And the scowls abound

Back to the builders
We waited on the beach, watching the tiny boat in the distance grow larger and larger. There were five builders on board, all looking slightly green about the gills and carrying bags of tools. There was also a large wooden crate which they loaded onto a flat pallet with wheels which they drew with a rope up to the village. I realised with some dismay that they had not brought a toilet.
Despite the fact that I had explained the unusual position of my house to the head of the company, the builders were still incredulous.
“What? You want us to take that thing all the way up there?” asked the largest guy, chuckling a little nervously. “That’s not possible, it’s too heavy.”
“But there are five of you, plus the two of us.” I argued, ignoring Vikkie’s groan.
Sighing the builder agreed that it was certainly possible, but still highly inconvenient, something he later said about the bucket.
As it turns out neither myself nor Vikkie were required to help with the transportation of the crate. Though we did have to carry up the tool kits. Eventually the builders, their supplies and the crate were at the top of the hill. After a brief rest one of the men got up and opened the crate with a crowbar, revealing my new stove.
It was beautiful, and not just because it promised hot food. I had been all over the internet trying to find a proper wood burning stove, the kind you and sit beside on a cold winters night and smear with blacking. It was a monster, with a thick hob and little doors to the oven and fuel compartments. Together the men hefted it into the house and proceeded to knock out bricks in order to fit it into the wall.
“I thought you said it was a protected building?” Vikkie stood next to me, watching the destruction. “That doesn’t look very protective.”
“I can do stuff like this, just no structural changes, like pulling down whole walls or adding new ones.” We wince as a large section of masonry crashes down.
“Maybe we should leave them to it.”
Ignoring the clouds of dust that drift with unsettling frequency from the doorway we get back to our gardening. As I pull weeds I mentally go through the building work I’ve commissioned, the stove obviously, then the sink and the well it will draw it’s water from. The campsite facilities would go in when I returned in the summer, along with a pump to draw water for the garden. It was all getting very complex, and not for the first time I wished that it was done already and I could just get on with living there.
When we were finally too exhausted to continue with the gardening, we went over to the house and sat with our backs against the wall to eat lunch. I ate an apple, studiously ignoring the sounds of men at work and bucket in use. It was starting to dawn on me that it was really happening, though slowly, and that there was no way out now. I couldn’t just give up and slink back to my university room, I had made a commitment, I’d signed papers.
I felt slightly sick.
“How are we going to get clean?” asks Vikkie suddenly “Please don’t say the bucket is going to multitask.”
“In the sea I suppose.” I rub some of the dirt off of my arms with a sigh. “I’m going to go down now actually, want to come?”
Another crash comes from the house at our backs.
“I think I’d better keep an eye on the builders.” she says, smiling wryly.
I grab a towel from my bag and walk along the one path that leads away from the house, but instead of following it all the way back to the village, I turn off and go down a steep slope to the beach. The path is deeply carved into the sandy soil, snaking around boulders and shrubs to the pale greyish sand which is as cold as a basements floor. Though the sea is slate grey, it looks reasonably calm, so I strip off my jeans, leaving on my longish shirt, and wade into the water. It’s cold, untouched by the sun below the immediate surface. I turn back and look at the shore once I’m up to my waist. The island has sheer cliffs of grey rock, dropping on to piles of similar rocks that have been worn smooth by the sea. A glittering fall of water catches the sun as it runs from the island hills to the edge and throws itself into the water, a natural spring. It’s beautiful.
I scrub myself with salty water, watching the dirt melt off like dye, leaving my skin once more pale and stippled with freckles. I wade back to the shore and rinse the salt off of my skin with bottled water, it is a regretful waste, but less so than washing in the stuff. I take off my shirt to wring out the water and suddenly freeze. I listen hard, in case I was mistaken, but even though I can no longer hear them I know that they were there before. Footsteps.
I look around, trying to spot any possible hiding places, then stop short as I notice someone looking at me from down the length of the beach. It’s definitely a man, maybe middle aged with shaggy hair wearing a long coat. I catch his gaze, and he strides off around a corner and out of my sight.
I hurriedly dry myself and force my still clammy, salt chafed body back into jeans and shirt. As I gather my things I try to hear over the thud of blood in my ears, but no more sounds drift up the beach. I relax a little, assuming myself paranoid. Maybe he was just a walker, stunned by my presence, and not a voyeur or murderer. By the time I get back to the house the light has dimmed, and the builders have gone, to return tomorrow to see to installing the stove properly. Vikkie has dragged our possessions back inside the dusty house and we stand admiring the new stove. We eat some of the food, cold, as the stove has not yet been connected, and settle down to sleep as the sea batters the coast relentlessly through the night.
I so was not being paranoid. Just a little jump ahead for you, that guy is the worst thing about the island and probably the worst man alive come to think of it. I promised I wouldn’t flame and I’d keep it all anonymous but god sometimes it’s a trial.

Captain Scowly Face and His Builders Arrive

Ah the toilet saga, anyway, we return to my first night in my new house.
Ablutions complete I broke out the food and, because it has grown dark outside, I light the candle with my Jack Daniels lighter.
“What’s for tea then?” Vikkie settles down by the open boxes and wraps her sleeping bag around her shoulders, for the air is already losing it’s fragile spring heat.
“Well, we have oat cookies, baked by yours truly, some fruit, raisin bread, peanut butter and fig rolls.”
“Anything else?”
“Well…I think there might be a spot of jam…somewhere.” I nod towards the pile of enormous jars, glistening purple.
“I’m good thanks.”
Vikkie selects several things and, in the absence of plates we eat from the lids of the plastic boxes. The candle burns down in it’s holder, as Vikkie packs the remaining food away I take out the bundle of cheap white candles and place them in one of the notches in the wall. The only entertainment we have is a pack of cards, which I brought out of nostalgia for the games of “Sevens” we played in the school library. I deal the first lot of cards, then the second and so on. We play over and over again, not keeping score, until we are so bored we change to “Go Fish” and then back to “Sevens”.
“Not to kill the evening” Vikkie yawns “but I really need some sleep.”
I check my watch, sure enough it’s past ten and with all the excitement of the day I’m exhausted. We change in opposite corners of the cottage, Vikkie into crazy monkey pyjamas, me into psychotic pandas. Vikkie inflates the ancient air mattress built into her faithful sleeping bag, the same one I remember from our school trip to the “Outdoor Centre”, where she fell off the bunk bed because of it’s slippery fabric. I slip into my new sleeping bag and make myself comfortable on the floor, I don’t want to sleep in the bed, not just yet. I feel as if I should save my first night in my new bed, in my new house, for me alone. Vikkie gives me a quizzical look, but leaves it be, she probably already knows why I‘m on the floor, she’s like that.
The last thing I do before bed is place a paperback, the only one I brought, next to the bed. At sleepovers I was always the first to wake, hours before the others and so as not to disturb them I always brought my own entertainment. Vikkie blows out the candle and utter darkness engulfs us.
“Mental note” I yawn “install a street lamp.”
Vikkie says nothing, already asleep.
The next morning I wake predictably early. After an hour or so of flipping restlessly through my book I feel compelled to get up. I roll off the bed and slip out of my sleeping bag, taking the bucket with me in the hopes of avoiding embarrassment when the builders arrive. The morning sun slowly creeps across the house and it’s garden, whilst sea birds call to each other in the air, chasing over the grassy plain and letting out their raucous cries. Mentally I go through my list of things to do. The amount of work is disheartening, and I feel increasingly unsure that this project can ever succeed. Swallowing my doubts and the lump in my throat with a mouthful of biting fresh air, I head back towards the cottage.
Despite the noise I make getting dressed in my jeans and baggy plaid shirt, Vikkie continues to sleep soundly. I take out a hand mirror and look myself over. As predicted my hair is all over the place, dark circles have appeared and deepened with lack of sleep and I look pale and ill. I try a small smile, but it comes out rather threatening, the effect of my unusually long canines heightened by my general appearance of death warmed over. Sighing, I drag a brush through my dull, sandy blond mop, trying to turn it back into hair. Then I brush my teeth with a little of the bottled water and grab some raisin bread for breakfast.
There seems little point in waiting around, and a brief look at my watch reveals that the builders, who are meant to arrive at eleven, will not appear for another three hours. I slip on my wellingtons and, taking up the spade and axe that I bought second hand, walk out into the overgrown garden.
I set myself the task of clearing it from one corner to the other, digging out all the unwanted brush and pruning what is left. From behind the house, where I discovered the metal pail that became our bathroom, I drag my other find, a metal dustbin, almost rusted through. I had learnt from Daniel Shield that the roof of the cottage had been repaired a decade or so ago, explaining the contemporary rubbish dumped out of sight behind the house. As I began to dig out woody shrubs and clumps of grass, I tossed the pieces that could not be saved as proper firewood into the dustbin, intending to make a bonfire later and return the ashes to the soil.
After about an hour of work, during which I had cleared only a fraction of the garden, Vikkie emerged from the cottage eyes reduced to slits against the glare of the risen sun.
“What are you doing up so early?” I tease, holding out the spade to her as she stomps down towards me.
“Very funny, you’d think after making me go to the toilet in a bucket and making me sleep on the floor AND not providing proper food, you could at least let me lie in guilt free.”
“You can complain whilst gardening.” I thrust the spade at her again, unmoved. At least she had an air mattress to sleep on, my back was killing me.
Grumbling she began to scrape at the ground with the spade, I took up the nearly blunt axe and started to chop the thicker shrubs into firewood to store behind the house. After a while Vikkie called me over to help her dislodge a stubborn stump. I trudged through the tangled grasses, breathing in the scent of rosemary and lemon balm as I disturbed their lush spikes. I gripped a portion of tangled root and we pulled hard, dragging the gnarled stump from the light salty soil.
The light spring sun settled on us and my hands were quickly wet with dew from the lush weeds which I uprooted. A fine layer of soil settled on my skin, clinging to my sweaty face and clothes. It occurred to me that I had no way of washing properly. When I lifted my hands to brush away the stray hair that fell in soft clumps from my ponytail, my fingers smelt of earth and herbs. Sooner than I would have liked, I realised it was time to fetch the builders from the village. We left our tools leaning against the garden wall and walked down the hill, a stiff sea breeze chasing us all the way down.
Ahhhh the builders, you have to laugh to keep from crying. Don’t worry, you’ll see.

Home inprovements

Ok, now a lot of important stuff happened all at once, so I’m going to stop jumping around and try to get it all in. Ok, lies, but It was amazing to see my new home and all the rest of it, so I’m going to indulge in a lot of lengthy description.
We climb out of the boat and, with Vikkie following me, I make my way across the beach and up towards the little hotel. I notice things about the village I had not noticed on my first rain soaked visit. The stained glass window of the church depicting swirling waves in indigo and violet, dull from the outside but probably beautiful when seen from within. To one side of the sundial square is a row of American style mailboxes, all of them numbered but for the one on the end, which remains unclaimed and tatty next to its white and blue neighbours. On it’s side I can vaguely see letters, the remains of a house name, strange by the strictly puritan numerical cottages. “Ocean House” I read, a whimsical name for such a tiny cottage. I thought back to my first impression of the place, how each element of it seemed to have been chosen specially, cost no object. Someone very strange had built a house to shame the dull village and named it for the sea whilst the villagers chosen numbers.
I spotted a note on the door of the hotel that shook me from my thoughts. It was addressed to no one in particular, from Pam, saying that she had gone to the mainland on the morning boat. Although I had not told her I was returning to the island I had wanted to see her again, and was slightly put out by her absence. This feeling quickly vanished beneath dismay as I realised exactly how much stuff I had brought, and how far we would have to carry it.
I hefted the box, our sleeping bags and my bag and began to walk towards the church. Vikkie followed with the folded camp bed, her bag and the plastic wrapped gardening tools I had stowed in her boot after buying them in Bath. I marched up the steps to the path beyond and began to walk steadily along it, to the highest point of the island, where the cottage was situated.
I stop at the gate, gripping the post and breathing in a huge lungful of salt sea air scented with the rosemary of the garden. I ease the gate open, so that Vikkie can pass through after me, and head up the path to the door. Though the wood has swollen with damp making it difficult to open, it is still unlocked. Inside it is exactly the same as when I left it months ago, only the view from the window has changed, as the garden has become green with new growth and the sea beyond the cliff is more placid.
I dump my burden gladly and Vikkie adds her things to the pile. Without the chill wind my face feels hot and sweaty with exertion, and I know my hair is probably half lank with sweat, and half frizzed with salt air. Vikkie looks no better, her face already chapped by the wind. I dig around in the bags and start to unpack the necessary bits and pieces I have brought along. I unroll the sleeping bags and set up my bed, set the plastic boxes of food in the middle of the floor with bottled water and place a candle in a blue glass stick beside them.
“Nice isn’t it?” I say, startling myself in the silence.
“Yeah…just like camping.” Vikkie grimaces “Where’s the toilet?”
Bugger. I knew there was something I’d forgotten.
“We don’t have one, exactly.” I cast my mind about for a moment, as if there is some solution I missed the first time.
“What do you mean exactly?”
“Well I can’t add one to the building, because it’s unusual and protected, so I’m planning to use the camper toilets…” I let the sentence drop, unfinished.
“Which haven’t been built yet.” puts in Vikkie.
“Exactly, they haven’t been, as you say, built.”
“I see”
“Well, the builders will probably bring a portable toilet with them…that’s what they do usually, isn’t it?” I suddenly feel quite hopeful.
“But meanwhile, we have no toilet.”
“You’re just a negative person really aren’t you.”
“Coming from you, Miss I hate university, and people in general and wish harm on them all.” I realise that she is trying not to giggle.
Jumping forward I tickle her furiously.
“No! stop it!…..Now I really need the toilet!”
As it turns out, revenge is best served on a dark cliff, in a bucket you find behind your toilet-less cottage.
　
Wow I’m coming off as really evil....not really much I can do about that without lying.
　
　

Back to the Island

Again, we’ve tried to remember our exact conversation, but it’s difficult to get it totally accurate, because Vikkie is a raging alcoholic and finds it hard to remember stuff. Well, she isn’t, but it’s my blog so I can just pretend she is.

I sink down onto the bed and flip open my phone, dialling Vikkie before I remember that she is visiting her family. She answers after the first ring.
“Oh thank god!” she exclaims.
“I’m sorry, I forgot you were at home.” I mutter, preparing to hang up.
“No! don’t leave!” she hisses “I’m already hiding in my room.”
I smile despite myself.
“Why? What happened?”
“The whole family is here…even people I thought were dead.” she whispers.
“I haven’t told my Mum, so now I‘m a liar and a disappointment.”
She goes silent for a moment.
“Ok you win” she mutters, grudgingly “what did you say? I mean, she must have asked you about uni”
“I told her that I was going to biography a dead poet and visit his native lands for a huge research project.”
“Oh” There’s silence on the other end “Well, you will have to tell her eventually.”
“Oh no I don’t”
“Yes you do”
“Whose side are you on?” I bleat petulantly “I know I have to tell her, but she’s going to hate me, and…It’s just too much on top of everything else, all the work and the worry over all the finances. I just need some more time.”
Vikkie giggles
“What?” I snap
“It’s like you’re having an affair, university doesn’t understand me! I’m going to cheat on it with an island, my parents can never know!” She giggles again
“Just a few more days and then we can leave anyway” she continues “and then I get to spend two glorious weeks as slave to Emma the Renovator.”
“And don’t you forget it” I add
“Yeah Yeah, just bring me some chocolate.”
Reluctantly I ring off and put my phone away, unload the rest of my things and go downstairs.
Things do not improve over the next few days. It‘s difficult being around my parents without feeling like an evil guilty liar, so I spend most of my time with Jake playing on the Xbox and doing the occasional bit of work. I take Alfie out over the fields, visiting all the old landmarks. I climb the mud hills left over from the construction of the doctors surgery. I visit the place where I once went to playgroup which is now a concrete slab covered in broken glass and charred remains thanks to an electrical fire.
I push through hedge boundaries and visit “The Quarry”, an enormous pit in a ploughed field where everyone dumps rubbish. Our camp is still there, a rusting blue trailer roofed with bits of wood and accessed by climbing on a wooden bucket. Inside I find the wine bottles we recovered and stuffed candles in, and a stack of reclaimed paperbacks, fat with damp.
I walk around the back of the church, on a thin path bordered by straggly grass, and wave hello to the spooky gargoyle and the tilting headstones. I peek over the fence of my old primary school. At home I eat with my family and count the days until I can leave again. I use my laptop to keep in contact with an equally desperate Vikkie and we arrange trips to our old haunts.
We meet on the second to last day, planning a pilgrimage from Royston to Buntingford to Stevenage to Hitchin. We start in Royston in the morning to take a look around the little occult/tourist trap shops that we used to visit for ritual supplies, then head to Tesco, our second stop for spell ingredients (for we were witches of limited means). We sit for a while on the fence in the car park, drinking thick chocolate milkshakes.
“I really miss this, just hanging around” I say after a while
“What is it we do every day in Bath?” smirks Vikkie, flicking her bottle cap at me.
“Yeah but that’s grown up hanging, we don’t just sit in car parks drinking…oh my god full fat milk!” I stare at the bottle in shock, then, even more shocked I say,
“When did I become an “oh my god full fat milk” person?”
“A while ago” Vikkie shrugs “I didn’t have the heart to tell you.”
“See this is what I mean! suddenly we’re all grown up.” I slump on the fence “I mean, getting older is unavoidable, but I shouldn’t have to be a grown up.”
We sit still for a moment in silence.
“Is this really hurting you’re arse?” asks Vikkie, giggling.
“Yeah, lets go.” I stand, fluffing out my skirt, and we walk to the bus stop.
It was a strangely sad day. We visited the bakery where we bought lunch most days in sixth form and the tree into which I hurled my coursework in a moment of frustration and then had to climb to retrieve it. There was even a patch of ash left from the bonfire in the park onto which I had joyfully thrown my copies of Shakespeare and Wilde on the last day of term. In Stevenage we saw the very first film we had seen together, now shown again as an “oldie”.
“I still say “The Emperors New Groove” was severely underrated” argues Vikkie, still munching popcorn on the ride home from Hitchin that evening. I scoop up a plastic forkful of cheesecake from the box on my lap and hand it back to her.
“Yeah, talking livestock and huge chins never get old.”
Carefully I perch a kernel of popcorn on top of the cheesecake and eat it. I am officially exhausted. After the film we caught a bus to Hitchin and spent hours in the charity shops, avoiding Starbucks and peeking enviously at the gorgeous displays of fair-trade clothing in Harvest Moon. I have blisters on my blisters, but I’m glowing with happiness and nostalgia. I take another bite of cheesecake, I’m trying to get back to my pre-calorie counting state by having desert for dinner. I get off the bus at my stop and wave goodbye to Vikkie, then practically dance to my house, where my good mood is swallowed by the black cloud of deceit that hovers over my family.
I spend my last day there the way I spent the ones before it, barely speaking to anyone, remaining distanced by my secret. Finally Vikkie drives up outside and honks her horn loudly. I hug everyone stiffly, except Alfie whose oddly biscuit scented head I kiss goodbye. I lug my things outside and deposit a cardboard box on the front seat. Vikkie views it with surprise, as I didn’t have it when she dropped me off.
“What’s in the box Emma?” she asks with mock seriousness.
“Severed head” I reply nonchalantly, climbing into the back. “How did it go at home?”
“Great!” she exclaims perkily “With luck and some chilly weather no one will find the bodies for a few days.”
She pulls out onto the road and engages the guidance system.
“Seriously though, what’s in the box?”
“Some stuff for the house, mainly jam” I reply “I made a couple of dozen pasta sauce jars full last blackberry season and Mum apparently has no use for them.”
“Is that like the apology jam you gave me? You know, when I helped you gather all those earwiggy elderberries and carried them because they freaked you out, so all that purple juice got on my favourite jeans. Because that jam could have filled potholes.”
“That was the practice jam” I say “I wouldn’t waste good jam on you, you critic.”
“Right then, what are we going to do at this place of yours anyway?” she turns onto the main road just outside the village and immediately begins to speed.
“Not much, put a lock on the door, keep an eye on the men installing my stove and sink, a little gardening maybe. I just want to get it ready for habitation and leave a few things up there ready for summer. Get my garden growing.”
Vikkie grumbles as I tap her shoulder to get her to slow down. The jars in the box rattle around and my bag slides onto the floor as she brakes.
“Hate to break it to you but there aren’t enough fertility runes or green candles in the world to make you good at gardening.”
“I happen to be an accomplished gardener.”
“You tried to kill cabbage fly with shampoo.”
“Ok, shut up or I’ll make you eat my lousy jam.”
“Ok Delia, keep your hair on” she raises both hands in a surrender gesture, causing me to dive forwards to make her hold the steering wheel.
Needless to say it wasn’t the most restful journey, which I suppose had something to do with the new “GLaDOS” voice of the navigator. We drove stopping once at a motel for some sleep and stale cornflakes. Then completed our journey to the small port in the Scottish town nearest to the island. After unbending my cramped back and legs I eased a crumpled piece of paper from my pocket and consulted it briefly.
“You made a list? Who are you and where is Emma you body snatcher.”
“You promised you would never mention that again! You know it freaks me out.”
I have had issues ever since I saw a clip of that film on TV, for the next two weeks I carried a gazebo pole with me everywhere, even to the shower. Seriously, it was traumatic, when Jake did the snatcher point and scream thing I started to cry.
“You mock me for the whole “Jaws” phobia thing.”
“I will now we’re going on a boat” I smile sweetly
In a camping superstore I select a wood framed folding cot and a blue and white gingham sleeping bag. During my ecstatic baking phase my Mum used to joke that I would wind up toting gingham iced muffins in a wicker basket whilst wearing a gingham dress and generally being wholesome and pure. Just thinking about how things used to be makes my heart momentarily heavy.
We return to the car to collect our bags of clothing and the box I brought from home. Manoeuvring a camp bed and all the luggage onto the tiny boat was a little more difficult than I had anticipated, but then again I can always grow new nails. I had taken a few pre-emptive anti-nausea tablets so I was ok on the bumpy journey over, Vikkie however, was not.
“Uh!…Kill me” she moaned from her position, lolling over the back seats.
“Told you not to mock me.” I reply smugly, flipping a page in my magazine.
“Evil, you are pure evil.”
“Nah na…Nah na…” I tease, humming the Jaws music for the rest of the journey because Vikkie is too sickly to make me stop.
All I can say to this is “MWAHAHAHAHHA! I regret nothing!”

Bugger

And so we return to blunder number eleventy-billion.
“Why did you say a campsite?”
“I don’t know!” I yell into the pillow covering my face. Vikkie sits at my laptop, trying to make sense of my excel spreadsheets and all the documents of research.
“Well, it’s not a terrible idea…”
I flip the cushion into the air and sit up, annoyed.
“I know it isn’t a bad idea, why didn’t we have it before? That’s my point! How dumb are we?”
“You’re only just asking that now?” she smiled “it looks like you’ve planned everything to death and back, it should work out fine….when are you going to do this anyway?”
I suddenly feel very sheepish.
“Well…I’m not exactly coming back next year….in the strictest sense.”
“What?!”
“I decided to finish this year, because I already paid the tuition and it would be stupid to just drop out, but after this year I’m moving to the island fulltime.”
“Have you thought this through? What if it all goes tits up and then you’ve got nothing.”
I toss a cushion at her and scowl.
“Thanks for all the confidence, and if breasts do become upwardly inclined, well then I’ll figure it out then.”
“All I meant was, what about university, you’ve barely even given it a chance, after all the effort actually getting here.”
“I shouldn’t stick with something based on the amount of time I wasted over it. If that was how the world worked divorce wouldn’t exist! And neither would rubix cubes.”
For a moment Vikkie appears to have given up. She closes all the computer files and opens the internet, bringing up YouTube and searching for “Frasier”
Finally she swivels on the chair and sighs.
“Ok...I’m alright with that”
Surprised, I gawp at her.
“Well, not relishing the idea of being on my own, but I’ll be fine, and you were really, really starting to get on my nerves with the whole I hate university thing.” She cracks a smile and nudges me hard. I nudge back, then push her off the bed.
“You know the only problem with my master plan.” I say to her slumped form on the floor.
“Your parents?” her muffled voice replies. I nod, realising too late that she can’t see me. There is a brief pause as she rights herself and flops onto the bed.
“Well, I’m not telling them” we say simultaneously
Vikkie and the nasty admissions lady were one thing, telling my parents that I was leaving university? I might as well announce my conversion to Satanism and confirmed teen pregnancy. They had been so into getting me into university, they had even got me into going, so much so that I hadn’t paused to consider whether I should go. Well, that’s not entirely fair, I don’t blame them for my situation, but for people who never went to university they were awfully quick to extol it’s virtues.
I therefore made the highly mature decision to put off telling them as long as possible. I waited out my time at university like a prison sentence, throwing myself into my work, there were assigned texts to read and discuss and an enormous university library to abuse. I spent whole hours writing scripts for the web cartoon that myself and Vikkie voiced and animated. But the world I had created for myself was slowly changing. I used my free time to amble around second hand shops looking for things to fill my home with, spent all my time at work planning out what I was going to do to the house. I phoned contractors and suppliers of solar panels and old stoves, trying to set up some renovations on the building itself.
The campsite too was taking up a lot of my time. Aside from finding someone to build the toilet block that was required; I still had to build a website and actually make some money.
Strangely though, I wasn’t stressed. Well that’s a lie; I was stressed, but also excited. I felt as if I was finally doing something that was to do with me, something that I wanted. I knew that at the end of all the little problems and the dark tunnel that was telling my parents, there was a life waiting for me, one I couldn’t wait to get to.
At long last a holiday came, the last one before the short stretch of time that would lead to the end of the year. I packed up a bag, with much more care than last time, and Vikkie drove me home.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before but Vikkie’s car is the best car in the world. For a start it’s purple, the kind of purple that, when it passes you at forty miles per hour makes your eyes water. It’s a beetle, one of the only types of car I know, the others being round, square, red and shiny. Inside it has really beaten up black seats and a few strings of fairy lights shaped like orchids.
As we speed down the motorway I lie across the back seats, seatbelts holding me in place as the car judders over bumps in the tarmac. My sunglasses are perched on my nose and my MP3 player is playing Kate Nash to drown out the voice of Vikkie’s guidance system, which she switched to Eddie Izzard especially for the trip. It’s an oddly sunny day for this time of year, but it has done little to lighten my mood. I was going to be spending a week at home, and sometime in that week I would have to tell them about Ilensay. I just knew they were going to go crazy.
Apparently Vikkie sensed this too, as she dropped me off at the end of our road rather than coming in for a cup of tea. I extracted myself from the car and tugged my bag after me, slamming the door closed. I waved at the retreating purple streak as she shot away towards the main road that would take her to her parents house. Sighing I began to trudge towards my childhood home.
I spent most of my life in the tiny village of Benington, it has one church, a small primary school, a playground and a large supplier of farm machinery….and that’s it. The houses all follow the main road and sprout off in branches, the expensive cottages that surround the village green give way to the affordable housing and small blocks of flats, which lead onto the very expensive houses at the other end of the village. My parents owned a three bedroom terraced house in the middle sector, with a grassy hill in front and an enormous fallow field to the side.
I hop up the two wide steps at the front and bang on the blue door, for a moment it feels as though university was just a weird dream and in fact I’ve just been out walking the dog. The door opens and I’m dragged into a hug as it slams behind me.
“Welcome back!”
I hear Mum’s voice from above my head. The stairs to my left rattle as my younger brother Jake comes down, still clutching a wireless Xbox controller. I wave awkwardly at him, simultaneously batting Alfie away from my legs. Alfie is my parent’s terrier, they bought it when our collie died, which was when I still lived at home. I had no idea if he even remembered me, or whether he just thinks I’m a pleasantly scented stranger. Finally Mum releases me and I can’t help smiling, it’s nice coming home to a friendly family.
We all go into the living room to chat and have some coconut cake. I get caught up on the latest gossip from school and home. Apparently my old maths teacher had just come out of the closet, causing quite a stir, and someone had dropped some lighting equipment injuring a girl in the year below who I had always disliked (apparently buying all the spices etc was sometimes worth it). I produce the presents I’ve brought, A copy of Bioshock 2 for Jake and a book each for my Mum and Dad, who isn’t around because he‘s working a shift.
“And this is for you” Mum proffers a wide, floppy package.
I open it to discover a crochet blanket, half the size of a single bed and done in greys and blues with shots of stormy violet. I remember her starting this blanket the year before I went to uni, and she finally finished it.
“It’s beautiful!” I exclaim, draping it across the arm of the chair, where Alfie sniffs it’s sheepy smell appreciatively.
“So, how is it at university?” She asks, refilling my teacup.
I have to tell her
“Mum..”
I can’t tell her.
“It’s fine actually” I smile “couldn’t be better.”
“That’s good” Mum smiles back, and refreshes my tea. “We were hoping to come and visit your flat soon, you know, when you move out of student accommodation at the end of the year.”
Oh crap! Why does God hate me so much?!
“Well, I won’t be there, the thing is Mum…”
Inspiration…inspiration…damn I knew I should have taken creative writing.
“I’ll be out…in the field.”
Well technically just a field, but still.
“I’m doing a research thing on John Clare, the poet? Which means I’m going to be staying near where he lived for a few months, to get a feel for the place that inspired his poetry.”
“That’s wonderful!” says Mum, interrupting my please to the Goddess that my lie be received blindly.
“It is, isn’t it?” I smile, sipping hot tea and burning my tongue. I have the unsettling feeling that this is some kind of divine punishment.
In the brief silence my Mum switches on the TV and finds a re-run of “Have a new life in another country or this one who cares buy a house and make a fortune flogging antiques from the attic in Spain” or whatever. That’s the slightly annoying thing about my parents. In all the years I was at home they never once did anything spontaneous or anything that they dreamed of accomplishing, they just stayed in watching other people having their dreams come true.
“Can I just go upstairs to my room? You know, unpack and get things sorted?” Mum nods and numbly I leave the lounge and go to my room.
I know, I’m a filthy liar, but I am going to tell her at some point, just not right now.