Page 1 of Never Gonna Happen

Chapter One

If she squinted intently at the bedroom ceiling, Emily Wilkinson could still see the outlines of hundreds of glow-in-the-dark stickers. Stars and crescent moons, tiny planets, spaceships shaped like chubby lipsticks with fins. She could clearly remember the day her dad had stuck them up for her, perched on a wobbly ladder, cursing his daughter’s art direction. Not THERE, Dad. You’ve got the spaceship flying into a planet. Point it towards the MOON. No, the OTHER way. She’d bought half a dozen packets with her pocket money in the hope of replicating a school trip to the London Planetarium, but the abiding memory was her dad telling her to sod off and leave him to it.

The haphazard distribution of the stickers had annoyed Emily when she was nine, and it still grated on her nerves twenty years later. Half of the biggest stars were piled up in one corner like they were waiting for the headline act at a cosmic festival, and the section of ceiling by the window had no moons or planets at all. One of the spaceships was aligned exactly behind another, like it had broken down and was being towed to the Martian branch of Kwik Fit. Her attempts to relocate them by standing on a flimsy bookcase had given her several torn stickers and a trip to A&E. It turned out to be nothing more than a sprained ankle, but her dad had breathed furiously through his nose in the car the whole way there.

It was eight years since Emily had left home, the last of the Wilkinson children to fly the nest. All that remained as evidence of her former occupation were the stickers and the greasy Blu Tack marks on the faded pink walls. Now the bedroom was what Mum called her ‘craft room’, which was clearly secret Mum code for a place where abandoned hobbies go to die. Emily supposed she should be grateful it still had a bed, even though it had been rammed against the wall and festooned with brightly coloured fake-fur cushions that made her itch. Instead of Emily’s swimming certificates and *NSYNC posters, the walls now featured a cross-stitch sampler in a frame which read ‘Home is Where the Wine Is’ and a foil scratch art picture of a timber wolf howling at the moon. Emily knew how it felt.

She took a deep breath and mentally offered up her current situation to the luminous papery heavens. I’m twenty-nine years old, living back at home with my mum and dad. My ex, who is also my boss, has gone back to his wife. Which means I need a new job AND a new place to live, because also my room in my crappy shared flat has been destroyed in a hair-straightener fire, along with all my belongings. Everything in my life is a burning pile of shit.

‘Moomin!’ yelled a voice from downstairs. She’d repeatedly requested that her dad stop using her childhood nickname, but her annoyance only encouraged him. ‘Dinner’s ready!’

Talking of burning piles of shit, it was Dad’s turn to cook.

Chapter Two

‘So what are your plans, love?’ asked Emily’s mum, not for the first time this week. They were gathered around the dining table, which seated four in its normal state and six if you put the flap up. At Christmas her dad added a piece of plywood balanced on an old camcorder tripod to make it seat eight. You couldn’t tell with a tablecloth on, and it just about worked as long as somebody sat in the doorway to the lounge and nobody made any sudden movements. There’d been talk of knocking the wall down and making downstairs open plan, but it had never come to anything. Most of this house hadn’t changed much since the Wilkinson family moved in when Emily was seven, which she found oddly comforting.

‘Leave her alone, Carol,’ muttered her dad, squeezing the ketchup bottle so it farted a torrent of red sauce over his food. Emily wafted her hand for him to pass it over. Today’s dinner was something that may once have been breaded fish, but several years of cooking had turned into some kind of carbonised brittle. She poked it with her fork and frowned as it snapped in half, resigning herself to the reality that even ketchup couldn’t save the most dehydrated piece of haddock in West Sussex.

‘I’m still waiting to hear about the insurance on my stuff,’ she said, ‘then I’ll find a new flat and get a new job.’

‘Why do you need a new job?’ asked Carol, her voice shrill with alarm. ‘The one you’ve got pays more than your dad’s ever earned.’ Emily was Personal Assistant to Mark Thompson, Managing Director of a big architecture firm in London, but she was currently on two weeks’ compassionate leave to deal with the aftermath of the fire in her flat. By all accounts her housemate Lucy had helped herself to Emily’s hair straighteners, then left them plugged in on her bed. They’d set fire to Emily’s duvet around the time Mark had taken her hand in a bougie wine bar and said, ‘I need to try to make my marriage work, Emily. For the sake of the children.’

‘No need to rub it in, Carol,’ Emily’s dad said tetchily. He’d worked his entire career as an administrator for Chichester District Council, currently in the Planning and Building Control Department. Emily’s mum was a school dinner lady and could make a bag of potatoes and a pack of frozen mince feed a family for a week. Neither of them earned much, and sadly you couldn’t pay a mortgage with vocal opinions on cowboy-builder loft conversions and Jamie Oliver’s war on Turkey Twizzlers.

‘I’m just saying, Martin,’ said Carol. ‘Jobs like that don’t come along every day, and she can’t stay here for ever.’

‘I’ve literally been here four days,’ said Emily through gritted teeth, giving up on the fishy charcoal and attacking the cremains of the chips instead. ‘My flat has burnt down, my boyfriend has dumped me, everything I own has gone up in flames.’ Including this dinner. Maybe she was being a bit dramatic – in truth Mark had never been a proper boyfriend, even though their secret fling had gone on for two years. As for the fire, the smoke alarm had alerted her housemates to the blaze and the fire brigade had been there within a few minutes. All her stuff was gone, either burned or smoke-damaged beyond repair, but the building would be fine.

‘Your boyfriend has dumped you?’ asked Carol. ‘I didn’t even know you had a boyfriend. Why didn’t you say?’

Emily shrugged. ‘It’s why I need a new job. He works at the firm.’

Carol crossed her arms in outrage. ‘Well, I don’t see why YOU should have to leave, just because he’s finished with you. Why can’t HE leave?’

‘He’s more senior than me, Mum,’ Emily explained. Just a bit. ‘It’s complicated. I’ve been there three years anyway, it’s a good time to move on.’

‘Are you not going to eat that?’ said Carol, standing up to clear the plates.

‘I’m all done,’ said Emily, patting her rumbling stomach. ‘Just a bit unsettled at the moment.’

‘We’ve only got the one loo,’ said Martin. ‘Let us know if we need to give it ten minutes.’ He chortled to himself as Emily wondered how on earth her life had come to this in the space of a week.

‘I love having you home, Moomin,’ said Carol, patting Emily on the shoulder, ‘but you can’t have that room for ever. I need it for my crafts.’

Emily thought about the paper sack of unused knitting wool, the sewing machine that had seized up from lack of use, the sealed box of glitter and pipe cleaners and rainbow pom-poms. ‘Then why can’t I have the other room?’ she asked. Number 22 Grove Street had three bedrooms; her parents had the biggest and the middle one was a guest room, having previously been shared by her two older brothers. Emily had always occupied the box room until Hobbycraft had launched a hostile takeover.

‘I need to keep that for guests,’ said Carol with a shrug. ‘Simon could come home at any time, or David might want us to look after the grandchildren.’

Emily rolled her eyes. ‘Simon’s in Hamburg and David’s in Newcastle, Mum. You’re hardly round the corner.’

‘I’m aware how far away my sons live, thank you,’ said Carol, her voice giving a tell-tale wobble.

Give me strength, thought Emily. ‘I’ve got a call with the insurance people tomorrow, and I’m planning to look at jobs this evening,’ she said, standing at the sink and pulling on a pair of yellow rubber gloves. She’d actually been planning to watch a cheesy romcom on Netflix, but anything to get her mum off her back. The Wilkinsons were a close family but living at home at twenty-nine was far from ideal.

Her parents headed into the lounge to watch EastEnders, so Emily rinsed the ketchup off the plates and plunged them into soapy water while she considered her CV. She’d been in secretarial roles for eleven years, five of which had been at personal assistant level. She could organise diaries, plan parties, haggle travel deals and defuse all manner of professional and domestic crises. She was never late, always discreet and typed so fast her fingers were a blur. She was brilliant at shorthand, liked dogs and children and could sniff out bullshit artists from a hundred yards. Why wouldn’t anyone want to give her a job?

Not that it didn’t grate a bit that she needed to leave. She liked her job at Thompson & Delaney, and she’d loved working for Mark. To her credit, Emily had never chased him, and she’d fought the head-over-horn battle for months before the conference in Dubai, when the lift to their rooms had taken long enough for Mark to lean against the gilded wall and give her a look that liquefied every inch of her body from her neck to her knees. By the eighteenth floor Emily had known for sure that, when the doors opened on the thirty-second, she was going to let Mark take her hand and lead her back to his suite. It felt like something that she had no control over, and it was hard to worry about consequences when she was being banged into next week against a backdrop of fireworks over the Burj Khalifa.