‘Ah oui. Maintenant, nous sommes aimerons aller au la plage.’
Plage was beach. I think. Or plague. ‘Oui, la plage.’
‘Pouvez-vous me donner des directives à la plage, s’il vous plaît?’
Something about medicines to take when you had the plague? Or was she asking for cafés near the beach? My mind was a blank page. I had nothing. ‘Uh, non?’
‘Non?’
‘Oui. Er, non.’
Le grand sigh.
Maths:
‘With that in mind, Natasha, what is the value of n?’
‘The value of n?’
‘Yes, on the board. See where it says n? What is the value of n, if we know that x = 40 and y is 203?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No. What was y again?’
English Lit :
‘So, studying these passages in Jane Eyre and A Tale of Two Cities, how do we begin to compare and contrast some of the ways in which Victorian novelists use landscape to lend resonance to their work? Natasha?’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear what I just said?’
‘Uh, no, sorry, miss.’
Big sigh. ‘The landscape in these two books. How does it lend resonance?’
‘I have no idea.’ Sniggers from the back.
It’s not like you, Natasha. It’s not like you. It’s not like you, not like you, not like you.
The only light that shone onto that day was when I saw the little white Bathory Basics van coming up the drive just before sunset. It pulled up on the gravel driveway just to the left of the front entrance, near the side door to the kitchens. I passed Mrs Saul-Hudson in the front porch.
‘It’s all right, ma’am. It’s just Bathory Basics with the turkeys for Christmas lunch.’
‘Oh wonderful, Natasha. I’ll leave you to deal with it. I’ve got the police on their way. Do you know where Dianna is?’
I stopped in my tracks. ‘The police? Is everything all right, ma’am?’
‘Yes yes yes,’ she said, all flustered and hair-flicky, looking all about her for something. ‘They come every year around this time. Just checking on who is staying over Christmas. Making sure we’ve done our safety checks, that’s all. All quite routine. Have you seen my handbag? Oh, I must have left it upstairs.’
‘Do you need me to talk to the police with you, ma’am?’
‘No, I need Dianna. You’ve got enough to deal with.’
‘Is it about the man in the village who was killed, ma’am?’
‘Yes,’ she said and minced off upstairs without another word.
Bloody Dianna, I thought. Bloody bloody bloody Dianna. Why was she the one to help her talk to the police about it? What about me?
I tried to shake the image of the blonde assassin from my mind as I stepped out onto the front mosaic to greet Charlie Gossard from the shop and try to be happy. I’d had a substantial crush on Charlie for a while now. His dad ran Bathory Basics and he worked there, serving customers and ‘out the back’ though I never really knew what went on ‘out the back’. It had started with the odd flirty comment about what I was buying whenever I walked there on a Saturday morning for provisions, then it progressed to long looks across the freezer in the summer. Now, we were into conversations and every now and again he’d give me some sell-by pies or sweets if there were any due for chucking out. I hadn’t told him about Seb being missing or anything serious like that—our conversations mostly ran to school or what Xbox game he’d recently bought and what his top score was.
He caught sight of me as he got out the driver’s door. ‘Hi, Nash.’
‘Hi, Charlie,’ I said.
‘How are you?’
‘Yeah, fine thanks.’
He was big into gaming, and even though I wasn’t at all, I enjoyed listening to him talk. He could have been reciting the phone book and I’d listen to him. Charlie had short blond hair, blue eyes and always wore tight t-shirts, even in winter, which you could see his nipples through. Maggie said he was a ‘un renard chaud’, which meant a hot fox, but I just thought he was lovely. There was always a long white apron tied around his waist, usually smeared with grubby fingermarks.
‘Do you need any help?’
‘Yeah, if you don’t mind. Thanks.’
His smile cut a diamond into the early evening light and he went to the back doors of the refrigerated van to unlock them, then reached in to get one of three humungous turkeys out for me to carry.
‘She’s a heavy one, mind. You got it?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, straining to hold it in both hands and making my way towards the kitchen door. He grasped the other two, one in each hand.
‘Dad said make sure your cook knows they’re premium birds. KellyBronze. Free range, the lot.’
‘Oh, great,’ I said, struggling a little with the weight of mine as he edged past me and opened the side door to allow me inside. Cook was delighted and, as she and Charlie settled the invoice, I hung around, even though I knew I had no business being there. I was just waiting. For anything. For some little shred of Charlie that I could think about for the rest of the day. Something to send me to sleep smiling tonight instead of crying.
When the invoice was settled and he and Cook had talked about cooking times and types of stuffing and ‘succulence’, he walked back out with me to the annoyingly nearby van.
‘So,’ he said. ‘I guess you go home for the holidays tomorrow then?’
‘Yeah. I guess so.’
‘Not looking forward to it?’
I shrugged. ‘It’ll be nice to see my parents. Yeah. Yeah, it’ll be nice. Presents and Midnight Mass and everything.’
‘Oh, we went one year. Pretty boring really.’
‘It’s tradition though, isn’t it? My mum and dad enjoy it.’
‘Yeah, it is. Gotta keep the old folks happy.’
‘Yeah.’
We both laughed, a nervous sort
