Page 6 of The Trouble With Love

I shut down the laptop and went into town to meet up with Nicholas. Since I’d done all his housework yesterday, today our designated venue was the big park down near the river. Open-air meetings suited Nick: he could run around the trees if he was having an ‘up’ day, or sit brooding on a bench, blurting out all the random stuff that seemed to poison his mind without disturbing other people, on one of his down days. Today he was lounging on the grass, despite the damp, eating a packet of peanuts. I spotted him from the path and tried to assess his mood before I reached him. With Nicholas it was best to know what you were facing before you actually faced it, so you could prepare, and the slouched posture could have meant almost anything, although the fact he was eating meant that this was probably one of the better days — he’d been known to go two weeks without food when his mood took a downward slide, and I’d have to tempt him to eat with treats, like a sickly cat.

‘Hey!’ The simple syllable told me all I needed. Or rather, the inflection. On a bad day, Nick could put a depressive tilt on ‘I won the lottery’. ‘How’s the witching business?’

‘Don’t start.’ I sat beside him, trying not to catch my boot-heels in the mud. ‘Is that jacket new?’ Wow, this was a turn up, Nicholas actually buying clothes. If I didn’t make him change, he’d stay in his favourite outfit all the time. Seriously. All the time. It’s cute when a five-year-old wears his wellies to bed, but when a thirty-two-year-old refuses to take off his parka, it really isn’t. It was some kind of security thing, apparently.

‘Yeah, well, newish.’ He looked at the blazer-style grey wool. ‘Makes me look a bit like a teacher though, doesn’t it?’

He actually looked fragile, with his blond hair and pale eyes and even paler skin. The jacket was slightly too big for his skinny shoulders and too bulky for his frame, it made him look like Paddington Bear without the hat. ‘Nah. It’s cool.’ I took a proffered peanut. ‘So, what’s the excuse for the new wardrobe?’

A shake of the head. I watched two girls, students in their Ugg boots and tight jeans, pass, turn to look over their shoulders at Nick, then nudge each other, giggling. ‘Are they laughing at me?’

‘No, Nicholas, they are checking you out, you daft bugger. Damn but good looks run in our family.’

‘I should have got married.’

Conversational shifts were something I took for granted with my brother. ‘Why?’

‘Because I’m thirty-two. By now Ma and Dad should be grandparents. You should be an auntie and we should have had a big family wedding with cousins everywhere and everyone dancing to La Vida Loca with their elbows.’

I sighed and hugged his arm; padded by the grey wool, it was like hugging a lagged pipe. ‘Plenty of time. You’ll meet the right girl one day. What about that dark-haired lass you used to hang around with when you were just out of hospital? You went to support group together, didn’t you? Whatever happened to her?’

‘She was a jumper.’

‘Woolly and a bit thick?’

‘No.’ And he mimed someone diving from the top of something high. The splat bit was very effective. ‘So, I was thinking . . . when you’re doing your witchy stuff, can you do a spell for me? To help me find someone?’

‘What is this? You’ve never believed in stuff like this before — apart from that time when you thought the squirrels were talking to you. And suddenly witchcraft does it for you?’

He pulled back sharply, like a horse tugging at a rope, with his head coming up in alarm and sending his hair tumbling backwards, leaving his face exposed and little-boyish. ‘Why are you angry, Holl?’

‘I’m not,’ I said, locking down on the sarcasm. If I got angry, Nick got scared. I’d learned to be careful about showing my emotions in front of him. ‘Honestly, I’m not. I’m just confused that so many otherwise sensible people have come over all credulous and naïve all of a sudden. Is there something in the water?’

He gave me one of his sudden grins, all signs of panic gone. ‘But I’ve never been sensible though, have I? Go on, Holl. Do a spell for me.’

‘But I . . .’ Useless. Pointless, even, pleading with a guy whose brain works on an alternative-sanity clause. Absolutely no good telling him that I was only going along to keep Megan out of mischief. ‘Yeah, all right. I’ll do a spell for you.’

‘Great.’ He threw a peanut up and caught it between his teeth. ‘Make it a good one. I mean, no eye of newt stuff — I want a girlfriend not an amphibian.’

‘Yes, Nicholas.’

‘And not ugly. She doesn’t have to be gorgeous but I’d like her to at least be pretty.’

‘All right.’

‘And if she could have enormous . . .’

‘You don’t need witchcraft, you need a mail-order catalogue. Shut up about women, will you?’

‘Okay. Can we go to the café now, I’m hungry.’

Yeah. Why the hell would I ever want kids when I had Nicky to look after?

I parked at the end of the road that led into Barndale Woods. I looked at the state of the forestry track ahead from a professional point of view. The lorries and catering trucks would be able to manage it, no trouble, but crew with little cars like mine would have to park out on the road and walk in. As long as it wasn’t too far, I thought; most of them came up from London and had to be cappuccino’d every five yards or their legs fell off. Pulling my wellies on and setting out, I looked at the track from my point of view. No way did I feel like walking to Vivienne’s through this squicky muck in anything less than a diving suit. Better off coming back for the car and driving the long way round.

After a couple of minutes walking, the conifer belt gave way to much older woodland, dark-barked birches and squat oaks. The trees hid the sky, underfoot the track was squashy with their discarded leaves and their vast trunks muffled sound. Ahead of me a heavy-bodied pheasant clucked its way up into the branches like a panicked housewife trying to get airborne, making me jump, and I hunched deeper into my coat as I kicked my way through the drifts. ‘It’s about a quarter of a mile,’ Kai Rhys had said. ‘You can’t miss it if you go straight on.’

But surely I’d gone further than a quarter of a mile by now. Had the path branched and I’d been concentrating too hard on not getting my boots sucked off to notice? I stopped walking. The bleak strip of sky visible between the skeletal tree-fingers was darkening alarmingly. Somewhere, with impeccable timing, an owl hooted and I wrinkled my nose. These woods were almost self-consciously atmospheric; I suspected that any minute now a little dormouse would run over my foot and twitch its whiskers cutely at me.

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