Chapter 1 #2
Brynn’s Land Rover is backed up to the boat shed, rear doors open, and she’s working through a stack of crates, hair pulled back, grease on her forearm.
Brynn isn’t the sort of woman who worries about a smear of grease, or a whole tub of it.
That’s why she’s perfect for Jude. That’s why Jude has been walking around with that smug expression on his face for two months now.
She arrived in March like a hurricane, claiming back her family space.
Ferocious, unyielding, but with a heart the size of the Atlantic when you get through the tough outer layers.
From the moment she arrived, alone, friendless, and in a village which had been fed lies about her family by Jude’s own family, she’d planted her roots back into the solid ground of Sea Salt Bay, and now it’s almost like she was never gone at all.
She glances up when she hears us, smoothing back dark waves of hair that have escaped from her ponytail, and shines moonbeams, or rays of sunlight, I’m not sure which, straight in Jude’s direction. Great.
‘He was still in bed,’ Jude tells her.
‘I wasn’t asleep,’ I say.
‘Just lying there?’ she asks, sharing a knowing glance with Jude that couples do so well and should definitely be fined for.
‘I was thinking.’ I shove my hands into my pockets and shrug. ‘A man’s allowed to think in bed on his day off.’
Jude cuts me a side-eye. ‘He was moping.’
Brynn gives a sympathetic nod. ‘Just call her, Tom, and ask when she’s coming back.’
It’s childish, yes, I know, but I roll my eyes so hard it nearly gives me a migraine.
‘You two need to drop this. It’s becoming boring and making me not want to spend time with you.
The kissing was bad enough. The moon eyes.
The general disgusting ickiness you’ve had going on.
But the psychoanalysis and mood reading are really starting to piss me off. ’
They look at each other, which totally proves my point. And also makes me want to launch myself off the nearest cliff.
‘Coffee’s in the flask,’ Brynn says finally, going back to the crates, but not before giving Jude a moon-eyed smile that they think I can’t see.
Ugh.
But the real problem here isn’t the moon eyes, isn’t the sun, or the tourists, or the endless feeling that this summer might never end and peace will never return. It’s the fact that the coffee is in the flask.
A bloody flask.
I hate coffee from a flask.
And it’s only in a flask because the café is closed. And the café is closed because my best friend has left, and I don’t know how long for, but it feels like the age of man has passed, but I reckon it’s only been a couple of weeks.
The morning unfolds in the way mornings do at the harbour.
I drink coffee from the flask, wince and curse about it, and watch kayakers launch from the slipway with cheerful confidence that tells me they haven’t checked the tide times.
Probably don’t even know there is an app you can do it on.
I’m on call with the lifeboat this morning, and we on the crew have a summer game we like to play.
Cal put a stop to us handing over money when we guessed the call correctly, so now we notch up points on a blackboard in the pub instead.
‘An hour,’ I say to no one in particular.
‘Forty minutes,’ Brynn says, without looking up. ‘It’s a Thursday. People are extra dumb on a Thursday.’
She’s closer to right. Damn it.
The pager goes off at half eleven.
The shout is a rubber ring. Two of them, in fact. A father and son from somewhere outside Wolverhampton who have drifted out past the headland on matching inflatables shaped like flamingos, which is information I absorb without comment.
Our launch is quick, and we are efficient.
I’ve been part of this crew so long now that my body knows what to do without consulting my brain.
The boat, the water, that rhythm that lives inside a shout that isn’t life or death but isn’t nothing either.
The sea is calm enough that the recovery is more logistics than drama, though the father, who is spectacularly sunburned, middle-aged and philosophically underprepared for the Atlantic, spends most of it explaining to his son that the current was much stronger than it looked.
‘Happens all the time,’ Cal confirms to him with a sympathetic nod, and a straight face I appreciate professionally. ‘Nothing to be embarrassed about.’
The father’s face relaxes, although with that sunburn he might not be able to move at all tomorrow. The son gives his dad such a direct look of derision that Cal and I meet gazes, both of us clamping our lips together to stop from laughing.
‘How old are you, mate?’ I ask him.
‘Eight.’ Another look at his dad. ‘And I told him the tide was too strong.’
I have to turn my face away because I can’t hold in my grin.
We get them back to the beach, although the flamingos, sadly, haven’t survived the experience. One has developed a fatal puncture, the other has simply given up and deflated with an air of existential resignation. The boy looks at them with grief, running his hand down one lopsided flamingo head.
‘Can I be on the crew?’ he asks as we’re coiling the lines.
His father claps him on the shoulder. On the bright sand, his skin is almost fluorescent. ‘Maybe when you’re older, mate.’
‘I’m eight,’ the boy says, with dignity. ‘That’s older than I was yesterday.’
I like this kid.
We’re back at the station by half twelve.
I change and hand in the log, exchanging the usual words with Cal about the usual things.
The rhythm of it is familiar in a way that settles something in my chest. The knowledge that this is what I do.
This is who I am. That whatever else is happening in my life, there is this.
Home.
Sea Salt Bay just is, and it always will be.
The sun is properly hot now. A couple are sitting on the sea wall eating fish and chips from paper, their legs dangling over the water.
Children run past with nets and buckets, heading for the rock pools at the far end of the cove.
The smell of salt and seaweed and sun cream hangs in the air, underlaid with the permanent base note of diesel from the boats.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Jenny’s Dream sits at her mooring, lines neatly coiled, lucky cap hanging on the cabin hook where it always hangs.
Peter’s lucky mermaid air freshener is still hanging where he left it, but it’s faded now so the mermaid is nothing but washed-out smears of pink, blue and yellow.
I don’t look at her.
I don’t not look at her either.
She’s just there, the way she’s always there, and I’ve learned not to think too hard about what that means.
That Peter is gone.
Peter, whom I loved but also hated.
Peter, who went into the water on a call-out with me and never came back.
Peter, whom Nina is still mourning and possibly always will be.
‘So are you going to call Nina and see if she’s still with her mum? Or when she’s coming back, because we are all having lavender shortbread withdrawals?’ Jude says, reading my damn mind.
‘Don’t know.’ I shrug and Jude narrows his eyes, which I dutifully ignore.
This is the truth. Nina and I have been best friends for our entire adult lives. Nina doesn’t know that I fell in love with her the day we met and have been ever since.
There’s a distinct chance she never will.
But it’s okay, because I’m finally moving on.
The weekend showed me that, even drunk and remorseful, I’ve proved to myself that I am capable of moving on.
It’s not like I haven’t dated other people, seen other people, Cara for example, but they’ve always been in the shade of Nina.
Like she blots them out. The process of moving on started when she began dating Peter and I realised he was more than competition for my best friend’s affections.
A process that deepened when Peter told me he was going to ask her to marry him about three weeks before he died, a secret that’s been tormenting me ever since.
And a process that’s near enough complete now that I know it’s impossible to compete with a man’s ghost.
Nope. Tom Darcy is moving on.
‘It’s not my business,’ I say, realising I’ve been silent too long and must look desperate and needy.
It really is all a bit Poldark around here, and not just the rugged coastline.
Except I’m blonde and blue-eyed, not dark and brooding, and I’m a fucking vet, for God’s sake, who needs to get a grip on his goddamn life.
My jaw must do something unfortunate, because Jude says, quietly this time, ‘You keep saying that like repetition makes it true.’