Her skin had once been supple and brown in summer, now it was the shade and texture of the bark from a birch tree and had the healing capability of a corpse.
Sometimes that’s how she felt on her worst days. A walking corpse with no family, no friends left, and her days spent in front of the television or listening to the radio.
‘See you in a few days,’ said the nurse when she left.
‘I might be dead by then,’ called out Tassie.
‘Oh, Mrs McIver, you make me laugh.’
The nurse drove away in her car. Did the idea of Tassie’s death amuse the nurse? She wouldn’t be amused if she came to the house and opened the door and found Tassie dead in her chair. In this heat, Tassie would be well and truly ripe by the time the nurse came, like a pear about to split its old, wrinkled skin.
Tassie looked out the window of her living room and saw Rachel Brown turning over the sign on the door of the bakery and tearooms to tell everyone it was now open for business.
Poor Rachel Brown. If Tassie was younger, she would have tried to help the girl but at eighty-nine, she didn’t think there was much she could do other than speak kindly to her when she managed to cross the road for a tea and a butterfly cake.
Tassie went into her little kitchen and turned on the kettle. She took her breakfast of stewed apples and yoghurt out of the fridge and sighed. She wanted eggs and sausages but those days were long behind her. Dinner consisted of a meals on wheels affair that came from the next village, one she heated up in the oven. Stringy beef stew with Yorkshire pudding and carrots and peas – it sounded far better than it tasted.
And then there was fish, chips and mushy peas, which almost had her signing up for the death clinic in Switzerland that she had read about in a large-print book from the mobile library. Getting old was depressing, she had decided nine years ago, and now she was truly dispirited about still being here. She sat at her pine table eating her apple and yoghurt and cheated by dripping honey on top that Nahla the cleaner from the council had given her from her husband’s hives on his allotment.
The nurse said she shouldn’t have honey or cream cakes or sugar in her tea but Tassie really didn’t care anymore. If she died in a diabetic coma it was better than trying to swallow the mushy peas and fish combination, which was its own sort of special hell.
The morning passed slowly, and more than thrice Tassie checked the traffic at the bakery. She worried for the business. Tourists didn’t come to Merryknowe very often, mostly because there wasn’t anywhere decent to eat and the Merryknowe Tearooms were not a drawcard with their ugly plastic tablecloths and that horrid Mrs Brown, the mother, hovering about.
Just as she was looking at the bakery, she saw a small truck with a van attached to the back of it shaped like a cottage. It had a thatched roof and was painted sunflower yellow, with painted flowers like a traveller’s van, and curtains on the windows.
Tassie had never seen anything like it in her eighty-nine years. When it stopped and a tall man stepped out and then took a sleepy child from the truck, she felt a shiver of something she hadn’t felt in a long time run up her head and over the scalp.
Something new in the village – more than new, it was something spectacular, and she watched him walk into the bakery with the little girl who had jumped down from his arms.
She looked at the van for the longest time, willing it to stay. For years she had known Merryknowe would die when she did. She was the last surviving long-time resident and the last of the old ones but everyone who came here left not long after. She knew the tearooms’ failing would be the final nail in Merryknowe’s coffin and yet there was nothing she could do, until the man in the van walked into the shop across the road from where she lived.
This was what she had been planning in her mind. New energy and new love. But the man wasn’t for Rachel Brown, no, he was meant for someone else, but they hadn’t arrived yet, and Tassie McIver hoped to hell whoever it was, would come soon.
5
Clara turned off the main road, checked the map on her phone and enlarged the image, peering at it closely.
There didn’t seem to be anything on the image that looked like a cottage. Just a huge number of trees and what looked to be an unmade road.
The cottage’s formal address was Acorn Cottage on Shears Lane but there was no sign for the lane, so she took a punt and drove to where she thought the lane should be.
It must be close, she thought as she put the car into drive and went further down the bumpy road, which was covered by trees.
They cast a beautiful green light over her as she drove slowly and her stomach flipped with anticipation. This was her dream about to come true. Everything she had wished for as a child was about to become a reality because she had worked hard and she had taken a chance. Sure, she was drunk when she did it – Clara rarely drank and was a lightweight so the bottle of wine really pushed her over the edge – but here she was. She turned into a clearing, the green light disappearing, and the cottage was before her, waiting.
Clara stopped the car and burst into tears.
‘Oh shit,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh my God.’ Her eyes tried to take in everything at once.
It was a dump. Whatever filter the agent
