make things better.’
‘You’re optimistic.’
‘Well, you never know,’ said Kezzie cheerfully. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before, but there’s always a first time.’
Kezzie and Joel sat in the park drinking a flask of tea. It was a chilly spring evening in March and they were both wearing warm fleeces and scarves. As arranged with Lauren, Sam was staying there for the night.
‘Do you really think anyone will come?’ said Joel. ‘After all there’s been a lot of publicity. They’ll probably go and find somewhere else to deface.’
‘I do think it’s likely to be kids,’ said Kezzie. ‘I feel quite sorry for them. They haven’t got anything to do or anywhere to go, so they’re bored and destructive. Heartsease could do with a community centre for teens. We should bring it to the attention of the committee.’
‘Can you imagine what Cynthia will say?’ snorted Joel.
‘“Ai really don’t think it is necessary. We are not some inner London housing estate,”’ Kezzie mimicked Cynthia’s modulated tones perfectly.
‘Still, I’m not that sympathetic with them,’ said Joel. ‘I was frequently bored as a teenager and I didn’t graffiti things.’
‘I did,’ admitted Kezzie. ‘The estate where I grew up was like that. You started drinking at thirteen, hung around with your mates, and knocked things down for fun. It was either that, or get into knife crime.’
‘So how did you get out of it then?’ said Joel. ‘I mean, you didn’t turn into a hardened criminal, did you?’
‘I was lucky,’ said Kezzie. ‘I had a couple of good teachers wh
o spotted I was good at art, and encouraged me to go into design. Then I fell in with a bunch of guerrilla gardeners when I was at college, and realized what I really liked doing was gardening. But I needed to work, so I got a job in web design, but I never really liked it. I’d probably still be there now if it weren’t for Richard …’
Kezzie paused. There was something about the two of them being here, after dark, that seemed to encourage intimacy. A sudden memory of the kiss they shared made her flush in the dark. She hoped that Joel wasn’t thinking about it too.
‘Why?’ said Joel.
‘He persuaded me to retrain and do gardening properly. He’s a garden architect, and we were planning to go into business together.’ Kezzie sighed. It had been such a great dream. She was going to design a winning garden for Chelsea, and he was going to create the structures to go inside. Together she knew they could have been a winning team. That was never going to happen now.
‘What happened?’
‘I was a bloody idiot’s what happened,’ said Kezzie. She shivered, and thought about her chat with Lauren. Richard was in the past. Time to let go. ‘Never mind. He made it clear from that email he sent me. It’s over now, and I’m here, and here’s where I plan to stay.’
‘So you wouldn’t go back to London?’ said Joel.
A bleak look crossed Kezzie’s face.
‘Nothing to go back for,’ she muttered.
There was a rustling in the bushes. Kezzie shone her torch, and disturbed a fox, which looked quizzically at them.
‘False alarm,’ she said.
‘I think we might have frightened the vandals off,’ said Joel.
‘With any luck,’ said Kezzie. ‘I’d hate to see all Lauren’s hard work go to waste. The paint’s barely dry on the swings.’
They sat in companionable silence for another half an hour. It was nearly eleven.
‘I doubt anyone’s going to break in now,’ said Joel. ‘If it is kids, they should all be tucked up in bed by now.’
‘I never was,’ said Kezzie with a grin.
‘What a rebel,’ said Joel. ‘You clearly had more of a chequered youth than me.’
‘If you knew the half of it,’ said Kezzie.
‘So none of the patrols have spotted anyone at night. That’s great.’ Lauren was chairing a meeting at her house to update everyone on the progress of the clean-up operation so far. They’d been running the patrols for nearly a month, and it was now midway through April. Whoever had been causing the damage appeared to have been scared away. Which was something; though Joel privately thought the minute they stopped watching out for the vandals, they would be back.
‘I think our next plan should be to renovate the pavilion and see if we can’t turn it into some kind of community hall. I’m looking into seeing if we can get any lottery funds for it. I think if we can set up somewhere for teens to go, then we might not have such a huge vandalism problem.’
‘Great idea,’ said Rose Carmichael. ‘I know my lot get really bored of a summer’s evening. I’d love it if they could find something constructive to do.’
‘But who would run it?’ said Joel, thinking practically. ‘Presumably we’d need to get CRB checked, and there will definitely be things like insurance to consider.’
‘That’s true,’ said Kezzie, ‘but surely as a community we can all pull together.’
‘I’ve been a youth worker,’ put in Troy, much to Joel’s annoyance. He seemed to be everywhere Lauren was these days, and now it looked as if he could actually be useful, which was even more galling. Joel chided himself for being so petty minded, but he couldn’t help it. As far as Troy was concerned, everything annoyed him.
‘You? Really?’ Lauren looked at him in disbelief. Good, at least Lauren wasn’t totally blinded.
‘Yeah, me,’ said Troy. ‘I retrained last year and worked on an estate in Southampton. It was challenging and rewarding, and I’d love to do something like that here.’
‘I didn’t think you’d want to stay that long.’ Lauren gave Troy a look that was impossible to misinterpret, and Joel felt his heart sink. Blinded enough, though. She was going to end up back with the worthless sap, and had clearly fallen for that I’ve-changed malarkey. A sudden stabbing sensation of jealousy shot through him. Jealousy? Why should he feel jealous of Troy? It wasn’t as though he had even thought about Lauren in that way. But since Troy had been on the scene, Joel felt like he barely saw her. He missed the chats they used to have when he came to pick Sam up in the evening. If Lauren and Troy became an item, Joel would see her even less. Joel was used to Lauren being there, framing every day for him. She’d been his steady support system since Claire died. He couldn’t bear to think of that changing.
Troy said, ‘I told you I wanted to stay here.’ But to Joel his words were loaded with significance. Troy was using Lauren again, getting involved with her, trying to impress her. It was so damned obvious, but she clearly couldn’t see it.
‘Well, we can certainly look into that,’ said Lauren, ‘but I think to get things really up and running we need to put all this before the Parish Council, and we need to restore the pavilion first. It’s a mess. In the meantime, anyone keen to help Kezzie on Saturday, please come along to the Memorial Gardens at around 10 a.m. We’re going to need people with green fingers.’
‘And depending on how much we get done,’ said Kezzie, ‘it’s all back to mine for drinks afterwards.’
‘I like the sound of that,’ said Troy.
‘You would,’ said Lauren, and shoved him.
‘Careful,’ he said, and shoved her back.
The warmth of their banter was not lost on Joel. Lauren was going back to Troy, he was certain. And there was nothing at all he could do about it.
Chapter Twenty
‘OK you guys, let’s get cracking.’
It was early on an April Saturday morning, and Joel, finding that Sam had already woken and they were both unable to sleep, had come down to the Memorial Gardens to see if Kezzie and her friends needed any help.
They were an ill-assorted mob, who’d arrived in a battered old minibus. Kezzie introduced Flick, a standard vegan kind of anarchist, who fitted the stereotype so neatly. Joel was convinced she was a lesbian, till she planted a kiss on the lips of a tall and scary-looking individual, who was covered in so many tattoos and piercings he wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Guinness Book of Records. Kezzie introduced him as Gavin, known as Space Cadet, who was an amiable giant (‘and hugely clever’ according to Kezzie), who had earned his moniker from the way he’d get distracted by his fascination in all things botanical.
‘Did you know the botanical name for weed is cannabis sativa?’ he was saying. ‘You can grow it anywhere, you know.’
‘Well, we’re not growing it here,’ said Kezzie firmly.
There were also two elderly ladies called June and Flo, who despite looking as though they belonged in the WI, possessed filthy laughs, a dirty sense of humour, and were veterans of Greenham Common, according to Kezzie. Joel was somewhat stunned to discover it was they who were the lesbians.
The party was completed by Tom, a morose young man who barely spoke, except when he was waxing forth about the state of the planet and giving gloomy predictions that global warming was accelerating at a speed beyond which the world had been told.
‘It’s a cover-up, I tell you,’ he was earnestly discussing Wikileaks with Gavin, ‘they’re all in it together.’
‘You think everything is a cover-up,’ said Kezzie, with fondness. ‘There aren’t enough conspiracy theories in the world to satisfy you.’
Kezzie clearly treated Tom like a daft little brother, but from the adoration that Joel was amused to see in his eyes, he was evidently besotted with her.
They might have been a motley crew, but Joel quickly realized they worked well as a team. Kezzie and Flick concentrated on hacking down bushes and carrying rubbish away, while Tom and Gavin put their not inconsiderable muscles to use, digging over
the ground. Flo and June dug in the compost, or where there was already space for them, put in some bedding plants which the Parish Council had supplied. And as more people slowly joined in, Kezzie, Flick and Gavin soon got them helping out in the most efficient ways. Before his eyes, the gardens were being slowly transformed.
Joel helped with the digging in between attending to Sam, who fortunately seemed quite happy gurgling in his buggy and watching proceedings.
By mid morning one complete bed had been cleared and Flo and June were readying themselves to fill it with buzy lizzies, verbena, pansies and geraniums.
They spent most of the time in raucous fits of laughter, and Joel soon found it was infectious. It was impossible not to laugh with them, and Joel felt a sudden zestful feeling about the glory of being alive on such a wonderful day, doing something so useful. He looked over to where Sam was chewing contentedly on his buggy book, and was filled with an overwhelming joy of being with his son, shot through with sadness that Claire wasn’t here to share the moment. But for once the joy seemed stronger than the sadness. He’d lost Sam’s mother, but Sam gave him a lot to live for. And over the last few months he’d really begun to feel life was worth living again.
In the end Sam started getting fractious, so Joel said to Kezzie, ‘Sorry, I think that’s my lot. I’ll come down again tomorrow if you like.’
‘Not to worry, we’ve got reinforcements coming,’ said Kezzie, as Lauren and Troy approached, with the twins dancing between them. ‘Do you fancy coming back to mine later and having a drink with us all? We usually crack open a bottle when we’ve been working together. I’ll ask Lauren too. You can bring Sam if you like. I should think we’ll all be too knackered to be too raucous.’
‘Sounds great,’ said Joel. ‘I’ll see you there.’
‘Hi Lauren, Troy.’ He felt forced to acknowledge Troy’s presence, but felt like punching the guy on the nose. He had such a self-satisfied air about him, and seemed to be almost proprietorial about Lauren, touching her arm constantly, as if he somehow had some claim over her. Why couldn’t she see it?
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