'We’ll just have to keep an eye on it.'
Tilly frowned. 'Keep an eye on it? Meaning?'
'You’ll need to tell me if it happens again. I mean, if I trigger it again. I have no idea how to get my head around that apart from the fact that if I ever meet him, he’d better run and fast. I am so sorry that happened to you. What a pig. Sorry, I’m in shock.'
Tilly frowned. 'That’s it?'
'Sorry, what did you want me to say? It’s not as if I can do anything about the past.'
'I meant, you don’t want to change your mind about me?' Tilly’s voice jolted at the end.
Otto wrinkled his nose. 'What? Change my mind? Why in the world would I want to do that?'
Stanley thumped his tail under the table, and Tilly squeezed her eyes tightly together to stop the fizzing in her nose and eyes. Otto had just played a blinder. Fair play that man. Fair play.
60
Afew weeks or so later, all was well in the Tilly and Otto story. In fact, the fast track relationship had not slowed down. Tilly was on her knees in the boat room with her head inside the cupboard under the packing table, fishing around for a ball of string that had rolled to the back, when her phone made a noise she'd never heard it make before. Right away, she knew it wasn’t a text or WhatsApp notification. Instead, it was a bright little cha-ching sound. It took Tilly a good three seconds of frowning into the cupboard to remember where she'd heard it. The website setup video.This is the sound you'll hear when you get an order.
Tilly came out of the cupboard so fast she hit her head. Picking her phone up from the packing table, she looked at the screen.
Foghorn: You have a new order. Order #1001.
'No, there must be a mistake. Nope. No, no.'
Opening the shopfront app, Tilly frowned, refreshed, closed the app and reopened it. One duvet cover, king size, in the deep berry and two pillowcases, bottle green. Paid. Tilly couldn’tbelieveher eyes. Someone had actually paid real money. It was sitting in a little column that had held nothing but a flat blueline. Also, there was a name she'd never seen in her life, with an address in Stockport.
Tilly didn't know a soul in Stockport and had never been there. Somewhere up there, a total stranger called Sandra had seen a linen duvet cover from a shed on an island she'd never heard of and had parted with her money. Unreal, unless, of course, it was from someone via someone else. Tilly narrowed her eyes and went straight to The Properlies.
Tilly:Is one of you Sandra from Stockport who just ordered from Foghorn???
Pia:What?? No! Wait. Did you get an order????
Jasmine:I'm in a tech rehearsal. I am not Sandra. ORDER???
Tilly:A real one. A STRANGER, girls. Berry red, which Inês said nobody would buy!
Pia:Tils!!
Jasmine:Go and look at how she found you. There'll be a thing that tells you.
Tilly navigated around the dashboard of the shop and did just that. There was a thing that told her. As she dug through the little analytics page with her heart going like the clappers, it didn’t take her long to find out that, in actual fact, it was not the advert or campaign she'd fed money into. Rather, it was the video she'd filmed on the very worst afternoon, feeling like a failure, with a few words whacked on, a filter and zero hope. How funny. She had thrown money down the drain into an ad that had brought her window-shoppers, yet one honest, fed-up video, made on the day she'd nearly given up, had found her people.
Tilly jigged around the shed and punched the air. 'Right, Sandra. Let's get you sorted.'
Packing the first Foghorn parcel took Tilly ages, and she loved every single minute of it. She’d packed the duvet cover andnestled the pillowcases in, included a little watercolour postcard and added a handwritten note. Then she’d wrapped it in brown paper, tied it with string and popped it into one of the eco satchels. Tidying up the string and thinking about walking to the post office, she was over the moon with the first sale.Cha-ching.
Tilly froze, grabbed her phone and frowned. Order #1002. A flat sheet and pillowcases, the misty blue. Harrogate. Tilly did a small dance on the boat room floor, witnessed by nobody except a seagull on the jetty post.Cha-ching,said her pocket.
It was as she was strolling along Darling Street with the two orders in her basket and a spring in her step that her third order sounded from her phone. Order #1003 had arrived, and Tilly was all over it like a rash. Thank the you know what, for that.
She couldn’t believe Foghorn had received its first orders. Had her tiny business begun to take off? She could but live in hope.
61
The Darling sky had been doing strange things all afternoon. Tilly stood on the decking with a broom in her hand and kept looking up at it as she swept. It was not quite grey, not quite blue, not anything she had a name for, really. A sort of bruised purple with swelling at the edges, the kind of sky that made her want to batten things down even when the weather app said light showers and a moderate breeze. One thing she’d learnt from living on Darling was that the weather, foghorns and Darling storms could not be predicted. They did precisely their own thing if and when they wanted to. Darling had taught her what a real storm looked like, and no app or weatherman came even close. This didn’t feel like a storm, though, more like a show in the sky.
Finishing with the decking, she propped the broom against the wall and stood with her hands on her hips as she surveyed her work. The old boards were now clean and swept, the jumble of terracotta pots had been rearranged, dead bunting removed, and a little café table she’d found buried under junk around the side had been wiped down and set with two chairs. A small vase of flowers sat in the middle, and the table was set with Foghorn napkins in deep shades of inky blue. Otto and Stanley were ontheir way for a supper for three to watch the happenings going on in the sky.
