The Spark

Chapter Two

‘You’ve got a bit of bounce in your step this morning, girl,’ announced Holly, stirring her coffee for all she was worth, as though it might whip up a bit more energy for her. ‘Good weekend?’

‘Not bad. I’ve got food.’ I held up a bulging carrier bag.

‘Good old Aunty Lynn?’

‘The very same.’

‘Please say there’s some of her tabbouleh in there. Ooh and that pomegranate and feta salad. I love that.’

‘Might be,’ I said swerving the carrier bag away from her gimme-gimme grab and crossing the kitchen to unload a series of plastic takeaway cartons into one of the large communal fridges.

‘How was it here?’

One weekend a month we were on call in case there was an urgent need to offer refuge to someone. Weekends tended to be pressure points.

‘Quiet. No new residents. And I think the council have finally found a place for the Thorntons.’

‘Oh, that’s fantastic. When do you think they’ll be moving out?’

The refuge could house up to six families at a time, seven at a pinch. The Thorntons were our longest serving members of the household at the moment – Mum, three young boys and a baby. They desperately needed their own place. Most of the women that arrived – with little more than the clothes on their backs, their children clutching, if they were lucky, one prized toy – were given one bedroom, which for both practical and emotional reasons they shared with their children, although without exception the kids couldn’t be prised from their side. All five Thorntons had been sharing one bedroom for the last four weeks.

There was only one lounge area with a shared TV, which led to a lot of bickering among the children, and a communal kitchen which was set up so that the residents could help themselves to the basics we stocked in the fridge. They could cook for their own family unit or for others. No one family was ever the same; some loved to cook while others barely had the energy or the strength to think about food. Having food that someone else had prepared was always a treat and it was guaranteed that Aunty Lynn’s offerings would be a hit.

‘They’ll be moving out as soon as I can persuade the council to put a new carpet in the place. And I’ve spoken to the local charitable trust and they’ve agreed to provide curtains and bedding.’

‘Oh, my aunt’s neighbour has some spare bedding which she’s going to donate.’

We were the queens of begging, borrowing and stealing to keep our residents in home comforts.

With coffees in hand, we drifted through to the little admin office, a somewhat grand title for the cramped space with two desks facing each other. It was a good job we liked each other so much, as we pretty much lived in each other’s personal space. We were very different: Holly was pure Essex with dyed raven-black hair piled up into an ornate bun on her head with a French plait feeding into it. She wore tons of make-up and favoured bold, bright colours. The surface of her desk – well, I think under all that paper there was a surface – mirrored her personality, but at any given time, she knew where absolutely everything was. She was a demon for detail and never forgot a thing, which was jolly handy. She was also doing an OU degree in psychology and liked to involve me in the theories she was learning about at any one time.

By contrast, my desk was super tidy, but I too could also lay my hand on anything within seconds.

My first task of the morning was to try and persuade a local headteacher to take on two new children that had recently arrived with us, although there was only one place at the school. It took umpteen phone calls and several emails liaising with the county admissions team, the head, and the social worker assigned to the case before I was finally able to push away my keyboard and put down the phone to pick up the black coffee that Holly had just brought me. As I took the first life-saving sip, the bing of my phone caught my attention, and my heart skidded to a halt before kicking off like a frolicking pony.

Hi Jess. Hope you haven’t troughed all those leftovers yet. Lovely to meet you at the weekend. Sam.

I picked up my phone and stared at the message. Conflicting emotions showered like meteorites: pleasure, regret, hope, guilt, annoyance. Chiefly annoyance, I realised. He had no business texting me.

‘Blimey. That’s a complicated look,’ said Holly. ‘Bad news? Good news? Indifferent news?’

‘The jury’s out,’ I said with a sigh, holding my phone in both hands. Why had he texted me? That said he wasn’t the man I thought he was. I should be pleased that it proved the point. ‘I met this guy. Sam.’

‘And that’s him. Don’t tell me, he’s given you the I-just-want-to-be-friends message.’

‘Sort of.’

Holly rolled her heavily kohl-lined eyes. ‘See, I should write the book.’

‘You’ll dislocate your eyeballs one of these days if you keep doing that.’

‘Whatever, sweet cheeks,’ she replied with irreverent disdain. ‘Are you going to text him back to tell him you weren’t interested in him anyway or just keep looking at your phone as if it’s got all the answers to the universe and everything?’

‘Forty-two,’ I said automatically, immediately thinking of mine and Sam’s silly conversation (if you haven’t read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which we both had, the answer is forty-two). I sighed and put my phone down. I should ignore it. He was out of bounds. And then two seconds later I picked it up again. The message was innocuous; he hadn’t done anything wrong. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

‘Want me to text him for you? “Bog off, you bastard, and don’t darken my inbox again.”’ Holly waved her bright-blue-tipped hands at me, trying to get me to hand it over.

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Oh Lord, you’ve gone all moony-eyed.’ Holly shuddered. ‘He’s not worth it. He’s a man, remember.’

I rubbed my hand over my face. ‘I don’t know what to do. The thing is, he’s really nice.’ And I was scared that if I responded to the text, we could end up having one of those text flirtations where things are said that shouldn’t be, especially when he had a girlfriend. There was a girl code. You don’t mess with another girl’s man. Another woman’s husband. The code was ingrained. I’d seen the damage done to my mother. It was unfair to cause that much pain to another person who was innocent and blameless. And that didn’t even begin to cover the additional casualties of any children involved.

‘Who? What? Where?’ asked Holly.

How could I possibly put into words that perfect storm of recognition between Sam and me? Every time I thought about it, saying we just clicked didn’t come anywhere close to covering it. Clicked sounded like a seatbelt slotting home, fingers snapping; it didn’t describe the feeling of completeness, the accompanying soar-away feeling as though I was taking flight, the magical, serendipitous sensation of being so in tune with another person, or the exchange of a smile because you didn’t need words.

Holly would laugh her cute little pop socks off.

Particularly as it’s all so unlike me. Seriously. I’m Miss Practical, a sensible, problem-solving kind of gal. This was not my style. I didn’t fall in love at the drop of a hat, or in this case the chink of a beer bottle against a Prosecco glass. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever really been in love.

I think, in the quiet moments, when I was completely honest with myself, I was a little bit scared of love. Perhaps frightened of what loving can do to someone when it all goes pear-shaped. My dad left my mum when I was eight; she took it extremely badly and never really got over it. I’m probably guilty of keeping a shield up to protect myself from what I see as the fallout, the collateral damage, and the eviscerating wounds that not being loved anymore can leave. I’ve seen it first-hand and it’s not pretty. I think it put me off opening myself to the possibility of falling in love. I’d had a couple of boyfriends. Long-term, too. But no one who’d ever made me feel quite like I’d felt in the company of Sam.

Being of a pragmatic bent, I didn’t believe in fairy tales and certainly not love at first sight but there was definitely something about him that had left an impression that was proving difficult to dislodge. I looked at my phone again. Ingrained politeness forbade me to ignore the text, which is really what I should have done, and I’ll admit that that little bit of ego that said, he likes you too, pushed my better judgement aside.

Lovely to meet you too.

My finger hovered over the keyboard, tempted to say more. God, I really wanted to. I liked him. More than liked him. But he belonged to someone else. I had no business here. It was wrong to even be thinking about him. Should I even send this polite innocuous text? But it said nothing really. I pressed send.

Three hours later, when there’d been no return text, I sadly acknowledged that I liked Sam even more. He was abiding by the rules. A good man who hadn’t strayed when temptation beckoned. Damn. It really did make me like him. Our text conversation was at an end and I knew it made sense. I wouldn’t contact him again. It was the right thing to do.

Chapter Three

‘I thought I recognised those pins,’ said a voice coming alongside me as I puffed my way along the dirt track, my feet crunching on the impacted soil of the avenue leading up to Nell Gwynn’s monument.

Flicking my glance sideways I almost stumbled at the sight of Sam easing alongside me with a delighted grin on his face.

‘Oh, hi,’ I said in a ridiculously girlish high-pitched voice, but it’s not easy being surprised and breathing at the same time, as well as wondering just what shade of tomato you’re approximating. I was guessing anywhere between overripe and sunburned-to-buggery. ‘Fancy seeing you here. Still housesitting for your folks?’ Except it came out more like ‘Fan … cy see … ing you … heeeeere,’ between pants. I sounded more like a rusty old swing.

He grinned at me. ‘No, I’ve been relieved of dog-sitting duty and been awarded the Légion d’Honneur medal for services to plant watering and recycling. My dad had a bet on that I would forget to put out the right bins for collection.’ He beamed again. ‘He never needs to know that Mum texted me reminders both weeks.’

‘What if I tell?’ I teased, managing to get it out in one exhalation. My memory had failed me; it had forgotten Sam’s golden glow of effervescent energy and that aura of glad-to-be-aliveness that seemed to envelop him. God, yes, I know I sound ridiculously fantastical. He was a mere man and not some immortal Greek god, but he certainly had some presence about him. And he was just so easy to talk to.

‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ His eyes widened dramatically and he clutched his hands to his chest, which made me laugh.

‘Remind me, what was it I was telling?’ I asked, enjoying the silliness between us. I’d thought about him quite a few times over the week. A memory I took out and stroked, like a child with its comfort blanket. I knew nothing was ever going to come of it but meeting a nice guy had been a pleasant reminder that there were still some out there.

He laughed, and for the next few minutes we fell into a silent rhythm, the pad, pad of our trainer-clad feet and the extension of our legs in perfect sync with each other and our breaths coming out in short energy-conserving pants as we matched each other step for step. I’d never thought about it before but there was something quite personal about running so in sync with another person.

We ran on in silence, which was only broken when I slipped unexpectedly on some loose dirt on the path. Sam’s arm shot out to grab me, otherwise I would have gone down. I stumbled but managed to stay upright.

‘You all right?’ he asked slowing his pace to wait for me.

‘Yeah,’ I panted, my heart pounding even harder with the sudden surge of adrenaline the near-fall had released. He jogged on the spot for a minute, his blue eyes completely focused on me, and for a moment it was as if everything else around us receded and we were only aware of each other.

That pesky adrenaline rocketed back into place and I could feel my heart dancing about all over my chest. I did that eyes-widening thing, which was probably what scared him off. That or licking my lips – completely inadvertently. I was running. They were dry.

There was no denying the electrical charge between us and he looked away, his mouth tightening, alarm skittering in his eyes.

It was as if I’d suddenly scalded him.

After that, he ran a pace ahead of me, as if he felt it would be rude to sprint off but he no longer wanted to run with me. I didn’t blame him. Another fall like that and I could take him out.

Gradually, he stretched out ahead of me and there was no way I could keep up with him. He passed me with a jolly wave on his downward leg as I was panting up the final hill before the turn around to come back on ourselves.

When I finished the course and picked up my sweatshirt and keys from the tarpaulin near the finish funnel, I saw him up ahead leaving the course without a backward glance. With a sigh, I said goodbye to a couple of people and walked back across the bridge over the dual carriageway, stopping in the middle to watch the cars whizz past under the bridge. They were like me and the man called Sam. Cars that passed each other, both headed in completely opposite directions. It had been nice bumping into him again – a bit too nice. Like when you spot a fabulous dress and you hunger for it but don’t buy it because you either really don’t need it or can’t afford it, so you’re good … although you can’t stop thinking about it. And yet you know that if you went back, it wouldn’t be as nice as you remembered; it’s not the dress for you. Well, unfortunately Sam was not that dress. He was still every bit as gorgeous as I’d remembered. And still as unavailable.

Later that day he invited me to be friends with him on Facebook.

‘Well, I binned him after that. Seriously? The man wanted me to wax his back after the second date. He’d even brought along a pack of wax strips!’ My cousin Shelley’s shrill indignation rang out in a quiet moment in the courtyard of the King’s Arms where we and my friend Bel, short for Annabel, were all nursing rather delicious gin and tonics on a school night, which felt horribly decadent.

‘I’d have gone for it and pulled each one off really slowly,’ said Bel, her eyes gleaming with mischievous malice.

‘Where do you find these men?’ I asked, laughing as Shelley took her disgust out on her ice cubes, poking at them with her straw.

‘There’s a special store with my name on it, Shelley Hilton Louses R Us, and they run the production line just for little ole me.’

‘Aw hon.’ I laid a hand on hers and gave it a quick squeeze. ‘That’s not true.’

‘You’ll find someone nice, one day,’ said Bel, with the comfortable conviction of someone who’d been shacked up with their man for eighteen months, three weeks and five days.

Shelley caught my eye and winked. ‘Who says I want nice? That’s my problem; I love a bad boy.’

Bel shook her head. Her boyfriend Dan had written the book on nice.

‘And,’ added Shelley, with a wry smile, ‘apparently I’m too indiscriminate. That’s what Mum says.’

I shook my head, loyalty coming to the fore rather than honesty.

Shelley laughed. ‘Come on, you know she’s right. You never have these problems.’

‘I never have any dates,’ I put in.

‘Because you always say no to everyone.’ Bel nudged me with her elbow.

‘You’re too discriminating,’ said Shelley rather proud of her clever observation. ‘A little bird told me that you got on rather well with a certain Mr Hottie from next door at Mum and Dad’s barbecue.’

I schooled my face into complete equanimity and shrugged.

‘Don’t give me that butter-wouldn’t-melt look.’ Shelley pulled a face. ‘Mum said Mr Hottie was taking a lot of interest. Sorry I ducked out on you. If I’d known what a complete and utter lard-arse of a bastarding bastard Sean would turn out to be, I’d have stayed home.’

‘It wouldn’t have done you any good. Mr Hottie is well and truly taken. Sadly.’ I pulled a jokey face of disappointment, which hid the raw hit of regret that punched me. ‘Although, funnily enough, I saw him yesterday.’ Both Shelley and Bel perked up and sat up in their seats, like a pair of cartoon villains smelling the scent of prey.

‘At the parkrun.’

‘Oh, bad luck.’ Shelley winced. Exercise was a dirty word where she was concerned. ‘That sucks. I bet you were all sweaty, weren’t you? Not a good look. That’s a nightmare.’

I gave a half-laugh. ‘Not really, when he has a girlfriend and he’s not interested.’ Despite all my good intentions, I couldn’t help the slight droop to my mouth which of course my eagle-eyed cousin spotted.

‘You like.’

I shrugged. ‘He’s very…’ utterly delicious, ‘nice, but like I said, he has a girlfriend.’

‘Ah, that’s a bloody shame.’ Shelley waved her gin glass in the air before halting suddenly, ‘Is it a serious, serious girlfriend? Do you know that? I mean, are they living together?’

‘Shelley!’ I warned.

‘What? All’s fair in love and war.’ She shrugged with a mutinous roll of her eyes. ‘Come on.’

Bel caught my eye. She understood. ‘No, it isn’t,’ I said quietly.

‘They’re not married,’ protested Shelley snatching up her drink. ‘They got kids?’

‘Neither, as far as I know, but it’s nothing to do with me because I’m not going there. As far as I’m concerned, he’s out of bounds.’

‘But you like him.’

‘It doesn’t matter if I like him. It’s wrong.’

Shelley scrutinised me in an over-obvious way before saying, ‘I’ve never known you even to “like” someone.’

I tried to play nonchalant. ‘He’s a nice guy. And this is a long-term girlfriend. It is serious.’ I knew that because I’d been doing a little investigation. ‘They’ve been going out for years.’

‘Aw, that’s a shame,’ said Bel in her soft voice, cottoning on straightaway ‘But you don’t want to get caught up with him. It’s so easy to start a flirtation and get carried away.’

Bel’s words stilled me, although I probably wouldn’t have confessed what I’d been doing since Saturday. I nibbled at my lip. It wasn’t as if I was doing any harm, was I? But I still felt a little grubby about it.

Facebook is the modern-day Pandora’s box. I kind of regretted clicking that Confirm Friends button. I couldn’t resist and it had done me no favours. I’d spent a good hour trawling through Sam’s posts, like an intrusive truffle hound sniffing out everything I could find out about him, including his surname, Weaverham … and her.

Every picture of him made me feel slightly gooey in the middle, but at the same time, I felt a touch guilty and voyeuristic, especially now I knew his girlfriend’s name and what she looked like. And then I’d made the fatal mistake of moving onto Instagram to check her out. Big mistake – to quote Pretty Woman – huge. Victoria Langley-Jones was an Instagram influencer with her own vlog and half a million followers. Eek! I’d half hoped she’d be sort of ordinary – not that I’m exactly anything in the looks stakes – but she was flipping gorgeous. Long, long dark hair with a slight curl in it, with a tall, shapely figure that went in and out according to enviable proportions and the sort of legs that looked perfect in the high ankle-strap sandals she seemed to favour.

Immaculately groomed, she had that slightly high-cheeked pouty expression reminiscent of a more approachable Victoria Beckham. I also discovered – from her many posts and a couple of sneaky peeps at her vlogs – that she came from quite a wealthy background; her pictures showed that she drove a Mercedes convertible, shopped at Harvey Nicks and Selfridges, loved oysters and champagne … and Sam. Really loved Sam. On her vlog she had features on shopping, dining and general opinion pieces which included: this season’s ten best little black dresses, tux shopping with your man (and yes, Sam looked exceptionally handsome in black tie at some fancy tailor’s in Jermyn Street), Marks and Spencer bra fittings versus Rigby and Peller, a parade of fashion faux pas at Ascot and what the best-dressed wore to a county cricket match.

‘Why is it all the good ones are taken?’ asked Shelley plaintively, bringing me back to the little pub terrace with a welcome bump. I knew Bel must have been shooting vicious behave-yourself looks at her while I’d been daydreaming.

All my Facebook spying had revealed was that Victoria wasn’t the sort of person I’d be friends with in a million years. And why was I even thinking like that? She was Sam’s sort of girl.

‘I mean, it’s not like…’ Shelley was off and, much as I loved my cousin, dear Shels could pontificate on the tragedy that all her friends had snaffled the best blokes and there were none left. Not single ones anyway.

When she finally came to the end of her diatribe and lurched away to the toilet, taking Bel with her, I picked up my phone and took an illicit shufty at Facebook, knowing I really shouldn’t. Sam had posted a picture of himself, looking particularly handsome in cricket clothes. Who knew? Even with the funny pads on his legs and leaning one-handed on his bat, the sight of him set a few butterflies fluttering low in my stomach. Above the picture the caption read, ‘Another century today – looks like I’ll be getting a jug in.’

Below it was a range of comments and of course I couldn’t resist taking a tiny peek into Sam’s world. His friends.

‘Make it two, you tight git,’ commented Mike, his circular photo revealing a big, dark, handsome man with his arm slung around a blonde woman.

‘About bloody time,’ commented Drew.

‘Lightweight. Only the one century.’

‘That cover drive is getting dull, old man.’

‘Hogging the crease again, Sam.’

I had absolutely no idea what any of that meant – not that it mattered. I sighed.