Chapter 3
Chapter Three
brYNN
The key sits in my palm with a crushing judgement I don’t normally like to receive from inanimate objects.
Heavy, rusted at the edges, accusatory in its weight.
Three months it’s been sitting in that solicitor’s envelope, sealed up with the rest of Grandad’s estate – if you can call a neglected cottage and the bones of a dead fishing business an inheritance.
But it’s mine. He left it to me, not to anyone else. Not to Uncle Alan who only visited at Christmas, not to the highest buyer, not to some developer who’d knock it flat and build holiday lets. To me.
The last Trelawney standing.
The only Trelawney.
A family of one.
You’ll go back one day, my bird. His voice is in my head, rough as rope burn, soft underneath. Along with the way he always sounded when he talked about Sea Salt Bay – like he was describing a woman who’d broken his heart but he loved her anyway. When you’re ready. When it’s time.
I wasn’t ready. But then he died, and the solicitor called, and the key arrived, and so here I am.
This isn’t about inheritance though.
Not really.
We never had money. I’m not, say, on a deathbed payout that needs taxing.
It’s something else. A ‘thing’ that I can’t explain or articulate. When I handed my notice in at the last garage and told them my plans.
Get back the boat shed.
Put a boat on the water.
Have a home.
They’d practically laughed me out of the building.
A single woman fishing business.
Yeah, well. Ha. Ha.
Here I am.
The lane up to the old Trelawney place is steeper than my memory has suggested, overgrown with brambles that are catching at my jeans like they’re trying to hold me back from making a monumental error of judgement.
The cottage squats at the top of the cliff like it’s grown out of it rather than being built on it.
The stone walls have gone green with moss, the windows clouded with salt and decades of neglect.
It’s further from the Harding place than I remember. Not that I remember much. Just heat, bare feet on warm asphalt, the sting of oxygen exhaling from my lungs as we ran up and down the hill.
Damn it.
Why am I even thinking about them? About him? One car park run-in and suddenly I’m seven again – mud on my knees, heart too big for my ribs, watching Jude Harding from behind my grandfather’s legs and hoping he’d look back.
He got tall. That’s all. Filled out like fishing men do, with broad shoulders, and hands that look like they’ve held onto rough rope too tight for too long.
Sandy waves pushed back off his face, still damp – from the sea or a shower, who knows – and freckles across his nose and cheekbones even though it’s barely March.
Who has freckles in March? Someone who’s been outside every day of his life, that’s who.
The limp’s new. Probably some heroic act involving a boat and terrible decision-making. Definitely nothing to do with me.
And that bloody hoodie. A faded surf brand, hood poking out from the collar of his weatherproof coat like a uniform.
He couldn’t have looked more beach bum if he’d tried.
I bet the flip-flops come out the second it hits Easter.
I bet he surfs before dawn and thinks that makes him deep.
I bet he’s never lived anywhere that wasn’t within spitting distance of the Atlantic and has absolutely no idea how lucky that makes him.
I bet he’s never had to miss it.
The thought lands wrong – not sarcastic, but raw.
Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? He gets to be here.
Gets to roll out of bed and smell the salt and hear the gulls and feel the pull of the tide like a second heartbeat.
He’s had that every single day of his life, and I’ve spent twenty years aching for it in landlocked flats and dockside bedsits that were close but never close enough.
The key scrapes in the lock, scratching into the silence like it’s forgotten how to work.
Takes three tries and some creative swearing before the door groans open, releasing twenty years of trapped air that smells like damp and dust and faintly, and worryingly, animal.
Behind the door a mountain of post slides in an avalanche.
I push at it with my feet so I can walk in without slipping onto my arse.
‘Fuck.’
It’s worse than I imagined, and I’d imagined pretty bad. The solicitor’s photos were apparently taken through a filter of extreme optimism and probable cataracts.
The front room is thick with neglect. Wallpaper peeling off in great curls, a dark stain spreading across one corner of the ceiling where the roof’s letting the weather in.
Damp has crept up the skirting boards, and there’s a smell – not rot exactly, more like abandonment has its own particular scent – that’s bloody revolting and is going to live inside my nostrils for the foreseeable future.
The kitchen is dusty and bare, cupboard doors hanging open on ancient hinges, mouse droppings on the counter.
A setback. That’s all this is. I’ve weathered worse.
That Bristol flat with no hot water for three months.
The Southampton bedsit where the ceiling leaked directly onto the bed.
That memorable week sleeping in the Land Rover in a Tesco car park when everything went to shit after the garage in Taunton let me go. This is just … a project.
My laugh echoes off the stone walls, hollow as a gull’s cry – startling, joyless, a sound I don’t entirely recognise anymore.
Grandad would have walked in here and started a list. He was a list man – everything in order, everything solvable if you broke it down small enough.
I can see him now, stood in this doorway in his ancient, waxed jacket, pencil behind his ear, squinting at the ceiling with that expression he got when things needed fixing.
Not angry. Never angry. Just … assessing.
He assessed everything – boats, weather, me – with a patience that made you believe things could be put right.
His toolbox is in the back of the Land Rover.
His actual toolbox, the one with his initials scratched into the lid and the socket set he taught me to use when I was eleven.
Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, and if that doesn’t work, hit it.
The memory ambushes me – his hands over mine on a spanner, engine grease on both our fingers, his low laugh when I overtightened a bolt and stripped the thread.
‘Patience, Brynn. It’s not a fight. You’re having a conversation with it.’
Christ, I miss him.
A different brand of Trelawney – that’s what I’m going to be. Not the kind who got run out of town. A Trelawney who comes back and plants her feet and stays.
I’m not fixing this place up to sell it. I’m not passing through.
This is mine. He left it to me. And I’m keeping it.
The floorboards creak but hold as I pick my way through the ground floor.
Newspapers from 2004, mail addressed to my grandfather piled behind the door like paper accusations.
A photograph face-down on the mantle that I don’t turn over because I know that it will be a captured image of Dad and Grandad, probably, standing in front of some boat, back when things were simpler.
Before Dad faded and Grandad picked up all the pieces, including me.
In the kitchen, a small darting shape scurries away from my footsteps. Excellent. Wildlife. That’s what the animal smell was.
But the bones of the place are good. Stone walls thick enough to withstand Atlantic storms, beams that are probably older than most of the boats in the harbour.
The structure’s sound – I can feel it in the way the walls take my weight when I lean against them, in the floors that give but don’t crack.
It needs the roof sorting, heating, a full cosmetic overhaul and a deep clean that might take the rest of my natural life.
But the building itself has survived twenty years of nothing. It can survive me.
I pull out my notebook from the holdall that contains literally everything else I own that matters.
Three changes of clothes, a battered laptop that probably shouldn’t work anymore but still wheezes to life, the letter from Dad I still haven’t read, and this notebook that’s going to be my bible for the next however long it takes.
Grandad’s handwriting is in my head as I write. Neat, clear-lettered words, never cursive or scrawled, the way he labelled everything in the workshop. I write the way he taught me – practical, no self-pity, one thing at a time.
Priority One – Make Habitable
Roof (leak in the front room corner, spreading damp – urgent)
Electrics (check with utility company – can they reconnect?)
Plumbing (turned off, not broken – hopefully)
Deep clean everything
Mouse situation (traps, poison, stern conversation)
Priority Two – Make Liveable
Heating (currently none)
Insulation
Actual furniture
Kitchen appliances
Paint (everything – twice)
Priority Three – Make it Mine
I stare at that last line, pencil hovering. Make it mine. Like I know what that even means anymore. Like I haven’t spent twenty years being nowhere’s daughter, belonging to nothing, taking mechanic jobs in coastal towns because at least I could smell the sea and pretend it was this sea.
Every place I’ve lived, I’ve lived near the water.
Bristol docks. Southampton marina. Plymouth – God, Plymouth was the closest, just up the coast, and I still couldn’t make myself drive the last stretch.
Every job I’ve taken has had me elbow-deep in engines and hydraulics, boats and motors, learning the trade that should have been my birthright if we’d never left.
Grandad saw it. Even in our cramped flat in Bristol, even working odd jobs that had nothing to do with the sea, he saw where I was heading.
Bought me my first Haynes manual when I was twelve.
Drove me to the boatyard in Portishead on weekends so I could watch the mechanics work.
Never said, This could have been yours. Never needed to. We both knew.