Chapter 22
SHANE
There was nothing she wanted to talk about, Josie assured him after the panicky episode.
She didn’t want to see if she could get a prescription dispatched to a chemist in Bridlington.
She didn’t know if you could even do that, and although he was tempted, Shane managed not to google it on her behalf.
He had a feeling that that would not go down very well.
Instead, he has driven them to a small, well-tended campsite on the outer edge of Bridlington.
The sun has pierced through the clouds and, as they park up under the shade of a tree, things are looking good.
A poster on the noticeboard announces a barbecue happening later, and Josie is cheered by the fact that they’re within walking distance of the beach.
‘Fancy a swim now?’ she asks.
‘Sure!’
She beams at him. ‘I’ll get changed in the showers.
Put my swimsuit on underneath…’ In the back of the ambulance she rummages through her rucksack, pulling out items chaotically until she finds her costume.
Shane gazes down at the array of discarded clothing.
‘Won’t be a minute!’ she says and scampers off, as if they’re just two friends enjoying a trip to the coast.
Sometimes Shane almost forgets how bizarre this is, and that they are only together under Ravi’s instruction.
How he’d worried about what it would be like, and what they’d do, apart from drive from place to place.
How on earth would they fill five whole days together?
It wasn’t as if he knew her any more – the kind of person she is, or what she enjoys.
In panic, he’d done a bit of research and reassured himself that there were several places of interest they could visit along the way.
However, even the thought of a trip to the Pontefract Museum, with its extensive display on the town’s liquorice heritage, had failed to steady his nerves.
While Josie is in the shower block, Shane changes whippet-fast into his swimming shorts and pulls his sweatshirt and jeans back on. Then, fully dressed, with rolled-up towels tucked under their arms, they stroll across the campsite and follow the sandy path towards the beach.
It’s a retro British seaside postcard come to life, Shane decides.
There are candyfloss stalls, and a machine you can post a penny into and it’ll come out flattened.
With a flicker of pride Shane discovers that he does, in fact, possess a single penny in his wallet.
‘Just what I always wanted,’ Josie announces, laughing, as the coppery sliver drops from the machine.
On the long sweep of golden sand, children are riding on donkeys and screaming as gulls dive-bomb for chips.
Kiosks are offering hot sugary doughnuts and waffles with every topping imaginable, and day trippers are posing for photos against the peeling railings, the backdrop a wash of milky blue sky.
‘Oh, this is lovely!’ Josie turns to Shane and smiles.
‘Isn’t it? Proper English seaside.’ Shane remembers it vividly – being here with Josie and Ravi on day two of their tour.
Playing the slot machines and Ravi trying to shake the Penny Falls machine to make money fall out, as if a handful of 2p pieces were essential to their survival – despite the fierce-looking woman presiding over the arcade from a raised booth.
Nostalgia washes over him, making him quite light-headed as they stroll past sandcastles at various stages of construction and decay.
He’s still concerned about Josie’s ‘turn’, although he is being careful not to refer to it that way again, as she’s scoffed, ‘It wasn’t a turn, Shane. It was just… a thing.’
Shane nodded, deciding she probably just wanted to forget it.
With every passing minute he is enjoying her company more and more, and he doesn’t want to annoy her.
He knows this trip isn’t about them; dutifully, they are just carrying out the instructions of their dead friend.
But occasionally he forgets about Ravi’s letter and the itinerary, and it’s just him and Josie on a mad adventure.
She seems to flip, he’s noticed, from quiet introspection to stand-offishness, with the occasional glimmer of the light-hearted sunniness that he remembers so well.
Dare he even think it? Shane has detected a hint of the closeness they once had, seemingly buried but catching the sunlight occasionally – like a golden sweet wrapper peeking out of the sand.
‘How about here?’ Josie indicates an empty spot on the beach.
‘Perfect.’ They spread out their towels and sit down, facing the sea. The beach is busy despite the cool, bracing wind. There are babies in buggies and a big, jovial group armed with blankets and windbreaks and cool boxes, clearly revving up for a bit of a party. Dance music starts playing tinnily.
‘Shane?’ Josie turns to him. She has pulled off her jeans and T-shirt and is looking only mildly hypothermic in a sporty navy-blue swimsuit.
‘Yeah?’
‘I was thinking,’ she says, looking hesitant, ‘if you wanted to do any detours at all… I mean, if you wanted to add on anywhere else on this trip? I wouldn’t mind at all…’
He looks at her, genuinely not understanding. ‘You mean extend it?’
‘No, no,’ she says quickly. ‘Not like that. I mean… visit your mum, maybe? Seeing as we’ve come up all this way. She’s still in the same house, right?’
Shane nods, turning this over. ‘Yes, she is.’
‘And… she’s still with Pete?’
‘Yeah. But I don’t want to visit. I mean, I haven’t even thought about it—’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, her cheeks flushing. ‘I just thought I’d mention it.’
‘Definitely not,’ he says. ‘But thanks for thinking of it.’ He looks at her, and he knows what she’s thinking – that she understands.
She knew everything, he always suspected.
More than she ever let on. He busies himself by pulling off his clothes and jumps up, shivering only slightly in his swimming shorts.
‘So,’ he says brightly, ‘are we going in, or what?’
‘Sure!’ she announces.
‘You feel okay to swim, do you? After the driving thing?’
‘Stop fussing,’ she exclaims, eye-rolling him like an adolescent, which makes him laugh as they stride towards the sea.
In they plunge, with Shane pretending that the bitterly cold waters off Yorkshire’s east coast are, in fact, balmy, and that he wouldn’t have been quite content to watch other hardy swimmers from the beach.
‘Great, isn’t it?’ Josie calls out.
‘It is!’ It’s true – sort of. At least, he can barely remember a time when he felt so fully alive. He’s still tingling all over as, shrouded by towels, they struggle clumsily back into their clothes.
‘Fancy an ice cream?’ Josie asks.
‘Sure!’ Because his teeth aren’t quite chattering enough.
‘C’mon, then.’ She smiles, and he notices that she has already caught the sun across her nose and cheeks. Her blue eyes are shining, the precise colour of the sky.
Two older women – perhaps even as old as Shane’s great-aunt Sylvia the last time he saw her – are strolling slowly, arms linked, along the promenade.
It was Sylvia whose box room they had all stayed in here: Josie and Ravi crammed into the narrow single bed, and Shane on a partly deflated airbed on the floor.
He hadn’t even known Sylvia, not really.
But Shane and his big brother were in touch sporadically – by letter, it seems so antiquated now – and he’d suggested that she might be able to put them up for the night.
Shane valued David’s letters. There were seven years between them and straight after school, David had moved to southern Germany to work in construction, and rarely came home after that.
Good for him, Shane had thought bitterly: having the means to get away from Pete. But he didn’t blame him, really.
Shane didn’t know much about his family background.
He remembered his dad only as a faded image, strolling along a seafront somewhere, buying Shane a stick of rock, and holding his hand.
Taking him on a big wheel and shooting a gun at a fairground side show.
He’d ‘gone away’, Shane knew that much, and when he’d pressed his mum on it, she’d said he’d died.
‘Just leave it in the past, Shane.’ But he was just a child, and he didn’t have a past to conveniently park difficult things in.
He and Josie queue at the kiosk, the breeze flapping the laminated menu tacked to a board. ‘What would you like?’ he asks.
‘Can’t decide. You go first,’ she urges him.
‘A vanilla cone, please,’ Shane tells the girl behind the counter.
‘Predictable,’ Josie teases.
‘No, it’s a classic!’
Josie laughs, opting for a lurid strawberry/bubblegum duo, which she devours with enthusiasm. ‘We’ve got to do our photo,’ she reminds him, ‘at our venue. The Marine Hotel, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh God, yes.’ In the headiness of the day, Shane had forgotten.
But now he remembers exactly where it is, and leads them straight to it, a little way back from the seafront.
Or rather, to where it was. Because it turns out that the old-style seaside hotel, where the kindly owner had brought them platters of sandwiches as they ran through their soundcheck, has now gone.
A retail complex sprawls over the area where the ornate whitewashed building once stood.
Shane shrugs off his mild disappointment as they take their Polaroid in front of a featureless furniture store.
‘I guess it’ll do.’ Josie slips the picture into her pocket.
‘It’ll have to.’ Shane catches her gaze and smiles. ‘That was a fun day anyway, wasn’t it?’
‘It really was,’ she says as they make their way back to the campsite. ‘The kind of seaside day we had when we were kids.’
Shane murmurs in agreement – although he never had those kinds of days. ‘Oh.’ She stops, frowns and touches his arm. ‘I’m sorry, Shane. That was really insensitive of me.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ he says with a shrug. ‘I know what you mean. Remember that school trip we had to Morecambe?’
‘Oh, yeah!’ She grins, and he catches something flickering in her eyes.
They’d sat together, Shane and Josie, on the back seat on the way home.
There’d been some teasing from his mates, about how he always seemed to be near her.
How there were plenty of other free seats on the coach. Naturally, he’d laughed it off.
They’ve reached the campsite now, where tempting aromas are already wafting from the communal barbecue set up next to the wooden reception hut.
It’s a golden, long-shadowed evening, and a full-scale feast seems like an awful lot of effort for the smattering of campers who have gathered around the trestle table.
But everything is delicious, and as beers flow and the sky darkens, the atmosphere is touchingly jolly.
By the time Shane and Josie repeat their getting-ready-for-bed routines in the van and shower block, he is overcome by the kind of pleasant drowsiness that only ever happens after a day by the sea.
When Boris said you can’t beat the freedom of being on the road, Shane hadn’t believed him.
Perhaps it was because his joints hurt sometimes from lugging heavy instruments about.
Or the fact that, since he’s been a dad, he has always favoured Spanish holidays with the kids.
Maybe he was also feeling a bit prickly about Rich Tony.
Whatever it was, Shane suspected that ‘van life’, as Boris termed it, was overrated.
Now, though, as Josie sleeps soundly beside him, Shane replays the day in his head: the bitterly cold sea, gritty sand in his pants and a gull plunging down to steal his predictable vanilla.
It was perfect, he decides. So maybe Boris was right after all.