A Day to Remember Read online

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he began as I clambered out.

  ‘Don’t you “sorry”’ me!’ I ranted, pointing at the bumper. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’

  ‘Oh, please don’t cr –’

  God, men. ‘And don’t you dare tell me not to cry!’ I barked. ‘I’ve had a pig of a day, I’ve been two hours in casualty getting my son’s wrist put in plaster, and now my car is in pieces as well!’

  He turned to Josh. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ he said again, nodding towards Josh’s arm. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  All this apologising. Anyone would have thought he’d been personally responsible. But saying sorry wasn’t going to get anything fixed, was it? I glared at him and tried to swallow the lump that was stuck in my throat. How ridiculous to burst into tears like that. He must think I was deranged.

  He certainly looked at a loss to know what to do next, so I went and took cover behind my open car door, in case he decided he should apologise some more. I knew that, if he did, I’d start crying again. But some instinct seemed to tell him he shouldn’t, and he turned back to Josh.

  ‘How’d you do that, anyway?’

  Josh seemed pleased to have found someone to tell about his stunt. Someone who wouldn’t nag him about not being careful. Someone who might just be impressed. ‘Doing an Ollie,’ he said, with some pride. ‘Got at least this much air though.’ He spread his arms to demonstrate. ‘And landed it too. It was just that this stupid kid on a BMX collided with me.’

  ‘Ouch,’ said the man, nodding like he knew just what Josh meant. ‘Still, way to go! I used to be a bit of a skateboarder myself, as it happens. Do you know Tony Hawk? I met him once, you know.’

  I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, though Josh was clearly quite excited by this news. I didn’t give a fig who Tony bloody Hawk was, only that right now every man on the planet seemed intent on ruining my life. I pulled my handbag out of the car and started looking in it for a tissue to blow my nose with. And also a pen. I didn’t want to be here all night.

  By the time I’d done that, the man had already found paper and pen of his own and was busy bent over the bonnet of his car, presumably writing down his details. I pulled one of my business cards from my purse and added my home address and phone number on the back.

  ‘Sign your plaster?’ he asked Josh as I was writing.

  Josh glanced at me to check and then nodded. ‘Why not?’ Clearly someone so up on skateboarding matters must command total respect. The man passed me his piece of paper, looking relieved that I’d stopped blubbing at last.

  ‘There you are,’ he said.

  I read it. Matt Williams, his name was. Short for Matthew, I guessed. But he looked like a Matt. He looked like a skateboarding, surfing kind of Matt. Not at all like a man in a big blue Mercedes. Not wearing those scruffy shorts. He finished writing on Josh’s plaster and I handed him my card.

  ‘ “A Day To Remember”,’ he read out from the front. ‘Well,’ he said, brightly, clearly keen to cheer me up. ‘Whichever way you look at it, we’ve certainly had that!’

  You don’t know the half of it, I thought grimly.

  Chapter 3

  ‘What you need,’ said my sister Jan, the following morning, ‘is a nice cup of tea. And then you can tell me all about it.’

  A nice cup of tea was my sister’s answer to everything. Well, everything that couldn’t be solved by my ‘finding a nice bloke’ to take care of me, that is. I was grateful that this was just a cup-of-tea day. It could be wearing, having your little sister hassling you about men all the time. Especially when men were the cause of all your problems.

  I sat down in her tidy kitchen and put my head on the table. The wood was cold and smooth and it occurred to me that what I needed was not a cup of tea but a bucket of iced water. So I could throw it over Steve’s treacherous head. And Josh’s. And the man with the Mercedes. Everyone. Every man.

  My sister, whose life always seemed so much more peaceful than mine, had made me a cup of tea the day I told her my husband Carl had run off to Alicante with the lap dancer. Or, rather, THAT lap dancer, as we all took to calling her. Which was incorrect because she wasn’t a lap dancer by then. She was the receptionist for A Day To Remember, of course. Funny how life works out.

  Still, that had all happened two years ago, and I was much happier these days on my own. Though I wasn’t happy right now. Why did everything have to go wrong all at once? Why couldn’t troubles come one at a time?

  I lifted my head from the table. Jan was at the sink, filling her peppermint green kettle. The room was full of the smell of roasting chicken. I’d forgotten the last time Josh and I had sat down to a proper Sunday lunch together. Roll on September and a chance to have our weekends back. ‘I don’t want a cup of tea, thanks,’ I told her.

  ‘A glass of wine, then?’

  I shook my head a second time. She turned and glanced at her kitchen clock. It wasn’t quite noon. ‘Hmm,’ she agreed. ‘You’re right. Bit early.’

  ‘What I need,’ I told her, counting with my fingers, ‘is one driver, one limo and my car to be fixed. Oh, and Josh to finish his geography coursework. That’ll do for now. Can you fix it?’

  We both smiled. Then she came round the table and sat down opposite me. ‘This is all too complicated,’ she said. ‘Start at the beginning.’

  So I started at the beginning with the limo and Steve disappearing, and finished with the case of the bee up the leg.

  A bumble bee, it had been. A really big one, it turned out. The man had found it in the footwell and showed it to us. Josh, who’d been stung by a bee the previous summer, had felt very sorry for him. I hadn’t. I was much too busy feeling sorry for myself.

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ I said, with feeling. ‘How unlucky can you get? Because if Steve hadn’t run off with the car I wouldn’t have had to do the job in the evening, would I?’

  ‘I suppose not. ‘

  ‘And if I hadn’t had to do the job in the evening, Josh wouldn’t have been running amok in the skate park as late as he was. And if Josh hadn’t still been there he wouldn’t have broken his wrist, would he? And if he hadn’t broken his wrist, we wouldn’t have had to go to the hospital, and if we hadn’t been at the hospital, we wouldn’t have been in the car park.’

  ‘Fair point.’

  ‘And if we hadn’t been in the car park, I wouldn’t have had my car bashed up. You know what? I’m going to kill Steve when I get my hands on him.’

  Jan got up again and squeezed my arm before attending to her chicken. ‘But are you sure it’s him who’s taken the limo?’ she said, opening the oven door and letting a blast of heat out. ‘Couldn’t it have been stolen by someone else?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. Rhys says Steve took it away Friday morning and he hasn’t seen it since.’ I thumped the table with the flat of my hand. ‘And now it turns out he’s been using it lots. Rhys told me. Moonlighting with it. How DARE he!’

  ‘Well,’ she said, closing the oven door again. ‘I’m sure he’ll be back with it before you know it.’

  I frowned. ‘I’m not sure I have your confidence about that.’

  I’d never been sure about Steve. But when Carl left and I took over what was left of his business, I kept Steve on because it didn’t seem fair to chuck him out of the job. It wasn’t much, I knew – two days work a week, at most – but it added to the wages he earned from his day job. Whatever that was. It had never been clear. It wasn’t even Steve himself that was the problem. He was generally reliable. It was just that he mixed with some less friendly types. The sort of people, in fact, that you wouldn’t much want in the back of your limo. But perhaps Jan was right. Perhaps he and the limo would turn up again soon. I couldn’t quite believe he would steal it.

  ‘Well, whatever. The main thing is, what about your car? Is it very badly damaged?’

  ‘I won’t know till Monday evening, when the garage have inspected it. It looked like it was.’

 
; ‘But he’ll pay for it, of course.’

  ‘He says so. I hope so. I’ve got to send him the estimate when I get it.’

  Jan smiled. ‘And what of the bee?’

  ‘The bee,’ I said grimly, ‘has paid with its life.’

  Poor little bee, I thought. And poor little me.

  Chapter 4

  Not that I felt sorry for myself on a regular basis. Not even on a Monday morning. Unlike most people I knew, I liked Mondays.

  Since I’d started back at college last autumn, Mondays meant the future. The time when I’d be able to sell the cars and what was left of my ex’s business, and start my new career. It wasn’t the most highbrow of ambitions, but I’d always wanted to open my own flower shop, and keeping the business going for a while meant I could afford to go to college and get the qualifications I’d need.

  I’d been working in a florists when I first met Carl, but his business was growing and it needed to be managed. And then we got married and had Josh and the years had flown by. Somehow my ambitions had flown with them. But now I was finally free and could do what I liked. Nothing was going to stop me.

  Assuming, that was, I still had two cars to sell. There’d still been no word from Steve, and no answer from his phone, and the limo wasn’t back in the barn. I’d checked.

  Josh was feeling fine, though, and was keen to get to school and show off his battle scars. I wrote him a long note for his teacher explaining why he hadn’t been able to complete his essay on Macbeth, and wondered if I could write one for myself to explain to my tutor why I hadn’t managed to finish my essay, either.

  I got the call from the garage just as I was coming through the front door on Monday evening. As I’d suspected, it was going to cost lots of money, but as it wasn’t my money, I didn’t much care. What I did care about, though, was that it wouldn’t be fixed until Friday, which meant the rest of the week with no transport. Not unless I wanted to take myself off to college each day in an ancient Rolls Royce, which I didn’t. Parked up there all day, I’d be lucky if it stayed intact.

  I sighed, and found the number of the man from the car park. I dialled it. It was answered immediately, by a woman.

  ‘Marie Williams.’

  ‘Oh, hello,’ I said. ‘My name’s Joanna Morgan. I’m calling about the repairs to my car. I was wondering if I could have a word with Mr Williams –’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ she said. She had a soft, sing-song voice. She sounded nice. His wife, I assumed. ‘You must be the lady from the hospital,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Matt told me all about it. Dear me, what a disaster! I do hope you haven’t been too inconvenienced. I’ll just go and see if I can find him for you. Hang on a tic.’

  I duly hung on, and a couple of minutes later, I could hear footsteps echoing as they approached the phone. I imagined what their house might look like. Probably went with their car. Elegant and grand. Parquet flooring, most probably. Obviously a big house. Much bigger than ours.

  There was a clatter as he picked up the phone.

  Except it wasn’t him. It was his wife again. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought he was in the garden. But he isn’t. He’s gone out. Can I take a message?’

  So I gave her all the details, double checked their address and promised I’d have the garage post the estimate to them in the morning. Then I got back to finishing my essay and wondering, for at least the tenth time that day, where exactly my limo had got to.

  Chapter 5

  ‘You should call the police,’ advised Jan, who’d called me for an update. ‘You must. Because he’s obviously nicked it.’

  It was Tuesday evening, and I’d still not heard from Steve. I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d thought about reporting it stolen all day Monday, but I still wasn’t convinced it was the right thing to do. Something else, surely, must have happened. Something bad? And yet the car was registered in my name, so if there had been an accident, someone would have informed me by now, wouldn’t they? Time was running out, however, and we had a two-car wedding at the weekend.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I still can’t believe he would do that. He’s lots of things, sure –’

  ‘Like a no-good waster.’

  ‘But not a thief. He wouldn’t do that to me.’

  ‘But someone else might have done.’

  ‘I would have heard about it by now. From Steve. He would have told me something. And besides, Rhys told me the car’s been out overnight before. More than once. So –’

  ‘What? The cheek of it! You see? That just proves my point. He’s been taking you for a ride. And now you have the evidence. You should have got rid of him the same time you got rid of that rat-fink ex-husband of yours.’

  We’d been here before. Many, many times. One day Jan would realise that our marriage had been in trouble long before the lap-dancer went and sat in his. But if it made her feel better to cast him as the villain, there wasn’t a great deal I could do. ‘Let’s not start on him, eh?’ I said. ‘That’s all history now.’

  I heard her exhale. ‘Okay, okay,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. But my point is still the same. You’re too trusting, Jo. Too busy seeing the best in everyone. And then you get trampled on. I’m just trying to look out for you, that’s all.’

  Jan was right, of course. She generally is. Perhaps I had been too trusting with Steve. Perhaps I was too trusting, full stop. I promised her I’d call the police first thing in the morning, and then I got back to the more important business of college and my overdue essay.

  I was just finishing it when the doorbell rang. I checked the time. It was after seven and I still hadn’t started on dinner.

  ‘Shall I get that, Mum?’ asked Josh. He was sitting with me at the kitchen table doing his homework. Any excuse for a distraction.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, smiling. ‘You stick at that. I’ll go.’

  I could make out a dark shape in the glass panel in the front door, and as I walked up the hallway I thought with a surge of relief that it was finally Steve with my limo. But the shape was too tall and altogether too slim. Unless Steve had been away at some secret diet camp, the person on the doorstep was somebody else.

  It was. When I opened the door I didn’t recognise the man at all. He was wearing a grey suit and a striped blue tie and was carrying a bunch of carnations, and a huge bar of chocolate. Perhaps he was going try and sell me a kitchen or some PVC windows, and this was a wacky new sales ploy. But no. He thrust the bar of chocolate towards me. ‘For your son,’ he said, smiling sheepishly. ‘How’s his wrist?’

  It took two more seconds before I worked out who he was. ‘Oh!’ I said, finally. ‘You’re the man from the hospital! Mr Williams!’

  ‘It’s Matt,’ he said. ‘Please. But yes. The very same.’ He smiled. ‘Oh, and these are for you.’ He now thrust the flowers at me. ‘By way of a proper apology.’

  I let go of the front door and took them from him, a little flustered to find myself starting to blush. ‘You didn’t need to do that,’ I told him. ‘Really you didn’t. But it’s very kind of you, even so.’

  I pushed the door out of the way with my elbow. He’d come all this way – his address, I’d already noticed, was in another, much grander, part of town – so the least I could do was invite him in.

  He stepped over the doormat and stood a bit self-consciously in the hallway, filling it with the scent of expensive aftershave. His hair, I noticed then, was shorter and tidier than it had been, though not a lot shorter and not a lot tidier. And although the suave look did suit him, he still had the expression of a man who’d rather be wearing something else. I sniffed the carnations. They didn’t smell at all. He clearly wasn’t a man who knew much about flowers. Probably picked them up at a petrol station forecourt. But I didn’t mind. It was a novelty for me, receiving flowers. From a man, that is. And such a nice one. Which made me instantly forgive him for ruining my week.

  After all, it had been ruined already. By Steve.

  �
�Did you get the estimate okay?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, but you wouldn’t have, of course. It was only posted this morning, so –’

  ‘All sorted,’ he said. ‘I spoke to the garage first thing and had them fax it straight across to the insurers. Seemed more sensible. Speed things up a bit, at least. When are you getting it back?’

  ‘Not till Friday,’ I told him. He looked dismayed.

  ‘That bad, then?’

  ‘They had to order a new bumper from somewhere. And there’s body work to do.’

  He looked even more dismayed. ‘God, that’s a pain. The Merc only needed a touch up. Doesn’t seem right, does it? Not when this whole thing has caused you so much hassle.’

  He sounded like he meant it. How sweet of him, I thought. ‘It is a very ancient old heap,’ I reassured him. ‘And don’t worry,’ I added brightly. ‘I can manage on the bus.’

  His brows shot up. ‘The bus? They’ve not given you a courtesy car?’ I shook my head. Bless him. What a different world he must live in. The nearest thing my trusty local garage could have offered was probably the owner’s bicycle. The car itself wasn’t worth a lot more.

  ‘No,’ I said, smiling. ‘But, like I say, I’m fine on the bus.’

  I don’t know why I was carrying on like that. It wasn’t fine at all. It was a hassle, as he’d said, for both me and for Josh. And despite my jolly tone, he obviously thought so too.

  ‘Then you must phone them right away and get one. It’ll all be covered by the insurance. The whole thing was my fault, after all – well, the bee’s fault – ’ He grinned. ‘So I insist. Look, shall I call them and sort it out for you?’

  ‘No, really,’ I said again. That’s the thing about me. Pride. Independence in all things. It’s almost an instinct. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I grinned back, to reassure him some more. ‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m sure.’