Friday March 30

I don’t quite know where to begin. Life has taken the strangest turns of late, a catalogue of the unexpected and the unfortunate. The outcome? I lost the house next door. Despite my best efforts, Francesca Hoyle at the bank went with the first offer she got on the place, just to spite me. Here’s what happened.

I’d done my upmost to get my boss John on board with a loan through the company to help me solve my capital shortfall and get the bank off my back, but when the crunch moment came, John was absent – in Invercargill – some claptrap about a mother with a broken hip. Fine, but how does that help me? With the bank selling both houses, I needed more than excuses. I needed cash! When I pointed out John’s considerable shortcomings, he starts whipping himself with a nasty bunch of flowers he’s hoping I’ll accept, as if they would placate me, dashing them against his back, bleating about letting me down. Well, why miss an opportunity to show him what I really felt? I hated him! I seized his tattered bunch of tortured willow and gave him his flabby white bottom a sound thrashing. Strangely satisfying for both of us…

But it was later, while waiting for my husband (again) at Sandy Grey’s marriage-counseling practice that it really hit me. Here I was, struggling like a madwoman to find solutions to life’s endless crises, when I thought of Caroline again, dying, her clarity and wisdom. Her simplicity. How she’d come back into our lives with the express purpose of resolving the past. She’d chosen what was important and let the rest fall way. When Sandy asked me what I wanted, what I really wanted, I suddenly knew the answer. I wanted destiny! I wanted greatness! None of these petty worries about money and getting ahead, but to connect with what is really meant for me. To lead people. Guide them. To create change on a massive scale. To touch many, many lives. We could die tomorrow. The time is now.

It was visionary moment. I saw my future, as teacher, guide. Using the wisdom I had accumulated through years of guiding careers, listening to people’s stories, bringing them hope. So I got Jase and Bonnie over that night and sat them down for a little chat. I suggested that either I could ruin their professional reputations and leave their family life in tatters, or they could sell their own house as reparation for Kumeu and we could all achieve closure. Move on!

I painted a simple and compelling picture of Bonnie in jail, no name suppression, her son tormented and beaten up at school. Of course she blurted out her guilt, blaming PMT for her hysterical reaction when she’d mistakenly thought I’d had sex with her awful husband. She admitted arson. I offered them my South African buyer who’d been keen to pay cash. They could get a cash offer on their own home. Full replacement cost and it’s over.

After a wasted gesture of resistance, Jase saw reason. And within days they’d sold their house. They got half a million from the very buyer I’d recommended, a bit less than the value of the torched house, so I decided that Bonnie could make up the shortfall doing some typing to help me write my book. I was bursting with energy to start this new venture, and if she was available, why not?

It was so nice to get all those details ironed out. At least it would have been, if that bitch at the bank hadn’t been quite so determined to thwart my plans.

And that’s when it happened. Just when I’d re-established order and calm – my office door flew open and there he was, Arthur Short with his hideous bagpipes, a hellish onslaught of ghastly tuneless screeching as he and his rat-like mate paraded around my office, triumphantly celebrated Arthur’s purchase of Number 11 Ginger Street. Arthur had made a cash offer. How did he pull the money together? You just have to take one look at the lowlives he associates with and the answer is clear: through crime, thievery, extortion.

So thanks to my friend Bonnie, to my boss, and to the bank, I was stuck with that terrible man forever, living next door in the house that was by rights mine! How my plans had been thwarted by the meddling of others! Now all I had to fall back on for the future, given that Stuart seemed to have run off, and Julian had texted me so say he’d gone flatting, was Ollie… and the inspiration of my dying friend Caroline.