Chapter 6
The next day, I meet Barb for a coffee while my clothes are in the giant washing machine. She is horrified that I didn’t bring it all around to her, and now she mentions it, so am I—I’m willing to bet good money that everything would have come back not only clean but pressed, folded, and possibly embellished with sequins.
Charlie has gone over to stay with his friend Eric for the night, and I am glad of the break. I love my son and know that he loves me, but there does come a time when being in such enforced close proximity to each other brings significant mutual irritation risk factors.
I am feeling low, in all honesty. The welfare people sent over links to some accommodations they have available, and none of it fills me with joy. Part of me feels ungrateful—they are doing their best, and I can’t expect to be offered a mansion with swimming pool and tennis courts—but the thought of taking what feels like a step back from what we had fills me with sorrow.
I have never been in a position to get a foot on the housing ladder—I’d need to stand on a box to even be within touching distance of the first rung. That has never bothered me until now, when I find myself cut adrift, insecure, facing a wobbly future. The only consolation is that hopefully Charlie will be off to uni in London in September, so whatever happens next won’t affect him for too long.
I hide all this from Barb, because she doesn’t need to hear it. She is trying to be perky and has also brought me a gift—a 100-pound gift card for Marks how every inch of the space has been used. I notice there are fairy lights strung around the top of the sides and imagine how cozy it must be at nighttime.
“What’s this stuff?” I ask, pointing at the blue matting I see on various shelves and spots in the kitchen.
“Anti-slip mat,” he replies. “It does what it says on the tin. So when you’re driving, you don’t want stuff moving around too much—like the microwave sliding off the counter, or even your phone falling off the dashboard, whatever. You put this stuff on shelves, in cupboards, on surfaces, and it helps keep things stable.”
I reach out and prod it and make a small ooh sound. It’s all so sensible, this motorhome stuff. I wonder if my mind could ever adjust to being so practical.
Luke flicks a switch on a small control panel by the door and says: “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Motorhome showers are not luxurious experiences. Help yourself to a cuppa; there are biscuits around somewhere as well... Coffee for me, black, no sugar!”
I nod and take the few steps over toward the kitchen area. Farther off to the other side is another door, which I assume is for a bedroom, and next to it is the one Luke goes into, bowing his head slightly to fit.
I soon hear the sound of a shower and pause, kettle in hand. This is the closest I’ve been to a naked man for a very long time—Charlie doesn’t count, obviously. I find my mind wandering a little, imagining Luke there, water cascading over his broad shoulders. I blush ferociously and shake myself out of it—inappropriate to the max. I feel like I’m taking advantage of him somehow, even if it’s just mentally.
I make a lot of noise looking in cupboards, extricating mugs, opening the little fridge door, humming tunelessly as I do it. I am trying to drown out both the sound of the shower and my own thoughts. As soon as I’ve made the drinks, I head outside. I need some fresh air, and possibly to sign up to a dating app.
I mean, I’ve seen other people since Rob left—but nothing that ever amounted to anything. I was too busy, too wrapped up in Charlie, too distrustful, if I’m honest. Every time I met someone, I’d immediately start imagining how it would end before it even began and ultimately never got past a second date. The collateral damage never seemed worth the risk—I didn’t want to introduce any potential disruption into our lives. I could hide behind my son here and say it was all for him—but it was also for me. I’ve never felt quite robust enough to put myself in a position where I could be hurt again. Now, I have to accept, Charlie is grown up. He will be heading off to start the next phase of his life shortly, and I will no longer be able to use him as a human shield. I am only thirty-six—other women are having their first child at my age, never mind behaving like an old maid. I barely know Luke, and I’ve already imagined him naked—maybe my body is telling me something.
I decide my body is stupid and that I won’t listen to it, at least not right now. I settle down on the steps of the motorhome, Betty at my feet, and sip my coffee. It is bright and sunny today, but not quite as skin-meltingly hot, and it is pleasant to sit out, looking across the fields to the sea beyond. I block out the ugly bit in between, the outlines of the dumpster and the tarp—I need to focus on the future, not get sucked into a black hole of what might have been. My old life is gone, and I need to accept that.
That would be a neat trick if I could pull it off, but, of course, I can’t completely manage it. I keep picturing my strawberry plants, mashed and battered, and the pretty terra-cotta pots full of begonias. They are small things, tiny fractions of what I have lost, but somehow they seem to symbolize it all: the comfort and the calm and the sense of nurture that I felt in my old home have been snatched away from me, and I feel stripped bare. I need to move forward, to make a plan, to embrace change, to have faith in my own abilities—I have done tougher things than this before. But still—I miss my garden. I hate the thought of the living things I’d grown and cared for being destroyed.
I am surprised out of my reverie by a noise to my left. I look along, and a chair emerges from the side of the motorhome. It is surreal, seeing its folded-up legs emerge, like a Salvador Dali painting.
“Here you go!” shouts Luke. “Grab this!”
I do as he says and take the camping chair in my hands. I stare inside and realize that one of the cupboards in there opens up so you can pass things through the side of the van. Ingenious. Is there no end to the mind-boggling efficiency of these crazy inventions?
I set up the chair, and Luke joins me. His hair is glistening, and his white T-shirt is clinging to him where he is still damp. He smells fresh and citrusy.
“So,” he says once we are settled, “how can I help? You said you wanted to pick my brains about something? I hope it’s not something too hard, or the pickings will be mighty slim...”
“Yes. Right. Well, I’m getting laid off, or moving to Kidderminster, not sure yet, but I’m leaning toward the first.”
His eyes widen in surprise, but he takes a sip of his drink before he replies.
“You’ve not had the best of weeks, have you?” he eventually says, shaking his head sadly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be too nice to me,” I say quickly, “or I might cry. And no, not the best of weeks—but, in all honesty, probably not the worst, either. Anyway, I am adopting ‘onward and upward’ as my new life motto...”
“You have a life motto?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“No. What was your old one?”
“Um... okay, I was lying. I didn’t have one before, and if I did, it’d probably be something like ‘duck and cover.’ But ‘onward and upward’ feels better for now. So, as you may have noticed, my home recently fell off a cliff. I am living in a hotel with free Wi-Fi. I have no job and nowhere else to move to. Charlie is off to uni this year, and everything feels very up in the air. Which, now I come to think of it, could also be my life motto, but it doesn’t feel as positive...”
He listens and nods, seeming to understand my need to ramble at this stage.
“So. I don’t have much money, but I’ll be getting a redundancy payment. It won’t be enough to buy a house, and until I get a new job, I wouldn’t be able to do anything grown-up like get a mortgage or probably even rent somewhere nice or whatever. Anyway, I was thinking about you, and this place, and the way you live, and wondering if it could work for me as well. I was wondering if I could use the money to buy something like this.”
“Okay. Well, what kind of money are we talking here?” I am oddly relieved that he isn’t laughing in my face and telling me I’m stupid but appears to be taking me seriously. I fill him in on how much money I might have to spend, and he frowns, gazing off into the distance for a few moments.
“Well, that wouldn’t be enough to buy one of these. In the motorhome world, this is the big bad beast—it sleeps six, has all mod cons, pretty much top of the range. It wasn’t cheap.”
“Oh...,” I murmur, feeling the disappointment settle over me. It’s like all my hope has been smothered by a blanket of reality. It was undoubtedly a stupid idea anyway. I have a never-ending supply of those.
“But,” he continues, seeing my expression, “you could probably get a smaller one, an older model. People trade up all the time; there are always motorhomes for sale. It just wouldn’t be a deluxe version. It all depends on how many compromises you’re willing to make, and how much space you could live in. It’d be you and Charlie, right?”
“At least to start with. Then maybe just me. I don’t really know. Charlie will be going off to uni, and I always knew things would change—but this has accelerated everything. Maybe I’m just looking for something different. For some kind of sign of how the rest of my life will look.”
“And you think it might look... mobile?”
“I don’t know! I mean, I expected the empty nest thing—it’s just that now I don’t even have the nest. Which sort of leaves me with just ‘empty,’ which isn’t a nice feeling. You seem so content, and... well, I haven’t thought it through properly, and I am beginning to suspect I was clutching at straws... I just don’t like the idea of renting another place, which won’t be as nice as the one we had, and getting another boring job. I’ve done a boring job for years, and it allowed me to support Charlie and give us some security, and it was fine. But the prospect of doing it all over again just makes me feel...”
“Trapped? Stuck? Cornered?”
“Yeah. All of those things. Am I being silly? Or selfish?”
“I’m not one to judge,” Luke says calmly, smiling at me. “I used to have a boring job too... well, no, it wasn’t boring, but it was big, and demanding, and it was chewing me up and spitting me out. Things happened in my life that made me see that more clearly, made me realize how unhappy I’d been. I opted out, and I enjoy this lifestyle—but it’s not for everyone. You need to not mind solitude, and you need to be willing to accept some practical limitations, and you need to be comfortable with minimalism. Having hardly any stuff around you is fine for most people when they’re on holiday for a week or two—it’s different when it’s permanent.”
“Well, I’ve got a leg up on that one, I suppose. I am currently Little Miss Minimalist. But you’re right. I don’t know if it would suit me. What if I get scared at night? What if something breaks and I can’t fix it? What if I get stuck down one of those country lanes you mentioned? What if I start talking to myself and adopt fifteen cats and die alone in a supermarket parking lot?”
He laughs and replies: “Well, that wouldn’t be good, would it? I mean, who’d look after the cats then?”
“I know—poor kitties! I’m sorry, by the way. For turning up here and loading all this on you. I bet you wish you’d gone and stayed on a different field entirely and avoided all this.”
“And miss out on a monologue from the Amazing Crap Woman? Never! Look, I know this isn’t easy. A lot has happened to you in a very short space of time.”
I nod and finish my coffee, placing the mug down at my feet. Betty runs over and sniffs it, decides she’s not interested, and takes off to investigate a blade of grass instead.
“You’re right. It has. It’s like I’ve been cruising along on a nice quiet B road for the last decade, and suddenly I’m in the fast lane on the motorway blasting along at ninety miles an hour, with no particular destination in mind. I’m scared I might crash.”
“You won’t. And anyway, right now, you’re not on that motorway—you’ve stopped off for a break, haven’t you?”
Huh. Maybe he’s right. Maybe that’s a good way of looking at it—I need a break for sure.
He stands up, and that fresh citrus scent wafts toward me.
“I’m going to get biscuits,” he announces. “Everything is better with biscuits.”
“That,” I reply, grinning, “could be your life motto!”
He laughs and picks up my mug. He emerges a few minutes later with a refill and an old-fashioned biscuit tin. It has pictures of little black Scottie dogs all over it, all wearing tartan coats. He opens it up and passes it across. A veritable feast of chocolate digestives and pink wafers and bourbon creams stares up at me.
“That tin was my gran’s,” he says, looking vaguely embarrassed. “Whenever I used to go there as a kid, it was always full of those kinds of treats. When she died, I was about fourteen and we were told we could choose something from her house to remember her by. That’s what I emerged with, and it’s kind of become a thing—I always keep it full.”
“What a nice idea,” I reply, fishing out a digestive. “If I believed in such things, I’d say I hope she’s looking down at you, proud of your biscuit barrel.”
We sit silently together for a while, and I enjoy the peace of it all. Luke is right: I have pulled into a parking area and need to relax for moment.
“So,” he says, leaning back in his chair, “I think I’m going to leave at the end of the week. That’s kind of the only rule I have—I don’t stay anywhere longer than two weeks.”
“Worried that Interpol might finally track you down?”
“Exactly. I’ve got away with that art heist in Vienna for so many years, it’d be a shame to blow it now... but actually, it’s just that now summer’s finally decided to arrive, I’m feeling a bit of wanderlust.”
I’m not proud of myself, but my first reaction is utter disappointment. It’s selfish, but I don’t want him to leave. I barely know him, and maybe that’s why this works for me—he has become, in a short amount of time, someone I feel safe talking to. Perhaps meeting someone in the extreme circumstances we met in heightens things, speeds up the process of connection. I have a slight suspicion that he could have saved my life, and he’s certainly been a good sounding board. I realize that I will miss him, even though I have no right to, and even though this time last week I’d written him off as a grumpy git.
I gaze over at him, see that he is looking serious and thoughtful, and, despite all this, also find myself noticing that he has really long fingers, wrapped around his mug. My mind is made of mush.
“Oh, right—well, that’s cool. Off on your new adventures?” I say. I think that was the right response—it’s definitely better than “Please don’t leave, kind stranger who makes me feel less mental.”
“Yes. No idea where yet, which is all part of the charm. But I was wondering, and this is a completely new thought that has literally just appeared in my mind, so bear with me... I was wondering if you and Charlie would like to come with me? You could just join me for a week or so, see how you get on with the motorhome, the lifestyle? It could give you a sense of whether it’s for you or not. Please don’t feel obliged to say yes—it was just a random idea, and I’m sure you have better things to do than take off into the unknown with a complete stranger.”
“One who has freely admitted to having a plentiful supply of duct tape and rope.”
“Indeed. Guilty as charged.”
“But, well... why? Why would you possibly offer such a thing?”
He frowns a little and shakes his head. “Honestly? I’m not completely sure. I’ve never exactly made myself approachable...”
“I noticed that. Before, I mean—you didn’t wave back or say good morning!”
He grimaces and replies: “Yeah. I know. But I was planning on staying a few weeks and didn’t especially want to end up having to make small talk every time I was out, to be honest—I like staying in places that are empty. I find it simpler to avoid too many people...”
“Ha! Well, that’ll teach you—be careful who you snub or you might end up rescuing them from a world-class storm! I feel bad now, for intruding so much... and maybe even more confused as to why you’re inviting us along?”
“Well, it was all pretty dramatic, wasn’t it? The storm? Before I moved the motorhome into shelter, it was rocking our world as well. And seeing what happened to you and Charlie... I suppose it made me realize that we all need a bit of help sometimes.”
“You don’t seem to,” I reply, gesturing around us. “You seem to have life cracked.”
“Ha! Far from it... and I did need help once, a long time ago. Someone I loved, someone I’d hurt, was kind enough to keep me in their life when I didn’t deserve it. Kind enough to help me move on. So maybe this is just a messed-up way of paying it back. We all need help sometimes, don’t we? It’s part of what makes us human.”
“Maybe. I’m not very good at asking for help.”
“You’re not asking; I’m offering.”
I’m not entirely sure I want to feel like a charity case and in two minds as to whether he realizes what he’s letting himself in for. Sharing close quarters with a teenager is not for the weak.
“So taking me and Charlie on a mobile mini-break would actually be a way of making yourself feel better?” I say.
“Yeah. Exactly. In fact, you’d be doing me a favor!” I look at him, at this man who has been so kind, at this man who just moments ago I knew I was going to miss. He’s right. He is a complete stranger. This is an insane idea.
“It’s an insane idea,” I say out loud. “But, on the other hand, you do have a really good biscuit tin. Let me talk to Charlie about it.”