Page 19 of The Night Before Christmas
‘Don’t you have a party to be going to?’ The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.
James gave a short, almost nervous laugh and glanced at his watch. ‘Oh yes. I suppose I do.’
‘Leave the poor man alone, Fliss,’ said Andrea hastily, throwing her a ‘look’. ‘For all you know, he’d rather be hanging out with us. I mean, the man’s clearly got taste.’
‘Well, this is true.’ James nodded enthusiastically and dived in for a slice of pizza.
Felicity looked from one to the other in amusement. ‘Okay, fine. Stay if you like. No one’s about to kick you out or anything.’
‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ said James through a mouthful of pizza crust.
Thank God for Andrea.
CHAPTER TEN
Andrea and Felicitymet when Felicity was at rock bottom.
Well, one of her many rock bottoms. A particularly rocky bottom, this one.
Felicity had left university with a reasonable degree in English and Art History and no clue at all what she was going to do with it. After her first of several cataclysmic break-ups with Adam, she had resolved once and for all to sort her life out, so on a whim she cut her hours at her not-actually-awful job in the café in town and embarked on trying to find some work that would give her a bit more of a sense of purpose.
She had contemplated teaching for about thirty seconds when she found out they paid a golden handshake just for signing on, but even then, the overly complicated process to get qualified and the prospect at the end of it of having to stand in front of a room full of people and decant some kind of useful information into their brains had paralysed her with fear.
She worked in an insurance call centre instead, which lasted approximately three weeks, before she got fed up with having to tell the manager when she was going to the toilet and how many minutes she intended to take. As if that sort of thing could be predicted.
When things got a bit dire financially she took some hours as a cleaner, but that went horribly wrong when she found something unmentionable under a wardrobe and instead of putting it back, she accidentally left it out for the husband to find. Turns out it was not something the wife had ever used…with him, but only when the man from number 43 popped round for a coffee. Needless to say, she wasn’t welcome in that particular house any longer.
There was a brief highlight when she found a role as a library assistant, which seemed like her dream job for a couple of months because she quite enjoyed moving stacks of books from one place to another, until she was made redundant when the library closed with two days’ notice.
Things got a bit desperate after that. Felicity signed up to various medical experiments but chickened out when she was asked to sign a 400-page waiver document and confirm she didn’t have an allergy to fish in order to give what was supposedly just one vial of blood.
Her last venture was as a rep for a slimming club, but the pay was miserable and the weigh-in sessions each week were even more miserable.
‘So, Karen, you’ve put on half a stone this week. Where do you think you might have gone wrong?’
‘Well, Felicity, I ate two massive pizzas and ten Mars bars, and I enjoyed every second of it.’
‘Um, good for you!’
Besides, because Felicity was naturally slim and petite, none of the members ever fully bought into her story about how she had once needed to lose ten pounds to get into a special dress. They always looked at her with narrowed eyes as she delivered her cringeworthy Tip of the Week from Head Office. (‘If you fancy a chocolate digestive, why not replace it with an apple ora few frozen grapes?’ ‘Try cutting up a chocolate bar into small pieces to make it last longer.’ And other such tripe.)
One particularly low day, she encountered Andrea in a supermarket. They were both alone and both clearly trying to rush to get the experience over as quickly as possible, and when they bumped trollies getting to the checkout, there had very nearly been pistols at dawn. Andrea would have looked quite scary except that she was dressed in an ancient bobbly old fleece with ‘Animal Saviours’ printed on the front, and she was covered head to toe in fur. She even smelled a little bit of cat hair, if Felicity was to be completely honest, like she could do with a good hoovering. But even in that get-up she was surprisingly attractive, with a long salt and pepper plait down her back and striking pale blue eyes.
After a bit of ‘After you’, ‘No, after you’, through gritted teeth, Andrea had let Felicity go first and as she was putting her meagre selections on the conveyor belt – Super Noodles, Pringles and red wine, dinner of champions – she decided to attempt a conversation to clear the air. She asked Andrea what Animal Saviours was, and they were like the magic words. Andrea’s face shone as she told her how she’d set up the charity after finding an abandoned litter of puppies under a hedge and how she had never been without a puppy or a kitten to bottle feed in her house ever since, until one day she came into some money from a deceased aunt and decided to invest in a proper centre.
When it emerged that Andrea had lost her only helper two months before after an unfortunate incident with a hamster, and that she was desperate for someone ‘nice and normal’ to come and cuddle the rescued animals, that was it. By the time they were walking out of the supermarket door together, they had arranged for Felicity to visit. And by the time she visited, shewas already planning a career in animal welfare and considering retraining as a vet.
A year and a half down the line, and although she was a way off being able to afford the vet thing, working at Animal Saviours had given Felicity a real sense of fulfilment at last. That, and her relationship with Andrea, who had become almost like a surrogate mum. Sure, on the surface Andrea was a bit of an animal rescue cliché: ruddy cheeks, long grey hair, partial to a ‘wolf fleece’, living in a tiny cottage in absolute chaos, no apparent form of income and yet complete and utter dedication to the cause. But Andrea was also completely authentic. No side to her, as they say. She was direct, occasionally even abrupt and didn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise, but she was kind too, and completely selfless. She had given Felicity a job when she really needed it and supported her unconditionally ever since. She was, perhaps, the only stable thing in Felicity’s life.
A rare treasure indeed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was a tense evening.
With Adam’s unexpected arrival, the memories of how she had behaved towards him, the way she had treated him – all of it had been unlocked. Her head was full of questions and her stomach was churning.
And James didn’t seem to want to leave. There had been no more mention of the mysterious party he was meant to be going to, and he’d even offered to help with the evening feeds. Felicity watched him carefully as he made his way among the cages, popping food in the bowls and giving each furry recipient a little head scratch or stroke on his way. Her heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vice. She longed to warn him, to tell him to run away from her at 100mph and never look back. What was he doing hanging around her anyway? Surely he had someone else – someone who wasn’t a complete emotional wreck, perhaps even someone who’d won a Nobel Peace Prize – that he could be spending New Year’s Eve with?
