One
ONE
WREN
Before Wren could take a second step from the doorway of the bookshop, she felt a rush of air from above, followed by an ear-splitting, thunderous crash. A plate-glass window fell from a great height and shattered onto the path no more than five paces in front of her. There was a spattering, like rain, over her clothes, and she looked down to see cubes of safety glass sprinkled over her jacket, balanced on the creases, along the top of her breast pocket and in the slight upturn of her shirt hem. Some had gathered on the top of her black loafers. She thought, as she stared at them, that they looked like diamante-encrusted shoes that she would never normally buy.
It took a second for a cold feeling to wash over her. The crumpled remains of the window frame lay on the path in front of her, pieces of wood criss-crossed like kindling, a sea of little blue-green glass cubes sprayed out from its edges. Just seconds . If she’d left Cravenwick Pages just two seconds earlier, the window would have come directly down on her head – if she hadn’t paused in the doorway to check that text from Alex asking her to buy milk.
The thought made her freeze on the spot, dimly aware of a handful of early-morning passers-by looking over with concern. Then slowly, robotically, and in more than a little shock, she brushed the glass off her jacket, kicked the fragments from her shoes and numbly walked forward around the wreckage in her path.
A man’s voice came from above. ‘Jesus, are you alright? I’m sorry about that.’
Wren didn’t look back; she just continued walking, in a daze, until she arrived at work.
Wren sat at her desk, chewing her pen and staring into space. The office at the Northumberland Echo was beginning to wake – the other ‘at the desk by ten’ workers wandering in holding takeaway coffees, the low electronic hum of computers being switched on, murmurs of good morning. She’d arrived first to the empty office, just after half past nine, and had taken some time to settle from the shock of what had just happened.
Even after she’d picked the last cube of glass from her clothes, she still felt covered in something. Maybe it was a fog of adrenaline slowly lifting, or maybe it was the feeling that she wasn’t as invincible as she thought, but she hadn’t fully shaken it off. Derek and Gary eyed her shrewdly from the opposite desk then glanced at each other. The office’s most experienced reporters always smelled a story in the air.
‘You alright, Wren?’ asked Derek, a sturdy man in his fifties who could do with going up a shirt size and had yellow fingers from years of chain-smoking.
Wren blinked, roused from plumbing the depths of her dark thoughts. ‘Just having an existential crisis about fate versus chance. How about you?’
‘Er, I’m alright thanks. What’s that now?’
‘I’m thinking… are we meant to be where we are at all times? Or is it just random? Like we just stumble around and sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad?’
‘Christ alive, Wren,’ said Gary, rubbing his shaved head, his solution to early signs of baldness. ‘That’s a bit deep for a Monday morning. Or is this something to do with a story?’
‘Maybe,’ she said, deciding not to mention exactly what had happened. If she wasn’t careful, Gary would be down there with his Dictaphone and a photographer, trying to expose a local dodgy workman. ‘Actually, yeah, ignore me. Just thinking out loud.’
They both gave her a funny look and seemed to be about to dig a bit deeper, so she was relieved when their editor, Zara, strolled through the door, nodding and smiling at everyone as she went to her office. That stopped the conversation abruptly as the others tried to look busy with their actual job, rather than musing on the mysteries of the universe. Wren tried to do the same, but it still nagged at her like a scratchy label on a shirt.
Her desk was a mess, like always, but this morning’s brush with chaos made her feel like she needed to put it in order. Haphazardly, since she lacked experience at tidying, she gathered up the half-empty takeaway coffee cups and sluiced away the greenish-brown contents into the kitchen sink. Then, after stacking some loose papers, flicking biscuit crumbs to the floor and covering a tenacious sticky mark with a pad of Post-its, she settled to work. But the words wouldn’t come.
She texted Libby, who’d been phoning her frantically since she’d walked away from the bookshop, zombie-like and unresponsive to the buzzing in her pocket. As she’d slowly let the shock wear off, it had been seamlessly replaced by guilt at not checking in with her friend, since it was her bookshop after all.
How is the scene of my near miss looking?
There you are!! Wren, you can’t do this to a pregnant woman. I didn’t know if you were unscathed or looking like the prom scene from Carrie .
I’m fine. Not a scratch. Are you okay though? Is it chaos?
All is well. I made the glazier’s tea with a dusty teabag I found down the back of the microwave so we’re even. You sure you’re really okay?
I’m fine.
Apart from the crushing sense of impending doom , Wren thought.
Come for a cuppa after work. I will make your tea with a clean teabag because you’re my best friend.
Thank you.
Wren looked up to find Zara crooking a finger at her from her office door. If it weren’t for Zara being as unintimidating as a children’s TV presenter carrying a box of Labrador puppies, she might have worried she was in trouble.
The short walk to the office door seemed to pull Wren out of her daze – this was work, and she needed to snap out of it.
‘Have a seat, darl’. How are you doing?’ Zara asked, sitting down in the moth-eaten chair behind her desk. Like the rest of the Echo premises, Zara’s office was tired and scruffy, in stark contrast to the woman herself. She was dark-skinned, with beautifully manicured nails, bouncy black curls and a perpetual smile. She was only a few years older than Wren, at about thirty- five, but had risen through the ranks of local journalism like the Empire State lift – smoothly, at alarmingly breakneck speed. Wren often felt in awe of her and thought it might only be a matter of time before she went on to bigger and better things – especially now that the tides were turning on the need for the local paper.
‘Great, thanks. You?’
She gave a wry laugh. ‘Don’t ask.’ She looked pointedly at Wren, as if she should know exactly what she meant, and she did.
The paper had been sitting under a cloud of rumours for some time. Local papers were attracting less and less interest, with more people getting their news and information online, and the Echo ’s own decrepit website just couldn’t compete. With their funding fading away like old newsprint, there was no way they could afford the investment the site needed, and besides, their readers were of a demographic that liked something they could hold in their hand. There had been talks of merging with another local paper, meaning job cuts, or worse. Wren knew to take Zara’s reply of ‘don’t ask’ at face value too. Zara hadn’t denied the rumours, but Wren knew she wasn’t in any position to go into detail either.
‘Have you finished that piece on the new restaurant in Hangforth? The one with the’ – she clicked her fingers, trying to recall, then narrowed her eyes to guess – ‘butter boards?’
Wren laughed. ‘No, that was the place I went to last week in Corbridge. The one in Hangforth was the charcoal ice cream. They should both be in your inbox.’
‘Right, I’ll have a look this afternoon. The gentrification of Northumberland towns and villages continues to give us material. Anyway, I called you in because I’ve got you a new contact for your Northumberland Diamonds series.’
‘Really? Thanks, Zara. I wasn’t sure where to go with it next.’
Wren had been working on a story a few months ago about the North East’s first full-time female firefighter. She was only in her early sixties but had no family, and early-onset Alzheimer’s, so was being looked after by home carers. She had nobody to pass her stories on to. As Wren had listened to her talk about her memories, recalling the distant past with much more clarity than she could recount what she’d had for breakfast that day, she’d been struck by how interesting the woman’s life had been, and what an important person she’d been for her profession. And when her carer had told Wren that she may soon lose her longer-term memories, Wren had realised that unless they were written down and recorded for posterity, they would disappear forever. That had started her wondering how many other fascinating women were out there waiting for their stories to be heard. She knew there must be plenty, but since a lot of women just stoically went about their business without shouting it from the rooftops, she felt like she was mining for rare diamonds, hence the title of her series.
‘Where did you find this one?’
Zara handed her a slip of paper, on which she’d scrawled some details in purple pen. ‘Let’s just say I’m well connected when it comes to women.’
‘You’d better not let Petra hear you say that,’ Wren said, referring to Zara’s long-suffering wife, who rarely got to see her work-addicted other half.
Zara grinned. ‘Her name’s Edie Macmillan, founder of the Community Kitchen in Newcastle. You’ve probably heard of it?’
‘Heard of it? I volunteered there when I was a student.’
‘Even better – you’ll have a good basis for an opener then. She’s getting on a bit now, still lives on her own just outside of town, so you could give her a call and go and see her.’
‘Right. Thanks, that’s brilliant. I’ll give her a call soon.’
‘Smashing. Right, bugger off. I’ve got some crossing out to do on that copy you’ve sent me.’
Wren left the office and sat down at her desk, remembering the year she and a couple of uni friends had volunteered to serve turkey to the homeless at the Community Kitchen on Christmas Day. It had been one of the best Christmases she’d ever had, and she’d promised herself that she’d do it every other year. But she hadn’t – life, exams and everything else had got in the way – and now felt a twinge of remorse. It would be interesting to meet the woman who’d made it all happen, she thought, resolving to call her tomorrow and arrange to go and see her.
For the rest of the day, she was absorbed enough in her work to shelve any thoughts of her earlier brush with fate. Waxing lyrical about the Cravenwick summer fete and the rise in litter-bug tourists on Lindisfarne was so far removed from life-and-death situations that she was able to bury the memory like a forgotten sheet of paper on her cluttered desk. It was only when she found a single cube of glass in the upturned sleeve of her jacket as she shrugged it on to go home that she felt that icy feeling creep over her once more.