Chapter 1: Mister not My Cester

AUGUST 2010

I’m Paul Robertson, I’m seventeen and I’m nothing special. I’m not rich. I’m not a sports hero or in the town’s brass band or a member down The Vic. I’m just me. I do okay in school but I’m not top of the class or anything—heaven forbid. Girls are allowed to be a brain, but not guys. We have to be good at football or cricket instead. Well, it would have to be football in my case—cricket is for the villagers, not the townies. Still, I do well enough in school that I’m confident of getting a place at a decent university next autumn if I don’t mess up my exams. Vicky, my big sister, wants me to go to Westmouth since it’s so close. She says I could live at home and save some money. But, honestly, I want to get as far away from Micester as I can.

Still, that’s next autumn and I don’t have to decide where I’m going until the spring at the earliest. Hell, I could even leave it until the end of next summer and chance my hand through clearing. But this autumn, I’ve got to go back to Micester High. Not something to look forward to. Of course, I didn’t realise that my whole world was about to be flipped on its axis and start rotating in the wrong direction, now did I?

There can’t be many towns in Britain like Micester. And before you try and get your tongue around it, it’s pronounced Mister, as in Mr Smith, not My Cester or Me Cester or something like that. I can’t tell you how much it annoys the townsfolk when outsiders get it wrong. But anyway, where was I?

Oh, yeah, there can’t be many towns in Britain like Micester. The story goes that the town was originally a small Roman settlement, a stop-off point on the road from Westmouth to London. That makes it at least as old as Westmouth and older than Walminster, the two biggest towns in Westmouthshire. But up until the mid-eighteen-hundreds it was nothing more than an insignificant village like so many other small insignificant villages across the country. Then in 1848—they drum the date into us from an early age at Micester’s primary schools—the local landowner, Lord Liddington, opened a textile factory with his partner from Westmouth, William Phipps.

The pair built a whole town for their workers around the new factory—houses, schools, a high street full of shops. Even a sports ground. They built them all. And they were pretty good bosses too by all accounts. The workers were treated a hell of a lot better than most at that time. But over the past century and a half, even though Liddington-Phipps continued to operate, the town never grew above a population of ten thousand—meanwhile Westmouth grew to a hundred thousand and Walminster even bigger.

Its relatively small size meant that the town has always been fairly close-knit, more like a big village really than a small town. Everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone’s business. And everyone certainly knows the business of the Liddington family, who still owns a majority share of the factory that still dominates the town.

How do I know that? Well, it’s like I said, everyone knows. Liddington-Phipps is the biggest influence on the town and the surrounding villages. If you live in Micester, chances are you work at the factory, or you’re related to someone who works at the factory, or you work in a business that relies on the factory. Both my parents worked there, until the accident, and I think they expected me to walk straight onto the shop floor when I left school. But I have no intention of doing so. Not me. No sir. As soon as I can, I’m out of here.

I worked part-time—weekends and the odd weeknight if they needed me—waiting tables in the restaurant at Micester Hall, the one-time home of Lord Liddington vacated by the family in the eighties and converted into a country club and hotel, complete with spa and golf club. Vicky got me the job. She’s a junior chef in the restaurant. You don’t get any job in this town unless you have connections or are supremely talented. Lucky for Vic, she’s supremely talented. I expected she’d be the Head Chef there one day; she really was that good.

Over the summer, I’d taken every shift I could get—sometimes working lunch and dinner. The idea was to save as much money as I could to enable me to get out of Micester when the time came. The last weekend in August, a week before school was due to start, there was a big wedding at Micester Hall. Christine Liddington was marrying Jake Rogers, a minor local celebrity.

Micester had a semi-pro football team, Micester Town, which was very much part of the town’s identity. It was a couple of rungs down the ladder from the professional leagues, but that’s not surprising since part of the club’s constitution stated that all players had to be dyed-in-the-wool locals. Most of the players worked up at the factory and got special privileges for being part of the team. Jake Rogers had been one of only a handful of former players that were talent-spotted and bought by a bigger club. He’d played mostly in the second tier but hit the big time for a couple of seasons in the mid-noughties. I tell you, the town was buzzing about that. I remember all the shops had posters of him in the windows. Now, he was back to be the player-manager of Micester Town and had big ambitions about taking the club higher up the pyramid. How the hell he’d managed to land the Liddington widow to boot was anybody’s guess. But he had.