Page 3 of The Price of Love
‘Good grief, after all these years. You look wonderful, Willow. Absolutely . . .’ and he left a pause, during which he looked me up and down quickly enough not to cause offence, but slowly enough to gratify my ego ‘. . . fantastic.’
‘I . . . er.’ Now I was sure I had most of my bodily functions suppressed, I allowed myself to stare upwards and into his face. Oh. Oh, wow. I couldfeelmy pupils dilating. I really needed Jazz to rush up, slap me and carry me away to the Land of theSane. But the best I could hope for was that he’d stump up in his ridiculous shoes and want to be introduced. Jazz was barely ever within hailing distance of the World of Sanity. ‘Yes. I think I remember you.’ I dropped a shoulder in a shrug of assumed insouciance. ‘You were in a band.’
‘Fresh Fingers. Jeez, yeah, fancy you remembering that.’
Oh boy. He still looked, a few years notwithstanding, exactly the same. His eyes really were clear violet. He still had cheekbones like a hungry vampire and his hair was the slightly long, slightly curly blueprint of perfection it always had been. Shit. This man had been my mental benchmark for boyfriends for ten years and this was the first time he’d acknowledged my existence. In fact, this was the closest I’d ever stood to him, if you don’t count the time I managed to press myself up against him in a crush at the Student Union bar. That makes me sound really stalkerish, doesn’t it? I wasn’t, honestly. Just a bit . . . well, obsessed, probably.
‘Well. What a coincidence, bumping into you like this. It’s my first time back in York for, what, about eight months, and the first thing that happens is I meet up with someone I haven’t seen for ten years. Amazing.’ His gaze floated up towards my face again, then glanced behind me. ‘Look, sorry, mustn’t keep you. Your boyfriend is looking daggers at me and you’re obviously in a hurry.’ He waved a casual hand (gorgeous, long musician’s fingers, no wedding ring, we are talking Jude Lawat leastcasting-wise) at my jacket slung over my shoulder and half-turned away.
‘He . . . it . . . that’s Jazz. Not my. Er, he’s not.’ I scrambled around in my brain for a coherent sentence. ‘It was nice to. Too. To see you again. Too.’
‘Hey, then, perhaps we could catch up sometime? I’d really like to find out what the old crowd’s been getting up to.’
‘The old . . . oh, yes, right. I, I live in York so . . .’ The ‘old crowd’? Either he’d forgotten that the old crowd had packed themselves so tightly around him that I’d metaphorically been stuck in the turnstiles, or he was mistaking me for someone else.
‘You stayed in York? Cool. Here, give me your number.’ He brought out his phone and I berated myself a little bit for noticing it was the brand new model. I wondered what he did these days, the trendy clothes and up-to-the-minute phone seemed to indicate that he was massively successful at it, whatever it was. I tried to hide my own phone’s ‘two generations old’ casing in my shaking hands as I got it out to check my number — I was so rarely asked for it that I didn’t know it off by heart. ‘Great. Thanks. I’ll call soon, yeah?’
I could hardly breathe as I fell through the door he held open for me, and my treacherous stomach felt squeezed and heavy like a rubber knapsack full of leaking batteries. Slowly, carefully, I walked home, ignoring the bile which chattered away at the back of my teeth.
Chapter Two
My house technically belongs to my parents, but they’d handed all the responsibility for its upkeep on to me when they decided to go off on the longest hippy trail in recorded history. None of the others had wanted it. My sister Bree and her husband lived in an old rectory in a village north of the city. Of my other siblings, Flint lived in Beijing, Ocean had a flat over his bookbinding business in Harrogate and Ash, well, of all of us Ash had most inherited our parents’ free spirit and tended towards no-fixed-abodeness. Although I gathered that an orderly queue had formed of people only too willing to provide him with a roof over his head and, most importantly, a mattress under his back. He writes for travel blogs, which means he gets to go to places all over the world and neglects to keep in contact from any of them.
I’d better get it off my chest now, before you meet him. Ash is not only my brother, but my twin. I hate, resent and adore him in roughly equal measures. He irritates me so much that it makes my head itch. He’s mouthy, stroppy, sulky and permanently late — absolutely nothing like me. Really. He thinks he’s ‘hip and happening’.Ithink that thirty-two is far too old to be using phrases like ‘hip and happening’.
And then there’s the name thing. Our parents, relentless children-of-nature that they are, had decided that they wanted four children to name after the four elements: earth, air, water and fire. Along in due course came Flint, Breeze, Ocean and Ash. I suppose it was no one’s fault, more of a cosmic joke, that their last-born fire-child turned out to be children. They were a bit stumped when it came to naming me. Bree, apparently, wanted me to be called Cinderella, but shewasonly two at the time. Then someone pointed out that Ash is also a tree and the rest, as they say, will be played by Cameron Diaz.
As I turned into my street, I could tell they were all already here. Flint was staying with me until he flew back to China, and his little black hired Smart car was parked neatly aligned with the front door. Ocean’s van was in front, Bree had borrowed her husband Paddy’s second car (a convertible BMW, which should tell you all you need to know abouthim) and Ash’s current vehicle of choice, a 750cc Yamaha motorbike, was corralled in my front garden, bridled with the weeds I hadn’t had time to clear from the walls since summer.
They were all seated around the dining table and they were, as usual, arguing.
‘I don’t know what you’ve got to complain about, Flint, he’s left me Booter and Snag, and what the hell am I supposed to do with a couple of smelly spaniels?’ My sister Bree patted her barely visible bump. ‘This is due in four months!’ With her smooth hair tied up and her work suit on — she’d only been able to spare half an hour for the will reading — she looked like one of those stock model photographs in a ‘working whilst pregnant’ article.
‘Complain? Oh, now why should I want to complain about being left an allotment on the outskirts of York when I live on a different bloody continent!’ Flint shouted back. ‘What did he expect me to do, fly over twice a week to spray the cabbages?’
‘No, but this is different, this is a baby.’ Bree patted her stomach again as though Flint might have missed the point. ‘Dogs are all germy. Especially those two.’
Ash wandered in from the kitchen at the same time as I entered from the hallway and we exchanged our trademark glare before sitting down. Ash had a bottle of wine and was drinking from it without benefit of a glass. He only did it because he knew how much it annoyed me. ‘Suppose you’re happy with what Ganda left you.’ He pointed the neck of the bottle at me. ‘At least yours is fucking portable.’
‘Well, I’m hoping some of the luck he said it brought him will rub off on me.’ I took the coffee which Flint passed me and smiled at Ocean who was, as ever, sitting listening to the tirade.
‘How can it be lucky, for fuck’s sake?’ Ash waved the bottle now. ‘Tell me in which context it is lucky to carry your nose in a matchbox.’
‘You’re only angry because he left you twelve pairs of rubber boots. You could always open your own fetish-wear shop.’
There was a sound of a throat clearing from across the table and we stopped bickering to await Ocean’s pronouncement. He rarely spoke, our brother. It was a family rumour that he hadn’t uttered a single word until he was four and had then said ‘balloon angioplasty’ and frightened our mother half to death.
‘I think’ — and Ocean looked around at us all, with his mismatched eyes, one blue and one brown — ‘that we’re just disappointed that Ganda didn’t leave us any money. That’s why we’re bickering.’ Then, as though embarrassed that he’d spoken, he looked down at the table and let his long hair fall over his reddening face. He was a man who’d been born to the largely solitary career of bookbinding and found social interaction, of any kind, acutely painful. No wonder Ash tended to refer to him as ‘the oldest virgin in York’. But he was clever, Ocean, and astute. Disappointment was the real reason for this whole gathering of the clan, or rather, disillusionment. None of us needed the money, as such, we’d just always thought . . . to be honest, I don’t know what we’d thought. Although we were now all clearly beginning to think that our beloved grandfather had been bonkers.
‘Ganda never had any money to leave, though,’ I said. ‘I should know.’
They all turned to look at me. Even Ocean.
‘Yeah,’ Ash muttered. ‘We’ve kinda wondered about that. You were his favourite, you’ve got to admit, Will, and all he leaves you is a mouldy old body part?’
‘Maybe’ — heads swivelled again as Ocean spoke — ‘he gave us what he did for a reason.’
‘I reckon he gave Flint that allotment so that he’d have something to come back to.’ I looked over at our eldest brother, fussily tidying up the fallen leaves of my spider plant on the window ledge. ‘You’re always saying you’ll come back to Yorkshire one day, aren’t you? Perhaps he was making a point. This is where your roots are. It’s the kind of terrible pun Ganda used to love.’
