LITMIR.BIZ

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I’d like to arrange a collection please.’

      ‘What is it and where are you?’

      ‘An armchair. It needs to go to the dump. I live in Acton Green.’

      ‘That’s a way out so it’ll be pricey. Forty quid.’

      ‘That’s fine. When can you get here?’

      ‘Six thirty all right?’

      I told him it was fine and gave him my address. I held my breath, waiting for that spark of recognition, for him to comment that he’d been to the farm before. Instead he said,

      ‘All right then Milly, I’ll see you later.’

      Then the call ended, just like that.

      By the time I got to work I didn’t have more than five minutes to run a comb through my hair and print out my emails before Alison buzzed me to tell me that Dr Wendy Harrison was waiting in reception for me. That was a strange meeting. I’ve met some interesting clients in my time – including the man who talked to my chin rather than looking me in the eye, a woman who continuously tapped a pen against her teeth and the man who addressed all of his questions to my male colleagues rather than me – but I’ve never met anyone like Dr Harrison before. She had a very odd manner for someone with a background in nursing – clinical, rather than caring. I could feel her watching me while Gary gave his presentation and then, after she’d ordered him from the room to make more tea, she stared at me like a specimen under a microscope. Then she started asking me personal questions, her strange, fixed smile not faltering once. As I wondered if she might be on the autistic spectrum, she sprayed me with ink.

      Let’s just say I won’t be gutted if we don’t win the bid.

      6.12 p.m.

      After a week’s worth of tidying, the house finally looks as I remember it, but it doesn’t feel like the house where I grew up. I always used to feel safe here – until the arguments started between Mum and Dad anyway. It was always draughty and the ancient cracked tiles in the kitchen were so cold I’d hop from foot to foot as I poured out my cereal, but the sounds were reassuring. It was always so noisy – the radio babbling away in the kitchen, the television blaring in the living room and Dad chopping logs in the garden while the dog barked at birds. All those noises have gone now and it’s eerily quiet. It’s true what they say, about people making a house a home. I never really understood that until now.

      ‘Right.’ I grab the arm of Dad’s old green armchair and pull. ‘I’m not letting Mike in this house, which means you’re going in the barn.’

      I am dripping with sweat by the time I reach the back garden. The lawn is more weeds than grass and the bright pots of flowers that Mum spent hours planting and tending are long gone. The only decorative touch Dad added is a pile of abandoned car tyres and a collapsed pile of logs. The gate at the back of the garden is almost rusted shut. I have to give it a good shove before it swings open, then I drag the armchair into the yard. When this was a working farm, there would have been tractors, trailers and farm machinery filling the space, but all that’s left is a huge dilapidated barn and the three fields that wrap around the house. Dad was an architect but he had designs about becoming a farmer when he bought this place. He swiftly changed his mind after the chickens he kept in the back garden were wiped out by foxes. His next bright idea was to try and convert the barn. It’s accessible by a track that runs down the side of the house as well as through the garden, but the council rejected his planning application. He pretty much gave up on the place then, and himself.

      The chair’s wheeled feet creak and groan as I drag it over the concreted yard and pull at the barn door. It’s the first time I’ve been inside since I came back. Mum hated this building. I did too.

      I brace myself as the barn door swings open, but the row of steel cages still makes me catch my breath. Dad’s decision to allow the local hunt to house some of their dogs here caused the biggest argument I can ever remember my parents having. Mum, an out-and-out city girl who’d met Dad at a wedding, was horrified at the idea.

      ‘Fox hunting!’ she screamed as I perched at the top of the stairs in my pyjamas. ‘I’m not supporting fox hunting.’

      ‘No one’s saying you have to support it. You’re not going to be shoved onto a horse and made to blow a bloody horn. We’ll just be looking after the dogs. Geoffrey needs somewhere to keep them for a little—’

      ‘I don’t want animal rights protesters throwing paint at our car and shouting and blowing whistles outside our house. We’ve got a thirteen-year-old daughter, Steve. What if they set fire to our house like they did to Geoff’s barn?’

      ‘That’s not going to happen, and anyway, there’s no proof that they burned—’

      ‘Of course it was them. It was the same people who threw red paint all over William’s haulage trucks last year. If it was some random arsonist, why wait until the dogs were on a hunt?’

      ‘Oh, for god’s sake. No one’s going to burn the barn down or hurt Louise. Anyway, it’s just for a few months, until Geoff’s barn is rebuilt. You were the one who said we need to make more of an effort to be part of the community and it’s not like we’re doing anything with it.’

      ‘It’s our barn. We don’t have to—’

      ‘Whose barn is it?’

      The cold silence that followed made me shiver.

      ‘I knew you’d do this,’ my mother said tightly. ‘Lay down the law when it suits you.’

      ‘I did buy the house, Maggie.’

      ‘You think I don’t know that?’

      I’d long stopped asking my parents why they weren’t married. They both claimed that they didn’t need a piece of paper and an expensive wedding to prove how much they loved each other, but I’d once heard my mum confess to a friend that she was sad she’d never got to have her big day.

      When Mum and Dad split up, she told him that he should sell the house so she could buy somewhere for me and her to live. Dad said he wasn’t going anywhere and if she was that worried about me living somewhere nice she should leave me behind. Mum said she’d rather bring me up in a hovel.

      The sound of their argument was still ringing in my ears as I trudged down the stone steps that led to the dojo and opened the door. Mike was sorting the pads and gloves in the corner of the room. He took one look at me and asked what was wrong. The concern in his voice made me burst into tears. My parents were splitting up. It was the end of my world.

      He put an arm around my shoulders and squeezed the top of my arm. His palm wasn’t touching the soft material of my gi for more than a couple of seconds but the warmth of his touch remained—

      A violent shiver courses through me. The sun has disappeared and the sky is thick with heavy, black rain clouds so, mustering all the energy I have left, I drag the armchair into the barn. The cages are even bigger and more imposing than I remember. They’re tall enough for a man to stand up in and almost as wide, with huge great padlocks hanging from the doors. They look like somewhere to house prisoners of war, not animals. The musky, yeasty smell of dogs is long gone but the air is rich with the sour, musty scent of sawdust, hay and ammonia.

      When I reach the other side of the barn, I abandon the armchair, push open the door and peer outside. Rain is bouncing off the tarmac and puddling in the cracks. The field at the end of the yard is already flooded where it dips down into the lake. Much more of this rain and the roads will flood too. I’d be cut off from the world and no one other than my solicitor and a handful of friends in London know that I’m here.

      A loud, angry, insistent sound cuts through the soft pattering of the rain.

      It’s a car horn.

      Mike is here.

       Chapter

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