We Belong Together Read online

  I returned to the kitchen to find a steaming mug sitting on the table, opposite where he sat with a matching mug, the baby next to him in the highchair giving the impression of a very unorthodox interview panel. Hat and hood off, I could see they both had the same thick, tufty dark hair. I gingerly lowered myself into a seat, before taking a few sips of scalding, sugary tea while I fought through the fog to come up with something to say.

  ‘Thanks again. I dread to think what would have happened if you’d not arrived when you did.’

  The man shrugged. ‘You’d have slept a bit longer until someone else came along.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t have lived at Damson Farm.’ I paused, questioningly. ‘I presume you do live here?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’m kind of surprised you brought me here without asking any questions about who I am.’

  ‘You weren’t in a fit state to answer any questions.’

  I took another gulp of tea, my hand barely able to lift the mug up to my mouth.

  ‘So, now that you’ve warmed up and are sitting down, why are you here?’

  ‘I’m a friend of Charlie’s. Charlie Perry.’

  His eyebrows raised slightly, before he quickly pulled his features back into neutral. ‘She’s not here.’

  I felt a rush of relief that at least he knew who she was, that this was the right Damson Farm, that she hadn’t made the whole thing up to cover up a boring childhood living in a three-bed detached house in the suburbs. ‘Well, I guess that’s not so surprising. Do you know when she’ll be back, or have any contact details so I can let her know I’m here?’

  ‘Given you’re having to ask me that, you clearly aren’t that good a friend.’

  ‘The last number she gave me hasn’t been working. I assumed she’d lost her phone again.’

  ‘Look, no offence but Charlie made a lot of friends. If you’re someone she met in a hostel somewhere, or worked in a bar with for a few weeks, then I’m sorry but she’s not here. I can give you the number for a garage who’ll tow your car to wherever you’re headed next, and drop you there once you’ve finished your tea.’ He bent down to pick up the crinkly fabric doll the baby had gleefully thrown onto the floor, then stood up, making it clear that I had finished my drink, whether I’d actually finished it or not.

  It took nearly everything I’d got, but I heaved myself to my feet, too, gripping the chair with both hands.

  ‘I know Charlie makes friends everywhere she goes, which is a stupid number of places. I know she drops everything and moves on after a random conversation or an out-of-date flyer catches her attention. I know that she disappears completely for months at a time and then turns up again as if she’d never been gone. I also know that this is the only place she’s ever called home. I know this because she’s invited me here tons of times during the twelve years we’ve been friends. The last time I heard from her she said she’d be staying here for at least a year, probably a lot longer. And this time I believe she meant it.’

  He eyed me silently for a long moment, his hand reaching up to stroke the scar on the side of his face. ‘Eleanor?’

  ‘Yes! Yes, I’m Eleanor.’

  ‘Okay.’ He let out a long, slow sigh, and for the first time I noticed how tired and drawn he looked. His hazel eyes were utterly forlorn. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, like this, after you’ve clearly had a crap night. But Charlie died.’

  What?

  The words engulfed me in a torrent of devastation – shock and anguish crashing up through my stomach and lungs, my heart, until it hit my brain.

  Breathless, distraught, I could only reply with a gaping mouth and shaking head before everything went blurry and then black.

  2

  I woke to find myself lying on a sofa, an older woman peering at me, one hand on my wrist. A mass of curly salt and pepper hair framed her head in a huge circle, and glasses dangled on a chain over her thick aran sweater.

  ‘Ah! There you are!’ She offered a brief smile. ‘I hear you’ve had a bit of a night of it.’

  I swivelled one eye to see the man loitering behind her, his expression tight.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Damson Farm?’ I managed to mumble. A living nightmare?

  ‘Excellent. I’m Doctor Ziva Solomon. Can you tell me your name?’

  I closed my eyes, concentrating so I got the right one. ‘Eleanor Sharpley.’

  ‘Ah-ah, keep your eyes open. Look at me. Watch my finger. Very good. What day is it today, Eleanor?’

  She asked me a few more questions along those lines – keep looking at me! – while simultaneously prodding about my person, before nodding briskly. ‘Bumps and bruises, but nothing serious. I’d put the fainting down to exhaustion, shock and excessively low blood sugar. What do you reckon?’

  I reckoned I’d feel much better if I was allowed to close my eyes and lie here in peace for a few weeks.

  ‘I’m prescribing more sweet tea, some decent painkillers and a round of hot toast.’ She placed a cool, wet cloth on my head and it felt like I’d died and gone to heaven…

  Died… Someone’s died. Charlie. Oh, Charlie.

  My face crumpled, the pain in my forehead intensifying as the tears began to flow, my heart contracting with sorrow. Charlie had died and I hadn’t even known. I’d assumed… just thought that… no one had told me… my best friend and she’d gone… I hadn’t even been at her funeral, said goodbye…

  Pelted by one realisation after another, I curled over and gripped the cushion beside me, wrapping myself around it as if that could protect me.

  I sobbed, probably wailed a few times, dribbled snot and tears and goodness knows what else on the cushion. But I couldn’t care less that I was in a strange house, with a strange man and his matching baby, pouring out unbridled emotion while crumpled on his sofa.

  The doctor was there for a while, patting my shoulder and telling me how sorry she was. And then she was gone, and it was just the man, pulling up a low table and placing tea and toast on it, jiggling the baby on his hip and offering me a piece of kitchen roll.

  A good while later, and by that point I could have failed the doctor’s ‘what day is it’ test, my tears dribbled to a stop. I took a few slow breaths, wiped my face with the remains of the kitchen roll clutched in my hand, pushed my hair off my face and creaked to a sitting position.

  I looked at the tea. The man stood up from where he’d been sitting in an office chair. ‘I’ll make you a fresh one.’

  I managed a weak smile as he nodded at the baby, curled up in one of those baby bouncers, head tilted to one side, chewing absentmindedly on her fist as she stared at me. ‘Can you keep an eye on this one?’

  Not waiting for me to reply, he grabbed the toast plate and disappeared. I took the time to appraise the room – too small to be the main living room in a house this big, it looked like a sort of nursery-study hybrid, with a desk underneath the large sash window opposite me, covered in papers, mugs and other mess. The wall to one side contained bookshelves stuffed with books, folders and other random items. The wall across from that had a changing table pushed up against it, on top of which was a mountain of tiny clothes, a packet of nappies, several of which were spilling out, wipes, bottles, a dummy and other baby related paraphernalia. The floor was relatively empty, but a pile of clutter in the space between the desk and the changing table implied that this was because everything had been shoved out of the way to create a path to the sofa. The walls were bare, the paintwork shabby. The grimy window was framed by a wonky blind. Looking up, a bare bulb swung amongst trails of cobwebs. This room was worse than the kitchen. Full of stuff, but empty of all warmth or beauty.

  The man returned, placing a mug in my hand and fresh toast on the table.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’m so sorry for ruining your day like this.’ Sorry, and embarrassed.

  ‘And I’m sorry you had to hear such bad
news straight after crashing your car.’

  ‘If you could call that garage, I’ll get out of your way as soon as possible.’ I took a tentative bite of thick, buttery toast, resisting the urge to groan in relief.

  ‘I already called. The car’s… not fine… but shall we say, no worse than it was before rolling into the ditch. They’ll drop it off later.’

  ‘Thanks. You’ve been unnecessarily kind.’

  He shrugged, burying his face in his own mug. ‘Charlie would have done the same.’

  ‘Probably.’

  He looked up, the faint tug of a smile on his lips. ‘And then cooked you a three-course dinner before inviting you to move in.’

  ‘She’d have burned the dinner, though, left the kitchen a total wreck and ordered a pizza.’

  He full-on smiled then. ‘That sounds about right.’

  I chewed slowly on another bite of toast, working up to my question. ‘Um… can I ask what happened?’

  ‘How she died?’ He sighed, putting the mug down and deftly plucking the baby out of her chair and tucking her into his chest before continuing. For the first time I clicked that this could be Charlie’s baby, but before I could ask, her dad spoke again. ‘This is Hope. Charlie’s daughter. She was born in June.’

  A girl. Dressed in a green top and blue trousers, it had been impossible to be sure. I mean, she was incredibly cute, with thick hair and huge eyes, a tiny nose and round, rosy cheeks, but don’t most babies look that pretty?

  ‘Charlie had… struggled with being pregnant. And afterwards, she got worse. We discovered later it was post-partum psychosis. She was last seen by the old Ferrington Bridge. They found her a few days later.’ He shrugged, face blank, but his voice had cracked on the words. ‘We’ll never know what happened, but I’ve reached the conclusion it doesn’t make any difference.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ My voice hitched, but what else was there to say? I was sorry for him, desperately sorry for Charlie who had wrestled with what she called the ‘evil brain-death demons’ for most of her life, and at the time she had most needed to live, they had won. Sorry for the rest of us who had to live on without her. But sorry most of all for this beautiful little girl who would grow up without her mother.

  Charlie had saved me, from myself, and now I felt awash with regret that when she’d needed someone to talk her down – when she most needed someone to believe in her, I’d been oblivious. Slurping champagne and stuffing myself with cuttlefish tortellini, swanning about in my free clothes and worrying about how many millions of people liked me. When I should have been worrying about one of the very tiny number of people who loved me.

  The pain of grief, so much harder to bear than my superficial scrapes, my aching head and stiff muscles, settled over me like a thick, black blanket.

  And there it stayed.

  I’d met Charlie at Birmingham University. Under different circumstances I’m sure we’d never have spoken – for no other reason than she wouldn’t have noticed me. But we were both studying English, both had flats in the same accommodation block, and by the time we’d walked back from our first tutorial together, she’d basically decided we were friends.

  She invited herself over to my room for a drink, stopping off at the student shop for me to buy a bottle of vodka and some Coke, when I admitted that all I had was teabags. I then had to admit I only had one mug and no glasses.

  After rifling through my sparse wardrobe, inspecting the solitary photograph on my desk, she plonked herself down on the bed, poured a generous splash of vodka into the glasses she’d pilfered from the shared kitchen and made her pronouncement:

  ‘Eleanor Sharpley, you are in dire need of my help.’

  I didn’t disagree.

  ‘But that’s perfect, because I think I need you, too. We’re an ideal match.’

  She held up her glass to chink mine, before taking a long gulp.

  ‘Firstly, why don’t you have any stuff? Your capsule wardrobe says, “highly organised, overly sensible person”. But who comes to uni with one mug and no glasses? It’s like you didn’t even consider the possibility of having a friend over.’

  ‘I had to bring whatever I could carry on the train.’ And no, I genuinely never expected to have anyone over.

  ‘No parents to drive you?’ She leant back against the wall, sweeping long, silvery-platinum hair off her forehead.

  ‘They don’t have a car. I don’t think they know how to drive. And they work all weekend. It never crossed their mind to come with me.’ It hadn’t really crossed mine either until I’d arrived the first day of freshers’ week and seen the queue of cars, jolly parents humping crates and suitcases, boxes of food and duvets up the stairs. My mum had handed me a tenner and a tub of scones and got back to scrubbing the bannisters.

  It wasn’t that they didn’t care, they just didn’t get it. Me leaving home and becoming a student was a world they couldn’t imagine, let alone understand. They were sort of proud of their only child, but they were also bemused I hadn’t been content to stay on and help run the Tufted Duck bed and breakfast they owned on the edge of Lake Windermere.

  ‘So, tell me one fact that sums up all I need to know about your life so far.’

  I took my first tentative sip of vodka and Coke, blinking as the burn melted into a warm buzz in my belly. ‘Up until last week, I shared a bedroom with my grandma.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I had the top bunk.’

  Charlie burst out laughing. ‘Perfect! That’s brilliant! It explains everything! Did you pack up her side of the wardrobe by mistake?’ She leant over and nudged my arm, to soften the tease. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love you already, but you look like you brought your old school uniform.’

  Um, that’s because I did? It was the only jacket I owned, and I might need to look smart for an interview or something. I’d picked the school badge off, of course.

  ‘So, what’s your fact?’ A couple more sips gave me the courage to return the question.

  Charlie thought for a while, twirling a strand of hair around one finger. ‘I ended up spending my first night here in the Aston Villa football team executive area in some nightclub. Only I lost my bag, with my phone and bank card in it. I’ve got about three days’ worth of food, if I’m careful. If the farm still had a landline I could call home and ask my parents to send me some money, but nobody bothers memorising mobile numbers, do they?’

  ‘Can’t you go to the bank and sort something out?’

  She shrugged. ‘I can’t remember which bank it is. I just used the app.’

  ‘Okay. I think we can probably come up with something before you starve to death.’

  ‘Awesome!’ Charlie topped up our glasses for another toast.

  And that about summed up the next three years of our lives, and a good few years after that. Charlie was my first real friend, and it turned out that despite her befriending everyone, I was hers, too. She careened through her first year, always breathless from rushing in late, if she managed to turn up at all. She joined half the clubs in the university, and left them all again. Sang in the musical one term, sprinted in the athletics club the next. Holidays and weekends were one adventure after another, whether that was a part-time job as a roadie for a rock band, or a day trip to London that evolved into a week in Paris. She lived for the moment, making the most of all the ones she could. Because, all too frequently, with shocking speed and devastating impact, the evil brain demons would come crashing in. She’d disappear for days, sometimes weeks, on one occasion two months at a time. Buried under her duvet, her colour extinguished by the darkness. Her eyes empty, words lifeless.

  I would call her mum, who’d sometimes come and bundle her back to Damson Farm, the place where she’d always eventually find some peace again, and gradually her joy would return like the apple blossom in her orchard after a long, hard winter.

  We swapped her clothes for my lecture notes. Party invitations for study sessions. Towards the end of the first y
ear, she cajoled me out on my first date, followed by my first kiss with a lovely boy who I think only went along with it because he was besotted with Charlie. She spent one Easter and a few weeks the following summer working at the Tufted Duck, charming my parents and grandma along with all the guests, until she was caught in bed with a guest’s seventeen-year-old son.

  Before Charlie, I had been a girl who shared bunkbeds with her grandma.

  With Charlie, I was a woman who saw life as brimming with endless possibility.

  And without her? I would maybe one day try to be the person she believed me to be.

  Once I’d stopped crying, put some decent clothes on and found myself somewhere to live, that is.

  3

  After our brief conversation, baby Hope started crying, so the man, whose name I should really have known by now, spent a while changing her nappy and giving her a bottle and walking up and down until she would settle, just long enough for him to put her back in the baby chair where she’d start bawling again.

  ‘I think we’ll try a walk,’ he said, after the third attempt. ‘She normally spends Fridays with my mum, and I’m supposed to be in a video call at three. She really needs to go to sleep.’

  ‘What time is it now?’

  ‘Two-thirty.’

  ‘I could take her for a walk?’

  He looked me up and down. ‘I’ll see if Ziva’s still in the orchard. She won’t mind.’

  Before stuffing Hope back into her ski-suit and wheeling her out in the giant pushchair from the kitchen, he brought me an oversized rainbow jumper and silver leggings that I could tell with one glance belonged to Charlie, and offered me the use of the shower.

  ‘Help yourself to more tea, and whatever food you can find. Apart from the bananas – they’re Hope’s.’

  ‘Thank you. And I’m sorry again for wrecking your day.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m sorry for upsetting you, too.’

  And with that, I was all alone in the farmhouse of a man I’d only just met and whose name I didn’t know, about to shower and change into someone else’s clothes. ‘Are you taking the mickey, here, Charlie?’ I whispered into the silence. ‘Landing me in one of your adventures?’