‘Time for sign off,’ the studio producer announced. ‘Kev? Three seconds to you before we cut away from Cape Town and wrap with Kath.’
‘That’s it from me here on the Gold Coast. You enjoy making all of those new friends up there, Kath.’
A glimmer of possibility that Kev finally got why she was doing this lit within her. ‘I will,’ she enthused as the producer told Kev he was a wrap. ‘It astonishes me how resilient everyone here is. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, suicide – these are just a few of the issues everyone here is riding for. With any luck, we can pass our goal of five hundred thousand pounds and really make a difference.’
‘Struth! I’d give you the difference right now to get you to talk about something a bit cheerier. Makes me want to kill myself just listening—’ The monitor went blank, then fuzzed with static, then an apology message about the signal came up for a moment before cutting to a commercial. Kath’s skin went prickly. Kev had said that on air. He’d thought his mic was off and … oh, boy. Some several hundred miles away, Kath could already hear the complaint lines begin to ring.
Raven stared into the phone lens desperately trying to think of something beyond the fact that she was completely and utterly miserable. As big a draw as her so-called ‘authentic angst’ seemed to have been … self-imposed alone time had found her swan diving into the darker realms of her psyche. Realms she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted the Insta-sphere to have access to.
She’d long since told Sue, who was impressively fit, to ride ahead. Flo had insisted upon staying close to Becky because ‘she was worried about her being all alone back there’ even though Becky’s job was to ride at the back, but, whatever. Raven had been sending out her ‘I’m quite happy riding alone thank you very much’ vibes and, as such had spent rather a lengthy spell of alone time.
Alone with her Insta fanbase, which had increased by fifty per cent overnight. Apparently the world liked self-deprecating, overweight, Indian goth girls openly sharing their misery with a japey flair. Or maybe it was all the tags for ‘Chakrabarti Flower Power’ Kath had sent out. Kath was far more popular than Raven had thought. Stupid, she knew, considering Kath had been on television for like, a hundred years, but it would never once have occurred to her to join Kath’s FOUR MILLION-plus followers. Then again, now that she’d met her, she could see the draw. She was super nice. It was good to support super nice people. Especially when they were married to a major dick. And now, thanks to her largesse, Raven had heaps more followers.
All that said, for the first time in, like, ever, the alone time she’d sought was morphing into deeply reflective time and she didn’t like the direction it was going.
She missed her mum and dad. The ding-a-ling of the bell as customers entered their shop. The racket her mother made clanking pans around the kitchen as she pressed the phone to one ear instructing one relative or another on how to live their life as she whipped up a “light” supper (usually, like, five different dishes, all of which were totally yum).
She missed her bossy sister.
And her goofy brother.
Their kids, their pets, their habits, their smell. She missed it all. And something about missing them made their lives appear like a pop-up book in her mind, but a pop-up book written by someone who could only see the good in them. Her parents’ shop filled with people grateful to have a chemist who remembered their name, their prescriptions, their GP. Her sister’s lightning-fast way with numbers that had made ploughing through algebra and calculus about a gazillion times easier. Her brother’s gentle way of handling conflict or an upset toddler which made it really really easy to see why he’d become a paediatrician. They’d all followed their actual paths, not The Dictated Path. All of which culminated in the dawning realisation that maybe her parents thought she would genuinely be a good lawyer and were merely encouraging her to do what suited her best? Or, perhaps, just like her, they weren’t really sure what she’d be good at so went with what was familiar?
That, or she was now officially hallucinating from the undignified trauma of her derriere being rubbed raw. Or, even more simply, perhaps absence really did make the heart grow fonder.
Down the M1 and left a bit had never felt so very far away.
She dispiritedly wiped the rain off of her odometer and gave it a squint. Ten miles down. Thirty-seven more to go.
Sweet mother of fuck. If ever there was any time to be prone to dramatics, now fit the bill. It wasn’t like there were any witnesses or anything. If you didn’t count sheep.
She jabbed at her phone and began talking, not entirely certain whether or not she was actually recording. She blithered on about how riding in the rain yesterday had been fun. Well. Tolerable. She wasn’t so into this exercise gig that the words ‘fun’ ‘cycling’ and ‘rain’ necessarily went hand in hand. That said, yesterday the rain hadn’t physically hurt when it landed on her. Yesterday she hadn’t had a bum that needed a new layer of epidermis. ‘Let’s be honest, friends,’ she said (she’d taken to calling her viewers friends as it seemed, well, friendlier), ‘one of the biggest challenges I’m facing today is finding a place to wee. Wot? You might ask. But you’re in the great out of doors! The wilderness! Surely there’s somewhere out there in the wilds of Britain for a discreet wee. Well, let me tell you – Britain’s country lanes
