Carry Me Home (Sea Salt Bay #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

TOM

I’m aware of the knocking for some time before I do anything about it.

Not an emergency knock. Hell, I know that one. Have been jolted out of sleep by it enough times to recognise it in my bones. This is the knock of someone who knows I’m in, has a view on my current life choices, and has all the time in the world to make that view known one knuckle at a time.

My head is still pounding, but it’s been doing it since Saturday last. A whole five days of recovery, and I don’t think I can blame it on a mix of champagne and sambuca shots anymore.

No, this pounding of the head is pure remorse.

Literal remorse, tapped out in Morse Code into my brain. R.E.M.O.R.S.E.

Or, if I were being honest with myself:

Y.O.U. T.O.T.A.L. D.I.C.K.

I don’t want to open my eyes. If I do, it means the memories will come back, the drinks, the dancing, the hotel room, the walk of shame down to the breakfast at the hotel where all the wedding guests were clumped together.

Sophie and Stewart. Uni friends. At least they’d left for their romantic wedding night pre-even-more-romantic-honeymoon before I started standing on the tables and shaking salt into my hair, encouraging everyone to come and ‘get some tequila’.

They’d left before Cara had helped me back to the hotel room.

And. Well.

With a groan that hurts my soul down deep, I blink into the sunlight that always manages to creep stealthy fingers around the navy blackout curtains at the window.

I look at the ceiling.

The ceiling looks back.

Quarter past nine. On a Thursday. My day off from the surgery, which is a fact I’m apparently alone in respecting.

The staring contest with the ceiling carries on. I don’t particularly like to lose these. Sets the day off on the wrong trajectory. But the knocking continues.

‘It’s open,’ I shout, because it always is, because this is Sea Salt Bay and the only people who knock on my door are people who would come in regardless, and the energy required to get up and lock it is energy I don’t currently have.

There’s a bashing of cupboard doors downstairs, and in any place other than Sea Salt Bay you’d think you were being burgled. Here, you know it’s just someone who’s decided your morning requires intervention and is making themselves coffee while they’re at it.

I consider the options. Getting up. Not getting up.

The distant possibility that if I stay very still, Jude Harding, who I can tell is downstairs by the tone-deaf humming and heavy couldn’t-give-a-fuck slightly uneven footsteps, will conclude I’ve died in the night and leave me to decompose in peace.

The footsteps come up the stairs.

So much for that.

He appears in the doorway holding two mugs of coffee he has made in my kitchen, looking at me with the particular expression of a man who has hauled himself out of a deep personal crisis over the last couple of months and now considers himself qualified to assess other people’s life choices.

‘It’s quarter past nine,’ he says.

‘I know.’

‘On a Thursday.’

‘I know.’

‘And you’re—’

‘Aware of what I’m doing, yes.’ I sit up against the headboard. ‘Some of us are choosing to embrace our day off in a horizontal position. It’s a lifestyle decision.’

He looks around the room. At the curtains, still drawn. At the book on the nightstand, face-down on the same page it’s been on for a week. At me, determinedly unbothered by his assessment.

‘Right,’ he says, and holds out the mug.

I take it, and he drops into the chair in the corner. The one that has become, over years of Jude turning up uninvited to my flat above the veterinary clinic, essentially his chair. He stretches his long legs out and says nothing.

He’s good at saying nothing. It’s one of his more irritating qualities.

I drink the coffee. It’s good coffee. Typical. The man breaks into your home and makes better coffee than you do.

Outside, a car goes past, then another, then the distinctive rumble of a campervan taking the corner by the war memorial too fast. Even with the curtains drawn I can feel the weight of the village in summer, the density of it, more people in the lanes than the lanes were designed for, the car park at the top of the hill groaning under the strain of too many cars.

Somewhere down the hill a child is shrieking, either in joy or outrage over a bucket-and-spade disagreement. Hard to tell at this distance.

‘I’m not on the rota until this afternoon,’ I say.

‘I know.’

‘So you’ve come to check on me out of the pure goodness of your heart.’

‘Something like that.’ He turns the mug in his hands. ‘Brynn said you walked past the harbour yesterday evening and didn’t stop.’

I didn’t know she’d seen me. ‘I had somewhere to be.’ I didn’t. I’d been musing over the events of the weekend and wondering how I could have fucked up so badly.

Jude says nothing. His face says several things, most of them sceptical. Which is exactly why I’m not telling him about the events of last weekend, because he will be all over it. Well done, mate. You’re moving on, mate. Nothing wrong with getting some, mate.

So why does it feel so wrong? Why do I feel guilty and eaten up in this chewed and mulched way that’s giving me a permanent migraine? Cheating. That’s what it feels like, except it’s cheating on an idea, not a person, and I’m not sure that’s even a thing.

I haven’t answered, and it’s been way too long. ‘I was tired,’ I say, which is pathetic but vaguely true.

‘Tom.’

‘Jude.’

He just looks at me. To be fair, I’ve given Jude Harding that exact look he’s giving me now on more occasions than I can count.

Usually when he was drinking too much, or working too hard, or refusing to admit that Brynn Trelawney had crawled under his skin and set up permanent residence there.

I like it considerably less from this side.

‘I’m fine,’ I say.

‘Obviously,’ he says, in a tone that makes the word mean the opposite of itself.

I drain the coffee and get up to pull on yesterday’s jeans from the floor. I give them a little shake, which practically means they’re clean. Jude watches this from his chair with an air of quiet judgement that’s almost eating him alive.

I open the curtains.

The day comes in hard and bright, late-May sunshine behaving like high summer and already acting as if it owns the place.

The sky is the sort of Cornish blue reproduced on postcards, the sort that makes tourists think this is what it’s always like and then act personally betrayed when it rains for six days straight in August.

Down the hill, the village is stirring into its summer self. Bunting has gone up along the harbour road. Tilly’s doing. She gets competitive about the bunting. Someone has put out the chalkboard sign for the pasty kiosk, the same sign that’s been there every summer for as long as I can remember.

Today’s Special: Cornish Pasty.

It’s always a Cornish pasty. This is Cornwall.

The Lavender Café is shut.

There it is. The thing under my ribs tightening before I can stop it.

It’s been shut for three weeks since my best friend decided she needed a change of scenery and left without a confirmed date of return.

The door is locked, the blinds drawn, the little menu board that usually stands on the pavement nowhere to be seen.

The hanging baskets are still there, though.

Terracotta pots overflowing with fuchsias and trailing lobelia, the sort of controlled chaos that looks effortless and actually requires daily attention.

The fuchsias are getting leggy now. The deadheading isn’t being done.

She’d hate that. She’d have been out with the secateurs before her first customer arrived, mug of tea in her hand, because Nina Ellis has feelings about fuchsias the same way she has feelings about most things.

Strongly held, immediately acted upon, communicated to anyone within earshot whether they’ve asked or not.

I look at the café for a moment too long.

Jude doesn’t say anything, which is worse.

I turn away first and ask, ‘Coming to the harbour?’

Jude is already standing.

The village in summer is its own creature.

The whole of Cornwall in summer is its own creature. Maybe a monster risen from the deeps, if you’re inclined to melodramatic thoughts, which I’m not.

It’s the same Sea Salt Bay it always is, with its four hundred permanent residents, one pub, one shop – post office and taxi included – one café, and enough opinions to fill a city.

But currently it’s overloaded with a temporary population of visitors who’ve seen the Poldark filming locations and expect something from us that we’re not entirely sure we signed up to provide.

The car park at the top of the hill will have been full since before nine, the overflow pushing down the lanes in a slow migration of roof boxes and optimistic cycling equipment.

Someone has erected a windbreak directly in front of the lifeboat station, which Cal, our RNLI captain, will have words about.

A family in matching waterproofs are standing in the middle of the harbour-side lane examining their phones with the paralysis of people with too many options and no brain power to make a choice.

A queue of eight has formed at the pasty kiosk.

Cal’s mum raises a hand to us as we pass, and I nod back without breaking stride.

Somewhere up the hill a seagull is engaged in a ferocious dispute and planning retribution its victim might never recover from.

The harbour itself is bright with boats and busyness.

The tide is high, the water that impossible turquoise-over-sand colour it only gets in good weather, and the fishing boats are out early, trailing their wakes towards the headland.

On the far quay, a man in a sunhat is painting the scene with more enthusiasm than accuracy or even talent.

He’s given The Ship Inn a blue roof for some reason.

Bill will have something to say about that if he sees it.

It is, in the Cornish way, both the village’s livelihood and its annual trial.