Chapter 3 – A new face in a new place

Chapter 3 – A new face in a new place

“-is.. iss… Miss? Are you alright? Hello? Miss?”

The first thing that Danni registered was the cold. Somehow, the heating had vanished during the night and now she was feeling every moment of it. Her whole body was a mess of shivers; her head pounded in that particular way only a night spent in the cold could do and the first sneeze smacked her upside the head like a hammer. She may have been wrapped up in her winter coat, but it was a poor substitute for thick blankets or heating.

Second, Danni had to fight to open her eyes. They were gummed together with sleep in the way that meant she would have to pull the gunk from her eyelashes later. Sitting up, she groaned, her exhaustion feeling doubled in size despite the full night of sleep, slammed into her. Looking around, she looked into the kitchen and found herself locking eyes with a freckled, friendly face beaming at her. Blonde hair the colour of hay topped a round face with large blue eyes, a long thin nose dusted with a layer of freckles, and his blinding smile revealed straight white teeth.

“Hu-Hullo?” Danni asked, blinking a few times before understanding snapped into place and she jumped off the couch. Stumbling over herself, she registered three things all at once. One, she was still dressed in the clothes she had arrived in. Two, her hair had become a rat’s nest. Three, she should probably find out who this person was. Tumbling off the couch, Danni stumbled over her own feet as she hurried up the stairs connecting the kitchen to the living room. Touching the handle, feeling it move in her hand without resistance as she pushed it, she swore under her breath when she realised that she hadn’t locked the door last night.

She must have been more tired than she’d thought.

“My apologies, miss. My name is Joey; I’m from the village. Are… are you okay? I was told you would be expecting me.”

“Uh…” Slowly, things were clicking back into place. Her memories of the train journey, the cheesecake, the ice cream challenge, meeting Richard, and him telling her all about the people in the village, including Joey. This was Richard’s… relative, right? She couldn’t remember the exact relation whilst her brain was fogged from sleep.

“Uhm… What are you doing here?” Danni rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Now that she was out of the darkness of sleep, the light outside stung her eyes. The sky outside covered in heavy greyish silver clouds, weak streams of sunlight breaking through. The living room curtains had been pulled closed but tiny rays of light were beaming in through determinedly.

“Well, I came to deliver your food; my uncle should have told you that I’d be coming. But when I rang the bell, you didn’t come. I looked through and saw you on the couch here. I got worried—I thought you might have been attacked,” Joey explained, the concern in his voice touching Danni’s heart. She wasn’t used to that.

“But uh… uhm…” Had she been more awake, Danni would have cursed her incoherence. Hoping to stall before she had to answer, she tried to comb her fingers through her hair but gave up when a snag made her wince. “Thank you… Thank you for coming.”

“Think nothing of it, Miss.” Joey replied, flashing her another beaming smile that made heat rise in Danni’s face coupled with a fresh wave of embarrassment.

Looking at him, Danni took in his blonde hair, shining eyes and farm boy good looks. He looked like a character who stepped straight out of the pages penned by Twain or Hemingway. In one chapter running off to an island, escaping trouble down the mighty Mississippi River in the next. “I hope you don’t mind that knocked. I was worried that you might have been hurt, but I didn’t want to make you think I was trying to rob you.”

“I guess… I must have been a lot more tired than I realised.” Even now, she could remember that she had neglected to put the keys in a safe place. Damn it! They were pressing into her hip from inside the pocket of her jeans.

“I’m sorry about surprising you. Are you alright?” Joey asked, offering her a hand and Danni took it, giving it a firm shake.

“I’ll be alright. I was just on the train for an exceptionally long time, and I guess... I was just bone tired. Thank you for coming to check on me.” She replied, still blinking owlishly.

“Think nothing of it. That’s what we do here in Origiham. We take care of each other,” Joey expressed, moving away and Danni took the chance to stretch, yawning as wide as a cat before relaxing. She felt so dusty and unkempt in front of this virtual stranger. She hadn’t even thought to brush her teeth that night, much less shower or change into her pyjamas. This was exactly why she wasn’t built for travelling stupid long distances. She either got distracted by something or fell asleep. Neither were good when you were supposed to keep your wits about you.

“Right uh…” Why couldn’t she get her damn words out? Why was she stumbling over herself like this? “Would… Did you say something about a delivery?”

Joey clapped his hands and the sound made her wince. “That is right! Your friend called ahead and told us that you’d be arriving, but might not have the energy to go shopping, so she asked us to bring some things for you.” From his back pocket, Joey removed a folded piece of paper and handed it over to Danni. Unfolding it revealed a shopping list of sorts.

“Would you mind reading everything on there while I bring it in? I think I have everything, but I would hate to realise that I had missed something. I’ve never done something like this before.” Joey disappeared off to the left and Danni followed him with her head to see a bicycle hooked up to a cart loaded with wooden boxes, each one filled to bursting with all sorts of food.

“You don’t do orders like this? In London, we do things like this all the time.”

“You’re not in London anymore, Toto,” chirped Joey, a cheeky smile that made his eyes sparkle coming over his face. He hefted the first box with surprising strength in his wiry limbs and carried it into the kitchen, bringing Danni’s attention back to the job at hand. Retrieving a pen from her bag, she started unpacking the crates and ticking off the bits and pieces in turn.

It was slow at first, but gradually, Danni ticked off the last thing, and together, she and Joey piled together the crates, putting them back into the cart.

“I won’t take up any more of your time. I’m sure you must have a lot to be getting on with, and so do I. Come around to the shop sometime. I’m sure I’ll have something that’ll interest you there.” Joey shook her hand again, adjusted his cap, mounted his bike and peddled away, singing to himself as he went.

Danni smiled as she watched him go before turning back to the kitchen. What a comical fellow… He seemed to have sprung straight out of some pastoral literature, something like a romance or even one of those strange little cozy mysteries. She mused, as she put boxes of cereal, cans of beans, sliced tomatoes, puréed tomatoes, pasta sauces, fruit cocktail, peaches, cherries, mandarin slices, soups, and more in the cupboards. Packs of dried pasta, rice, flour, stock cubes, yeast, sugar, tea, coffee, hot chocolate mix, boxed mixes for cookies and cakes, salt and pepper were placed into another. In the fridge, Danni placed milk, bacon, eggs, beef mince, chicken fillets, pork chops, sausage links, cheeses, jarred sauces and jams, fruit juice, and 24 cans of coke into the fridge. More meats and frozen goods were put into the freezer, and to finish it, oranges, apples, bananas and lemons were arranged in the porcelain fruit bowl. Danni slumped down onto the kitchen table, her head buzzing, spots dancing before her eyes.

All of this was so much, it felt so... certain. Like she was supposed to stay here.

“Tawney… You really don’t go by halves, do you?” Danni breathed, smiling to herself. Her friend could be downright exhausting to be around, but she really went all out. With all of this food, she wouldn’t be in need for anything. As if summoned by her thoughts, Danni heard her phone’s email notification go off inside her bag, still sitting where she had left it on the kitchen table. Upon opening it, she discovered that she had gotten a message from, of all people, Tawney.

Hey sweetie!

Hope you made it safe!

Can’t talk for long but I had a great idea!

I felt bad about springing this about you, so I have an offer for you! If you stay there, I’ll set you up with £40 a week! That way you can tell your folks you got a job and you’re planning to move out. You won’t be lying.

Sound good?

Great!

See ya!

“DAMN IT TAWNEY!” Danni exclaimed. She had just been thinking about how Tawney was a good person. Tawney goes and drops this on her. The last thing that Danni had wanted was to tell her parents about what she was doing here, and the idea of telling them that she would be moving out?! That was absurd! As soon as they heard that, they would think it was a done deal, and she would never be able to go home again without getting her parents turning into the Spanish Inquisition!

She didn’t even get to say anything, because Tawney might never get it.

Wasn’t that just her luck!

Damn it…

She knew that she shouldn’t complain. That she should be glad that she was getting paid to house sit, basically; but Tawney had no idea how her parents worked.

Her mother would condemn her for leaving. For going out into the middle of nowhere, for thinking that she could do anything without running it past her.

“Are you really going to wear that?” Her mother had asked, looking down at her as she was trying on a pair of skinny jeans for the first time.

“What’s wrong with them?” Danni had asked but her mother had only walked away.

“Are you really going to eat that?” Danni’s fork, poised above the second helping she’d wanted, paused.

“English? Is that really what you want to go to university for?”

Every single time Danni had tried to make a decision for herself; her mother had this way of making her feel guilty. Half the time, it was simply because Danni had wanted to do something different. On the other half…

“Why are you always wearing the same thing? You’d look better if you tried to do something different with your clothes.”

“You’re skin and bone. You’ll never find someone if you’re a walking skeleton.”

“English will get you into so many walks of life.”

It was like being kept in a pressure cooker mixed with a hadron collider!

Then again, her father was no better.

“Lazy girl. Waste of money sending you to school.”

“Smart girls make better partners.”

“That writing will go nowhere! You should work for a company like mine.”

Every day was being barraged with both barrels but at least there was some consistency.

But now, if she’d had even a prayer of backing out of this, it was gone now. Vanished like a drop of water in the desert.

She was well and truly stuck.

Before now, she’d had an escape plan. But now that was gone. Her parents would surely be messaging her to ask where they could drop off her things any minute now.

She couldn’t stand to look at her phone or that message. Danni tossed it back onto the couch and sighed. She was far too hungry for this. She desperately needed something to eat and being around so much food had only made it worse.

As she chewed on a bowl of cereal, Danni looked around and admired the kitchen properly for the first time. It had a cream-coloured tile floor, polished wooden cupboards, a tall fridge in a solid white, and there was a stand mixer, blender, food processor, a slow cooker and a kettle all standing beside each other, taking up one corner of the counter that stretched out before her. The stove had four cookers and what looked like two ovens. The sheer elegance of such a place, everything looking shiny and new, a matching set that would have looked better in a show room than a house people were supposed to live in.

It was sitting there, waiting to be used and Danni’s stomach was coiling in on itself at the thought. Did she even know enough recipes to use everything? She was just a few years off being a broke university student subsisting on whatever was in the fridge that hadn’t started moving yet.

Moving closer, she ran her hands over their many levers and buttons, never hard enough to make them start.

‘I’m going to have to learn how to bake… And how to use each of these. I guess that’s what Google is for. That’s pretty damn intimidating now I think about it. When was the last time I made anything more intricate than a cheese toastie… Did Tawney want me to make anything with these?’

Placing her bowl in the sink and deciding that would be a problem for Future!Danni, she hunted around for the router and found it tucked away into the back of what she surmised to be a cleaning supply closet. Well, it was good to know that Richard’s wife hadn’t had to bring all of her own cleaning things up here. Next to the box of blinking lights, there was a yellow post-it note with the WiFi password scrawled on it in Tawney’s barely legible chicken scratch handwriting. Putting it into her phone and tucking the note into her back pocket, Danni turned her attention to something that had been pressing on her mind ever since she had woken up.

Attached to the email all but summoning her to the house, there had been a list of all the things in the house that needed to be here. What kind of person would traipse all the way up here for this place, Danni chose not to question. There were better uses of her brain power. Other than doing this damnable inventory, she had to make sure that Tawney had stuck to her word and made sure her books were really all here. If something was missing, Danni swore that there would be hell to pay.

Last night, she had fallen asleep in what she discovered to be a cavernous living room, whitewashed walls, solid oak flooring, two windows that rose to the ceiling, either side of a huge flat screen TV sitting on an old flat-top chest. Much like the kitchen, it all felt like too much. She was one person, this was a place meant for parties, for spreading around, for taking up space. The couch she’d passed out on was black leather that still had some of her body heating clinging to it and there were armchairs on either side of the room, though the couch alone was big enough to fit five people with room to spread out.

Behind the living room was a dining room, that had a table which could have supported a banquet, metal chairs and two more windows that let in the weak morning sunlight, already under threat of being covered by heavy clouds.

On either side of this cavernous dining, two staircases led to bedrooms, one of which Danni assumed to be hers, that begged to be explored. Her wanderings also revealed two smaller bedrooms down one hall, a third on the other side of the house and a bathroom with a carved stone sink, an open shower with a peculiar showerhead hanging over where one was supposed to stand and a towel rack she supposed must heat up. She returned to the kitchen, grabbing her luggage, lugging it up the stairs on the right, shouldering the rough wooden door open to reveal a bedroom that could have come straight from her dreams.

The bed was a double and fit for a queen, stacked with many plush cushions, blankets, a dust ruffle and even a throw in the deep shade of purple. A desk had been set up in the corner with a shelf above it, just wide enough for a pair of speakers to be sat comfortably. A wing backed armchair had been pushed into the other corner, next to some of the tallest bookshelves Danni had ever seen. The room was over 6 feet in height, considerably taller than Danni herself and her jaw dropped at the shelves stretching all the way to the ceiling. She had been concerned about storage when Tawney had told her that she could send all of her books ahead of her but now… it was more a question of if she had enough to fill it!

Speaking of the boxes, her precious collection was sitting neatly on the floor and Danni sent up a secret, silent prayer for the backs of the people who had had to carry them all the way here. Whatever Tawney had paid them, it had not been enough , Danni was certain of that. After all, she’d had to pack all those boxes. At the same time, she was immensely grateful to see that all of them had made the journey safely. Before she could talk herself out of it or remind herself that she still had to unpack the rest of her things and do the inventory, she had grabbed a pair of scissors from the kitchen and was cutting through the tape securing the tops and pulling out volumes by the armful.

Everything from Stoker, Shelley, Austen, Homer, Vergil, Byron, Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Defoe, Golding, Miller, Alcott, Burnett, Dickens, Orwell, Blyton, Du Maurier, volumes of romance, horror, adventure, mystery, an enormous, phone book sized collection of Shakespeare’s works, and a not so small collection of manga volumes, all of it found a home on her shelves.

She had worked up a sweat organising all her books and her clothes into their respective places, but what was better, she had forgotten all about why she had been avoiding looking at her phone. Instead, she changed into her thickest long-sleeved shirt, a deep shade of plum with three stars decorating her shoulder, a pair of woollen tights and her favourite jeans. Unfortunately, not all things, especially not good things, were meant to last. Something she was swiftly reminded of when she picked up her phone again. Right there, on the screen was a missed call from her mother. Just… great. Just what she had been afraid of. Why did all of her happy moments have to be followed by a cavalcade of crap afterwards?

Every minute that ticked by without her calling back was another minute that her parents had to build up heads full of steam. Steam they would surely direct straight at Danni. Just like they had done when she had been late coming home one Christmas because of a delayed train. She’d had to put up with their grousing and condemnations all through the ride home, as if they expected her to jump out a window and sprint the rest of the way home or drag the train back by herself.

Turning her phone over in her hand, Danni tried to think about what she could say or do that might stop the pair of them from biting her head off. She hadn’t even been expecting them to call her, she had hoped that they were too busy having fun to bother and she certainly hadn’t been planning on calling them. But of course, Tawney had sent them that message. Just her damn luck. As nice as this place was, Tawney’s actions were still managing to screw her over. One step forward, two steps back may as well be that girl’s middle name.

Before she could do anything about her predicament, the universe saw fit to take matters into its own hands. The ‘Kill Bill’ siren ringtone sounded through the bedroom, making her jump so high, her bare feet almost slid out from under her. Steadying herself with a hand on the ground, she accepted the call and braced herself for the explosion.

“Uh… Hi mom.”