My Perfect Stranger: A hilarious love story by the bestselling author of One Day in December. Kat French
charity shop, full-time volunteers who asked for nothing in return for their services apart from company and the occasional bright string of beads. They were magpies for colour and sparkle; or rather a pair of colourful canaries, singing wartime hits as they fluttered from customer to customer and batted their eyelashes against their heavily rouged cheeks to encourage a sale. Honey adored them both; fabulous aunts she’d chosen rather than had foisted upon her by the inconvenience of bloodline.
‘Thanks, Lucille.’ Honey took the dainty teacup and saucer. ‘No Mimi yet this morning?’
Lucille bent to pull a sequinned dress from the pile at Honey’s feet and shook it out at arm’s length in front of her. ‘She was entertaining last night.’ Her perfectly lipsticked mouth puckered into a tight, sour little raspberry as she turned the dress inside out to squint at the label.
‘Was she really?’ Honey whistled. ‘Not with Billy Bobbysocks again?’
Lucille sniffed. Her sister was far too smitten with Billy for her liking. Exactly what Mimi saw in him, with his ridiculous quiff and purple drainpipe trousers that were indecently tight for a man well into his eighties, was anyone’s guess.
Honey glanced down to hide her smile. Both Lucille and Mimi lived in fear of the other leaving, when history really ought to have taught them better. Men had come and gone in each of their lives, but their sibling bond had remained undiminished by romantic entanglements. It was a bond Honey well understood, having spent her formative years in the comfortable sweet spot between her elder sister Bluebell and their equally fantastically named youngest sister, Tigerlily. Their mother Jane, a failed actress forever saddled with the moniker ‘Plain Jane Jones’, had made certain that her daughters would never suffer the same indignity of anonymity.
Honey sorted the last of the clothes into washing and ironing piles and moved on to unpick the sticky tape from around a dog-eared cardboard box. The musty smell of long-discarded possessions assailed her nostrils as she peeled back the lid, and just as she was about to reach inside to remove the top layer of yellowed newsprint the telephone trilled in the office.
‘It’s probably Mimi ringing to say that she’s still indisposed,’ Lucille said with a scandalised arch of her eyebrows.
Honey grinned at the idea of being too swept away by the tides of passion to go into work at the ripe old age of eighty-three. ‘I sincerely hope so.’
But when she picked up the receiver, she found herself doubly disappointed. One, it wasn’t a love-swept Mimi and secondly, it was Christopher, the manager of the shop and the attached old people’s residential home. A man of much influence and no charisma, which he masked with borderline rude officiousness.
‘Staff meeting. Seventeen hundred hours. Don’t be late or I’ll start without you.’
‘But we don’t close until five p.m.’
‘So close early. You’re not exactly Tesco’s, are you? And don’t bring those old women, either. Paid staff only. Got that?’
‘Loud and clear, Christopher. Loud and clear.’
Honey sighed as the dial tone clicked in her ear. ‘Yeah. Goodbye to you too,’ she muttered into the empty ether. Would it kill the man to feign politeness? Lord knows how he got people to entrust their frail relatives into his care; Honey wouldn’t trust him with so much as a hamster. It was a great shame, then, that her financial security rested in his sweaty little hands.
Several long and eventful hours later, Honey dropped her plastic shopping carriers down on her front step and groaned with relief as she flexed her bag-sore fingers. Baked beans and tinned tomatoes were heavy but essential items on the non-cooking cook’s shopping list.
Her heart lurched at the crunch of broken glass as she shouldered the door open. Shit. Had she been broken into? Honey flicked her eyes over the undamaged panes in the stained glass door, confused, until she noticed the pink tulips strewn across the parquet hallway floor. The very same pink tulips she’d placed in her favourite glass jug in the hallway a couple of days ago to welcome herself home. Or at least it had been her favourite, until now. There was no mending it – whoever had broken it had made a very thorough job.
By the looks of the still dewy flowers and the huge wet patch on the floor, whatever had happened had happened fairly recently, and as everything else in the shared hallway looked ship-shape, that left only one possible culprit. Only one person who would come through here and smash her jug without bothering to clear up the mess or leave an apology note.
Thanks a million, Johnny Depp.
Honey slammed the hallway door shut and leaned against it. It had turned into one hell of a day. Christopher’s words at the earlier staff meeting scrolled around inside her head like ticker-tape on the twenty-four-hour rolling news channels. ‘Funding being pulled. Threat of closure. Six months. Period of consultation.’
The shop was under the cosh, and unless they secured new funding soon they’d be closed down within a few months. And it wasn’t just the charity shop, either; the whole home was under the hammer, leaving thirty residents facing eviction. What do you do when you find yourself unexpectedly homeless at ninety-seven? Honey had no clue, and Christopher had offered precious little in the way of answers. The day had gone from bad to worse as she’d struggled home with heavy shopping on the packed bus, standing next to a drunk teenager who had touched her bum at least twice. He’d been lucky not to have a can of beans wrapped around his head, but Honey was all out of fight. Until now.
The sight of her pretty jug and dying flowers strewn across the floor turned out to be the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
‘Hey, rock star!’ Honey yelled at her new neighbour’s door as she picked her way over the shattered glass. ‘Thanks for nothing!’ She dropped her shopping bags by her front door and leaned against it. ‘That was my favourite jug. Just so you know.’
She paused. Stubborn silence reigned, even though she was sure she’d heard movement beyond his door.
‘Fine. I’ll just send you the bill then, shall I?’
It had actually only cost 50p from work, but it had been pretty and his silence riled her. He was in there, she was sure of it. Although, thinking back, Honey couldn’t recall seeing his lights on when she’d passed his windows. Another day, another hangover. Too bad.
‘You’re not the only one who had a bad day, you know. I almost lost my job today.’ She screwed up her face as soon as the words left her mouth. Why was she telling a complete stranger her woes? Or worse yet, yelling them at someone who was clearly too much of an arrogant cock to care less?
Hal lay on the sofa, dark glasses over his closed eyes even though he was wide awake, pained by the effort of holding himself still rather than storming out there to tear a strip off Strawberry Girl. Flowers. Stupid, fucking, stupid flowers.
Storm out there. Who was he kidding? It had taken him almost ten minutes to make his way out into the hallway earlier that afternoon. All he’d wanted to do was answer his own goddamn front door. To stop the door-to-door salesman from banging on it, from banging on the inside of his head.
Who the hell put fresh flowers in a communal hallway anyway? How was he supposed to know they were there? The first rule of living with a blind person – don’t place unexpected hazards in their way. But then, Strawberry Girl hadn’t realised he was blind yet, had she? Thank fucking God, because when she did, she’d no doubt switch straight into that same mode most other people did around him these days, a vomit-inducing mix of sympathy and desperation to make things easier for him. He didn’t want to hear that falter in her voice when she first realised he couldn’t see, so he lay on the sofa and listened to her berate him instead. Not that he could have gone out there even if he’d wanted to. Not with a soaked crotch and hands still sticky with warm blood where he’d cut his hands to ribbons trying to gather the glass up.
He knew exactly what she’d think. He reeked of whisky, and no doubt looked like he’d tried to slash his own wrists. And on top of that he must look like he’d pissed himself.