Page 2 of This is Where I Leave You

Georgina snapped her phone shut and sighed in frustration, puffing her ultra modern fringe off her face with her irritated, shaking with rage breath. She glanced at her Cartier watch and groaned. Her flight was due to leave for Paris in ten minutes and she couldn’t get hold of Cady. Her bed had not been slept in when she checked this morning at her apartment, and her mobile was switched off. No-one was answering at the house she had shared with Richard, although she could not imagine that she had slept there, she hadn’t set foot near the place since that night. Jesus, Cady, where are you?

Georgina glared at her phone, willing it to ring. Then the tannoy announced the last call for her flight. Georgina pushed down the sick feeling in her stomach and smoothing her smart skirt suit over her lithe, tanned legs, picked up her suitcase and click clacked to the gate, every step in her Louboutins taking her further away from her distraught friend. Man, this business trip was going to be a killer, she thought. Cady had better be ok.

Pulling out her passport from her oversized Louis Vuitton handbag, her eyes were drawn to the file containing the details of the business contact she was due to meet in France; the predictable type with family money and a corporate job in daddy’s business with money to burn. And nothing between the ears but Cristal and Ferraris.

Should be a breeze, but why did she not feel excited like normal at the prospect? The high flying job, expense account, great apartment? Any woman would kill to be in her position. Maybe it was just leaving Cady like this. The two friends had been inseparable since they were seven years old and Georgina had moved in with her aunt when her parents had moved to America for their high flying careers, leaving their only daughter behind. They felt it was best to keep her in England, and not disrupt her education or rip her away from her friends and everything familiar at home. Georgina soon realised though, that she was seen as more of an inconvenience to their careers and wining dining lifestyles, and the trips to the States to visit her folks soon became few and far between, firstly due to her parents’ constant excuses and cancellations, and lastly due to Georgina simply refusing to go. Not that her mother or father ever pushed the subject. Georgina could sense their relief each time; now when she spoke to them, it was usually short and sweet and she could hear the happiness in their voices at their corporate, plush, child free life.

They still sent her money every month, but Georgina was making so much from her own job that she never touched it; it just languished in her HISA. The thought of using the money never occurred to her. She saw it as buy off money and would rather have been a poor child than a latch key one. Her Aunt had brought her up well and they were still close, but she had always felt the loss of her parents throughout her teen years. Still, it had taught her the power of total independence, and the importance of never relying on anyone or letting someone into her life. Well, except Cady.

What was Cady going to do now? If Richard wasn’t already dead she would bloody ring his neck herself.

Handing her passport to the perky flight attendant at the gate she smiled to herself at the flight attendant’s obvious jealousy at her expensive clothes and immaculately turned out appearance. She boarded the plane, settled into her seat and buried her head into the contact file for the rest of the flight.

CHAPTER 3

Opening a crusty, puffed up eye, Cady peeked at her surroundings and winced at the pain that shot through her skull upon contact with the sunlight to her eyeball. Ugh. Mouth like sandpaper, check. Brain too big for shaky, dried out head, check. Dry, salty tongue, check.

She gingerly opened her other eye and scanned her surroundings with a fear of dread. The Moet champagne bottles lay on their side on the floor, empty. She was laid on her sofa at home and still wearing her funeral clothes. The TV flickered in the corner, showing the title screen for Bridget Jones’s Diary. Ah. She remembered now. She had come home to the home she shared with Richard, got raucously, rip roaringly drunk, ate her own body weight in crisps and chocolate, and watched Bridget Jones - twice. The first time screaming at Daniel whilst throwing snacks at his smug, philandering face. And the second time, crying her eyes out, thinking how much she and Bridget were like each other; both fumbling through life encountering fuckwits while everyone else seemed to flow through it smugly. Where was her Darcy? In her Austenesque brain, years ago, she thought she had found him in Richard. How laughingly wrong that thought was.

Today was the reading of Richard’s Will. She shuddered at the thought of sitting in a room with Richard’s nearest and dearest after her outburst yesterday. She had not even considered his Will, not until now. What if Richard put something in there about his fancy piece? She couldn’t bear the thought of people pitying her; laughing up their sleeves at the silly secretary who was sharing her husband with half of the legal quarter of Wakefield. Work was another thing she would have to get her head round as well. She couldn’t stay off forever. It had only been a week of course, and no-one would expect her to be back at her desk yet, but she had to return sometime. She was alone now and would need the money more than ever.

She dragged her tired, hung-over body off the overstuffed, manly couch (Richard’s choice). She traversed the room like a newborn giraffe, and clinging to the banister, made her way to the bathroom. The meeting was at 10am and it was 8.56am already. She’d take a cab; she’d be way over the limit and not fit to drive.

CHAPTER 4

Grinding to a halt outside the small row of neat houses, Luke Masters rested his push bike against the brick wall and reached into his battered rucksack for some flyers. The area was nice here, nicer than in town where he lived in a riverside apartment. He liked his apartment, but it was essentially a tiny box within a tower of tiny boxes, and the rent was huge. Wakefield was trying to move with the times, and the result was tiny apartments at huge rents. Still, a bonus of living where he did was that he could see the Hepworth Gallery out of his living room window. He loved that space. It was his second home; the muse for his inspiration. Being an artist himself, albeit a struggling one, he really needed the inspiration, and the cash. Hence today’s visit and dropping leaflets through doors to advertise his painting and decorating, jack-of-all trades services. He could turn his hand to anything, his dad Jack was a practical sort, running his own building firm, and had taught him well. His mother Arabella was the arty-farty type, as dad called her, the creative one; the one who could make a doily out of a piece of string whilst simultaneously knocking up a pineapple upside-down cake and painting her toe nails.

It was his mother’s creative independent streak that had him delivering flyers today, his dad was always offering him work at his firm, and although he loved working alongside his dad, he got more thrills and job satisfaction from drumming up his own little paid jobs and seeing them through to completion. The artist in him loved the painting and decorating too, even if it was just a touch of emulsion and glossing a few dado rails.

As he walked up to number 3, he noticed that the curtains were almost completely drawn shut and there were a number of cards on the bare windowsill. Hmm, bet it was someone’s birthday, he thought, the occupants are probably still in bed pissed.

As he pushed the folded leaflet into the letterbox slot, the door opened roughly, taking half of his finger skin with it.

“JESUS CHRIST! FU…!”

Luke’s profanity died in his throat. The woman opening the door was staring at him with a mad expression on her face, eyebrow arched, lips pulled back in a ‘who the hell are you’ grimace. She was dressed smartly in a simple grey suit, white shirt and red handbag, but she looked tired and drawn. Her blue eyes still had smudged mascara flecks around the edges and her blonde highlighted hair was scraped back into a loose, messy chignon. Glancing down her body, he saw long tight clad pins encased in a pair of nude kitten heels. Nice legs too….

“Er hum, can I help you?”

Luke realised he had been staring at her agog and checking her legs out for what seemed the last five minutes.

He closed his mouth and concentrated on his pitch.

“Hi, yes, er Luke, I mean, I am Luke, sorry, I was just popping this flyer through your door, I am a handyman service you see, can do anything, painting, DIY, my dad is in the building business too, so basically we can do anything between us, big or small so..”

He proffered the flyer. Taking it and glancing at her watch, she smiled thinly. Luke could smell the feminine scent of Davidoff Cool Water, and a not so feminine waft of stale alcohol, and… could he smell cheese?

“I will bear it in mind, Liam, thanks. Not to be rude, but I have to go….”

Stuffing the flyer into her pocket, she turned on her heels and headed to the waiting cab that Luke had not heard arrive.

Luke realised he was staring after the car as it drove out of sight. Wow, she must have had one hell of a birthday party….

Sighing and physically shaking his head to dislodge the memory of those legs, he carried on up the street. He would certainly have something to tell his dad tonight over mum’s shepherd’s pie.

CHAPTER 5

Richard was apoplectic with rage. Dead, how could he be bloody dead!? He didn’t have the time to be dead! What the hell was going on? Wiped out by a taxi on the way back to the office he practically lived at had to be the lamest death ever. Richard was embarrassed. Which is strange, because should he not be feeling something else, sadness, pain, grief? He actually felt pissed off. Pissed off, yet eerily calm and detached from the actual event of his death…as though he were watching it happen to somebody else. He was seriously annoyed that he had gone at this time. He had a new life beckoning. He had so much work to do, Cady to deal with, divorce, new girlfriend to shack up with…. instead he was sat here. In a white, empty room, wearing the Armani suit he had died in. The room wasn’t just white. It was brilliant white, straight out of a scene from Bruce Almighty. He was alone. There was no door, window, person, anything. Why was he here? What now?

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