Motherlove by Thorne Moore Page A

indefinitely. A few days and then she’d need to order more feed. And she had two jobs to get back to.
    She stayed for breakfast in the conservatory, and reassured herself that Roz had slept well and that Mandy knew exactly what to do with all the medications and the dietary instructions, then she let Roger escort her to the double garage where her new chariot awaited her. Electric windows, air conditioning, a CD player and Sat Nav. It felt like sitting at the controls of a spaceship. She hadn’t been in a car like this since taking her test.
    â€˜Don’t worry about a thing,’ Roger assured her, tapping on the sunroof as she started the engine and waited for the growls, grinding and whines that she associated with internal combustion. They didn’t come. It felt like cheating, letting the car roll softly out onto the gravel. Not real driving at all – nothing to fight. She manoeuvred it onto the drive, just to convince Roger she could handle it, then she stopped to say goodbye.
    â€˜You know how everything works? Lights there. Windscreen wiper. Sat Nav.’ Roger leaned in to adjust it. ‘It’s on. Do you want me to show you how to use it?’
    Kelly laughed. ‘I’ll manage. I usually get there in the end.’
    â€˜You always will, Kelly. Look, phone charger; you’ll keep in touch, won’t you?’
    â€˜Of course. Every day. Not that I don’t trust you.’
    He grinned. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll mind her like our own.’
    She waved, he waved. She headed down the drive, then sat back and began to get the feel of the ridiculously well-appointed car.
    It was the Sat Nav that did it. Kelly navigated by instinct and memory; it had always worked in the past. But the Sat Nav on the Corsa’s dashboard kept showing her the world that lay before her, the junctions, the forks, the crossroads. Constant temptations. She was heading north for the M4, and there on the map was the motorway running west for home. And running east. East to the M25 and the home counties, a world she knew nothing about but that was, in a sense, her birthright.
    She pulled into a lay-by before the motorway and sat gazing at the map, zooming in, zooming out. East to London, the M25 and the satellite towns that clustered round the capital. Lyford. Turn off at that junction, the Sat Nav invited her; drive the twenty odd miles to Lyford and Stapledon General Hospital where, according to her birth certificate, she had been born. The hospital where labels had been switched.
    Kelly nibbled the houmous and sun-dried tomato ciabatta that Mandy had given her. Maybe Joe could manage for another day or two. And she was owed some leave. They’d understand at work. Her mother was ill, after all. She looked again at the map, spreading its motorway tentacles out to her, as she sat in a car that would happily cruise anywhere, without being kicked or tickled into obedience. Fate, surely. How could she refuse?
    She drove to the M4 and turned east.
    Lyford. An urban sprawl, too big to be a mere town, but too formless, too lacking in identity to be a city. Too close to London to have any regional significance, and just too far out to share the capital’s glamour. High rise blocks and concrete fly-overs superimposed on defunct car plants and forgotten gas works. Mushrooming housing estates and small-scale industrial complexes spilling out from a civic centre that had once had delusions of Art Deco style and that now nursed its pedestrian zoning under the shadow of a vast shopping centre and multi-storey car park. Kelly noticed narrow Victorian lanes and a gracious Medieval church as she strolled round the shopping precinct, wondering what it would have been like to have been brought up here. This was her place of birth but she felt no link to it. She’d been a couple of weeks old when she had left it behind.
    Kelly had no affinity with towns, but she wasn’t intimidated by them either.