Page 51 of Forever, Maybe
“Yup. Anyway, I’d better get back to the house. Busy day ahead,” he said, turning to leave.
As he jogged off, she called after him, “I’ll let you know when the article’s coming out! Might be a while yet.”
He waved over his shoulder, picking up his pace as he headed down the gentle incline. The park was coming to life, scattered with early-morning dog walkers and fellow runners. Despite the bright start to the day, his thoughts darkened.
What did she know about Uncle Shane? Could her pointed question prove problematic? The timing gnawed at him. Shane had been muttering about that car parked outside his house for weeks, claiming it was watching him. Could there be a connection?
No. That was ridiculous. Those concerns had surfaced years ago and been brushed aside as baseless paranoia. Even if Jennifer suspected something, what could she actually prove?
Daniel’s temple throbbed, tension tightening in a band around his forehead. She could insinuate all she wanted, but the newspaper wouldn’t dare publish anything without hard evidence. Nothing untoward had ever been proven, and the publishers would know full well that even a whisper of impropriety would invite a libel suit that they couldn’t afford.
Besides, he advertised in that paper. Stephanie always claimed that when it came to a clash between journalists and advertising executives, the winner was rarely the one typing up news stories and articles.
He exhaled slowly, forcing his shoulders to relax. There was nothing to worry about.
Nothing at all.
Chapter twenty-one
July2003
“Make him stop snoring. Or, honest to God, I will stab him. Through the eyes.”
Nell’s hissed whisper dragged Daniel out of sleep. For a disoriented moment, the unfamiliar surroundings left him baffled. Wherewashe? The smell—grass, the innocent green kind and weed, the druggy kind—brought everything crashing back.
A sweaty sleeping bag. Squashed against his wife. Inside a tent. In a field.
The pig-like snort beside him—wet, rattling, and offensively loud—completed the picture. Joe. Their tent’s third, entirely unwelcome occupant. The three of them were at a music festival, not as wide-eyed attendees soaking up the atmosphere, but as stallholders, slinging overpriced sandwiches and wraps to crowds of drunken, stoned festival-goers.
Joe, oblivious as ever, lay on his back, mouth agape, serenading the tent with yet another cacophonous snore. It ended with a wet, wheezy flourish, as if his nasal passages were clapping for themselves. Then he sighed, rolled over and farted.
The stench—a repulsive blend of recycled veggie chilli and something reminiscent of rotting cabbage—wafted through the tent like an act of biological warfare.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Nell was no longer bothering to whisper. Joe didn’t stir, instead burrowing deeper into the coat he’d commandeered as a makeshift pillow and exhaling a new symphony of rattles and wheezes.
Daniel shifted uncomfortably, his right thigh protesting at the unforgiving lumps of soil beneath him. The sleeping bag—a relic borrowed from a cousin—was as thin as a damp tissue. The tent was no better, a flimsy contraption that offered about as much protection from the elements as a soggy napkin. Proper campers invested in gear that didn’t feel like punishment.
“How about I buy you breakfast?” he murmured to Nell.
Every food stall at T in the Park, including his, charged a fortune for their wares. A captive market was the stuff of business dreams, as Uncle Shane never tired of saying. Yesterday, during one of the big sets—when everyone had flocked to the NME stage for Biffy Clyro—Daniel had wandered around the other stalls, mind boggled by the audacity of their prices.
“The value of a thing,” Shane always preached, “isn’t in what it’s actually worth, but in how much folks are prepared to pay for it. And you’ve got to convince them that what you’re selling is worth a helluva lot more than it really is.”
Back in the tent, Nell wriggled free of the sleeping bag, muttering curses under her breath. Neither of them had bothered to change the night before, so she was still in her black leggings and sweatshirt, both rumpled from sleep. Smudged mascara darkened the corners of her eyes, and her blonde hair stuck out in wild, clumpy tangles.
She threw a murderous glare at the still-snoring Joe before directing it at Daniel. “Right. Make it a bloody buffet. With champagne. And a hitman.”
Unlike him or Joe, both pinned down by the tent’s Hobbit-like dimensions, Nell managed to stand up and slip outside. The tent flap snapped in the breeze behind her. Daniel struggled his way into a hoodie and followed her out a moment later.
He found her combing her fingers through her hair, glaring at the world. Around them, fellow campers shuffled about, rubbing their bleary eyes and checking their phones. Some had underestimated the Scottish summer and yesterday’s blazing sunshine had left their skin an unholy shade of lobster red. Shoulders, noses and foreheads glowed like walking advertisements for skin cancer warnings.
From nearby stalls, the hiss of sausages and bacon on hot plates wafted through the air. The smell, rich and greasy, had drawn long queues of ravenous festival-goers.
“Look at them,” Nell muttered, nodding toward the queues. “Trudging along, all burnt and hungover. Think we could charge twenty quid for a bacon roll?”
Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Uncle Shane would be proud.”
She smiled, grudgingly, but with a touch more cheer, and pointed to a stall three units down. “Can you get me something from there, please?”
