The Summer Seekers

“You’ve had a rough time, but everything will work itself out.” Mrs. Hartley patted her arm. “You’re a good listener and very cheerful.”

Not around her family. The cheer was sucked out of her.

“I’d better go. My dream job isn’t going to present itself unless I look for it.”

Martha walked back into the kitchen of her parents’ house and found her mother scowling into the fridge.

“There’s nothing much to eat. I’ll go to the shops, but you need to clean the kitchen floor.”

“Later. I’m busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Job hunting. Trying to find a boat I haven’t missed.” Hatching an escape plan. She’d reached the point where she’d do anything.

“I forgot—” Her mother pulled an envelope out of her pocket. “This came for you. I hid it from your father because I knew how upset he’d be if he saw it on the mat.”

Martha took the letter, hoping her mother didn’t notice her shaking hand. “Thanks.”

That was it then. All done. Finished.

No turning back now.

Sliding the letter into her pocket, Martha washed her hands, made herself a mug of tea and

disappeared up to her bedroom.

She had the smallest room in the house, which meant she had room for a bed and not much else. There was a small recess where she hung her clothes, and a desk that folded away when she wasn’t using it.

The wall opposite her bed was covered in a map of the world. Sometimes she lay in bed at night, dreaming about all the places she was never going to visit.

She pulled the letter out of her pocket and stared at it for a moment. Then she ripped it open, feeling sick even though she already knew what it would say.

She read it and felt her eyes fill with tears.

Her mother was right. She made bad decisions. What had she achieved in her life?

She folded the letter carefully and stuffed it into her bag.

She was keeping it as a reminder to make better decisions in the future.

Next to her on the bed her phone buzzed. Steven.

She rejected the call.

The summer stretched ahead like a long, gloomy road. She checked her social media and saw that one of her friends was now in Ibiza posting the most enviable beach selfies, while another was spending a week on a canal boat with her family and kept posting photos of rippling water, sunsets and glasses of wine balanced on the deck. Martha threw her phone on the bed. It wasn’t that she cared massively about social media, but it said a lot about your life when you had nothing at all to post.

She stared out the window. The nearest thing she’d had to excitement in the last few weeks was when a fox had climbed into Mrs. Hartley’s garden and dug up her flower beds. Martha had spent the morning clearing up fox poo so that Mrs. Hartley’s little dog wouldn’t roll in it.

Kicking off her shoes, she balanced her tea on the shelf above the bed and opened her ancient, temperamental laptop. Her hands hovered over the keys. She didn’t even know what job to search for anymore.

Great with laundry, good at cleaning up fox poo weren’t exactly assets.

What she needed was a job that came with accommodation so that she could get away from her family home.

She scrolled through the website.

Someone was looking for a live-in companion, to include full nursing care. What exactly did that entail? Martha, who was horribly squeamish, decided she didn’t want to find out.