I have picked the worst possible moment to be standing on the pavement outside the village shop: the exact moment the bus to the sixth-form college goes past on its last morning run of the term.
If only I hadn’t agreed to pick up my brother’s parcel from the post office counter before work.
If only Mr Parkins and his stupid package to Australia hadn’t been ahead of me in the queue.
If only I hadn’t told my friend Mira that I’d meet her and we could walk back up to the hotel to start our housekeeping shifts together.
If.
Only.
But here I am, and here’s the bus, and as it stops to let Mr Parkins cross the road with agonizing slowness, every single face behind the bus windows turns to look at me – and I am fixed to the spot as firmly and definitively as if someone had driven iron spikes through my shoes.
Everything stops: time, my heart, the movement of the Earth through space. Everything. I am trapped in this moment, pinned like a butterfly on a board. Me on one side of the windows; the people I used to go to school with, the people I used to know – the people I used to be friends with – staring at me from the other.
And then Mr Parkins has made it to the other side of the street and, just like that, the world is moving again and the bus is gone. I step off the pavement to watch it disappear from view between the hedges and the green overhanging branches of trees.
There goes the life I could have had.
Almost did have.
A strange, horrible screeching sound fills my head, drowning everything else out – and at first I wonder if it’s just in my head or whether it’s me and I’m doing it out loud…and then I realize that Mrs Rolfe from the Old Vicarage has stopped in the middle of the pavement and is staring at me, and the screech stops and there’s a new noise. One that sounds a bit like…like a car horn.
A car horn coming from behind me.
I’m in the middle of the road, aren’t I? That screech was brakes.
Slowly, I turn around.
It’s an old green car – one of those vintage things that looks like a squashed frog.
More blasts on the horn, sharp and angry, then long. One-two-three-fooooooouuuurrrr.
Sweat prickles along the back of my neck, along the lines of my palms.
Is everybody looking? Has anyone else seen? Are people peering from behind their curtains to see what all the noise is in this tiny little nothing village at this time of the morning?
No big deal – just Flora Sutherland, standing in the middle of the road.
I make myself take a step sideways, back to the safety of the pavement, and hope that’s enough. I wish the car would go, that the ground could swallow me, that nobody has noticed or shaken their heads and thought, Well, what do you expect from someone like her? But the driver’s door swings open with a creak.
“What the hell are you doing? I almost hit you!”
Red hair, sunglasses above a dark T-shirt, and a face bleached pale with shock.
“Are you crazy? Hello? HELLO?!”
The word “crazy” hits me harder than the car could ever have done. I flinch – then panic in case he saw, but he whisks straight past me and drops into a crouch in front of the car.
He’s checking it for damage. Buffing at the paint with the palm of his hand.
He doesn’t care whether he nearly hit me. He cares whether I somehow dinged his paint job.
I take a deep breath, hugging Charlie’s parcel tighter to my chest like a shield.
Is this a balanced reaction?
Satisfied I haven’t magically dented his paintwork, he turns back to me and sees me watching him.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, just standing there in the road? Have you got some kind of death wish?” He pulls the sunglasses off his face and waves them around him like he’s conducting the orchestra at an outrage concert. “If I hadn’t looked up right then…” he starts – then stops himself.
“Maybe,” I say quietly, “you should look where you’re going.” I almost add, “Instead of calling other people crazy…” but decide it’s better if I don’t.
“Maybe,” he snaps back, “you shouldn’t stand in traffic.” He’s younger than someone with that kind of car should be. My age, maybe a couple of years older. Eighteen? Nineteen? His eyes are a washed-out shade somewhere between blue and green, and he squints against the bright sunshine.
“Yes. Traffic. There’s so much of it round here,” I mutter, turning my face away again and letting his gaze slide off me.
I hear him open his mouth to speak, but there’s no other sound.
Just go. Get in your car and go. Leave me alone.
He still hasn’t moved. Why won’t he go?
“Look, seriously, are you okay?” He says it gently now – there’s real concern in his voice. “Do you need me to call some—”
“I’m fine,” I snap. “You can go now. Really.” The edges of the parcel dig into my ribs, and there’s a pounding in my ears – I can’t tell if it’s my heart or my brain that’s thumping, but something is. Maybe it’s both of them.
“Can you just leave? Please?”
“Wow. Okay.” He leans away, his eyes as wide as if I’d slapped him. “Fine. Whatever. I mean…Jesus. I was just trying to find this hotel…”
His lips keep moving, but it doesn’t matter; I can’t hear a word.
He’s a guest.
He’s talking about Hopwood Home Hotel. There are no other hotels for miles around. There’s nothing else at all for miles around, not out here.
Oh god, he’s a guest he’s a guest he’s a guest.
Get it together, Flora.
He reaches into the car, pulling a sheet of paper from the dashboard. The sheet of paper he must have been looking at when he nearly hit me. He holds it out. “I don’t suppose you know where it is, do you? It’s not on my satnav and there’s no phone reception out here.”
“I work there.” It falls out of my mouth before I can stop it. I end up half-swallowing the last part of “there” and feel stupid. He, however, brightens.
“Oh, amazing. I’m so lost. Totally, totally lost.” Running a hand back through his hair, he looks around – as though to say that the only reason he’d be anywhere near a village like Hopwood-in-the-Hollows is to pass through it on the way to somewhere else. With that kind of car, and dressed the way he is – carefully, neatly, probably expensively – it seems about right.
And if he’s staying at the Hopwood, and I’ve been stupid enough to let slip that I work there, the last thing I need is him complaining about the super-unhelpful staff member standing in the road on his way to check in.
Get it together, Flora. The sooner he gets directions, the sooner he’ll be gone.
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“I am?” He squints along the road, the same way the bus went, then turns around to look behind him. “But…”
“You need to turn around then go back through the village, past the pub and take a right. Go past the farm with the ice-cream sign shaped like a cow, then keep going until the road gets narrow and forks off to the left. Take the left fork, and there’ll be a metal gate with a gatehouse and an intercom. That’s the hotel.”