‘If Briony comes back for the op, getting rid of the cancer might not be the only amazing thing to happen.’ The muscles in Bex’s jaw were tight from forcing herself to say those words out loud and somehow keep the sneer off her face at the same time. ‘Maybe me and Briony could finally patch things up.’
‘Rebecca.’ Her mother’s tone was steely, and the use of Bex’s full name sent a shiver down her spine because it so rarely happened. ‘Don’t you dare use the situation with Briony to try to manipulate me. I’ve said I’m not even going to consider a live donor transplant using part of one of my children’s livers and I’m not going to change my mind. If surgery is the best option, then I’ll have to wait to be matched with a deceased donor.’
‘But the cancer could grow too big by then, or you could get more tumours. Dr Chan said they’ll only operate if you don’t develop any more, and the tumours all stay under three centimetres. We can’t afford to wait.’ Bex was aware she was starting to sound like a whiny child, but she didn’t care. ‘Why don’t you let Ken reach out to Briony and see if she’d even be willing to do it? If she isn’t, that’ll be the end of things, but if she is, you could at least meet with the surgical team and get a much better overview of the risks and benefits of surgery.’
‘I said no.’ Her mother’s eyes flashed with anger this time, the veins in her neck looking more prominent. The earlier chink in her armour appearing to have been welded shut. ‘And if either one of you contacts Briony about this and puts the idea into her head that it’s her responsibility to donate a part of her liver to me, I will never, ever forgive you.’
And yet you were able to forgive her for everything she did to me.This time, by some kind of miracle, Bex was able to stop herself from saying the words that were screaming inside her head. Briony had to be protected at all costs, it was the way it had always been. But if doing that resulted in Bex losing her mother, she’d have even more reason to hate her so-called sister than she already did.
4
Holly leant against the cushions of one of the seats in her campervan as she watched the video back. Did she sound okay? Would her audience notice how many umms and errs there were in this week’s episode of ‘Woody’s Words of Wisdom’? And would it matter if they did? She wasn’t sure, but one thing she’d learned over the past few years, as her career as a vlogger had really begun to take off, was that filming the videos she made, over and over again, until they were ‘perfect’, made the whole thing inauthentic. She was there to talk about van life, an alternative way of living that thousands, no,millionsof people were interested in finding out more about. She answered any questions they might have in her regular ‘Ask Me Anything’ live video streams and there was no opportunity to re-record or rehearse those. Her followers wanted realism, but not so much that it wasn’t Instagramable. She wasn’t going to film herself emptying the chemical toilet, but she was prepared to capture footage in the dead of the night, when she couldn’t sleep because mating foxes were screaming outside her campervan, sounding far more terrifying than anything Stephen King could come up with.
Holly hated the phrase ‘influencer’. She wasn’t here to influence anyone into doing anything. She was just sharing a bit of an insight into her life and helping people to see that doing things more simply was an option, and that you could still live a great, big, wonderful life in a tiny space. At least in some ways. She didn’t have that much stuff, but she didn’t need it. And okay, she didn’t have a partner or any children either, but somehow being on her own in such a small space felt right. Maybe she’d have been lonely if she’d been rattling around a house all by herself, but as it was, it was just her and Woody, the twenty-year-old campervan she called home, and an elderly black Labrador called Merlin. She always referred to Woody as a campervan, but strictly speaking, he was a van conversion and quite a quirky one at that. With the budget she’d had at the time, she’d been forced to use the interior of a scrapped motorhome that someone was selling for next to nothing online and it was pure 1970s chic – if there was such a thing.
Holly had originally planned to change most of it as soon as she had the money, making it shabby chic, or an homage to the cutesy designs of Cath Kidston. But the more time she’d spent hanging out with Woody, the more she thought his interior suited him. It had partly been the interior that had given him his name. The kitchen cabinets and work tops were pine, with the same kind of orangey tone that almost every other aspect of the décor seemed to share. There was wood everywhere, so why not celebrate that in the name she gave her new travelling companion? Then there was the fact of how well their names went together. She’d started calling herself Holly Day when she was just making travelogues. Not even her first name was the one she’d been born with, but she’d needed a fresh start after leaving her old life behind. It was a way of reinventing herself and not having to think about the mistakes she’d made that had left her feeling as ifrunning away was her only option. Except it turned out it wasn’t that easy to separate out who shereallywas from the person she wanted to be. She’d tried on various other names for size, but none of them had felt like her – probably because they weren’t. Holly had been part of a nickname she’d been given as a child, which had meant it had enough links to the person she used to be to feel like people were actually talking to her when they said the name. Taking on the surname Day had been the perfect fit for travelogues, when she’d taken on all kinds of temporary jobs and used whatever mode of transport was the cheapest to visit as many places as possible. After her content had started to focus more on van life, she’d needed to bring Woody right into the heart of things, too. She’d come up with a combination of their names and a related byline for her YouTube channel and social media platforms, settling onThe HollyWoody Hills – travel and adventure with one woman and her faithful camper.
They might never make it to L.A. to park Woody on the driveway of a Bel Air mansion, or get their own star on Hollywood Boulevard, but they had achieved their own kind of fame, and in just three years had secured over a million followers; something Holly definitely couldn’t allow herself to think about when she was recording her videos. She preferred to pretend she was just talking to Merlin. Although, sometimes, depending on the subject matter, she’d imagine herself saying those things to the one person she wished she could say them to in real life. Like the time she’d talked about academic achievement not being the only measure of success, and she’d pictured herself talking directly to her old Maths teacher, who’d once told her that if she didn’t master trigonometry, she’d never amount to anything worth talking about. Sod you, Mr Glenister. One million people think I’ve got something worth saying. In Holly’s mind, there was never more than that one person listening though. She couldn’tallow herself to think about that until after the recording was done, otherwise she’d never be able to get her message across. You couldn’t find a way of addressing a million people in a way that related to all of them. So thinking about sending that same message to just one person, who she knew had some link to this week’s ‘Words of Wisdom’ was the way she had always approached it.
Today’s topic had been a particularly tricky one and she hadn’t quite known who to focus on, because there had been several people she’d had in mind who she could have directed the words to, if they’d been in front of her. In the end, she’d thought about the two men who had robbed so much from her: her belief in love and the chance to have a family. In the main, she tried not to judge other people too much – there were often complex reasons behind the choices they made that she’d never be party to. But one thing she couldn’t bear was cheating, because of the two men who had shaped so much of who she’d become. She wasn’t naïve enough to believe that everyone got a happy ever after, and she knew only too well that it wasn’t uncommon to fall out of love, even when someone had made the promise of forever. Holly didn’t subscribe to the belief that people should stay together come what may, even when they were desperately unhappy, but none of that excused cheating. It wasn’t hard to finish one relationship before you started another, and she’d witnessed the pain and destruction that cheating could cause first-hand.
The things that Holly had been through made it difficult for her to trust and it was probably why she liked life on the road. She didn’t make friends easily, partly because of that and partly because she found it difficult to let people in. But she was fiercely loyal if she decided someone could be trusted and her closest friend was a man called Gray, who was more than a decade hersenior, and who she’d last seen in person over six months ago. She’d met him when she’d first moved to a village outside Aberdeen at the age of twenty-three, where she hadn’t expected to form any close bonds, having already bounced between bar work in Ibiza and a ski season in Andorra, and then travelling from place to place so she never had to go home to Cornwall. In all honesty, the accents of the locals in Aberdeen had been so strong that she’d often struggled to understand what they were saying and, although most of them were very friendly, not everyone was welcoming to outsiders, especially not English outsiders. By the time she’d met Gray, she’d been renting a damp caravan on a farm and getting by on a diet that consisted mainly of jacket potatoes. Not the sort with lashings of butter and cheese, or more exotic fillings, but the plain kind, made from potatoes she’d stolen from a heap on the farm, that were deemed fit only for animal consumption.
Gray managed a small hotel with his wife, Louise, and he’d taken Holly under his wing. He’d given her a job, doing a bit of everything from reception to cleaning, and had let her stay in one of the single rooms in the hotel when she was between homes. There’d never been any impropriety, and he’d been nothing but kind. She’d always hoped she’d be able to return the favour and, a year after they first met, she was finally able to, but not in the circumstances she’d hoped for.
By then Holly was assistant manager at the hotel, as Louise had taken a voluntary role as special constable with the Scottish police, as a step towards achieving her lifelong ambition of becoming a police officer. Gray had been so encouraging and it had been obvious to Holly how proud he was of Louise, but within months it had all come crumbling down after Louise’s affair with a police officer. She’d left Gray to move in with her boyfriend, taking their seven-year-old daughter with her andadding insult to injury by presenting a showreel of her ‘perfect’ new life online.
Gray had been heartbroken at first and Holly had tried to repay him for all the kindness he’d shown her. She’d been thrilled when he met his new partner, Janey, and when his daughter chose to move back in with him. A decade later, and years after Holly had left the hotel for a life on the road, he seemed to have got the best revenge possible, by finding happiness. But it had been the discovery, in a phone call from Gray just a few days ago, that the man Louise had left him for was cheating on her with half the women at the police station, that had restored Holly’s belief in natural justice. Maybe she shouldn’t have taken such pleasure in discovering what had happened, but she couldn’t bring herself to feel one scrap of sympathy for her friend’s ex-wife. A glance at Louise’s social media had revealed that she was still describing her partner as the ‘hero who’d saved her’, and as the kindest, most loyal man she’d ever known. It was a reminder, if Holly had needed one, that so much of what was posted online was make-believe. The reality of Louise’s wonderful new life had also given her hope that things might not have turned out so perfectly for the men who’d hurt Holly. She’d never know for sure because she’d cut them out of her life and trying to track them down, even just online, risked opening up a whole can of worms she wasn’t willing to deal with. Maybe she was using Louise’s situation as a substitute for all those feelings, but either way she’d known she wanted to talk about it on her next ‘Woody’s Words of Wisdom’.
She’d considered making the slot about cheating, but wasn’t sure her followers would want to share their own stories, or that she’d feel equipped to give them any advice or guidance if they did. Her mantra in any cheating scenario was LTB, online shorthand for ‘leave the bastard’, and it didn’t matter to Holly whetherthe cheater was a man or a woman, or what mitigating circumstances they might claim. In the end, she’d decided to focus the video she made on the importance of not believing in everything you see online and asking her followers to share things they’d seen online which turned out to be a world away from the truth.
She always enjoyed interacting with her followers and hearing their stories too. She felt less alone, almost as if these online connections could fill the void of the friendships she’d never really made.
Holly tapped out a message to accompany her latest video and uploaded it to each of her online profiles, knowing that within minutes the comments would start to ping through. Standing up, she flicked the kettle on and looked out of the side window of the van across the Elan Valley, where she’d been staying for almost two weeks. She loved Wales, but the pull of the open road was starting to tug at her consciousness, and it would be time for a change soon. She had no idea yet where she wanted to go, just that she had to keep moving. Maybe a little trip across the Irish Sea was in order.
Picking up her phone again as she waited for the kettle to boil, she fully intended to open Google, but instead she clicked on her emails, and the first one had the subject line ‘Can you grant a dreamer’s wish…’ It was from someone called [email protected]
Opening the email she scanned the message.
Dear Holly (and Woody!)
I’m a huge fan of the HollyWoody Hills and I love your videos, especially the travelogues and the words of wisdom chats.
With a lot of research and channelling my inner Colombo (I’ve already got the shabby dress sense), I managed to trackdown your email address, but it’s okay I promise I’m not a crazed fan who’s going to bombard you with messages, but if I don’t take the opportunity to ask this, I’ll never know if you might have said yes.
For a moment Holly wasn’t sure if she even wanted to read on, despite the appeal of Tristan Eddy’s self-depreciating style, but something prompted her to do so. There’d been a sense of restlessness lately that even her nomadic lifestyle couldn’t seem to satisfy. She needed something that she couldn’t define to fill the emptiness inside her that seemed to be growing; she just had no idea what – but the message was intriguing. It was why she didn’t just delete it, as she had so many others. Maybe the reference to Colombo had helped, because it provided a link to her old life that she hadn’t even known she needed to feel. Anyone who watched her videos regularly would know she was a big fan of seventies TV shows and that earlyColomboswere right at the top of her list, having first been introduced to them by her lovely stepdad. Maybe it was because Colomboalwayssolved the crime and as the viewer, she knew who the guilty party was right from the start. It played into her sense of justice and her need to know who the good and bad guys were from the outset. Either way it had made her warm to Tristan enough to read on.
My family have just opened a campsite on the farm we run, and it would be an absolute dream come true for you to feature it on one of your travelogues. We can offer a fully serviced pitch with direct sea views free of charge for the duration of your stay – however long you might choose that to be.
It was sounding quite appealing now and maybe the messagearriving when she’d had no idea where to go next but had known she needed to move on, was serendipity. She’d have to check out the details of the site of course, and make sure it was all legitimate. She didn’t want to end up walking into a dangerous situation. She didn’t need to be Colombo to know that offers that came via email weren’t always what they seemed to be. Going back to the message she read on to the end.
We’re situated in the Three Ports Area of the Cornish Atlantic Coast. It’s absolutely stunning and I’ve noticed that in all your travelogues of the UK, you’ve never visited this part of the country, so it feels like it’s meant to be.
If you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me and, if you’d like to look at the campsite itself, you can check out our gallery at mordrosfarmcamping.com
Yours in hope
Tristan Eddy
