Love: A Messy Business (6 page)

“Hmm…that was one of the reasons why I moved up here, to get away from annoying people.  Not that any of the people around here are annoying, of course!” he hastily corrected.  “Anyway, I hereby confirm that there is absolutely no substance to that particular rumour.  The thought never even entered my head, although I can see why it would be a nice idea in theory.  Still, sounds like far too much work as far as I’m concerned.”

Kate was absolutely dying to ask Colin why he had bought all the custard and why he had so many eggs in his fridge, not to mention a vat of ketchup.  But she just couldn’t bring herself to ask – she vowed that she would get to the bottom of this over dinner though.

“That’s a shame. I bet there will be a few people who will be disappointed there isn’t a chance of a free feed.”

“I’m dreadfully sorry about that, but I never gave any indication that it was on the cards, did I?  Anyway, I would have thought the locals wouldn’t want to set foot inside this place.  As a matter of fact, I was surprised that you have.”

“Well, my psychology training has taught me the value over mind over matter.  I must admit I did think about it but I have the mental strength to put what happened here to the back of my mind.  As for everybody else…well, it all happened a fair while ago now and, besides, there is probably a bit of a macabre fascination about the place that people are drawn to…especially when they can get some food out of going…”

“I suppose you’re right.  So you’re a psychologist are you?  I’ll have to be careful then, or else you will have me on the coach and analysing me to death before I know what hits me.  I’m not sure you really want to find out what makes me tick!

“And that’s where you’re dead wrong, Mr Love!” thought Kate to herself.  There was something very mysterious about him that she was determined to discover.  She didn’t think it was anything particularly sinister, although she could be wrong.  But there was something strange and different about Colin Love.

Kate had a lot to chew on as she cycled home that evening.  It was fortunate that her parents had gone to bed by the time she arrived home, as that meant she avoided any awkward questions about her bedraggled appearance and unusual attire.  Not that there was anything particular to hide, it was just something she would rather not talk about as it was bound to lead to a motherly interrogation as to who this Love fellow was, and whether he could be trusted.   At this point, Kate, even though she had signed up to a dinner date in less than 48 hours couldn’t give a totally definite answer on that point.

Kate slept in the next morning, as she almost always did.  She didn’t have to be into work until just after eleven when she was on the lunch and afternoon shift.  Frankly, she didn’t really have much reason to be up and about early and doing so usually only reminded her that she didn’t have much to do.  She did leave slightly earlier that morning, though, as she had planned to pop into the Spa for another quick chat and update Liz on the previous night’s escapade, mainly to gloat over the fact that Colin had asked her out for dinner.  She planned, understandably, to gloss over the truth that he had done so, at least in part, to apologize for accidentally forcing her into a muddy puddle. 

But it turned out that she didn’t have time to get to the Spa in the end, because she spotted Fred Yates in his garden as she cycled past on the way down the hill.  Normally, a cheery wave would have been quite sufficient as she went by, but Kate realized that there was an opportunity here, if she played her cards right, to do a bit of snooping about Colin.  The trick was going to be thinking of a plausible reason to stop and then find a way of bringing Colin into the conversation.   Fortunately, Kate was (not by her own choosing) quite an experienced barmaid and so she was quite used to making small talk off the top of her head and, at the same time, convincingly charming her customers into believing that she actually gave a damn about what they were talking about.

Fred, never missing a thing that went by his house in either direction, had spotted Kate arriving in the distance on her bike and had stopped his garden work momentarily to acknowledge her as she went by.  However, to his surprise, instead of cycling past as he expected, she gradually slowed down and came to a halt right by him.

“Morning, Fred!  How are you this morning?”

“I’m not too bad, actually.  To what do I owe the pleasure of you stopping for a chat?”

“Well, I was a bit worried about you, to be honest Fred,” she lied.

“Really? Why ever would that be?”

“Well, I didn’t see you at the pub last night, Fred.  Very unusual, that.  You’re one of my best customers.”  She was lying again.  She quite liked Fred, but her best customers were those who drank four or five pints a night and left a healthy tip at the end of the evening.  But Fred was buying this hook, line and sinker.

“I just wanted to check you were OK; that you hadn’t fell under a bus or something.”

“No, nothing quite like that, although the reason is probably almost as painful.”

“Oh? I’m sorry to hear that.”  Kate was in full fabrication mode now.

“Lumbago,” said Fred simply, as if no other explanation was needed, nor was it.

“Ah…”

“It’s a bugger when it strikes.  Right out of the blue it is, and then it’s gone again.  I’m fine this morning.  Hopefully, I’ll be back out again tonight to prop up your bar again as usual.”

“Very glad to hear it, Fred.”  It was time to move the conversation along to her original purpose.  She made a motion with her head to indicate Ashton House across the road.

“How are you getting on with your new neighbour, then?  Keeping you awake at night with lots of all-night parties, is he?

“Not a bit of it.  Quiet as a mouse, he is.  Hardly see him at all most days.”

“Ha, I bet you find that a bit of a disappointment.  Nothing to gossip about then, is there?

“Are you calling me a gossip, young lady?” he said with a twinkle in his eye.  “Just call me your unofficial Neighbourhood Watch Scheme – always looking out for what’s going on for the good of the community.  Any road, I don’t see him much at all, but there are people coming to the house almost every day, and more than once a day sometimes.”

“Really? I wonder why?”

“No idea, love.  The odd thing is though that almost all of them are women, nice-looking women as well, I might add.  Dressed up to the nines a lot of them.  Each of them stays for a few hours - but here’s the really strange bit.  They never seem to come out wearing the same clothes AND they always seem to come out with wet hair.  Beats me, it really does. “

“Yes, that is odd, really odd.”  Kate secretly wondered if these women were all arriving to provide Colin with a form of personal service that she would be far too embarrassed to mention to Fred.  As a matter of fact, it wasn’t something she really wanted to think about.

“Anything else funny going on at Ashton House, Fred?”

“Hmm, not much.  But whatever he is doing in that house is causing a huge amount of rubbish, that I do know.   He put six bins out last week for collection – six!  I live on my own, as you know, and I can barely fill one bin every two weeks.  Still, it’s really none of my business, I suppose.  As long as what he is doing isn’t illegal or hurting somebody, then I suppose it’s up to him, isn’t it?

“Yeah, you’re right.  We’re just a bunch of nosy beggars, aren’t we Fred?

“Speak for yourself, love.  You seem more interested in Mr. Love than I am, I reckon.  You don’t fancy him, now do you?”

“Fred!  What a thing to say!  He’s not my type, if you must know.  You know what these Southerners are like, don’t you?  Bit too big for their boots and looking down on us simple folk.  Give me a local every day.”  She was, of course, lying again and doubly so.  Colin was tall, handsome, charming and articulate, which was right up her street.  As a rule, the locals were short, ugly, rude and could barely string three sentences together and she had long written them all off as potential candidates for walking her up the aisle.

“Anyway, I’d better be on my way or I will be late for work.  See you later, Fred?”

“Aye, if my lumbago doesn’t start playing up again.”  Fred shrugged his shoulders as if to say that his health was really in the lap of the gods these days.

Kate continued on to work, feeling quite content with life.   Tomorrow was something exciting to look forward to – a nice meal at a restaurant was something she didn’t get chance to do much of these days, and of course it was a “first(ish) date” with Colin.  Today seemed just like a regular day with nothing memorable in store.  Wrong!

CHAPTER SIX: A CHANGE OF PLANS

The shift at the pub was completely uneventful.  On the one hand, this was a good thing because it meant that nothing had gone wrong.  On the other, it meant that it had been a really, really boring day, the kind of day were every glance of the clock advances the fingers by only five or, at most, ten minutes when you were sure that twenty or thirty minutes had passed.   It was the kind of run-of-the-mill shift that made Kate question again what she was doing with her life.  Question wasn’t really the right word as it implied that she had made a conscious choice to live the life she was living.   As much as she hated to admit, if this state of affairs carried on, she was going to be one of those “Failure to Launch” people like in that movie a few years back. 

She was an intelligent person, she told herself, with a qualification as well.  She could do better.  She
must
do better.  She
would
do better, she resolved.  But how, and where, to start?  For the first time, Kate began to seriously consider the prospect that she might have to move away from the place where she had spent all of her life, except for the time that she had spent away at University, and even that was only just over half of each of those years.  People did that all the time, move away in search of work, or in search of some kind of meaning and purpose to life, or even just for the hell of it.  Perhaps she needed to move to London, the big smoke, where there were supposed to be a lot more jobs and opportunities.  But was that really true?  Would she just find herself on her own, with even more bills to pay, and even worse off than she was now?  Better the devil you know, some people said.  Maybe they were right.  It was a bit ironic that Colin had only just moved in the opposite direction from London to here and he didn’t seem too thrilled about what he had left behind.   The grass is always greener on the other side perhaps.

These were pretty serious thoughts to be having on a bike ride home and they were disturbed by the sound of a text message arriving on her mobile.  Kate would normally have not bothered to get the phone out of her pocket to read the text, because the entire trip home was uphill in varying gradients and any lost momentum was very hard to get back as she laboured up the slope.  But this time, she didn’t recognize the message tone.  Kate was one of those overly-organised people who had set up her phone so that she could tell who was ringing or texting her by the unique ringtone that had been attributed to it.  Her boss had one, her parents each had one, and Liz did of course.  Beyond that, there were three or four friends from University that she still kept in touch with now and again and that was about it.   

But this was not any of their ring-tones; it was a general “unallocated” one.  Very few people had her number and somehow Kate had so far managed to escape the pain and suffering of spam texts.  So when the unallocated tone sounded, Kate immediately was curious as to who it could possibly be and took her right hand of the bike to fish for the phone that was in her pocket.   Her phone was not the latest model so she had to press a few buttons to find the text message.  It was from a number that she did not recognize at all…she scrolled down the message and soon discovered that the texter was none other than Mr. Love.  She had forgotten that she had given him her number.  Once she realized who it was, Kate was no longer concerned about maintaining her speed and came to a halt as quickly as she could and shuffled off slightly to the side of the road, just in case a car driver didn’t spot her and sent her into the middle of next week.

She found that she was trembling slightly for some reason and in a bit of a tizzy. She could not for the life of her get the little stand on the bike to work and she gave up in the end, letting the bike fall to the ground with a crash.  What did Colin have to say?

The message was quite short and quite cryptic. “Change of plan. RU free tonight? Pick U up @7.  Put your best togs on! CL.”  Somewhat bizarrely, Kate’s first thought was one of surprise that Colin should descend to using that awful text-speak that she hated.  She hated it even more when people used it on Facebook and even proper emails.  She bet some people even used it when they were writing proper letters, for job applications and such.  She hadn’t thought that would be his style, for some reason.  Anyway, what was far more important was the content of the message.  It looked as though tomorrow was now cancelled and replaced by something tonight instead?  Presumably it was somewhere different than the Indian restaurant as Colin had asked her to dress up, something that really wasn’t necessary for the original location.

Fortunately, thought Kate, there was no other plan for that evening, other than watching the telly with her mum and dad, so there was no reason not to respond that she was, indeed, free. Kate had never been the best at texting, mainly through lack of experience, and was no match at all for someone like Liz who seemed to have bionic thumbs and could probably have written a text essay in the same amount of time that Kate could type a few words.   Kate was even more hopeless than usual and she was all fingers and thumbs in her haste to type a message – the blasted auto-correct feature was doing her head in as well.   She began to understand why text speak was actually a sensible idea – the less characters you had to try and type the better. In the end, she reluctantly decided writing in text speak was going to be the best approach and that the shorter the message was the better: