Page 9 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

He chuckles good-naturedly. Johnson is a big ball of good nature.

‘You need to sign for a parcel,’ he says. ‘I know when you finish.’

‘Oh, Johnson!’ she says. ‘You can just leave it outside; nobody will nick it.’

‘Can’t take chances,’ says Johnson, even though there is so little crime in the village that Pete, the policeman, spends most of his time giving parking tickets to tourists for reasons he has just made up. Everyone is very grateful he is not running for political office. ‘Also . . . ’

Johnson and Lish live out in the country, far away from the shops. She looks in his hands. Sure enough, there’s clear evidence of a Fry’s Chocolate Cream bar on there.

‘Have you been to the Scot Nor?’ she says.

‘Don’t tell Lish! She’ll start going on about my cholesterol again. Do you want your parcel or not?’

Janey picks up the box and colours slightly.

‘Don’t tell me,’ says Johnson. ‘I am very good at this.’ He concentrates. ‘Some miracle skin cream you saw advertised on Facebook.’

‘Lish told you.’

‘She didn’t,’ says Johnson. ‘All you ladies get it all the time.’

‘Oh, really?’ sighs Janey. ‘Is it working, do you think?’

‘I think,’ says Johnson, ‘you are all lovely and you shouldn’t worry so much.’

‘Well, Lish is a very lucky woman.’

‘She is. Oh, also, look out for a big dog that’s gone missing.’

‘What kind of a dog?’

‘How about, any big dog you see running free, you just call it in anyway?’

‘Who needs Facebook when we’ve got you?’ says Janey, smiling, as Johnson gets back on his electric bicycle and pedals off, grinning broadly, and she takes out the rusty old key to her very own house, and steps inside.

8

The little house is all hers now, and Lish and Johnson had been such a help to get her there.

‘Don’t be dumb,’ Lish had said, that day back in the autumn, when they’d finally, finally taken possession of the new little house, and she’d had the chance to see how much stuff Janey reckoned she could move into the sixty square metres of the new place (including stairs).

The old lady she’d bought from had taken away her personal things but had, to their consternation, more or less left all the old trash, and Janey had been so terrified of losing the house, she hadn’t dared make a fuss. The price of houses in their picturesque village had been shooting up over the years, faster than anyone local could possibly keep pace with.

Hence the gigantic mess.

The wallpaper was particularly dreadful. Amsan got her hands on a steamer, so they all took turns opening their pores as well. And gradually, bit by bit, filthy pail after filthy pail, the bones of the tiny place had begun to emerge. Her friends chipped in and they got Milton the porter, who kept boasting that he could do anything, to whitewash the front, and to be fair he did a good job, although they had to feed him so many steak bridies and so much Irn-Bru it might have been cheaper just to hire a professional. Which would also have saved thesplashing of white paint on the grey head of the gull who had swooped down to see if there was any bridie left for stealing, although this had the useful knock-on effect of marking out the gull – who was the greediest in all of Carso, famous for swiping chips on the harbour’s edge – so that people got used to seeing it and pointing it out and guarding their food, and eventually the greediest gull in Carso moved off to Thurso to nick chips in a place people didn’t know him and they all lived happily ever after.

And Janey watched DIY YouTube videos late into the night and developed a raging crush on any gentle-voiced, comfortably shaped man who was happy to talk you through the ins and outs of plastering, and she in fact sometimes left plastering videos on autoplay just to have a nice man’s voice around the place, a fact she would not have confessed under torture.

She plastered and painted the old walls in the colours of the shoreline: pebble grey, and clear low-tide blue and cold sand beige. But in the little sitting room she went for a dark, dark green and everyone tutted and said, well, but this is such a small dark room, don’t you want it to be lighter? And she was happy for the kitchen at the back when it had all its old cereal boxes removed and the units stripped back (another lovely voice) to be painted a lovely sweet cornflower-blue, with jolly new yellow handles, and the windows were clean and suddenly letting in light over the dunes just beyond the end of the tiny garden, and just enough space to get in a little table and two chairs – one for me, one for a friend, Janey found herself thinking – and it caught the morning light in a way that lifted her heart every morning as she stumbled down to the coffee machine. That room was light. The sitting room wasn’t; it was small, and the windows faced the other side of the street. From upstairs, in the tiny bedroom, you got the sunset, but down here therewasn’t much of anything. So Janey decided to double down. She got curtains of thick velvet that kept out the draughts, and sweet-smelling logs for the grate, and she filled the alcoves with books they uncovered behind the piles of old chair legs and cat toys. The sofa she found on Freecycle was being moved out of a hotel that was doing itself up and seemed to Janey to be in fantastic condition, a deep mustardy velvet with tartan cushions, and she bought a thick rug that might have been wool if you didn’t read the label. In short, she turned the room into a warm winter jewel box, because there was no point in trying to pretend she lived in a vast modernist Malibu beach house, but there was quite a lot of point in trying to be cosy the rest of the year round, and everyone nodded when they saw it and said, well, that definitely made sense.

Everything else, she was strict about. Dividing up the old house had been one of the hardest things she had ever had to do. The kids didn’t care about their childhood paintings or school reports but she had sobbed over every last one of them. The Christmas decorations had nearly broken her. Finally her friends had taken pity and taken away all the old toys and clothes she was keeping for reasons she couldn’t express and stuck them in their attics, because they were very good friends. Janey had managed to get the good old clothes to Barnardo’s, the rest to the recycling. And then, on a sweet pink-skyed October evening, they had held a bonfire with the leaves and, with some ceremony and quite a lot of cider, placed her old wedding dress on it.

‘I never liked it,’ Janey had said, as they toasted it and it whooshed, horrifyingly quickly, into sparks in the air, moving as if there was someone still inside. It had given Janey a start, as if she was immolating that hopeful, anxious version of herself. Which, of course, she was. She wasn’t quite sure what would emerge from the ashes.

‘You looked lovely,’ said Lish quickly.

‘I thought I looked nice on the day,’ said Janey. ‘But it was the nineties, wasn’t it? I had two big stripes in the front of my hair.’

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