Chapter 2
‘A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.’
The rumble of Dad’s car as it pulled up in the driveway signified that Dom was back for the summer. The quiet of my attic eyrie was about to be shattered.
From above, I heard Mum shrieking with pleasure. ‘You’ve grown again!’ Dom’s grunt in response was, as usual, sufficient. It always was.
‘Dinner in an hour. Why don’t you unpack?’ she added, already swept up in the Dom Effect.
I stayed where I was, perched on the edge of my bed, listening to the thuds and bangs as Dom and Dad hefted the trunk up the stairs. From the landing, Dad let his end drop. ‘You got a dead body in there, Dom?’ Another grunt.
I was leaning against my bedroom door frame when Dom looked up and nodded – our standard greeting. We didn’t hug. That wasn’t done.
‘Good to have him back, eh, Florence?’ Dad said cheerfully, catching sight of me. He always smiled a bit wider when Dom was home.
‘Heading down for a beer in the garden. Come down when you’re ready.’ He vanished, already in weekend mode.
Dom tugged the trunk towards his room, but it snagged on a bit of exposed gripper-rod – a casualty of Mum’s obsessive carpet-shampooing.
‘Give it a shove, will you?’ he said. No please, of course.
I crouched down without answering, bracing my back against the end. Dom pulled. I pushed with my feet. It began to inch across, through his bedroom door.
‘Keep going to the window.’ The trunk scraped across the cream carpet, leaving behind tramlines of dirt from its last voyage across some mossy school driveway.
We reached the far wall and I collapsed against the burgundy velvet chair – the one that still smelled faintly of pipe smoke and old books.
Grandad’s chair. Untouchable by decor trends, exiled to the attic for not fitting in.
Dom barely noticed. He was already elbows-deep inside the trunk, excavating. He didn’t care that the attic rooms were a museum of mismatched furniture and discarded things.
I, on the other hand, had waged a quiet war against the aesthetic assault, by draping a bedspread here, a strategic scarf there. I’d tried to coax a little civilisation out of a room that looked like the final resting place for every piece of furniture the house no longer knew what to do with.
Out came a giant whisky bottle. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked, staring at the dark liquid and its suspicious foam.
‘Home brew,’ he said, stroking it with reverence.
Dom was in his element. He launched into one of his boarding school stories – full of exploratory ceiling tests, hacksaws, secret hatches, makeshift planks, and a borrowed flag to cover their tracks. He grinned as he told it. The Dom grin: cocky and unrepentant.
I let him talk, absorbing it in pieces. Dom needed somewhere like school, a place with rules he could bend until they broke. Home was too comfortable, too settled for him.
Boarding school had been the only solution. He was too ‘high energy’, as Mum called it, which was her polite way of saying he was impossible. They hadn’t known what to do with him. Constantly in motion, covered in bruises and mud, endlessly starting fires – metaphorical and once, alarmingly, not.
Some teacher had mentioned ‘he might be attention deficient.’ The solution was to send him off somewhere with a uniform and high walls.
I, on the other hand, was the good one. Saintly Florence. The one who went to the local school with packed lunches. No dramas, no scandals. No one ever worried about me. Sometimes I wondered if I’d done myself a disservice. Being the easy child got you good marks and leftover attention.
Next out of the trunk came pint glasses, and LPs wrapped in a stained cricket jumper. I watched the archaeology unfold from my seat in the corner.
Then I saw them – a stack of thick Polaroids, wedged carelessly to the side. ‘Can I?’ I asked, already picking them up.
‘Ummm,’ he mumbled, preoccupied with the delicate calibration of his turntable.
The first photo was classic teenage nonsense: his friend Toby saluting with celery stuffed up his nose. I smiled. The next was a pool prank – a row of pale bums under a scrawled headline ‘full moon.’ I flicked on.
Then I saw him.
The world stopped.
A boy, dark-haired and sunlit, smiling directly into the camera with an easy confidence – the sort that comes from never having been told no.
His robe hung open at the neck, revealing a golden chest and just enough hair to suggest he was older, more worldly, dangerously so. His eyes were green, his lashes long.
It was the kind of face that rewrote your standards and made you question what you’d been doing with your heart up until that point, and with sixteen-year-old certainty I thought: that’s him, the boy who ticks every box on the list.
I didn’t know it then, but that photograph had just changed everything.
‘Who’s this?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.
Dom glanced up. ‘Jamie.’ Just that. As if it explained everything.
‘Jamie,’ I repeated quietly, the name already melting into something softer in my mind. ‘What’s his last name?’
‘Stonehill.’
‘What, one of THE Stonehills?’
‘Yeah. His family’s loaded. Screwed up though. Parents divorced, both remarried. Think his dad’s on his fourth one right now.’
Stonehill Frozen Foods as in the peas in the freezer. I suddenly wanted to run downstairs and cradle the bag.
‘What’s he doing this summer?’
‘Spain. His mum’s villa. I might go out for a week.’
Spain. Sun. Pool. Jamie. ‘He invited you?’
Dom snorted. ‘Course. His sister’s going, and her friends. Toby too if he can get the cash.’
Her friends. My stomach dropped; pictures flashing through my mind of tanned limbs, flicked blonde hair, lounging by Jamie’s side with casual entitlement. One of them might already be his girlfriend…
‘Mum and Dad won’t pay for your flight,’ I said, a little too sharply.
‘I know. I’m working for Dad. Sorted.’
Of course he was. Dom never asked for things. He simply arranged them. I would be here all summer. He would be in Marbella with Jamie Stonehill.
The stylus snapped. ‘Bloody thing’s broken,’ Dom said. ‘Did you touch it?’
‘No I bloody haven’t!’ I had. Last week. Attempted Rolling Stones. Failed. He’d never find out. I stood up, headed back to my room, and tucked Jamie’s photo between the pages of an old sketchbook on my desk. It was mine now.
Dom could have his beer, beaches and his bloody broken stylus. I had a plan of my own forming. Not quite fully shaped – but enough. Enough to begin.