Time since last Internet usage: 21 hours, 10 minutes and 36 seconds
I try to breathe in and out as I slowly consider my options. If I kill my sister and bury her body here, it would be days, or maybe even weeks, before anyone found her. I could totally make it to Venezuela or somewhere else without a UK extradition treaty by then.
I take a deep breath, muttering a quick ‘I love you’ to Siri down the well before heading back to the cottage, following Rosie.
I need to find out what she’s talking about.
Besides, my earlier attempt to leave the drive proved that I’m not going to make it out without her Land Rover.
‘What the hell is going on?’ I shout at her as I storm into the farmhouse. My sister is calmly unpacking the shopping into the cupboards as if she didn’t just make a huge revelation minutes earlier. ‘What do you mean, you made the whole thing up? What about my digital addiction?’ I say, all high-pitched and squeaky.
‘Oh, that is totally real,’ she says, pulling a packet of pasta out of the bag. ‘You really needed to go on a detox, and by putting your phone down the well, you effectively have. I just can’t pretend anymore that this is an organised thing.’
‘But the ritual at the well and the meditation, it all sounded like you knew what you were doing.’
‘The power of the Internet,’ she says winking, ‘but I’m sort of relieved to have told you before we got to the whole self-awareness and mindfulness sessions. I don’t think deep down that’s really you.’
‘It could have been, if we’d gone to a bloody spa instead of this place,’ I say prodding at a wall, a lump of plaster crumbling into my hand. ‘Why are we here?’
‘Because I’ve bought it.’
‘I know you’ve bought this holiday, but I’m quite happy to pay for something else.’
‘No, Daisy, you don’t understand. I’ve bought this place. The whole of it.’
I stare at my sister in shock for a second. She can’t possibly mean she’s bought a farm. What would she want with that?
‘What are you talking about?’ I say, wondering if my lack of phone is clouding my mind from being able to think clearly.
‘I’m talking about a property purchase. I bought the house, the barns, the land – all of it. Ta da!’ she says, doing jazz hands as if that’s going to make it better. On this occasion, it would take the whole cast of Chicago doing jazz hands to make this place look any better.
‘I’m so lost,’ I say, my head spinning. I let her con me into coming here and putting my phone down a well . . . I’m starting to have palpitations.
‘Come and sit down,’ she says, realising that I’m no longer a violent threat, and she leads me into the lounge. She forces me down into one of the rocking chairs and instinctively I start rocking back and forth.
‘It’s a bit dark, can you switch the light on?’ I say, thinking.
‘Much better to use candles,’ she says, bending down to light them again. It looks like we’re about to have some kind of supernatural séance. It might have been fine for the meditation, but now I know that that was all a lie, it feels wrong.
‘It’s a bit creepy,’ I say, thinking that it feels scarier here in the day than at night.
‘Nonsense, it’s totally hygee,’ she says confidently.
‘Hmm, are you sure you’re not just trying to cover up the fact that this place doesn’t have any lights?’ I say, pointing to the ceiling where a bare wire is hanging down from the ceiling in lieu of a light bulb.
‘Maybe – is it working?’ she asks as she sits down.
‘No,’ I say coldly. ‘So do you want to explain to me why you brought me to this place and threw my only lifeline down a well?’
‘OK,’ she says, taking a deep breath. ‘I bought this farm a couple of months ago at an auction. It was a great bargain, I got it for peanuts.’
‘Can’t imagine why,’ I say sarcastically.
She ignores me and carries on.
‘I thought that Rupert and I could turn it into a holiday-cottage business and live up here, as he’s been working so much lately that I’ve barely seen him. I thought this way, if we had another business opportunity, I could tempt him away.’
It’s all starting to make sense now. Why she flinches whenever I mention her husband’s name. ‘I take it he didn’t share your dream?’
‘No, it turned out he was furious,’ she says shaking her head. ‘He thinks I’m totally out of my depth. I’d imagined us coming up here on weekends and painting and fixing away, but what I thought was going to be a fun project, one that was going to bring us closer together, has actually driven us apart.’
I get the impression she’s trying not to cry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my sister properly upset before; she usually has an emotional fortress around her as strong as the Tower of London, but she seems to have sent the Beefeaters off for the day.
‘So why don’t you sell it and be done with it? Surely your marriage is more important.’
‘That’s what Rupert wants me to do but I can’t. I mean, look at it, it’s got so much potential.’
I raise a sceptical eyebrow.
‘I can’t explain why, but I feel drawn to this place, and I want to convince him that I’m right. I’ve already had builders in to do the roof and some of the plastering, and they totally get my vision.’
‘Probably because you’re paying them. Are you still thinking of moving up here?’
‘No, I don’t think Rupert would come, or at least not for the foreseeable future. He made that abundantly clear. What I want to do is turn it into holiday lets, so he’ll see that it was a wise investment. That’s why I need to get it done quickly. All the while it’s standing here empty it’s not making any money and it’s a failure.’
‘Do you think you’ve been watching too much Homes Under the Hammer while you’ve not been working?’
Rosie laughs. ‘I did watch that a lot in the early days. It’s why I started buying properties. I bought a few terraced houses and “flipped them” as they say in America. You know, bought them as a wreck, got the builders in, then I did the cosmetic bits and pieces and sold them on for a healthy profit. Which is how I ended up with the money for this place.’
Huh. I vaguely remember her saying she was buying a small terraced house to rent out one Christmas, but I never heard anything more about it. And there was me thinking she swanned around after her redundancy being a lady that lunched.
I stop rocking. ‘As great as this all sounds, I still don’t understand what it’s got to do with me. How does my detox fit in?’
‘Well, I’d been planning to come up here and start working on the house, and when I saw what a state you were in and how you didn’t have anything to do after being fired, I thought you could come and help me.’
‘So why didn’t you ask me?’
‘Because I knew you’d say no.’
‘That’s not true,’ I say, lying.
‘Of course it is. I could barely get you to make the two-hour train ride to Manchester where you’d get to stay in our luxury penthouse. Do you think I’d honestly have been able to convince you to willingly come here?’
I purse my lips. She’s right.
‘But helping me aside, I genuinely believe this is the best place for you with everything that’s going on at the moment. It’s perfect for your detox, there’s no mobile signal around here at all.’
‘What?’ I snap. ‘Then why is my phone lying ten metres down the bottom of a well?’
‘So that you’re not tempted to go hiking up the fells to find a signal. Believe me, it’s in the best place. We’ll get it out in a week or two.’
‘How are you going to get it out? I cut the sodding rope and there’s no International Rescue Team to save it like I’d been led to believe.’
And fishing with a stick doesn’t work.
‘Relax, I’ve got a plan.’
‘You and your bloody plans are what got me into this mess in the first place.’
‘Look,’ says Rosie, who’s stopped rocking and is leaning towards me. She grabs my chair and stills it. ‘This hasn’t changed anything. We’re still on a digital detox. You’re still getting away from modern life. It’s just that there’ll be less pretend meditation and more helping to pick out paint colours and curtain samples.’
I gaze around the bare room. ‘I think it’s going to take a bit more than a lick of paint and some curtains.’
‘I know, but it’s all under control,’ she says.
I hate to side with her husband, but I get the impression that this project is far too big for her. A small terraced house is one thing, but a run-down farmhouse and barns is quite another.
‘Rosie, there’s way too much work for the two of us, even if we knew what we were doing.’
‘Ah, well, I’ve got builders coming, and then I’ve got a French help-exchange coming to give us a hand next week too.’
‘A help-exchange?’
‘Yeah, I provide food and somewhere to live and in return they work. She’s called Alexis, seems very polite and formal in her emails.’
‘Um, are you sure that you can class this place as somewhere to live?’
‘I know it’s a dump now, but I’ve got a week to sort out one of the bedrooms so that it looks habitable. You’ll soon see that everything looks a lot worse than it actually is once we get stuck in,’
All the way up here I thought I was the broken one who needed to be fixed, but having listened to my sister, I get the impression that this trip is just as much about her fixing the farm, or, more accurately, her marriage.
It suddenly puts my phone addiction into perspective. Unlike me not being able to snapchat a photo of myself with cat ears to Erica, this is real life-changing stuff for Rosie. And there was me thinking she had the perfect life. For once my sister is the vulnerable one, and having seen a chink in her armour, I’ve realised that she might need me.
I guess a week off from my phone isn’t going to kill me, and it might let the dust settle after my tweet. As Erica kept saying, it will probably all have blown over by then. Meaning that I’ll get my phone back, contact some agencies, and will be sure to have a few interviews lined up for the week after.
‘It’s going to take a hell of a lot of work,’ I say to her, shaking my head.
‘But you’re going to stay and help for a bit, aren’t you?’ she asks, looking at me as if I’m her last hope.
‘Of course I am. I can’t go anywhere until I figure out how to get my phone out of that sodding well.’
Without thinking, Rosie hugs me with relief, and I hug her awkwardly back. I’m reminded of the times that Mum used to force us to hug goodbye when we visited her at uni, and the thought of hugging my sister in public was more embarrassing than the hand-me-downs she forced me to wear.
‘This time next week you’re going to have forgotten all about it. I may have made up that this was a real-life retreat, but I’m still going to take your digital detox very seriously indeed.’
‘Unfortunately, I don’t doubt that for a second.’