Stockholm

Annabelle disliked the beach. She disliked, as an avid lover of the idea of becoming sleepy in the sun, the way that even on hot days it was kind of cold. She disliked the way the breeze toyed with the pages of her precious books, tossing them to and fro, making it a struggle to even read. She hated the way the beach affected her hair and the fact that she always felt dirty coming from there, spending half an hour in the shower to get away the grubby feeling of sand. But most of all she hated the open space. She wasn’t an agoraphobic at all. No, Annabelle just preferred the feeling of being safe, surrounded by her many trinkets and sentimental objects. So having a house in the Maldives with a private beach did not suit her at all. This was good and bad for Michael. Good in that it made his job extraordinarily easy as he always knew where she was, in turn impressing his employers as it looked like he made much more effort than the other bodyguards. Bad in that it made her room, where she spent most of her time, an assault course.

It was exactly this room he was trying to navigate. It all started with the door which was often blocked by beanbags, piles of clothes or sometimes even the arm chair kept behind it that had a tendency to fall over. Eleanor, whenever she deigned it necessary to step in to one of her children’s room, usually left Annabelle’s until last and always begged that she throw out that ratty out chair. But Ann was nothing if not secretly sentimental and the chair held many good memories for her. Being as lonely as she was led her to hoarding everything that had a good social memory and she often hand-made many things for her room, her private haven.

After the door came the myriad of mobiles, dream-catchers, wind-chimes and ribbons that hung from her ceiling. A lot of Michael’s gifts, chosen specifically for the ceiling, hung with care in one corner of the room known as The Shrine. This was the Shrine to all of her actual friends and not the ones she made sure to be seen with to please her parents. There were only three faces on the massive photo wall apart from Ann’s own and Michael’s was the prominent one. There were photos from all of their trips together, her friends and their bodyguards, her and her siblings and her volunteering. There was only one of her parents and that was one they had posed for, for reporters at an event. Their noticeable absence on the Shrine only served as a harsh reminder of the type of parents they really were. There were candles around the Shrine, stones she’d picked up on trips and various gifts from her friends.

On the other side of the room there were three bookshelves due to the fact that this house didn’t have its own library unlike the one in England and Los Angeles. It was full of new books, old books, personalised and bound books, leather books, diaries, journals and many, many notebooks. There was no order to them at all; they were just placed lovingly at random. If Ann or Michael were looking for a particular book it would take them all of an hour to find it. Like almost every piece of furniture Ann had in the room, the bookshelves looked old and well-used. Ann liked the idea of age and cottage chic in their thoroughly modern villa. Even if all of the furniture was bought new Ann would automatically age it somehow. She was very creative when it came to interior decorating.

At the end of the wall of bookshelves was an ‘aged’ world map painted on to the wall with colour-coded dots painted on to it. Green for the places she would like to go, these took over most of the map, red for the places she had been, there were a fair few of these too, and yellow for the places where a plan was already in place to see them. All around the map were pictures of certain monuments, certain posters for volunteering websites and that part of the wall was designed to look like an old airmail envelope.

It was hard to tell what the actual colour of the room was as Ann had painted it all with everything she could. The roof was half sunrise, half starlight. There was the map on one wall and above all around the windows was a forest scene. Pink flowers spiralled all over the walls leading to the balcony where old Victorian garden furniture waited for her. On another wall was graffiti from all of her friends, a message wall. The door to her walk-in wardrobe was painted to look like the entrance to Narnia. Even the floor was covered with script from various plays, quotes from various books and even a Twister board was painted on.

And Michael found Ann, as always, on her hanging bed that hung from massive steel wires that was placed in the middle of the floor. This was covered in oriental covers, university books, normal books and a lot of her craft things. At the moment Ann was lying flat on her stomach, hiding away from her parents as they continued on their second day back. Ann was quite clearly stressed already as she’d asked one of the house staff to bring breakfast up to her.

Upon seeing her rugged and dark companion standing by the door with his hands shoved into his jean pockets Ann said nothing but shuffled over in the bed. As he walked over silently she couldn’t help but admire how long those jeans made his legs look and how that black shirt seemed to have been poured on him. Ann often had thoughts like these, defending herself by saying that she could look but she could never touch even though they seemed to have this magical rhythm that none of her other siblings did. This was probably because none of them had grown up with each other like they had.

Despite the ten year age difference it was true that Michael and Ann had both developed and grown together. She remembered how hard it was to glean bits and bobs about Michael’s past from him and she’d gone about her interrogation with all of the childlike innocence she possessed, using it to her advantage. Michael came from a rough part of Ireland where there was usually one way of getting out of the way of the crime and that was to become a part of it. They were petty thieves mostly all under the radar of one massive boss who Ann liked to compare to a nastier version of Fagin. Michael, who hailed from a large single parent family, had somehow found himself in the middle of this entire syndicate, right under the big boss man himself. It was his way of supporting his family. He got in deeper and deeper, using arson, knives or guns and training himself in hand-to-hand combat for the fights that the boss arranged so that he could have a sick kind of gambling ring.

When he was twenty-one, having spent eight years under this man’s thumb, giving all he could to his family, someone saw in him something good, something that could be used. All of Michael’s dark violence and brooding glares was to be used to protect others. And so, somehow (although Ann could never find out how) Michael was sent to become a bodyguard, one of the elite. His visual nastiness and apathy to using violence made him perfect. And Ann was his first ward. She was also his last. He’d gotten comfortable in the job, had never requested a transfer and instead had stayed with her for ten years, never once leaving her side. Partly because he wasn’t allowed a holiday or any sort of break apart from three days at Christmas and partly because he just didn’t want to. He’d found acceptance with Ann and hadn’t need to fight for her respect. And for now that was enough. For the both of them.

Michael lowered himself to the bed beside her with a small grunt. Without a word he picked up her new project, knitting something for him for Christmas, before placing it down and picking up a university book of hers about the Sanskrit language. Ann’s silence, whilst his was normal, was contemplative. It didn’t take her long to get off what was on her chest.
“What do you want Michael? More than anything else in the world?” She asked as she curled her body to look him in the eye. He copied her action and with all of her stuff in the middle of them they almost looked exactly like the Ying and Yang sign. Michael knew the answer straight away but didn’t want to say anything. Bringing anything she deemed sad in to her haven was a no go usually.

“Well what do you want?” If he asked this question than maybe it would set some boundaries for whatever answer he could give to make her feel okay. That was, is and always would be his main concern even if he wasn’t her bodyguard, even if he wasn’t paid to live his life for her. All he wanted to do was make her feel good, always. Annabelle was the centre of his life, forever and always. Sometimes he wanted to see what would happen if they had met outside of their circumstances somehow. He was sure it would feel exactly the same. There was just something deep, solid and eternal about the pair of them.

“That’s a copout question Mike and you know it.” She rolled her eyes and still expected his answer. When he turned the book he was holding over in his hand and pretended to understand the slew of Sanskrit that was written there she sighed. She’d never get an answer out of him like this, “fine. I only ask because I don’t know what I want. I have everything Michael. And I am privileged I know, and I know you think I’m some whiny girl child and everything. ‘Oh no woe is me, my life is so terrible’. It’s not that at all. It’s just… staid. Nothing ever really happens. I guess I want some excitement? I don’t know. What do you think?” The only emotion in Ann’s voice was mild annoyance and Michael only nodded, keeping his eyes trained on the books. He knew exactly what she meant. Whilst, yes, he did live his life for her, her life was kind of boring. She didn’t party unless forced. She didn’t travel extensively unless it was the summer holidays. And when she did go to the houses around the world she stuck like glue to the activities that she knew well. Her life was boring and so his life was boring. But he didn’t say that.

“I think… I think that you let your life be staid,” okay so he didn’t say that exactly, “you could do so much more but you stick to what you know rather than explore. And even when you do explore it’s in familiar places. And you don’t know what you want because you don’t want anything. Life’s too good for you.” Finally he glanced up from the book he was pretending to be interested in to find Ann just staring at him with her thinking face, the one where she bites her lip and her brow puckers slightly. She was seriously giving what he said some thought. After five minutes of silence and her flopping lightly back to the bed, which rocked slightly, she extended her hand out and flicked his dark fringe.

“So you still haven’t told me. What do you want? Right now what is the foremost on your mind?” Well he definitely couldn’t tell her that. Because she was obviously. Lying together on her bed like they do an uncountable amount of times and watching her curl around him. Most of the time they’d lay in silence together, each wrapped in their own ideas. Sometimes they’d watch a film and Ann would cuddle in to his side and place the popcorn on his lap. More than once they’d fallen asleep tangled in each other. Despite this he had never once drifted in to the realms of the ridiculous with his thoughts about her, always kept safe behind a line he’d drawn himself. And he never wanted to reveal how much she was really on his mind. It was just something he’d kept to himself. It was platonic but deep affection, stemming from the time he realised she was going to need him just because it was him. Not because he was a job to her or a source of income.

But he couldn’t say any of that, so instead he merely settled on what he wanted and not what was foremost. “I want to go home.”

This caused Ann to sit up and stare at him with her thinking face again. Then she gave a sad smile, knowing how ill the fact that he had only seen his family via the internet sat on his heart, “I’ll try and arrange it for you.”