Page 2 of You, As You Are

Maisie’s insides tightened as Vera flicked through the highlighted pages. “Miles has just started back at university with exams this week, and Maks is in Berlin or somewhere right now for work.”

“And Morgan?”

Maisie paused her method of shoving boxes to the back of the room with her feet. Morgan in the middle was the least communicative in their family group chat. She didn’t entirely knowwherehe was at any given moment. He’d once sprung up in Thailand without telling anybody until he was in the airport to come back, requesting a lift home when he landed.

“Morgan is … somewhere.” Her answer sounded enough like a question.

Vera smiled fondly, placing more books in her lap. Maisie wasn’t so sure if she smiled at their raunchy covers or the thought of her grandson. “He has yourtaid’s?* spirit, that one.”

Right. And Maisie? Whose spirit did she have? Miles got their mother’s mind for business, Maks their father’s love of language. Morgan was the free spirit. So where did that leave her?

Moving in with a grandparent at just shy of thirty years old,that’swhere it left her.

A heavythudfrom upstairs made Maisie jolt, and the following silence brought on an itch. Either both brothers had perished under the weight of her mattress, or they’d broken something and didn’t know what to do about it.

“Should we be helping them?” she asked as Mister Roberts stalked up the stairs with a scowl. Nobody got to make noise in his house, apparently.

Vera leant back to peer up the stairs. “No one screamed. They’ll be fine.”

That she was so unconcerned with the possibility of something bad happening was disconcerting, and half explained the state of her broken wrist. The story of how that had happened involved Ronnie and a substantial volume of lubricant – weeks later, Maisie still didn’t want to know the details.

Sure enough, a second later the brothers came down the stairs with heavy feet, stomping one behind the other, deep in the midst of a hushed conversation with suspicious looking gesticulations. Behind them, Maisie raised a single brow when they waltzed off to the van, hoping they’d been discussing how to test the ripeness of melons.

She didn’t really mind a little heavy-handedness as they carried her possessions inside; clothes, toothpaste, that kind of thing; but when her craft supplies began to unload, that’s when the trembling chihuahua inside of her awoke.

“Please be careful with that one, it’s the?—”

“The mini oven. I know,” blonde number two assured her. “I’ll be gentle.”

Without the mini oven, stocking up her small business that she filled her evenings and weekends with would take four times as long.

“Oh—and that one’s the?—”

“The UV lamp. I’ll put it down over here.” Blonde number one settled the box on Vera’s sofa next to the hand-stitched‘cwtch?*’cushion that’d been there for twenty years.

Maisie didn’t say anything when the younger brother carried her very large and very expensive computer monitor in by himself and placed it near the kitchen door. She’d wrapped it up perfectly in its original box and packaging, hoping that she could jump straight into work as soon as she’d organised herself.

With her new bedroom on the third floor, Vera kindly let her take over the dining table at the back of the living room as her office space. The whole reason whyshewas the one in their family to be relocating was the fact that her job could be done from anywhere. Anywhere with Wi-Fi and a computer, that is. The set-up wasn’t ideal. In London, she’d turned half of her living room into an office, which was fine when she’d been living alone. But having Vera pottering around the house, sipping tea in front of the television, and spending hours on the phone to her friends, all whilst Maisie tried to work, was going to take some getting used to.

It took an hour, but the white van was eventually empty, and Vera loaded up the two brothers with sandwiches, biscuits, and hot tea in their travel mugs before letting them go. Maisie had saved some cash in her purse to tip them, promising to recommend them to Faye for when she moved out of London soon. She said goodbye and thank you for the hundredth time, then they were on their way.

The front door clicked shut, deadbolt latching itself, leaving Maisie to turn and examine the fortress of boxes built up around the living room. Mister Roberts had resumed his position on the stairs with a scowl, and Vera flicked through more pages of unboxed ‘literature’ with an unnervingly blank expression.

Maisie gave herself a second to stand and take it all in, sighing quietly.

This is me, then.

She loved her grandma, she really did, but her life wasn’t supposed to devolve this way. Mentally, she prepared for her social life to take a quick trip and be flushed down the drain. Apart from Vera and Ronnie, she knew absolutely no one in this coastal town at all. That hadn’t been a problem as a child, because her brothers had always been here too. They’d kept each other company. But things were different now.

Vera rose from the settee, taking her pick of her next box to plunder. “I’m very glad that you have moved up here to stay with me. It’s going to be so much fun having you around, Moo Moo.”

Her excitement hit Maisie with a stab of guilt. She hadn’t considered how much hernain, the busiest socialite in all of Aberystwyth, might have been wanting her company. “Thanks for letting me come.”

“Of course! You children used to come and stay here all the time when you were younger.”

Maisie remembered it well. She would sleep on a blow-up bed in her grandparents’ bedroom whilst her brothers all took the spare room. Hertaidhad died when she was fifteen, so any time she would come to stay after that she’d share Vera’s bed, burrowing under the electric blanket. For a few years, things stayed that way. But eventually she stopped coming at all. College became too hectic, then university, and then finally she was forced to accept the fact that she was an adult. Life in London got busy, and taking weekend trips to Wales hadn’t been feasible anymore, monetarily or otherwise.

“I am surprised that you asked to come though,” Vera said thoughtfully. “Are you sure that this isn’t a bother for your work?”

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