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“Just up here, is it?” asked Dan, swinging the van around a corner.
Billie saw the postbox at the end of the street and her stomach sank. “Yes.”
“And then it was number forty one, wasn’t it, love?”
For God’s sake, he had a GPS. Billie said nothing and Dan peered over her at the numbers of the houses until he finally turned on his indicator and turned into a driveway. Then he came to a slow stop and whistled.
“Alright for some, innit?” he said as he looked at the neat little cottage with its neat little garden and neat little front door.
“It’s not mine,” Billie said as she climbed out of the van.
Not strictly true, but also not strictly untrue. With her parents in Portugal now the place was hers for the foreseeable future. An arrangement that had just happened to be the perfect safety net since Billie’s life had fallen apart.
“You’d be doing us a favor, darling,” her mother had said.
“Just tell me by the end of the week or I’ll have the electric switched off,” her father had said.
“Yes,” Billie had said, because she had no other choice at that point.
The lease on her London flat was almost up and she had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do and this had been the easiest of solutions. Except it wasn’t exactly a solution. Then her mother had chipped in and said that Mrs. Lawton had retired at last, her arthritis too bad to play the piano for school assembly anymore. So that had worked out as well.
In a way.
Teaching music for three mornings a week at a primary school wasn’t going to make her rich. Actually, it wouldn’t even pay the electric bill, which her father had warned her was going to be astronomical if she insisted on leaving lights on all over the place like she had when she was a teenager.
Billie had snorted at this because she was well over thirty and not a teenager at all. But then she did leave the lights on all night to keep her company.
“You going to let us in then, love?” Dan asked, his voice muffled as he ruffled around in the back of the van.
Billie pulled the keys out of her pocket. There wasn’t any point in putting this off any longer. She walked to the door and unlocked it, letting the smell of old house out, before setting foot inside.
She had, at one point, thought that this place might be a museum. She’d been young and arrogant and fresh off a school trip to the Bronte house, and she’d imagined that one day people would come here and see the table she’d eaten at, the piano she’d first learned at, the bed she’d slept in.
And it sort of was a museum in a way. Nothing had changed, not really. The place still smelled like it had, still looked like it had, still felt like it had. But it had always felt like sort of a prison, a holding cell that she had to wait in until the rest of her life could begin, so that lack of change wasn’t exactly a good thing.
“You get yourself settled,” said Dan, struggling in with a box that Billie knew contained scores. “I’ll get these things in for you.”
She might be arrogant and cold, but she wasn’t rude, so she asked if he’d like something.
“A cuppa wouldn’t go amiss,” he said as he went back out to the van.
She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, pulling out a mug from the cupboard and everything else she’d need without having to search. This had been her house for eighteen years, after all.
“Milk and two sugars,” Dan shouted through as he came in with another box.
Billie did it all automatically. The fridge had a picture of her on it, her long dark hair cascading down her back, her dark eyes focused on the music on the stand in front of her, her body not shown off to its best advantage in school uniform.
She’s always been what her mother called ‘a big girl’ when what she’d meant was it was impossible to find bras and school shirts that fit properly. Her cleavage had been an asset when she was auditioning. Hardly a feminist thought, but a true one.
The kettle clicked off and she waited for the water to stop bubbling before she poured it over the tea bag.
Dan was depositing yet another box as she walked into the living room. The bay window looked out over the garden, what her mother had called ‘the music corner’ was lit by the afternoon sun. The music corner had spread like some kind of weed by the time Billie was eight and actually took up most of the room. Enough that her father, grumbling, had taken to watching the cricket in his study rather than on the larger living room screen.
“Thanks, love,” said Dan. “Just put it down, I’ll get the last couple of things and be right with you.”
Billie reached for a coaster before remembering that her mother wasn’t there and that she didn’t care enough about a coffee table to put one down.
Coming back to Whitebridge had been the best of a not very large set of bad options. One that she was already starting to regret. People would recognize her, she knew that. Obviously they would, she’d grown up here, started her career here.
