TODAY, WE ARE OVER THE MOON TO WELCOME OUR GUEST AUTHOR. ANNIE COOK, WHO IS SHARING AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE OF HER NOVEL, 'NO SMALL CHANGE' #RWRTeamBlog #ReadWriteRepeat
Updated: 4 minutes ago
Excerpt from Chapter One
The trouble with sat-navs, Adie fumed, is that they all-too-often lied. This one, the wretched stupid thing, was doing exactly that right now. It was lying through its teeth, or at least it would be if it actually had any teeth.
Somehow, through no mistake of her own - unless you counted blind obedience to a monotone-talking box attached with spit and a prayer to her windscreen as a ‘mistake’ - she'd managed to end up half a mile down an impossibly narrow, pothole-pitted dirt track. It looked like a road as far as the sat-nav was concerned, but it seemed to be leading precisely nowhere. As annoying and embarrassing as it was to have to admit it Adrienne Elizabeth Bostock, menopausal mess and newly disowned wife and mother (not to mention pilloried social pariah) really did seem to have got herself well and truly lost.
With her teeth clenched and her mouth compressed in a grim line, Adie stopped the car and contemplated the massive, spiky, paint-gouging brambles that flanked the ever-tightening track before her. It had dwindled to little more than the width of a cycle trail already. How much further could she realistically go? And, of course, there was nowhere to turn around. So that meant reversing. Around stupid blind bends and bushes. All the way back to the stupid main road. Adie glanced at her watch, tried to ignore yet another surging, suffocating hot flush, and gritted her teeth even harder. With a frustrated sigh, and swearing like a slaughterhouse worker under her breath, she graunched the gear stick into reverse and started inching backwards. And God alone knows how long this is going to take!
Adie had a simple but important goal; to get to her first-ever house-sitting job at a place called Teapot Cottage in a town called Torley before the owners left for the other side of the world. She forced down her rising panic and wracked her brains to figure out where she’d gone wrong with the satnav’s directions, but drew a blank. Instead, she took a couple of deep breaths and tried to hold on tightly to the inner voice of rea son – the one that told her nobody would die if she was an hour or two late. In fact, the voice of reason insisted, if she was an hour or two late, nobody might notice what time she turned up at all, except maybe the dog, who was no doubt desperate to be fed, and poo'd-n-wee'd-n-walked, before what was left of the daylight finally faded.
She checked her watch again. It was twenty to four. She promised herself that if she hadn’t made sense of the directions in another twenty minutes, and assuming she had mobile phone reception in this God-forsaken place, she’d simply call her hosts, admit defeat, and ask for guidance.
She didn’t think that would upset them greatly. They’d seemed very relaxed overall, about the house-sitting arrangement. They’d happily given precise instructions on where to find the key to their cottage and, by default, access to all their worldly goods, in case they had already absconded to the other side of the world by the time she arrived. But Adie thought it would've been nice if she could have made an entrance while they were still around. They could then perhaps bimble off to Australia for Christmas with a bit of peace of mind, having left everything they held dear - quite bizarrely, in her opinion - in the hands of someone they’d actually managed to meet.
The house-sit had all seemed perfectly doable and reasonable earlier in the week, when the plans were being made over the phone. But now, thanks to her apparent inability to find the place, even with the help of technology, she was beginning to wonder if she’d made a disastrous decision in plunging headlong into an arrangement she was only halfway confident she could even pull off.
It doesn’t say much about my capabilities, does it, if I can’t even find the bloody house?
Adie was a very reluctant free agent, this Christmas. Since the family home had been put up for sale, her now ex-husband Bryan had gone off in whatever direction he'd decided on (Adie tried to tell herself she didn’t give a monkey’s), and all three of her children were doing their own thing too. Not a single one of them was even vaguely interested her plans, or including her in theirs. As much as she hated the idea, and had done everything she could to avoid it, she’d ended up facing Christmas alone.
Her first-born daughter Ruth, who was barely speaking to her anyway, was in Italy
with her gorgeous Italian wife, the well-known dress designer Gina Giordano, and
their little daughter Chiara. They normally did the big Italian family Christmas every
second year, but various events that including a recent pandemic, had derailed their
plans more than once. Nobody could argue that it was well and truly time for Gina to
go and reconnect with her people, and take her wife and daughter with her. Adie
hadn't wanted to infuriate Ruth and Gina, or a noisy bunch of excitable Italian in-laws, by asking them to change their arrangements for her, so she didn't. After all, she was hardly in a position to ask for favours, especially over something as important as that. Knowing what the answer would have been, she’d decided that suffering in silence was infinitely preferable to being sworn at in Italian by the truly terrifying Gina.
If Ruth herself had suggested that they stick around to enable her abandoned, menopausally deranged mother to feel like someone cared enough to see her through her first Christmas alone, it would have been a different matter. But nothing was said, and Adie understood completely because plans are plans and her unfortunate position of ‘persona non grata’ within her family was, after all, her own stupid fault. But the timing really couldn’t have been any worse.
Adie's younger daughter Teresa was also away, backpacking around the Sunshine Coast of Australia with a group of good friends she’d known since her school days. The date of their return home was open-ended. Teresa appeared to be in no rush to give up her freedom and join the workforce yet.
It was all fair enough, Adie knew. Ruth, Gina and Chiara needed time with their extended family, and Teresa deserved a chance to let her hair down before getting down to the business of deciding on her first career move. Adie’s now settled but once wayward (and some might have said morally bankrupt) son Matty was a little closer to home, in Epsom, having his first family Christmas with his new wife and even newer baby, but his plans hadn’t included her either.
"You do understand, don't you, Mum? We're just wanting to 'nest' this year on our own, for our first-ever Christmas in the new house. Why don’t we think about getting together for a family do next year, when Teresa, Ruth and Gina will all be here? We could even invite Dad, if things have settled down?"
Over my dead body, Adie had seethed at the time, as she’d struggled not to choke on her raspberry gin and tonic. Even now, the very thought of Bryan's condescending presence inflicting an indelible memory-stain across any future family Christmas made her furious; so much so that she jammed her foot on the accelerator, shot abruptly backwards much faster than intended, and promptly smacked into a tree.
"Oh, dammit! This is all I bloody need!” She wailed angrily, banging the heel of her hand on the steering wheel. She took a deep breath, counted to ten, then flung the door open and got out of the car, at the same time as losing the battle to ignore the raging hot flush that was now doing its best to burn her alive.
And damn these stupid ‘power surges’! When I wished for a ‘hot body’, this is NOT what I had in mind!
Fighting back her fury, she stomped to the back of the car to survey the damage. Luckily, it wasn’t as bad as expected. A smooth, orange-sized dent stared defiantly back at her from the metalwork just below the back window, but thankfully the bent elbow of the renegade branch hadn't gone through the glass. The offending tree had been a small one. And the car was still perfectly driveable, thank goodness, with its bumper still intact. She could carry on with her journey, although there was still a long way to go back before she could expect to go properly forward again.
What an appropriate metaphor for my messed-up, train-wreck of a life, she muttered under her breath, as she stalked belligerently back to the driver's seat.
Adie had decided that house-sitting for three weeks in a quiet corner of the Lake District was a far better alternative to ending up at her much older brother Raymond's house for Christmas, with his horrible judging wife who she'd never got along with. Listening to (and pretending not to be hurt by) a barrage of sarcastic jibes about how thoroughly and permanently Adie had lost the trust of her family, and having to endure the terrible woman’s spiteful remarks about how disgusting her ‘tom-cat’ son was, all just felt like more than she could stomach. Ditto the hours of mean-spirited gossip that would inevitably follow, about people she didn't even know or care about.
Chomping her way through her sister-in-law's overcooked turkey and lumpy gravy, and then being saddled with the washing up while her brother snored his head off in front of the millionth rerun of The Wizard of Oz, with an avalanche of gravy stains congealing down the front of his hideous Christmas jumper? No thanks. Adie and Raymond had never been close, and forced jollity at Christmas, spent with someone you shared absolutely nothing but a bloodline with, was just too grim a prospect – especially when part of the deal was having to suffer an insufferable spouse. And staying in her poky rented flat all alone seemed monumentally pathetic, especially as she didn't even have Creole for company. The ageing German Shepherd had stayed with Bryan after he’d thrown Adie out of the house, and although she had Creole on occasional weekends and holidays, Christmas wasn't going to be one of them.
But, as luck would have it, that had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After meeting her glamorous friend Miranda for coffee one morning, and confiding her dread about being alone at Christmas for the first time in her fifty-two years on the planet, Miranda, (who was jetting off to Madeira for the holidays with a new and much younger man in tow) had made a rather interesting suggestion. She wondered if Adie might join a couple of house-sitting websites where people offered others the chance to go and stay in their homes to take care of their property and pets while they were away. She mused that if Adie could get a 'Christmas gig', that might just be the thing to get her 'out of her funk'. Miranda had a wonderful way with words, and she made house-sitting sound like a big adventure.
Adie wasn't entirely sure it would be that, but she had to admit that Miranda was right. She did need to 'get out of her funk', and this might just be a way of kick-starting the process. Because it really was going to be a process. Adie was under no illusions about the amount of time it might take to recover from a shattered 26-year marriage that was built on a foundation of lies - even if the lies were all hers.
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The Amazon link to buy this book is:
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AUTHOR BIO:
Annie Cook has authored eleven published novels, with a twelfth due for release soon. She is also a writing mentor who supports other women to tell their own stories, and she regularly releases podcasts and speaks at public events about the importance of mature women's voices.
Annie's 'Teapot Cottage' series of novels are set in a small town in the Lake District of England, around a 'mysterious' little holiday house where people who are suffering from major life trauma are unwittingly drawn for refuge. Her stories focus mainly on the dysfunctional dynamics of important relationships, and the role of vibrational energy ('a little bit of magic') in enabling people to learn, heal, and rebuild their lives after major life-changing trauma. Some of the characters endure and overlap, lending familiarity and offering a sense of 'welcome home' to the reader, throughout the series.
Annie also writes 'filler' novels, written in a more literary fiction genre, that provide more information about the back-stories of some of the key characters in the Teapot Cottage series. All of her books examine different elements of the human psyche, and the evolution of character, strength and joy through adversity and change. She has recently released her first novel in a new series, again with overlapping characters.
Annie grew up in New Zealand. She is a keen traveller, something of an eco warrior, and she now divides her time between the UK and her home in rural Southern Italy.
Social media links:
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COMING SOON: On Sunday, 4th October, we will be pleased to welcome our guest author, Mark Fowler, who will be sharing Chapter One of his novel, 'The Crimson Corpse'.
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