Authors: Victoria Connelly
Tom Mackenzie stood outside the George Hotel, wincing as the rain finally found its way down his collar. He looked up at the pearly grey sky. So much for summer, he thought. This was one of the loveliest parts of the country – when the sun was shining. He loved the gently rolling fields with their mile-high hedgerows, and the villages with more ducks than people. He loved the quietness of the land: the way the flint churches seemed to grow out of the ebony soil. Yet it was this very quietness that he found so hateful in his job because, lovely as it all was, rolling fields and candy-coloured cottages didn’t exactly provide riveting copy. He’d long grown tired of the absurd annual tractor race, the endless debates over new bypasses, and local shop robberies. They just weren’t the kind of news stories to stir his blood and make his fingers race feverishly over his keyboard.
In short, he was bored, and it was beginning to show in his work. Only last week the editor had shouted across the
small open-plan office, ‘Mackenzie, you great arse! You’ve got Brenda Myhill married to her own brother here!’
Tom hadn’t bothered to apologise. He’d rewritten his copy and gone home. But it couldn’t go on like this. He’d often asked himself why he was letting his life leak away when he knew there could be so much more. But where? Where was this life he wanted to lead? One thing was for certain: it wasn’t hanging around outside hotels in the hope that a D-list celebrity might show his head and make a comment about his relationship with his much younger co-star in last year’s Christmas panto.
So what was it that kept him going? That big story that would make his name? The splash that would propel him into the world of the big players? It wasn’t really likely to happen in a backwater of East Anglia. But you never could tell, and that’s what kept him sane: the promise of something bigger and better just over the horizon. In the meantime, he was freezing his butt off in the middle of a Suffolk summer.
Sod it, he thought. He was going to do his shopping. Shaking a hand through his dark-blond hair, which had almost turned black in the persistent drizzle, he headed for his car.
There weren’t many advantages to living in the middle of the country but farm shops were one of them. Tom loved the fact that the goods for sale were grown only a few yards away and wouldn’t have been flown across oceans with the possibility of foreign creepy-crawlies as travelling companions.
As he drove along the country lanes, he felt himself begin to thaw out. It had crossed his mind that he could probably get away with spending his entire career in his car, just driving
around the county, making the stories up in his head.
‘After a night of torrential rain, Mr Mandrake was shocked to find the river running through his sock drawer.’ Or ‘For centuries, this village has been the home of the annual duck and teaspoon race.’ Nobody would notice because they were exactly the kinds of things the local paper was full of each week.
Tom turned off the road into what was really still part of a field but which passed for a car park when it wasn’t a bog. He took care to avoid the potholes and kept half an eye on his rear-view mirror, making sure his guitar wasn’t getting a rough ride. Perhaps he should have put it on the back seat and secured the safety belt around it rather than leaving it to roll around on the floor.
He parked the car and leant back to inspect it for damage. Being second hand, it already had one or two imperfections, so he really couldn’t afford any more. He knew he should be more careful with it yet, because he could never bear to be without it, it was constantly flung from living room to car as he moved around, enabling him to strum whenever opportunity and urge coincided. But now he had potatoes on his mind so, repositioning the pale-bodied instrument to prevent further damage, he headed into the shop.
There was nobody about, which was just how he liked it. For a reporter, he found general, everyday conversation hard. The ‘hello, how are you’ stuff always seemed stilted and unnecessary. People normally weren’t interested anyway, so why bother? It was another of the reasons why he favoured this shop, because the man who ran it liked conversation about as much as Tom did.
His name was Pike. Tom had once asked his name and,
whilst pouring the contents of a man-sized bag of potatoes into a display, he’d simply said ‘Pike’. Was it his surname or first name? Tom was never quite sure but one thing was certain, he was a man of very few words, most of them blasphemous or cripplingly rude. But somewhere, under the fleece body warmer, checked shirt and thermals, which he wore despite the change of the seasons, there was a heart of gold. Tom was almost sure of it.
Either way, Pike was quite a character. Tom had always thought it rather fitting that he should have a cauliflower ear and a nose like a Maris Piper, and he loved the way he moved over the shop floor, his shoulders hunched to within
kissing-distance
of his ears, and his heavy boots grazing the bare floorboards.
Piling his basket high with fruit and veg, he took it to the till. Pike was on the phone but nodded to let him know he wouldn’t be long.
‘You jammy bastard!’ he was saying. ‘I wish my honesty box was as full.’
Tom’s ears pricked up. It was the occupational hazard of being a journalist.
‘And you’ve no idea who could’ve left it?’ Pike sucked in a good amount of air very noisily. ‘
Je
-sus!’ There was a pause and a good deal of head-shaking. ‘Well send some down this way if you don’t know what to do with it. All right. Talk soon.’
‘Everything all right?’ Tom asked as Pike ran his massive hands through his sparse, sandy hair. He looked slightly drunk on the news he’d just received.
‘That jammy bastard, Wilfred, has just had a windfall. Seems he found five thousand pounds in his honesty box this
morning.’
‘Really?’
‘One hundred
fifty-pound notes. Can you believe it!’
‘What on earth does he sell to warrant that much?’
‘That’s just it!’ Pike said, shaking his head in wonder. ‘He only had a couple of caulis by the side of the road.’
‘Blimey,’ Tom agreed. ‘Not a bad return.’
‘Who the hell would do something like that?’ Pike asked, weighing Tom’s goods and writing the prices down on a large piece of yellowing paper. The till had obviously broken again or hadn’t been repaired since the last time.
Tom shrugged. ‘Who indeed?’
‘Certainly nobody round here. Bunch of mean gits.’
‘Where was it, then?’
‘Up in the Eden Valley in Cumbria.’
‘Oh.’ Tom couldn’t disguise his disappointment. Just his luck that the first piece of exciting news to come his way happened to be over three hundred miles away. Nothing newsworthy ever happened within a fifty-mile radius of his newspaper. News was something that happened elsewhere; big stories broke in other reporters’ neighbourhoods. And what did that mean for Tom? He pondered for a moment as Pike placed his goods into a carrier bag. If the story didn’t find him, maybe he should go in search of the story.
‘Pike,’ he said, the name sounding strange on his tongue, ‘can you ask your mate if he’s reported that story to the local newspaper yet?’
A tank full of petrol was a beautiful thing, Molly thought. It was partly the novelty, of course, because, previous to her win, her tank had never been above half-full. But it was the symbolism of it too; it was filled with endless possibilities. The road lay ahead, blissfully unexplored. The map on the back seat lay open, page after page of discoveries to be made. Left or right? Motorway or B-roads? Town or country? The decisions were endless, and Molly had all the time in the world to make them.
The first decision she’d made, though, had been to visit the local dogs’ home. Ever since she’d moved to Kirkby Milthwaite, she’d been meaning to buy a dog, but her profits from the florist’s were barely enough to feed her, let alone a dog as well, so she’d made do with weekly visits and helping out with the feeding and walking.
That’s when she’d met Fizz. He had come to the kennels when a puppy and had looked like an out-of-control
snowball. From the day Molly first clapped eyes on him, she knew he was meant to be hers and, because the owner of the kennels couldn’t justify keeping him there until Molly could afford to look after him, she’d absolutely dreaded the thought that he might become somebody else’s pet. But she hadn’t had to wait long.
He was sitting beside her now in the passenger seat. As good as gold and far more precious. She wondered how they’d get along together on her mission. Would he make a good travelling companion? He certainly wouldn’t be bothered about the distribution of her wealth. There wouldn’t be any sanctimonious pleading as to whether she was doing the right thing. For a moment, she tried to imagine what it would be like to have Marty travelling with her.
‘It’s irresponsible and childish, Molly,’ he’d say, shaking his head. ‘It won’t make you a better person, you know. People won’t thank you for it, and just think how much interest you could make –
we
could make – if you invested it all wisely. You’d never have to work again.’
‘But I love my work,’ Molly said aloud, as if really answering him back.
He’d glower at her in disbelief. ‘That’s not the point.’
And Molly could argue all she liked but she knew that there was no winning with Marty. No verbal winning, anyway. So, over the years, she’d learnt to keep her thoughts to herself as she’d listened to her big brother’s advice, and then went and did exactly what she wanted.
One thing was for sure, she thought, looking down at Fizz, she’d chosen her travelling companion well. She smiled to herself. At long last, she’d found the perfect male companion.
She pulled over into a lay-by for a moment, Old Faithful
making a peculiar noise as she did so. The car was, of course, another thing her brother would have made a scene about. Why did she insist on driving a clapped-out old Beetle when she had a mountain of money in the bank? Why indeed? The car was old and temperamental, but it would be like losing a limb if she parted with it. At least she had the money to get it fixed now if it did decide to break down.
She grabbed the map off the back seat, quickly finding where they were. This was the sort of mapscape she loved: more green than brown, more space than roads, and not a hint of blue motorway. She looked down and examined the roads before her. Green, red, yellow or white. From Carlisle, the green was straight as a piece of taut ribbon in places, and the yellow too, whereas the reds and whites curved and crinkled like caterpillars. In true Dorothy Gale mode, she chose to follow the yellow road, sincerely hoping, for her old car’s sake, that it wasn’t made of bricks.
She’d never taken that road before, but the red castellations of Hadrian’s Wall marked on her map looked so pretty that she wanted no other route. It was a strange feeling, though, having so much freedom. She was no longer bound by her daily routine at the shop. There was nothing she absolutely
had
to do and that felt peculiar. All she had to worry about was looking after herself, Fizz and Old Faithful. And the money.
After making the necessary arrangements for her own relatively modest future, she’d opened several bank accounts and split her win up into more manageable amounts. This enabled her to make daily withdrawals from a number of cash machines as she moved around the country. That way, she could keep her secret stash of cash in the car topped up,
and the money she
deposited
on her mission would not be sequential. She wanted to remain untraceable, so she wasn’t going to take any chances.
She gave a great sigh of contentment. Wasn’t time the best thing money could buy? It stretched out as beautiful and enticing as the road ahead, and Molly intended to enjoy every minute of it.
Of course, she
had
been tempted by thoughts of a mad shopping spree. What woman with a few million in her bank account wouldn’t be tempted to blow the whole lot? There’d been a very dodgy moment when she’d shut up shop one day and just hopped on the first train to London. Normally, the price of the ticket would have been prohibitive but she’d handed over her credit card without a second thought and headed for the big city.
What an experience that had been. Growing up in the Lake District hadn’t quite prepared Molly for the level of noise in the capital. She could well understand how it had got its name the Big Smoke because she soon felt as if she’d ingested most of the pollution around her.
Then there were the crowds to contend with. Molly wasn’t used to rugby-scrum streets or armpit travelling on the tube and, in her initial panic, had travelled in completely the wrong direction on the Central line and spent half an hour getting back to where she’d begun. It had been most exhausting.
Once she’d surfaced, it had been with a strange sense of unease that she’d walked down the place she’d reckoned on spending some of her winnings: New Bond Street. She felt rather like a red rose in a field of buttercups; everybody seemed to be blonde and slim with straight-cut hair,
straight-cut
figures and straight-cut shopping bags. Molly, with her
head of dark curls and bouncy bosom, felt alarmingly alien. And they were all so confident-looking, as if this was the most natural way to spend time, but Molly just couldn’t get the hang of it. Her idea of clothes shopping was the winter and summer sales in Carlisle’s department stores; shops which weren’t the least bit intimidating but, here, she didn’t even dare venture into some of the shops for fear of being frogmarched out again. They were all so immaculate. Even the shop assistants looked as if they graced
Vogue
in their spare time.
Then there were the price tags. Honestly, some of them had more figures than a telephone number. But everything was so beautiful, especially the jewellers with their
marquise-cut
diamonds, square-cut emeralds, flower-shaped rubies, and sapphires the size of lakes. Molly’s eyes were dazzled and dazed. She even tried a ring on in Tiffany’s, slipping an
egg-sized
sapphire on her finger.
‘It’s beeeeaaauutiful!’ she cooed, her vision dissolving into its blue depths.
‘And it suits you,’ the assistant said, dripping compliments on her in a steady flow.
Molly held her hand up to the light, watching as the diamonds surrounding the sapphire winked at her most becomingly.
‘H-how much is it?’ she dared to ask, not having a clue seeing as the only item of jewellery she owned was a pair of large silver hoop earrings.
‘Twelve thousand,’ the assistant said without batting an eyelid, his tongue used to such dizzying figures.
Molly gulped and tried very hard not to blush. It was a mere splash in her ocean of winnings, of course, but it was
still twelve thousand pounds. That was a hell of a lot of money to spend in one go on herself for a single item. What had she been thinking of? What did she want with such baubles? She was a florist! Florists didn’t wear rings like that. They belonged on the fingers of film stars.
Molly slipped the ring off and handed it back to the assistant. ‘It’s very lovely,’ she said, ‘but I think I’ll have a look round before making my mind up.’ And, avoiding eye contact with the rows of eye-socking solitaires and gold necklaces as thick as wrists, Molly left the shop.
As soon as she was out in the street, a woman waltzed passed her, casually knocking Molly’s shin with a sharp and expensive-looking carrier bag. Molly turned to watch as the high heels clicked past on the pavement. Stopping to peer in one of the designer shops, she gave her icy-blonde hair a quick flick, her hand then reaching up to stroke the gold necklace on her throat. Molly grimaced. Who really wanted to wear such a vulgar dog collar? Wasn’t gold just cold? Wasn’t it nicer to wear a woolly scarf against your skin? And, as for diamonds, they weren’t called ice for nothing, were they?
Molly was in the wrong place. There was nothing in these shops that she wanted to buy and she certainly didn’t want to turn into one of these New Bond Street clones. So, after getting on the wrong tube once again before finally finding her way back to King’s Cross, she bade farewell to the city and headed north.
It had been such a relief to get back to Kirkby Milthwaite; to a life where people weren’t obsessed by possessions and where the air was as rich as wine. She knew she’d made the right decision in not spending any of her money on such
foolish luxuries. It wasn’t in her nature to spend so freely – not on herself anyway. It was so unnatural; so unsavourily selfish, and that was partly what had given her the idea of what she should do with the bulk of her money.
Now, cranking Old Faithful up again, she pulled out of the lay-by and, hitting the accelerator, headed for Housesteads.
Tom had never been to Cumbria before. Come to think of it, he’d never been further north than Derbyshire, and that trip had only been because of a family funeral. He’d found that most people in East Anglia were the same. ‘I never leave the county if I can help it,’ his elderly neighbour had once told him as if it was something to be intensely proud of. ‘I went to Cambridge once,’ she’d elaborated, ‘but I didn’t like it.’
Tom was profoundly ashamed of how little he’d seen of the country. His road atlas was practically untouched. He didn’t even keep it in his car because the stories he had to cover were in places he’d be able to find if blindfolded.
So where was the atlas now? He pulled a face worthy of a gurning competition as he looked round his study. Study, he thought grimly. It was his ‘everything’ room really. Sure, there was his computer and books but that was all that comprised the study element of the room. Then there was the chest of drawers and wardrobe which hadn’t fitted in the bedroom because that’s where he kept his family of smashed-up guitars. There was the second-hand futon which doubled up as a spare bed; a rowing machine which had probably forgotten it was a rowing machine and more likely thought of itself as a still life; and a huge standard lamp inherited from his grandmother. Added to that were the heaps of what he called ‘unhomed items’: old shirts he hadn’t quite finished with
but which weren’t fit to be hung in the wardrobe; notepads scattered on the floor like stepping stones; picture frames he wasn’t sure how to hang; rucksacks and old hiking boots; and odd-looking tools his father kept buying him in the vain hope that he’d get his house sorted out. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
He started by tentatively probing one of the mountains of unhomed items with his toe but it didn’t look very promising so he moved on to the next one. But there was nothing but rubbish.
At last, under an avalanche of old receipts and notepads, the road atlas was found. He bent down to pick it up and opened it, quickly finding the page he wanted. Cumbria.
‘Bloomin’ heck!’ he whispered, giving a long, low whistle. It was a long way up north. His eyes scanned the page quickly. Other than Carlisle and the M6, there really wasn’t much to it. It was all empty space up there. Did people really live there? Could a story really begin in such an unlikely place? And was it worth the travel? It was at least three hundred miles. That was a lot of driving and a lot of petrol. A lot of time too. Time he knew he wouldn’t be able to get off work.
He flopped down onto the futon and puffed his cheeks out in a dragonesque sigh. He knew what his options were and it was a dangerous choice. He thought for a moment. What did he have to go on? Someone had placed an obscene amount of money in a farmer’s honesty box. So what? They might be insane. They might have trespassed on the farmer’s property at some point and felt an overwhelming sense of guilt.
But what if it went the other way? Maybe it wasn’t just a one-off act of kindness, but the beginning of a spate. Maybe this person had found out they were dying and wanted to go
out in style? Perhaps they’d inherited, or even won, a large amount of money and wanted to share their good fortune. That’s what got Tom excited: the knowledge that this sort of thing didn’t happen every day, and that the person behind the donation must definitely be worth writing about. But what made him think that it could pan out into a story? His guts? Maybe that was just indigestion.
He scratched his chin. It was an enormous risk but, then again, wasn’t that what life was all about? It surely beat stagnating at his local news desk. He knew that if he stayed there much longer he would work himself into early dementia. There had to be more to life than writing about cemetery extensions and stolen power tools, and it was up to him to go out in search of it. He would be out on his own, yes, with absolutely no assurance that he would be successful.
Tom grinned as he suddenly realised how utterly delicious that sounded.