Hubble Bubble (39 page)
Amber said nothing. What was the point? She’d made up her mind. It was all her parents’ fault anyway. Well, and Jamie’s of course. But mostly her parents.
Like all her friends, she was a SLAHWP: Still Living At Home With Parents. The lack of well-paid jobs and crippling house prices, and the fact she spent every penny of her salary before it arrived in her bank account, had seen to that. So when her parents decided to take early retirement and, overexcited by the surfeit of Change Your Lifestyle programmes on the television, chose to sell up and move to rural Spain, she’d been left with few choices.
At first she’d thought she’d move in with Jamie. They’d been together for nearly two years. It made sense.
Jamie, however, had nearly passed out at the suggestion and muttered feebly about being far too young to settle down and not being ready for that sort of commitment and, well, to be honest, Amber living in might just cramp his style.
Renting was out of the question on her own; house-shares were few and far between. Her sisters, Coral and Topaz, had been thrilled at the thought of living in a tumbledown goat shed about three million miles into the hinterland of Andalucia. Amber, who felt that luxuries like electricity, running water, drainage and a roof were fairly important, was simply horrified.
Then she’d had the letter from Gwyneth Wilkins, her grandmother’s friend.
Why didn’t Amber come and live with her for a while? Maybe just for the summer? Until she could sort out what she really wanted to do with the rest of her life?
Amber, still smarting from Jamie’s rejection, and her entire family’s embracing of the Spanish peasant lifestyle, had thought about it for all of two minutes and then said yes.
Her friends all looked at her sorrowfully.
‘Well, when it all falls apart, don’t say we didn’t warn you.’
‘It’s not the other side of the world. You could always come and visit me.’
‘Get real!’
‘Yeah, well – we might … one day …’
‘And what’s this village-that-time-forgot called?’
Amber filled her glass again and smiled.
‘Fiddlesticks.’
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