Vee had swallowed her first comment, which would have been, ‘Nothing’s wrong with me, you great baboon, I thought we were partners, and I pay my way, you know I do, have done for years.’ Instead, she forced a smile and tried to admire the smooth grey tiles and matching towels. The whole room was completely bland. He’d got rid of all her leafy plants and quirky vintage bathroom accessories. Even the vintage basket chair with the squishy, embroidered cushions had gone. This had been the best room in the flat, in Vee’s opinion, and now it was ruined.
Looking back, now Vee was able to view her last relationship more dispassionately, the bathroom debacle was the beginning of the end. Long soaks in the bath had been Vee’s escape from the real world and without them, she felt lost and tetchy. Nigel hadn’t understood, and ironically, it hadn’t been many weeks afterwards when his personal hygiene gradually hit an all-time low, so the high-tech shower had never been properly appreciated.
Vee pulled the plug when the water was once again growing chilly and dried herself, putting on her comfiest pyjamas and her fluffy dressing gown, then padded downstairs barefoot and made herself familiar with the idiosyncrasies of a strange kitchen, ending up with a mug of instant hot chocolate and a plate heaped with toasties oozing melted cheese. She drew the curtains, settled herself on the sofa in the living room and switched on the television, scrolling through the programmes on offer as she ate her snack.
At last, after many forays into murder mysteries, thrillers and grim documentaries, Vee decided to play it safe and go for a series she’d watched before. However, it wasn’t long before she realised her mistake. The last time she’d seen this particular programme had been some years previously, when she and Nigel were still reasonably happy. Now, seeing the relationship in question gradually disintegrate before her eyes, Vee experienced a sense of déjà vu. The couple in the story were almost carbon copies of Nigel and herself. Their relentless misunderstanding of each other’s feelings was painful. Worse still, the issue that was driving them apart was something from the woman’s past that had reared its ugly head and refused to go away.
Vee put down her mug and paused the action, frowning as she at last faced up to thinking about possibly the most significant part of her own history. These were the memories that she’d been avoiding ever since she left Willowbrook. The ones that sometimes kept her awake long into the small hours of the night with their unspecific niggles. They were cloudy memories, lost in the fog of anxiety that had surrounded her family’s sudden departure from the supposedly idyllic village life of her childhood.
The room was quiet now, and Vee glanced around, taking in the ambience that Rick had created for himself. The furnishings were simple, consisting of a large and comfortable sofa, several bookcases, a beautiful oak coffee table and the enormous TV in the corner. It was a good place to ponder, but try as she might, Vee couldn’t bring to mind any firm details of what had happened in those long-ago days. A few names floated around in her brain and also one or two vague recollections of the fun she’d had growing up here, but something was getting in the way of total recall. There must be some way of breaking through whatever barrier was holding her back.
Vee stood up and began to pace up and down the living room, finally ending up facing the largest bookshelf. It was lined with all kinds of books in every shade of the rainbow. Some were clearly from Rick’s early years, brightly coloured, battered and much loved. Others were leather-bound copies of the classics, equally well-used. There were glossy non-fiction books and a whole shelf of thrillers with covers in black or muted colours. But on the very bottom shelf, Vee hit pay dirt. Here she found a whole row of photograph albums propping each other up, their plastic bindings dusty from lack of use.
‘Wow,’ she breathed as she ran a finger along the edges of the albums. ‘You are one organised bloke, Rick.’
Each volume was labelled with its own dates. Was it overstepping the mark as a lodger if she leafed through some of them? Vee knew she’d hate anyone looking at her own rudimentary collection of old photos but the more she peered at the dates, the harder it became to resist them. At last, she reached for the one labelled ‘1984’. She couldn’t bring herself to take it back to her chair to look at in comfort. That seemed even worse than having a quick, casual peek by the shelf, so she sank to the floor and opened the book, holding her breath as she turned the pages.
The two large photographs on the first page were a surprise, because they were pictures of the school Vee had attended. Why would anyone want to remember that place? It had been built in the late sixties and never been properly modernised, merely had bits added on when the volume of pupils grew too great to fit inside. It consisted of a square, rather bleak-looking group of buildings surrounded by concrete play areas and car parks. In the distance could be seen the playing field which had been the scene of some of least professional games of football and hockey known to mankind.
Vee soon saw that Rick was one of those people who liked to caption his pictures. Underneath these two photos were printed the words:
They say heaven is a place on earth… but in that case, so might hell be.
Vee shuddered and almost closed the book. It had been a loveless experience, being at that school. Some teachers had been better than others, but the general atmosphere was one of barely suppressed frustration. Small fights often broke out at lunchtimes and the midday supervisors always seemed to be out of range at these moments, usually smoking behind the bike sheds. There had been several teenage pregnancies while Vee was there, and the girls concerned had left under a cloud, never to return. Rick must have been there at the same time as she was. Why didn’t she remember him? A blond, good-looking boy like him would surely have stuck in her memory. She braced herself and turned to the next part of the album, stomach in knots.
There in front of her on the following pages lay many snapshots, some clear, some blurry. They were neatly laid out, and each one had its own tiny label. Long-forgotten names floated before Vee’s eyes. Rick must have an amazing memory to be able to recall all these schoolmates along with their nicknames. Mackie Pearson, Dino Butler, Shazzie Smith and Rhonda Clements…
Rhonda Clements. Vee paused in her perusal, feeling cold fingers of dread running up her spine. Rhonda had never allowed anyone to shorten her name or give her a new ridiculous one instead. She had been a fearsome character, cooler than cool, deferred to wherever she went. For a while, she and Venetia had been friends, or what passed for friends in the gang that hung around with Rhonda. Vee had been so eager to fit in that she’d turned a blind eye to a lot of the things that went on around them at that time. To fall out with Rhonda would have been the biggest mistake of her young life, so she made sure she was always on the right side of her. It wasn’t easy. Rhonda had very little in the way of scruples and she wasn’t averse to treading on everyone who got in her way.
Vee turned another page. This time she was confronted by a few of the kids she thought of as the rival gang. They’d been a sorry lot. In Rhonda’s words,a right bunch of tossers and losers. She supposed that in any peer group there would be those who fell into Rhonda’s very own set of categories. The teachers’ pets and swots. The geeks and nerds. The cool kids. The tossers and losers. The bullies. The victims.
The last category stuck in her mind as Vee thought back to the painful early days at high school when she had been one of the victims. Tallulah’s mixed Spanish and Italian background and her father’s rather brooding good looks had provided Vee with the dark hair and soulful eyes that she hadn’t appreciated in her teens but it had also been something that was seized upon by the bullies. She had been relieved when for some unknown reason Rhonda had adopted her into the cool kids’ gang, which effectively stopped all the bullying but had its own price to pay. A high price, as it turned out.
Now, unable to stop looking, Vee scrutinised some of the group that had irritated Rhonda so much. There were three of them in this particular snapshot; two girls and a boy. Both girls had long, straight hair, looped behind their ears. One had particularly large ears, which the style emphasised. The other had pink-rimmed glasses. The boy was dark-haired and skinny. His expression was one of abject misery. He had a bad case of acne, in fact all of them were plagued with spots, as Vee now remembered. She looked at the label beneath the clearest of the photographs.
Ginny Burton (GeeBee), Sharon Smith (Shazzie) and Brad Potter (Petrol Head or BP).
Vee carried on flipping through the pages. There were no photos of Rick himself that she could find. The album wasn’t just full of Vee’s year group and others in years above and below. The last few plastic-covered pages had newspaper cuttings tucked inside them instead. They all involved the local police’s search for a graffiti artist who was making themselves increasingly unpopular with the townspeople of nearby Meadowthorpe. There were close-ups of some of the artwork, and Vee couldn’t hold back a gasp of admiration. They were stunning. Swirling images that reminded her of a rough sea, of dramatic waterfalls, of rivers in full spate. The final page brought sudden tears to her eyes. It was a short notice cut fromThe Meadowthorpe Recorder, describing the death of Sharon Eva Smith, aged twenty-seven, former resident of Willowbrook and by then residing in Manchester. She didn’t appear to have been married, and no family members were mentioned. There had been a post-mortem, but no suspicious circumstances had been found. Shazzie Smith, she of the owl-like glasses and terrible stutter, was no more.
Vee closed the book carefully and placed it back on the shelf. She retreated to her previous seat and tucked her legs up beneath her, reaching for the fleecy blanket that was folded over one arm of the sofa. Wrapped in its warmth, she contemplated all that she’d just seen. To think of Shazzie, dead at such a young age with apparently nobody to mourn her and no explanation given, was heartbreaking. Vee was aware that even if she hadn’t been directly unkind to the girl herself, she hadn’t made any effort to prevent Rhonda from teasing her unmercifully whenever their paths crossed.
Had Rhonda been equally mean to all the people she classed as losers? Yes, she had. There was no avoiding that, and if Rick had been at school at the same time as Vee, he must remember what Rhonda had been like too, even if he’d been in a different year group. She wondered why he hadn’t made himself known to her when they first met. Surely that was unnatural. It would have been normal to say something like, ‘Hey, we go back a long way. I was at your school, but we didn’t…’
Didn’t what? Didn’t hang around in the same crowd? Maybe Rick remembered her family leaving, and the events leading up to it. The uncomfortable feeling was growing and there was nobody else to ask about what really happened around the time that the Prescotts left Willowbrook. Vee honestly couldn’t recall anything but the most basic of facts. Maybe she’d blocked it all out. In that case, there must be something really bad lurking in her subconscious. This growing sense of unease and unexplained guilt was making her edgier by the minute. To ask Rick to talk about the past might wreck their working relationship and Vee so badly needed both a safe space to live in for now and someone to make her own house ready for the future.
Reaching for her phone, Vee clicked on Facebook and stared at her list of friends. Rhonda must have some kind of social media presence, she was far too egotistical to be anonymous in this world of Instagram, TikTok and so on. She tried a Facebook search first, with no joy. Then she moved to Instagram and suddenly, there was her quarry. Rhonda Clements-Barrymore. So she’d married at some point. Rhonda’s profile picture showed a glamorous woman who was holding back the years very successfully, unless she’d used a whole lot of filters. Ash-blonde hair in a classy bob, vermillion lips and eyes that stared straight out of the photo with a challenge in them, or so it seemed to Vee. Her hand shook. She hesitated for seconds before she pressedfollow.Then she pressed the message button and typed:
Hi, it’s Venetia Prescott here, remember me? Would be great to have a catch-up sometime, now I’m back in Willowbrook and I can see from your profile that you’re still living somewhere nearby.
The words were on their way through the ether before Vee had given herself the chance to change her mind. It was done.
Faintly horrified at what she might have set in motion, Vee headed for the kitchen and opened the fridge. There was a bottle of gin in there and one of tonic. Mentally apologising to Rick for pinching his booze, Vee found some ice cubes in the freezer, sliced a lemon from the fruit bowl on the worktop – might as well do this thing properly – and poured herself a very large G&T. If Rhonda got in touch with her, there was at least a chance of getting straight in her mind what had closed her memories off so effectively. Knowing must be better than guessing. That way madness lies, she told herself, taking a large swig of her drink. Her eyes watered at the strength of it, so she took another slurp and added more tonic. Then, turning her back on the cosy living room, she took herself to bed.
14
Back at the Fox and Fiddle, the celebrations were still bubbling. Rick had bought another bottle of Prosecco and delivered it to the happy couple before reorganising himself and Sam into a game of Scrabble. Maurice was beyond any sort of sensible conversation, now happily clutching Anthea’s hand and staring into her eyes, while Sid had joined their table and was busy pouring drinks for everyone in the group, paying special attention to Winnie.
‘Is it just me or do you feel a bit out of it tonight?’ Sam asked, setting up the Scrabble board and passing Rick one of the little racks for his tiles.
