Chapter Text
ACT I: IGNITION
CHAPTER 1 — Breathe the Smoke of What is Left Behind
Sweat trickles down Lisa’s face inside the mask of her breathing apparatus. She shakes her head, trying to prevent it from running rivulets into her eyes.
Keeping one gloved hand in contact with the wall beside her, she readjusts the heavy hose that's hoisted over her shoulder.
Her fellow crew member ahead continues pulsing water up towards the ceiling to cool down the hot gases that swirl through the building. She can’t see him, even with the aid of the head torch on her helmet, their visibility reduced to nothing while the room is filled with thick black smoke. But she knows he’s there, clipped on to the other end of her short personal line, holding up the branch of the hose reel as he leads the way.
Lisa continues to run her right hand along the wall as they slowly progress forward. The rubber inside her mask is soaked now by her sweat, the temperature around them growing with each step they take closer to the fire. Every breath is a battle in the growing heat, each intake of air becoming more and more restricted.
She feels a tug on the hose as her partner ahead of her turns, and sure enough, her hand on the wall soon reaches a sharp corner, and she too turns with it.
“Sofa,” her partner calls out.
Lisa feels her line and the hose pull out to the left as her partner begins to round the new obstacle. He has to make sure it's pressed against the wall so he can maintain contact with it. With zero visibility, the wall is their compass, their best chance of not getting lost.
As Lisa turns her head, orange flames flicker at the edge of the black void that is her field of vision. The fire must be in the next room, the adjoining door open to reveal it.
Her partner has seen it too.
“I’ll tackle the fire, you keep checking,” he yells.
Lisa can barely hear him over the vibrating roar of the flames.
She hesitates.
“We’re supposed to stick together.”
“There could be people in the other rooms,” he reminds her.
She hears the clink of metal as he unclips the carabiner on the end of her line from his own equipment.
Right.
Lisa reels her line back in and stows it in a pocket of her tunic. She turns, ducks her head under the hose so it can rest on the same shoulder she carried it in on, and follows it back the way she had come, her other hand now feeling along the wall.
She finds a doorframe and steps through it back into what they had determined to be a hallway. Dropping the hose from her shoulder, Lisa turns off, perpendicular to the route they had taken, searching for a new room to inspect.
Using her leg to sweep the path ahead of her, and still feeling her way along the wall, she continues plotting a mental map of the bungalow layout, adding to it with each new metre gained.
Suddenly, her sweeping foot hits something hard, though she can’t even hear the contact of her boot with whatever it is, not over the continual hiss of compressed air in her breathing apparatus, and the persistent roar of the fire. She reaches down cautiously with her free hand and feels the unmistakable heat of metal through her glove. A table? She grasps her way with care along the length of it. A prickling sensation begins to run its way down between her shoulder blades as sweat and uncertainty mingle.
Something about the material of the table doesn’t seem right for the location. It's almost… industrial? It’s out of place in the hallway of a suburban bungalow.
Lisa tries to shake off the thought, and pushes on.
…
And on.
And on.
Her hand remains in contact with the wall but she discerns no variation in texture or density beneath her glove, no change in direction for her to follow. The hallway seems to stretch on beyond the limits of plausibility.
Unnerved, Lisa is just considering turning back the way she had come, to rejoin the hose, when her hip bumps hard against something pressed right up to the wall. She gropes around to find a metal cabinet — it's like the kind found in a garage, or even the vehicle bay down at the station. Again, not common in a bungalow…
“Something’s not right here,” she says tentatively down her radio. “This room is too big, it’s not—”
Not what? She can't even put her finger on what feels wrong, and her crew are depending on her to not lose her nerve. She gulps down a breath, and asks, “how’s it going with the fire?”
No response.
Maybe he didn’t hear her over the constant drone of fire and gushing water. Lisa opens her mouth to call out again, louder, to her partner but she’s stopped by the realisation that she doesn’t know what to call out.
What’s his name?
Why doesn't she know?
Her pulse quickens. She stutters to a halt. She needs to stay calm but nothing makes sense anymore. She’s desperate to fill her lungs with fresh, cool air but all she’s permitted right now is the everpresent smell of rubber from her mask infusing her nostrils instead.
She’s about to try calling out again when she suddenly hears the voice, inside her mask, coming through her radio. A woman’s voice.
“Lisa?”
She freezes her movements entirely, heart rate picking up rapidly.
No, no.
“Lisa, are you there?”
Lisa pants into her mask, feels the edges of her vision begin to blur. Her legs almost buckle under her.
With great effort, she raises a shaking hand to push the ‘press to talk’ button that operates the radio once more.
“...Bex?”
“Lisa, I need you.”
Lisa feels her body heat up impossibly further. More sweat trickles uncomfortably down her nose, down the sides of her face, now stinging her eyes. She scrunches them shut against it.
“Bex? What are you doing here? How—”
“I need your help, Lisa.” Becky’s voice sounds… pained. Scared.
“I don’t know where you are, Bex,” Lisa says, voice quivering. “I’m in a different room, it was— I was in a house, and now…”
She blinks open her eyes, reaches out for the wall to steady herself.
It’s not there.
She cries out in frustration.
Groping around frantically, arms and legs carrying out the familiar, ingrained sweeping patterns, she searches for the wall, for any point of contact, anything physical to tether herself to besides the floor.
“It hurts, Lisa,” Bex’s voice cries out to her.
“No, please,” Lisa whimpers, stuttering to a halt once again. Her pleading voice sounds so small and pathetic to her own ears. She needs it to carry. She needs to be heard. She needs the whole world to understand: no.
Bex is just murmuring unintelligibly down the radio now, her pleas reduced to pained cries and whines.
Lisa doesn’t think her heart has ever beat so fast. She can hear it pounding in her ears, interspersed with the cries for help. Her arms hang listlessly at her sides. With nothing to hold onto, she's unmoored, might fall to her knees at any moment.
“No!” she calls out, though her voice still sounds so quiet to her. “No!” she tries again, trying to drown out the sound of Becky in agony.
She needs to shout. She wants to scream. Why can’t she be heard? Why is nobody helping?
Maybe it’s the mask — maybe it’s muffling the sound of her voice. Maybe everyone will hear her — feel her torment — if the mask is no longer obstructing her mouth.
Unsteady on her feet, she unclips and pulls off her helmet, letting it fall to the floor at her feet.
“Lisa—”
Scrunching her eyes up once more, she raises her hand again as she begins to scream, and rips the mask away from her face—
Lisa jolted awake with a yell, arms flailing out to brace herself until slowly she came to realise: she wasn’t falling. She was in bed — covered in sweat, heart pounding, panting heavily into the early morning stillness.
With thrashing limbs she kicked off her quilt and sat up, desperate to feel the cool air against her skin. Her thudding heartbeat refused to relent. She pawed at her own face, her neck, her chest, the last vestiges of her nightmare telling her that something had been there, prohibiting her.
Of course, she found nothing.
With a groan, she flopped back down onto the pillows and fixed her gaze on the ceiling as she tried to recall details. The most pertinent, the one that always stood out: Becky. Her voice, calling for help.
Then, as if fate were intervening in Lisa’s thoughts spiralling out of control, there was a noise in the hallway — the unmistakable creak of the floorboard that lay just beyond Lisa’s bedroom door — and her attention was redirected.
Then, an uncertain knock at her door.
Lisa froze, remained silent.
But, of course, a familiar voice soon followed.
“...Mum?”
Lisa sighed inwardly.
“I’m fine, Betsy,” she called out, willing her voice to sound steady, composed.
Betsy was not so easily deterred however.
There was a pause, and then she spoke again through the wooden door.
“You had a nightmare, didn’t you?”
Lisa sighed again, less inconspicuously this time.
“I’m fine, really, Bets.”
Another pause, and then: “I’m coming in.”
“No, Betsy, you don’t need to— ugh!” Lisa sat bolt upright again as her daughter pushed open the door and crossed the threshold. “You can’t just barge into my room like that!” Lisa scolded her, throwing her hands up in despair and her legs over the side of the bed as she twisted round.
The teenager did not allow herself to be so easily sidetracked by her mother's hollow outrage.
“You had a nightmare,” she repeated, more certainly this time. “I heard you yelling and crying out. You woke me.”
“No, I—I’m sorry I disturbed your sleep but it wasn—”
With a pointed look from her daughter, Lisa quickly changed tack.
“It was just a bad dream, that’s all.”
“Was it about Mum?”
Lisa dared herself not to wilt under the intensity of her daughter’s gaze. But with all her energy invested in schooling her facial expression, the set of her jaw, the straightening of her spine as she sat up on the edge of her mattress, she had none left to lend strength to her voice.
She couldn’t say it. She wouldn’t.
But Betsy knew.
Even in the low light, Lisa could see her daughter’s sleepy features creased with concern as she stepped closer to the bed. Where she stopped, a weak sunbeam slipping through a gap in the curtains fell on her, highlighting every golden strand of her tousled blonde hair. It was a terrible happenstance, that meeting of pure light with her daughter’s beautiful, soft face; Lisa now subjected to every spike of sadness, every flicker of worry, and flash of reproach etched on it, all the visible markers of Betsy’s pain thrown in such sharp relief.
Though she was unaware of it on a conscious level, Lisa shuffled further back just a fraction on her mattress.
“It was about Mum, wasn’t it?”
Lisa hid a trembling hand under her thigh.
“Yes but darling… It's been a really long time since I’ve had a dream like that. And it’s normal to have bad dr—”
“I know it’s normal,” Betsy snapped defiantly. “I have bad dreams about her all the time. The difference is, I can actually admit that…” Her mouth hung open as she trailed off, halfway to accusation but perhaps lacking the requisite cognitive abilities so early in the morning to make a proper attempt at words that would really sting.
Instead, her bottom lip wobbled, and it was the sight of that, that reminder of her daughter’s vulnerability in this moment, which told Lisa she should not be swayed by the heat that was beginning to flush up her neck and into her cheeks, a telltale sign of her rising temper at having been cracked open and exposed so efficiently.
She sighed awkwardly and began to shift closer, to reach her arm out.
“Bets, come here.”
But Betsy wasn’t finished with her interrogation.
“Was it a fire?” she asked, eyes blazing.
Lisa frowned.
“No,” she said — but she knew the moment the word escaped her lips that she had expelled it too quickly for it to be the truth.
And the disappointed look that flashed across Betsy’s face told her that her daughter knew too.
And then, Betsy deflated.
“I’m going back to bed,” she muttered, her shoulders dropping as she began to turn away.
Lisa’s gaze flicked towards the alarm clock on her bedside table, illuminated red digits reading 06:17.
“Okay, darling,” she said, forcing false cheer into her voice despite it having no benefit for either of them. “I’ll wake you in an hour.”
Betsy muttered something unintelligible as she shuffled out of the room, then just as Lisa thought she might get a reprieve from her daughter’s increasingly frequent expression of ire, the teenager slammed the door shut behind her.
Lisa let out a loud exhale. Worse than her daughter's hurt and disappointment was the relief she felt at the questioning having ended, at her thoughts and feelings no longer being under scrutiny.
An involuntary shudder rolled through her then, as her sweat-soaked shoulders and chest began to cool in the gentle breeze that came through the partially open window. She pulled her knees up, feet planted on the bedframe, wrapped her arms tightly around her legs, and rested her head for a moment against the tops of her thighs, eyes closed.
The details of the dream had mostly scattered from her memory now, just snatches remaining: becoming separated — against her instinct, in reality against procedure — from her nameless, faceless partner; a warped, endless room that seemed to defy space and time; and Becky, unseen but her presence all-encompassing. It really had been a long time since Lisa had endured a dream that bad — almost a year, she thought — but that didn’t mean it hadn’t felt any less horrifying than the ones she was having two years prior. Not that she could ever admit that to Betsy.
Knowing then that trying to return to sleep was not an option, Lisa pushed herself up off the bed and set about replacing her satin pyjama set with something a bit more athletic, hoping that some exercise would have her right as rain again.
—
When she set off out the front door ten minutes later — following a few stretches in the living room — she tried to dispel all thoughts of her nightmare as she began jogging up the road. It was day two of her four days off, and she was determined to be present for Betsy’s sake.
Within another five minutes, Lisa found herself up at the Red Rec, lapping the odd dog walker, and steadfastly ignoring the occasional other runner that passed by with a puff of breath that misted in the cold air. The sun was now rising over the taller buildings that lined the edges of the park, though with clouds having taken up residence across most of the sky, its light was diffused into a white haze that cast a flat pallor across the landscape.
Lisa could feel the cold reddening her cheeks and freezing the tips of her ears. She kept going, running another lap of the park, quickly averting her eyes when a man she recognised from having already passed him unexpectedly grinned at her as they approached each other once again. She tore past, her gaze firmly fixed on the tarmac immediately in front of her. The chill gnawed at her nose until, like the grey paved path that rushed by under her feet, it was all she could think about. Cold, tarmac, cold, tarmac, cold, tarmac, cold... The two words seeped into her consciousness, burrowing their way into her running rhythm. Repeating them in her head like a mantra, she let them become a backing track to her every step.
Before she knew it, and without remembering when she had made the decision to return, she was back at her front doorstep, breathing heavily through her nose and trying to rub warmth back into her cheeks. She checked her wristwatch: 06:59. It left enough time for a quick shower before she had to wake Betsy.
—
Despite how much better Lisa felt after cleansing her body under hot water, all efforts to stop thinking about the nightmare were undone the moment she stepped back into her bedroom, wrapped up in a large white towel.
Immediately her gaze fell upon the bed she had thrashed awake in.
She had bought it when they had moved house, in an attempt at starting fresh.
No matter if or how often Becky's likeness visited her in the night, she had never actually lain in that bed.
The thought made Lisa shiver.
Shaking her head in a vain effort to clear it, she busied herself with moisturising, tying her wet hair up out of the way. Once dressed, she descended to the kitchen, opting to give Betsy another few minutes of sleep out of guilt at having woken her earlier.
While waiting for the coffee to settle in the cafetière, she pulled her to-do list off the fridge and sat down with it. Nothing was worse than having four days off but no tasks with which to fill them. Lisa tried her hardest to bury herself in work even when she wasn't at work but Betsy nagged her if she spent all her rota off days sat indoors on her laptop, reviewing policy documents or doing online training courses. So, she had managed to find a loophole, saving up work-adjacent responsibilities that required her to leave the house.
Right now, top of her list was making arrangements for a community event that the station had been invited to take part in. She scanned the notes she'd made when she had taken the phone call earlier in the week, then pulled out her paper map of the area.
Coronation Street… it was familiar. It wasn’t too far from the station, and she knew she had driven through there, both while out on the pump, and in her own car. But she hadn’t yet bothered to take a look around the area on foot.
She was just forming a plan to carry out a recce when she heard footsteps down the stairs, and then Betsy was traipsing into the room.
“You forgot to wake me,” the teenager muttered as she passed Lisa by without so much as a glance her way. “Good job I set my own alarms, isn’t it.”
Bewildered, Lisa looked up at the clock to see that it was already half past seven. Frowning, she cast her gaze around the kitchen, trying to recall what she had been doing before she had become engrossed in her to-do list. Then she caught sight of the cafetière on the counter, plunger still sticking up, forgotten.
So this was what it had come to: a sixteen-year-old getting herself up for school because her mother was too incompetent to wake her, even on a day off work. Lisa tried to ignore the suffocating shroud of guilt that began to once more envelope her. She and it were becoming all too well acquainted these days.
“Sorry, Bets, I lost track of time… I’ll drive you in today.”
Lisa crossed the room to resume her coffee making, grimacing slightly when she felt how much the water had already cooled. She would have to drink it quickly. “Want any?”
“No.” Betsy pulled a mug out of the cupboard then turned, and nodded over at the dining table where Lisa had been figuring out her plans for the day. “Were you working?” She tossed a teabag into her mug and flicked the kettle back on.
“No, I’m just… just helping with a community event.” Lisa found sudden interest in the sugar bowl and peered into it. She heard Betsy scoff.
“Which is for work,” her daughter concluded.
“Well, actually, I thought it was a good chance to get out and explore some more,” Lisa countered with faux cheer as she turned back to face the teen. “Y’know, get out of this neighbourhood and see what the rest of Weatherfield has to offer.”
Betsy raised her eyebrows, looking thoroughly unconvinced. “Fun,” she drawled sarcastically.
Lisa sighed as she poured coffee into her mug.
“Look, I know it’s been difficult… moving here, further from school, away from your mates, but once you start college it’ll be a lot easier to settle in.”
Betsy gave a non-committal shrug of the shoulders.
“Speaking of… how’s revision going?”
Betsy groaned.
“Mum, please. Do you have to ask me every day?”
“Er, yes, young lady. I would like you to actually pass your exams, you know.”
Betsy let out a growl of frustration as she swivelled away from her mother’s attention and finished making her cup of tea.
Recognising that they were pressed for time and an argument would only delay them further, Lisa let the avoidance tactic slide for once.
—
The drive to Betsy’s high school passed by in uncomfortable silence, with Betsy tapping away on her phone and Lisa growing progressively vexed by the morning rush hour traffic. As she pulled up just down the road from the school, Betsy almost had her door open before the car had even come to a full stop.
“Hang on a second!” Lisa twisted in her seat to face her daughter, tugging her seatbelt out of the way. “I thought we could do something nice after you finish today — maybe get milkshakes?”
Betsy shrugged.
“Maybe.”
Lisa scrambled to think of some other way to entice her daughter.
“Or we could order in pizzas? Have a movie night? I promise I won’t nag you about revision.”
Betsy shrugged again.
Lisa sighed.
“Okay, well… have a think. I’ll see you when you get home.”
“Okay. Bye.” Betsy hopped out of the car before Lisa could even think to say anything else.
“Bye, darli—”
Her words were cut off by the door slamming shut.
Following a brief return home to finish readying for the day — hair, make-up, unloading and reloading the dishwasher — Lisa climbed back into her car with her notebook and leather jacket neatly placed on the front passenger seat, and pulled open the map app on her phone. There didn't seem to be a conveniently located car park near to Coronation Street, so she settled on a nearby café as her destination, clipped in the seat belt buckle, and started up her car.
When she arrived a few minutes later outside what decidedly had the look of a greasy spoon caff about it, she paused for a moment in the car, taking in the area that she was starting to recognise from driving through it while on shift: the taxi office behind her; and ahead, the modern apartment building that gave way to towering old warehouses that lined either side of the road up to the repurposed rail arches at the far end.
And across from where she was parked: a builders yard. Her crew had been called to a fire incident there earlier in the year. The unmistakable smell of white spirit had pervaded the area as they had fought the flames, though a faulty electric heater was later identified as the source of ignition. Now, looking at the site properly again a few months later, everything seemingly intact, Lisa would never have known the site office had recently been ablaze had she not spent a couple of hours hosing water on to it.
Her stomach grumbled then, a reminder that she still hadn't eaten breakfast yet, so slipping on her jacket and stuffing the small notebook into a pocket, she headed straight for Roy's Rolls.
A bell tinkled overhead as she pushed open the door, and she was met with the sight of red and white chequered floor tiles, and — as she stepped around a partition — tables against the walls on either side of the room. Wooden panelling lined the back wall which slanted up in a diagonal, an obvious signifier of a staircase behind it — to the flat above, Lisa supposed — while the open kitchen extended back underneath the sloped wall.
There was something reassuring about this kind of slightly knackered-looking, unpretentious café with its mishmash décor still standing in a world of hipster coffee spots and overpriced brunch places. That said, the old, framed illustrations of steam trains were… an acquired taste.
Two people stood ahead of Lisa in the queue, with an elderly man serving from behind the counter. He was slow moving and slow speaking, and as the minutes stretched out, Lisa began to regret having ever entered the place, shifting from foot to foot and fighting the urge to tut. All the while, her belly grumbled some more. Then, at last, the people in front were gone, and the old man looked to Lisa expectantly, hands clasped over the navy blue and white pinstriped apron he wore.
Before Lisa could step forward, however, a brunette woman swept into the room from the other side of the partition, a flurry of perfume and movement as she arrived at the counter and slapped her hand down on it, rings clacking loudly against the glass.
The old man greeted her.
"Oh, Roy," she responded a little breathlessly. "What a morning. I won't have time later, so could you do me a quick bacon butty when you're not busy? I'll take it with me." She spun away, pulling a phone out from a pocket of her black trench coat as she stood off to the side.
Lisa blinked.
The old man glanced at her, before addressing the other woman.
"Certainly. I will just finish attending to customers first…" he gestured towards Lisa though the other woman didn't bother looking up as she scrutinised her phone.
"Yeah, of course. Just when you've got a minute, Roy," she said distractedly.
Lisa could no longer temper her annoyance. She scoffed loudly.
"You've got to be joking," she said, not too loud, but loudly enough as she finally took a very deliberate step forward.
The brunette woman didn't react for a moment, then — seemingly sensing attention directed at her — looked up and registered Lisa's presence at last.
"'Scuse me?"
Annoyingly, she was extraordinarily beautiful.
Her sleek, chestnut hair hung past her shoulders, framing a face defined by immaculate bone structure and striking green eyes. Green eyes that, in that moment, were narrowed in confusion at Lisa.
For a split second, Lisa almost regretted having said anything. But beauty didn't excuse rude behaviour, and so she ploughed on.
"Do you make a habit of queue-jumping?"
The brunette, seemingly less reluctant about being loud in such a public place, barked out a derisive laugh.
"You what? I'm not jumping the queue."
Lisa gaped.
"Seriously? You just barged in here, straight past me when I was about to order."
It was the other woman's turn to scoff as she snapped her phone shut.
"Seriously," she echoed, her voice low as she took an almost menacing step forward, "I came to talk to Roy, who is my friend, and asked him to make me summat when he's not busy. As in, not with customers." She gave Lisa a pointed look, then after a long sigh, added: "Roy literally just said — he'll sort your order out first." She looked between the two, blinking obstinately.
The man — Roy — bowed his head in confirmation. "That's correct. What would you like?"
In the periphery of her vision, Lisa noticed a few heads had begun to turn, looking their way. Suddenly in the spotlight, she felt a blush bloom in her cheeks and spread to her ears. She swallowed as she took another step closer to the counter.
"Bacon barm, please," she said quietly. Sensing that she might already require more caffeine to get through the day, she added, "and a black coffee." Her gaze flicked to the woman, then back. "To go."
Roy responded in acquiescence then set about fulfilling her order.
Lisa looked around awkwardly, trying to avoid meeting anyone's gaze. Unfortunately, her own landed on the brunette woman, who was now distractedly spinning her phone around in one hand as she fixed Lisa with an aloof stare, her other hand resting on her hip.
Quickly averting her gaze again, Lisa glared at the floor between them, biting the inside of her cheek.
The other woman began to tap her foot.
After perhaps thirty seconds of unbearable, tense silence, Lisa could not let it lie any longer.
"It wasn't very obvious," she said, jaw tight as she looked back up.
The woman snorted and began to shake her head, hair swaying side to side.
"What's that?"
"It looked like you were trying to get in ahead of me. You could have just followed basic etiquette, waited until I'd ordered…"
The other woman was still shaking her head.
"Cor, what are you — the café police? You've placed your order; it's being made. Get over it."
Lisa was about to respond when Roy returned to the counter, placing down her coffee cup and gesturing for her to take it.
"Ladies, please," he said softly. "We’ve resolved the situation. Let us try and observe a small degree of… harmony, shall we?" He spread his hands out in front of him in a placating manner.
Contrary to Lisa’s expectation, the brunette woman seemed almost immediately abashed under his gentle admonishment. After one last lingering look at Lisa and a dramatic sigh, she set her jaw, adjusted her hand on her hip, and said nothing further as she glared at some fixed point in the kitchen.
Once Lisa had paid and taken her food with a muttered thanks a few minutes later, she turned instantly on her heel and exited the café, vowing to herself she would never return there again.
A small urban garden across the street offered a quiet space for Lisa to polish off her breakfast. Sat on a wooden bench as she devoured the bacon barm, she reconsidered if she even still wanted to properly explore the neighbourhood, put off as she was by her experience in the café.
The one thing she couldn’t chicken out of, however, was finalising the arrangements for the station’s participation in this upcoming community fayre. Though it wasn’t a part of the job Lisa ever felt totally comfortable fulfilling, community outreach was considered a core principle of the service’s operations these days, and an invite to a local event was not to be sniffed at. Her bosses certainly wouldn’t be impressed if the opportunity fell through because she had failed to follow it up.
According to her notes, the fayre was to be held primarily in Brewery Lane, with some stalls spreading out into Viaduct Street and around the corner into the end of Coronation Street. Lisa needed to see what the space looked like; they needed somewhere to park an appliance. They always brought one to events whenever possible — a large, bright red truck tended to catch the eye, and never failed to excite children. But from her experience, driving larger vehicles in these narrow streets could be tricky; finding somewhere to park out of the way of bouncy castles and dawdling families, and without blocking the road, was going to be a challenge.
She stood, drained her coffee cup, chucked her rubbish in the nearby bin, and began to head back up the street. Rounding a corner past a hair salon into Coronation Street, she tried to keep her head down, suddenly wary of possibly bumping into the rude brunette woman from earlier. The last thing she wanted today was another altercation.
As she passed a short row of terraced homes, she found a forecourt that stretched between the end house and a newsagents, offering access to a mechanic’s garage and an industrial building off to the side which was adorned with signage reading “Underworld”.
She followed the road round to where the map had said Brewery Lane was located: behind Underworld. It was easy to see why it had been chosen for the fayre, being out the way of the thoroughfare, and expansive enough to set up stalls. But Lisa couldn’t imagine an appliance being parked anywhere and not blocking the way — not to mention, if they received a shout while at the fayre and needed to mobilise quickly, they wouldn't want to be boxed in by food trucks and craft stalls.
Doubling back around the newsagents, she inspected the forecourt again. It was certainly spacious enough to reverse into, and it looked like the Underworld building had a loading bay — so the neighbours were probably used to vehicles coming and going.
It looked perfect — but first they would need permission.
Lisa rolled her shoulders and straightened her back as she strode towards Underworld, mind made up. After all the unpleasant events of that morning, it would feel good to actually achieve something.
She climbed up the few steps to the entrance, and pushed open the door.
As she crossed the threshold, the hum of workplace activity washed over her. A tinny radio was playing pop music somewhere further into the building, and voices carried from different directions. Above it all was a rhythmic juddering that seemed to come from multiple sources, a percussive cacophony of machinery.
Lisa swept her gaze across the room before her, looking for some kind of reception desk — there didn't appear to be one. Across the room, to the far left, she saw a common area and kitchen for staff. Straight ahead, a large sign on the wall denoted a sales office through the open floor-to-ceiling glass doors beside it. She strode in that direction, and not three steps later a man bustling quickly from the kitchen area almost bumped into her.
He let out a surprised "ooh!" as he looked up, trying to awkwardly sidestep out of her way.
"Sorry, didn't see you there!"
Lisa slowed to a stop and offered him a polite smile.
"Do you work here? I'm looking for a manager, or somebody who runs the business…"
"Oh, that'll be Mrs B," the man said with a nervous chuckle. “She’s the boss lady!” He said it like there was no room for argument over the matter, irrespective of any potential attempts at such. "Just through here, and she’s in the snazzy office at the back." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing through the sales office.
Lisa murmured her thanks, letting the man pass, then stepped into the room. A few of the desks were occupied, one woman typing away studiously. Lisa expected to be asked to explain her presence but neither the lady nor the two men taking phone calls paid any attention to the newcomer's arrival.
She continued through until she reached the next doorway, the glass doors already wide open, revealing a similarly sized though less furnished office.
She was about to knock on one of the doors when she properly caught sight of the room’s sole inhabitant — metres away but, unexpectedly, horrifyingly, all too recognisable.
Lisa felt heat flush back up into her cheeks instantly. The back of her neck began to prickle.
Sat behind a large desk, writing on a paper pad, was the brunette woman from Roy’s Rolls.
Lisa almost turned tail and ran right then, silently cursing herself for setting this series of events into motion, for noticing the forecourt and recognising its potential. For stepping into the dowdy little café.
But this wasn't a personal errand. She couldn't just walk out, or pretend she had never even come in the first place. She had to see it through.
After sucking in a breath and smoothing down her shirt, Lisa raised a hand and rapped her knuckles on the glass.
The woman beckoned her in without looking up, still engrossed in her work.
After a moment's hesitation, Lisa began to step forward.
"Kirk, if that's you coming to tell me you've lost the van keys again, then I swear I’ll—" The woman finally glanced up then, mid-rebuke, and blinked rapidly in surprise as her gaze fell upon not Kirk but Lisa. Her mouth dropped open, though she quickly recovered.
"Oh, you've got to be flamin' kidding me."