For the first time in about an ice age, Iris wished that she didn’t live alone. A month or so after her eightieth birthday, she had been visited by a cheery man from the council who wondered whether she would like to join the meals on wheels scheme, or go to the seniors’ bingo on the special bus on a Friday morning. He had been new to the area and hadn’t heard of Iris. She imagined he had come in for some gentle leg-pulling when his colleagues realised he’d visited the witch and offered her leaflets. If Iris hadn’t been concentrating on not passing out from the pain in her back, she’d have snorted at the memory. He’d left a panic button thingy-ma-jig, though, which would’ve come in handy right about now. Iris had her pride, but she wasn’t an idiot. You had to play the cards you were dealt, after all.
The button, however, was downstairs on the hall table. She was supposed to wear it around her neck on the cord supplied, like one of those children’s purses, but she never had. Not that she’d have been wearing it in the bath, Iris reasoned. No, she had no reason to feel silly or humiliated as a result of this predicament.
Logical though this thought was, it didn’t help. It didn’t help her out of the bath, either. That took half an hour of minute movements, followed by an undignified, hunched-back crab-walk before she had a towel wrapped around her body and the cork tiles of the bathroom beneath her feet.
If only she had been a fairytale witch, Iris thought, as she edged her way across the landing. Then she could’ve waved her hands and removed her pain. She could have killed a lamb at full moon, eating its still-twitching heart to stay young. She could have captured small children with her gingerbread cottage and put them to work. If she’d been a storybook witch, she wouldn’t be creeping sideways, bent-double, to get the extra-strength painkillers in her bedside drawer.
Just as she had made it to the bedroom and into her dressing gown, she heard the unmistakable sound of someone knocking on the back door. She slipped the tablets into her pocket and began the slow, painful descent, for the second time that day. That was another problem with being a real witch as opposed to a made-up one. When someone came knocking you had to answer. Damn and blast the rules.
Chapter Two
Bex Adams had been raised to be independent, and then, as if to seal the deal, her parents had divorced just before her seventeenth birthday, and her mother had moved to London and into her boyfriend’s flat. Bex’s dad had bought a little two-bedroomed house on the new estate off the Bath Road, which Bex thought should’ve been more properly marketed as ‘one-and-half bedrooms, if all your furniture is made by pixies’. When friends complained about their parents turning their old bedrooms into craft rooms or gyms, Bex snorted. Her childhood bedroom had gone for ever and the replacement set-up was cramped and tinged with sadness. Her dad did his best to make her feel welcome and she knew she was lucky to have a home with family-rate cheap rent, but he was out all hours trying to find a life and the place felt unloved and temporary.
Bex both valued her independence and felt it was something of a burden. There were times when it would have been nice to lay her head on a comforting shoulder and have someone else sort things out for her. Like now. A comforting shoulder right about now would be perfect, but she knew from past experience that she wasn’t the leaning type.
Jon was finishing up his set. Bex knew this because he always played the same bluesy number last, his eyes closed as he put his heart into the music. He always looked so vulnerable in that moment. A sharp contrast to his usual, guarded expression. Bex knew that was what she’d fallen in love with. However clichéd it was to be attracted to a musician, she couldn’t help herself. The very first night she’d seen him play, she had watched his sure hands moving on the fret board and heard the catch in his voice as he sang, and she’d been hopelessly lost.
He finished the song and opened his eyes, looking around the room as if surfacing from a dream. Bex made her way to the bar to get him a post-set pint, stopping to chat with Mel who was working tonight. There was no point rushing back to her table, as Jon would be a while yet. It didn’t matter that the Red Lion wasn’t exactly a jumping gig venue; there would still be at least one fan who went up to talk to Jon, maybe to offer a telephone number or talk about guitars. That was one downside with the music crowd, Bex thought; they could talk about guitars for hours. Nicola was going to find that out if she went out with Jon. Bex squashed that painful thought and carried the drinks back.
Despite her excitement on the phone earlier, Nicola had arrived late and, apart from giving Bex the promised bag of cashews, hadn’t been the best company. Bex tried again to start a conversation, but Nicola didn’t react. She was too busy gazing raptly at Jon as he put his guitar away in its moulded case and unplugged his amp. The
