Chapter 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, millions of 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 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 if running away was her only option.
Except it turned out it wasn’t that easy to separate out who she really was 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 on The 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’t allow 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 na?ve 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 her senior, 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 and adding insult to injury by presenting a showreel of her ‘perfect’ new life online.