Celebrity Shopper (31 page)

‘I’m very sorry, Fern,’ Mick offered.

‘I’m just glad to have it back,’ Fern said with a contented smile that Annie wanted her to wipe off. Why was she being like this? Why wasn’t she much, much more angry with him?

Mick turned to Ed, hoping to move the conversation away from the bracelet. ‘So what are these little people called?’

‘This is Minnie, short for Minette and this is Micky—’

‘Short for Michael, just like Mick,’ Mick jumped in, smiling with obvious pleasure.

Annie could have kicked him.

‘Ed’s dad was called Michael too,’ Annie pointed out. ‘He was a lovely family man and Ed always wanted to name his son after him. Your name is an unfortunate coincidence,’ she added.

Mick’s eyes were cast down. ‘Well, yes, I can see that would have been awkward. Your husband wanting to use the name and you wanting to use anything but …’

‘Not really,’ Annie told him defiantly. ‘I’d so nearly forgotten about you that I didn’t think it would matter. And Ed is not my husband. I had a husband but … oh never mind!’

Now Annie could feel tears choking the back of her throat and stinging behind her eyes. She was just so furious with this stupid man. He’d missed whole chunks of her life. Huge things had happened since she was thirteen.
Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have had a great dad by her side through some of those times? Someone to talk her through teenagehood from a dad perspective. Someone to teach her how to drive, or help her pick out her first car. That was the kind of thing dads were good at.

An elderly uncle of Fern’s had walked Annie down the aisle towards Roddy, not her dad. And when she had buried Roddy, she should have had a great, strong dad standing right beside her, someone whom she could have leaned against in her terrible grief.

Instead this stupid, bloody man had never had the courage to stand by them or learn anything about fathering.

‘Mum isn’t well,’ Annie blurted out, ‘you really can’t stay.’ She took the glass from his hand. ‘I think we’d all prefer it if you just went away. If you want to talk to us again, we’ll give you the number and you can … make an appointment.’

She bent her head to scribble a phone number on to a piece of paper, biting her lip hard to stop the scalding tears from spilling out. There was no way she was going to let this stranger see her cry.

Roadtrip Lana:

Skinny black top (Dorothy Perkins)
Skinny black jeans (Diesel)
Dark green tunic top (Auntie Dinah)
Black lace-up baseball boots (Converse)
Total est. cost: £90

‘I will have to KILL you!’

‘ “We’re all going on a summer holiday, no more working for a week or two …”’ Owen sang loudly for about the fifty-seventh time from his seat in the back of the Sharan.

Lana was staring out of the window. She didn’t think she could take it any more, not one more verse, not one more time, not one more bloody note. ‘OWEN!’ she shrieked. ‘If you don’t stop singing, I will have to KILL you!’

‘But if I don’t keep singing, the babies will cry again,’ Owen pointed out.

No one could take any more of that: two babies bawling in unison as the Sharan lumbered up the road mile after mile.

This was their ninth hour of Sharan travel and tempers were fraying. No, make that tempers had frayed, snapped, been repaired and were fraying and snapping all over again.

‘ “We’re all going on a summer holiday …”’ Owen started up again. Lana jammed her fingers furiously into her ears.

She’d not asked to come on some stupid trip to stupid Scotland anyway. No one had asked her. She’d just been told: pack your bag, pack your books, there’s a three-day trip to Scotland coming up … it’s a treat! It’s a holiday, oh and Mum – what a surprise! – has got to do some filming while we’re there.

Wasn’t it bad enough that everyone in her class had had to read the interview with her mother’s long-lost sailor dad in
Pssst!
magazine last week? Now Lana was being dragged up to Scotland along with all her revision. Fingers pushed hard into her ears, she looked out of the window at the damp green scenery passing by the window. Trees, hills, trees, hills, more trees, more hills … some bloody exciting place this was.

Annie’s phone burst into life. ‘Stop singing for a minute,’ she instructed Owen as she picked it up.

‘Dinah!’ she exclaimed on answering. ‘No, I’m not driving, Ed’s driving, so we might die any moment now. Have you just come back from Mum’s?’

‘Yeah, everything’s going really well,’ Dinah assured her.

‘How is she?’

‘She’s fine, she’s really fine. Normal, Annie, with just the odd little senior moment, and I’m really liking Stefano. And apparently Mick is taking her out to lunch tomorrow.’

The noise Annie made on hearing this could only be called a harrumph.

‘They’re talking about having a sort of family
get-together. He wants to meet you again, me and my family and Nic, of course.’

Their older sister Nic had been kept fully up to speed about the return of Mick and, just like Annie, she had many reservations.

Dinah and Fern were the tender-hearted family members who seemed a little too ready to give Mick the benefit of the doubt.

‘He’s getting on,’ Dinah reminded Annie, ‘I think he just wants to make some reconnection with us before … it’s too late.’

‘Ha! Just like he said in the magazine. It is too late,’ Annie said sternly, ‘he should just have stayed away.’

‘Where are you?’ Dinah asked.

‘On the west coast of Scotland with just another thirty minutes to go, Ed promises.’ She looked over to the driver’s seat where Ed nodded at her more in hope than with firm conviction. ‘If he’s not right, there’s probably going to be a mutiny,’ Annie added, casting a glance towards the back of the car, where the babies looked grumpy, Lana looked furious and even Owen’s usual cheeriness seemed to be wearing thin.

‘And what are you doing up there?’ Dinah asked, struggling to remember.

‘A bit of filming and lots of lovely family time,’ Annie answered, hoping she would get away with this.

‘This hasn’t got anything to do with the jokes you made on TV about hillwalking in heels, has it?’ Dinah asked suspiciously. When there was no immediate reply from Annie, she went on: ‘You’re not actually going to do it, are you?’

‘Don’t worry about me, girl, we’re going to have a proper guide with us and we’re only going for a short, glorified walk …’ Annie tried to reassure her sister. ‘It’s really about having a bit of family time.’

She didn’t like the way Ed looked as if he was trying to suppress a laugh.

‘We?’ Dinah asked. ‘Who else is doing the walk with you? Not the crazy Russian lady? Things always seem to go completely haywire whenever she’s around.’

‘Yeah, Svetlana, and she’s Ukrainian,’ Annie countered. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said down a line which was beginning to break up.

‘I’m losing you,’ Annie called.

‘Welcome to the wilderness,’ Ed announced, ‘your mobile cannot help you now.’

Set well back from the narrow road, in front of a dense green forest, the cabin rose in an elegant triangle from the luscious lawn before it. Built of dark wooden planks, with an enormous triangular glass window at the front, it looked surprisingly sleek and stylish.

‘Good old Tamsin,’ Annie said as the Sharan turned down the grassy driveway towards the cabin. ‘She wouldn’t let us slum it.’

It took almost forty-five minutes to fully unpack the Sharan. There were clothes, there were shoes, there were hiking things, then baby beds, baby seats, baby plates, baby cups, baby bottles, followed by Lana’s book bags, then all of Owen’s hiking and generally-mucking-about-outdoors equipment.

Also, of course, there were the Everest things which the mountaineer was going to wear and sing the praises of: a special pair of hiking boots, an anorak, longjohns and waterpoof trousers.

As Ed, Owen and Lana humped things back and forth from the car to the house, Annie sat outside on the lawn watching her twins crawl joyfully about the grass, delighted to finally be free.

Minnie crawled a good 10 feet or so away from Annie; then she stopped and carefully raised herself up on her knees and looked back, just checking, to make sure she was still within range of Mummy.

‘Hello, Min!’ Annie cooed and gave a wave. Minnie lifted her hand into the air and turned it several times with a bubbling giggle.

Micky stopped crawling and sat down with a thud on his big, padded nappy-bottom. After several attempts, he managed to get hold of the buttercup he was aiming for, plucked it and, after a moment of examination, stuffed it into his mouth.

Annie leaped up from the bench and went over to extract the buttercup. Then Minnie nosedived into a deep clump of grass and began to wail for rescue.

Now Annie had a baby under each arm and she decided she would sit down on the grass with them to guard against further disasters. No sooner had she sat down and released the babies than she felt a tiny prick on her face, quickly followed by another, then one on her hand and one on her neck.

‘Ouch!’ she exclaimed, smacking against the pain on her hand. The high-pitched whine in her ear told her that she and probably the babies were being eaten alive.

‘How’s it going?’ Ed shouted from the cabin door.

‘Mosquitoes!’ she shouted back.

‘You’ll have to come in anyway,’ he called. ‘The twins need food and you have to get Owen to explain to you how your camera works!’

Annie groaned to herself. She was a TV personality who needed her thirteen-year-old son to talk her through the basics of making a video diary. It was embarrassing. Totally embarrassing.

‘So here I am in the Scottish Highlands, miles from civilization, watching you have an outfit crisis,’ Ed teased as Annie fussed in front of the dressing-table mirror in their bedroom the following morning. ‘This is surreal. The only things it’s safe to wear out there are hiking boots, an anorak and—’

‘A mosquito net!’ Annie snarled. ‘Look at those’ – she had two enormous zit-like eruptions on her face – ‘some turbo-charged, burly, porridge-eating mosquito gave me those. No amount of concealer is going to hide them. They’re so itchy!’

‘They’re called midges,’ Ed said helpfully as he saved Micky from diving head-first off the bed. ‘Scottish mosquitoes are called midges. And you look lovely,’ he approved.

‘You always say that!’ she huffed.

‘Because you always look lovely,’ Ed soothed.

Annie, in her full ‘ladies who lunch’ hiking outfit, tried to look herself over in the tiny mirror. From the selection of high-end outfits she’d crammed into the back of the Sharan, she’d chosen a beautiful silk dress, ivory-coloured with big red poppies strewn across it. Then came a snappy trenchcoat worn with the sleeves pushed up and the collar turned high. On her feet were an ever-so-slightly cheating pair of red high heels. They were just under three inches, very comfortable, well worn and, most importantly of all, they had a chunky rubber sole. When she stepped into the shoes, her sense of confidence returned. These were old favourites. She felt totally at home in them and suddenly the possibility of managing a hillwalk in high heels didn’t seem so remote.

She picked up the soft red bag she’d selected and slung it over her shoulder.

‘Ah, a shoulder bag,’ came Ed’s comment. ‘Good idea.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll need your hands free.’

‘Why?’ she asked again.

‘To break your fall,’ he replied with a wink.

‘Ed?’ Annie walked over to the bed and sat down. ‘You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if this was going to be totally stupid, or dangerous? I mean … I know accidents can happen.’

Ed, one hand on Micky, put his other arm around her.

‘It’s up to you,’ he said finally. ‘Only bite off what you can chew out there. Even if you only manage ten minutes, that’s probably all the footage they’ll use anyway.’

‘Ten minutes!’ Annie protested. ‘I’m being sponsored by the mile. Anything less than two miles is going to be total and utter humiliation.’

‘Don’t do anything silly,’ Ed warned. ‘If you feel it’s too high or too steep or too difficult, give up!’ Putting his forehead against hers, he added: ‘It’s about time you got it into your stubborn little head that not everything can just somehow be willed into the way Annie wants it.’