The World at My Feet Read online

  The picture that has caught my attention features a striking male silhouette against a sky smeared with thunder and charcoal. He’s holding a yoga pose in which the weight of his body is upheld by his hands, his legs raised in front at a 45-degree angle. It looks like an unfeasible, impossible position, yet he is as strong and steady as an oak tree. The caption reads:

  Do not let your past define you. Being happy and fulfilled is a choice, as long as you’re willing to open your heart to the magic all around you.

  #yogaman #positivity #positivityquotes #passion #inspiration #crossfit #goodvibes #fitness #Chilterns #wellbeing

  I re-read the caption and like the sentiment so much that I click on the account. Its owner is called @Firefly_Guy. He has just over nine hundred followers and a biography that reads: ‘Yoga man, traveller, positive thinker’.

  His pictures have been predominantly uploaded in the last few weeks, though some were taken a while ago. Most are in locations within a twenty-mile radius of here, but a few feature shimmering snow in Austria or rocks glittering with dust in Picos de Europa, Spain. His six-pack could have an Instagram account of its own judging by the level of interest it has attracted. Though undeniably impressive, it is his face that I’m mesmerised by. Everything about it is twinkly and alluring – artistic-looking hair that’s tied back but falls onto a tanned forehead, a soft, dark beard that obscures his chin and eyes as blue as a swimming pool. My fingertips hover over the keypad for a moment, before I begin to type.

  @EnglishCountryGardenista

  That caption was a welcome thought today. Thank you for posting it. (Also, I love that spot – I made lots of childhood memories there!)

  I press return, shut down my iPad and don’t give it a moment’s thought for the rest of the day. It’s only after the light has faded, I’ve finished in the garden and showered, that I slump on the sofa with my phone – and discover that @Firefly_Guy has responded.

  @EnglishCountryGardenista It’s a beautiful view from there, I agree. One of my favourites.

  I am contemplating whether to say anything back, when a private message icon appears in the corner of my screen. I open it up. It’s from @Firefly_Guy.

  I ought to have said: thank you for your kind words about my post . It’s nice to hear these things mean something to someone out there. Feels like I’m shouting into the abyss at times .

  This is significantly more exciting than my usual standard of direct messages, the last one of which asked if I could recommend a wormery starter kit. I compose my response eagerly.

  I know that feeling. I might have a few followers these days but it wasn’t always like that.

  In the lull afterwards, I click on one of his pictures, tilting my head to examine the beaded bracelet that kisses the veins on his wrist. I run my fingers over the screen, idly tracing its outline, when another message arrives.

  Okay, I’ve just seen how many followers you have. I am ridiculously impressed. How long did it take you to grow to that? And how? I have a million questions!

  I can’t deny I’m pleased he noticed. I reply coolly.

  I’ve been here for just over two years.

  Wow. Quite unbelievable…

  Thanks, but lots of others on here have built their followers far faster. It’s actually slowed down for me a little recently.

  You can’t fool me with your modesty. Come on, what’s your secret? I realise this is starting to sound like I’m asking for a consultation but I’m genuinely curious…

  Oh, just the usual. The photography has to be top notch (but you already seem to be on top of that judging by your most recent post!). I always plan well in advance to make sure I get lots of pics – sometimes 100 or 200 – before I whittle them down to one. That’s the case whether it’s for a post that a sponsor is paying me for – or one of the others. The main thing is letting your personality shine through. Instagram Stories are good for that.

  I hardly have to wait between messages; his replies arrive faster than I can keep up with, making my heart flutter every time a new one pings onto my phone.

  You realise you should be charging me for this!

  I snort.

  These top tips are probably worth a fortune… about the price of a packet of Smoky Bacon crisps I’d say.

  Well… I wouldn’t know. I’m vegan

  I wince. Of course he’s vegan. You don’t get a body like that from a diet rich in sausage rolls. I decide to steer the messages back to more comfortable territory.

  Re. shouting into the abyss. I felt like nobody was interested too at first. You just need a couple of lucky breaks.

  Hey, you’re an inspiration.

  My eyes narrow.

  Hmm. Now you’re taking the piss… I think?

  Of course not. Why would you assume that?

  Oh, I don’t know. Maybe sarcasm is just hard to detect online. But if you’re sure then I’ll just soak up the glory.

  Take it where you can, I say. Besides, it’s obvious your breaks haven’t been lucky. I’m not surprised people want to follow you. I’ve been clicking through your pictures. Your garden is lovely and your passion shines through. It also helps that you’re incredibly pretty, of course.

  My insides flip. I turn to the dog. ‘Blimey, Gertie. What do I say to that?’

  That’s not offensive, is it?

  ‘God no,’ I say out loud, though restrain myself from actually writing it.

  Not at all. It’s nice of you to say.

  Ha! Okay, good. What would have been the point in pretending I hadn’t noticed, after all?! .

  It’s been such a while since I’ve engaged in anything you could call flirtation that it’s hard to know how to respond to this kind of thing. I’ve had approaches from men online of course, but they’re rare in the gardening community, and I don’t count ‘hey sexy’ when they land with sledgehammer subtlety in my inbox. Though the internet is awash with people to message, meet up with, have sex with, all of that would mean taking a step I wouldn’t contemplate.

  Nevertheless, this feels different. This feels wonderful.

  It continues for most of the evening, until I eventually retire to bed, my head full to the brim with thoughts about him, as one final message arrives.

  Sleep tight lovely gardener. And dream well x

  I allow myself one last look at his photograph before I turn off the light, gazing sleepily at the silver rings on his tanned fingers. I imagine what it must be like to be touched by those hands, to feel his skin against my own. It’s a surprisingly easy thought to conjure up, one that prompts me to release a long, slow breath. Because, above anything else, it serves as a reminder of just how long it’s been since I’ve been touched by anyone at all.

  Chapter 6

  Harriet, 1989

  Harriet would have to admit that, several years after she’d won her first job in Fleet Street, there was still the odd moment when she felt out of her depth. The key, she’d worked out, was simply not to show it. Most of the men never did. This was particularly the case on foreign assignments, when she was among a press pack that was still predominantly male, with a few notable exceptions. Even though she considered most of her colleagues to be generous, unpatronising and fun to be around, it didn’t do to broadcast bouts of self-doubt. Not when she still encountered the odd one who seemed positively troubled by her presence in a war zone.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever get married?’ asked Frank, as they sat in the back of a bullet-riddled Volvo having just left the airport in Beirut. While they were preparing for landing, the pilot had warned passengers to exercise caution when they exited the aircraft – and advised them to run as fast as possible to the terminal building to avoid being caught in any crossfire.

  ‘Absolutely no idea. You?’ Harriet said.

  From the quirk of his eyebrow, he hadn’t considered the question to be relevant to him. It wasn’t as if he was an old duffer either – Frank was younger than her, in his early twenties and fresh from Cambridge.


  ‘All I mean is… don’t you think that if you did marry your husband would mind you being in places like this?’

  ‘I’m absolutely certain that my imaginary future husband would be very supportive.’ She grabbed the handrail of the door as the car swung around a corner.

  They’d been sent by the foreign desk to Lebanon in the immediate aftermath of General Michel Aoun’s declaration of a ‘war of liberation’ against Syrian occupation. The next 48 hours had been devastating, with Aoun’s forces shelling West Beirut and Syrian forces targeting East Beirut, resulting in 40 dead and 165 wounded. As their car hurtled through the wreckage in the streets, the ring of distant gunfire peppered their conversation. In other words, you’d think there was quite enough going on to occupy Frank’s mind outside of Harriet’s personal life.

  ‘Don’t you ever think about staying in the UK to do something a little… safer?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Health reporter. Education, perhaps,’ he suggested.

  ‘I applied for the job of Knitting Correspondent but didn’t get it,’ she replied.

  His head snapped towards her. ‘Really?’

  ‘No, Frank.’ She smiled. ‘Not really.’

  She’d never been able to work out who decided why certain specialisms constituted ‘soft’ news and were therefore especially suited to a woman. She counted her blessings that the succession of news editors she’d had were rather more enlightened – if by that was meant that nobody had batted an eyelid before sending her somewhere she could potentially get her head blown off.

  The only issue had ever been whether she could get the job done and Harriet had worked very hard to prove that she could. She was fast and accurate, but also reported compassionately. She’d developed a pin-sharp ability to appraise risk, knowing when to keep away from danger and when it was worth trying to blag her way through a barricade. Despite a near miss by a rocket-launched grenade – which occurred while she was sharing a bottle of Scotch with an NBC cameraman in Afghanistan – and a brush with kidnappers in Angola, she was known for a refreshing absence of fuss.

  ‘My aunt was an art critic for The Lady,’ Frank continued, clearly considering this to be a helpful suggestion.

  ‘But I do this, Frank,’ Harriet said firmly. ‘This is what I do.’

  If someone had told Harriet when she was a little girl that this was what she’d end up doing for a living, she’d never have believed them. She’d wanted to be a gymnast and was obsessed with the sport until she turned fourteen, when her body had grown in all the wrong places and scuppered her ambitions, apparently overnight.

  She’d grown up with her teacher father and housewife mother in a neat semi-detached house in a small town in the West Midlands. At school, she liked English and History but rarely came top of the class. She was bookish and shy, with no particular interest in, or knowledge of, current affairs.

  There really was no single moment that led her to this point. It was more a series of opportunities, curves in the road. Her father had a job at a good private school which she then got to attend as a pupil. Her first work experience was as a messenger on the Coventry Evening Telegraph – and she only chose that because it sounded more interesting than the alternative: photocopying clerk in a building society. A year in Rome as part of her History degree at Birmingham University sparked a period of joyous self-discovery, in which she learnt to shed off her introversion, chat to strangers on the tram and develop a life-long love of travel. After that, she would simply never have been happy working in any building society.

  She quickly graduated from local newspaper hack to doing weekend shifts in the London newsroom of a broadsheet. She was chosen for her first trip to cover a conflict while she was working as a general reporter, for the typically illogical sort of reason that newsrooms specialise in: she’d had a long-term boyfriend from Ballymena while at university, which meant she was one of the few journalists they had capable of consistently spelling Northern Irish names correctly.

  Since first seeing a tank roll into an urban street during the Troubles, her job had taken her to conflicts further afield – everywhere from Sri Lanka to Angola and Iraq. She was often terrified, occasionally moved to tears, but never anything less than fascinated. She also liked the idea that she was doing something that might make a difference, in small and occasionally very big ways.

  Now, as their driver hurtled down a narrow alleyway, she clutched the small leather holdall that accompanied her on every trip. She’d picked it up in Lisbon airport on her first stint abroad as a reporter, to cover a more sedate royal visit. Within were the bare essentials: torch, toothbrush, notebook, official documents and a novel, in this instance the new Anne Tyler.

  Suddenly, a blast resounded from somewhere, and their car wobbled. Frank grabbed her by the arm, his complexion chalk white.

  ‘Do you think we need to try and buy some guns?’ His voice was trembling. ‘The driver said he knows somewhere he can get us a couple of pistols. Apparently the local press are all fully armed.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ She tutted. He removed his hand and looked at her, exasperated.

  ‘But why? Are you worried about trying to claim it on expenses?’

  ‘If you and I go around toting those, we’d be far more likely to end up in a gun fight with some local militia and frankly I don’t fancy our chances. Besides, it would mean breaking my number one rule as a journalist.’

  She crossed one hand over the other and looked out of the window. A crack of gunfire echoed through the street.

  ‘And what’s that?’ he asked.

  She turned back and fixed her eyes on him. ‘To keep myself out of the story.’

  Chapter 7

  Ellie

  As someone who has shown a remarkable talent for losing friends over the years, I’ve reflected a lot on the first person I was ever really close to.

  My childhood best friend wasn’t a sister in the biological sense, but what she was to me transcended anything you could compare with a straightforward playmate or chum. Even though it was years ago, a whole lifetime away, I can still recall how much stronger, taller, better I felt for being around her. It sounds coy to say we were inseparable, but it’s true. I assumed she’d be in my life for ever, the way children do. When you’re young, you don’t think much about the future, only the next hour, or day. Funny how it’s only when someone is gone that you can reflect on the weight of their absence in any meaningful way.

  Now I’m an adult there is really only one person who fulfils a role you could compare to that of a best friend and that’s my sister Lucy.

  She turns up on Saturday, while Mum and Dad are out. It’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve seen her, so I pre-empt what Mum will say by asking it myself. ‘Why didn’t you let us know you were coming over?’

  ‘Last-minute decision,’ she replies, as if she ever makes decisions that aren’t. She sinks into my sofa and takes a bite of a sandwich that’s clearly the result of a raid on my parents’ fridge – half a baguette stuffed haphazardly with brie and grapes.

  ‘I needed to get out of the city,’ she says, between mouthfuls. ‘Breathe in a bit of fresh air.’

  ‘You’re hungover then?’

  ‘I think my brain might be bleeding. I’m giving up drinking as of today though.’

  ‘I thought it was your favourite hobby?’

  ‘Don’t joke. Please,’ she says, finishing off the sandwich and closing her eyes as she slumps further down the sofa. Gertie jumps up next to her and curls against her leg, as I bring over a glass of cold cordial from the kitchen. I place it on the table with two Paracetamol.

  ‘Oh, you’re good,’ she murmurs.

  ‘Anything else I can do for you?’

  ‘Donate a liver?’

  ‘You hide the fact that you’re a human cesspit pretty well, I’ll give you that,’ I say, sitting down on the chair opposite her as she knocks back the tablets. Her chestnut hair is piled in a messy topknot
and she’s wearing white trainers and a floral print dress that goes down to her ankles, but shows off at least four inches of sumptuous cleavage.

  Despite growing up in the same household, with the same parents and rules, Lucy and I couldn’t be more different. Perhaps it’s the ten-year age gap.

  I, as the eldest, was obedient and anxious to please. I was an enthusiastic Brownie Sixer and deputy head girl, and my hand was always the first to shoot up when a teacher asked for a helper. Lucy on the other hand was averse to conformity. She lasted five minutes in ballet classes and chess clubs and was the kid who, when asked ‘What’s the magic word?’, would not reply with ‘Please’ but ‘Abracadabra’. As a teenager she hung around with the goths, the punks and the weirdos; she had pink hair with shaved sides for eighteen months and gave the impression that her Doc Marten boots were surgically attached.

  She was clever enough to get into UCL to study Ancient History, graduate with a 2:1 and, after teacher training, begin work at a highly regarded sixth-form college, where her repertoire of amusing trivia about Roman orgies goes down a storm. You could never accuse Lucy of being boring. She is big-brained, big-hearted, funny and loyal.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ I ask, taking two cups from the kitchen cupboard.

  ‘Yeah, that’d be nice.’ She lifts Gertie onto the floor and eyeballs the dog momentarily, before issuing the command: ‘Sit!’

  Gertie doesn’t move, other than to blink.

  ‘She only does it for me,’ I say, flicking on the kettle.

  Lucy is undeterred. ‘Sit, Gertie!’