These Hills Called Home | ONC 2024

[11] Planning for a Future

    "I beg your pardon! You may certainly not."

    "Be reasonable, Madam! We have permission from the council to place these here."

    "Well, you haven't got no permission from me. Now, do one!"

    Snippets of heated voices rose from the conversation that stewed downstairs. Gemma swivelled her feet into her boots to finish dressing, flinching at the needles that lined the last of Iris' syllables. As hostile as she had been since their first meeting, the woman's tone had never swilled in Gemma's ear with such vicious venom. Iris was not just furious with the caller; she was deeply wounded and keen to inflict similar pain, if not more severe.

    Gemma looked down the corridor outside her room, and her shoulders sank as Avery's door stood stubbornly shut. She approached the staircase, cast a final futile glance at her friend's door, and crept her way down. Raised voices flew off the walls ahead, every bitter shout injecting a shot of stress into her blood. With one hand pressed against the quickening rise and fall of her chest, Gemma paused on the staircase and focused on slowing, counting, and controlling her breaths.

    Standing imposingly in the entryway, Iris blocked any glimpse of the caller on the doorstep. "How many times do I have to tell you, Cox?" she cried, punctuated with a fierce slap of her palm against the doorframe. "Nobody clutters my fine windows with tatty adverts!"

    "Watch it, witch," the caller responded, and the steady drip of bile through the words marked the voice's owner out as Edmund. "Your so-called fine windows would smash like any others in the right circumstances."

    "They shall shatter around your thick skull if you don't desist, boy," Edgar hissed from the doorstep, his scalpel-like eloquence slicing through the creaking steps and rustling trees. "Madam, these papers aren't advertisements. They're notices intended to raise public awareness about the consultation happening here tonight, you see."

    "I see a pair of overdressed badgers on my doorstep, that's what I see," Iris spat with another smack on the doorway's loose wood. "You're not holding nothing here 'til the council asks me proper."

    Stacked papers flapped together as a solid heel clicked against the pavement. "Make yourself useful, Edmund. See if Mr Gatland's able to stop by – presently," Edgar said, staying silent in the wake of his son's trailing curses. As a gust of wind barrelled past the front of the building, his shoe tapped back onto the doorstep. "May we at least wait inside? It doesn't become your establishment to keep guests waiting in such dreadful cold."

    Leaning away from the entrance, Iris tilted her head and dug her heels into the floorboards. "...paying guests?"

    The sound of grinding teeth trailed through the air. "Of course."

    "What's going on?" Gemma asked, hopping off the staircase as the others crossed to the bar area. With an anxious eye on Edmund's pacing form by the front door, she returned the older Cox's courteous wave and joined Iris behind the bar. "Hi, Mr Cox – Edgar, I mean. What's this about? We don't usually open until later."

    "And I don't often indulge in alcohol so early, but Life has surprised us all lately," Edgar answered, raising his eyebrow at Gemma as he placed a small cluster of coins beside his elbow. "Just this hour, Mr Gatland phoned to approve a public consultation for my redevelopment plan. It's being held this very evening, in fact."

    Iris slid the money into her hands, counted the value up, and stared at Edgar in unspoken expectation. After a long pause, she claimed another few coins from the man and tucked them beneath the counter. "Handy, that," she muttered under the chiming of pint glass against steel tap. "Especially after weeks of him blocking your little plot."