A Perfect Summer in Starshine Cove (Starshine Cove #5)

Chapter 1

ONE

‘Suzie? Are you up there?’ Molly calls, walking through the woods with a torch in her hand, shining it around the pathways and moon-dappled undergrowth. A search party of one.

‘No!’ comes the grunted reply. ‘I’m not!’

Molly pauses at the foot of the gnarled old oak tree, taking a second to clear the amused smile from her face.

Teenagers, she ponders for the millionth time, are the most unintentionally funny creatures on the face of the earth.

They think they’re so grown up, constantly battling for independence, but at the same time they’re only one tantrum away from behaving like a toddler. At least when it comes to their mums.

Suzie is seventeen, which encompasses a mental range of three through to thirty at the moment. She’s sometimes sullen, sometimes sweet, always on the verge of running. Filled with a yearning to escape, to see around the next corner, to be free.

Right now, she’s found her freedom by sneaking away from the Millennium Party taking place in the village they call home, and hiding in the branches of her favourite climbing tree in the nearby woodland.

‘Oh. Right,’ Molly replies, gazing upwards and seeing her daughter’s trainer-clad feet hanging down, the reflective strips on the sides picking up the torch beam.

‘I see. Well, if you’re not up there, I think someone’s stolen your running shoes.

Or you’ve been cloned. Or maybe it’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario, and you’ve been taken over by an alien who’s using you as a host body… ’

There’s a slight snigger from above, and Molly can picture her daughter trying desperately not to laugh.

‘Maybe. Or maybe you’re just imagining all of this, or it’s just a dream. Because like I said, I’m not here. And even if I was here, I’d be here because I want to be alone.’

Ah, thinks Molly, down below. The classic teen dilemma – she wants to be alone, but she also desperately wants someone to find her, to miss her, to pay her attention even if it’s just so she can scorn it.

‘That’s a good point,’ she says, ‘it could all be a dream. I think I’d better come up and check.’

‘Mum!’ Suzie replies in sudden horror. ‘Don’t do that! You’re too old to climb trees!’

‘You’re never too old to climb trees,’ Molly asserts confidently, even though she suspects Suzie is absolutely one hundred per cent right.

Her knees aren’t quite what they were, and clambering around over frost-coated branches doesn’t feel anywhere near as much fun as it did when she was a kid.

Back then, she was a championship-level tree climber – now she fears for her life as she makes her way up to join her daughter.

It’s a huge old tree, one of many in the patch of woods next to the village. In spring and summer this place is dense with life, with flowers and wild garlic and insects, and in autumn the whole forest floor is covered in a dazzling carpet of gold and red.

In winter, it’s quieter – building its strength, waiting for its chance to shine again in a few weeks’ time.

This is one of the biggest trees here, and Suzie has always loved to climb it.

When she was little, she used to say it was her Magic Faraway Tree, like in the Enid Blyton stories she loved so much.

It’s still a place of refuge for her, and it took Molly about thirty seconds to figure out where her daughter might have disappeared to – hence the conclusion that she actually wanted to be found all along.

She takes a deep breath as she navigates the next few rungs of the tree, grateful for the light of the moon and the bareness of the branches that lets it filter through. She had to abandon the torch because she needed both hands to avoid a death plunge, or at the very least a skinned elbow.

There’s a momentary flash of fear as she reaches eye level with Suzie’s feet – she can’t entirely rule out the possibility that her cherished offspring might deliver a swift kick to the head if she’s in a bad enough mood.

Luckily, the feet remaining in their dangling position, and Molly eases herself onto a nice solid bough on the other side of the trunk.

Best to give her a bit of space, let her feel independent, even if they are now sitting in the same tree.

She pauses, and sets aside everything else for a few precious moments as she takes in the view from their elevated position.

Their little village, Starshine Cove, is set in a hidden corner of Dorset on the south coast of England.

It doesn’t show up on any maps, it’s not in guide books, and the visitors it does get either find it by accident or word of mouth.

Molly rolled into the place in her old VW camper van decades ago, looking for a replacement tyre, and never left.

Looking for one thing and finding another – love.

George was an older man, handsome and kind, with the brightest blue eyes she’d ever seen.

Three children later, she’s still here, and this place still takes her breath away.

The little horseshoe-shaped bay is surrounded by curving cliffs, magical caves, and gently rolling hills.

Right now, the stars are reflecting onto the inky-dark water, casting silver shadows on the rippling waves that roll inland.

She sighs, gazing into the horizon, into infinity, into peace. At least for her.

‘What do you see, Suzie, when you look out there?’ she asks. For a second there is only silence, and she wonders if any reply will be forthcoming. Maybe she’s climbed all the way up here just to be ignored. And for the view, she reminds herself. It was worth it for that.

‘I dunno,’ comes the eventual and resentful reply. ‘Probably not what you see. You probably see love hearts and unicorns and rainbows and stuff.’

Molly bites back a giggle, briefly imagining a celestial unicorn appearing in the night sky like a brand new constellation. It wouldn’t surprise her if Starshine Cove did have its own constellation.

‘Maybe I do. At the very least I see a place I call home, a place I love.’

Suzie doesn’t spit or mock or laugh out loud, and Molly glances over to see tears shining in her daughter’s eyes.

This isn’t unusual – like her, she’s always been a girl who feels everything very deeply, at the mercy of her own emotions.

Now, though, Molly has to figure out exactly what kind of tears these ones are.

‘Angry or happy or just too much?’ she asks.

They’ve had this conversation before, bonding over the way that their crying spells could be categorised.

The angry tears are usually pretty easy to spot, often accompanied by clenched fists and/or flying crockery.

The happy ones are quite rare, at least for Suzie at this stage in her life.

But the ‘just too much’ tears? They’re always lurking beneath the surface, her mind’s way of purging the intense feelings that seem to come from nowhere and ambush her.

‘A bit of everything,’ Suzie answers, swiping at her own eyes as though she’s annoyed with them.

‘I’m sick of this place. I’m sick of how everyone knows everything about everybody else, or at least thinks they do.

I hate how nosy they all are, and how I never get a minute alone, and…

I hate everything. And now we’re all supposed to be celebrating the new millennium, and that’s ironic because nothing in this place has changed for the last thousand years and I don’t expect that’ll start now… ’

Molly lets her ramble, to get it out of her system. It’s like a river of anguish, and the more Suzie dams it up, the stronger it gets. She sits and listens as her daughter blasts out her grievances, barely even needing to respond. Being there is enough.

It breaks her heart a little that what she thinks of as Starshine’s strengths – its sense of community, its friendly neighbours, its closeness – is exactly what Suzie is currently railing against. What Molly sees as supportive, Suzie sees as suffocating.

She is only seventeen, and all she wants is to be liberated from what she perceives as a prison.

Molly herself was a handful at seventeen, full of messy emotions and needs that she couldn’t even properly articulate to herself, never mind to her own mother.

Her parents never understood her, and seemed relieved when she finally left home.

She was too complicated for them, and she has always vowed to do her very best to avoid the same situation with her own children.

So far, of the three of them, only Suzie seems to have inherited the ‘It’s Complicated’ gene.

‘And Simon and Sandy seem to be so bloody happy with it all!’ Suzie continues, as ever fiercely aware of how different she is to her siblings.

She’s crying again now – definitely a combination of angry and just too much this time.

‘They’re all, oooh, isn’t it lovely, oooh, aren’t we lucky…

and that just makes me feel like even more of a freak, like there’s something wrong with me!

It’s like I’m trapped in some kind of horror movie where everybody else is all blissed out, and I’m the only one who doesn’t feel like everything’s perfect!

What’s wrong with me, Mum? Why can’t I just be happy like everyone else? Why can’t I be normal?’

She sounds wrung-out and desperate, and Molly wishes she was closer so she could give her a cuddle or at least hold her hand.

‘There’s nothing wrong with you, Suzie, I promise you – and you don’t have to be normal, my love.

You just have to be you. It’s all my fault anyway.

When mine and your dad’s genes got squished in the big Person Creating Experiment, you got a lot more of me in the mix.

I was exactly the same when I was your age. ’