Of course, it had only been a day. They’d only had the one afternoon together, and his stony face when she told him of her plans couldn’t be missed. Given that all she’d done so far was paint a chalet to look like a bogey and clean the place, she couldn’t blame him for thinking she was an airhead. They had a long way to go before things were shipshape. She didn’t mind the quiet working either; it suited her fine. Given her own hormonal mood swings when her polycystic ovarian syndrome decided to throw her a heavy period, she could understand feeling a certain way. Hating people a little. Hell, when her hormones were in full flow, she pretty much hated the world and wanted to lock herself away with a hot water bottle and the latest weepy saga book to curl up with.
She understood moods, and feeling angry and frustrated about things. She had an idea that he was going through something but what, she didn’t know. Everyone else around here seemed to have an inkling. Martha had dropped enough hints at it. Maybe it was having to move again. No one liked that. She herself had cried half the journey down here, part relief and part grief. Her life as she knew it was over, but she didn’t realise how much in limbo she had been back home. How unsettled she’d felt. Maybe Cillian felt the same. Plus, she’d only been driving with the remnants of her old life, and her dead mother in the back. She had moved with family, but it wasn’t remotely the same. Maybe Cillian was just making the best of a bad situation. Maybe he was just grumpy.
Martha sure was a prickly pear at times. Perhaps the famed Cornish air was a little off today. Or maybe it was she herself, her Yorkshire ways rubbing others up the wrong way. She’d felt that way at home, like she was surplus somehow. On the fringe of life, watching others live it and never quite being part of the gang. Her mother would despair at her thought pattern if she knew. She shook herself out of her reverie and went to check the bedrooms.
This chalet was a two-bedroom one, with twin beds and a double in the master. The sheets were all on now, and the rooms smelled clean and fresh. She’d even found a little pink teddy among her belongings, one that her mother had given her as a daft present one birthday. They were always doing that. Her mother was obsessed with cows and birds, so she’d often woken to a phone full of pictures from her, from the Yorkshire Show, or her daily dog walks. One of the last photos she’d sent her was of a robin, a little red-breasted fellow that had come to visit her mother daily in the hospice. On the last day, it had appeared again. Her mother’s eyes had flickered when April told her, her head moving towards the window, as though her soul was searching for it.
The day after, when April had dragged herself, alone and numb, back to say goodbye to everyone she’d looked out of that window for the longest time. The robin didn’t show. April liked to think it was because her mother was gone, and the robin had done its job.
Realising that she was looking at a teddy, crying her eyes out, she sat down in the easy chair she had installed in the room. It was a dusky pink colour, which matched the bedspread she’d dug out of the storage she’d bought along with the rest of the place. The previous manager might have been a really poor employee, but the storage reflected how the management had planned the place to be. Their loss, her gain.
From the chair, she could see the beach off in the distance, and it was away from the front, looking out not onto the other chalets, but on the landscape around them. It was a beautiful room for a little girl. She found herself choking up again at the thought of the new arrivals, but the sound of a van stirred her into action. Shit! They were here, and here she was crying in their child’s new room like some kind of crazy Miss Havisham stereotype.
She was out of the back door a mere second or two before she heard the front door open. She pushed the back door closed as quietly as she could, hoping that the air wouldn’t whoosh through the cottage, and give her away as an intruder. Listening for a moment, she heard something heavy being put on the floor, and the low rumble of a single voice. Peeping through the kitchen window, she saw a tall shadow, and ducked under the sill. Shimmying across the chalet wall, head dipped, she crab-walked the length of the chalet. Peeking around the corner of the building, she could see the van, the doors open, blocking most of her view.
She took a deep breath and jumped across the space between the chalets like a long jumper, lengthy desperate strides propelling her into the back of her own chalet, and safety. She was so involved in her Tom Cruise impression, Mission Impossible Cornwall edition, that she didn’t see the woman standing some distance away, beach side, with a rotund brown chicken under one arm and a box of
