Chapter 20
‘I f I were insecure, I’d think you were avoiding me.’ Sophie’s voice startles me awake as she stands over my bed, stripping my pillows from their cases one by one.
Still groggy with sleep, I rub my eyes just to make sure that this isn’t another of my anxiety-inducing dreams. When Sophie pulls the pillow out from beneath my head and it bounces against the mattress, however, I am firmly awake.
‘Are you making my bed whilst I’m still in it?’ is the only thing I can think to say as she straightens out the new linens.
Looking down at the bedclothes in her hand, then at me, still bundled up in my duvet, Sophie shrugs. ‘Yeah, suppose I am. You don’t usually wake up when I do it, though,’ she adds casually.
‘Hang on.’ I sit up against the headboard, feeling my hair standing on end with my movement. ‘You’ve done this more than once?’
‘I do it all of the time. You’re a really heavy sleeper, you know.’ She goes to grab the duvet but I cling to it tightly like a child, refusing to get up for school. I’m not quite ready to leave the perfectly warm nest I have created for myself.
‘I’ll pretend you never said that, and will put aside my slight concern that I can sleep through someone changing my bedding, whilst I am in the bed, if you allow me five more minutes to rot in here.’
‘Fine,’ she huffs, sliding off her shoes and choosing instead to climb into the bed beside me. After making herself comfortable, she turns to me again. ‘You didn’t acknowledge what I said.’ Sophie looks at me across the pillows, like a wife looking at her husband and dreaming of divorce.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say softly, like said apologetic husband. ‘I was just a little more concerned with the whole watching me sleep thing.’
‘Have you been avoiding me?’ She snuggles deeper into the blankets, unable to look me in the eye as she asks again.
Guilt curdles in me, and I debate whether or not I should tell her the truth. ‘A little,’ I admit, ashamed.
‘Why?’ Her hurt expression cuts through me.
‘I think I’ve been avoiding everything good.’
‘But that makes no sense.’
‘I know.’ Looking at the blank space on the wall, I think of all the ways that I have sabotaged my own life the second anything goes wrong. It used to only be me getting hurt, but now I see Sophie’s sad dark eyes and entirely innocent being, I realise that what I thought was just self-destruction has hit my best friend in collateral.
‘I could give you ten self-pitying reasons why I’ve been ignoring you,’ I confess. ‘That I ruin everything good before I lose it, or I don’t believe I deserve to be happy, but my own issues with myself are no excuse to hurt you. You aren’t like the people I’ve had in my life up to now, where they’re fine with seeing me disappear from their lives the moment things get tough, or they don’t even notice when I’m spiralling. You are everything that is good in my life, Sophie, and you haven’t deserved any of this.’ Though the truth flows out of me uncontrollably, I still can’t bring myself to confess to the kiss. I can’t bring myself to break her heart. I pull in a shaking breath and Sophie takes my hand in hers but allows me the room to speak without interruption. ‘I thought I was doing the right thing, but honestly, I’ve been a shitty friend. And now I have no idea how I can even begin to make it up to you. I’m so sorry.’
I’ve had enough therapy in my life to know where all of these actions and emotions come from, and I can logically see that they’re destructive, and yet I’m still not equipped to deal with any of them. I can’t seem to escape them, no matter how much I know that it’s all just … wrong.
But how am I meant to tell anyone that? How am I meant to say that expensive therapists and medicines still don’t work and at the end of the day, my brain seems to conspire against me so that I end up losing all that I love? How do I explain that I know shouldn’t do the things I do but I can’t seem to stop?
I can’t lose Sophie. I have never had a friend like her, and I don’t think I ever shall again. I’m taking back control. I refuse to drive her away too when all she’s ever been is good.
‘Make it up to me?’ Sophie sits up straighter in my bed, a look of confused intrigue crossing her face.
‘Well, since I’m going to be staying here for the foreseeable, it’s only fair that I repay all of the favours that you have done for me.’
‘And how are you thinking of doing that?’ Sophie raises an eyebrow and I rack my brains.
‘I’ll come to work with you, for a week.’ Happy with myself, I sit up straighter, folding my arms over my chest with contented pride. After a few seconds to process, Sophie’s serious expression cracks into her widest smile yet as she laughs hysterically. She shakes the bed with her laughter, and I watch on, confused, until she finally runs out of breath and talks between giggles.
‘You … work … Oh, Alice.’ She resumes her knee-slapping laughter. ‘The great Lady Alice changing bedsheets and scrubbing toilets?’
‘Are you scared I’m going to steal your job, eh?’ Hopping out of bed with a laugh, I continue what Sophie had started and wrestle with the duvet cover. Sweat soon dapples my forehead and I am ever so slightly stuck in the fitted sheet, but still I persist.
‘No offence, but I reckon that you would be more of a hinderance than a help.’ Sophie frees me from the fabric and then deftly finishes the bed before I even have a chance to stop sweating.
‘Okay, okay, maybe your job is safe,’ I confess. ‘There must be something I can do, and not be completely useless.’
Sophie taps her chin with a hum. ‘Well, there has been something I’ve been wanting to do for a while.’
Knee-deep in dust in the Braemar Village Hall, I begin to regret wearing the pale pink silky slip dress. It turns out my returning favour for Sophie isn’t helping her dye her hair, or finally fixing her up with Fraser, it is clearing out the community centre that has seemingly stood derelict for the best part of a decade.
After an hour of transferring most of the contents into a skip, finding a dead mouse inside of an old tea-stained mug is enough for me to tap out for a break.
Sat on the wall on the side of the road, sipping tea from a flask, I watch the sleepy village around me. Every now and again, a car will trundle past slowly, or someone walking a dog crosses the road to simply stop and say hello. Sophie seems to know every single one of them and talks to every person, of every age, as though they are a life-long friend. Not one person who tootles by seems to be in a rush. Every step is almost savoured, as though to rush would be to miss all of the important things. As though getting somewhere quickly is not as important as taking in the scenery of the same streets, the same faces, and the same joy that all of it brings.
I used to love London for its busyness. Life flew by at such a pace that you never had the chance to really stop and think. My mind didn’t have the space to self-destruct. I could leave the house and go entirely unnoticed for days and days, as everyone is so caught up in themselves that they simply don’t have the time to take an interest in the life of a stranger. I thought that I loved it. I thought I loved the anonymity it brought. I loved what I thought was freedom, when in reality, it was just isolation.
Sophie introduces me to every single new face and there are no awkward curtseys or muffled replies, only warm smiles and welcoming words. She even tosses handfuls of breadcrumbs to seagulls that look big enough to eat a healthy-sized terrier and she chitters away to them as though they too are her neighbours. By the size of them, I’d say they are definitely fed human-sized portions and if you stuck a tie on the fattest one, I’m sure he’d look like he has a thirty-year mortgage on a bungalow around the corner and works for the local council.
‘They haven’t had a place like this to come for years,’ Sophie says after she waves goodbye to a pensioner and her little scruffy dog. ‘They used to have coffee mornings, wedding receptions, kids’ birthday parties. It was literally the hub for everything social around here. Now there’s only the pubs and they’re mostly full of tourists wanting to find their Jamie Fraser only to be sorely disappointed that it’s only auld Jack, Victor, and all their pals propping up the bar.’
‘What happened to it then? How did it get so bad?’ I ask, looking at the dilapidated building behind us.
‘The upkeep was too expensive. People couldn’t afford to volunteer; council cut its funding. A few local neds broke in and were using it as a little hideout for a wee while and trashed it. Then once one big thing needed doing, like the boiler or the roof, there was no money to fix any of it, so it just got left.’ Sophie casts a sad reminiscing glance at the boarded-up windows.
‘And you’ve decided to fix it up all by yourself?’
‘Nope.’ She grins. ‘You’re helping me now.’
‘Why hasn’t anyone tried before?’ I think out loud, wondering why, if this has been such a staple of the community, it takes a young woman in her twenties to try and repair it all herself.
She shrugs. ‘I suppose it isn’t much of a priority. People are just trying to feed their families, or earn enough to pay for the heating this winter. I’m lucky. I live where I work; they feed me. I never went to uni or anything like that, so I’ve been putting my wages aside to do this for a while.’
Watching her now, pride flows from me uncontrollably. Here is a woman who has worked and worked and worked, and the money she has saved, she’s gifting to her community, doing something good. Sophie is far more of a woman than I could ever be, and I envy her; I envy the fact that I could never hold such goodness in me. Fraser would be lucky to have her. Both of them have a kindness so rare in this world, both of them would give every last fibre of themselves just to please everyone else around them. They deserve each other. Good deserves good.
‘Come on then.’ I hop off the wall and dash the dregs of my tea into the weedy garden. Sophie looks at me, confused. ‘All this junk isn’t going to shift itself now, is it? Make the most of this hunk of pro manual labourer whilst you’ve got me.’
She laughs, shaking her head as she follows me back inside.
The damp, musky smell is overwhelming. I have no idea where to even resume. But I know that I owe it to Sophie, and people just like her, to do at least something to give back. If that is pulling dead mice out of old doll’s houses, so be it.
‘Alice …’ Sophie says as I pick up a nondescript piece of rubbish with my fingertips. ‘Here.’ She hands me a pair of pink marigold gloves, and I accept them with great fervour.
Without being exactly sure how just yet, I decide I am going to help her. I don’t mean helping her find a boyfriend – that’s a given – but surely I must have something I can offer her, some way I can be of use. This place, this person, all of it makes me want to change. The world would be a far happier place if we were all just a little more like Sophie.