As if Flo had been privy to her entire internal monologue, she gave Raven’s knee a bright pat. ‘Alright, duck. That’s settled then. It’s get your bags out time. Just give me a minute and I’ll grab one, too. I’ve got to make a quick call home.’
Raven got out of the car and scanned the street for Sue’s house. There it was. A couple of doors down. Number eleven Harworth Lane.
From the outside, it looked perfectly pleasant. As pleasant as a mid-terraced two-up, two-down without a garden on the outskirts of Bicester could in the late February gloaming. Not that Raven had been looking for fancy. Or lush. Or anything at all like the comfortable family home she’d left without so much as a backwards glance because she knew if she’d looked back and seen her mother’s tear-streaked face she would’ve run straight into her arms and begged to be forgiven for having wanted anything other than what they did.
So, yeah. It was fine. It didn’t look like somewhere that someone would kill themselves which was, she had to admit, a total relief. (#Don’tTellTheGoths)
What struck Raven the most was how compact everything was. Sue-sized. A small wrought iron gate led to a teensy tiny brick path which ran alongside a tidy (small) container for rubbish and an area that could, at best, contain a bicycle (a small one). Four petite squares of glass formed the front window which sported a titchy flower box with a few wax-like cyclamen, some dainty ivy sprigs and two tiny topiary. Even the front door, painted a lovely shade of pastel blue (lovely if you were into pastels, obvs), seemed Sue-sized. Her sister would’ve called it bijoux. A term she used regularly because her sister actually was bijoux. Delicately boned, petite features, she was like a little porcelain doll.
At five foot nine, and big boned without the extra weight, Raven was suddenly feeling distinctly super-sized. She should have asked Sue if she could’ve seen the room before handing over a wad of money that set her back thirty-nine hours in her call centre/Newcastle target. A sudden image of her arms and legs sticking out the windows burst into her head. Oh, Lordy. Would she even fit?
She rehoinked her bag onto her shoulder as it threatened to slide off and tried to knock some positivity into her brain. Her cousin Kalinda, a newly qualified psychiatrist, said fear coloured all first impressions, so … given the fact Raven’s life was teetering on the precipice of just such a change … little wonder everything seemed so little. All of her teenaged hopes and dreams would have to fit into Sue’s little house.
Sure. Raven might look as though she was into dark and morbid from the outside, but inside? She was a nineteen-year-old girl moving out of her parents’ to pursue a dream that didn’t exactly have a well-defined rainbow, let alone a pot of gold at the end of it and to be honest? She was pretty bloody freaked out about it.
‘Go on, love. I’ll grab this bag and you knock on the door. Oof!’ Flo grunted as she tried to stop Raven’s second duffel from hitting the wet pavement. ‘What’ve you got in here. A body?’
Books actually. It was a bag full of books. Books from her childhood right up to the huge wrist-benders she poured herself into on a nightly basis, all to escape the ever-encroaching reality that she was going to have to pick what she wanted to do for the rest of her entire life fairly sharpish.
Crumpets and bums. What was she doing? Why hadn’t she looked for a local law firm to scuttle around for? (Duh … Bicester. Law firm. Parents.) Was spending money to save money the wisest of things? She’d always been a good saver. It was built into her so she actually had most of the money for the first year. She’d just wanted a buffer to see her into the next. Maybe she should’ve become a live-in nanny somewhere. An au pair to a family in France who didn’t mind a teenager who favoured black lipstick, refused to follow the beaten path and couldn’t, for the life of her, understand how everyone else in her family had managed to do it apart from her. They seemed so at ease with themselves. Their bodies. Their lives. Their pre-planned futures. As if everything had, in actual fact, been tailor made for them. How was it she constantly felt so uncomfortable?
Flo clocked the swell of nerves and gave her one of those incredibly practical, but strangely helpful it’ll all be fine smiles then knocked on an imaginary door. ‘It’ll be your home too soon enough, duck. Off you pop.’
For what felt like the first time in a long time, Raven did exactly as she was told.
Before her knuckles connected with the door, it swung open. Standing in a small pool of light in the entryway was Sue, anxiety etched into her every feature. ‘I’m sorry.’ A smile fell from her lips before it had completely begun. ‘I’m not sure I can do this.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sue was in what her mother would call a right old pickle.
The kind that rattled you to the very core and made you wish you’d never done the thing you did, namely put up a notice to rent out the room she hadn’t yet had the courage to enter.
Instead of doing the English thing – offer an abundance of apologies and leave – Flo pulled Sue into a big old hug, ushered Raven in out of the rain with a, ‘Course you can, love. You can do anything you want to. It’s just nerves, is all.’
She was right, of course.
It was nerves. Nerves and fear and lack of preparation. Having Raven here, duffel bags weighing down her shoulders, had suddenly made everything irreversibly real. As
