Chapter 5 #3
She studies me for a moment, head tilted, and her gaze narrows – not quite with recognition, but the ghost of it. Like she’s trying to place a tune she hasn’t heard in years.
‘Do I know you, love? You’ve got a familiar look about you.’
My mouth opens. Brynn Trelawney. You used to slip me sherbet lemons over the post office counter when Grandad came in for his stamps. The words are right there, fully formed, ready.
I swallow them.
Because if Dot Pendleton – and it is Dot, I’m almost sure, older and softer but the same sharp eyes behind those glasses – if Dot knows who I am, the whole village knows by teatime.
And if the whole village knows, Reuben Harding knows.
And I’m not ready for that. Not yet. Not until I’ve got my feet under me.
‘Just passing through,’ I say, and it tastes like a lie.
‘Well.’ She doesn’t look entirely convinced, but she lets it go. ‘That’s more than most tourists would do – staying with her like that.’ She presses a paper bag into my hands. ‘Pasty. Still warm. You look like you need feeding.’
I want to tell her I’m not a tourist. That I was born here. That I used to steal peanuts from The Ship and build sandcastles on the beach with a boy who grew up to scowl at me across a harbour.
But I don’t. I take the pasty and say thank you and let her think I’m nobody.
Then she’s gone. Absorbed back into the waiting crowd.
I bite into the pasty and it’s proper Cornish, heavy on the potato, perfect ratio of pastry to filling, you can’t get anywhere else, and God knows I’ve tried, and realise I’m being absorbed too. Fed. Claimed. Like Sea Salt Bay has already decided I’m staying before I have.
Maybe it knows something I don’t.
Or maybe it knows exactly what I do – that I’m not leaving. That I tried everywhere else and everywhere else felt like wearing someone else’s coat. Wrong in the shoulders. Never quite warm enough.
Back at the shed – my shed, and I need to start owning that – I make tea using Peter’s kettle, sit at the workbench he maintained, and start making lists on paper I find in a drawer. Block capitals. Grandad’s habit, not mine, except it is mine now.
WHAT’S brOKEN:
The cottage (roof, electrics, heating – not the structure, that’s sound)
The harbour (not enough crew, not enough hands)
Nina (grief with a hair trigger)
Whatever happened twenty years ago that drove my family out
Possibly me
WHAT’S WORKING:
The shed (thank you, Peter)
The coffee machine at the Lavender Café
The lifeboat (barely, and on a skeleton crew)
The community (holding on by its fingernails)
My hands (still know the work)
WHAT NEEDS DOING FIRST:
Move into the shed (camp bed > cottage floor, pride can wait)
Income – offer mechanical services at the harbour? Fill Peter’s gap?
Start on the cottage roof before the next big rain
Learn what happened to my family. The real story, not whatever Reuben Harding’s been telling people
Stop caring about things that aren’t mine to fix
I’m still writing when I hear the boat returning. The engine sound carries different when they’re coming home – lighter, maybe, or maybe that’s just projection, the way you hear what you need to.
I go to the window, watch them come in.
Count them. Same number that left. Everyone walks off under their own power.
Jude’s last off, and even from here I can see the exhaustion in how he moves. He stops on the dock, runs a hand through his hair, and for a moment looks exactly as wrecked as Nina did on the café floor.
Then someone calls his name and he straightens and puts on whatever face they need to see.
I know that reassembly. I’ve done it myself, in other harbours, other lives. The quick recalibration from human to functional. The mask that says, I’m fine when fine is the last thing you are.
I watch him until he’s out of sight. Then go back to my lists and add to WHAT NEEDS DOING:
Stop noticing when Jude Harding is pretending
Stop recognising myself in his exhaustion
Accept that this place is getting under my skin and it’s too late to stop it
The shed settles around me – Peter’s space becoming mine, or maybe always mine underneath, the way the carved initials on the workbench go all the way down to bedrock. bt. Lowercase. Uncertain. Five years old and already leaving a mark I’d spend twenty years trying to outrun.
Grandad’s voice in my head, clear as the harbour bell: You’ll go back one day, my bird.
I pick up his toolbox – his initials scratched into the lid, the weight of it familiar in my hands like a handshake – and start unpacking just as a solid shape brushes against my calf.
I let out a scream that I wish didn’t come from inside me and glance down to find a black cat winding up for a second headbutt against my left leg.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I ask it. Unsurprisingly it doesn’t answer, just winds around my ankles again. That explains the cat bowl.
I can’t look after a cat. Whoever this Peter was he had more patience than me. I’ve never kept anything else alive in my life. I give it a gentle push with the heel of my boot. It just comes back for more. ‘Wrong person, buddy,’ I tell it. Another figure of eight around my ankles. I sigh. Loudly.
You’ll go back one day, my bird.
Another sigh.
One day is today. Apparently, it comes with a cat.