architect, and we were planning to go into business together.’ Kezzie sighed. It had been such a great dream. She was going to design a winning garden for Chelsea, and he was going to create the structures to go inside. Together she knew they could have been a winning team. That was never going to happen now.
‘What happened?’
‘I was a bloody idiot’s what happened,’ said Kezzie. She shivered, and thought about her chat with Lauren. Richard was in the past. Time to let go. ‘Never mind. He made it clear from that email he sent me. It’s over now, and I’m here, and here’s where I plan to stay.’
‘So you wouldn’t go back to London?’ said Joel.
A bleak look crossed Kezzie’s face.
‘Nothing to go back for,’ she muttered.
There was a rustling in the bushes. Kezzie shone her torch, and disturbed a fox, which looked quizzically at them.
‘False alarm,’ she said.
‘I think we might have frightened the vandals off,’ said Joel.
‘With any luck,’ said Kezzie. ‘I’d hate to see all Lauren’s hard work go to waste. The paint’s barely dry on the swings.’
They sat in companionable silence for another half an hour. It was nearly eleven.
‘I doubt anyone’s going to break in now,’ said Joel. ‘If it is kids, they should all be tucked up in bed by now.’
‘I never was,’ said Kezzie with a grin.
‘What a rebel,’ said Joel. ‘You clearly had more of a chequered youth than me.’
‘If you knew the half of it,’ said Kezzie.
‘So none of the patrols have spotted anyone at night. That’s great.’ Lauren was chairing a meeting at her house to update everyone on the progress of the clean-up operation so far. They’d been running the patrols for nearly a month, and it was now midway through April. Whoever had been causing the damage appeared to have been scared away. Which was something; though Joel privately thought the minute they stopped watching out for the vandals, they would be back.
‘I think our next plan should be to renovate the pavilion and see if we can’t turn it into some kind of community hall. I’m looking into seeing if we can get any lottery funds for it. I think if we can set up somewhere for teens to go, then we might not have such a huge vandalism problem.’
‘Great idea,’ said Rose Carmichael. ‘I know my lot get really bored of a summer’s evening. I’d love it if they could find something constructive to do.’
‘But who would run it?’ said Joel, thinking practically. ‘Presumably we’d need to get CRB checked, and there will definitely be things like insurance to consider.’
‘That’s true,’ said Kezzie, ‘but surely as a community we can all pull together.’
‘I’ve been a youth worker,’ put in Troy, much to Joel’s annoyance. He seemed to be everywhere Lauren was these days, and now it looked as if he could actually be useful, which was even more galling. Joel chided himself for being so petty minded, but he couldn’t help it. As far as Troy was concerned, everything annoyed him.
‘You? Really?’ Lauren looked at him in disbelief. Good, at least Lauren wasn’t totally blinded.
‘Yeah, me,’ said Troy. ‘I retrained last year and worked on an estate in Southampton. It was challenging and rewarding, and I’d love to do something like that here.’
‘I didn’t think you’d want to stay that long.’ Lauren gave Troy a look that was impossible to misinterpret, and Joel felt his heart sink. Blinded enough, though. She was going to end up back with the worthless sap, and had clearly fallen for that I’ve-changed malarkey. A sudden stabbing sensation of jealousy shot through him. Jealousy? Why should he feel jealous of Troy? It wasn’t as though he had even thought about Lauren in that way. But since Troy had been on the scene, Joel felt like he barely saw her. He missed the chats they used to have when he came to pick Sam up in the evening. If Lauren and Troy became an item, Joel would see her even less. Joel was used to Lauren being there, framing every day for him. She’d been his steady support system since Claire died. He couldn’t bear to think of that changing.
Troy said, ‘I told you I wanted to stay here.’ But to Joel his words were loaded with significance. Troy was using Lauren again, getting involved with her, trying to impress her. It was so damned obvious, but she clearly couldn’t see it.
‘Well, we can certainly look into that,’ said Lauren, ‘but I think to get things really up and running we need to put all this before the Parish Council, and we need to restore the pavilion first. It’s a mess. In the meantime, anyone keen to help Kezzie on Saturday, please come along to the Memorial Gardens at around 10 a.m. We’re going to need people with green fingers.’
‘And depending on how much we get done,’ said Kezzie, ‘it’s all back to mine for drinks afterwards.’
‘I like the sound of that,’ said Troy.
‘You would,’ said Lauren, and shoved him.
‘Careful,’ he said, and shoved her back.
The warmth of their banter was not lost on Joel. Lauren was going back to Troy, he was certain. And there was nothing at all he could do about it.
Chapter Twenty
‘OK you guys, let’s get cracking.’
It was early on an April Saturday morning, and Joel, finding that Sam had already woken and they were both unable to sleep, had come down to the Memorial Gardens to see if Kezzie and her friends needed any help.
They were an ill-assorted mob, who’d arrived in a battered old minibus. Kezzie introduced Flick, a standard vegan kind of anarchist, who fitted the stereotype so neatly. Joel was convinced she was a lesbian, till she planted a kiss on the lips of a tall and scary-looking individual, who was covered in so many tattoos and piercings he wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Guinness Book of Records. Kezzie introduced him as Gavin, known as Space Cadet, who was an amiable giant (‘and hugely clever’ according to Kezzie), who had earned his moniker from the way he’d get distracted by his fascination in all things botanical.
‘Did you know the botanical name for weed is cannabis sativa?’ he was saying. ‘You can grow it anywhere, you know.’
‘Well, we’re not growing it here,’ said Kezzie firmly.
There were also two elderly ladies called June and Flo, who despite looking as though they belonged in the WI, possessed filthy laughs, a dirty sense of humour, and were veterans of Greenham Common, according to Kezzie. Joel was somewhat stunned to discover it was they who were the lesbians.
The party was completed by Tom, a morose young man who barely spoke, except when he was waxing forth about the state of the planet and giving gloomy predictions that global warming was accelerating at a speed beyond which the world had been told.
‘It’s a cover-up, I tell you,’ he was earnestly discussing Wikileaks with Gavin, ‘they’re all in it together.’
