Chapter 5
Chapter Five
brYNN
Four in the morning on a Thursday and I’m considering minor vandalism.
The Mary Jane sits pretty in her berth, all gleaming efficiency and Harding pride.
Newer than the other boats in the harbour, or maybe just polished more – it’s a boat that says, We’re doing just fine, thanks.
The name’s painted in gold leaf that catches even the pre-dawn light.
Showy. Like putting chrome spinners on a tractor.
I drop onto the dock beside her, boots silent on wet concrete.
My fingers find the engine housing by feel – twenty years since I last touched a Harding boat and my hands still know the layout, muscle memory from years of watching Grandad work on anything with a propeller.
The fuel line’s right there. Thirty seconds, that’s all it would take.
Loosen the connector just enough that she’d cough but wouldn’t catch.
Salt corrosion as cover. Plausible deniability.
That’s for parking your shit in my shed for twenty years.
My fingers are on the connector before I’ve made a conscious decision. Muscle and rage working faster than reason.
Then I stop.
Because I’m a mechanic, not a vandal. And you don’t mess with fuel systems. Not ever.
Not as a joke, not as revenge, not as petty satisfaction at four in the morning when nobody’s watching.
Fuel lines are where boats stop being inconvenient and start being coffins.
Grandad drilled that into me before I could spell diesel: you can play stupid games with the electrics, with the bilge pump, with the radio – but you never, ever compromise the fuel system.
That’s not sabotage. That’s attempted murder by negligence.
I pull my hands back like the connector’s hot.
Instead, I climb into the wheelhouse – door’s unlocked, because Reuben Harding’s clearly never met a security measure he didn’t consider beneath him – and retune the radio from the shipping forecast to Radio Cornwall.
Then I draw a small, but precise penis in the condensation on the window.
No initials. Just the penis. Let them wonder.
Petty? Yes. Satisfying? Mildly. Better than a prison sentence.
‘Vandalism downgrade noted,’ I mutter to the boat, then feel immediately stupid for talking to fibreglass and wood. But boats have personalities – any fisher will tell you that. And this one’s definitely a Harding. Showy on the surface, probably solid underneath, definitely annoying.
I hop down from the wheelhouse and head towards the south end of the harbour.
The Trelawney shed looms against the lightening sky, and I’m braced for the worst. I should have come here first. But the cottage, or what should be renamed The Disaster Zone, took more of my time than I’d have liked.
Chasing mice and cleaning up droppings for an entire day doesn’t put me in the best frame of mind, and now I’m about to face the shed.
Twenty years of neglect. Rats the size of cats.
Possibly actual cats, gone feral and organising into gangs.
Definitely spiders – the kind that have had two decades to evolve into mutants requiring a cricket bat and a formal apology to kill.
My grandfather built this shed in 1962. I know because he carved the date into the cornerstone, along with ‘BT & Sons’.
The building itself is stone and corrugated iron, proper workshop scale – big enough to hold a boat on blocks, a decent workbench, storage for a whole operation.
Not a glorified cupboard. A place where things got built.
Should have been mine. The thought arrives fully formed, no warning, and it sits in my stomach like a stone.
All of it. The workshop, the trade, the routine of nets and engines and dawn starts.
Not because I romanticise it – I know exactly how cold and unglamorous and bone-grinding commercial fishing is, I’ve done the unglamorous versions of it in every port town that would have me – but because I’m good at it.
Because my hands know this work the way other people’s hands know piano keys or steering wheels.
Because this was supposed to be my inheritance, and instead it’s been someone else’s workspace for twenty years.
The door opens on hinges that someone’s been oiling. Recently.
‘What the fuck?’
It’s … clean. No, more than clean – it’s maintained.
Cared for. There’s electricity that actually works, proper industrial shelving lined with labelled parts (labelled!), and a workbench that’s seen better days but is solid oak underneath the scratches and oil stains.
Someone’s been using this as a proper workshop.
Not storage, not abandonment – actual daily use.
I read the space like a schematic. Whoever worked here was methodical – tools hung on shadow boards, parts bins sorted by size and type, a system for tracking inventory that’s chalked on a blackboard by the door.
There’s an engine manual open on the bench, spine cracked at the cooling systems chapter, a pencil marking a comment in the margin.
Clean rags folded, not balled. Oil cans lined up by viscosity. And a cat bowl, clean but dusty.
A professional. Someone who loved the work.
There’s a kettle on a side table, box of Yorkshire Tea beside it – the good stuff, not the budget brand I’ve been drinking. A jar of instant coffee that’s actually in date. Sugar in a tin that says ‘Pete’s Sweet Stuff’ in faded permanent marker.
Pete.
A camp bed’s folded in the corner with an actual pillow that, when I push it with my fingers, gives with the softness of feather, not foam – and a wool blanket that looks military surplus but clean.
A small fridge hums against the wall, covered in faded stickers.
Kernow Fishing Supplies. Newlyn Harbour Authority.
Save Our Seas. And one that makes the space behind my ribs tighten: Trelawney & Sons – Sea Salt Bay’s Finest Since 1962.
Our sticker. On his fridge. In our shed.
There’s a paint-splattered radio, still tuned to the shipping forecast. A space heater that’s newer than anything in the cottage.
What looks like a makeshift shower rigged in the back corner behind a blue tarp – proper showerhead and everything, probably illegal as hell but ingenious.
A small mirror above a basin that’s plumbed into God knows what.
This is better than my cottage. This is better than most of the flats I’ve lived in. This is better than the hostel in Portsmouth where I spent six months studying advanced marine engineering while working nights at a chandlery.
‘Bastards,’ I mutter, but there’s no heat in it. Whoever Pete was, he looked after this place. Kept it ready. Kept Grandad’s bones alive underneath his own additions, even kept that sticker on his fridge like an acknowledgement. I know whose this is. I’m just borrowing it.
I should resent that. I do resent it, somewhere underneath.
But resentment’s a luxury I can’t afford right now, and besides – the camp bed doesn’t collapse when I sit on it, which already makes it superior to the cottage.
The wool blanket smells like diesel and salt and the hint of a scent unknown.
Safety, maybe. It’s a combination that says working harbour rather than tourist attraction.
I find the carved initials on the workbench, running my fingers along them like reading braille. KH. JH. Kit and Jude Harding, marking territory in my family’s space like boys pissing on trees. Harding initials carved into a Trelawney workbench. Twenty years of assuming what’s yours is theirs.
But there, in the corner where the light barely reaches, carved deeper than the rest: WT. Walter Trelawney. My grandfather. And underneath, in a child’s wonky letters: GT. My dad. And smaller still, so faint I almost miss it: bt. Lowercase. Uncertain. Mine.
I trace those tiny letters and I’m five years old, Grandad lifting me up so I could reach, his big hand over mine on the penknife. Make your mark, my bird. Trelawneys always leave a mark.
Well. I left. But the mark stayed.
The kettle works. The tea is fresh. I sit on the camp bed with my hands wrapped around a mug with a fresh brew, but no milk, and my eyes are stinging, but I’m pretty sure it’s the dust causing it, and absolutely nothing else.
I let myself feel it for exactly thirty seconds – the grief and the rage and the longing and the fierce, stubborn certainty that I’m not leaving again.
I didn’t come back to fix and sell. I came back because this is the only place that ever felt like mine, even when they took it away.
Even when Grandad moved us to the other end of the country and spent twenty years pretending it didn’t break his heart.
Even when Dad drank himself into a ghost and then a grave.
Even when I scraped through every port town on the south coast, fixing other people’s boats, building other people’s businesses, learning a trade that should have been my birthright.
This shed. This harbour. This work.
Mine. Still mine.
Thirty seconds. Then I wipe my eyes, drink my tea, and start planning.
By seven, I need real coffee and food that isn’t the emergency biscuits I’ve been surviving on. The Lavender Café’s just opening, purple door propped wide to let in morning air that carries the smell of fresh bread from somewhere deeper in the building.
It’s exactly what you’d expect from a Cornish village café – mismatched chairs that somehow work together, walls covered in local art that ranges from brilliant to what someone’s grandmother painted after too much sherry.
The menu is on a chalkboard, handwriting that loops and swirls like it tried to be fancy but gave up halfway through.
Cinnamon and fresh bread and old coffee grounds all fighting it out in the air.