Eight Perfect Hours: The hotly-anticipated love story everyone is falling for in 2021!

by Lia Louis

  Chapter Nine

  Today, I have opened the website for the summit programme Sam works on three times. Some days it seems totally sweet and harmless, the idea of sending an email. Other times it feels like I might as well be outside his house in a false beard and sunglasses, wearing a hedge and holding an SLR camera. There are sixteen of them, half-written in my drafts folder. I’ve yet to send a single one of course, but sometimes, when he flits into my mind, I’m tempted to press send. I think of him now, too, as I tie these daffodils together with brown hessian twine, the odd plum-coloured tulip nestled in the spray, and remember the conversation we had about flowers during those eight hours in his car.

  ‘So, would you say your hobby is your job?’ I’d asked Sam beneath my blanket that night, and he’d said, ‘I guess it is, yeah. And what about you?’

  ‘I wish,’ I’d told him, then I’d shown him photos on my Instagram page, of the posies and bouquets I make for my clients’ reception desks and windows; finishing touches for when the rooms are clean and tidy: a burst of fresh colour, the scent of the season on the other side of the glass. ‘I buy my flowers from the supermarket at the end of the day, mostly,’ I told him, ‘the flowers nobody wants.’ And Sam smiled and said, ‘So, that officially makes you the flower rescuer, then.’

  A tingle of something trickles down my spine at the sound of his voice in my head. Maybe that’s what I loved about those hours in the car with Sam. He asked me questions, he listened, and nothing was off the table. I didn’t have to worry about my words inadvertently hurting anyone. Not that talking about my weird and unexpected love of flowers hurts anyone, but it’s loaded, how much I wish I could do something more with them in my life. It started as something I did on a whim – planting bulbs in pots in our tiny concrete courtyard garden the summer after Daisy died. I think it helped, having something to nurture, something to look in on every day. Something that started as nothing, then burst into life and colour. If I didn’t care for the seeds, or the bulbs, if I wasn’t here any more, they’d die, or wouldn’t have the chance to become anything at all. From then, they became an unexpected comfort to me. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish they could be a bigger part of my life. To sign up for six-month-long floristry workshops, go to college, try my hand at an actual wedding bouquet that is carried down an aisle instead of put in a vase in the living room and posted online. But if I said any of that to Mum, she’d internalise it. See it as everything I’d do if it wasn’t for having to be here for her.

  ‘Going to make a camomile, I think.’ Mum comes into the kitchen now, her grey furry mule slippers scraping against the lino, her hand gripping the slate-grey countertop to support her. ‘Took me a bloody age to get off to sleep last night – oh. They’re pretty, darling. Who’re they for?’

  ‘Jetson’s,’ I say. ‘They’re all on a team-building day tomorrow so I’m going to clean there in the morning. Candice loves daffodils.’

  ‘The receptionist girl?’

  I nod.

  Mum smiles, the creases by her eyes like doodles of bare branches. ‘They don’t deserve you,’ she says. ‘They hire a cleaner and get a bloody angel.’

  ‘They expect it now,’ I say. ‘They get excited, to see what I bring.’

  I leave out the part about Candice and Steve asking to book me as their wedding florist months ago, and how it took absolutely everything inside of me to turn it down. But they’re getting married in Edinburgh, which is three hundred and eighty-six miles away (I of course, counted and counted again, to be sure) and it just isn’t doable. With Ian not next door any more, and Dilly on tour with his band living in the back of some sweaty old van, I don’t have anyone to keep checking in for a day or two. One day I hope it’ll be different. But until then, making up little bouquets at my kitchen table will have to do. Big things, I hope, might happen someday, but it’s the little things that are important, isn’t it? They keep us grounded. The little things are the things we miss the most when normality is turned on its head.

  Mum yawns, the kettle boiling and clicking off, steam rising under the kitchen cupboards like a mushroom cloud. ‘Dilly said he should be popping home next week,’ she says, ‘for a few days. Says he’s made quite a bit doing the circuit up North.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ I say. ‘Last time Dilly said that, that club owner paid him in meat. Not sure the council accept pork chops and beef sausages as payment for council tax these days.’

  Mum laughs, moving a dainty hand flat to her stomach as she waits for the bag to brew in her cup. Sometimes I look at Mum and I can hardly believe her stomach was where I began. Mum is small – petite, is what the clothes shops call it. When she was a performer – a singer, and a truly brilliant one at that – I’d watch her on the stage of holiday parks as a kid, in awe. Everything she wore hung and clung perfectly, and her neat, pixie features under the stage lights made her look like some sort of fifties Hollywood star. Dilly is the same as Mum. Pretty-featured, and lean, despite the fact he eats as if he has a stomach hiding in every limb and consumes entire rotisserie chickens while the rest of us manage a sandwich. I’m not like either of them. I take after Dad. I never really knew him, but I’ve seen photos, have the odd, fuzzy memory of him when Dilly was a baby. He’s tall like me. Curly-haired, like me. When I was a kid, I’d dream of suddenly hearing from him, like they do in movies, that he’d have a perfect reason for his absence and it would all suddenly make sense, and a perfect fix would be revealed. I’d imagine both of us walking along, our wild curls bouncing in unison. But you learn as you get older and wiser, that some people just aren’t meant to be in your life. It just doesn’t work, even if on paper, in theory, it should. It just is the way it is. Mum has always been enough for Dilly and me, anyway. A whole village in one small person. Well, that’s who she was, anyway, until the stroke.

  ‘Money’s really tight, Noelle.’ Mum’s words pierce my thoughts.

  ‘What? How do you mean?’

  Money is always tight for us. We’ve always had to budget, to tick off the bills as they’re paid on the list on the fridge, to plan ahead for anything we want to buy that isn’t essential. It’s all we’ve ever known.

  ‘Just – well, I didn’t realise that Dilly’s credit card bill still has six fifty on it,’ says Mum. ‘And the monthly payments are almost double what I thought.’

  What? And I want to say it, let it blurt from my mouth like I usually do, but I don’t with Mum. Because I skirt round her like she is brittle glass, as if the slightest tremor can crack her. And I see now, being close to her, that her usually pink, religiously moisturised skin is grey. She looks tired.

  ‘He said he’d send money back,’ Mum carries on. ‘From the gigging.’

  ‘And he hasn’t.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll bring some with him, Noelle,’ says Mum, her eyes wide and eager, as if to sell it to me. Dilly. Her baby. So like her, in looks, in dreams, in ambition, in musical flair. ‘But it’s just – until then.’ And in case he doesn’t, I think.

  ‘I’ll speak to him,’ I say. And I want to say so much more. Because every day, I hope Mum will say the words, admit she needs help – counselling, the group therapy, a doctor suggested once – admit she misses who she used to be, before she shrunk herself so small. But I don’t. Because I understand more than anyone. And things could be so much worse. I’m here. I have my family. I have this home. And that is lucky. Luckier than so many. Luckier than where I could’ve ended up, back then …

  ‘We’ll be OK,’ I say, and I think I convince her. I’m just not sure I’ve convinced myself.

  Text message: Hey Nell. Was nice seeing you the other day. Let me know if you wanna grab that coffee :) You can catch me on my new number. 07882 171 7712 x

  Chapter Ten

  Dilly doesn’t come home much. He pretty much lives on the road, playing guitar and singing backing in his band, Five Catastrophes. And while Dilly has the responsibility and common sense of a shelled walnut, I’m always relie
ved when he comes home for a bit. I don’t have to rush back from work. I can go to the market on a Tuesday, browse the weird, vintage clothes stall on the corner. I can visit Charlie in her studio, take lunch in for us, both of us eating it sitting on the leather, hydraulic tattoo chairs. When Dilly is home, my time is – however fleeting – mine. Except for today, that is. I planned to meet Candice at a tea room next to Jetson’s to talk about her wedding, help her plan the flowers. I planned to spend a birthday voucher I’ve had since last February. But then Dilly texted: ‘Could you come back sooner rather than later?’ and then he’d sent a long meandering voice note that started ‘Do you mind popping back and taking a look at Mum’s ankle?’ and I’d cut it off before he went on, and tossed it in my bag. A walnut. That’s what happens when you leave a walnut in charge.

  I find Mum sitting in the living room with her leg up on the sofa, a bag of frozen sweetcorn around her right leg and a tray of frozen sausages on her foot. Dilly is on the armchair, his hands splayed and holding the edges, as if he’s just finished counselling her, his white-blond hair sticking up like frosting on the top of his head.

  ‘W-what is going on?’

  ‘We’re just doing some meditation,’ says Dilly. ‘Help with pain levels.’

  ‘Pain levels?’

  ‘Did you not listen to my voice note?’ he asks.

  Mum is taking deep breaths through her nose and whimpering every time she exhales, but she is rigid, as if there is concrete poured into her joints.

  ‘Yes – well, no, not all of it, it was like a bloody podcast, Dilly, just tell me what’s happened?’

  ‘Oh, Noelle.’ Mum opens her eyes and looks at me, like a scolded puppy. ‘I fell.’

  My heart drops to my arse. ‘Fell? Where did you fall?’

  Mum starts to cry and holds her face in her hands, tears sliding between her fingers. ‘I was up the ladder,’ she explains, her voice shaky. ‘Trying to get into the loft. I’ve got so many records up there, so many things I don’t use any more, microphones and all sorts, and I thought – well, Ian is always banging on about eBay, and seeing as we were talking about money the other night, I …’ My heart aches then, like there’s a fist wrapped around it, squeezing.

  ‘Oh, Mum. Why on earth did you attempt to climb a bloody ladder – Dilly, where were you?’

  ‘I was in the bath,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Watching Gilmore Girls.’

  ‘I was just lucky I didn’t fall down the bloody stairs,’ Mum carries on. ‘I fell onto the landing. But my leg got caught in a rung and … oh, Noelle, it’s really, really hurting.’

  I rush over to the sofa, and carefully peel back the bag of frozen peas on Mum’s skinny ankle. There’s a patchwork of purple and blue, that seems to be getting darker just as I sit, staring at it.

  ‘Is it bad? I can’t look.’

  Dilly leans over and winces. ‘It’s uh, yeah. That’s fine, I reckon.’

  ‘Fine? Dill, it’s black and purple.’

  Dilly cocks a single sad eyebrow at me as if to say, ‘Well, you can be the one to tell her we’ve got to go to the doctor then, ’cause I’m not.’

  ‘I think maybe we need to try and get someone out to look at this, Mum.’

  Mum goes white almost instantaneously. She hates hospitals. She was in one for four weeks after her stroke, and begged me daily to break her out, as if she was being imprisoned and not cared for. ‘You come in here with something as simple as a bloody gall bladder problem and come out with MRSA. And that’s in a coffin and with “My Way” playing on the sodding organ. Don’t look at me, that’s just what Sheila says. Her, in bed four. She used to be a dental nurse.’

  Mum sniffs, straightens in her seat and shakes her head, as if shaking off the worry like raindrops. ‘No. It’s a bruise,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She stretches over to take a look, but I can tell by the way her round eyes widen, that she’s alarmed at the sight of it, growing, like a marbled island across her skin. ‘Just get me some painkillers, and maybe call round to Gary at twenty-one. See if he’s got ice packs or something in the freezer. These sausages are beginning to defrost. You’ll have to cook them, though, Noelle. Don’t waste them. Do a nice casserole. A nice sausage toad.’

  I flit around the kitchen, gathering everything I can find for an injured ankle – ibuprofen, Deep Heat cream from 2003, KitKats for the shock – and Dilly manifests ten minutes later with multiple ice packs he’s sourced from Gary’s freezer (and an addition of a fine sparkling piece of bullshit plucked freshly from his own arse).

  ‘That was a bit embarrassing,’ he laughs, ‘talk about awkward. Ol’ Gary. He was a bit starstruck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, he’s not seen me since we performed on Radio Rock Gloucester. I dunno, his face when he opened the door and saw me. He was sort of … starry-eyed. I suppose that’s how I was in Waterstones. When I met Brian May.’

  I want to tell him that there’s as much chance of Gary (who practises hooligan chants before the football season) listening to Radio Rock Gloucester as there is of Mum and her leg exploring Asia with nothing but a compass and harpoon, but I’m trying to find the heating pads, pulling open every kitchen cupboard, as if they’d ever be nestled in with the chocolate Hobnobs and cans of Big Soup.

  ‘Do you think we should call 111?’ I ask Dilly. ‘For medical advice.’

  Dilly reappears in the doorway after delivering the ice packs. ‘Nah. I reckon the ice will sort it. Plus. She hates the fuss.’

  ‘Do you suggest we just leave it then?’

  He doesn’t respond, and instead, starts tapping away on his iPhone, swiping through photos of multiple swollen ankles and calves on Google Images, and disappearing into the living room.

  ‘Dilly?’ I call out. ‘Dilly, do you have that hot water bottle you got for Christmas?’

  ‘What?’ Dilly pokes his head around the door, phone flat to his ear.

  ‘Hot water bottle?’

  ‘Don’t have one of those. Oh – hello, mate, how’s it going? Nah, just chilling with the fam, what’re you up to? It’s The Storm, Mum. Yeah, Dwayne, but he goes by The Storm now …’

  I sigh, hold the counter, look around our pokey little kitchen that in this moment feels so empty and so suffocating all at once. I wish there was someone else here, someone I could talk to lean on. When I was with Ed, he witnessed so many times like this. He’d sit calmly at the kitchen table, his analytical brain looking for and compiling a solution as chaos ensued around him. ‘The GP could prescribe sertraline,’ he’d say, or, ‘You could employ a carer, Nell.’ If he were here now, he’d be doing the same. And then we’d both secretly laugh together at Dwayne’s new stage name. Dilly’s band always change their stage names. They’ve been everything from cutlery, to different types of sediment.

  ‘Elle?’ calls Dilly. ‘Where’re these heat pads? No, no, Storm, I’m still here, mate.’

  Dilly is horrendous in a crisis. He melts down. Purely because he’s been protected from them all his life, by Mum. Dilly was born with a hole in his heart. He’s fine now – it closed up over time, something doctors always hoped would happen. But sometimes I think Mum gives her best self to Dilly, so as not to put any strain on it. My heart can take it, I suppose she thinks, and I wonder how often the pair of them think, ‘Noelle’ll sort it. Noelle’ll deal with it.’ And I wonder what would happen if I said, ‘No. Noelle won’t actually. Noelle is sick of dealing with it.’ But I don’t. Because I love Dilly. Because I love Mum. And isn’t that why we do anything, at all? However directly or indirectly. Love.

  ‘Noelle?’ Mum calls now. ‘Noelle, darling, are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I call back. ‘Yes, I’m right here.’

  It seems incomprehensible to me that not even an hour ago, I was asleep in my bed, and now, I’m in a silent hospital waiting room in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, a coat, and an old tatty pyjama top which is printed with the big, rounded, and somewhat inappropriate-for-hospital-emergency-rooms fac
e of a Moomin.

  Mum’s leg swelled up in the night and by the early hours, she was in agony. Dilly was still up, having got back from the pub at midnight, drunk and smelling like beer and kebab shop burgers. He’d met up with a guy he dates on and off called Matt, who works there, behind the bar.

  ‘I got home and was taking a wazz,’ he’d said, ‘and I could hear her, as I come out, crying in her bedroom.’ Then he’d woken me up. And Mum asked – she actually asked – for us to call her a doctor, and relief and worry washed over me like a wave. But then she’d started the freaking out. The panic, the hyperventilating, the anger, the nasty words. ‘Why on earth did you call an ambulance? Why? They’ll make me go in, Noelle. They’ll make me go in.’ I calmly told her it would be fine, pretended the words she threw at me bounced off, like rubber bullets, but I took deep breaths when I got into my ice-cold car, stopped myself from crying. I’m doing my best, I wanted to say, that’s all I’m trying to do.

  Dilly looked haunted at the front door, biting the cotton of his sleeve, the lights of the ambulance painting blue ominous stripes across his pale face. I’d told him to stay at home. He’d be no use to anyone, rile us up, both me and Mum. Plus, he was drunk. The last thing I needed was him throwing up in a hospital bin and trying to keep a Lucozade down.

  The ambulance arrived and left quickly, and I followed in the car. Mum was taken off, checked over by nurses who took her blood pressure and temperature, before she was sent down for an emergency X-ray. She shook the whole time, holding an oxygen mask over her face, her eyes wide like dinner plates, her face stone, despite my fake, encouraging smiles from the plastic orange waiting room chair. She’s been gone for half an hour now, and I don’t even know how anyone is going to know where to find me. They plonked me here, on these benches outside a silent rheumatology wing once I followed Mum in her wheelchair as far as I could, and before I could ask what I should do, where I should wait, they wheeled Mum off to the top of the corridor, and into an elevator. The corridor is silent now, save for the whir of two vending machines, and the traipsing back and forth of doctors and nurses, squeaky shoes on polished floors. I think of Ed. Of him walking these corridors as a kid, the night Daisy died, and of him walking them now, an adult. A doctor. This, his workplace, somewhere he comes to make a living, while others’ lives fall apart.