Dancing Over the Hill: The new feel good comedy from the author of The Kicking the Bucket List. Cathy Hopkins
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I fancied him in the beginning but never thought he was my soul mate.’
‘Do you really believe in soul mates?’
‘Oh yes. I have no doubt that everyone has one, maybe people who have known each other in past lives; they might be back in this life somewhere, but it doesn’t always work out that you meet. What if you live in Shepton Mallet and he lives in Katmandu? Bummer. Or if he was born in another time? He’s in the twentieth century and you’re in the twenty-first? A case of oops, bad timing. That’s when the compromise has to happen and you have to make do, like I did with Fabio.’
I’d believed Tom was my soul mate when we were together. Had I compromised with Matt, knowing that Tom had gone? I wondered, as Debs collected more of Fabio’s things. Is Matt the love of my life? I used to feel that he was once but I know I’m not happy in the way that Lorna was with Alistair. Their love was constant and anyone could see that she respected him and admired him as well. Matt’s a lovely man, was attractive when he was younger – he still is when he makes an effort. It’s probably me that’s the problem, restless as ever. If I can let go of that, I’m sure we can work things out. Now would be the perfect time to mention Tom. Maybe Debs could tell me how to get him out of my system.
‘But what if you meet your soul mate but you’re already married to someone else?’
Debs stopped what she was doing. ‘Why do you ask? Has that happened to you? Surely Matt’s your soul mate?’
I panicked. I wasn’t ready to open up to her about Tom, not yet. What would I say? I still didn’t know myself how I felt about him getting in touch with me. ‘I was just thinking about what you said about bad timing.’
Time to change the subject. Debs’s cats, Yin and Yang, sat on the windowsill, watching with interest as she collected more of Fabio’s items, including his laptop. ‘Was it because of their colouring that you called your cats Yin and Yang?’ I asked. Yin was a white Abyssinian and had cost Debs a fortune, Yang, a black long-haired rescue cat that’d cost a donation to the animal centre.
‘Yes, because I believe in balance: two sides to everything and everyone, the light and the dark, yin and yang. Lorna says it’s just a fancy excuse for having a split personality, but everyone has different facets to their personalities – apart from Fabio, he’s just a plain bastard. I really tried everything to please that man. The Tantric workshop, phone sex—’
‘Phone sex?’
‘Yes. Don’t tell me you’ve never called Matt when he was away on business?’
‘I …’
‘Oh, Cait, you should try it. It’s liberating. You don’t have to think about how you look, if your wobbly bits are showing. You’re a sex goddess on the other end of the phone and your weapon of seduction is your voice. Men love it.’
‘Facetime?’
‘No, it’s hard to get the right angles. Just keep it to audio.’
‘I wouldn’t know what to say.’
‘Course you would.’
‘What then?’
‘What you’d like to do to him.’
‘Slap him with a wet fish?’
Debs ignored me. ‘What you’d like him to do to you.’ Stop following me round the house and questioning my every move, I thought. ‘Try it,’ Debs continued. ‘Men like an accent sometimes too.’
‘Yorkshire or Scouser?’
‘You are not taking this seriously. No, something sexy – Russian or French or Italian.’
I laughed, grateful that she hadn’t pursued the soul mate conversation. ‘What’s next on the goodbye Fabio task?’
Debs chuckled and pointed at the laptop. ‘Fabio’s,’ she said. ‘I know all his passwords so I’m going to go to his Facebook page and change his profile photo.’ I went to sit next to her and watched as she opened the MacBook Air, found Facebook, then deleted Fabio’s smiling face from his page and replaced it with a photo of Jabba the Hutt.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘Creative. He’ll kill you.’
‘I haven’t finished yet,’ she said as she pulled a leather jacket from a pile by the door, laid it on the floor then painted the word ‘Slimeball’ on the back in white paint from a small tester pot. ‘That should do it,’ she said as she gathered up his things, put them in a couple of bin bags, tied them with red ribbon and put them with the others by the front door. She came back in with a couple of bundles of dried plants.
‘God, Debs, what now?’
‘You can help me cleanse the atmosphere of him next.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘White sage sticks,’ she explained. ‘I bought them last week in Glastonbury.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Clear the house of toxins and bad spirits – at least that’s what the witchy-looking girl in the shop informed me. She said they can change your environment from your current one to a mystical one. We light them, then take them from room to room waving the scent into all the corners.’
‘OK, let’s do it,’ I said.
An afternoon spent with Debs was never normal and always made a refreshing change, but her antics reminded me that she probably wasn’t the one to ask for marriage-guidance advice. I followed her instructions, lit my bundles of herbs, then went from room to room waving the sage sticks in the air, into corners, above the doorways and windows. It had a strong herbal scent that was pleasantly pungent.
‘The process is called smudging,’ Debs called from the corridor where she was waving her bundle with great enthusiasm. ‘Goodbye Fabio, goodbye bad vibes, goodbye misery. Air, fire, water, earth, dismiss, dispel, disperse. Witchy woman told me to bury the embers of the sage once finished so, when your bundle’s gone out, we’ll do that.’
‘Righto,’ I called and went back to my task.
Ten minutes later, the bundles had burned down, so we went outside, found a spade and buried them under a lilac tree. Yin and Yang followed us out and watched as if we were mad.
‘I guess they burn frankincense and myrrh for healing and to raise the spirits in churches,’ I said, ‘so maybe it’s not so barmy to use white sage to dispel negative vibes.’
‘Exactly,’ said Debs. ‘Though I’m glad Lorna’s not with us. I don’t think she’d have joined in with the same open-mindedness as you. I’m not finished yet, though. I have one last thing to do, and that’s to call the locksmith to come and change the locks and then I’ll be done. Fabio will have been exorcized and I have to say it’s made me feel a darn sight better. OK. How about a change of scenery next? How about I put on my Bollywood movie soundtrack CD and we dance around the living room? We can pretend we’re in India.’
‘Excellent. I like your thinking. Lead the way, Debs,’ I said, and followed her back inside the flat. When the going gets tough, the tough act like mad old hippies, I thought as Debs put on the music and I put my hands on my waist and began to bang the floor with my feet and bounce around the room. Debs may be many things, I thought when I left an hour later – opinionated, eccentric, outspoken – but she’s never boring and she can always distract me from my problems with her peculiar view on life.
As I drove home, I thought about what awaited me. Matt and a house full of worries or … maybe I’d try the phone sex. OK, so … stuff to get him excited? Now let me think. Last year on the writing course, a great