31 Dream Street by Lisa Jewell Read Free Book Online Page B

it easier to control.
    Things To Do
1 Buy new sofas
2 Get hair cut
3 Buy new socks
4 Look at kitchens
5 Look at bathrooms
6 Get builder in to quote on works
7 Get plumber in to quote on works
8 Get decorator in to quote on works
9 Get tenants to move out
10 Sell house
11 Move to Cornwall (?)
12 Get a publishing deal (?)
13 Get divorced
14 Stop being in love with Ruby
15 Find someone proper to be in love with
16 START LIVING

10
    Leah found it hard to believe that she’d ended up working somewhere called the Pink Hummingbird. She’d thought it was a joke at first when the woman at the agency had mentioned it to her.
    ‘The what?’
    ‘Yes,’ she’d said, ‘I know. You’ll understand when you see it.’
    It was the most violently, unremittingly feminine shop in London. It had a sugar-pink façade and windows strung with feather-shaded fairy lights. It sold things that only girls would ever want to buy, such as gem-encrusted picture frames and writing paper scented with eau de toilette. The ceiling was dripping with bejewelled chandeliers and whitewashed bamboo birdcages. The walls were hung with Venetian glass mirrors and soft velvet hats in shades of plum and passion fruit. It sold underwear constructed from pure gossamer and presented in tissue-lined sateen boxes with rosebuds on the lid. And soft plush cats dressed in fur coats and heels. And birthdays cards handmade using diamanté and sequins. And cushions made from pastel-tinted Mongolian sheepskins. And pens decorated with lilac glitter and wisps of marabou.
    It was sugar-coated decadence on a sickly scale.
    Leah wasn’t really a pink sort of girl. Leah liked wearing chunky footwear and hard-wearing jeans. She wore the minimum of make-up and no perfume. Her only concession to femininity was her hair, which she wore long and wavy, and her fingernails which she kept manicured and shiny. She didn’t really need make-up. She had one of those scrubbed land-girl kind of faces that looked better with just a touch of eyeliner and a pinch of the cheeks. Maybe that was why Ruth had offered her the job. Maybe she hadn’t glanced down and seen the chunky-heeled boots and the hint of old mud clinging to the hem of her only smart trousers. Maybe she hadn’t noticed that Leah was wearing a T-shirt with a logo on it. Maybe she’d just taken in the cute face and the girlie hair and decided that Leah was a Pink Hummingbird in the making.
    Whatever the reason, she’d offered her the job. Leah had been managing Ruth’s shop for five years now, ever since Ruth had relocated herself to LA and opened Pink Hummingbird II in Beverly Hills. Leah quite liked working here. It was a sweet-smelling antidote to the scruffiness of the rest of her life. It was nice to walk in here in the mornings, stepping from the grey of the pavement outside into this fragrant pink grotto.
    But if someone had told her ten years ago that one day she’d be thirty-five years old, unmarried, non-home-owning and managing a gift shop in Muswell Hill she’d have kicked them in the shin. But here she was selling overpriced gewgaws to girls and grannies and clinging – she could feel it as keenly as an oncoming train today– to the sheer rock face of an existential crisis, by the tips of her shiny fingernails.
    The doorbell of the Pink Hummingbird sounded at three o’clock, just as Leah had opened a new copy of heat and was about to tuck into a tortellini salad. She jammed the plastic tub under the cash desk and glanced at the door.
    It was Toby.
    He was wearing a cream cable-knit turtleneck jumper with narrow black jeans and a red scarf. On his head was a grey ribbed woollen hat. His shoes were enormous and shiny, but he somehow managed to pull the whole look off, even with his abundant and unfashionable sideburns. She smiled when she saw him; she couldn’t help herself.
    ‘Hello,’ he said, peering at her from beneath the Chinese-print paper parasol she’d been hiding behind.
    She peered back at him.