Page 2 of Summer at Harbour View House
‘No, because I don’t have my phone or any money, and no one will let me borrow a computer so I can go online and send an email.’
‘Yeah, sorry. Wi-Fi’s off. Budget cuts.’ A shrug. ‘Coffee’s free though, right?’
‘A good job too, because I have nowhere to sleep tonight.’
‘Don’t you have a boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Family?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You should call them.’
Natasha flapped her free hand up in the air. The secretary chuckled. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll probably see it on the news.’
Eventually she found herself in a courtesy hotel, bland and small, but at least clean, warm, and not fire damaged. There were even clean towels, and a bath robe. With nothing else to do, she took another shower, then wrapped herself in the bath robe and wished they’d given her a pair of jeans and a sweater instead. She was still sitting there, staring out of the window at the distant flicker of headlights on the nearby ring road, when the room’s internal phone rang.
‘Hello?’
‘Ms. Bright? Sorry to bother you so late. This is Sargent George Wilson of Gloucestershire Police. We’ve managed to recover a few of your belongings from your flat. Can you come in tomorrow and pick them up?’
Natasha looked down at her bathrobe, then at her dressing gown, slung over the back of her room’s desk chair.
‘Sure,’ she said.
Over the years, Natasha had read dozens of stories and watched numerous documentaries about amazing tales of survival. Plane crashes in the Andes, marooned on Pacific islands, lost in the desert, abandoned in a rainforest. She hadn’t really understood how resilient the human soul could be when it really needed to survive, not until now. Quite unsure how she managed it, she somehow found herself at work the next day, sitting at her desk at the back of the teachers’ room at Brentwell Secondary, wearing an ill-fitting suit borrowed from a kindly member of staff at the hotel, and trying to look interested while the headmaster droned on about mock exam results for the Fourth Years.
‘Were you on the sauce again last night?’ came a voice at Natasha’s shoulder. ‘You look like you didn’t sleep a wink.’
‘My house burned down,’ Natasha said, giving Tina Jones, a middle-aged science teacher with a penchant for a misspent youth, a tired smile.
‘Yeah, that’s what I used to say,’ Tina said. ‘Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Did you happen to leave a window open for a man to fall inside?’
‘Unfortunately not,’ Natasha said. ‘I could have used him to douse the fire.’
Tina leaned back in her chair and sighed. ‘I wish I’d left my window open a few more times when I could still turn an eye,’ she said. ‘You’re what, thirty? Still got petrol in the tank. Don’t waste the good days or you’ll find yourself an old hag like me before you know it.’
The headmaster, calling them out for talking at the back of the room, saved Natasha the need to reply.
Her phone was a charred ruin but the police had found her purse, and her bank cards were intact. The courtesy hotel didn’t extend for a second night, so Natasha had to run down to the local Tesco superstore after work and buy enough clothes to last until the end of the week, plus a cheap pay-as-you-go phone, then booked herself into another hotel to get her bearings. During a free period at work, she had gone online and contacted her family and a few friends about her current predicament. While two of her friends had offered her a place to stay, one lived in Ireland, and the other was currently working in Basingstoke, neither of which took her fancy. Her mother had of course offered Natasha her old bedroom, but Natasha was reluctant to go home. Despite Tina’s almost flattering estimation of her age as thirty, Natasha would be thirty-three in October and the thought of living with her parents again filled her with dread. Her younger sister, Bethany, still lived at home at twenty-nine, and picking up where they had left off with teenage arguments, not to mention her mother’s smothering attention, made the idea of a hotel room’s solitude far more appealing.
Even so, she couldn’t handle sitting in the hotel room all evening, so she called Hannah on her chunky cheapo phone and invited her now ex-neighbour for a drink.
They met in a wine bar near Brentwell station. Natasha ordered a double vodka and lemonade while Hannah got a wine spritzer. Considering she was also similarly now homeless, Hannah seemed in good spirits.
‘It was the push Brad needed,’ she said, raising her glass to make a phantom solo toast. ‘He asked me to move in with him. I’m pretty sure he’d have gone one step further, but he needs time to choose the right ring.’
Hannah, twenty-four, slim, bubbly, and almost painfully gorgeous, was probably long overdue getting married. Brad, whom Natasha had only met once and didn’t consider even remotely in Hannah’s league, had probably been holding out over the fear that his beer nights with his mates would soon be over. Hannah, who had cornered Natasha in the common lobby a number of times to complain about her loser boyfriend, didn’t understand the shelf the way Natasha did. Natasha’s last boyfriend had gone on holiday to Spain a few years ago and had never come back, sending her a belated postcard to inform her of his decision to start a new life as a scuba diving instructor in a pretty white-washed Costa Del Sol village, the name of which he neglected to mention perhaps in fear that she would attempt to track him down. Natasha had simply shrugged, and shuffled a little further along the shelf, towards the inevitable incinerator.
‘Congratulations,’ Natasha said, reaching up to clink Hannah’s glass on the way down. ‘I’m sure you’ll be very happy.’
‘You don’t sound very sincere.’
Natasha wasn’t, but at least she had an excuse. ‘My house just burned down,’ she said. ‘As you know.’
‘Do you think I’m making a mistake?’
