Page 22 of The Trouble With Love

‘Well, a bloke did fire a gun next to me.’ I reluctantly conceded that this was probably the most exciting moment in the past week, although it hadn’t exactly been the fun event I’d been expecting. The huge adrenaline rush that had been Kai’s kiss was none of their business. ‘But he was a gamekeeper. Or something.’

‘So. No, you know, thrilling things? Nobody whisking you away to the Côte d’Azur for a weekend?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice. Anyone else getting anything?’

The other three shook their heads.

‘Maybe it didn’t work,’ Isobel said. ‘I don’t mind, really. Being part of this group has been so good for me, being able to get out and chat and do something other than sit at home with Mum and Dad watching wildlife shows. If the spell doesn’t ever work, I still feel like I’ve gained such a lot.’

I rolled my eyes. Any moment now and they’d start embracing and calling each other ‘sister’.

‘Well, I think it’s damn shabby. And I blame you, Holly, I really do.’ Vivienne snatched the scones away, into another dimension probably.

‘Hang on, how is this my fault? I only came along to keep Megan company. I didn’t even have a proper wish!’

Isobel and Eve also interceded on my part. ‘Perhaps there was something wrong with the spell?’

‘Yes, could the wording have been wrong? Were we meant to put our wishes in like that?’

Vivienne shook her head. Her cropped hair was showing root growth, I noticed, about half an inch of brown sprinkled with grey was lying along her parting. The vivid red hid it well but she’d not had her hair done in a while. ‘My part was perfect. It must have been some of the ingredients that were wrong, and, Holly, you supplied the major part of them.’

My teeth ached with the urge to say ‘but it’s all just pretend. Magic isn’t real.’ They completely believed their own fabrication, and it would have been useless to point out that we’d used photographs and computer printouts and surely that wasn’t in the spirit of any branch of magic.

‘Okay, well,’ I said into my cup, ‘I did my best.’ Maybe it was because I’d had fun getting all the bits and pieces that it hadn’t worked. Perhaps it all had to be dark and joyless and rocking on the edge of the razor blade between sanity and talking squirrels to be properly occult.

‘And we haven’t really given it very long, have we?’ Isobel-Pollyanna went on. ‘I mean, we’re supposed to be channelling earth-energies into our wishes, well, at this time of year earth-energies must be a bit low. I think we should wait a while before we write it off. Maybe do some more visualisation up on the hill?’

‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘I mean, let’s let the bad weather pass first. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t fancy sitting in six inches of snow with nothing but an IKEA blanket between me and anal frostbite.’

Eve shuddered. ‘I’m with Holly. Let’s wait and see.’

Vivienne twitched her long nose. ‘Well, if that’s the opinion of the group.’

We all nodded vigorously, and I checked around for the scones.

‘All right. But we can really only spare a short while before we have to link ourselves in to the rhythms of the earth mother once more. We can’t ignore her and yet expect her to bend to our dominion.’

Ah, bollocks, I thought. But it’s hurting no one. And she’s providing scones. So I joined in the nodding, and refilled my cup while they were all hugging.

Chapter Twelve

So, yeah. Drug article done and posted, not exactly Pulitzer prize stuff but it makes a point and makes it well, I reckon. New product, mostly untested but useful results so far, launched on kids with problems so complex that . . . hey. Nothing to do with this, with us. It’s just . . . gods, sometimes I wish I could show you what I do. Hold up something I’ve done that’s made a difference, changed something. I wish I could tell you how I’ve sweated and hung in for something because I believed in it . . .

Part of the problem, I guess. I want you to know me. I want someone to know me, not to take this outer shell as gospel but to get through, to understand . . . and you can’t. You never will. But now I know, that’s what’s behind so much of what I do, why I drive them away with my behaviour, my bastard act; I want someone to make the effort, to put the work in — I know that now. And it’s because of her, because of Holly, when she started plugging in to some kind of weird psychological shit, me not wanting anyone to get inside my head — that kind of crap. Okay, yeah, like I said before, her asking . . . it threw me for a loop, y’know? Like it was the first time I realised that no one was interested in my hopes, my dreams, and it took this girl with her Merlot hair and the kind of stare that you normally see on something nocturnal, it took her to . . .

And I couldn’t take it. Scary, huh? That thing I want so much from another person, that thing I wanted from you and could never have, that understanding? Because, I guess, so much of what I’ve done has been so shitty that the only way to deal with it is to pretend that it’s how I am. Not a conscious choice made to keep people distant when I judge them unworthy, but something that I can’t help. Something I can blame you for: if you were here I wouldn’t be like that. If you’d . . . nah. I’ve judged you and judged you so many times in my head. Found you guilty, condemned you, I’ve argued with you and pleaded so hard that I’d cry in the night and . . . No more. It is what it is, and I am what I am. And what I am is a coward, a sad, vindictive heap of terror. I don’t deserve understanding. So I cut her loose. Killed it. Who needs someone giving it the full MI5 treatment, trying to drag your background out of you when all you want to do is kill the dark, not illuminate it. I don’t want light, not now. Afraid of what I’ll see perhaps, if someone holds the light up to my face; what might be operating now behind these eyes? Nah. Just prefer the shadows, me, where I can watch and wait and listen, pick up the tail-lines of stories until I can follow the scent back to the origin and then blow it all open for anyone to read about. I’ve got a good life here, things running nicely, all under control. I’m cool, it’s all fine. Yeah. It’s all fine.

Chapter Thirteen

And then things got weird.

Well, no, first things got cold.

The wind swung round to the north, and while it had felt like having stitches in your face before, now it felt like it was inflicting the injuries which would need stitches. ‘It’s like being attacked by Edward Scissorhands,’ as Cerys put it, during one of her ten-second outings. She was so huge she couldn’t get behind the wheel of the Jeep any more and had to be driven by Kai with the passenger seat back as far as it would go. She wound the window down and called it ‘getting fresh air’. The news had come through that her flat was taking rather longer to get straight than it should have; apparently her tosser was some kind of second cousin to the many wankers I’d dated, and had trashed the place before eviction took effect. Cerys had spent a morning swearing and then resigned herself to staying with Kai until just before the twins arrived. It was going to be touch-and-go, but she reckoned she’d be back home in time for the labour twinges.

Kai behaved as though he’d never kissed me, as though the whole of that strange time in the Jeep had never happened. He behaved, in fact, as though I were a friend of Cerys’s, and rarely hung around when I went over. If I spoke directly to him he’d answer me politely enough, but I never saw those unusual eyes light up with pleasure or amusement the way they had the night we’d searched for the spell ingredients. He behaved now like a man who’s carrying his entire life in an invisible suitcase strapped to his back, weighed down and weary.

And then it really got cold. A week after my visit to Vivienne’s, it started to snow. Brief flurries at first, then settling, until a couple of inches lay underfoot. It was picturesque, and everyone started predicting a white Christmas, never mind that it was a month away. Then it got grubby, the buses ran late and trains were cancelled and everyone got annoyed.

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