giving him a proper explanation, and dragged him across an ocean, not to mention two hundred miles of the M3 and the A303 in a tiny Ford Fiesta because that was the only hire car they had left. And he always got cranky when he was hungry. Right now he was probably ravenous, because she’d had to make do with the limited options at the small service station near Stockbridge. Hence the Melton Mowbray debacle.
And, anyway, even a cranky Josh was a welcome distraction from the flood of memories that had kept her awake during the red-eye flight to Heathrow.
What had she been thinking? That swapping one shit storm for another would somehow cancel them out?
‘I said that less than a minute ago,’ she corrected. ‘But you’re right, that means it’s probably only nineteen minutes now.’
Why was it that when you knew something bad was headed your way, it always took that much longer to arrive? Was it just life’s equivalent of slow-motion replays on America’s Funniest Home Videos? Because she could remember another sunny June day nineteen years ago, when her mum had driven her to Wiltshire, their whole lives packed into the back of the family Range Rover. She had drowned out her mum’s fake cheerfulness by listening to Take That’s break-up album on a loop, and it had taken for ever to get there then, too.
‘I’m bored.’ Josh interrupted her maudlin thoughts.
‘Why don’t you play on your DS?’
‘It’s out of charge.’
‘Why don’t you listen to your iPod then?’
‘I’m bored with the songs on it. I’ve listened to them over and over.’ She knew how that felt. After that summer, Robbie and his pals had been dead to her for ever.
‘Then have a nap. You must be tired.’ Because I’m exhausted.
Although she doubted she’d sleep any time soon. All the nervous energy careering round her system made her feel as if she were mainlining coke.
‘Naps are for babies,’ Josh moaned.
‘You’re my baby, aren’t you?’
‘Mom!’ She could almost hear Josh rolling his eyes. ‘Don’t say that in front of the new kids, OK. They’ll think I’m weird.’
The smile died as she heard the anxious tone, generated by a year of being the ‘weird kid’ at Charles Hamilton Middle School in Orchard Harbor.
‘They won’t think you’re weird, honey.’
Because I won’t let them.
She didn’t doubt that if the kids at the commune these days were anything like the ones that had been there when she’d arrived at fourteen for that one fateful summer, she’d have a job keeping Josh’s self-esteem intact.
But she was ready for the challenge. This summer she had no job to go to, or marriage to pretend to care about, giving her ample time to concentrate on the two things she did care about: her son, and creating a new grand plan to give him the settled, secure, idyllic family life he deserved.
‘Will they think I’m fat?’ Josh asked.
Ellie’s head hurt. ‘No they won’t, because you’re not. Your weight is perfectly healthy.’ Or healthy enough not to risk giving Josh a complex about it with weight charts and unnecessary diets. That’s what the nutritionist had said at any rate, at a cost of two hundred dollars an hour. And, at that price, he must have been right.
‘Mom, there’s a sign. Is that it?’
Josh’s shout jogged Ellie’s hands on the steering wheel. She braked in front of the sign, which was no longer a childish drawing of a rainbow on a piece of splintered plywood, but a swirl of hammered bronze. The sign appeared sophisticated, but it announced the entrance to a rutted track that looked like even more of an exhaust-pipe graveyard than it had nineteen years ago.
Sunlight gleamed on the metal swirls which read: ‘Willow Tree Organic Farm and Cooperative-Housing Project’.
Underneath was another smaller sign listing – shock of shocks – an email address.
So they’d finally managed to dynamite themselves out of the 1960s then. Was it too much to hope the hippies who ran the place even had Wi-Fi? Perhaps they’d also realised that calling it The Rainbow Commune had conjured up images of stray dogs and filthy children in badly tie-dyed clothing? Unfortunately, the state of the track suggested the name change was nothing more than a cynical rebranding exercise.
A housing co-op is probably just a commune in disguise.
Josh bounced in his seat. ‘Let’s go, Mom.’
He sounded so keen and enthusiastic. How could she tell him this was likely to be a disaster?
Whatever reception she got, Josh was a sweet, sunny, wonderful boy, and anyone who tried to hurt him would have his big bad mother to answer to. Plus, they didn’t have to stay, there was still the Madagascar option, which she had considered a week ago, before settling on Wiltshire.
Ellie crunched the car’s gear shift into first, determined to be positive, no matter what. ‘I’m sure Granny can’t wait to meet you.’
The car bounced down the track, the nerves in Ellie’s stomach bouncing with it like a team of obese gymnasts wearing hobnail boots, as she clung to the one bright spot she’d managed to eke out of her dark thoughts during her night flight.
At least Art Dalton, the scourge of her existence that long ago summer, wouldn’t still be here. Her mother had never mentioned him or his psychotic cow of a mother Laura, or even her lover Pam, in the emails they’d exchanged in recent years. And Art would be pushing thirty-five. He must have buggered off and got himself a life by now – or at the very least, got himself arrested.
*
‘Arthur, they’re nearly here.’ Dee Preston burst round the side of the farmhouse in a swirl of gypsy skirts and jangling bangles brandishing her mobile phone as if it held the Eighth Wonder of the Universe. ‘I got a text from Ellie that she sent from the service station outside Tisbury.’
She grasped Art’s arm. His chopping arm. And the axe thunked into the stubborn trunk he’d been trying to shift all day inches from his boot.
‘Jesus, Dee, calm down.’
Her round, flushed face beamed at him and his heart shrank in his chest. He knew how much Dee had invested in this visit. If Ellie Preston was the same high-maintenance drama queen now that she’d been at fourteen, though, he didn’t hold out much hope of Dee getting the Kodak moment she was hoping for with the daughter who hadn’t bothered to come visit her once in nearly twenty years.
‘I almost took off my big toe,’ he added.
‘Stop being such a killjoy.’ Dee shoved the phone at him, only stopping short of inserting it into one of his nostrils by a few millimetres. ‘Read the text and see for yourself. She sent it twenty minutes ago, she should be here any minute.’
Art plucked the phone from her fingers, before he ended up with a nosebleed, and checked the
