The Family Friend, C. MacDonald [ereader for android TXT] 📗

‘Well, I think you’ve pulled a seriously flair move,’ Erin says, mushing a waterlogged pebble of chalk between forefinger and thumb.

‘Oh yeh?’

‘Flying halfway across the world from him is the ultimate in playing hard to get.’

‘Guess that’s right.’

Erin stares at the side of Amanda’s face, those cheekbones like cut crystal.

‘I needed to leave Oz to, to know, you know?’

‘Time apart, get some perspective.’

‘Things between us have always been complex and I can’t have that energy coming back into my life without knowing that this time things can be different.’ Amanda must feel Erin staring at her because she whips her head round to her, the suggestion of a tear at the corner of her eye. She smiles it off, reaches a hand out and grabs Erin’s wrist, squeezes it and then lets it go. ‘It’s so lovely to be here. The colours.’ She thrusts her arms out wide, the action shocks Bobby and he puts his Puffa-coated arms back in within the wrap. ‘It’s so beautiful! I love it!’ Amanda shouts out to the sky. It prompts Erin to look up at the vast blue above, makes her see the golf-course green tops of the brilliant white cliffs, and it makes her grin and throw her arms out as well and she almost, almost whoops along with Amanda. When the moment dies and their arms are back down by their sides, they both notice Bobby glaring at Erin. His unsmiling mouth seemingly more fixed in an angry pout than ever at these two women enjoying life so much when he has no intention of seeing anything positive about it. And spontaneously the two of them guffaw into laughter until it dies away and they look at each other and something passes between them, a quiet wave of mutual satisfaction at having each other in this place, in this time Erin feels a warmth spread in her stomach like she’s just eaten a bowlful of stew on an icy day. And for the first time in a long, long while she feels nourished.

9

‘Can you not take Bobby with you?’ Grace Fentiman asks, her voice made nasal by the speaker on Erin’s phone.

‘To London?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Er … ’ Erin stands in front of the kitchen sink, watching thick rain obscure her view of her garden. Bobby’s hit-or-miss in the buggy and trying to manage a two-hour train journey, the Underground and a sodden metropolis with him in the hip-crippling sling is an impossibility. ‘He’s got a chest thing, if it wasn’t raining … ’

‘Course.’

‘Shit. This is so annoying.’ Erin scours away a patch of mucusy sick from the top Bobby’s just been wearing with scalding water. She flicks her wrist under the stream and wrinkles her nose at the pain.

‘I could suggest you call in, but don’t think Ally’s producer would go for it. I had to do a big pitch for them to go for you.’ Erin and Grace haven’t yet formalised their working relationship, but when someone called the agent from Ally Thornton’s MotherBoard podcast saying their guest had dropped out and they needed someone to step in, Grace had put Erin forward. Ally’s a hip, young radio presenter and her guests are usually celebrities and mega-influencers, so, as Grace has now said three times, this could be a huge thing for Erin’s profile. She’s called Raf a few times but he’s not picking up. He’s having to take freelance projects on top of his agency work to cover the mortgage so she couldn’t ask him to take time off anyway.

She hears a bump and looks over to see Bobby has keeled over on the Winnie-the-Pooh blanket he’s playing on. Mercifully, he’s avoided the minefield of loose building blocks and doesn’t seem to have hurt himself.

‘What can I tell them? Their recording session’s running until six.’ Erin spots a figure in white emerging from the studio at the end of the garden. Amanda lifts her head to the rain, it looks like she’s drinking the water. She’s holding an orange bucket that Erin recognises from their garden shed.

‘Give me two minutes,’ Erin says to Grace. ‘I’ll call you back in two minutes. Less.’ Erin goes to right Bobby and finds him a cuddly butterfly with various rubber and plastic appendages that he can shove into his mouth. She clicks open the door and sprints out into the downpour as she sees Amanda walking out the back gate.

‘Amanda, I need the biggest favour ever,’ she shouts after her, no time to dice in niceties. Amanda comes back down the alley behind their house. Erin runs under the cover of the studio’s porch where their house guest joins her.

‘We just don’t get weather like this at home. It’s New Moon, crazy low tide, it’s elemental. I was going down to see what beasts came out in something like this. Crabs, oysters, muscles. I thought I could cook. You guys want to come down?’ Erin creases her eyes. Amanda can’t have heard her.

‘Can you do me the hugestest favour ever?’

‘Sure,’ she says, a hint of ambiguity in her inflection.

‘Can you watch him?’

‘Bobby?’

‘Yeh.’ A globule of rainwater pools into one of Erin’s eyes and she blinks it away. ‘I’ve got to go and do a thing in London. Last minute. I’d never normally ask but it could be a pretty big work thing for me and you’ve worked with kids.’

‘Is he on his own in there?’

‘I don’t mean to spring it on you.’

‘We shouldn’t leave him.’ Amanda heads over the muddy grass towards the house as Erin stepping-stones her way across the patches of paving behind her. She glances at her phone, trying to do the sums of timings and trains and Tubes. Erin needs to either go or stay and she has minutes to decide. As they get in, Bobby swivels to see them.

‘Have you spoken to Raf?’ Amanda asks, going to the kitchen and drying herself with