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As she was waiting for her cooked breakfast to arrive she made the mistake of taking her phone out to double-check there were no calls from the care home. There weren’t, but there was a log of six missed calls from Paula and a text in shouty capitals.
RING ME, URGENT. ABOUT MUM!!!!
No kiss. Paula didn’t do them.
She put her phone away, then got it out again. It would hang over her head all day if she didn’t find out what was so ‘urgent’. Paula picked up after two rings.
‘Oh, you’re alive then,’ Paula said in that permanently exasperated way of hers.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Shay in a low voice. She didn’t really like having phone conversations in public places as some did, revelling in forcing their one half of the dialogue upon others. ‘What’s up?’
‘Did you know the people next door to Mum were converting their garage into a lounge? She’s going absolutely bonkers. She asked the builders what they were doing this morning and they told her so she rang me in a right old state. I was supposed to be going shopping and instead I’ve had to come here at stupid o’clock.’
‘They can’t do that, can they?’ asked Shay. The bungalow in Merriment Close was a link detached. The Balls’s garage was attached to both their bungalow and Roberta’s, but if it was converted, that would make the two houses semi-detached instead.
‘When we come to sell it, it’ll be worth much less if they go ahead,’ Paula went on, clearly focusing in on the money side of things.
‘How’s Mum, did you say?’ asked Shay. She didn’t want to think about selling the house, because then she’d have to think of why her mother wasn’t living in it any more.
‘Driving me insane. I’ve only been here half an hour and my brain’s already fried. She doesn’t know what day it is.’
Shay felt a shot of anger speed through her.
‘I asked how she was.’
‘I told you.’
‘No you didn’t, you told me how you were.’
Paula ignored that. ‘When are you getting back?’
‘I’m away all weekend, you know that.’
Paula gave a long outward breath of annoyance. ‘Can’t you cut it short?’
Had Shay not been in a dining room full of people, her answer might not have been as measured.
‘Would you, had it been you on your anniversary weekend, Paula?’
Paula swerved a direct answer. ‘I don’t know what to do with her. If she mentions that bloody skip once more I’ll scream.’
‘Have a cup of tea with her, Paula. Snapping at Mum won’t—’
‘Oh wait, there’s that woman from next door but one. The foreign one, she’s knocking.’
Dagmara – she’d calm Mum down. Good.
‘Right then, I’m going to enjoy the rest of my weekend, knowing that Mum is in your capable hands,’ Shay said and ended the call before Paula could get another word in.
She reached for the coffee pot, tipped it over her cup and added milk. But it was no longer the relaxing, carefree interval she had hoped it would be. It had been spoilt, by those who continued to see her only as the middle of a sandwich, something to be squashed out of existence.
When Shay returned to the bedroom, Bruce was still sleeping soundly, his breath steady, deep. There was no way she was sitting in a darkened room waiting for him to rouse, not on a beautiful day like this, so she brushed her teeth,reapplied her lipstick and grabbed her cardigan. She propped the anniversary card she’d bought for him up against a complimentary bottle of water on the dressing table together with a note saying that she’d gone for a walk, and exited the room after hooking a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door handle – a small act of kindness she wasn’t sure he deserved.
There were no clouds in the bright blue sky and Shay was glad she’d packed clothes in line with the weather forecast on Metcheck. She had on a sleeveless dress, yellow cotton, with small blue flowers and a swishy skirt. She’d found it on a sale rail the previous autumn and had snatched it up because it had reminded her of a dress she’d had when she was seventeen and loved so much she’d worn it all that long, hot summer. The year when she rejoined the world again after missing a whole twelve months of her life.
She took a right, saw the welcome sign for the cheese factory in the near distance and joined the small queue at the entrance. She tried her best to put her mum’s neighbours, her overbearing sister and her hungover husband out of her mind and instead concentrate on the origins of Birtwell cheese but it was hard.
There was a gift shop and a café tucked in the corner. She bought too many cheese rounds from the first and a pot of tea and a slice of apple pie with Birtwell cheese baked under the top crust from the second. She wasn’t hungry really and still a tad too annoyed to enjoy it. She hoped Bruce’s headache was relentless. She hoped it felt like a hammer-drill in the side of his skull because his sabotage was deliberate at worst, thoughtless at best. Everyone else in the café was in a group or a couple; she was the only saddo by herself and it was her twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. She took a tissue out of her bag to blow her nose and surreptitiouslydab at her eyes to push any tears back before they made an appearance because they were close to the surface. She felt very alone, sitting in a café on such a beautiful day surrounded by people. She never wanted to be alone on this date, it was too dangerous. It was the date when the present and the past were separated by a film as fine as gossamer. It was too easy to travel back there, to remember how it all was, how happy she’d been once upon a time. In another life.
