‘Most people don’t spend their days falling off ladders and hitting themselves with hammers.’ He sounds cheerful, even though both hands are on his lap now and both are still shaking. ‘I’m a builder. A bit of wood in the leg is practically a Tuesday for me. I should have left my lamp on, but I’ve spent a lot of time camping out here this summer and you’re the first vehicle I’ve seen in the car park. I shouldn’t have become complacent.’
I’m surprised by his lackadaisical attitude. I can’t imagine being so laidback if someone had mownmedown with a stolen campervan, but my heart has been thundering against my breastbone, and for the first time in twenty minutes, it starts to slow to something resembling a normal pace.
I look up at him properly for the first time. He’s around my age, tall and lanky, with sandy brown hair that’s sticking up at odd angles and the sort of face that looks like it smiles a lot. And those ridiculous pyjama bottoms…
‘I have no idea how I managed to miss you in these things.’ I give the cut-off part of his trouser leg a gentle tug. ‘You could offer them to a circus clown and he’d be like, “Ack! No, not for me, far too bright!” You’re practically luminous.’
‘Why thank you.’ His grin makes dimples dip in both cheeks and well-used smile lines crinkle up around his eyes. ‘Life’s too short to wear pyjamas thatdon’tmake you smile, right?’
Clothes that make you smile. If I’d encountered him and his neon pyjama bottoms in some other situation, would they have made me smile? You’ve got to admire the bravery of someone who could wear clothing like that in a public place. I glance at my own wardrobe, currently spilling out of binbags that are even more battered than they were this morning. It’s simple, practical, and plain. I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything for no reason other than ‘it makes me smile’.
‘Can’t argue with that attitude,’ I mumble, even though it makes mewishfor a drop more of that attitude in my life. I meet his eyes and my heart speeds up again for an altogether different reason, and I feel something spark across the space between us.
He’s the first to look away. ‘Thanks for doing that. I never knew I was so… squeamish.’
‘I’m sure you could have. I was just trying to ensure no one threw up or lost consciousness in my van.’My van. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud, and it sounds odd. It isn’t my van, but I can’t exactly admit to a stranger that I’ve stolen a campervan and driven three hundred miles in it. He’d be straight on the phone to the police, especially given what I’ve just done to him.
He laughs, a bright sound that makes me feel better than I have all day.
‘Right.’ I sit back on my heels and pull my gloves off, mainly to occupy my hands because there’s an urge to slip my fingers over his shaking ones, which he’s clamped together to try and hide. ‘Tea. Good for the shock. A nice cup of tea can fix anything.’
The opposite side of the van has a little kitchenette area with all the mod cons. There’s a tiny fridge, a tiny oven, a hob, and two plug sockets to make it all work, and I have to admit that I’d never appreciated Jared’s design skills until now. Every door I open reveals some other hidden gem, and every drawer I pull out is hiding some clever gadget or shelving to maximise storage space.
I fill the kettle and plug it in and cross everything that it won’t blow the electrics. I know the van’s electrical system is powered by a battery, but I have no idea where it is or how I’m supposed to charge it.
Now, if I was a mug in a campervan, where would I be? I pull open door after door, hunting for mugs and teabags, and making it even more obvious to Reece that this is not just my first time in this campervan, but that presumably, I’ve never seen a campervan in my life before.
I make a noise of victory when I finally find a set of mugs, tucked safely into a corner of a cupboard and held in place by a pull-out stand, and I find teabags in the cupboard above the worktop, and I can feel Reece’s eyes on me, but he doesn’t say anything.
Fresh milk would have been preferable, but I hadn’t planned on making tea for men I’d recently mown down, so the carton of long life I discover in the fridge will have to do. I make two cups of tea and lean over Reece’s leg to put one gently on the table in front of him, and he looks up and meets my eyes again with a soft smile.
He takes the mug and wraps his hands around it like he’s cold, but I get the feeling that he’s trying to disguise how shaken he is by what’s just happened, and I don’t know whether I should apologise again or try not to draw attention to it.
I take my cup of tea and sit down on the smaller seat on the other side of the van, across from him. ‘Can I offer you…’ I trail off.Whatcan I offer him? I have no idea if Jared has any food in the van. The only thing I’ve uncovered so far is three out-of-date Pot Noodles.
‘I’d say yes, but I can’t bear witness to another hunt. Perhaps you need more time to get better acquainted with your van before having guests…’
I go to make an excuse, but I stop before the words come out. There’s something in his bright blue eyes that makes me feel like he can see right through me, and I don’t want to lie to him. Well, I can’t exactly tell him the truth, but I don’t want to lie evenmoreto him.
‘So, you’re here on holiday?’ he asks when I don’t dispute his comment. I clearly do need to get better acquainted with this van if I’m going to continue pretending it’s mine.AmI going to keep pretending it’s mine? Or am I going to wake up in the morning, realise I’ve taken leave of my senses and drive back to London, preferably without injuring anyone else on the way?
That instinctive feeling of not wanting to lie to him kicks in again. ‘I’m not sure. Something happened this morning…’ I hesitate because I might not want to lie to him, but getting into Jared and Vickie is alotto dump on a complete stranger. ‘A business opportunity fell through and for the first time in years, I don’t have a job to go to, so rather than looking to the future, I decided to revisit the past. I used to come here all the time when I was young.’
‘Me too. My grandparents lived quite near so I used to stay with them during school holidays. Londoner?’
‘Close. Sevenoaks in Kent. You?’
‘I’m originally from a different part of Yorkshire. Harrogate, about sixty miles south, but I’ve been living in London for decades now. Never quite lost my accent though.’
Until now, I’ve been too panicked to really notice his accent, but now he mentions it, hehasgot a lovely warm and homely sounding accent, the kind that makes you feel safe and comfortable with every word. ‘Are you on holiday too?’
‘No. I… um…’ He seems momentarily stumped by the question and it takes him a moment to come up with an answer, and then he inclines his head towards the hill outside, with the stone steps that lead up to the Kingfisher Arms. ‘I’m working on the old pub up there. It’s being turned into a private residence. The guy who bought it has hired me to do the work.’
‘Oh, wait, so it’s not a pub any more?’ I ask, feeling the same jolt of sadness I felt when I saw the remains of the cottage. ‘That place was magical when I was little. My grandpa always said that fairies and pixies held meetings in the garden, and if you sat very quietly, you might get to see them.’
‘Hah. Mine used to tell me the same thing, except I think it was just a sneaky way of getting kids to be quiet and not interrupt the adults for a while.’
Things change, of course they do, but this place felt like one of the things that wouldn’t. The ivy climbing those grey stone walls and the arch windows that made it look like something from a fairytale. ‘Part of me had imagined that Mrs Patchett and her husband still ran the place, that the same families still came back every summer, that no one ever aged or moved on. It seemed like the kind of place that would always be exactly as it was.’
