The heat hit me like a brick wall.
‘Fuck me, it’s hot,’ I gasped, Suzanne cackling with laughter as I clutched at the massive car. I’d never felt anything like it, the air so dry and intense, it felt as though someone had seared the insides of my nostrils. After eleven hours in a stale cabin on the plane and the icy conditions of her SUV, my body was not ready. But it was ready for the little white bungalow in front of me, with its quaint wooden roof and charming double stable doors. The only word to describe it was adorable. More compact than I’d thought after Suzanne’s description but wasn’t that always the way?
‘Suze, it’s so cute,’ I gushed, breathing deep and slow as I adjusted to my new normal temperature. ‘But where’s the pool?’
‘Behind the house, where most pools are?’
‘Behind the house where?’ I asked. As far as I could see, there was nothing behind the cottage but hillside.
Suzanne stared at me from across the car bonnet.
‘Phoebe, this is the garage. The house is up there.’
Keys in the palm of her hand, she pointed towards a narrow, tucked away staircase that ran up to an impossibly beautiful white-walled, Spanish-style villa. Huge, sparkling windows glittered like diamonds in the sun and an infinite number of warm terracotta tiles rippled along the roof. In front of the villa, two towering palm trees swayed in a breeze that was too high up for me to enjoy and the sloping garden was filled with dozens of lush green succulents, stately cacti and beautiful blossoming bougainvillea, running all the way down to the quiet, winding road. The deep fuchsia pink of the flowers sighed against the stark white walls of the house. All of a sudden I felt so far away from home, I couldn’t quite catch my breath.
‘Can you manage the stairs with your suitcase or do you want to take the lift?’ Suzanne asked as though it was a perfectly normal question when we’d both grown up in the same semi-detached house in a tiny village forty miles outside Sheffield.
‘You’ve got a lift?’ I replied, wrangling my suitcase out from the boot of her SUV. ‘In your house?’
‘Yes, I have a lift, but technically it starts in the garage.’ She pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head and winked. ‘Well? What do you think?’
‘I think you’ve got enough room to start your own cult and I think I’d like to join.’
She reached for my carry-on and started up the stairs, chuckling as she went. ‘There’s a white tracksuit waitingfor you in your room. I’ll get started on the Kool-Aid while you unpack.’
‘If you don’t mind. I’ve always wanted to try it,’ I replied, heaving my case behind me and climbing the stairs to the house, step by step by step.
‘It’s all about the flow,’ Suzanne said. We finished our tour of the house on a stunning terrace that rolled over the edge of the hillside, affording us a breathtaking view over the city, and I stared off into the distance, dazed. It was all too much. Outside was even more glamorous than inside, the lush green lawn, the indoor-outdoor living space complete with gas grill and wall-mounted TV, not to mention the azure-blue pool and in-ground hot tub. ‘The real estate broker explained it all. With the south-facing aspect, you get all this wonderful natural light that sort of pulls you through the rooms and out here to the deck. All the good vibes in the house? That’s the flow.’
‘Vibes are impeccable,’ I agreed, digging my hands into the pockets of my jeans, too afraid to touch anything even outside. ‘Makes perfect sense to me.’
‘I looked at another place up the street but I didn’t connect with it. It was gorgeous and I loved the treehouse yoga studio in the backyard, but the energy was off, you know?’
‘No,’ I replied with a bluntness I reserved for immediate family members only. ‘But I do remember when you forgot to pay the gas bill when you were at uni and they turned your heating off.’
She glared at me, turning her back on the spectacular view and leaning against the waist-high wooden fencethat stopped us falling off the end of the terrace and into the neighbour’s garden below.
‘Point taken. You think I’ve turned into an LA wanker.’
‘I think your house is incredible,’ I corrected. ‘And you’ve every right to want to show it off.’ Holding a hand over my eyes to shield them from the sun, I took in the view, shaking my head with disbelief. ‘You’ve come a long way, Suze. It’s not the village, is it?’
‘Too right it isn’t,’ she replied. ‘There’s no bloody freezer shop for a start. Practically impossible to find a box of fish fingers at a decent price around here, and do you know they don’t sell Birds Eye potato waffles in America?’
‘No wonder there’s so much political unrest,’ I tutted.
We stood side by side, lost in quiet reverie, and I wondered if we were thinking the same thing.
‘Gran would be so proud of you,’ I said softly. ‘I’m so proud of you.’
‘She’d be proud of you too,’ she replied. ‘I don’t doubt it.’
Which was exactly the sort of thing you would say if you did in fact doubt it.
I knew I did.
‘I called Mum before I got on the plane,’ I told her, brushing my frizzy, post-flight hair behind my ears. ‘She said to say hello. Have you spoken to her lately?’
‘Couple of weeks ago, maybe a month?’ She rubbed her fingertip lightly underneath her eye and shrugged. ‘Have you heard from Dad?’
