She looked at him, raised her hands to show she was unarmed, and then looked at the broom handle. ‘I’m not here to rob you,’ she said, slowly, although her heart was still thumping. ‘I’m here to see Harry, and to buy some bread and bacon. Where is Harry? And who the hell are you?’
The adrenaline flooding her veins was making her tetchy now. Angry even. How dare this person wave a broom handle in her direction as if she were a common criminal? He was the interloper. The outsider. The thing that stood out on the lane, where everyone knew everyone and all their business.
It struck her then who he was and as she watched him – clearly terrified at her arrival in the shop – she felt all the anger and fear drain from her body.
‘So you must be Lorcan,’ she said. It was a statement not a question. ‘Your grandad told me you were coming to stay. He just didn’t say when.’
‘Well, erm… yesterday, as it happens,’ Lorcan said, gingerly lowering his makeshift weapon. ‘And Grandad just nipped home to change his shoes. Said he put on the wrong ones and they were giving him bother.’
Jo sagged with relief, delighted that Harry wasn’t ill as she had feared. She’d grown even closer to him since his heart attack and dreaded the thought of anything bad happening to him.
‘He was wearing the brown shoes?’ Jo smiled, being all too familiar with Harry’s issues with the brown shoes, which she had told him, repeatedly, to just throw away.
‘That’s the problem with you young ones nowadays,’ Harry had opined, launching into one of his famous lectures. ‘You think anything that’s not perfect or that’s got a bit old should be tossed on the rubbish pile, but you’ll learn in time. You’re young yet.’
‘Yes,’ Lorcan replied, incredulously. ‘How did you know?’
‘I think everyone on this lane knows about your grandad’s brown shoes – at least everyone who shops in here does. Which, thinking on it, is just about everyone who lives on Ivy Lane.’
‘And you know about me too?’ he asked. He looked as confused as if he’d just stepped into some alien world. His brow was furrowed and Jo was sure he’d broken into a bit of a sweat. He pushed his blonde, wavy hair back from his face and looked at her.
‘Oh yes. We know all about you,’ she said.
‘You do realise how sinister that sounds when it’s said in a Northern Irish accent?’ Lorcan asked, but there was, at least, a hint of humour there.
‘Oh yes. I realise. It’s a tool we like to use here with the blow-ins from time to time.’
As she looked at him, she could see shades of Harry in his mannerisms. The way he tilted his head to the side, the curve of his smile. He may have been a good fifty years his grandad’s junior but they definitely had the same twinkle in their eyes. Jo could see at once that Harry must’ve been very handsome in his youth. Although she doubted he would have opted for the same baggy jeans and oversized sweatshirt that Lorcan wore. Not that Jo was paying too much attention to what he was wearing, or what he looked like. Or that he wasn’t at all the childlike wet wipe she had been expecting.
‘It’s very effective,’ he said. ‘But, if you want to know, I went to see if there were any cans of energy drink, and the lights just went out. I think a bulb has blown. And then I knocked something over, I couldn’t see what. That’s about the time I heard you screaming and shouting and come hurtling after me.’
‘I was hardly hurtling after you,’ Jo said, her defences up. ‘I was checking if Harry was okay. We care about him here, you know. Especially since his heart attack. We’ve been looking after him.’ She hoped that the bold Lorcan, with his floppy hair and his blue eyes and the hint of a tan that seemed at odds at this time of year, would get the dig. That she, and the rest of the residents on Ivy Lane, had stepped in to care for Harry where his own family had not. Harry, of course, wouldn’t hear a bad word spoken about either of his two sons, their wives or his grandchildren – of whom Lorcan was the oldest and, as such, held the title of ‘favourite’.
‘Well, there’s no need,’ he said, brushing over her concern. ‘It was just me, wanting a super caffeine fix.’
‘I hate to break it to you, Lorcan, but you won’t find any energy drinks in this shop. Your grandad isn’t a fan of the concept. He’ll happily tell you why, at length, if you ask him. You’ll have to make do with a can of cola, or fizzy orange.’
The look on Lorcan’s face was similar to that of Clara when she was told she absolutely could not have a bar of chocolate just before bed. Clara had an excuse for childlike behaviour. Lorcan did not, and he had just reinforced her negative opinion of him.
‘I’m Jo, by the way,’ she said, and held her hand out to shake his, having decided that despite her feelings towards him, she should still practice good manners. ‘You’ll find we’re actually quite a nice bunch here and we hold your grandad in extremely high regard. I work a couple of shifts here, every now and again when needed. As you might know he’s getting older and doesn’t always keep well. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to do what is needed to look after him, you know. Since he’s all on his own with little family support.’
He stared at her, and ignored her outstretched hand. She took that as a sign her message had been received.
‘I really should just get what I came for and be off. I’m on bacon sandwich duty this morning,’ she said.
Lorcan nodded. He did not banter back and forth. He did not ask where she worked, or where she lived. He did not ask who she was making the sandwiches for. He simply rang up her order, took her money and handed over her change. He did at least say thank you, even if there was a begrudging tone to it.
‘Well, at least you’ve had a welcome to the street you’re not likely to forget,’ she said as she left.
The expression on Lorcan’s face said it all. He was not amused. Not one bit. In fact, his expression was so sour that Jo wondered how on earth he shared any of the same genetic make-up at all as Harry – the very lifeblood of their community.
She mulled that over as she walked back up the street to the pub and Noah’s flat, where both he and Libby were now awake and looking as if their very future existence relied on a bacon sandwich, stat.
‘I’m on it,’ she told them before she regaled them with the news about Lorcan, the intruder who wasn’t an intruder, the broken light bulb and his total sense-of-humour failure. ‘For a moment, I thought he was actually quite good-looking but that was before he’d opened his mouth,’ she said. ‘It all went south from there.’
8
While You Were Sleeping
Jo got home just after nine that evening. She planned to go straight to her room, switch on her laptop and email her manuscript to Libby before she had the chance to change her mind. She wouldn’t even have a quick read of any of it first, she would just open her email, attach the file and press send.
But when she went upstairs to her room, she found Clara, fast asleep and curled into a little ball in the middle of her double bed, her red curls splayed on the white pillow. Her skin pale against the moonlight shining in the window, and her lips were pursed in a little pout. Jo wondered what filled Clara’s dreams. Did she play out the scenes from her favourite books or films? Did she imagine she was Princess Buttercup and her Westley was coming to rescue her?