Soul Love
Authors: Lynda Waterhouse
Lynda Waterhouse
lives in Elephant and Castle in South London. Her hobbies include missing aerobics classes, watching silent movies and listening to
anti-folk music.
First published in Great Britain in 2004
by Piccadilly Press Ltd,
5 Castle Road, London NW1 8PR
www.piccadillypress.co.uk
This edition published 2009
Text copyright © Lynda Waterhouse, 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
The right of Lynda Waterhouse to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 84812 025 9 (paperback)
eISBN: 978 1 84812 259 8
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Cover design by Patrick Knowles
Text design by Louise Millar
Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque , Croydon, CR0 4TD
Song lyrics on pages 87 and 215 are from ‘Because The Night’ by Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith. Copyright 1978 Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Reprinted
by permission.
All efforts have been made to contact holders of copyright material. If notified the publisher would be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this
work.
To my soul love, D.H.
Contents
Prologue
I
t’s a warm summer’s evening. The Saturday of the August bank holiday weekend, to be precise. The stars
have never looked so bright. I’m sitting at my bedroom window, staring up at the dazzling display, and I’m thinking about what happened to me that summer.
What a different person I, Jenna Hudson, was then.
Remembering hurts. My brain tries to locate exactly where the pain is, but soon gives up because I hurt all over.
I’m fed up of being grown-up and mature about my life. I want to be a child again – a six-year-old girl who’s fallen off her bike. I want to screw my face up, scream loudly and
run wailing into the kitchen where my mum would gather me up tight in her arms and kiss the scrape on my knee better. Then I’d stop crying and sip chocolate milk until the pain eased.
That’s one thing about growing up they don’t tell you – dealing with the sort of pain that can’t be kissed away.
Chapter One
I
breathed a huge sigh of relief when the car turned into the road leading to Aunt Sarah’s cottage. When
we’d set off from London, Mum and I weren’t speaking so I had no idea where she was going to dump me. Given the mood she was in, she would have been quite capable of buying me a one-way
ticket to boot camp, where I’d have spent the summer holidays dressed in a brown sack and only being allowed to say, ‘Yes, sir! No, sir!’
‘I can’t hang about, Jenna,’ Mum said in a sharp voice as she opened the car boot and deposited my bags on the tarmac. ‘Marcus frets if I’m away too
long.’
I groaned. There was no way I was going to break my no-speaking rule yet. I was too mad at her for that. Typical that she’d be worrying more about my little eight-year-old brother than me.
I just rolled my eyes and stayed in the car as she walked up to Aunt Sarah’s cottage.
From the back Mum could be mistaken for a teenager. It never ceased to amaze me. Her long hair was scrunched up into a funky ponytail and she was wearing kitten heels. From the front, however,
it was a different story these days. Her face was one big permanent scowl. And it was all down to me. According to her, my behaviour over the last few months had aged her ten years.
She should consider herself lucky. When Tara Cowley’s mum discovered that Tara had failed all her exams on purpose, her hair had turned white overnight. What I had done was much worse than
failing a few exams and Mum’s hair was still the same shiny nut-brown.
All I heard from my mum in the days before we’d stopped speaking was, ‘Jenna, how could you . . .’or that all-time classic, ‘When I was your age, Jenna . . .’,
followed by the ‘modern-parent’ grumble, ‘Do you know how hard it was to get you into Coot’s Hill School in the first place? I had to buy this hideous house just because it
was in the catchment area!’
I did feel a bit bad about that. Good schools are hard to get into in London.
Mum would then begin muttering about having to go private – ‘If they’d take you!’
When I heard, ‘Jenna, when I was your age . . .’ for the trillionth time, I snapped.
‘But Mum, that was in the dark ages when fifteen-year-old girls wore big frilly knickers and got excited by hockey and iced buns!’
Then we had a massive row and stopped speaking to each other altogether.
What else could I do? Hadn’t I promised Mia I wouldn’t tell? And hadn’t
Mum
always drilled into me how important it was to keep promises? As I was leaving my house
I’d seen Mia looking down at me from her bedroom window across the road. She was dressed in her school uniform. She just kept staring at me and I looked away.
I glared out of the car window as Mum talked to Sarah. They both turned and looked at me. I continued glaring. Mum frowned back and Sarah gave me a weak smile. Mum began to talk animatedly,
waving her arms about. No doubt telling her all the gory details about how her only daughter managed to get herself excluded from ‘such a good’ school.
Actually, I hadn’t been expelled. Technically, I was leaving two weeks before the end of the summer term to ‘make a fresh start’. But Mrs Kelly, the head teacher, had made it
perfectly clear that I was no longer welcome at Coot’s Hill.
The thought of all those embarrassing meetings in her office made me shudder. So I dug myself deeper into my seat, where, for the moment, it was safe and warm. I looked in the rear-view mirror,
and imagined myself in an American police drama. I put on my meanest expression as a cop read out my description. ‘Single, white female; five foot, four inches tall; long, red/brown hair with
blond streaks, green eyes, squidgy nose and fat lips. Refuses to talk. Yup, this one’s a real
bad
girl.’
Obviously the ‘bad girl’ story had another side to it. There was a part of me that wanted to just break down and tell Mum everything. To be fair, she had tried to get it out of me. I
couldn’t even bring myself to think about what I’d done without feeling sick to my stomach. To be honest, the fall-out with Mum was really just a smokescreen. It meant that I
didn’t have to talk to her about it. She had even rung up Dad and told him and my stepmum all about it. I came close to cracking several times. But then there was Mia. How could I let her
down?
Mum had kept on and on asking, ‘Did Mia put you up to it?’ It was always the same question in a hundred different variations.
I hated the way she assumed that only another child could be blamed for such unexpected behaviour. ‘I’m not a child. I can make my own decisions,’ I had said over and over
again. I had a right to keep some things to myself. Plus, she was getting too close to the truth.
Mum startled me out of my thoughts as she wrenched the car door open. ‘Get out, Jenna.’
I got out as slowly as I could whilst Mum and Sarah gave each other a hug goodbye.
Sarah was Mum’s older sister, but she looked younger. ‘No career and no kids to age her!’ Mum had said once, with a tinge of resentment in her voice.
‘Are you sure you won’t stay for a cup of tea?’ Sarah asked in her soft voice.
Mum shook her head. ‘No, I’m too wound up. I’ll stop off at the motorway services.’
‘Jenna.’ She spoke to the air above my head. ‘I’ve given Sarah some money for your keep.’
I stuck my hands in my jeans pockets and shrugged my shoulders. After she had driven off down the road I raised my hand into an ironic wave and said, ‘Bye, Mum. Love you too!’
So, I had been exiled to Aunt Sarah’s. My job was to have a miserable summer and be grateful when Her Majesty said I could return to a new school in London.
Chapter Two
S
arah lived in a small terraced cottage in a back-of-beyond, middle-of-nowhere village called Little Netherby, slap
bang in the middle of the nothingness that’s called the countryside. A place where old folks go for mind-numbingly boring holidays and where mothers send their newly minted bad girls to get
them away from the influences of city living.
She lived there with her partner, Kai, and her cat, Tallulah.
Sarah and Kai owned a second-hand bookshop in the next village, Greater Netherby. They were both poets who did readings at festivals or in dark, empty rooms above smoky, city pubs. Mum, Mia and
I had gone along to one of their readings the previous summer in an ‘alternative’ café in South London. Sarah’s poems were really funny, but she read them out in a small
voice with lots of nervous tics so it almost felt like she was apologising for herself.