A Time to Change Read online

  A Time to Change

  Callie Langridge

  Contents

  Love Women’s, Contemporary Fiction ?

  17 DECEMBER 1995 - LOU, AGED 10

  1. 1 December 2013

  2. 17 December 2013

  3. 18 December 2013

  4. 18 December 1913

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  7. 19 December 1913

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  10. 20 December 1913

  Chapter 11

  12. 21 December 1913

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  16. 22 December 1913

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  20. 22 December 2013

  21. 22 December 1913

  22. 23 December 1913

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  26. Christmas Eve 1913

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  30. Christmas Eve 2013

  31. Christmas Day 2013

  32. Christmas Eve 1913

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  35. Christmas Day 1913

  36. Christmas Day 2013

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

  Love Women’s, Contemporary Fiction ?

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  Copyright © 2017 Callie Langridge

  The right of Callie Langridge to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2017 by Bombshell Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bombshellbooks.com

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  ‘But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold’

  * * *

  The Dead (I) by Rupert Chawner Brooke, 1914

  17 DECEMBER 1995 - LOU, AGED 10

  It’s dark in the old stable block, and it smells like bonfires. Beneath a hole in the roof, there’s a pile of burnt wood – all that’s left of the dividers that once separated the stables into individual stalls. The big boys from the estate broke in on Bonfire Night, smashed up the cobbled floor and set fire to the whole place. A fire engine put out the flames, and the next day, a workman came to block up the windows and doorway. But it will take more than a sheet of metal and a snarling dog on a poster shouting:

  WARNING. DANGEROUS BUILDING. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! to stop Lou squeezing into her favourite hiding place.

  She crouches closer to the wall, cups her hands around her mouth, blows warm breath through her gloves.

  ‘27, 28, 29, 30. Ready or not, here I come!’

  Footsteps thump outside. Lou covers her mouth so that her brother won’t hear her breathing. She waits, and when the footsteps disappear away, she grins. Stephen won’t like it when he loses. He’s eleven – only one year older than her – but thinks he should beat her at everything. Winning at hide-and-seek is her only way of getting revenge for all the times Stephen has hung her My Little Pony by its neck from the loft hatch. He’s only playing with her now because Mum wants them out from under her feet so she can bathe their baby brother. Stephen would much rather be at home watching cartoons or hanging out with the big boys in the car park of The Hill House Arms.

  When Lou is sure the coast is clear, she picks her way over the broken cobbles and burnt wood, and squeezes back through the gap between the wall and the metal.

  It’s getting dark outside. She wanders into the walled garden where gardeners once grew flowers and vegetables for the kitchens inside the house. They learned that at school. They learn a lot about the history of Hill House at Hill House Primary. But Lou can’t remember a time when there were walls around the garden or glass in the long row of greenhouses. In her whole life, she has only ever seen the garden and greenhouses full of weeds as tall as men.

  She skips down the side of the main house. Puffing out clouds of warm breath, she drags her hand over the boards covering all of the doors and windows and picks at the moss between the bricks. In the spring, it was spongy and green; now, it’s brown and crispy and dead.

  She reaches the front of the house and peeks around the columns holding up the roof above the front door. But Stephen’s not there. She wraps her arms around one of the columns and tries to make her fingers meet on the other side. She can’t. The column is as tall and as wide as a tree trunk. She presses her cheek to the stone. It’s cold and hard.

  ‘Oi! What are you hugging that for? You’re such a freak!’

  Lou spins around. Stephen is running away down the long drive. When he reaches the end, he climbs the high gates and drops to the ground on the other side.

  ‘Look out!’ he shouts. ‘There’s a ghost behind you!’ He’s still laughing when he runs up the steps of the footbridge that crosses over the top of the motorway, linking their estate with what’s left of Hill House.

  Lou doesn’t run. She takes her time to get to the end of the drive. She is still small enough to squeeze through the gap between the padlocked gates, dodging the branches of overgrown trees that reach out like arms to snag her coat.

  Out on the pavement, she takes hold of the rusty metal bars of the gates. She looks back up the drive. The sky is pink now. How sad Hill House looks, sitting all alone up on its hill. She would like to ask someone what it was like to live in that huge house when there was still glass in the windows, servants in the basement kitchen, horses in the stables, and someone in the bedroom with the big windows above the front door. But everyone that lived in Hill House is long dead and buried, some of them in the vault inside St Mary’s Church at the end of their garden.

  Lou waves at the house in case any ghosts are watching and feel lonely. She’s not scared of ghosts. She was scared, after their dad went away, and she didn’t want to sleep in her own room because of the dead people in the graveyard.

  ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ Mum had said, when she tucked her in and kissed her goodnight. ‘The dead can’t hurt you. It’s the living you have to worry about.’

  1

  1 December 2013

  ‘Hello …? Mum …? It’s me.’

  ‘Lou? Is that you, love? It’s a terrible line. Are you at the chip shop?’

  ‘I’m having a quick drink at The Arms with the girls from work.’

  ‘Oh. You won’t be back for tea then?’

  ‘I can’t hear you. I’ve got Christmas songs blasting in my ear. I’ll stop at the chippy on my way home. It’s my turn to get tea in.’

  ‘No, love. Stay and have a nice time with your friends. I’ll go. Dean’s been hassling me since four o’clock. I swear that boys got hollow legs.’

  ‘Oh – oh, well if you’re sure, I’ll have chicken pie and extra mushy peas. Keep it warm in the oven for me, would you?’

  ‘I was thinking we cou
ld put the tree up tomorrow and make some mince pies and—’

  ‘I’ve got to go. My drink’s coming.’

  ‘OK. See you later then. Love you.’

  ‘Yeah. See you later.’

  Lou hung up, shoved her phone into her bag and watched Mel squeeze back through the payday scrum at the bar.

  ‘‘Scuse I, pardon I,’ Mel laughed, rubbing up against every man in her path, no hint of shame or subtlety. If an irate girlfriend or wife challenged her, she had the readymade excuse that she couldn’t help it; she was as wide as a small family hatchback and as short as a gingerbread man – her words, not Lou’s.

  Mel plonked a pint on the table. She squeezed on to the bench seat beside Lou and wedged the straw from an odd-looking blue concoction into the corner of her mouth. ‘Was that Andy?’

  ‘No-o. We split up last week, I told you’

  ‘Oh yeah. Shame.’ Mel slurped her drink loudly.

  Was it? Lou thought. Two months was good going by her standards but it hardly qualified as the romance of the century. A series of un-inspirational dates peppered with a few disappointing meals barely qualified as a romance at all.

  ‘I wouldn’t kick him out of bed,’ Mel said. ‘Just so long as he didn’t fart under the duvet and waft it in my face.’ She cackled before launching into a croaky rendition of ‘Deck the Halls’, her tongue slipping around modified lyrics – ‘Deck the halls with pints of lager, Fa la la la la!!’

  Lou laughed and took a sip of her pint. ‘Where’ve Becca and Shelley disappeared to?’

  * * *

  ‘‘Bogs. Becca’s spotted that Luke bloke she fancies. Shelley’s giving her an emergency makeover. Reckon she’s in with him. Lucky cow.’

  ‘Luke Smedley? He only split up with his wife a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Fair game, then, ain’t he. A butcher doesn’t put his meat in the window unless it’s for sale.’ She elbowed Lou in the ribs.

  ‘Is that all you think about?’

  ‘What else is there?’

  Here it comes, Lou thought.

  ‘We haven’t all got the brains to be teachers, you know,’ Mel said.

  Lou curled her toes in embarrassment. She should never have let slip to the girls at work that an Open University prospectus had landed on the doormat that morning. ‘Just because I’ve got the application form, it doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything with it. Anyway, it takes two years, and where am I going to find ten grand to pay for a PGCE?’

  ‘A PG-whatty?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Mel drained her glass and slammed it down on the table. ‘Are we having a whip or what? I’m spitting feathers here.’

  Lou placed her hand over the top of her glass. Mel looked at her as though she had just refused a share of a lottery jackpot.

  ‘‘Ark at Einstein. Not even a teacher yet and already too good to be seen out with the thickos.’

  Lou tore a ten-pound note from her purse and slammed it down on the table. ‘You win!’ God, she was weak. But what was waiting at home apart from an evening of Coronation Street, Family Fortunes and a soggy chicken pie?

  At some point, just after nine o’clock, Becca and Shelley disappeared with Luke Smedley and his mates, heading for a bar in Northampton. An hour or so later, Lou stumbled into a waiting taxi. An unnecessary payday extravagance.

  ‘Don’t forget you promised to get your mum to make us some of those mini chocolate logs like last year,’ Mel said, hanging out of her own taxi. ‘She’s great, your mum is.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you had to live with Mrs Christmas.’

  ‘See ya tomorrow, Piss Head!’

  ‘Laters, Lush!’

  The cab pulled away, and Lou tried to focus on the orange strands of light from the streetlamps trailing across the dark night sky. She bloody loved those girls. They were the only friends she had left here since Katie had got herself hitched and moved away to Manchester. She fell back into her seat. Was she a cow, then, for wanting to escape: to break out of the shell she had constructed to hide who she really was? Because the Lou she was around her workmates – dumbing down her vocabulary, drinking in pubs with people she had gone to school with – wasn’t the Lou she knew. That Lou – the real Lou – had spent three years reading history at Sheffield, expanding her brain and her horizons, experiencing the world beyond this small town.

  Her head began to swim. Was she thinking too hard? Or was it the second vodka chaser or maybe the fifth pint? She pressed her forehead to the cold glass and frowned at her reflection. Seven years since graduating, only just back in the black after paying off her massive student debts, and here she was, contemplating another loan to put herself through teacher training. All so she could stand in front of a class of fourteen-year-olds, desperate to share her passion for the past, when they were only interested in the future. She giggled. She must be mad.

  Just short of the parade of shops on the edge of town, the cabbie made an unexpected stop. He nodded to a police car blocking the road. ‘I’ll have to take a detour.’

  Lou looked out at the crowd of boys milling around behind blue and white police tape tied to lampposts. ‘Fine,’ she said and slumped back in her seat.

  After paying the cabbie, Lou stumbled up the path and into the house. She kicked off her trainers, dumped her bag in the hall and tripped over the Christmas tree and a box of decorations at the bottom of the stairs. How many times had she told Mum not to go up that rickety old loft ladder on her own? One of these days, she was going to fall and break her bloody leg.

  ‘Hey, Mum,’ she called, ‘there’s a police car blocking the road at the parade. Do you reckon someone held up the chippy? Was it assault and battery? Get it? A salt and batter-y? Did you get me that pie?’ She grabbed a strand of silver tinsel from the box and wrapped it around her neck, making a twinkling boa. She giggled and was still giggling when she fell into two police officers in hi-vis jackets, standing in the living room. Dean was on his knees in the middle of the room with Stephen and a female police officer standing over him.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Dean sobbed. ‘I want my mum. Get me my mum!’

  2

  17 December 2013

  It was only three o’clock, but the day had already turned to night. The iron-cold December air, heavy with the threat of snow, had so far managed nothing more than a bitter wind pricked with ice.

  Through the window of Iceworld, Lou watched a flurry of empty crisp packets and burger cartons tumble down one of the deserted “boulevards” and swirl in a mini-cyclone around the drained fountain in the open-air, central courtyard. In the fortnight she had been away, another three shops had closed their doors for the final time; shutters down, fly-posted, graffitied. Now, Hill House Shopping Arcade – or The Arc as the single-storey 1960s shopping precinct was known to the locals – was reduced to a handful of going concerns – Iceworld, a Polish grocer, a halal butchers, two pound shops and Kwality Klobber, a clothes shop selling two pairs of jeggings for four quid. Only those locals who couldn’t afford the bus fare to the out-of-town shopping centre still shopped here. Just as only those that couldn’t afford to move away stayed put in town. Poverty, not loyalty, connected The Arc’s remaining customers.

  Lou ran the barcode of a frozen chicken tikka pizza over the scanner and handed it to a harassed young woman struggling to pack her shopping while keeping a toddler strapped into its pushchair.

  ‘Seventeen fifty-eight, please,’ Lou said.

  ‘Shanelle, how many times! Sit down or I’ll text Santa and tell him you’ve been bad again.’ The young woman emptied the contents of her purse on to the conveyer belt and loaded her bags on to the handles of the pushchair.

  Lou counted out the collection of coins and crumpled notes. ‘You’re sixty pence short,’ she said flatly.

  The woman rifled through her shopping and plucked out a packet of chocolate buttons. The child began to wail, stretching out her hands like two pink starfish.

  M
aking sure the supervisor wasn’t watching, Lou shoved the sweets back into the carrier bag. If her till was down, they’d deduct the sixty pence from her wages. So what. The young woman smiled, said nothing. She beat a hasty retreat and was followed closely by a teenage girl who didn’t stop at the counter to pay for the packet of biscuits shoved up her sleeve. She gave Lou a sidewise glance as she pulled up her hood, hiding her impressive mane of auburn hair. Lou had worked at Iceworld long enough to suffer the training session on identifying a shoplifter multiple times. At least this girl wasn’t stupid enough to wear her hood in the shop. She cared enough about not getting caught to make an effort.

  When the supervisor pulled the shutters down at the end of the day, Lou slipped quietly away, saving her colleagues the embarrassment of having to ask whether she would be joining them at the Christmas party. All day she had faced the awkward stares and pitying looks from the other checkout girls. After the initial hugs and the well-meaning flood of, ‘You all right? You sure you haven’t come back too soon?’ they had kept their distance, whether out of tact or embarrassment, Lou wasn’t sure.