Tapping my fingers on the table, I waited a while to see if he’d come back. When he didn’t, I cut my losses and left.
A couple of hours later, I made it home to find a camp meeting in full swing.
Meg got up to greet me. “Oh sweetie, you didn’t have to come home.”
“I did, actually. There was nothing more I could do in London.”
“You went to relax and spend time with Cash.”
“Yeah well, I’m relaxed. Okay?”
I slipped past her and claimed my spot around the fire. Fletch was speaking, but he stopped and nodded at me.
“To recap,” he said. “I’ve spoken to a fella I know who works for a different council, and he reckons we can’t be forced off even though we never had planning permission for a campsite.”
“But you have a campsite licence,” I said. “Why do you need planning permission too?”
“Fucked if I know.” Fletch shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. We’ve been camping here for more than ten years, so the passage of time is enough to outweigh that. If they wanted us off on those grounds, they’d have to have done it last year. Timing, eh?”
He grinned as though the world had fallen at his feet, but I didn’t share his optimism. “When’s the camping licence up for renewal?”
“Now this is where it gets complicated,” Fletch said. “Technically, the licence is valid as long as we have planning permission, but we don’t, so it might not stand for next year, even though we don’tneedplanning permission. Basically, we’ve got a ton of paperwork to go through, and everything contradicts its ‘effin self.”
By “we’ve got a ton of paperwork to go through”, he meant me, and I was down with that, but I couldn’t see what good it would do. If the council wanted the camp gone, they’d find a way to do it.
The meeting broke up. Fletch sheepishly handed me a rain-damaged envelope and sloped off, but Meg stuck around.
“You didn’t have a nice time?”
“What?”
“With Cash,” she clarified. “You were so excited.”
“Was I?”
“Come on, sweetheart. I know you.”
Did she? Right now, I didn’t feel like I knew myself. I shrugged her off and retreated to Cash’s van. The breakfast he’d bought me seemed a lifetime ago, but the vegan cakes Meg had left on my bed turned my stomach. I buried them in the electrical cupboard and opened the envelope Fletch had given me. Old licences and forms littered my bed. Most were out of date, but this year’s license was at the top of the muddled pile. Renewal date was six weeks away—not much time if the council were going to play hardball. A couple of letters lost in the post, unanswered phone calls and missed messages, and those weeks would be gone. I needed a loophole, or a magic solution, and fast.
I was nowhere near finding one when the burner phone I’d picked up a few days ago buzzed. Distracted, I reached for it, expecting Meg to be hassling me to come out and eat, or maybe even Cash breaking the stalemate he’d left me with, but a message from an unknown number stared back at me.
Unknown:I can help
I frowned and searched through my pockets for the scrap of paper I’d scrawled Cash’s number on to keep up with the monthly burner cycle, just in case the sacred digits I’d committed to memory were somehow wrong, but they weren’t. The unknown number matched no one I knew, and besides: no one off camp besides Cash had this number. Had he given it up? Passed it on to someone who could help? Logic told me it was possible, but my gut said otherwise. Cash didn’t want my life, but he’d lived it. There was no way he’d have given out my number without speaking to me first…right?
There was only one way to find out for sure, but I didn’t feel like speaking to Cash just yet. I didn’t understand him. He wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty, of the fight and the danger, so what the hell was it? Maybe fucking me had put him off something that had clearly once been his whole world. Or perhaps I was self-absorbed douche. Cos it wasn’t like a day went by when I didn’t picture my life as it might’ve been if I’d found my calling elsewhere. Somewhere bland and safe. Where not turning up to work meant overtime for a colleague who wanted it, not a slew of dead creatures littering my conscience.
I set Fletch’s paperwork aside and fired a reply to the unknown number.
Rae:how?
Chapter Fifteen
Cash
I felt like shit, but that wasn’t unusual since Rae had taken over my life.
Right, cos you were happy as Larry before that?
