Rowans

By Jennifer Gibbs

Cerys is lost and drunk in her own life after years of blocking out reality with anything she can get her hands on. She and her best friend Daniel don't remember what it is to be sober. A family bereavement, big windfalls and larger betrayals combine combine to throw them both even more off course. Can a bungalow somehow save Cerys from herself?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326513764

Book preview

Rowans

Rowans

Jennifer Gibbs

Dedication

For Grandma and Grandpa and Brucie, in heaven.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my Mum and Step dad Ted who inadvertently gave me the idea for this novel on 10th April 2011.  And thank you as ever for everything else especially since July 2015!

Thanks to Dmac for pretty much selling Lit Up to half of Southend.  And to the awesome Southend folk as you all seemed to think I was famous…  Which was nice.

Thanks to Samantha Seddon again, and to Pete Telford for your lovely reviews of Lit Up – you basically sold those copies for me! 

Thank you everyone on Twitter who actually inspired me during my writing of Lit Up, my redundancy and unemployment, and continued to do so for Rowans.  And another redundancy and more unemployment!

I wanted to add a few extra thanks to people who have helped me write this in the past four years especially Layla, Sayem, Mary, Brendan, Colette, @mamahinks, Carl (thanks for reading the first chapters), and my three Lush boys: Vaughan, Andrew and Matt.

And thank you to all of the lovely people who were so wonderful about Lit Up and were so enthusiastic and encouraging.  You’re amazing and I hope this one is OK

For the record I have never woken up with pizza in my bed. I know a man who has… Cheers Mikee!

Prologue

The Pizza Incident

There was no feeling in her left hand.  Well, it was there but it felt slightly numb.

Cerys turned over and felt a slightly strange sensation on and in her stomach.  It took her a moment to realise that she was lying on two slices of oily, stinky pizza.

Fuck!!

She looked in disgust at her stomach.

There were many reasons to look in disgust at her stomach as it was, but having dubious quality tomato sauce, dodgy stringy cheese and a type of meat that could easily have been dog stuck to it did not help matters.

For fuck’s sake…  She cursed again, sitting up and removing the slices with a disdainful look on her face.  The pizza box was also on the bed, and she dumped the rogue pieces into it, pulling a face when she realised that only one slice had even been started. 

Another waste of the best part of a tenner. Lovely.

The thing that really worried her wasn’t actually the cash, or even the fact that she could hardly remember what had happened last night and took several minutes to recall where the offending pizza had come from:  It was the fact she’d clearly passed out whilst eating it that concerned her. 

She threw the pizza box onto the floor and swung her legs round and onto the carpet.  She was still in her underwear; the rest of her clothes from last night were in a heap near the door.  She could see her reflection in the full length mirror by her bedroom door and noted with a sigh that she had tomato sauce around her mouth and was somehow still wearing false eyelashes, although they were hanging from the corner of her eyes.

Urrrr…

Shuddering slightly at her haggard image, she hauled herself up and threw on the hooded top and tracksuit bottoms that had been slung over her wardrobe door in her haste to leave the day before.

She could hear movement outside her room.  This was no surprise; Dave was here, although she had expected him to be in her bed. 

Sadly it seems I preferred to be in bed with pizza.

I am a bit of an idiot…  Hmm or am I?

She opened her door as quietly as possible though this made an inadvertent amount of noise. 

Dave was standing in the kitchen, his eyes framed with bags and creases, his chest naked apart from a sparse amount of hair and the nipples that she found bizarrely alluring.  He was wearing last night’s jeans; Cerys rather suspected he hadn’t ever removed them.  Looking at him – he looked like a young Mick Jagger – she could not believe she had chosen some grim pizza over this god like man.  Having said that, she suddenly remembered clearly the hunger she had felt after ten drinks… Doubles?  Who could tell, who could say?

I am officially an idiot…  I mean. Look at him…

Again, she found herself throwing herself in his direction, trying to make something happen that just was not there.

She was focussing on the wrong person, the wrong issue.  It just took her a while to realise.

Chapter One

Afterwards

The ending with Dave was not even close to being awful; it was oddly nothing.

Cerys had been drunk and had sent a questionable text to him about nothing, trying to get attention as she often did.  He had finally lost his patience and no amount of begging would change his mind.

She didn’t beg him though; she just sighed, deleted his telephone number from her mobile and the few times she saw him around Norwich shortly afterwards, ducked onto side streets or suddenly feigned interest in the pavement or a passing car.  She assumed she would never see him again.

It was the middle of 2011 and Cerys had been back from travelling for about a month.  She had moved back to Norwich despite some grand plans to move to London, or Singapore, or Dublin.  Whilst she had gone her old house mate Siobhan had had a baby and finally got together with that skinny fella Rich, whom Cerys had known instantly was right for her, her Chandler to her Monica, her Luke for her Lorelai.  The baby wasn’t Rich’s, it was Siobhan’s previous boyfriend Kerrod’s, and since Cerys had been away he’d gone from a rather abrasive drunk to a teetotal, best-selling author.  It scared her no end that all these changes had happened to just three people in her life and here she was, renting a flat one up from a bedsit with dodgy heating and temping for her previous employer at a vastly lower level than she had been at 25.

So this is 32, she pondered, as she painted her nails blue in readiness for Latitude Festival the following day.  It still feels like 17, no matter what my crow’s feet and pot belly say.  Her old friend Daniel had had a spare ticket for the sold out festival, and she felt like having a blow out after a month back in the drudge and normality of work. 

It was July; the weather was pleasant enough to have the windows open, but there was not much sign of the Barbecue Summer the weather forecasters had been promising.  A middle aged woman she sat across from at work had been complaining about this daily since Cerys had started there and she was sick to death of it.  As her role was ultimately an admin chimp she tended to put her iPod in and turn up PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me to block out the whinging.

Her mobile rang and she smudged the nail polish.

Argggh! She threw the brush down and answered her phone.

Yeah? She barked.

Ha, and hello to you too sweets. 

It was Daniel.

Sorry, Cerys mumbled.  I was just doing my nails… bit distracted…

Ah you see I’ve already done mine.  You’re not doing yours purple as well are you? We’ll look like proper twats.

Cerys was never sure if he was joking about things like that.  She had painted his nails once but he’d passed out after they’d been to some dodgy rave back in the 90s.  As she recalled she did them black, very 70s Freddie Mercury, she had thought.

Nah, blue…  She heard herself say in a pathetic voice.

Are you OK?

Yeah, sorry, just a bit tired.

What were you up to last night?

Cerys thought about this question.  What HAD she been up to last night?

She knew there was another vile pizza in the kitchen and she knew she’d ripped her dress…  But details…  Not so much.

Just… Out, with some of the old work crowd…  There was vodka…

Standard…  OK so what time am I picking you up tomorrow?

Dunno… Twelve?  When can we get in?

Two.

Yeah twelve should be fine.  I’m not going out tonight.  Well I am, but only to Siobhan and Rich’s, so probably be rationed to one glass of wine, she laughed, as if that were somehow ludicrous.

Cool, see you tomorrow mate.

Cheers… Bye…

She chucked the mobile down onto her bed and sorted out her nail varnish.  Once she had finished it, she looked up at the clock on the wall.

She should have been at her friend’s flat twenty minutes beforehand.

Oh crap…  She immediately began racing around her room, throwing books onto shelves and stuffing clothes back into her increasingly unsteady wardrobe.  She didn’t need to do all of these things before she went; it just made her feel slightly more in control of the situation, something she felt less and less the longer life went on.

Lying on the beach for hours in Thailand thinking about how awesome life was suddenly seemed like the horrible waste of time her mother had told her it was, rather than a super-cool way to spend her late twenties, or whatever idiotic phrase Cerys had used at the time.

She hurriedly pinned her wavy blonde hair into a lopsided French plait and applied more make up over the stuff she had been wearing all day, including touching up the bright turquoise eye shadow and blue eye-liner and smearing on some peachy flavoured lip-gloss.

That’ll do.

She slipped on some flip-flops, grabbed her old cloth bag and huge bunch of keys and ran out of the flat.

Chapter Two

The Other Side of Life

Sorry I’m late, she said, as she always did, as a fresh faced Siobhan answered the door.

No worries, Siobhan smiled; she was very used to Cerys’s timekeeping and actually asked her to be round half an hour earlier than she needed to be there.  It just made life easier.

She let her pass her in the hallway, and frowned in concern when Cerys couldn’t see her expression.  Cerys’s face was thick with make-up but that couldn’t disguise the bags under her eyes and she appeared to have a small bruise on her neck.

We’re in the kitchen, She gestured to the room on the left, the one they had once shared, that Cerys had regularly nearly burned down because of her lack of interest in removing packaging on ready meals.

It looked rather different now.  It was a lot cleaner, and there were smatterings of family life all around: the hand print painting stuck to the fridge with a Disney magnet, the old pushchair in the corner, and the box of Coco Pops on the worktop.

Rich was standing by the cooker, stirring something in a saucepan on a low heat.  The room smelt of garlic and warmth.  The windows were open and you could faintly hear traffic going past on the nearby Unthank Road.  He was still slim but had filled out a bit over the past few years particularly since he had been with Siobhan  Contentment, he had said.  His hair was a lot shorter and more grown up and he was clean shaven and dressed in jeans and an old Suede t-shirt.  Cerys smiled at that; he hadn’t completely grown up.

Little Rich, Siobhan’s son, was sitting on a chair at the small circular