Chapter 4

4

I have a secret identity, of sorts. More like a pen name, an alter ego? Except that for the past year this other me has adopted the physical face of my intern and friend, Lucy. It’s a long story…

     After graduation, I managed to get a job working on our local newspaper, the Cumbria earning a generous twenty pence an hour over minimum wage, making tea, running errands and completing all other tasks that nobody else either wanted or could be bothered to do. Other people who’d got themselves an English degree with a dream of becoming a journalist might have worked to make something of this opportunity – chased down stories, left anonymous articles on the editor’s desk, hustled and strategised and begged if necessary for that one big break.

     In my head, I was going to do all those things. Once I’d learnt a bit more, grown a little wiser. For now I was pootling along, helping out at the Tufted Duck to top up my income in order to afford luxuries like socks and petrol, and enjoying living in the most beautiful countryside in the UK.

     And then Charlie came to visit, and everything changed overnight.

     We had eaten out at a recently opened pub on the edge of the town. It was, to put it bluntly, outrageously terrible. The worst meal either of us had ever eaten, served by the most incompetent staff. And then they had the audacity to drop a card on the table asking for an ‘honest review’ on the Windermere Community Facebook group, in exchange for the chance to win a free meal.

     Oh boy. The wannabe journalist in me was roused, fuelled by a nasty bottle of wine and my best friend. The review was most certainly honest:

Having lived in Birmingham, my friend and I have enjoyed our fair share of delicious curries. We’ve also had a couple that resemble cat sick. The Gourmet Gannet provides the novel experience of a curry that not only looks like vomit, it smells like it, too. At least, we presumed the lukewarm plate of watery yet gloopy slop – a true scientific marvel! – was the curry my friend had requested. The waiter had previously tried to force a steak on her, insisting that my vegetarian companion had ordered it. ‘You must have got confused,’ he kindly suggested, scarpering away leaving the steak on the table. No, good sir, you’re the one confused if you think we’re accepting a charred lump of burnt shoe instead of the food we asked for. Poor chap, the whole debacle shook him up so badly that when he brought the alleged curry, he fumbled his grip and tipped the accompanying plate of undercooked rice into my friend’s lap. Which, no, was not cleaned up or replaced. Not that she wanted it to be, given that the scattered grains carried a distinctive whiff of rancid fish.

    But on to my food, arriving a mere seventeen minutes after the curry. I was tempted to ask if we could have the steak back. How difficult is it to create an inedible burger? Well, the Gourmet Gannet certainly rose to the challenge. Again, this left me questioning everything I knew about the science of matter, being both rubbery, gristly and mushy all at the same time. At fifteen quid, I wasn’t expecting Michelin star food. I was, however, hoping for something no worse than Ritzy’s Saturday night burger van. You won’t be surprised to hear that the chips were burnt on the outside, raw in the middle, and devoid of seasoning, or that the burger bun was both stale and soggy. I can’t review the accompanying ‘garden salad’, because I didn’t want to deprive the slug of his single lettuce leaf and shrivelled slice of cucumber. He seemed to be enjoying them far more than I would have.

    When I asked for tomato ketchup in an attempt to render the burger at least slightly edible, I was told, ‘We’re not that sort of establishment.’ That makes sense, considering flavour of any sort seemed to be not their sort of thing. either. I won’t bore you with the dirty cutlery or the sticky, dog-eared menus. Neither will I expound on the hairs stuck to the table, or the dead flies in the ladies’ loo. I won’t blather on about the diners next to us, whose beef and onion pie looked as though it had been dropped on the floor and scooped back up again, nor how when they complained the waiter told them that it ‘won’t make no difference to the taste’. Because that’s their review to give, not mine.

    But I will tell you that both my friend and I invented a game called ‘grubby waiter bingo’, including points for things like nose picking, crotch scratching and coughing on the food, and that both of us got a full house before the bill arrived. I tell you this, because it’s not a matter of opinion, as the manager helpfully explained was the reason we disliked the food, but of protecting the health and happiness of the good citizens of Windermere. Gourmet? I don’t think so. A Gannet running the kitchen? That might be an improvement.

     To my utter amazement, and Charlie’s utter delight, the review went bonkers. You could say viral, by Lake District standards. The Cumbria Chronicle editor called me into his office, not to fire me, as I’d expected, but to offer me a part-time job writing reviews for the paper, providing I continued with the humour.

     Back when I’d tentatively applied to study English at university, with the faint, flimsy hope that maybe one day someone would pay me to write something, I would have been horrified at the thought of mocking and criticising people’s livelihoods for a cheap laugh.

     But in the three years since graduating I’d had seventeen rejections for the novel I’d submitted to agents and publishers. All attempts at getting a different job with a less tenuous link to writing had failed. I was broke, bored out of my brains and beyond tired of getting up at 5.30 to cook a dozen breakfasts before going to work.

     And, more to the point, I was still sleeping in a room so tiny that even with bunkbeds, only one of us could move about in there at a time.

     Something needed to change.

     I tried to keep things kind, and fair, but the worse the reviews were, the more people loved them. Once a week I found somewhere different – maybe a backwater pub, or a flashy, up-itself brasserie. If the food was okay, I would say that, and then maybe throw in something amusing about a poor member of staff, or the décor. Perhaps how the menu struggled to cater for allergies. I would rope in someone else from the newspaper, or occasionally drag one of the Tufted Duck staff along on some made up pretext. Every few months, Charlie rocked into town and we’d blitz several places in one weekend. Often, I went alone, which led to me more than once being able to write about a slimy waiter’s attempts to hit on me. In the two years I wrote for the I wrote overwhelmingly positive reviews. I worked hard to find fantastic places to feature as a counterweight to the few necessarily dreadful ones. The first great article was for a restaurant specifically set up to provide training and jobs to those with learning difficulties. The food there was outstanding. Following my review, they were able to open a second restaurant in Kendal. Another was a couple who had a buy-one-share-one scheme, providing a meal for a homeless person for every meal paid for, along with cookery and gardening classes for clients of local foodbanks. One bakery was just so delightful I couldn’t find a single bad thing to say about it. A café run by a Somalian couple who’d arrived as asylum seekers a decade earlier was similar. I also gave a fabulous review for the breakfast at the Tufted Duck. Over the months, their popularity grew. Restaurant owners knew that a positive review would see an immediate increase in custom, and the token ‘although I was somewhat disappointed by…’ mention became like a local in-joke, whereby readers knew if the worst I could come up with was a dodgy ceiling tile in the toilets or a rude fellow diner, then the place was excellent. The power was overwhelmingly terrifying and addictive at the same time.

     And then a national newspaper called.

     Three weeks later I was living with Charlie in Crystal Palace. I had a blog, Twitter account and Instagram set up and an actual company credit card. They also insisted on a name, rather than ‘The Phantom Food Lover’ as I’d been in Windermere. Nora Sharp was born, and she hit the ground running.

     Within a year or so, Nora had branched out into events. I started getting invited to book launches and award ceremonies, slipping about undetected in my uninspiring outfits with my boring hair and make-up, pretending to be someone’s assistant if anyone bothered to talk to me. My followers grew from the hundreds to the thousands, and within a couple of years had reached the tens of thousands. Despite increasing pressure from my editor to focus on the negatives, as again that received by far the most interest, I tried to maintain my balanced approach, keeping the ‘although I was somewhat disappointed…’ section short and as sweet as I could get away with. I even started a blog, as Eleanor Sharpley, writing unfailingly glowing reviews to counteract every negative one the paper printed. Yet despite my efforts, even going so far as to have Nora endorse it, no one was interested in reading it (apart from my parents and grandma, who thought this was my real job). In the meantime, Nora continued to thrive in direct correlation to how heavily my articles were edited to maximise the criticism and downplay the praise. My new editor asked me to launch the YouTube channel, right about the same time that Lucy contacted me asking to be my intern.

     And that was when things really started getting crazy.

Having charged my phone overnight using the one yellowing socket in the room and a charger borrowed from Daniel, I quickly scrolled through the Nora Sharp social media accounts. Lucy had added a fairly innocuous tweet and Instagram post about Nora looking forward to a restaurant opening later that week. I checked my emails, but nothing urgent had come in since I’d last checked on Thursday evening.

     I called Lucy. I wasn’t about to let her go over the phone if I could help it, but I could at least schedule in a video chat for later on (once I’d changed into a decent top and fortified myself with some breakfast).

     The call went straight to voicemail. I left a brief message telling her I’d gone away for a few days and asking her to call me as soon as possible, following up with a WhatsApp for good measure.

     I also needed to speak to my editor, Miles Greenbank. I definitely needed some caffeine before that conversation, however, and my first attempt at getting out of bed made it clear that I needed painkillers before I could go and get a coffee.

     It took me a long, drawn-out, agonising eternity, peppered with yelps of pain and more than a few tears before I was out of the tiny bed and on my trembling feet. Having made it this far, I thought it best to press on, shuffling the short distance to the door and across the hallway to the bathroom. Eyes scrunched to slits, I did what I needed to do while avoiding looking at the rust, the mould or the cobwebs, and hobbled back to bed. I was still figuring out how to climb back into the bed, when there was a soft tap on the door.

     ‘Hello?’

     ‘Hello,’ I croaked back.

     ‘Am I all right to come in?’

     Considering the events of the past couple of days, this was not a time to start worrying about pride. Or appearances. Or how badly my breath stank, given that I’d not had the energy to bother brushing my teeth. Daniel came in carrying a tray bearing a mug of tea, a sandwich and another dose of pain medication. He paused, frowning at me slumped against the bed on one elbow, ratty hair falling over my face like a witless old crone, before dispensing with the tray and backing out of the room again.

     Great. I made one more half-hearted attempt to hoist a knee up on top of the stupidly high bedframe, instead collapsing face-first onto the mattress. Perhaps I could stay here until I recovered enough to slither the rest of myself up to join my top half. Maybe just a short snooze…?

     ‘Here.’

     Oh! I twisted my face around to see Daniel placing a wooden stool about a foot high beside me on the faded rug. He busied himself faffing about and doing nothing with the tray so I could clamber into bed with a modicum of privacy.

     ‘Thanks.’

     ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, handing me a glass of water and two pills.

     ‘Can I answer that once these have had a chance to kick in?’

     ‘Is there anything else you need?’ He glanced at the ceiling, the floor, the pile of bags against the dresser. This was a box room. The heavy, dark green curtains blocked most of the daylight from entering, and it suddenly felt like an exceedingly small space for two people who had only just met, one of whom was wearing the other’s sister’s pyjamas.

     ‘I’m fine, thanks. I need to make a couple of work calls, and hopefully by then I’ll feel strong enough to get out of your way.’

     Daniel sighed, shaking his head slightly. ‘I’m taking Hope to Mum’s for a couple of hours, after she missed seeing her yesterday. There’s some as yet unidentifiable meat in a sauce defrosting for dinner. Hopefully by then you’ll feel strong enough to come downstairs and watch whatever crap we can find on TV. If not, that’s fine. Here.’ He pulled a piece of paper out of his jeans pocket. ‘My number. In case you need anything, or get stuck halfway down the stairs or something.’

     I nodded, this simple token of kindness causing my throat to seize up with fresh unshed tears. My body wasn’t the only thing about me that had arrived at Damson Farm feeling bashed up and broken. Having lost so much in the past few days, and about to sever ties with my last thread of security, knowing I could stay here for a while and do nothing, have no pressure or expectations put upon me – not even coming down the stairs – was the best possible medicine. I drank almost all of my tea, managed three bites of sandwich and then scrolled through photos of Charlie on my phone until I sobbed myself back to sleep.

     Calling Lucy, speaking to Miles, would have to wait.