Read Online Summer Daydreams by Carole Matthews - Free Book Online

someone was hurt. Now dry those tears. Thrown off your course?’ She tuts. ‘That can be fixed.’
    She leads me to a table and sits me down. Then she calls out. ‘Phil! Phil! Our Nell is here and she needs tea!’
    Phil and Jenny appear from the back of the chippy. My boss’s face falls when he sees me. ‘Nell, love.’ He comes and slips into the seat next to me and puts his arm round my shoulder, which makes the tears that I just about had under control flow again. This place feels like my sanctuary, my home. I’m loved here, not out on a limb. They don’t think I’m stupid, lazy, incapable. They don’t tell me here that I’m not good enough.
    Jen says, ‘I’ll make that tea.’ She disappears into the back once more.
    Constance hands me a napkin and I blow my nose into it.
    ‘Now then,’ Phil says softly. ‘Tell us all about it.’
    I launch into my tale of how I’ve struggled to keep up with the work, struggled to keep all of my balls in the air, struggled to make the one important person at the college like me, like my work.
    ‘Oh, Nell,’ Phil says after he hears me out. ‘We could have helped you out. Why didn’t you say? We thought you were eating it up for breakfast. None of us knew you were struggling. We’re your friends, Nell.’
    ‘I wanted to show you all that I could do it.’ Look where that’s left me. My eyes fill with tears again.
    ‘Don’t fret,’ he says, patting my back. ‘There are other courses.’
    ‘She thought my work was rubbish, Phil.’ She thought I was rubbish. ‘What if I sign up for another course and they say the same thing?’ Then all my dreams, my hopes will be truly crushed.
    ‘They won’t,’ he assures me. ‘You’re wonderful. I’ve a good mind to go down to that college and drag that woman up here and make her look at what you’ve done. You were too good for them, that’s the problem.’
    I have to laugh at that. ‘It’s lovely to have friends who have such blind faith in me.’
    ‘It’s not blind,’ Phil points out. ‘We can see what your work has done. She’s the one who can’t.’
    Jen brings the tea and some chocolate digestives and we all dig in, gratefully.
    ‘She’s probably just jealous,’ is Jen’s take on this. ‘You’re young and fit and have the whole of your life ahead of you. Well, most of it. She’s a bitter old bag who probably hasn’t had a decent shag in years.’
    That makes us all laugh. If only life were so simple. But the long and the short of it is that, decent shag or not, she still had my future in her hands. And she decided that it was not going to be on her bloody course, come hell and high water.
    I put my head in my hands.
    ‘So what now?’ Constance wants to know.
    ‘Can I have my full-time job back, Phil? I’m going to be free at lunchtime now.’ I try to make light of it but inside my heart is breaking.
    ‘No,’ Phil says. ‘No. I’m not having you back here.’
    He sounds fairly adamant.
    ‘You’re not giving up that easily, Nell McNamara. Oh, no.’
    ‘I can’t face starting another college course,’ I tell him. ‘Anywhere I went would be further away for one thing, and even more difficult to work round Petal.’ Not to mention the fact that my already shaky confidence, my self-esteem, has been smashed into the weeds.
    Constance holds my hands. ‘Phil’s right, love. Don’t give up this easily. We need to come up with a Plan B.’
    Plan B could just be to stay working in a chippy for the rest of my life with my good and well-meaning friends.
    ‘Will you get any money back from the course?’ Phil asks.
    ‘Full refund,’ I tell him. That offers some consolation. Phil’s money hasn’t been completely wasted. ‘At least that’s not lost. I’ll give it straight back to you.’ Otherwise I might be tempted to have a retail frenzy of the handbag nature to cheer myself up.
    ‘That’s not what I’m worried about,’ he says. ‘I want you to keep it and put it to good use.’ He