Page 50 of The Next Chapter

To Do:

Get life back on track

Consider finding therapist

Bond with Elton

Pay off taxi

Get on top of WhatsApp messages

Get on top of emails

Seb picks me up in Fort William early Sunday morning. The drive home passes in a blur, mostly because I’m trying to sob quietly the entire time. At least the fucking roof is up.

I’m also back to puking.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Seb asks.

I shake my head against the window. ‘Not yet.’

In a rare concession to my feelings, Seb doesn’t push it. We’re both exhausted so we’re forced to stop and spend Sunday night in a Premier Inn. It’s neat and ordered but it feels bare and clinical compared to Lola’s hotel.

Finally, at some point on Monday, we pull up outside my house.

‘Thank you, for coming to get me.’ I sniff.

‘You’re leaving me a whole house when you die, it’s the least I can do.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ I open the car door.

‘Tomorrow?’ he asks.

‘For work.’

That makes him laugh at least.

‘Lily, you just sobbed and puked for a day and a half straight. Quite frankly, I didn’t realize it was possible for someone to cry for so bloody long. You really think you’ll be in a fit state to come to work tomorrow?’

I do another sad little sniff. My head is aching; quite possibly I’ve cried myself into a state of dehydration.

I can’t even settle on what exactly I’m crying about.

Lola and everything she went through, Lola and her leaving me, Noah, Mum and Dad – it’s all just one giant ball of messy emotion in my brain.

‘You should take some time,’ Seb finishes.

‘No!’ I might be completely confused about everything that’s happened, but if there’s one thing that I’m absolutely sure of, it’s that the best thing I can do is to get back to normal.

Get back to my nice, normal, ordered life here.

Hopefully, in time (and with possibly no small amount of therapy) what happened on Skye this summer will come to feel like a fairly potent fever dream.

The sort of story I recount when I’m in my nineties and people tap my hand in a way that suggests they don’t quite believe me.

‘I don’t want to take some time.’ I think of my mound of washing. ‘Or at least not much time. I want to dive straight back into it. I have a meeting with Mr Vandergilden on Wednesday, I can’t miss that.’

‘Well, that’s bound to make you feel better.’

‘I’ll see you Wednesday,’ I say firmly.

Seb rolls his eyes before getting out to help me unload the boot. I really can’t ever let him die; I don’t know what I’d do without him.

‘Call me tomorrow if you need me?’ he asks. I’m stood in the doorway, the detritus from Skye piled around my feet.

‘I will, thank you. I think I’ll sleep for a week after this.’

Seb nods. ‘We can talk on Wednesday, but only if you’re up to it. Please tell me you’ll call in if you aren’t.’

‘I will,’ I lie. ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

He narrows his eyes at me. ‘Rest up, Lily. Call if you need me.’

I must be giving off a seriously unhinged aura. I’m not sure Seb has ever been so consistently nice to me. Well, except for when Dad died that is.

‘I will do. See you later.’

I shut the door and stand in the dark hallway on my own.

I’m so bone tired by everything I trudge straight up the stairs, where I find Elton sprawled on my bed.

I don’t have the energy to worry that to the naked eye he looks to have gained weight.

Or about the fact that he’s squarely on my pillow, the only place in the house he’s not meant to sleep.

Maybe he wanted to feel close to me while I was gone.

The thought of Elton missing me sets me off again. Seb’s right, how can it be possible for a person to cry this much?

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow I’ll get everything sorted out in my head. For now, I just lay down, careful not to disturb Elton, and fall into a fitful, disturbed sleep.

I wake with a pounding headache and a mouthful of cat fur.

Elton had been reluctant to share what I now presume to be his pillow. I’d woken several times to him, intentionally or not, suffocating me with his girth. Now he’s flopping his tail with force over my face.

I roll away after another flop smacks me across my forehead.

Pleased to have more space, Elton spreads out. I check my phone. 6am. I’ve been asleep (if you can call it that) for four hours.

But you know what, if I’m going to start getting things back on track, there is no time like the present.

I need a plan.

Maybe a three-point plan.

Though that sounds way too much like the three-pronged plan I’d had with Noah. My time on Skye can’t have taken planning from me, anything but planning!

I force myself out of bed. In the morning light I’m unfortunately unable to miss my reflection in the mirror above my dressing table.

I look like a victim of Dracula. How can someone spend so long in the sun and come back paler than ever? There are deep dark circles under my eyes. I think I might have actual foliage in my hair.

On Skye, I blended right in, but here, I’m all out of place in my white bedroom.

No, I’m not going to dwell on where I fit. Chances are, I don’t fit anywhere. Instead, wrapping myself in my dressing gown, I head downstairs, deciding that it’s now or never when it comes to tackling the mountain of washing that I’ve brought back with me.

Washing, it turns out, is an excellent distraction from fleeing your birth mum and the man you’re pretty sure you were falling for in the dead of night and instead sleeping with your dead dad’s cat who hates you.

I’m a woman possessed. There are piles of colour co-ordinated washing raring to go.

Of course today would be the day when the weather finally breaks and I can’t hang anything out on the line.

Not to be deterred, I drag out my drying rack.

I add fabric softener and get a little thrill of pleasure at the fact.

I read an article once that millennials were abandoning fabric softener, fools.

The first load on, I think that I might as well clean the house and check on all the plants.

And that’s how Mr Cains finds me at 8am. Scrubbing the wonky skirting boards in the hallway. Rubber gloves and dressing gown on and it’s quite possible there’s still tree in my hair.

‘Oh hello, Lily, I didn’t realize you were home.’

I smile at him from where I’m kneeling on the floor. ‘Yes, yes, I’m back. Thank you for feeding Elton. I should have messaged, and now you’ve come all the way over here, I’m so sorry. But me and Elton, we have it all under control.’

Elton, the absolute traitor, comes thumping down the stairs to miaow at Mr Cains. So far, Elton has not deigned to recognize my presence. So much for us bonding.

‘There’s a good boy, Elton. Isn’t it nice that your mum’s home?’ He strokes him behind his ear. I’d lose a finger.

‘Elton’s taking some time to readjust,’ I declare grandly. ‘But we’ll be getting on like a house on fire in no time at all, won’t we, Elton?’

Elton hisses at me as the end of his tail makes the slightest contact with my leg when he tries to get around me to move towards the kitchen, presumably in search of food.

‘Is, er, everything okay, Lily?’ Mr Cains asks. ‘Only you don’t seem quite yourself.’

It’s because I haven’t stopped scrubbing. Most people stop scrubbing when they have guests. I sit back on my ankles.

It’s quite possible that I’m high on the fumes of all the cleaning products. The house is cleaner than it’s ever been. It’s almost enough to make me forget about everything. Almost.

The only thing I haven’t cleaned is Mum’s piano under the giant throw. I know my limits. Seeing Mum’s piano is a hard limit.

I wave the bottle of bleach I have in one rubber-gloved hand at him. ‘Course I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be fine? It’s not like anything happened that could make me not fine.’

Mr Cains looks at me for a moment longer.

‘Well, if you’re sure you’re fine…’

‘Never in human history has a person been finer than me!’ I say, in such an unhinged, manic way it undermines my sentiments entirely.

‘Okay, Lily,’ Mr Cains says cautiously, and if we still did it, there’d be a chance some men in white coats would arrive in the near future to drag me off to the asylum.

‘Ooh, and before I forget, I’m going to get on with some food prep later. I’ll drop some of your favourites off.’

‘You know I always appreciate the sentiment, Lily love, but don’t pressure yourself on my account.’

‘I’m not, honestly, it’s just really important that I keep busy. It… helps, you know.’

He nods. ‘I felt the same after Amber died. That’s when I really took it up a level, with my magic.’

Oh god, he thinks that this is all because of Dad.

I nod along. ‘You’ve just got to do whatever you can, to get through.’

‘You know I was there, the day your mum and dad brought you home?’

‘You were?’ I did not know this. Dad had told me how happy they were to bring me home, about how they’d bought everything you could possibly buy for a baby, and a ton of stuff that they never even got out of the box.

But now, the imagined memory is tainted by the thought of Lola sitting in that hospital bed after she handed me over – how alone she must have felt.

Mr Cains nods. ‘They were so happy to have you, Lily. Never seen two people happier.’ He’s trying to make me feel better, but he’s just making me feel worse.

‘I was really lucky,’ I tell him. Unlike Lola, who wasn’t lucky when it came to her parents.

There’s an actual, physical pain then, somewhere around my middle.

I close the door on Mr Cains. ‘Thanks again for looking after Elton. Okay, bye, bye, see you soon.’