Daydreamer

Felix

As I walked up the path to the small, terraced cottage, I felt my chest tighten. I loved it here: the warm kitchen, the laughter, toasted hot-cross buns, casual affection – it was the total opposite of my family home. The Mayweathers had a way of making you feel like you were one of them. I never felt like I was just a paying guest or that Hetty was just my nanny. They were family. I started to feel sick. What does Hetty think of me now? Realising that I’d paused on the path, I shook my head to clear it before I made my feet step forward towards the bright blue door. After I’d knocked, I was bracing to be confronted by a furious Hetty, so when a just mildly grumpy Jimbo, one of the bartenders at The Badger’s Sett, opened the door, I was flummoxed.

“Ah, the Moretti boy,” Jimbo said, rubbing his hand over his stubble as he looked me up and down. “What you here about, lad? Not still sore about the time I cut your fake ID in half, are you?”

“You always served Mike.”

Jimbo’s eyebrows went up. “Yeah, well. Back then, Hetty wasn’t about to bankrupt my business if I got her boy shitfaced, was she? Nobody wants to piss off the Morettis.”

“That’s not—” I broke off and took a deep breath in and out. Why was I getting involved in a ridiculous conversation about why I hadn’t been served at age fifteen when the rest of the village got away with it? I needed to focus on the task at hand. I was so stressed that I was starting to become as distractable as Lucy, and I didn’t have the excuse of being a creative genius to fall back on. “Listen, Jimbo, I’m here to see Hetty.”

Was Jimbo Hetty’s boyfriend now? That would be… weird. I would have hoped that Hetty had better taste. I mean, it was midday and Jimbo was standing in the doorway wearing his dressing gown and scratching his balls. Charming.

“Hetty?” he asked, his eyebrows up in his hairline. “Hetty’s not lived here for over a year, boy.”

I blinked. “What? I don’t understand.”

“That daughter of hers bought her the Moonreach place. Hetty was right chuffed, she were. It was bad enough when Lucy retired her mum. Hetty banged on enough about that to anyone that’d listen in The Badger’s. But since Moonreach, she’s been fit to burst. She has the bridge club meet at her place now rather than your mum’s. Avoids that stick-up-his-arse dad of yours apparently. Can’t say I blame her. Never was that keen on your old man.”

Moonreach was a beautiful, grade two-listed, large cottage on the outskirts of the village. Hetty would often talk about Moonreach and how she loved it. Old Man Tinsley had lived there. I knew this because Moonreach was the direct neighbour to my parents’ house. In fact, it sat between the Buckingham Estate and ours. Not that you could see the house from either my parents’ house or Ollie’s, as both had a fair acreage. I blinked again and took a step back. I was beginning to feel very, very stupid. Here I had been feeling bad for Hetty supporting her daydreaming daughter, and all along it was the other way around. I mumbled something to Jimbo as I turned and made my way back to my car.

There was a new gate on Moonreach, much more sturdy than before, with a large sign saying to shut it after yourself. Once I’d driven through it, I realised why. Two hugely fat pigs ambled their way up to my car, snorting like obese asthmatics. They were probably the ugliest creatures I’d ever seen in my life. Behind them, a couple of hens emerged from a bush. One of them was missing half its feathers, and the other was limping. Hetty used to talk about running a small holding. She’d always taken in as many waifs and strays as she could into her tiny cottage. I was guessing that with more space, she’d decided to go nuts. I smiled for the first time in weeks. My father absolutely hated animals. And there was no way that Hetty would manage to contain this lot in her property; at least, I really, really hoped there wasn’t.

My smile grew as a llama trotted down the lane towards me. This just got better and better. Old Man Tinsley had only had a couple of dogs, and even they used to drive my dad totally mad. The llama was staring at me now, its teeth pulling back. I hopped in the car. Not worth being spat at. We had a face-off on the drive for a couple of minutes until the pigs decided to join the llama in blocking my path. One of them lay down in front of my bumper. I decided to cut my losses and drove up into the muddy field to get around them, covering my car in dirt. I added buying a Land Rover to the list of things to sort out. Once I’d convinced Lucy to forgive me, I was planning on being at Moonreach a fair bit. I would need a vehicle that could handle the mud and didn’t scream “poncy city boy” as Mike had dubbed me when he first saw the low-slung Aston Martin that I was currently ruining. Thankfully, the rest of the driveway was relatively clear – I only had to pause for a moment to let some ducks cross in front of the car.

I took a deep breath when I made it to the front door. They’d painted it the same colour as their old cottage and there were climbing roses up the side. The whole building looked like something out of Country Life – thatched roof, thick stone walls, areas of exposed brick and beams. It was the opposite of my parents’ house. My father had done as much as he could to modernise their property, skirting very close to the planning rules and sometimes completely disregarding them. He’d managed to make what had once been a beautiful, old country house into an oversized, glass-fronted monstrosity.

I knocked and waited, my heart in my throat. Hetty opened the door wearing the same apron she’d always worn, some flour on her cheek and in her salt and pepper hair. She was holding a rolling pin, and I braced for impact. But when her shocked expression cleared, her face filled with warmth and she did something completely unexpected. She dropped the rolling pin and pulled me into her for a tight hug. For such a small woman, she was surprisingly strong, pulling me down to her height with ease. I actually felt my throat thicken with emotion. Hetty gave the best hugs.

“Oh, love,” she said. “You’ve gone and got yourself in a right pickle, haven’t you?” She pulled back, putting her hands on either side of my face to keep it at her level. “Always were a bit slow on the uptake.”

“Er… what?”

She patted my cheek a couple of times. “I sent you my Lucy on a platter. You two were always meant for each other. Your mum and I talked it through and decided that you both needed a bit of a push.”

My eyebrows went up. “My mother?”

“She wants you happy, love. All those silly women you’ve been with won’t do at all. It was time to put a stop to it. And my Lucy doesn’t want anyone but you. Never has.” Before I could correct her, Hetty grabbed my arm and started pulling me into the house. As we stepped into the hallway, the barking started. Two massive retrievers came bounding up to us, one of them jumping up on my chest and licking my face, the other wanting to, but too old to manage it.

“That’s Samwise. I still leave the naming to Lucy, see,” Hetty said. “We’ve not got very far with training, to be honest. And you know Frodo.”

After I’d given the younger dog some fussing, I went down to my knees on the floor to get to Frodo.

“He must be sixteen now?” I said, my voice rough with emotion. “Hey boy,” I muttered to him as I rubbed behind his ears the way I knew he liked. “You remember me?” He chuffed, then gave my face a long lick, his tail thumping on the floor. Memories of walks with Frodo and Mike with Lucy trailing behind flooded my mind. I’d always make Mike wait for her, much to his annoyance.

My chest tightened as my memories moved to the old Mayweather dog, Bilbo, and how distraught thirteen-year-old me had sought comfort in his fur after I found out my father took my own dog, Benji to the pound. Mum and I had found Benji at a rescue centre six months earlier, and I’d fallen in love with him despite his scruffy appearance. I was frantic when I came home from boarding school with him missing, and then devastated when I discovered what my father had done. My eyes had been red and puffy from crying on the way to the cottage, but I’d forced them back after arriving. Unfortunately Mike had been away at scout camp, so it was just Hetty and eight-year-old Lucy there. Hetty had taken one look at me and hustled me into the kitchen where I’d sunk down in front of the Aga and burrowed my face in Bilbo’s thick coat. Then little Lucy had come into the kitchen, tilted her head to the side as she stared at me and her dog.

“You’re sad,” she’d told me.

“A bit, Shakespeare,” I’d said in a scratchy voice, sniffing a couple of times but managing not to cry again. Lucy sank down the other side of Bilbo, and her small hand covered mine on his neck.

“Wanna hear a story?” she asked softly.

I nodded, and that’s how we stayed. Hetty cooking supper around us and Lucy telling me her story. After an hour, although the aching pain of my dad’s cruelty was still there, I at least felt like I could breathe again. How had I forgotten how kind Lucy was? How had I ever thought her capable of betraying me?

“Come on, love,” Hetty said softly. I blinked away the memories and looked up at her smiling face before getting to my feet to follow her.

“Is Lucy here?” I asked as we made our way into Hetty’s large but somehow still cosy country kitchen, filled with old wood, a Belfast sink, warm tiles, cream Aga. Warm, homely, again the complete opposite of my family home.

“Yes, she’s here, but don’t worry. She won’t have heard you arrive. She’s got her special headphones on – can’t hear a thing with those things on her ears. Says she needs them to concentrate with Gandalf squawking all day.” A cockerel started shrieking right on queue then.

“I’m assuming that’s Gandalf?”

“Yes, poor chap’s got a nervous condition – squawks all the time. Sad really, all the hens avoid him so, he can’t even get himself some. Your mum thinks he’s frustrated… sexually.”

“What?” I spluttered. Commenting on a cockerel’s sexual needs was not an in-character action for my mother. I cleared my throat and rubbed the back of my neck. “Mum said that?”

“Oh yes,” Hetty said in a breezy tone. “Bianca’s much less repressed these days.”

I didn’t want to hear about my mum and her theories about poultry sexual and mental health problems. Thankfully, Hetty was on a mission and she wasn’t about to be distracted by Gandalf.

“You really messed up,” she said, straight to the point – but then Hetty always was. “What on earth were you thinking?”

I sighed, my shoulders dropping as I sank down into a chair next to the huge, worn kitchen table, running my hand along the smooth wood surface.

“I’m a fucking idiot.”

Hetty reached behind her for a blue and white striped pot, opened the lid and held it out to me.

“I only have fifties.”

She shook the jar at me and lifted her eyebrows. “Better not say bad words then, young man. You still owe me one pound twenty-five from two decades ago anyway. You always did have a potty mouth.” I pulled my wallet out and put a fifty in the jar.

“Well, we’d better sort it out then, hadn’t we?” Hetty said as if we were back when I was a kid in the kitchen complaining about a difficult piece of homework instead of sitting here as a full-grown man having broken her daughter’s heart. “Nice cup of tea?” A cup of tea was pretty much Hetty’s starting point for any crisis, big or small. “Her hands are getting better, so that’s one good thing.”

“Her hands?” I frowned at Hetty as she put the kettle on. She gave me a cautious look before answering.

“You didn’t know about her hands?”

I shook my head, my stomach clenching in dread.