LITMIR.BIZ

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bedroom this soon, I’m going to have to grit my teeth and go with it. And pretend he looks like Quasimodo.

       Friday

       13th December

       5.

       Make it a December

       to remember

      When I’m woken by hammering on my bedroom door on Friday morning, it’s so early that when I pull back the curtains it’s not even light enough to see the sea.

      ‘If you want to choose trees, I’m leaving in five.’

      ‘And I love you too, Bill.’ I don’t. At all.

      Despite my groans and Merwyn’s yawns and dirty looks we pull on our clothes and do a dazed run-in-the-dark round the lawn. By the time Bill’s battered pick-up rattles to a halt by the front door we’re standing, backs to the gale, coffee in hand, watching the dawn light send luminous pink streaks across the pale grey sky.

      Bill throws the door open. ‘I brought the Landy, hop in.’

      I lift Merwyn up into the cab and heave myself in after him. ‘So what are we listening to? Apart from the banging of metal panels, I mean.’

      Bill pulls out of the entrance gateway onto the lane. ‘Pirate FM’s obscure festive half hour, it’s quite a challenge to hear the awful tunes that didn’t make it. We’ll be there in forty.’

      My eyes are barely open, but as the road winds back to hug the coast I’m sitting back basking in the sound of some band singing about Puppies for Christmas, and it’s magical to see the breakers crashing relentlessly up the beach as dawn lightens to day.

      Bill finally showed me to his room and the wifi yesterday evening, after my dinner of Aga baked potatoes. It’s on the ground floor, tucked away beyond the stairs that lead up to mine and as empty and pared back as the rest of the place. If I was hoping for a glimpse of the real guy in there, I was truly disappointed. I can completely see that he’d strip back the rest of the castle so the stags don’t crush the ornaments as they fall over, but in his room you’d have thought there’d be a flash of something – anything – more individual. I understand not everyone wants to be like Fliss and I and have every drunken moment from our youth emblazoned across the walls to remind us of the fun times we had and how crazy and alive we used to be. But there aren’t any photos or any personal touches at all even on Bill’s bedside table. No birthday cards, not a single postcard or memento to express that he has a private life or indeed a past. There’s nothing. It’s as if his backstory and history have been completely wiped out. There isn’t as much as a paperback here, not even a print on the wall. It’s as if someone’s come and very carefully wiped away every trace of his past.

      I’m not being nosey, or judging here. I’m just really puzzled that someone who I once glimpsed as such an outgoing, fun and rounded guy should be living this stark and sterile existence. I mean, I did get a glimpse in his suitcase in Chamonix, it was as full of shit as mine, his room too. So it’s not that he’s an anal tidying minimalist who travels through life with nothing, because he’s not. Even if he did think he was better than people, he didn’t deserve this. There has to be some rational explanation for the vacuum, something more than the castle being newly converted.

      Whatever the explanation, he didn’t touch on it last night. He was in and out and mostly left me clutching my laptop, perching on the edge of his king sized bed which is so high I only had one toe on the floor. Obviously Merwyn insisted on coming too, so we took his furry tree rug for him to lie on and had to promise he wouldn’t try to clean his face on the pristine pale grey duvet cover.

      The moment I put in the password a hundred emails from Libby pinged in, all of them delivery notifications, and all duplicated in the matching texts that popped up on my phone too. Then I rushed off a Facebook message to flag up to Fliss and Libby that the interiors we’ve been mooning over are the wrong ones and that what we have here is more-tower-less-frills. Then I called Fliss a few minutes later, certain by half past eight her kids would be asleep. They weren’t.

      I love Oscar and Harriet to bits, but they’re the kind of insomniac babies who drink milk non stop, scream really loudly and never close their eyes. The theory that second babies are easier hasn’t worked for Fliss either, which is why popping out number two has almost pushed her over the edge. Oscar was easily three before I saw him fully zonked out and that was only with chickenpox and after Calpol, which if you don’t know is squirted into their mouth from a syringe, and the baby equivalent of a tranquiliser dart. Fliss swears all that saved her as a mum is the phone app she works with her nose at the same time as clutching both kids, which reads advice out loud and plays soothing tunes.

      If Fliss ever actually gets her nose onto her phone when I ring her, there’s a five second window to talk, so when she answered I didn’t mess about.

      Unlike her babies, she always sounds super-sleepy. ‘… Ivy … fab … just feeding Harriet …’ Nothing new there then.

      I fired out the words ‘… stylish … stony … sparse … small-but-snug …’ then threw ‘staff’ in as an inspired afterthought. Then I blurted. ‘I’ve taken full charge of the deccies too.’ And damn for putting my head on the block there.

      I could hear Fliss musing over the sound of Harriet’s sucking noises and Oscar banging the life out of what might have been a drum, or possibly the patio doors. ‘Sparse … how?’

      Another damn for that one. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be full by the time you arrive.’

      ‘Brill … we’ll see you Sunday …’ And then there was a clatter of the phone being dropped, Fliss was telling Oscar not to lick his mango yogurt off the TV screen, and we got cut off.

      I must admit, conversations like this make me view the super-cute baby clothes in Daniels in a whole different light – the kind that has me whooshing off to Pet’s Corner. Five seconds listening to life on Fliss’s sofa is enough to remind me crooning over the tartan velvet coats and diamanté dog collars is a whole lot safer. Even if they cost ten times more than the human versions they’re cheap at the price when you consider what they’re saving you from.

      After that I took refuge in shopping for the castle and by the time Bill wafted back in again my online baskets were overflowing. I trotted out my favourite festive mantra, ‘You can never have too many candles, or ribbons …’ then tossed in a couple of kiddie ones just for the pleasure of seeing him shudder again, ‘… or fire guards or high chairs …’

      It must have worked, because he pulled a face at the checkout totals, paid by one-click PayPal, then disappeared. I’d gone in armed with my strongest cinnamon candle, worried about how I’d cope with his scent when we were poring over the screen together, but as that bit turned out to be complete wishful thinking on my part, I never got to light it.

      But this morning, in spite of the mix of dust and oil and wax jacket in the front of the Landy, as I watch his hands wrestling the steering wheel around the twisty country lanes between fields and hedges that are monochrome in the cold morning, there’s more. In fact the man-scent wafting my way is so delicious I’m already working on excuses to get into his bathroom to check out what it is he’s wearing. I know I’m taking an extended break from dating, and the women in Men’s Fragrances at Daniels are great at splashing them around. But if I ever spot a new one in the wild, I like to get it in my notebook for future reference. A boyfriend in my future definitely isn’t a priority. But in the unlikely event I did get one, decades down the line etc. etc. – please, oh please let him smell like the inside of this Landy cab does

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