Page 23 of Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
Nina didn’t really have that much to moan about. She had a sweet, rent-free flat in Central London and although things were quiet on the finding-her-one-true-love front, they had to pick up soon and she liked her job. Except she was still worried about how long she’d keep her job, which led her thoughts swinging back to Noah.
‘Paul, you’ll never guess who I’ve been working with,’ she said in the break between the roast and pudding. ‘Do you remember Noah Harewood from school?’
Her brother shuddered so hard that the dining table shook. ‘That’s a blast from the past,’ he said slowly. ‘Christ, I’ve gone clammy just thinking about what we used to do to that poor sod. How is he?’
Back in the day, Paul had been the scourge of Worcester Park. He’d run with a gang who styled themselves as gangsters, when actually they’d been a bunch of white kids from Surrey in tracksuits and Gazza haircuts. They frequently bunked off school to shoplift, hang around outside the dodgy off-licence where they could buy single cigarettes or loiter outside the station on their bikes probably telling passing women that they had nice tits. And when they were at school, they were rude to the teachers, disrupted lessons and made Noah’s days a living hell.
Paul had left school with hardly a qualification to his name and then two life-changing things had happened to him. Firstly, he’d been involved in an accident on a stolen moped and he’d collided with a lorry and wrapped himself around a lamppost. He ended up in hospital with a broken neck and a full-body cast and no one had known for a week or so if he’d be paralysed for life. It had frightened the bad right out of him and then, to make sure that it stayed gone, he’d met Chloe at Cheam Leisure Centre, where he was swimming to improve his mobility, and had fallen head over heels in love with her.
‘Never underestimate the love of a good woman,’ Hilda had said sagely when Paul, determined to be the man that Chloe deserved, had got an apprenticeship with a local plumber and gone back to college to get his qualifications. Now, ten years later, he was a loving husband, a devoted father and had his own business. It was quite the turnaround. Paul was a completely different person to the boy he’d been back then and Nina could hear the guilt in her brother’s voice, see it in his eyes as he enquired after his adolescent whipping boy.
‘He’s all right,’ Nina said. ‘He looks quite different now, it took me a whole week to recognise him.’ She frowned. ‘He didn’t seem to recognise me at all.’
‘Why would he though? I mean, you look completely different to how you were at school.’ Paul waved a hand at his sister to encompass the hair, tattoos, piercings and all the other facets of Nina version 2.0.
‘Well, you’re at least four st—’
‘Anyway,’ Nina hurriedly cut her mother off from speculating on how much weight she’d put on since she was at school, when her main goal in life was to get into a pair of size-six skinny jeans. ‘I only just managed to stop myself from shrieking, “Oh my God, you’re Know It All Noah!” Can you imagine? How traumatic for him. As it is, I bet he’s had some hardcore therapy so he could get over his school days.’
‘Don’t! That bloody song we used to sing. We were so cruel,’ Paul moaned, head in his hands. ‘But what thehellis he doing working in a soppy bookshop?’
There was no point in arguing that selling only romantic fiction didn’t mean that the shop was soppy. Nina had tried countless times. ‘He’s not actually serving on the till or ordering stock. He’s come in as a business consultant to see how we can improve our working practices.’
‘Business consultant. Sounds fancy,’ Great-Granny Hilda decided. ‘Doesn’t sound like a proper job though.’
‘Don’t let his grandmother hear you say that,’ Alison sniffed. ‘Comes into the salon for her weekly set on a Friday and all she talks about is her wonderful grandson Noah and how he went to Oxford and then Harvard after that, which apparently is in America and doesn’t let in any riff-raff, and how he’s worked for Google, and your Aunt Mandy said, “Well, our Nina reads a lotandshe works in a bookshop.” That shut her up.’
‘I don’t see why it would,’ Nina said, because reading a lot and working in a shop hardly compared to Noah’s achievements. ‘Noah was always really clever. I don’t even know what he was doing at our school.’
‘Well, his parents had very funny ideas about state schooling,’ Alison said. ‘The amount of times I had to go down to the school for a meeting with the head and that Noah’s parents when Paul had got a little too high-spirited …’
‘Mum, I was a thug in a Kappa tracksuit …’
‘He really was, Ally,’ Nina’s dad interjected.
Alison shook her head like it was all untrue. ‘Paul just got in with a bad crowd. As I was saying, Noah’s parents, they were very left-wing. Hippies.’ She said the last word in a shocked whisper. ‘The headmaster, Mr Hedren, hebeggedthem to take Noah out of Orange Hill. Said the local grammar would be delighted to have him but his mum said that they didn’t believe in selective schooling and Noah would find his own path in life.’
‘I think finding his own path in life was why he took his A-levels two years early,’ Paul said. His head was still in his hands. ‘So he could get away from all us lot. Look, next time you see him, will you tell him I’m sorry? I’d love to take him out for a drink, install a new power shower in his gaff, do something to make it up to him.’
Nina grimaced at the thought of it. That was one conversation that she never wanted to have. ‘To be honest Paul, I’ve got no intention of telling him that I knew him from school. What’s the point? It would just be dragging up memories that he’d rather stay buried.’ She paused, rewound the conversation. ‘Anyway, Mum, what wereyoudoing in Aunt Mandy’s salon on a Friday? You always go to get your hair done on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month.’ And had done for the entire time that Nina had been on the planet. ‘Isn’t Friday your Pilates day?’
There was an uncomfortable silence around the table, quite unlike the uncomfortable silence when Alison was needling Nina about just how many roast potatoes she was going to eat.
‘What? What’s going on? What are you not telling me?’ Nina demanded, eyes sweeping around the guilty faces of her nearest and dearest.
‘Oh, nothing you’d be interested in,’ Marilyn said quickly. ‘Really, you don’t want to know about all our comings and goings.’
‘Of course I want to know about your comings and goings,’ Nina protested. ‘Maybe not all of them. I really don’t need a blow-by-blow account of Granddad’s visit to the urology consultant, but of course I’m interested in what you’re up to.’ That wasn’t strictly true and besides, none of her family were wildly interested in what Nina got up to, which was just how she liked it. A phone call every couple of weeks, a once-a-month family lunch and a lot of sending amusing gifs back and forth on Twitter with Chloe. She wasn’t even included in the family WhatsUpp group, but still … ‘Mum, you changing your hair date ishuge.’
‘It’s notthatinteresting and …’
‘GRANNY’S GOT A JOB BUT NOBODY’S ALLOWED TO TELL YOU!’ Ellie shouted as if she couldn’t bear the lies and deceit any longer. ‘She answers the telephone at Great Aunt Mandy’s hair salon and says “Can I take your coat and do you want a cup of coffee?”’
Nina had to steady herself by clutching on to the table edge for dear life. ‘You’ve got a job?’ she asked her mother in a tremulous voice because this went against her entire belief system. In fact, it went against her mother’s entire belief system.
Alison believed that a woman’s place was in the home. Especially when that woman liked to clean that home from top to bottom every day. Nina looked around the dining room to confirm that everything was still in sparkling, gleaming form. Not a single speck of dust or smear. Not a single ornament on the sideboard out of place.
Her mother was the only person Nina had ever met who vacuumed twice a day. Once after dinner (and woe betide the person who made a mess after seven p.m.) and then again in the morning, in case the carpet had managed to cover itself in crumbs during the night.
