Page 87 of My Kind of Happy

I pretended to roll up my sleeves and grinned. ‘Let’s do it.’

As expected, the evening was loud, messy and a lot of fun and I was enjoying every second of it. As the noise levels had risen steadily so had the temperature in the shop. I propped open the back door and took in lungfuls of cool damp air.

‘Getting rowdy, are we?’ Tom the PE teacher looked over, concerned. ‘Some of these lads are worse than my year nines.’

‘Only in a good way,’ I replied, reassuring him.

Despite Sam’s jokes earlier about heavy drinking, the cricket players behaved impeccably. They alternated between teasing each other, bemoaning their own efforts and secretly getting a kick out of how well they were all doing. Scamp was happy too, mooching about under the table for any dropped morsels.

As well as making his own arrangement, Sam was doing a great job of helping me: clearing up empty beer bottles, sweeping the floor every so often to get rid of the debris from stripped and snipped stems and rushing to get cloths when the inevitable spillages occurred.

So far Mikey was my favourite. He was quiet and earnest and determined to master spiralling the stems properly. I’d spent at least ten minutes helping him to work out where to place the flowers and not once did I get the impression that he was a flirt as Sam had implied. He didn’t have a girlfriend, he confided, but his mum always came to watch the cricket matches and she’d volunteered to make the tea tomorrow, so he was going to give the flowers to her.

‘Come along if you like?’ He had a boyish face, dark curly hair and friendly eyes which crinkled when he smiled.

I’d never been to a cricket match, but the idea of spending Sunday afternoon in a deckchair watching this lot enjoy themselves had a certain appeal and I knew Scamp would enjoy being in the fresh air.

‘I might just do that,’ I replied. ‘But only if the sun shines.’

He made a fist and I bumped mine against his.

‘Date,’ he said with a grin.

‘You’re not wasting any time, Mikey,’ said Sam, appearing between us. He slapped his friend on his back.

I wondered if Pandora and the children would be at the match. If I saw Sam with his family, as a father and a husband, it might help cement him in my head as purely friend material. It had to be worth a try, I thought, feeling his gaze on me.

‘I’ve just been invited to the cricket tomorrow,’ I said brightly. ‘What do you think? Shall I come?’

Sam’s eyes flicked to Mikey’s briefly and he shook his head. ‘You’d be bored. And if the weather stays like this, it’ll be cold.’

‘Oh. Well as I said, I might come, weather permitting,’ I said, disappointed. Sam clearly didn’t want me there. Perhaps he was simply trying to warn me off Mikey, although he seemed perfectly charming to me.

‘Speak for yourself, Diamond!’ Tom pretended to be insulted. ‘Come along, Fearne, my top spin has to be seen to be believed. Besides, my wife will be there and she’ll enjoy having someone new to talk to, to stave off the … er …’

‘Boredom?’ Sam finished for him and we all laughed.

This camaraderie was something I missed, I realised. Summer evenings in Pineapple Road had meant parties for Freddie and me. We’d decide late on Saturday afternoon to invite a few people over and before we knew it, a party was in full swing. We had a garden shed that we’d converted into a Tiki bar and even though our garden was tiny, it became known as party central for our friends. Even Ethel had been known to join us for a tipple, with Scamp of course. I had very fond memories of her showing Freddie and Hamish how to do the quickstep to a Foo Fighters track. I thought about that parcel of foil sitting in my fridge with Sam’s special barbeque rub in it. It was time to let laughter back into the house …

Sam murmured in my ear. ‘You OK?’

My eyes were shining with tears. Everyone was looking at me. I ruffled my hair, trying to hide behind it.

‘I am actually!’ I said, smiling. ‘Now, how is everyone doing? Are you ready to tie your bouquets?’

‘No!’ said Archie plaintively. ‘How did you get the surface of yours to be all spherical?’

I made my way around the table, relieved to escape the attention. ‘Don’t worry, everything is fixable.’

‘Except Tom’s nose,’ Richard sniggered. ‘That’s past redemption.’

‘Hey,’ Tom retorted, covering his nose with his hand. To be honest it did look as if it had been in the wars once or twice. ‘This is the nose of a multi-discipline sportsman.’

‘Yeah,’ said Sam, ‘there isn’t a single sport in which Tom hasn’t managed to end up in a crumpled heap.’

Everyone laughed and the mood lifted again.

I focused on Archie’s bouquet; it did look a bit ragged, his line flowers sticking out and his focal flowers bunched up together.