Chapter 4
Chapter Four
JUDE
The Mary Jane is being a temperamental bitch this morning, and Dad’s mood isn’t helping.
The harbour’s barely woken up – half five, the sky that bruised grey-blue you only get in early March, seagulls starting their shift with half-arsed screaming.
The dock’s already busy, though. Always is.
This is a working harbour, not a postcard.
Fish crates stacked three high along the south wall, nets draped over the drying racks like enormous spiderwebs, the sharp stink of diesel and brine and yesterday’s catch rising off the wet concrete.
Lobster pots are piled by the fuel pump in towers that lean at angles that would give a health and safety inspector a coronary.
The rigging on the moored boats clinks and taps in the wind – a sound so constant I only notice it when it stops.
Dad’s running his hand along the Mary Jane’s gear housing like it’s personally offended him.
‘You didn’t check the hydraulics before bringing her in,’ he says. ‘Kit always checks the hydraulics.’
‘I checked them.’ I had. Sort of. A glance counts as checking. ‘They were fine yesterday.’
‘Fine doesn’t mean functional.’ He’s got that tone that suggests I’m about twelve and have just tracked mud through the house. ‘Fine is what people say when they haven’t looked properly. Peter would’ve—’
He stops. We all do that – hit Peter’s name like a wall and can’t get past it.
We both know what Peter would’ve done. Peter would’ve stripped the whole system down, rebuilt it with spare parts and wishful thinking, and somehow made it work better than factory standard.
Peter, who’d been the harbour’s unofficial mechanic for the better part of two decades, working out of the old Trelawney shed down by the slipway like he’d been born to do it.
Which, in a way, he had – he’d married into the trade, learned from the old man himself, kept the Trelawney workshop ticking over long after the family left.
Half the boats in this harbour owe their continued existence to Peter and that shed.
Six months. Christ. Six months and we still can’t talk about him without the sentence trailing off into nothing.
‘The buyers were happy with the catch,’ I offer, trying to redirect. ‘Got eighteen per cent above asking for the turbot. Negotiated the Dover sole up too – seasonal premium, new supplier contract. The margins are the best they’ve been since—’
‘Should’ve been twenty.’
‘Market price was—’
‘I know what market price was.’ Dad straightens, his back creaking loud enough to hear over the harbour noise. ‘Been selling fish since before you were born.’
Right. One of those mornings, then. The kind where nothing I do is the right thing, because the right thing would be Kit doing it instead.
Kit, with his easy confidence and his feel for the mechanical side, the engines and the rigging and the physical work that Dad respects because it looks like effort.
Not the spreadsheets, the supplier negotiations, the licence renewals and quota management and all the invisible labour that keeps Harding and Sons afloat.
That’s just paperwork. Anyone can do paperwork.
He wanders off to find someone else to correct – Frankie, probably, who’s trying to patch nets by the far wall.
‘All right, Reuben?’ I hear him call.
Then, quieter, Dad replies with, ‘Good morning, er—’ A pause. ‘Frankie.’ His laugh is off key. ‘Those nets won’t mend themselves.’
I go still. He hesitated on the name. Just for a second – a beat where his eyes went somewhere else, searching – before landing on it. Frankie. A man he’s known for forty years.
It’s nothing. He’s tired. Early start, cold morning. Happens to everyone.
I turn back to the Mary Jane and her mysterious hydraulic issues.
The manual’s already spread on the dock, pages held down with a rusty shackle because the wind’s picking up.
The harbour around me is settling into its morning routine – Cal hosing down the deck of the Celtic Pride, Bill checking his pots with the grim determination of a man who’s been catching along the same stretch of coast for three decades, a couple of the weekend boats bobbing smugly in the visitors’ berths, all polished fibreglass and money.
The diagram might as well be in Japanese. No, that’s unfair to Japanese – at least that has consistent patterns. This is just lines and numbers and arrows pointing to things that don’t look anything like what I’m staring at in the engine.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ I mutter, leaning deeper into the housing.
Twenty minutes later, I’ve got oil on my shirt, grease in my hair, and I’m no closer to fixing anything.
The spanner slips, I graze my knuckles on the metallic sharp edge of – well, whatever the fuck this bit is I’m fixing.
Automatically, I let out a string of cursing that would make Dad proud, and it echoes across the water.
‘You know there’s a manual for that.’
Tom’s voice makes me jerk, banging my head on the housing cover. ‘Fucking hell, Tom.’
‘Language.’ He’s grinning, the bastard, holding two cups of coffee from Nina’s.
Tom – who is technically Tom Darcy member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, but around here is just Tom, the bloke who shows up with food when you forget to eat and opinions when you don’t ask for them.
Him and Nina have been a story waiting to happen for years, a fact obvious to everyone in Sea Salt Bay except apparently Nina. ‘Thought you might need this.’
‘I need a new hydraulic system. Or a mechanic. Or a different life.’
‘So dramatic.’ He passes me the coffee, studying my pathetic attempts at repair. ‘That’s… What are you even trying to do?’
‘Fix it.’
‘By hitting it with a spanner?’
‘It’s a legitimate technique.’
‘It’s really not.’ He pauses, takes a deliberate sip of coffee. ‘So. You tell him yet?’
I focus on the engine, suddenly fascinated by a bolt that doesn’t need adjusting. ‘Tell him what?’
‘Don’t be a dick, Jude.’
‘I’m not being—’
‘You haven’t told Reuben that Brynn Trelawney’s back.’
Her name sounds loud out here, like Tom’s summoning something. I glance around, but Dad’s safely out of earshot, now bothering Bill about something by the pots.
‘I’ll tell him when it’s relevant.’
‘When she shows up at a harbour master meeting, that’ll be relevant.
When the whole village is talking about it by tonight, that’ll be relevant.
When she’s working in that shed’—he points towards the south end of the harbour, where the old Trelawney workshop sits squat and solid against the harbour wall, its corrugated iron roof just visible past the slipway—‘that’ll be relevant. ’
That shed. It’s a big stone-and-iron building – proper workshop, not some glorified cupboard – built by Brynn’s grandfather in the sixties.
Trelawney Marine Services still just about legible on the gable end if you know where to look, although the paint is worn to ghost-letters by decades of salt wind.
A long time after the Trelawneys left, Peter took it over – kept it running as the harbour’s workshop, oiled the hinges, maintained the electrics, stocked the shelves.
The rest of us treated it like communal space, storing equipment, borrowing tools.
But it was never ours. It was always theirs. We just stopped thinking about that.
‘Since when did you become the voice of reason?’
‘Since you lost yours, apparently.’ Tom finishes his coffee and sets the cup on the dock. ‘Look, I don’t know what happened between your families, and don’t give me the business rivalry line, because we both know it was more than that, but secrets have a way of—’
‘I know.’
‘Do you? Because from where I’m standing, you’re playing with fire and calling it warmth. You know what your dad’s like.’
‘That doesn’t even make sense.’
‘You know what I mean.’ He starts walking away, then turns back. ‘She’s watching you, by the way.’
‘What?’
‘Ten o’clock. By the harbour wall. Been there about five minutes.’
He walks off before I can respond, the bastard, leaving me frozen with a spanner in my hand and the sudden awareness that yes – there she is.
Brynn’s leaning against the harbour wall, maybe thirty feet away, hip cocked against the stone, arms crossed.
Watching me fail spectacularly at basic engine maintenance.
Christ, how long has she been there? Did she see me consulting the manual like a first-year apprentice? Did she hear Tom asking about Dad?
Our eyes meet across the dock.
She’s smirking. Probably cataloguing every mistake I’ve made, every wrong tool I’ve used. Her hair’s pulled back in a messy bun that somehow makes her look more dangerous, not less. She’s dressed for work – steel-toed boots, an old flannel shirt rolled to the elbows.
I straighten up, setting down the spanner. Wipe my hands on my already ruined jeans.
Whatever happened between our families – whatever made the Trelawneys leave, whatever it is that makes Dad spit at the mention of their name – it’s got nothing to do with us.
Not really. We were kids. She was seven, I was nine, and now we’re …
what? Two people who happen to share history and a harbour?
I take a step towards her. Not aggressive, just … closing distance. Because maybe if we could just talk, like adults, like people who aren’t carrying twenty years of their parents’ grudges—
She turns.
No hesitation, no backward glance. Just turns and walks straight to the old Trelawney shed. Her shed. The one that’s been hers all along, whatever we told ourselves while we filled it with our gear.
The door opens. She disappears inside. It closes with a sound that carries across the water.
‘Fine,’ I say to the empty space where she was. ‘Be like that.’
But I’m still standing here, holding a spanner I don’t know how to use properly, watching that closed door like she might come back out.
Like she might give me a chance to … what?
Apologise for something I didn’t do? Welcome her home to a place that clearly doesn’t want her?
Ask her if she still builds sandcastles?
The door stays closed.
The wind picks up, sending the manual pages flapping despite the weight holding them down. I look back at the engine, at the mess I’ve made trying to fix something I don’t understand.
Maybe Tom’s right. Maybe I am playing with fire.
But standing here, oil-stained and frustrated, watching that closed door and remembering the challenge in those dark eyes, I can’t help thinking that getting burned might be worth it.
Just to feel warm.
The Ship Inn at seven on a Wednesday is depressing as fuck.
The pub sits at the top of the harbour lane, hunched and low-beamed, looking like it’s been serving pints since before the Armada and hasn’t redecorated since roughly the same era.
Carpet sticky enough to remove shoes. A dartboard nobody’s sober enough to use past nine o’clock.
The smell of old beer and woodsmoke and something fried that Ayo claims is a speciality but is really just whatever didn’t sell at lunch.
The walls are covered in photographs – boats, catches, crew shots going back decades – and a chalkboard behind the bar still has Peter’s name on the quiz league roster because nobody’s had the heart to wipe it off.
Frankie’s holding court at the bar, telling the same story about the seventy-pound bass that definitely existed, definitely got away, definitely wasn’t a floating log.
Bill’s nursing his third pint and his fifteenth year of divorce.
Ayo’s behind the bar, polishing glasses that are already clean, while Tilly does the crossword with aggressive pencil strokes.
‘Jude!’ Frankie waves me over. ‘Tell Bill about that time with the nets, you know, when Peter—’
‘Not tonight, Frankie.’
I order a whisky. Then another. The pub feels emptier without Kit taking the piss, without Maisie sneaking crisps when she thinks no one’s looking, without Isla mediating our worst arguments with her actress ability to redirect attention.
‘You all right, love?’ Tilly asks, not looking up from her crossword. ‘Seven letters, means solitary?’
‘Isolated?’ I offer.
‘That’s eight.’
‘Recluse, then.’
‘Must be.’ She fills it in, pencil scratching. ‘So. I hear a Trelawney’s turned up in the harbour.’
News travels in Sea Salt Bay at the speed of gossip, which is to say faster than light and twice as distorted.
‘Her name’s Brynn.’
‘I know what her name is. I was at her christening.’ Tilly looks up then, sharp blue eyes in a face lined by decades of sea wind and crossword puzzles. ‘Question is, what’s she doing back?’
Good question. One Dad definitely knows the answer to but won’t tell. One that sits between the Hardings and the Trelawneys like an unexploded mine, ticking quietly, waiting for someone to step on it.
‘Why is she back?’
Tilly takes a long drink of wine before answering. ‘Maybe she had nowhere else to go?’
It’s a question to a question that doesn’t help me answer anything. But I get this feeling, this sense, of what it might be like to not know where you are supposed to be. Of not knowing the place that made you, even if it broke you too. The tide always returns to the same shore, even after storms.
Tilly’s just looking at me, waiting.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Miles away. What were you saying?’
‘I was saying your father’s going to blow a gasket.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘He really is.’
I stay until closing. Watch the locals drift out in ones and twos – Frankie weaving slightly, Bill steady as a rock despite the pints, Cal ducking in briefly for a half before heading home to Cassie.
The harbour through the pub window is dark now, just the navigation lights on the moored boats and the sweep of the breakwater lamp.
And one light in the old Trelawney shed. Steady. Working late.
I watch it longer than I should.
Then I pull on my coat, step into the cold, and walk home to a house where my father’s already asleep and doesn’t know yet that the past has just parked in his harbour.
Tomorrow I’ll tell him.
Probably.