A Part of Me. Anouska Knight
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have to get going. I’ll call the office to arrange a site visit then, Miss Alwood?’ He pushed himself off the table and stood before me. ‘I’ll leave these with you?’ He nodded at the papers he’d brought.
‘Um, yes. Thank you, Mr Bywater.’ I offered my hand to conclude our unorthodox meeting.
‘Call me Rohan.’ He reached for my hand, but instead of shaking it he turned it over in his, carefully placing my silver stud on my palm. I hadn’t even seen him pick it up.
‘It’s been nice meeting you, Miss Alwood,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
I felt my naked earlobe as I watched him follow Hannah out into the office to where James was talking to the marketing team. Rohan Bywater playfully slapped James on the back, pointing to the leg I’d kicked. He laughed, his hand on James’s shoulder. James began to laugh too, all boys together. Then Bywater pulled his trouser leg up. It was hard to tell from here, it could’ve been a birthmark or a graze perhaps, but I reckoned it to be another bruise that engulfed Bywater’s knee. Whatever it was, it was large and painful-looking. James stopped laughing, outdone where I hadn’t kicked him hard enough for him to compete with the bigger boy’s injuries. James looked defeated.
Rohan Bywater put his cap back on and with a parting glance almost caught me watching. He gave James a last friendly slap, then disappeared through the studio doors.
Common assault wasn’t what I’d been aiming for, but I’d have taken a sore leg over the sickening weight of revelation. Six months. Had they been sleeping together all that time? Or could I cling pathetically to the delusion that they might’ve been building up to it with a chaste courtship? Yeah, right.
I leant against the door frame, watching James across the office, already flexing his charisma, holding court once more. I must have been mad to think that if I could just stick it here, act normal, things might have a better chance of getting back that way. It hurt just to look at him. The way I’d felt when he’d walked into the boardroom made me wonder whether or not I should just get my things now. But I’d never loved anyone except James. Anna would be contacting us at some point, and I couldn’t do any of it without him. I wasn’t even sure that I knew who I was without him.
Phil’s face bobbed round the boardroom doorway, startling me with an expectant stare.
‘What?’ I grimaced.
‘Oh, I just wanted to say, well done on the cool, Ame. You nailed it. You were cooler than cool. In fact, I think you might have just knocked The Fonz off the top spot.’
APRIL HAD HAD a change of heart. It had decided it didn’t want to be a rubbishy month of late frosts and wet winds any more, it wanted to be daffodils and crocuses and bugs venturing onto the breeze for the first time since last year. I didn’t expect the sun would hold, but it was nice to see the lush green of young wheat fields rolling past the window.
I sat in the passenger seat, looking for signs pointing to Briddleton Mill while Hannah hummed along to the tune crackling from the stereo. It was pretty here. Just ten minutes’ drive south-west of Earleswicke, I’d enjoyed bike rides with my dad on the public footpaths near here before Jackson’s Park had become our agreed rendezvous point on the weekends Petra could spare him.
‘Is that it?’ Hannah called, slamming her brakes on. I lurched forward, the plush cheeseburger and fries toy dangling from Hannah’s rear-view mirror flapped into the side of my head. I batted them aside and read the sign.
‘Yeah, that’s it. Where the lane forks, we need to take it all the way round to the left, and the mill should be there.’ Trusting Hannah had enough information, I rooted around my bag for my compact. Sleeplessness took its toll on the over twenty-fives and I was starting to look like a panda. I swept a little more powder beneath my eyelids. Warpaint in place, I was ready to pretend to the world that I hadn’t stayed up into the early hours this morning, reading and rereading the messages James had sent me before he’d gone to bed. I was also ready to show Rohan Bywater that I really wasn’t a complete psycho.
‘Wow,’ Hannah said bluntly. ‘Welcome to my crib, MTV.’
I clasped shut the compact and slipped it back into my satchel. ‘Pretty beautiful,’ I agreed, taking in the tree-lined millpond stretching like a mini lake across the foreground. The mill itself, rising from the far edge of the black waters, seemed to double in size as Hannah pulled the car closer to the two VW vans parked out front. One was an old battered orange affair, a campervan like those I’d lusted after in my carefree student days; the other a very sleek and shiny truck you could easily imagine the A-Team exploding from.
‘Right then, you ready to measure this place up?’ I asked, cranking open the door.
‘It’s massive!’ Hannah laughed. ‘We’ll be here all night.’ Not if I could help it. I still wasn’t convinced Bywater wasn’t wasting our time but he’d booked the survey anyway, so here we were.
I climbed out of the car and reached for my things. ‘You all set?’ I asked, checking Hannah had hold of the drawings. Hannah nodded, agog over the grand design in front of her.
‘Okay, let’s do it.’ I said, slipping into my jacket, pulling my hair free. Dry weather was preferable for the artificially straightened.
Hannah followed me to the only obvious entrance. Further to the right of the door, the original water wheel was turning steadily – fed, I assumed, by the River Earle somewhere over the far side of the mill. We stood there expectantly for a minute or so before I tried the door knocker again.
‘They did say ten, right?’ Hannah asked, checking her watch.
I knocked again. ‘We’ll give it a minute, then I’ll call the office.’ Who was I kidding? That was the last number I wanted to call. I’d thought the sideways glances were bad enough on Monday afternoon, but the whispering had gone into overdrive after a large bouquet had landed on my desk yesterday. Sadie still hadn’t shown her face.
‘Wait,’ Hannah said, ‘do you hear that?’ I listened for the sounds of somebody approaching the door from the other side. I couldn’t hear anything over the gentle gushing sounds of the water wheel. ‘They’re round the back,’ Hannah said. ‘I can hear them yelling.’ Hannah’s bionic hearing led us from the stone path onto the timber walkway reaching out over the millpond where small clouds of insects hung like mist above the water.
We took the timber gangway wrapping itself around the mill’s water side, leading us over the pond into a gravelled yard the other side of the mill. I could hear it now: men’s voices, laughing from somewhere over the grassy ridge that ran a sweeping line around the yard here.
A crunching on the ground behind us and we both turned to find Rohan Bywater stepping from the mill’s rear double doors stained black to match the cedar cladding above them.
He looked less boyish today, pushing navy sweater sleeves up over olive forearms. ‘Hey. You found it then?’ He was already smiling. Hannah’s cheeks seemed to be getting redder. I cleared my throat, striding confidently towards him until I’d made it within hand-shaking distance. There was an approach that went with being female in this industry, forged by enough years of burly builders attempting to make me blush. Phil had never struggled but I’d had to learn how to show no fear.
‘Hello again, Mr Bywater,’ I said, offering my hand. Hannah ambled up behind me, perplexed by my sudden burst across the yard. ‘This is Hannah, one of our interns. Shall we get started?’
Bywater looked a little perturbed too. I realised I was probably overusing the power-walk.
‘Sure.’ He smiled, taking my hand. His skin was rough against mine, not smooth like James’s. We broke contact then, him reaching to casually muss the back of his hair. ‘Come on in.’
Inside this first room, whatever