I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - Milly Johnson Page 0,6

easy with Carmen, everything flowed, like a peaceful river, whereas Bridge was a whirlpool full of piranhas.

He could have replied to Bridge’s shouty text (STOP PRESS, DIVERT TO FIGGY HOLLOW INN. OFF THE A7501, SW OF WHITBY. ASK SIRI IF SATNAV CAN’T FIND IT) that they do this at another time, i.e. one less treacherous and more sensible, but he knew it meant a lot to Carmen to start off the new year with things moving forwards out of what had felt like an eternal impasse. As Bridge had foreseen, his TomTom hadn’t recognised the name Figgy Hollow, which was just plain weird and if Siri hadn’t helped him out, he would have put his substantial personal fortune on all this being Bridge playing more stupid games. She always could get under his skin more than anyone else ever could; like a sharp, thin splinter that managed to wiggle far enough in so that using tweezers to hoick it out was ineffectual and a serious incision was needed. He could feel his default setting these days of cool slipping by the second and, despite himself, he laughed aloud. There really was no one like Bridge on the planet. He looked up at the thick grey clouds through the windscreen, expecting to find her on a broomstick circling above like a malicious crow.

The snow had come from nowhere, impossible as that might have seemed in this day and age; yet it had happened. Luke had been half an hour into his journey when it started, drops of sleet falling onto his windscreen, smudging his vision. Within five minutes they’d turned to snow, within ten that snow was settling on the country’s grid of ungritted roads. He’d presumed, like everyone else had, it was only a few flurries that would quickly melt away, but those flakes kept on dropping, thicker and heavier and the traffic got slower and slower. It would have been the only sensible thing to do to rearrange the meeting, but he had to get this divorce properly underway. He didn’t want to go into a new year with this hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles, not when he planned to be remarried by late summer. He needed to pack up his old life with the old year and he had to see Bridge in person in order to do that and on both counts he was determined that nothing would stop him. Nothing.

* * *

Bridge lifted her glass to the optic, pressed upwards and stood until a double brandy had been delivered. There was definitely no one in the inn, she’d shouted loud ‘hello hello’s up the stairs and into the area behind the bar. She’d even stood at the top of the cellar steps and shouted down into the black silence and not even an echo of her voice had come back at her.

Someone must have been there recently though because the bar area was spick and span, the tabletops were gleaming and a faint smell of polish still hung in the air. There was an enormous fireplace, logs banked up on it ready to light, for the Christmas Day diners, no doubt. A large Christmas tree occupied one far corner of the room, thick green branches ready for their drape of tinsel; baubles and lights sat patiently in a cardboard box tucked underneath it, with packets of paper-chain strips, waiting to be constructed and tacked with drawing pins onto the picture rail. They were the sort Bridge remembered making at school, with a gum line at one end that tasted awful. Another memory flashed in her head: sitting on the floor putting such a chain together, in front of a fire fuelled with wood that they’d gathered illegally from the nearby park because they were too skint to buy it. She and Luke. He leaning over towards her, crushing the chain as they started kissing, tearing off each other’s clothes, then making love, which had given her bum major carpet burns. She shook her head to disengage those images, stamped the mini-film of chain-making in Joseph Street junior school back over them, sitting next to Michael Butler who used to pick his nose and wipe it on any available surface other than a handkerchief.

She sat down at a bar table next to the middle of three windows and took a swig of brandy before picking her phone out of her handbag to find she’d had two missed calls from Ben. She rang him,