Chapter Twenty-Seven
GEORGINA
Georgina treated herself to two days off work, just enough for Alice to slip out of the picture, as she’d cleverly predicted. Of course River had dressed up her disappearance with the announcement that His Beloved was taking a weekend break to visit her sister in London.
Oh, the irony! As if.
Little did he know Georgina had already had her own introduction to that grotesque specimen of a Society Darling, courtesy of their mutual swift mini break at one Reading Services. Georgina rather thought River would find that Alice was in fact flunked out on a sunbed at Glenn Luke Sherringham’s mansion in Bel-Air, attempting to revive his affection in a barely-there bikini and a string of diamonds dancing around her neck. She was more than welcome to stay there.
It was almost like wiping the slate clean: just the two of them running the bar. And with the ever-increasing chance of Alice’s eclipse really being for ever and ever Amen, it was also something of a relief that Georgina wouldn’t need to start desperately stuffing cushions up her jumpers like some child playing Mummies and Daddies in a Wendy house. She’d already started experimenting with socks in her bras, realising quickly that it would have been a desperately hard act to keep up.
Depleted stock brought them to the local supermarket. River had left the wholesale order too late for the delivery to arrive on time and had instead called Georgina in early, seemingly eager to encourage her to make up for those lost hours of the last weekend.
Loser Lee was strutting his stuff on the shop floor, biro tucked behind his ear as if he’d suddenly shot up to management level. River spotted him and left Georgina to bag up the fruit, passing her an extensive shopping list behind him.
“Pineapples, lemons and limes in first, don’t squash the peaches whatever you do.”
“Blimey, I must be going up in the world,” she said to his back which was now halfway down the aisle to bestow Lee with a handshake.
“Coincidence?”
River couldn’t seem to help but tease him about something, and Georgina couldn’t help but overhear. With River’s focus firmly on his friend, she couldn’t resist but to wheel the trolley closer, eyeing the pineapples’ handy location, just to the right of their dialogue and on special offer. Because who exactly did buy pineapple in a town like Glastonbury?
“It’s nowt to do with your outlandish theory. They had a vacancy, I fit it. Simple as,” Lee replied, and Georgina found herself raising her eyebrows and listening in more intently.
“Wonder why it’s never happened before in… how many? Thirteen years of service for the same supermarket?”
“Because I wasn’t ready, obviously, but now I am,” Lee replied in a funny kind of yodel, more than hinting at his uncertainty regarding this apparent twist of fate.
“Exactly,” said River, and then promptly turned, visibly more than a little stunned with the realisation that Georgina had been all too obviously eavesdropping. She dived onto the pineapples like an amateur actor, grabbing the two closest to hand and carefully deposited them upright in the front section of the trolley where they made the perfect likeness of twin babies in the child seat, wild new born hair in spikes, not all that dissimilar to River’s – or her own on a windswept morning on Glastonbury Tor. She couldn’t help but let out a giggle at the synchronicity given her recent cunning plan, upon which River eyed her, curiously.
“What was all that about then?” she asked, averting him from her childish behaviour.
“Leeroy’s only been promoted to Assistant Manager.”
“He’s what?”
“Lee, he’s going up in the world.”
That was an all too obvious dig at her earlier comment which she’d sarcastically assumed he hadn’t heard. She’d have to be more careful around him, she was starting to realise he wasn’t quite as naïve as she’d previously thought, although quite how he’d still not twigged she’d pilfered the Spanish letter, was anybody’s guess.
“But Blake’s been working here eighteen months longer than Lee, how’s that for dedication?” she snapped back as he burdened her with a heavy netted bag full of Seville oranges. “Ever since he’s stopped doing the night shift and got together with that short-arse Jonie, it’s like he thinks he’s a cut above or something. He’s lucky Blake is still working nights. There’s no way he’d stand for taking orders from that.”
“Oh for crying out loud, Georgina, why can’t you just be happy for him? He’s had an opportunity and he’s taken it, that’s all,” said River, flinging a bag of limes into the trolley, grinning bizarrely like the Cheshire Cat in an undeniable attempt to blind Lee with the flash of his teeth even from afar.
She wanted to loathe him for that remark.
Yet these weeks without him wouldn’t allow hatred to completely consume her heart. And that’s because she was in love with him, the bastard. Why couldn’t he trade that pony tail for a man bun and make things easier for her?
She’d been as sure as hell that she’d built a fortress around the word ‘emotion’ when she’d entered those tween years, but it was becoming more apparent by the day that she hadn’t tended to the cracks. She’d let her guard down big time and he’d turned her into that pathetic teenage tomboy again, the one who masks her insecurities by clothing like the unassuming girl with the pudding basin haircut; the one who simultaneously embraces the masculinity and convenient hiding place of the shell part of shell suit, the one who gazes adoringly at those cult Athena posters of the man and the baby, and the Smash Hits pull outs of Robbie Williams, with Mark and Howard vying for second place, Gary coming in third at a push; all safe bets, as good as fictional characters in a story book. Apart from Jason, who never got a look in, poor Jason. But it was easier on the heart that way. When your own mother abandons you as a child, never again will you be foolish enough to let anybody else get close to you.
Love and hate; a potent mix when they strike at the same time, and, like a desperate teenager, clinging to a rock of nothingness, now that she truly knew Blake’s anguish over Alice, she also knew she was ready.