3
BALMORAL ROAD, SALISBURY, WILTSHIRE, UK
I met someone last night at this really cool club called Vipers. Michel De Vos!!!! An artist!!!! He looked a bit like Johnny Depp and he was foreign too. Exotic!!!! I think Dean would probably fancy him. We danced and talked and he told me all about his paintings and photographs. He’s going to be exhibiting at these cool galleries – New York Life and the Tilton. New York is giving me all these completely amazing opportunities. You just don’t bump into sexy artists in Wiltshire.
I can’t remember the hotel we went to. It began with ‘t’ I think or it could have been ‘the’ something. It was nice, though. Like a Hilton. And there were chocolates on the pillow. I ate them all and he didn’t mind. And then he kissed me and I kissed him and we did EVERYTHING… twice. And I lay there thinking, this is one of those perfect moments I’ll remember forever. Me, in New York with an artist called Michel.
In Dean’s old bedroom, Hayley snapped her ten-year diary closed. She’d read enough. The memories were good but the feeling they left her with didn’t feel nice; it felt… dirty. She pushed the diary onto the bookshelf between a Jill Mansell and a Jilly Cooper. Not content with how it looked, she set a toy elephant and half a dozen fairground Gonks in front of it.
‘Mum!’ Angel called from the other bedroom.
Hayley pushed two Gonks closer together so the diary was no longer visible and checked how it looked. Obvious because of the furry guardians? Or invisible?
‘Mum!’ Angel called again.
‘Coming!’
Hayley couldn’t help the smile forming on her lips when she got to the other bedroom. Angel was diligently putting things inside her suitcase, her pigtails bouncing as she moved from drawers to case and back again in the smallest bedroom of the house.
Angel turned, a thick dictionary in her hands. ‘I do have twenty-three kilos, right?’
‘Yes but, Angel, seriously? A dictionary?’
It was a hardback. She could see Angel struggling to even hold it in one hand.
The reply came quickly. ‘It’s my favourite.’
Her daughter had a favourite dictionary. Why didn’t she know this? It was a proud mother moment despite how much it weighed. Hayley sat down on the edge of what had been her childhood bed. The duvet cover with swirls and graffiti logos on had long since been replaced by something clean-lined, neutral and perfectly prim – ideal if ever the Queen or Mary Berry needed a bed for the night.
‘They do have books in New York, you know.’ Hayley patted the duvet next to her.
Angel put her hands on her hips and struck a surly pose. ‘Does that mean I can’t take my favourite dictionary?’
What did you say to moves like Beyoncé from a nine-year-old?
‘What if I want to know whatsidewalkmeans?’
‘You know whatsidewalkmeans.’
‘That’s not the point.’ Angel stuck her head forward like an ostrich getting interested in prey. ‘There will be things in America I might not understand.’
‘They speak English, Angel.’
‘American English is very different to British English. They practically never use a “u” in anything and they prefer “z” to “s”.’
‘See how much you know already,’ Hayley quipped.
‘Ineedmy dictionary.’ Angel pouted better than Naomi Campbell.
‘YourBritishEnglish dictionary.’
Angel let out a growl akin to an irritated beast on a nature documentary. Definitely more bear than ostrich. ‘I bet you’re taking that massive diary.’
The words pinched but Hayley did her best not to let it show.
The diary she’d just hidden was practically an undetonated grenade. She didn’t know why she even kept it. Most entries these days were a couple of lines, sometimes only a few words.Angel’s tooth came out when she ate the yellow Quality Street. Mother made another crack about single mothers – she’ll be asking Denise Robertson to give me advice soon. Greg bought me a sausage roll from Greggs, it would be funny if he wasn’t expecting his sausage to be rolling around somewhere near me and the trouser press.
Hayley forced a smile. ‘I’m not taking it.’ There was no way she could take it now.
