Page 9 of The Little Board Game Café

It was Tuesday evening and they were sitting in The Red Lion, Essendale’s one and only pub. Kate was wearing one of her wrap dresses and looked far too alluring for a cosy little pub in a small Pennine town on a week night. Emily was wearing her brightest-red dungaree pinafore with a stripy red-and-white t-shirt; for someone who had just been fired by her fiancé, she was feeling rather cheery.

‘That I’m “surplus to requirements”,’ said Emily, making inverted comma signs with her fingers.

‘So you’re single again? Yay!’ Kate mimed punching the air. ‘You can be my wingman. I have a new plan to meet—’

‘We’ve not split up.’

‘But you just said that he said…’

‘I’m surplus to requirements at work. He’s making me redundant. Not dumping me.’

‘Oh.’ Kate looked crestfallen. She took a sip of her Merlot.

‘Crisp?’ said Emily, pushing the Walkers towards her.

Kate’s finger hovered over the open bag, but she didn’t take one. ‘Better not. I’m taking a leaf out of Peter’s book actually, and giving keto a try.’

Great, Emily thought. She loved baking and now neither her fiancé nor her best friend would eat her cakes.

Kate tore the corner off a beer mat. ‘So what are you going to do, Em? Get another job? Or, better still, run your own café? You’ve been talking about it for long enough.’

‘I’ve seen one for sale, but I’m not sure I’m ready.’

‘Not ready? You’re a fantastic cook. You know about running a business from that course Peter sent you on. And I can advise on the marketing.’

‘I can rustle up a dinner party for six no problem, but cooking for an entire café full of customers when everyone’s ordered different things? And that business course… Well, it only covered the basics. A bit of accounting. Profit and loss. How would I know how much food to order? Which dishes to prepare in advance and what to make fresh? And the regulations and food hygiene stuff and…there’s so much I don’t know. I don’t even know what I don’t know. The unknown unknowns. Who said that? Donald Trump, wasn’t it? Donald Someone anyway. Duck?’

‘Rumsfeld. Anyway, what are you going to do about Peter?’ Kate took another sip of her Merlot, but her eyes never left Emily’s face.

‘Nothing. What d’you mean, what am I going to do about him? You’ve never liked him.’

‘It’s not that. He’s a nice bloke. I just don’t feel he’s right for you. He’s a bit… I dunno. Uptight. Well, isn’t he?’

‘I suppose.’

‘And under his mother’s thumb?’

‘Yeah, well there is that.’

‘And it’s always seemed like he wants to mould you into someone else?’

Did he? Emily wondered. She’d have to think about that, but she nodded anyway.

Kate’s face brightened a little. ‘Perhaps this is the perfect excuse for you to end things. To move on.’

‘I don’t need an excuse. I don’t want to move on.’ Emily felt slightly disembodied as she said that, and heard her own voice as if it was someone else’s. Someone who didn’t sound too sure of what she was saying.

‘Shame. I had this new idea. And I was rather hoping… I mean, I could do it on my own. But it’d be so much easier, so much better, so much more fun if you were to do it with me.’

Emily’s heart sank. Kate and her ideas. They’d met at primary school, when Emily had been one of the little gang of girls Kate used to rope in to her projects. There’d been ‘homework club’ where each week, one of them – usually Emily – would do the homework and the others would copy the answers, with Kate insisting that they each changed one answer so as to fool the teacher. It always did.

Then there’d been that time when Kate had found a pair of waders in the charity shop. They’d taken it in turns to plunge into the pond by the golf course in Thornholme, where they grew up, in search of lost balls that they could flog back to the golfers. The waders had kept their legs dry enough, but their arms – and most of the rest of them – got soaking wet. And they’d only retrieved three balls.

A couple of years later, homework and money-making had given way to boy-finding schemes and Kate had insisted they befriend Liz from the year below at school; she had twin brothers in the sixth form. After over six weeks of buying huge bars of Dairy Milk for her with their pocket money and helping her with her homework, Liz had finally revealed that both lads were gay.

Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to be part of yet another of Kate’s mad projects.

Kate tore her beer mat in half, then into quarters. She picked up one of the quarters and began tearing that into the tiniest pieces. ‘I’m sick, sick, sick of dating apps. All that time swiping left, swiping right. Or sending online winks. Or writing coy little messages.’