She needed to sort out her own place to live, and pretty darned sharpish, but whenever she thought about it a feeling of intense lassitude swept over her. There was so much she should be doing, so many things to organise and arrange, and she didn’t seem to have the willpower or the energy to do any of them.
She was worn out, both physically and emotionally.
‘You look worn out,’ Anne said, echoing her thoughts.
‘I am, but there’s so much to do, I don’t know where to start.’
‘What you could do with is a break from everything. Why don’t you have a little holiday before you get stuck in?’ Anne finished her tea and put the mug on the coffee table. ‘I bet you haven’t had a proper break since before your mum was diagnosed.’
Sophie thought it was probably considerably longer than that. The last time she’d been away was at least eight years ago, a last-minute splurge with her friends before one of them got married. Not a hen party as such, more like a final fling as a single woman. The fact that her friend had been living with her fiancé for ages didn’t seem to matter.
They’d gone to Spain; Ibiza to be exact, and they’d done all the things that a group of women on holiday normally did – stayed up until the dawn brushed the sky, slept until the afternoon when they’d flopped on loungers on the beach to sleep some more, eaten too much, drunk too much, and danced until their feet were sore. It had been so much fun, and she’d been younger and carefree and she’d thought she still had the world at her feet.
Now look at her…
These days, staying up most of the night didn’t involve clubs and parties – it had been to nurse her mother. Her feet had still ached, not from dancing but from lifting, fetching and carrying. And any falling asleep she’d done hadn’t been on a sun lounger, but in the armchair in the living room where her mother’s hospital bed had resided for the last few months. She’d lost touch with her friends, had given up her job, and had gradually faded from the world, as caring for and nursing her beloved mum had taken over her life.
Maybe Aunty Anne was right. Sophie knew she had to make changes, and extremely significant ones, but she simply felt she wasn’t ready. And she wondered if she ever would be while she lived in the house that had been at the centre of her very existence for such a long time. Maybe she did need to get away for a while, to give herself the distance, space and time firstly to grieve, and then to decide what she intended to do next. The decisions were big ones, starting with where she was going to live and what job she could possibly do, having been out of work for years. She used to work in admin, but she suspected most employers would take one look at the huge employment gap in her CV and throw her application form in the bin. The only other thing she had experience of was caring for an invalid, but even then employers wanted a Level 2 qualification in this, that or the other before they’d even consider an applicant.
Sophie had nothing that an employer would want, except for a handful of GCSEs and a couple of A levels.
At least she had a small amount of savings, enough for a cheap couple of weeks away – although where she’d go for some sun in October that didn’t involve a long-haul flight and lots of expense, she had no idea – and for a deposit plus two or three months’ rent on a flat. She only hoped she’d have enough time to find a job before her money ran out.
Perhaps going away wouldn’t be such a good idea after all. It would be a waste of money for one thing.
‘Look,’ Anne said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘They’re not going to throw you out just yet. The council have to give you a decent amount of notice, and you won’t want to take any time off as soon as you start a job, so now is the ideal time.’
Put like that…
‘Maybe I could stretch to a few days away in Cornwall or Devon,’ she said.
Anne snorted. ‘In this weather? You might as well stay at home. No, listen to your aunt and go somewhere nice and hot.’
It would be considerably less hassle (she wasn’t sure she actually knew where her passport was) to have a staycation, but one glance out of the window made her think again. It was midway through the morning, but the sky was a sullen, depressing grey and rain was falling in torrents. It was bitterly cold, and the wind was whipping the branches of the trees in the park opposite into a frenzy. Did she really want to spend a few days in a guest house staring at the same rain? Once again, her aunt was right – she could do that far more comfortably from her own living room and with considerably less expense.
No, she decided; if she was going to go anywhere, it would have to be warm and sunny – which meant that most of Europe was out. The only place she could think of that she might be able to afford and would feel comfortable visiting on her own was the Canary Islands.
So with that in mind, when Aunty Anne left, Sophie began the mammoth task of searching for her passport; and if she didn’t find it, at least the hunt would have killed a couple of hours.
Chapter 2
As Sophie walked through the sliding doors of Tenerife’s airport and stepped into the balmy air, she turned her face up to the sun and sighed with pleasure at the unaccustomed warmth. She was here, really here. In a foreign country. On her own. For two whole weeks.
The thought filled her with a quiet exhilaration which was tinged with apprehension.
The last-minute, remarkably cheap, midweek flight had been uneventful, most of it consisting of reading her book and peering out of the window at the cloud-laden sky. But when the aeroplane drew close to the group of islands, the pilot first pointed out La Palma, then La Gomera on the right of the aircraft, and she craned her neck across the aisle to see better. It was at that point that the conical peak of Tenerife’s impressive volcano hoved into view, poking up through a ring of cloud like a pale, shining witch’s hat, and she caught glimpses of flatter land beneath before the plane turned and began its final descent.
Now that she was on terra firma, the cloud which she’d spotted from the aircraft’s windows seemed to have disappeared and the sky was a bright azure blue, tinged with a silver haze. She’d read that the island could be windy and so she wasn’t surprised to feel a stiff breeze, but the wind was a warm one, totally unlike the howling gale back in the UK earlier that morning, and at least the sun was shining.
Sophie took a steadying breath and scanned the throng of people hanging around the doors holding pieces of paper with passengers’ names scrawled on them until she found her own. It was her one indulgence this holiday (apart from the holiday itself, of course) – a private transfer to the apartment she was renting. Apparently it was a good half an hour away from the airport and she hadn’t trusted herself to be able to find her way there on her own. Not on her very first day, at least. So she’d booked a taxi and, as she sank into the back seat, she still couldn’t believe she was here. It felt like a rather odd, yet pleasant dream.
From the second she’d made the decision to book a holiday, the time had passed in a whirl of preparation and guilty excitement. She’d even managed to push her grief to the back of her mind for minutes at a time, as she scrolled endlessly on her rather ancient phone to find an Airbnb to book, then dug out her few summer clothes, washed and dried them, and shopped for some essentials. During those activities the sorrow seemed less sharp, less shocking. Sophie sensed it would always be there, but she also sensed that it would fade and become less painful over time, and part of the healing process was this holiday. She hoped it would serve to draw a line between her life before it and her life after it, and enable her to face her future with a clearer head and more focus.