by Daisy Tate
She hated the hospital.
It reminded her of too many things. Forms. Hospice. Funerals. Spreading her mother’s ashes in big fistfuls all round the world. It had taken Izzy ages to fulfil Theodora’s dying wish. ‘Ashes in Splashes.’
Weirdo. Only her mum would insist upon having her ashes sprinkled on the graves of the people she’d marched for. And she wasn’t just talking Mobile, Alabama. No, sir. There’d been all sorts of marching. For the children of America, the oppressed peoples of China, Southeast Asia, the whole of Africa. Global warming, pesticide bans, war, war, war. Bras. Flicking handfuls of your dead mother about wasn’t strictly illegal, but Izzy was pretty sure some of the places would’ve frowned upon the whole ashes on ashes thing. Their last little secret.
Izzy’s giggle turned into a cough as she crawled onto the big old four-poster bed. She hadn’t remembered it being this tall.
She fell back against the pillows and hacked out what surely must’ve been a portion of her lung, wincing as the pain shot through to her back. She burrowed beneath the heavy quilt, wondering what her last little secret with Luna would be. Or worse, when it would be.
‘All right there, lassie?
‘Ack! Don’t come in Lachlan! I am filled with the dreaded lurgie!’
He smiled and came in anyway, arms weighed down with perfectly chopped wood. ‘Thought I’d light the fire in your room.’
Izzy sneezed in response. Gross. She was so gross. A big revolting, snotty snotbag from Snotville of Snotdonia. No wonder her own flesh and blood wouldn’t come near her. She was a living, breathing repellent.
He bustled about, getting the logs into the thick willow-weave basket adjacent to the fireplace. ‘Let’s just make sure you’re nice and cosy in here.’
If she’d had the energy she would’ve thrown herself at him in gratitude. Was this what it was like to have a dad? Or was it like the fire? Not knowing she’d needed one until it was there.
She wondered if Luna wished she had a dad. Well. She did have a dad. She just didn’t know anything about him. Izzy did. Perhaps that was a secret she was meant to share. Maybe she’d reach out to Alf in the New Year. Maybe.
Aaaaachooo!
‘That’s a powerful sneeze you’ve got there.’
‘I twy by best.’
‘You’re doing all right, then darlin’. If that’s the goal.’ Lachlan made creaky old person noises as he knelt down to lay the fire.
‘Do you want some help?’ Izzy doubted she could make it that far, but there was no harm in offering.
‘Ach, away,’ Lachlan laughed, then let the brick hearth take his weight as he lowered himself fully to the floor. ‘It’s nice to have someone to fuss over.’
‘How’s dat?’
‘Well. I suppose the house has been pretty empty since Mariella … you know, and Rocco’s always so busy with the cows …’ He rearranged some of the kindling. ‘I suppose seeing all of you girls talking and sharing your burdens …’ He held up a hand. ‘I’m not much of a talker, but I hadn’t realized just how much I’d relied on her to halve my burdens.’
Izzy’s heart cinched and she offered a paltry, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’ Lachlan lit a match and put it to the rolled-up knots of newspaper stuffed beneath the kindling. ‘I suppose it’s a good lesson to learn.’
‘What’s dat?’
‘Remembering they won’t always be there.’
Bleak. Then again, from a man who’d named his farm after his wildest dream, perhaps it was plain old common sense.
Izzy pushed herself up a bit. ‘What if you had a burden you didn’t want other people to have to share?’
Lachlan considered her question then said, ‘In my experience, the folk who love you most are the same folk who will want to share your burden. Hurt, in fact, if they found out you didn’t.’
Lachlan pushed himself back up to standing, satisfied the fire was burning properly. ‘Anything else I can do for you?’
Warmth and wisdom. The man had outdone himself.
‘No dank you.’ She settled back against the pillows as Lachlan gave the fire one more glance. Before he’d finished replacing the fireguard, she’d fallen into a deep sleep.
The attic had once been Freya’s favourite place. Her escape zone in which to read, sew, paint and dream. It had been her magic place. Now it felt like a creepy Narnia.
Just knowing it was here. The solution to all of her financial problems, or the most beautiful reminder that her mother had chosen her.
Not just Freya. Mariella had chosen family. This family. The people who had cocooned Freya through a thousand different knockbacks. Scraped knees. Torn dresses. Failed exams. A bloody nose. Her first school disco. Her first rejection. A skin rash so embarrassing her mother had let her stay home from school for a week.
Had Monty left her because of the mistakes he’d made? Or had it been her mistake to give him the job of household accountant? She’d genuinely thought he’d liked the job. Her stomach churned as another wave of guilt swept in. Perhaps doing the accounts had been like becoming the house husband. It was something he’d had to do because she hadn’t been around to do it.
Freya ached for her mother’s advice. She wouldn’t dare ask her father. Or her brother. They worked so hard on the farm, the last thing she wanted to do was to admit everything she’d worked for – with their blessing – had gone horribly, terrifically wrong.
She checked that Charlotte was busy at the far end of the long room, then uncovered the painting, her eyes arrowing in on that mysterious male hand reaching out to her mother’s.
People had choices.
Of course your father drives me mad, child, but he’s part of my fabric now. If I pulled that thread out, it would affect, you, Rocco, the wee bairns you’re expecting … Ach, child. It’s not worth thinking about. C’mon. Show us how your new quilt’s coming along, then. Let’s focus on what we do have, not what we don’t.
Her mother’s words were, as ever, wise and practical. Life wasn’t always sunshine and lollipops. Besides. It wasn’t as if she and Monty were getting divorced or anything. This was a blip. A painful blip, but a surmountable one. They were not Oliver and Charlotte.
That’s what she’d keep telling herself anyway.
‘Oh! Look at these!’ Charlotte – who had stoically endured a FaceTime call from Oli during which he promised the children a ‘monumentally epic’ sailing holiday over Easter, which virtually no one believed he would honour – held up a cushion cover she’d found in a black bag marked Don’t Let Freya Bin. Her mother’s handwriting, of course. ‘Frey, I think rather than decorate with these, we should sell them.’
Freya snorted. She’d been down this road before. No matter how much her mother had loved them, her quirky sofa cushions did not sell. ‘They’d sell as well as T-shirts with Wookiees and leprechauns, I expect.’
Charlotte looked confused. ‘You’ve done leprechaun T-shirts?’
Freya was about to tell Charlotte to use them as fodder for the bonfire when she stopped herself. Her shy, quiet, unassuming friend had, in the midst of an awful divorce, single-handedly turned a shack with a few jars of questionable honey into a Waitrose Weekend-featured success story. Surely to god she could give her cushion covers another shot.
Rocco stuck his head through the door. ‘You ladies coming down? I expect we might be getting our first guests in an hour or so.’
Charlotte’s cheeks pinked up.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, would the two of them get on with it and bonk? The energy between the pair of them was humming with pent-up lust. It was ruddy annoying.
‘I think Freya’s cushions would sell in the shop.’ Charlotte held up another. It featured a Highland cow knitting an Islay scarf. ‘You could get forty quid for this. Easy.’
Rocco’s guffaw was as disbelieving as his sister’s.
Charlotte pursed her lips. ‘When I go into a farm shop, and I go into quite a few, customers don’t just want fresh t
omatoes or a fennel bulb with a bit of earth still clinging to it.’ Her eyes took on a dreamlike quality. ‘They want the upper-middle-class lifestyle that goes with it—’
‘A fictional lifestyle,’ Freya cut in.
‘An aspirational lifestyle …’ Charlotte countered. Firmly.
Ooo-err, missus!
‘It’s up to you, but …’ Charlotte looked as though she was about to give up the fight then, after a nod from Rocco (!), carried on. ‘The thing is, Freya, the type of people you want buying – or in this case making donations for – your brother’s milk are not your everyday punters. You want people willing to spend two pounds on a pint of the beautiful, organic milk, mostly because there’s a picture of a buttercup on the bottle. A bottle which, by the by, should warrant a fifty pence charge and ten p credit if it’s returned.’
Freya and Rocco gawped at her.
She thought for a moment then said, ‘If you won’t sell the cushions here, with your permission I’ll bring them down to Sittingstone. I guarantee you they’ll be gone by the end of the week.’
‘If we get two pounds for each pint of milk, we don’t need to sell the cushions,’ Rocco laughed in disbelief.
‘Of course you do!’ Charlotte chided, already stacking the covers in a tidy pile. ‘You’ll have to factor in the bottles, the cleaning, the staff you’ll need to hire. The profit will obviously be larger than if you sell to the bigger retailers, but you’ll definitely need second-tier customers buying higher-end items like the cushions to boost your profit levels. Those mismatched china teacups you found would sell for a small fortune.’ She laughed as an idea hit. ‘If you filled them with artisanal butter, you could double the price and call them butter cups!’
Freya could hardly believe the woman standing in front of her was the very same Charlotte who’d been unable to speak up for herself while her husband humiliated her in front of everyone she knew. If only Charlotte could take some of this confidence and use it to hammer Oli to the wall. The man really knew how to take the Michael.
‘And you think all of this is genuinely possible?’ Rocco leant against the doorframe, genuinely engrossed. All their lives they’d milked the cows without so much as a second thought about anything beyond ensuring it was ready for the milk distributor. There was just too much work involved in doing anything apart from that. Freya’s eyes flicked towards the Vettriano. If Rocco sold it, he could make the shop a proper concern. He definitely deserved some cream after all of his years of hard graft keeping the farm afloat.
Charlotte glanced at her watch. ‘We’d best get down there, but if you help me with these, I can explain on the way.’
An hour later, the shop looked as if it had been plucked out of a ‘Fabulous Farm Shops of Fyfe’ newspaper spread. Rocco had given Charlotte free rein to put suggested donations on everything. It was an impressive spread. The bottles of milk stood in a glass-fronted mini refrigerator that Lachlan had unearthed. There were gingham-cloth-wrapped Breakfast Bundles (milk, a small disc of butter, sausages or bacon and a few rolls from a local bakery). Freya’s cushion covers were tagged at an eye-watering forty-two pounds (freshly stuffed after an emergency trip to a craft shop which had opened its doors after Emily had threatened to throw herself through the window. Something had really got into Emily over the past couple of days. And, of course, there were Charlotte’s cakes and the malted milks. A huge Kilner jar marked ‘Donations’ had a solitary pound coin in it courtesy of Lachlan ‘as a primer’.
Four farmers who regularly sold their wares at farmers’ markets pulled up with portable food trucks and trailers. The air smelt of bonfire, sausages and baked potatoes.
Emily had augmented her standard black ensemble with a tartan scarf that Lachlan had insisted she wear, and a knitted hat decorated with a bauble that Freya had taken from the Christmas tree. Izzy had necked a bottle of Day Nurse, put on one of Freya’s old snow suits and kept insisting she was ready to parrrr-tayyyyy before dissolving into more worrisome coughing fits.
The children were all wearing silly Christmas jumpers, apart from Jack, who was refusing on the grounds they were for children. Fortunately, Regan and Felix were perfectly comfortable with looking ridiculous. Monty had fostered healthy levels of silliness in them to make this sort of thing fun.
Freya was tempted to make a video call and show Monty the shop, but thought it best to leave it, as they’d promised, until midnight.
‘Right!’ Charlotte clapped her hands together, as she so often did, in prayer position in front of her lips, as if she were holding in everything she actually wanted to say. She dropped them to her chin. ‘What do we do now?’
They both looked out to the road where the odd car was passing by but not turning in.
‘Well …’ Freya crossed her fingers and held them up for Charlotte to see. ‘We wait!’
Emily wondered if this was what partying in Lapland would be like. Berloody freezing, but utterly hedonistic. She kind of liked it.
There were flames and dancing and drinking and singing. One man had been tossed into a frozen water trough and pronounced it ‘ab-so-lute-ly legendary’.
It looked as if the entire Kingdom of Fife had turned up. Cars had long since filled the extra field they’d earmarked for an overflow car park and were spilling on to the road. They’d run out of booze ages ago, but it hadn’t been a problem as word had gone out on the Twitter-sphere that it was BYOB at Burns’ Folly. Apparently it was traditional to show up with a bottle anyway, so … these Scots could cane it!
The milk and breakfast bundles had been snaffled hours ago, as had the cakes. Every time Charlotte emptied the donations jar, Lachlan shook his head in wonder and said he always knew the Scots were a generous sort but not this generous. The last of Freya’s cushions had just been snapped up. She was compiling a waiting list of would-be buyers for more. Rocco’s chest was so puffed out with pride, he genuinely did look fit to burst.
Even Charlotte had let her hair down. She was wearing one of Freya’s woodland crowns atop her neat, ash-blonde mum do – a whorl of tiny pine cones sprayed gold, interwoven with holly berries and multi-coloured silk flowers that someone had found in the attic. She was glowing.
There was no sign of Tansy, but … it wasn’t as if Emily would have anything to talk to her about. That was what had struck her the most as the evening had progressed. Emily couldn’t do chitchat. Izzy, who looked like death warmed up, could jabber away with anyone. And was. Freya kept flinging herself into people’s arms, talking and laughing. Friends, no doubt, from the olden days. Even Charlotte was chatting with ease to total strangers. Emily simply didn’t have it as a skill base. How could she when her entire life revolved around the hospital?
‘Sausage?’
Emily blinked as a sausage was put directly in her eye line. Behind it glowed a crown of shiny auburn hair.
‘You came.’
Nice one, Emms. Stating the obvious.
‘How could I not?’ Tansy revealed her freckly nose and smiley lips. She made a tragedy face. ‘I can’t believe we missed the butterscotch gin cakes!’
Emily shrugged and said nothing. Her insides were doing all sorts of weird things. Like swooping.
A skinny-jeaned, antler-wearing, sausage-eating man emerged from the crowd. ‘This place is absolutely amazing.’
Emily’s heart dropped back into place. Lower probably.
Brodie.
Brodie the ‘partner’.
Brodie the Partner stuffing a sausage into his smug beardy face. Emily decided against telling him he had onions stuck on his chin.
He whacked a possessive arm over Tansy’s shoulders. ‘This place is brilliant. Mind if we talk to the big man about doing a partnership with the malted milks? A little “I scratch your back if you scratch mine” action?’
Bleuuurgh.
‘Please. Be my guest.’ She pointed towards the bonfire where Rocco was putting another huge log on amidst a shower of sparks.
‘Mint!’ Brodie pulle
d Tansy in for a greasy, sausagey cheek kiss. ‘Catcha later!’
Emily needed a drink.
‘SEVEN!’
Being one of a hundred-odd people round a bonfire counting down to the New Year was sending fireworks through Charlotte’s bloodstream. Or perhaps it was the fact that Rocco had his arm casually slung over Charlotte’s shoulder. He’d been telling someone how helpful she’d been, given her a half-hug and then … simply left his arm on her shoulders.
He’d been so busy all night. Talking about the farm, his cows, the milk, his (new) plans for selling artisanal butter. Apart from the days her children were born, Charlotte had only felt more proud once in her life. The day she’d graduated from university.
‘SIX!’
‘Lotte!’ Izzy danced up to her and squeezed in between Rocco and Charlotte. ‘There you are, woman! I wanna sneeze in the New Year with my girlie girls!’
Charlotte and Rocco’s eyes met over Izzy’s head. A feat, considering Izzy was both tall and wearing sparkly reindeer antlers. Rocco looked perplexed. Charlotte didn’t know what she felt. She wasn’t divorced yet. Or ready to date. But … she had fancied Rocco Burns from the first day she’d laid eyes on him all those years ago. What would her life have been like today if she’d said something?
Izzy launched forward as another violent sneeze took hold of her. Charlotte scooped an arm round her waist and shifted her to her far side. The one not next to Rocco. His arm slipped back into place across her shoulders. She didn’t dare meet his gaze.
‘FIVE!’
‘Where’s the best big brother in the world?’
Freya was high as a kite. It was nice to see her letting go after all the hard graft she’d put in over the past few days. She dance-walked to them, wielding a half-empty bottle of red, her lips and tongue stained a dark purple. ‘Iloveyoubothsomuchithurts! Physically.’ She thumped herself on the chest. ‘Ithurtsmyheart!’
Izzy raised her own bottle for a clink. Prosecco, from the looks of things. ‘Amen to that, sister! Feeling your love pain!’
‘FOUR!’
‘Where’s Emily?’ Izzy suddenly looked mournful. ‘And Booboo. I want my little Booboo by my side when the bell strikes.’