Debbie Johnson - Pippa’s Cornish Dream

Pippa stared at him intently, rubbing her cheeks and smudging that oil patch even harder into the milky-smooth velvet of her skin. Huge, cornflower-blue eyes. English rose all the way, if English roses had taken to abandoning the need for underwear and had just trodden in a cow pat.

He waited the few beats he knew it would take, saw the confusion in her eyes clear as she finally recognised him. Never mind, he thought. He could leave in the night; find somewhere even more deserted. Somewhere his face wouldn’t be known. Somewhere they wouldn’t have him pegged as the UK’s most popular jailbird. Somewhere he wouldn’t have to face someone who thought they knew him, thought they understood his story.

She pointed one grimy finger at him, and said, triumphantly: “You! I’ve figured it out! I know who you are! You’re that bastard who threw me in the duckpond when I was seven!”

Ben stared back at her, wondering if he’d fallen into some kind of wormhole and landed in an alternative reality. Okay. She did recognise him – but not for the reasons he’d assumed. She hadn’t got a clue who Ben Retallick really was, had never heard of his case, never heard of Darren McConnell, and clearly hadn’t got any idea that he was one of the most famous criminals in the country. He’d assumed she would be like all the rest – about to quiz him, prod him, look at him with that familiar mix of admiration and fear.

Well…she hadn’t. She seemed to have him pegged for a far more historic crime – one he couldn’t even remember. Maybe he’d started to believe his own hype…

“It was a long time ago – fourteen years or something like it – but I know it was you, there’s no point denying it!” she said, almost jumping up and down in her excitement. Again, he studiously avoided looking at her upper half. She might be twenty-one, if he had the maths right there, but it was still a decade or so younger than him. It was still…wrong. And he’d worked very hard at avoiding women altogether since he’d been released. Since Johanna and her family made it clear they wanted nothing to do with a common-or-garden ex-con, no matter how justified his actions had been. Johanna – his fiancée when the incident that changed his life forever had occurred – had disappeared as fast as his career. She was engaged again now, he heard, to some corporate lawyer in Abu Dhabi. Good luck to her. And him, poor bastard – he’d need it.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about,” he replied, ragging himself back to the here, the now, and to Pippa – wondering if she’d accidentally sniffed some adhesive while she was fixing the loo.

She poked him in the chest with one finger – hard enough that it made him take a step back.

“You remember! Of course you do! It was ages ago, and you were here with your…grandfather, I think? Is that right? He was talking to my dad about some business thing or another, and you stayed here for a couple of nights. I was seven, so Patrick would have been, well, about three, and the twins and Scotty didn’t even exist then. You seemed really glamorous, all the way from London – don’t you remember, really?”

She gazed up at him expectantly, eyes huge and sparkling, and he realised he didn’t want to disappoint her, didn’t want to dismiss what was clearly still vivid in her mind – but he genuinely couldn’t remember.

“I know I came here,” he said, screwing his eyes up in concentration. “It’s one of the reasons I booked my stay. I was eighteen, I think, spending the summer with my granddad before I went off to uni. I was bored rigid. There were…yes, there were some kids, I remember now!”

He cast his mind back: eighteen. Jesus. A whole lifetime ago. His parents had just moved to Australia and he was packed off to his granddad for a few months, filling in time until he started his law degree.

It was a different world back then. A world of youthful arrogance and easy potential and the safe and certain knowledge that the whole universe was his for the taking. An endless summer of heat and rain and surfing; blonde-haired girls with skin that tasted of saltwater; of working on his grandfather’s farm and drinking cider and planning the rest of his life. His granddad, a wizened old man with a leanly corded body even in his seventies, had brought him to Harte Farm to discuss a joint venture with the vaguely hippy-ish couple who owned it. They were organic, he thought – ahead of their time.

And there were kids, yes, now he thought about it. A sulky brat of a boy, who had a habit of hiding and spying, and a hooligan girl with wild hair and a tendency to walk around naked. He looked at Pippa again. At the windswept tresses, roughly tied up into a boisterous ponytail. At the braless chest beneath the hot-pink jersey.

Really? Could that be her? All grown up, in ways you can never imagine when they’re seven and you’re eighteen? When that feels like a world of difference, the unthinkable rather than the inadvisable?

“You jumped on my head,” he said, smiling at the memory. He saw it now: he’d had a hangover, as was usual back then. Too much scrumpy the night before. He’d been trying to sleep it off in the fields, found a patch of shade beneath the spreading arms of one of the old oaks that dotted the place. Half asleep, dreaming of London and home and those sailing girls with the salty skin and dirty laughs.

She’d yelled, like Boadicea screaming out a war cry, and launched herself from the lower branches of the tree, landing straight on top of him. He’d never even noticed her – she’d been wearing camouflage paint, greened-up like Rambo, hiding in the dappled leaves. Twigs stuck in her hair, soles of her bare feet covered in mud from running wild all day.

It amused him to think of it now, but he’d been a bit embarrassed at the time. Shocked out of his stupor by Stig of the Dump, caught out by a kid. A strange and slightly scary kid, who seemed to have made him the target of some kind of farm-based war game. God knows how long she’d been up there, watching him as he snored and drooled and sweated cider.

He’d picked her up by the skinny ankles and run all the way across the field, dangling her inches from the ground. She screamed and yelled and twisted herself up to try and scratch him, but he held firm until he reached the duck pond – where he’d swung her back and forth as if he was winding up for the Olympic discus, then let her fly through the air and land with a huge splash in the middle of the water.

His grandfather had given him a right telling off – what if she couldn’t swim? What if she’d banged her head? What if she’d squashed a duck? But her parents, they’d been cool. Just laughed and said it served her right – she was a little savage and deserved a bit of her own medicine. Yeah, they’d been cool, and from what she said a few minutes ago, they were gone now. They might have taken off for a commune in Marrakesh, but he got the impression that wasn’t what she’d meant. Rather that they were dead, like his grandfather. That the little girl he remembered had had to grow up very quickly, and way too soon.

“You remember now, don’t you?” she asked, laughing. “You remember my war cry?”

She let it out again and he heard Scotty, Lily and Daisy join in in the background. My God! A whole family of them! Savages, one and all.

“Okay, okay…I surrender!” he said, holding up his hands in the universal gesture of giving up. “I do remember now – but you can’t blame me for not recognising you. You have changed a bit, you know? You’re more…”

He floundered, trying to find a word that didn’t sound lecherous, curling fingers against his palm in case they accidentally made the equally universal gesture for “curvy-woman shaped”.