sister was wearing. Lord help the local boys with those two when they were older!
“This,” she said, kicking her younger brother in his good leg with her mud-coated wellie, “is Patrick. Patrick, this is Ben Retallick. He’s staying in Honeysuckle for the week. If you could try and avoid hitting him with the death machine, blowing up his belongings or stealing his car, I’d really appreciate it. What do you say?”
The teenager gazed up at them all, looking from his stern big sister to a confused-looking Ben. His sullen face, seared red by his scrapes, broke into a huge grin.
“Wow, sis!” he said, brushing himself down and standing up. “Do you know who this is?”
“Yes, Patrick, I do,” she replied, sighing. “It’s Ben Retallick. The boy who threw me in the duck pond when I was seven.”
“Nah,” he replied, staring at Ben as if he was the only interesting thing he’d ever seen in his whole existence. “This is Ben Retallick – that posh lawyer who got sent down for beating the shit out of some loser who got off with it. You remember? Bad Boy Ben, they called him – it was all over the bloody newspapers! Put the bloke in hospital for weeks! You treat me like I’m dirt ‘cause PC Plod in the village has a whinge about me, sis, but you’ve gone and invited a proper ex-con into the family home – what will people say?”
Pippa couldn’t sleep, for about a million and one reasons, not all of them involving caffeine. After he’d dropped his bombshell – thrilled that he’d got one over on her – Patrick had limped off to the village saying he was going butterfly-hunting. That was a lie, clearly, and not even a good one. He was going to the pub. Everyone knew he was under-age, but as his birthday was only a few weeks off, the eyes of the staff were well and truly turned. They didn’t see the harm – mainly because they didn’t have to deal with the fallout. She was lucky enough to have that plum job.
He still wasn’t back and she knew there was a strong possibility he wouldn’t be – that he’d spend the night crashed out on a pal’s sofa, in the nearest hay barn, with one of the girls who seemed smitten by his small-town Steve McQueen routine, or even on the beach. At least he wasn’t on his bike this time, she thought. They’d played out this particular drama a hundred times before, and she knew it called for deep breaths and calming thoughts. He was a big boy – too big for a spanking. Too big for a cuddle. Although she suspected he’d probably needed both on regular occasions over the last few years, and she hadn’t been parent enough to provide either. Possibly because she was only a few years older than him herself – physically, at least.
She’d tossed and turned so many times in her bed, worrying about him, about what he was doing. About what she wasn’t doing. About how she could try and reach him. About how she’d quite like it if he just buggered off and lived somewhere else.
That last one was usually the final stop on the late-night train ride through her brain. She knew Patrick – she loved Patrick. She understood why he was the way he was – but it didn’t make it any easier to deal with.
That’s when she usually reached the point where she had to try and talk herself down, get some rest so she could deal with the challenges of the next day. With the needs of the kids still young enough for her to matter to them – the ones she could still save, if Patrick was determined to plough his own destructive path.
The calming thoughts, though, just weren’t coming that night. They were being chased away by all the anxious thoughts instead. And the anxious thoughts were bigger, nastier and came equipped with badass stun guns.
She couldn’t stop the anxiety flooding over her, dozens of tiny and not-so-tiny concerns drowning her in a crushing wave. Like the fact that the second instalment of the tax bill was due at the end of the next month. That the dishwasher in Primrose needed replacing. That their account at the vet’s was bigger than the national debt of a small African republic. That Social Services were due their quarterly visit in a few weeks’ time, and they’d all need to scrub up, shape up and pass muster. Four times a year she had to prove that she was a suitable person to be raising the kids. That Patrick’s problems weren’t dragging them all down; that Scotty’s issues at school were just due to shyness; that Daisy and Lily were communicating properly with the outside world.
She’d been doing this for years now, since she’d managed to convince them to take a risk on her after the car crash that claimed their parents. She was eighteen at the time and expected to head off to Oxford to study history. One drunk driver changed all that and instead she found herself playing mother to the other four, including baby Scotty. It wasn’t what she’d planned for her life – but she couldn’t stand by and watch them all get split up and packed off into foster care, could she? Not that the thought hadn’t crossed her mind – she was eighteen. Nowhere near old enough to become a mother, she knew. And maybe, she thought, when Patrick was playing up and her self-esteem was hiding somewhere round her ankles, they’d all have been better off if she’d thrown in the towel.
But…well. They’d survived so far and they’d carry on surviving.
She kicked the covers off her with her feet, lying in the dark and staring at the shadowed ceiling, criss-crossed with wooden beams. She glanced at the clock and didn’t like what she saw. Tomorrow was going to be an absolute bastard.
Her brain was just too busy to let her body go to sleep. It was all twisting and turning in there, like a barrel of angry snakes. Patrick, the money, Social Services – and, if she was honest, the man in the cottage across the way. Ben Retallick. Duckpond-slinger, cow-wrangler and convicted criminal.
Patrick’s revelation had shocked her, but not Ben – his face had fallen into a well-worn mask, almost as though he’d been expecting it. As though he’d played this scene out before. No replies, no response to her brother’s mockery or to her perplexed look. He gave them all a polite smile as he backed off, traipsed down the hill and retreated into Honeysuckle. No explanations. No comment at all, in fact. He’d shut the door behind him and never emerged again, not even when the rain cleared up and the sun started to shimmer gold onto the blues and greens of the Atlantic. He looked mega-fit, active, the type who went fell-running or surfing or at least cliff-walking. But he stayed in, presumably Minding His Own Business.
Which was certainly more than she’d managed. As soon as the kids had been packed off to bed – a long, multi-tiered process that involved stories, games of I-Spy, the forcible brushing of teeth and the collection of discarded underwear from the bathroom floor – she’d settled down with too much coffee and hooked up to her patchy internet access. It was frustrating, constantly having to reconnect, but she was used to it. All part of the charm, she told her guests, while swearing silently as she waited for pages to load. All she really wanted to do was watch an hour of crap telly and pass out, but she needed to know more about Ben Retallick. About Patrick’s comments and about the kind of man who was staying in a cottage just a few short steps away from her and her family in the main farmhouse.
The online newspapers were full of stories about him – so much so that she couldn’t believe she’d missed it. He must have been on the TV, on front pages, on billboards. Huge news in the local press. All over the known universe, in fact, and still it had slipped her notice. That’s what running a business and raising four kids did for you, she thought. You lost your grip on the world at large – all that mattered were the concerns of daily life, getting through every blocked toilet and piece of homework and dentist’s visit and random call from the local police. Feeding five humans and a menagerie of animals. Cleaning a farmhouse and
