Starting Over

By Annette Keen

Rough sleeper Olivia lands on her feet when kind-hearted Mavis rescues her from life in a supermarket car park, and takes her back to the co-housing development where she lives.

Olivia finds a generous and supportive group of people there, all with their own stories and problems – though none quite as potentially explosive as hers.

What led her to a life on the streets when her background is so obviously out of step with the lifestyle she adopted for herself? How long before the past and the people in it catch up with her?

It soon becomes apparent to everyone that Liv is not who she claims to be, and as her former life moves closer to a collision with her current one, she starts to realise her safe haven can’t protect her indefinitely – and that running away hasn’t really solved anything at all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781803138350

Annette Keen

Annette Keen is the winner of the Yeovil Literary Prize for her book The Generation Club, and subsequently wrote two other books: Distant Cousins, and Finding Bella. Annette has also written song lyrics, recorded by a professional singer, and has written for Penguin-Longman EFL readers. She lives on the south coast with her musician partner and their tuxedo cat, Mittens.

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Copyright © 2021 Annette Keen

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador

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ISBN 9781803138350

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To Pam and Andy, for constant love and support.

Special thanks to Lyn Dunning and Sue Battes, for reading, correcting, encouraging and spending a lot of time going in and out of those gates!

I am immensely grateful too to the following people who have been unstinting with their expertise: Sue at Strumpet Design, for her brilliant cover artwork, Chris at Rare Rooster, for website fettling and having loads of patience, and Norman Lingwood, for drawing up the architect’s site plan of Horsfield Close.

Also everyone at Matador for their expertise and professionalism.

The Residents

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Seven months later; Montepulciano, Italy.

By the same author

Chapter 1

They’ve rigged up some arc lights, which are casting a glow across an expanse of pink-streaked water, and under other circumstances, combined with the flashing blue lights just beyond the garden wall, it would make an oddly pretty sight. Nobody is admiring the light show tonight though.

It’s taking a surprisingly large number of people to deal with this. Several police officers have gathered on the house side of the pool, their hi-vis jackets and white forensic suits achingly bright under the lights. A couple of non-uniformed policemen are squatting down alongside a wooden slatted lounger and pool table. A middle-aged man in a denim shirt and chinos is bending forward to talk to them and all the while incident tape is being placed around the pool area.

A young woman bursts through the gate to the lane, shaking off a WPC as she rushes forward. The two plain clothes policemen stand and turn, and as they do so the body lying on the pool side is in plain sight.

‘I said no Press,’ one of them calls across to the WPC. ‘Get her out, there’ll be a statement later.’

He realises his mistake immediately, when her first anguished scream hits the air.

***

Several months later and a hundred miles away, in early September sunshine, two old ladies sit together on the front porch of number six Horsfield Close with a pot of tea, some digestive biscuits and a copy of the ‘People’s Friend’. There’s not much conversation between them, only because they’ve got nothing much to say to each other at that time, but it’s a silence they’re both comfortable with. Behind them, the front door clicks shut and Jo joins them briefly on her way out.

‘Tony’s here if you need anything,’ she says, lifting the lid of the teapot to check that it isn’t empty. ‘I’m just off to the allotment but I’ll be back in time to get lunch,’ and she heads across the courtyard and then out of sight behind the common house. They watch her go at a bouncy pace, sunglasses perched on the top of her head, a bottle of water clutched in one hand.

‘Funny when you think about it, Jo being the one to take on the responsibility for the allotment,’ says Queenie. ‘her never having had a garden, I mean.’

‘But the others help her sometimes, when there’s a lot to do.’

‘Well of course – they don’t want to miss out on the veg. But she’s the one who got it all organised and keeps it ticking along. It’s her baby, isn’t it?’

Beryl nods. She’s proud of her daughter-in-law. ‘Jo’s a good worker. Tony bought her lots of books to get her started and he’s always there for the digging and heavy work.’

They fall silent again. There’s not much activity around Horsfield Close this morning. The last two remaining industrial units on the site, to the north of their development, have moved most of their equipment to new locations so the flow of vans coming off the main road has dropped right off. There’s building going on behind Horsfield Close, new ‘executive homes’ apparently, but they can’t see what’s happening there from their houses. The constant hum of cement mixers, that was the backdrop to every conversation until recently, has suddenly stopped and it looks as if the builders have been pulled off site for the time being.

‘Waiting for more deposits to come in,’ is the view of Beryl’s son Tony who, as an ex-builder, should know.

So today is quieter than it was when they first moved in, and there’s little activity from other houses round the courtyard, too. Queenie’s great-grandson Oscar starts back at school the following day and his mum and grandma have dragged him into town to get new shoes and trousers. Meanwhile, some of the others have gone together in Karen’s car to do a big supermarket shop, so this is an unusually tranquil day with nothing much for Queenie and Beryl to comment on.

Queenie takes a digestive, snaps it in half, and dunks the edge of it in her tea. ‘I wish they hadn’t closed those curtains before they moved out,’ she says.

Beryl, caught off-guard, looks at her in confusion. ‘Curtains?’ she says, frowning.

‘Yes, curtains. Number two.’ Queenie points the other half of her digestive across the courtyard. ‘Looks like somebody’s died with them all closed across like that, top and bottom windows.’

Beryl’s gaze follows the line of the biscuit. ‘Oh. I see what you mean. Nice that they left those tubs at the front though, with the plants still flowering.’

Queenie waves a hand dismissively. ‘Probably couldn’t be bothered to take them, they’re only plastic pots and the plants are on their last legs anyway. They’ve only kept going this long because Jo has been watering them, I don’t remember those two making much effort with them.’

‘How soon before that chap and his dad move into number two?’

Queenie shrugs. ‘Two or three weeks I think.’

‘Change is difficult, isn’t it?’ says Beryl, with a sigh.

Queenie puts her cup down and brushes crumbs off her lap. ‘Oh, I don’t know, not necessarily. It was a big change moving here but that wasn’t so very difficult was it?’

‘Because we were all doing it more or less together I suppose. They made it feel more like one of our outings.’ Beryl picks her cup up, sips some more tea and then says, ‘I miss Stella.’

Queenie looks across the courtyard to number one, where Stella had lived with Mavis until quite recently. It’s as if she’s expecting to see her sitting on their front porch, bent over her usual pile of newspapers stacked up on the table, and peering at them through her magnifying glass.

‘So do I,’ she says quietly. And after a moment adds, ‘Just you and me left now.’

***

Jo examines the dwarf damson tree at one end of the allotment. It was the first plant to go in, the last thing her dad bought for her before he died, and she has followed all the advice she could find to keep it in good condition. This is its third year, and the first it’s borne any fruit. There are just a few, small, blueish-purple damsons, and Jo checks them for signs of disease every time she comes over to the allotment. Now she reaches up, rolls one gently between her fingers and is relieved to see that it looks fine. They won’t be serving damson crumble for a communal supper, not this year, but with luck there’ll be enough to make something just for her, Beryl and Tony. Don, Jo’s dad, loved damsons and he’d have been as excited as her by this mini-crop, but if Jo starts to dwell too much on that she won’t get anything done this morning, and there’s plenty that needs doing.

Voices from behind make her turn round. The sound is coming from the back of the common house, or rather, an open window in the flat upstairs.

‘Oh, just listen to yourself Mum, that’s really ridiculous.’

‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that!’

Jo drops a trowel into the wheelbarrow with a clang. There is a beat of silence, followed by the slamming of the window. Tony’s daughter and her seventeen-year-old son are visiting for a few days, and it’s always tense when she’s in the Close. Jo finds it impossible to think of Amanda as her step-daughter, having acquired her too late in life to feel much of a family connection, but in the short time she’s known his grandson a bond of sorts has developed. Unfortunately, they never get the one without the other.

Thank goodness, Jo thinks, that we don’t have to put them up in our house, and she silently sends up a thank you to whoever first came up with the idea of community apartments on developments like theirs.

Jo gets on with weeding between the rows of carrots. The visitors in the flat will be gone soon anyway, until the next time Amanda has a crisis and comes round looking for a hand-out. It’s a relief to Jo that they don’t live closer, a relief to Tony too, but as Jo knows only too well he’s working through a lot of guilt where his daughter’s concerned, and he does it partly through hand-outs. But she also knows that this time Amanda is out of luck, and presumably from the tone of the exchange upstairs in the flat, she’s already got an inkling of that. Jo keeps out of all discussions between Tony and Amanda, and only offers her opinion in private if expressly asked for it.

And then her resident robin arrives with a flurry and flutter of feathers and Jo sits back quietly on her heels and watches him tugging at a worm. No easy hand-outs for this little chap, she thinks.

***

It’s unfortunate that an hour later, at the very same moment Jo rounds the corner of the common house, Tony’s daughter and grandson are leaving from the side door to the flat. And so it is that they all join the path and walk in the same direction at the same time.

They’re an unlikely looking threesome and a casual observer would be hard pressed to find a connection between them. In complete contrast to Felix’s designer-ripped jeans and hoodie, and Jo’s muddy gardening gear, Amanda is wearing a navy blue business suit. Jo can only assume she’s going straight in to the office when they get back to London, or maybe she arrived in it two days ago and she doesn’t want to pack it for the return journey. Amanda is wheeling her cabin bag along behind her and Felix has a sports holdall over his shoulder, so they’re obviously ready to go. Jo feels her spirits lift at the thought.

‘Hello Amanda’, she says with a smile. Amanda ignores her. Her mouth is compressed into a tight line. It’s the same look she’s wearing in family photos taken when she was just a little girl, and tellingly, it matches that of her mother in the same pictures.

‘Hello Felix’.

‘Hi Jo, the allotment’s looking good’. For a boy of seventeen he’s not bad at making conversation, an accomplishment he clearly hasn’t got from his mother.

Queenie and Beryl are no longer on the front porch, and someone, Tony presumably, has cleared away their tea tray.

The three of them reach the front door of number six at the same time, Felix falls back and gestures to Jo to go ahead of him but Amanda sweeps past them both and pushes the door open as if she owns the place and it’s Jo who’s the visitor. From the hallway Jo sees Tony in the sitting room look up from his paper and peer over the top of his glasses, and then Gnasher the dog comes forward wagging his tail. Felix squats down to stroke his ears and Jo steps round the two of them and Amanda’s parked cabin bag and heads straight for the kitchen. Behind her, the lounge door closes with a heavy click, and then Felix and the dog pad into the kitchen.

‘I’m sorry Mum’s such a bitch to you,’ he says. ‘Once I’ve passed my test I’ll be able to come on my own to see you and Grandad and Great-Granny Beryl.’

Jo isn’t really bothered by Amanda, but she thinks it’s sweet of Felix to apologise for her bad manners. She puts a bundle of runner beans and half a dozen potatoes down on the counter top and turns to face him.

‘It’s not a problem for me, Felix. I just make sure I don’t get involved.’

Felix nods. ‘I don’t blame you,’ he says, and then makes a sound that’s a cross between a laugh and a snort. ‘I don’t think either of my aunts are much like Mum. I must have drawn the short stick, as Grandad would say.’

‘I’ve never met your aunts, they don’t keep in touch with their father. Do you see much of them?’

‘No, they live too far away and the three of them aren’t really what you’d call friends – what I mean is, the other two aren’t great friends with Mum, but maybe they’re OK with each other. The last time we all met up was in January for my cousin Jake’s eighteenth. I got on pretty well with him considering we didn’t really know each other all that well.’

Jo has no understanding of this family, all so distant and combative with each other. If she’d had the siblings she always craved she would never have let their relationship deteriorate the way these three have. Still, they’re not her concern, though she quite likes feeling the beginnings of a bond between her and Felix.

‘And what about your dad?’

Felix shrugs. ‘Mum won’t have him in the house. I used to spend time with him when I was younger but not so much now. He’s married again, which is something else for Mum to hold against him.’

‘That’s a shame,’ says Jo.

‘I bet your mum was lovely,’ he says, mothers being much on his mind at the moment. Jo folds her arms and leans back against the counter.

‘Hardly. She walked out on me and Dad when I was four,’ she says, ‘and my Dad brought me up on his own, which wasn’t easy for him because he was a musician and had to travel a lot for work. For years we had no idea where she’d gone.’

‘Oh, that’s pretty bad,’ says Felix, looking as if he wished he hadn’t asked in the first place, but nevertheless wanting to know all the details. ‘Did you ever find out what happened to her?’

‘She ended up in New Zealand, and had two other husbands who must have been very rich because they left her extremely well-off. And then, oddly, when she died she left me everything – her house, investments, money, all her jewellery… we hardly knew each other. Strange isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps she felt guilty about leaving you.’

‘Maybe she did. Anyway, that inheritance was what made this place possible,’ says Jo, stretching her arm out and gesturing beyond the house. ‘We were able to buy the land and get it all started and then the others joined us as they sold their houses and bought their own units here. We’ve all stayed in that little flat over the common house at some time or other, because the timings didn’t usually work out.’

‘So, were you all friends before you came here?’

‘Most of us. We’d started up a support group which we called The Generation Club, because we all had a parent or someone that we were carers for – this was how your Grandad and I met, he was looking after Great-Granny Beryl and I had my Dad. The Generation Club actually became quite a big thing ten years ago, we were on television and featured in newspapers, and then a glossy magazine picked up the story.’

‘Wow, you were celebrities!’

‘Well, not exactly, and not for long… it did spark off lots of other similar groups up and down the country, though. Eleanor occasionally still gets someone contacting the website for advice on how to get started.’

Felix is impressed. ‘And then you all came here?’

Jo nods. ‘Thanks mainly to the mother I never really knew.’

Felix considers this for a moment.

‘I don’t think Mum will even lend me the deposit for a car.’

‘She probably will. Parents often surprise you.’

Jo knows that Tony will make sure Felix doesn’t miss out, if needs be. As far as she’s aware, unlike his mother, Felix hasn’t asked him for anything in the few short years since Amanda decided to make her father’s acquaintance again .

‘Have you got your driving test booked?’

He nods ‘Yep, it’s in a couple of week’s time. I’ve already passed the theory.’

‘Well I’m sure you’ll be fine, and then when you’ve had a bit of experience behind the wheel maybe we’ll get to see more of you.’

Felix nods, and then, at the sound of his mother’s voice from the hallway, he steps forward unexpectedly and gives Jo a hug.

***

Back from town, Sally, Eleanor and Oscar park the car and walk round into the courtyard. They’ve got several bags with them, so their shopping trip was obviously successful and a rapidly-growing Oscar will be able to go into the next school year kitted out with practically everything new and not straining at the seams.

Oscar loves his school. Eleanor’s fears about uprooting him from his first school and the friends he’d made there were entirely unfounded in the end – he settled in immediately and walked straight into a new friendship set. The only downside is that living in the Close, out of town, it takes more organising for him to attend after school activities and social events like sleepovers. But Eleanor and Ash can’t afford to rent in town, whereas in Horsfield Close they get a special deal, and there are other advantages – for a start there have always been more babysitters and birthday cakes on tap than any mother could ever wish for or need. And it’s worked both ways; Ash knows the electrics in everyone’s house because he was the one who installed them.

Oscar adores Ash, who came along at just the right time in his childhood and stepped into the role of father figure completely naturally. And Sally, once so difficult to please where her daughter’s boyfriends were concerned, wouldn’t hear a bad word said about Ash – not that anyone has one. In the end, it’s all worked out perfectly for Eleanor.

They reach Sally’s house and Oscar races in ahead of her because he can see Queenie standing at the window and he knows there’ll be trouble if he doesn’t go in and say hello to his great-granny.

‘Send him down when he’s ready,’ says Eleanor. ‘Thanks for coming today Mum, trailing around the shops with him drives me mad.’

‘We got everything he needs, that’s the main thing. Next year will be worse when he goes up to secondary school.’

‘Great, I’ll look forward to that,’ says Eleanor, carrying on towards number eight. As she draws level with Jo and Tony’s house Amanda and Felix are just coming out and she can’t help thinking that Amanda looks like an air stewardess with her navy suit and cabin bag. Eleanor smiles in their direction but only Felix returns the smile.

‘New school clothes,’ she says, holding out the carrier bags. ‘We must be feeding him too much.’

Amanda acknowledges Eleanor with a nod of the head and walks on, but Felix slows down and seems to want a chat.

‘Is this his first year at secondary?’

‘No, last year of primary. You’ve left now, surely?’

‘Sixth form college,’ says Felix, with a grimace, ‘my second year’s just starting. I hate it, to be honest.’

‘Oh that’s a shame, but maybe…’

‘Come on Felix, I need to get away NOW,’ Amanda calls from across the courtyard.

Felix pulls a face.

‘She who must be obeyed,’ he mutters. ‘I’d better go. See you again.’

And he turns away from Eleanor and follows Amanda in a slow, loping walk.

***

They’re driving home, and having moaned throughout the first twenty minutes of the journey Amanda has now fallen into a brooding silence. Felix has his earphones in. He’s had them in since they drove away from the Close, but his mother didn’t notice and, annoyingly, he could still hear her carping on.

He’s back at sixth form college in a couple of days, a prospect that gives him no joy at all. If it had been his decision he wouldn’t have gone there in the first place, but his mother insisted so now he’s stuck on a course he doesn’t enjoy, with the prospect looming over him of uni applications and all that goes with that. This is not the route Felix wants to take, and sooner or later he knows he’s going to have to make a stand and say so. He sighs, and wriggles a bit in the passenger seat. It isn’t that he’s not clever, he doesn’t find the course work especially challenging, but he really can’t see himself fitting into an academic environment. He’s much more interested in