The Things I Know(46)
She saw her mum and dad exchange a quizzical look and then lower their eyes to the floor, as they tried to piece together the words of her outburst and the muddle of her mind.
‘I’m going out,’ she sniffed. Grabbing her wallet and phone, she made for the back door and ran up to the coop. Crouching down with Daphne in her arms, she spoke to the rest of the birds, who were unsettled, their behaviour a little odd. Daisy Duke had pecked some of her own feathers and Little Darling was squawking with her chest pushed out.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay, girls. I know you’re scared, but it’s all going to be okay. You have nothing to be scared of. It will all be fine. You’ll see.’
With Daphne in her hands, Thomasina jogged back across the yard, past the house, and turned right at the bottom of the yard, through the five-bar gate and up the narrow lane.
She carried on walking as dusk began to bite. With her tears subsiding and Daphne now cool in her hand, she made it to the pub. Her plan was to get very drunk. She immediately cried at the thought of her last pub visit with Grayson by her side, her gut folded in longing as she pictured the lanky, long-fringed man who lived in a domino flat far, far away.
She pushed on the door and walked to the bar. Some of the boys were playing pool and a few older farmers were sitting in their usual spots with caps on their heads, gripping warm pints in calloused hands with dirty fingernails.
Shelley looked up. ‘Jesus, Hitch, you look like shit!’
‘Good,’ she said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. ‘I feel like shit.’
‘What’s that?’ Shelley nodded at the feathery mass in her hand.
‘It’s Daphne. My chicken. She’s dead. Emery killed her.’
Shelley walked slowly from behind the bar and put her arm around her. Thomasina cried again, angered and embarrassed by the seemingly never-ending stream of tears and touched by Shelley’s display of kindness; it felt a lot like friendship. She heard the coughs of embarrassment from some of the men who looked on. Not that she gave a damn what they or anyone else thought.
‘You can’t bring a dead chicken in here, lovey. Come on, let’s take her outside.’
With Shelley as her guide, Thomasina let herself be steered back out into the car park.
‘Where’s Change Purse tonight?’ one of the lads at the pool table shouted, as she left the pub.
‘Get lost, Des! Leave her alone!’ Shelley shouted on her behalf, and Thomasina was grateful.
She sat on the wall of the car park while Shelley smoked, cuddling her much-loved hen.
‘I know Emery did this on purpose, Shell. He’s a shit.’
‘He’s a shit. No mistake there,’ the other girl concurred as she exhaled a long plume of blue smoke up into the air.
‘I’m not going back to Waycott, not tonight. I can’t.’
‘Where are you going to go?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, feeling pathetic that she had no grand plan. She thought about sneaking back to Big Barn and crashing on the dog sofa, maybe.
‘You want to sleep on the couch upstairs?’ Shelley crushed the butt of the cigarette under the heel of her boot and jerked her head towards the top rooms of the Barley Mow. ‘I mean, it’s not very grand up there, hardly five star, but you’re more than welcome. I have spare blankets.’
Thomasina stared at the girl who was showing her such kindness and she wondered for the first time what it actually meant to be a friend. Shelley had been around her whole life and wasn’t mean to her like some of the others, and now this kind offer. Could it be that she might actually have had a friend close by all along?
‘Thank you, Shell. Can I bring Daphne?’ She lifted the little corpse in her hands.
Shelley pulled a face and twisted her mouth. ‘If you have to.’
Thomasina sat on the sagging sofa, listening to the sounds of the pub, which, like the smell of beer, drifted up through the floorboards. The chuckles of laughter, shouts of delight and roars of disagreement, all punctuated by the bang of darts in the dartboard, the calls for drinks and the general hum of conversation. She felt it suited her perfectly, sitting up here listening to life, close to but not part of it, a self-imposed exile, where she, who wasn’t capable of getting a certificate of learning and was never going to win a race, kept herself to herself. It summed things up for her. The question was how to change? How to break out of the rut into which she had fallen? She pulled out her jotter and tapped the pen against the pad. Tonight, the words were slow in coming . . . So much for steering her own ship.
She considered going back down to the bar and drinking vodka until she fell asleep, but even the thought of that made her cry. What she really wanted was to feel the way she had on the riverbank, when Grayson Potts had taken her in his arms and told her she was beautiful.
Eventually, once her tears had subsided, she fired off a text to Pops so he wouldn’t worry and made herself a large mug of tea in the tiny galley kitchen. She thought about texting Grayson, but to say what? He hadn’t made contact and she now wondered if her mum was right. Was she simply a conquest? Did he go up and down the country spinning the same line?
Nursing the hot drink, she tried not to look at the forlorn lump of Daphne, who lay on a plastic bag placed on a cushion on the floor. She wondered now if it were sanitary to have her anywhere near Shelley’s soft furnishings.