Free A Summer to Remember by Victoria Connelly

can,’ Nina said. She held out her hand and Olivia beamed, taking it in hers and shaking it vigorously.
    ‘Oh, Nina! That is wonderful. Really wonderful!’ Olivia enthused.
    ‘I just have one question,’ Nina said.
    ‘Yes?’ Olivia sounded a little nervous.
    ‘When do I start?’
    Dominic scratched his head as he looked down at Nina’s teacup. If the blue and white china hadn’t been sporting a smudge of pink lipstick, he might well have believed that he’d just invented an entire scene in which his mother had asked Nina to stay at the mill. But there it was. Pink lipstick; as bright as the Norfolk Broads’ daylight.
    Dominic smiled as he remembered the tickle of her hair as she’d bent over him to help him with his homework that time. He’d been eleven years old and she’d spent twenty minutes reading through a comprehension and helping him to answer the questions, but he hadn’t heard a single word. Well, he’d heard her; the soft lilt in her voice, the way it rose so beautifully in the middle of a question and the melancholy tenderness with which she read the story; he just hadn’t heard any of the answers.
    His teacher had given him two out of ten.
    But, as with most childhood crushes, she’d been placed, very firmly, in the back of his mind as he’d grown up – the image of her fading over time, along with those intense boyhood feelings he’d had for her.
    So why then did he now feel as if he’d swallowed a snake? His insides were wriggling about in a most disconcerting way. Ten long years separated him from those feelings – yet he could still recall them, and that made him uncomfortable. He couldn’t still harbour feelings for her, could he? He didn’t even know Nina. He had never really known her. But that, in its own way, had been part of her appeal. She’d always been rather elusive; like a movie star whom you can dream about, but whom you’ll never meet. It would be completely irrational to think he was in love with her. It would be utterly insane to suggest that the old feelings could just bob back up to the surface in the space of a smile and a hello.
    Wouldn’t it?
    He took a glance in the mirror and his eyes widened with horror. He’d suspected he might look like an extra from a low-budget horror film, but it didn’t prepare him for the reality. No wonder Nina had been smiling at him so much. He looked hilarious. Like Groucho Marx after an electric shock.
    He shook his head in despair and left the mill before Nina could clap eyes on him again.
    When Nina finally got home, she looked around her flat and smiled at the peeling wallpaper with the damp patch in the shape of Italy. She’d wasted many fruitless hours trying to cover it up with a succession of posters and cheap prints in frames, but the thing had merely spread to enormous proportions.
    She smiled down at the ancient carpet that was so hard underfoot that you could grate cheese on it. She smiled as she heard her neighbour revving up the motorbike he’d been fixing in his kitchen for the last four months, and she grinned widely as she smelt the familiar waft of curry, courtesy of her other neighbours, through the air vent in the open-plan kitchen. This had been her home for the last two years, and she was smiling because she was leaving it forever.
    She knew it would be reckless to give up her little place, but she meant to continue as she’d started – if she really wanted to get her life back on track she was going to throw caution to the wind and leave it for good anyway. Determination fuelled her, and a sudden sense of calm and purpose filled her. She was getting good at leaving things recently. This could very well be the new Nina, the new direction, the new way forward that she’d been looking for, she thought.
    The flat had come fully furnished, so Nina only had a few personal belongings to pack up and, if at the end of the summer she couldn’t find a new place to rent, she could always make do with Janey’s