Summer Nights at the Moonlight Hotel (34 page)

‘What are you eating, Georgia?’ I ask a little girl in her last day of Reception year.

She looks up at me with wide eyes. ‘Some chewing gum.’

I reach into my pocket for a tissue and hold it out. ‘Pop it in there, please. Chewing gum’s not allowed, even on your last day.’

‘I didn’t know,’ she says, looking slightly worried. ‘I just found it stuck on my shoe.’

Scarlet Cranston tugs at my side. ‘Miss, when are you going to open our presents?’

‘Oh . . . you want me to open them now, do you?’

‘YES!’ they all shriek.

I laugh. ‘OK, right . . . well, look at all these lovely surprises!’ I say, though in reality we are fairly light on the surprise front around here at the end of term.

Last year I ended up with four plants, seven Body Shop gift sets and fourteen boxes of chocolates, which were responsible for me putting on three quarters of a stone over the summer.

‘Oh, how lovely! I never would’ve expected one of those!’ I declare, unwrapping the first present to reveal a box of Roses.

‘Do you like it? That was from me,’ James Wesley tells me proudly.

‘It’s extremely kind of you, James – I love it. Please thank your mummy and daddy.’

‘My dad got them from a man in the pub,’ James tells me. ‘They were really cheap because they’re out of date.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘They’re OK though,’ he reassures me. ‘Apart from the orange ones. The orange ones gave my Auntie Rachel the trots.’

‘I’ll remember that, thank you, James,’ I say, moving on to the next box.

My stack of booty amounts to an unusually large number of plants this year (six), something I briefly wonder could be attributed to people noticing how dramatically my arse had ballooned by the
time I returned to school last September. And as the children file out to go to lunch, Tom Goodwin appears.

‘My mum forgot to get you a present. She forgets a lot of things these days.’

‘Tom, it’s absolutely fine, please don’t worry. It’s been gift enough to me being able to teach you.’

He goes to shuffle out but pauses and turns back to me. ‘I’m going to miss you,’ he says.

I’ve replied in exactly the same way dozens of times today. Only this time, to my surprise, the words catch in the back of my mouth. ‘I’m going to miss you too, Tom.’

On Saturday night I have never felt less sociable, and certainly in no mood for Mum and Barry’s ‘farewell dinner’ to Jeremy. Having decided that the
farm-handling job isn’t for him, he’s taken a job shovelling shit of a different variety, at an accountancy firm in London.

Helen, Jeremy’s mum, told my mum that the pay is minimal, the prospects are abysmal and that he’ll be lucky if they’ll let him near the photocopier, but he’s said yes
because he gets to wear a suit and never has to see the business end of a sheep again. To listen to Jeremy, you’d think he was taking over from Richard Branson.

‘I’m going to be in charge of a twenty-nine-million-pound portfolio,’ he tells us with a self-congratulatory grin, as Barry walks to the kitchen table carrying his latest
culinary masterpiece: a recreation of the Swedish Ice Hotel, fashioned primarily out of marshmallows and Fox’s Glacier mints. ‘I cannot tell you how glad I’m going to be, to be
out of this place.’

‘I’m sure Jim and Gill Gavin will miss you too,’ Mum says. To the untrained ear, it’s impossible to work out whether she’s being sarcastic or not. I’m not
sure that even I can tell.

‘You must be so hacked off that your Australia trip’s fallen through,’ Jeremy continues – and I grit my teeth because I could do without discussing the subject again in
front of Mum, who seems to think my ‘change of heart’ can only be explained by some sort of mental breakdown.

‘I don’t know how you’ve been able to stand living round here all your life, Lauren,’ he goes on. ‘I’m not saying it’s without
any
appeal;
it’s pretty enough, if you go for that kind of thing. But after a while, all this fresh air is enough to make you sick. And the hills – Jesus! I cannot wait to walk somewhere without my
calf muscles burning. Even the buildings . . .’

‘What’s wrong with the buildings?’ asks Mum wearily, clearly used to this kind of rant.

‘This is a lovely home, Caroline, but it’s so . . . old,’ he says, as if the word is interchangeable with the phrase, ‘rife with infectious diseases’. ‘If I
have to duck to avoid another doorframe I think I might just
die
.’

Mum finishes off her dinner and resists the temptation to invite him through to the sitting room, which would involve passing through a doorframe several inches lower than his forehead.

‘The big city is where it’s all at and it is calling me. The cocktails. The parties. The glamour and energy, the sheer thrill of it all!’

‘So did you manage to get that bedsit in Streatham you were after?’ Barry asks.

‘Um . . . yes.’

‘The two ladies sound nice you’re moving in with. How old are they again?’ Mum asks.

‘Early eighties,’ he coughs. ‘That’s just a stop-gap though.’

‘Of course,’ Mum says.

‘Well, we’ll miss you, Jeremy,’ Barry says heroically, as he dishes up the Ice Hotel cake. ‘And you’re always welcome back here, whenever you like.’

‘I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ Jeremy mutters, before taking a bite of his cake as Barry awaits his verdict.

Instead of murmuring his approval – or more likely turning his nose up – my mum’s second cousin’s son instead launches into a cataclysmic coughing fit, turns the colour
of a varicose vein, sprays marshmallow halfway across the kitchen and, most disconcertingly, seems unable to breathe.

We are collectively stunned into inaction, at least for a moment, until Mum leaps up.

Just as he looks as though his vital organs are about to burst out of his belly, she grabs him round the waist and gives him several sharp thumps, before a shard of glacier mint torpedoes out of
Jeremy’s mouth.

‘Oh. My. GOD.’ Jeremy’s chest trampolines up and down, as he clutches the side of the chair. ‘Your cake nearly killed me!’ he shrieks at Barry.

Barry stands there, unable to speak. But I’m afraid I’m not. Something rises up in me as I fix my glare on him.

‘Jeremy,’ I say tightly. ‘Barry and Mum have shown you nothing but kindness and hospitality – you’d do well to remember that.
You
might not have enjoyed
your time here, but it’s not their fault if you come out in a rash every time you approach so much as a tree.’

‘Don’t give me that, Lauren,’ he splutters. ‘You’re as desperate to get out of this place as I am. It’s written all over your face.’

‘That’s not true.’ I stand there, mute for a moment, and wishing I could fire back the real explanation: that my desire to leave is far more complicated than he – or
anyone else here – realises.

But of course I can’t say that. So I am left to slink back into my chair and simply watch as Jeremy spins on his heels and attempts to flounce out of the room. It’d be a good flounce
too – with big, theatrical strides – if he didn’t come undone at the kitchen door. As his forehead smacks on the beam between the kitchen and the living room, it nearly shakes the
foundations of the house.

Then he stumbles backwards and lands on the floor. He is out cold for a second or two, before his eyes flutter open. Mum turns to me and lets out the long sigh of a woman in whose vocabulary
‘panic’ does not exist. ‘I think one of us had better drive him to hospital,’ she says. Her eyes flick up at me. ‘Assuming they’ll have him.’

The hospital is forty minutes’ drive away and I’m sorry to say that I’m the one doing the driving. Mum and Barry had both had a couple of glasses of wine, but
I’d abstained because I wasn’t staying over.

Jeremy is appalled by the fact that we didn’t call the air ambulance for a full-scale rescue involving ropes and stretchers and frantic shouting. Instead, he sits groaning like a burst
radiator valve in the back of my car, a bag of frozen peas pressed against his temple.

‘Because I’ve had a head injury, it’s very likely that they’ll consult with
you
to find out what’s happened,’ he tells me. ‘In case I’m
delirious or something. So, can I just say now that it’s important we present a united front and
do not accept
anything less than an MRI scan.’

‘Hadn’t you better see what the doctors say first?’ I suggest, glancing in the mirror.

‘I don’t like doctors,’ he declares. I wonder if there’s anyone Jeremy does like. ‘They’ll fob you off with anything, particularly in some small cottage
hospital like the ones around here.’

‘The hospitals around here are fine,’ I tell him. ‘Once you get used to the rusty pliers or neat whiskey they use as anaesthetic.’

‘I’m not the being-fobbed-off kind,’ he continues, ignoring me. ‘I’ve read about this sort of head injury. About people getting a bang to the head and on the
surface feeling completely fine. But in reality internal bleeding is going on and hours – literally hours – later, they wake up DEAD.’

‘I promise I won’t let you wake up dead,’ I tell him, as I turn on to the A road. ‘Although don’t be too disappointed if they send you away with two Paracetamol and
tell you to go and get some rest, will you?’

‘There is absolutely no way they’re going to do that, Lauren. Absolutely no way. LOOK.’

He thrusts his head between the two seats like that alien that burst out of Sigourney Weaver’s torso and points at a massive purple egg between his eyes, apparently unconcerned at nearly
forcing me off the road.

We pull up in the hospital’s car park and, as I rustle round for some change for the Pay and Display, Jeremy staggers to the front door of A&E, convinced there is no time to waste. I
follow him in a minute later and find him at reception, where he is laying on his injuries thicker than Cara Delevingne’s eyebrows.

‘I do feel I’m facing a life-or-death situation here,’ he tells a receptionist who, despite the pleasant expression, looks distinctly unmoved. ‘I’d hate you to get
in trouble or end up in some sort of terrible litigation situation. Seconds could count.’

‘OK, lovely,’ she replies, with a sunny smile. ‘No probs at all. Take a seat and the triage nurse will be with you shortly.’

He fails to move. ‘The fact that we’ve driven here ourselves might give the impression that I’m in a better physical state than the reality is,’ he continues. ‘I
did explain to my hosts how dangerous head injuries can be. How they can go from seeming innocuous one minute to DEATH the next. But they’re not trained medical professionals,
so—’

‘There’s a drinks machine over to your right if you’d like to take a seat,’ the lady adds.

‘A drinks machine?’

‘In case you fancied a brew while you’re waiting.’

‘I don’t think you’re quite grasping this . . .’

As Jeremy continues explaining to the receptionist how his situation is ten times more pressing than absolutely anyone else’s here, I take a seat and settle down to what I suspect is a
lengthy night. I’ve just taken my phone out of my bag to see if I can get enough of a reception to log on to Facebook, when a text arrives from Cate.

I text her back.

She responds.

I close my eyes, feeling an uneasy sense of relief.

Belatedly, I realise that I’m not as convinced as she is that this will be the end of it. What happens when the money runs out and Robby decides he wants more? He could easily have backed
up those photos somewhere else. And even if he has deleted them, the nature of this particular beast is that copies of it will still be out there, ready to emerge at some point on some dodgy
website.

But, if it makes Cate feel well enough to start rebuilding her life, and it’s enough to get Robby to move to France, then it’ll have been worth it.

‘This place is run by a bunch of yokels!’ Jeremy says loudly, stomping over and plonking himself next to me. This has the unfortunate effect of making it impossible to pretend
I’m not with him.

I spend the next hour and a half trying to get a signal so I can log on to Facebook and ignore Jeremy, which unfortunately – after the triage nurse has made some rudimentary tests –
is exactly what the emergency team have to do after we’re told they’ve admitted two climbers in a far more serious condition.

When Jeremy is finally called in, he musters up a brave face and tells me graciously that I can wait in reception.

So I wait . . . with nothing but my thoughts for company.

It is saying something, but after twenty minutes, even being with Jeremy is suddenly looking like an attractive alternative. I decide to head out into my car to find a magazine I think I might
have left in the boot, when the double doors open and a figure shuffles in, huddled in a massive coat, head down. I barely give them a second glance; indeed, am about to stride out into the car
park when I hear my name spoken in a low whisper.

‘Lauren?’

When I look up, it takes a moment for me to realise who it is.

‘
Emily
?’ I reply. ‘What are you doing here? Has something happened?’

The fear on Emily’s face is stark as she nods her head. I put my arm around her shoulders and usher her in through the door, out of the cold.

‘I’ve been bleeding,’ she confides, her bottom lip trembling. ‘I think it’s the baby.’

She looks to be in shock. ‘Come on, let’s go and see the receptionist,’ I say.

Emily gives her details before we take a seat. ‘What happened?’