On her way back to the cottage, she popped into the charity shop that helped to support the cat sanctuary. She was in no hurry to get back to the cottage today, so she thought she’d see what was on sale.
‘Morning!’ the cheery voice of Sally Sharpe, one of the local volunteers who staffed the shop, called out to her as she came through the door.
‘Morning,’ Bella called back. She began to browse the store, not quite sure what she was looking for. There was a good range of clothing, arranged by colour, and still summery, although autumn was knocking on the door. Finding nothing to interest her in the racks, she browsed the novels and DVDs for a few moments, but again, nothing grabbed her. Bric-a-brac and ornaments weren’t her thing, and she had all the shoes she wanted, so she was about to wander back out of the door when she spotted something sitting on the shelf by the window display that caught her eye.
It couldn’t be.
Could it?
She was pretty sure none had been produced in this country. Sure, there’d been plenty hanging around in Europe a few years back, especially in Sweden, but she’d never actually seen any of them on sale anywhere in the UK before. It was both a welcome and an unpleasant surprise to see it sitting so innocently on the shelf, almost lost between many other things that someone had turned out of their house and donated.
But, Bella thought with a flash of determination, it wasn’t going to sit there any longer. With slightly shaky hands and feeling a flood of adrenaline surging through her body, she reached out and took it off the shelf.
31
Having paid for her purchase with a pound coin she found in the bottom of her shabby old purse, Bella hurried back to Jack’s cottage. She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do with what she’d bought, but one thing was clear: she had to get it out of the shop. If anyone else from the village found it, she’d never live it down.
Her first instinct was to shove it in the nearest bin, but she couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t catch someone’s eye, with its vibrant colours and sharp edges. Better to take it back to the cottage and stash it somewhere, so there was no chance of anyone else finding it.
Bella couldn’t believe how much her heart was thumping as she let herself in through the front door. She paused, once she’d closed it again, and pulled her purchase from her shopping bag. What was something like that doing in the local shop? There had been a very limited number produced; how ridiculous that one of them should turn up here.
Sighing, she wandered through to the kitchen, turning it over and over in her hands. It felt like another time, another life. She’d been another person. She’d been many people in her life, she thought. The person she was back then would have laughed at how nervous she was about confronting the past.
One small, flat, rectangular case. One coloured sleeve. And inside, one circular piece of almost obsolete technology that took Bella back to a place, twelve years ago, that she thought she’d moved away from. It was a perfect piece of nostalgia from that time, a time when compact discs were already losing the war against streaming music services, but a hard copy of an album would be produced as part of the marketing strategy.
On the front of the CD sleeve was a dramatic picture of a singer, hair blowing backwards as she stared down the camera, clad in a deep crimson satin dress and Dr Marten boots, with heavy eye make-up and an enigmatic smile. Or, at least, Bella thought wryly, what the photographer, the stylist and later the cover designer had said was enigmatic. Looking at it now, it just looked daft.
This girl had been packaged and marketed as an indie pop sensation. This girl had supported a number of bigger artists on tours all over Europe. This girl had had a lucky break, or so she thought. And this girl had crashed out, exhausted, when the demands of the music industry had become too much, the road too long and winding to persevere. This girl had been Isabella Indigo.
Isabella Indigo had never quite made it big enough to be known outside the medium-sized clubs and venues of Europe, and her dent on the UK music scene had been minimal. A devoted following of young women who’d identified with Isabella Indigo’s stage persona, the artist who sang of love and loss, of happiness and pain, of moving on but still nursing the past, had struck a chord in the austerity-ridden years of high living costs and increased isolation. The record company who’d signed her had high hopes, but Isabella’s persona, while attractive to a portion of the market, wasn’t quite successful enough to go mainstream. After one album and a modest tour, the label moved on, and Isabella Indigo became Bella West again.
For this CD to have turned up in charity shop in a very small English village, the gods would have to be laughing themselves sick.
All the same, Bella felt a wave of nostalgia, a sensation of regret mixed with a large dose of relief at what could, or might, have been. She smiled to herself as she slipped the CD from its case and popped it into the radio-cassette-CD player that sat in the corner of Jack’s kitchen. Taking a deep breath, she heard the whirr of the mechanism starting up, and then, after a short guitar-led intro, the vocals started.
I never let you go,
Until you told me so,
Until you said goodbye,
Those tears were in my eyes.
And now I’m all alone,
Just waiting by the phone,
Baby, oh please just call,
I just can’t see at all.
Heartbreaker,
You’re just a heaaaart-breaker!
Dream maker,
You’re still a heartbreaker…
