Chapter 2
Chapter Two
ISLA
Iwake up in the middle of the afternoon, creased into Maggie’s sofa like a hungover ghost with a crick in her neck.
Fuck. I try and pull myself up, but I’m wedged. I roll myself off, landing on the floorboards with my hands and knees first. Sand grinds into my palms.
The Ritz it is not.
I took Maggie there once, before schedules and press junkets devoured every spare second.
She came to London to see one of my premieres and I booked us a suite.
She’d nodded politely, admired everything, then I’d come out of the bathroom to find her running her finger along the edges of the windowsill looking for dust.
See, she hated it.
I need to clean this place if I’m going to sell it.
Am I going to sell it? I could stay for a week or two, pack up her belongings and put them in storage.
After that, I don’t know. What would I do with it all long-term?
What would I do with teacups and old cigar boxes filled with buttons and cotton?
All I know is that it’s the only place I want to be right now. Off-grid. Off camera.
London isn’t home. Not anymore. Maybe it never was.
The headlines call me a meltdown. Maggie used to call me her rose.
One of them must be right. I just don’t know which.
I change into some faded old jeans, and rifle through my suitcase trying to find anything that will keep me warm, and not like an A-list alien docking down on Cornish sands.
In the end I tug on an old denim jacket, one I haven’t worn since a film premiere in Edinburgh.
It was vintage chic that night, styled over a borrowed dress I can’t remember.
Diamonds on loan. The fashion mags had said I was styled with a careless, breathtaking grace.
They didn’t know that my stylist had full-on melted down when I’d suggested it.
Now it’s one gust away from falling apart.
The fawn Celine I arrived in, I place in Maggie’s wardrobe. Out of sight.
Outside, the wind does that trick where it slaps you across the face and says welcome home. A seagull screams like it’s got personal beef with me, and I march down the lane towards the harbour before I change my mind.
The town hasn’t changed much. The butcher still has a cartoon pig on the window.
Reminds me why I’m pescatarian. The newsagent still has mint humbugs in a jar older than I am.
I can still feel them stuck to the back of my teeth.
Can’t remember when I last had anything like that.
And The Ship Inn, God bless it, still has hanging baskets with dead trailing lobelia and a handwritten sign for karaoke Wednesdays.
There’s an optimistically early pumpkin on a cottage doorstep – already carved, already slumping at the edges. A little too soon, a little too hopeful. Like it doesn’t know the frost is coming.
I’ve been away ten years, but it could have been yesterday.
Ten summers I came here. Ten summers of arriving in July with a suitcase full of sundresses and leaving in September with salt in my hair and Kit Harding’s goodbye kiss still burning on my lips.
Every year, the same pattern. The train pulling into the station, Maggie waiting with her handbag and sensible shoes, then when we were old enough, Kit – Kit leaning against his truck, trying to look casual, like he hadn’t been counting down the days.
We had two months. Sixty days. And we made every single one of them count.
Swimming at dawn. Midnight walks to the lighthouse. His hands in my hair, my name on his lips like a prayer. We were summer itself – golden and fleeting and hopelessly, achingly temporary.
Every August, he’d ask me to stay. Every August, I’d promise to come back.
Until I didn’t.
It’s been ten years, but my body remembers. Remembers the weight of his hand in mine. The taste of salt and Kit and teenage dreams. Remembers what it felt like to be loved like that – completely, desperately, like every sunset was our last.
Maybe it was.
I keep my head down. Some people look twice, always unsure if they saw correctly the first time. Others look away fast, as if catching my eye might make them part of the headline. I can’t blame them.
I don’t want to be part of the headline either.
I walk past the fishing boats first. Their names are painted in fading letters: Morning Glory, Sea Witch… Another one is so faded and peeled that the name is now illegible. Then of course there’s the tourist boats, all shiny and polished, more statement than livelihood.
Beyond the fishing boats sits the lifeboat station, the RNLI flag snapping in the wind. The boathouse doors are open, and I can see the orange and blue hull of the all-weather lifeboat inside, ready. Always ready.
In LA, lifeguards are professionals. Tanned, trained, working beaches like it’s a nine-to-five.
I’d forgotten until this very moment how different it is here.
The men who haul nets at dawn are the same ones who drop everything when their pagers go off.
Who launch into storms to pull strangers from sinking boats. Who risk their lives for free.
Volunteers. All of them.
And I’d forgotten, blinkered by glitzy glamour and photo-shoot calls.
I hunker down into the old coat. What would Maggie say if she could see me now?
There’s a few men down at the Lifeboat Station, next to the old community boat shed.
I hold my hand up to shield my eyes as I try and see who they are.
Is that Cal Morrison? I shake my head and try not to wonder if Kit Harding might be on the crew like his dad, and his grandfather, and his great grandfather.
Of course he is. Of course Kit Harding grew up to be the kind of man who saves people.
I pass the fish shack just as the bell above it rings and Bill Tiller pops his head out, apron stained, grin wide. In an instant, I’m eighteen again and a little sunburned across the shoulders. ‘Oh bloody hell, if it isn’t Hollywood herself.’
I freeze. Heart stumbling. My stomach twists and a cool bloom of sweat prickles across the back of my neck. But then I stand up straight, breathe.
Frankie appears beside him, chewing a toothpick and glaring at a lobster like it’s personally insulted him. ‘You’re not dead then?’
Frankie has deep creases around his eyes. Laughter lines etched into perpetually tanned skin. Bill’s hair is iron grey. And something about it makes my insides ache.
I blink, trying not to let the shock of their ageing show. ‘Not yet.’
Bill beams just like he always did. How is it possible to be away so long, to even forget that people exist, but the moment you see them again, they are back. Name. Character. Smile. Memory is an impressive thing. ‘Want a cod bap, Isla? Still got that weak spot for vinegar and regret?’
I laugh before I mean to. It bubbles up, ridiculous and real. ‘Always.’ I shake my head. ‘I can’t believe you remember.’
Frankie flicks his toothpick out from between his teeth, brown spots on the back of his hand. ‘Never going to forget you, love, are we?’
I shrug, not wanting it to seem quite as desperate as it echoes within me. ‘Never know.’ Frankie gives me a broad and dramatic wink and another childhood flashback hits. Hamlet. Frankie. I drop my head to hide my smile.
The smell from the van makes my stomach growl. Got to be about 800 calories in one of their baps. I root myself in place and wait for them to fry it up. ‘Much changed?’ I ask, keeping my tone light.
‘Not much, you know how it is.’ Bill nods out to the sea.
I’m not sure what he thinks I know or don’t know.
Not sure if there is an accusation lingering there, but then he cracks a weathered smile and adds, ‘Dot’s still at the post office, but she’s got a computer now.
Thinks she’s bloody Google.’ He hands me the bap wrapped in paper.
When I reach for my wallet, he waves me off.
‘On the house. Figure you need it after what that bastard did.’
My throat tightens.
And here we go.
‘Oh, we’ve all read the headlines, Isla, and we’ve got you, kid,’ Frankie says, leaning on the counter.
‘I always said that Vale had a slimy look, you know? I saw him on Jonathan Ross once and I said he was as slippery as an eel.’ He looks to Bill for confirmation.
‘You remember that, right. He was wearing that silver suit, and I said—’
‘Aye, Frankie,’ Bill cuts in. ‘I remember. I said he looked like a big shiny shit.’ I almost laugh. The great and all-powerful Marcus Vale being described as a big shiny shit.
Frankie, though, is already moving the conversation on. ‘Reuben’s still fishing when he shouldn’t be,’ Bill says. ‘Too old, too stubborn. Jude’s got a limp now – accident few years back, they don’t talk about it. And Kit…’ he trails off.
He chews on his toothpick thoughtfully. ‘The Hardings might be a different story.’ He looks almost apologetic, shoulders shrugging up by his ears. ‘Just warning you. They aren’t quite how they used to be.’
I swear my heart is hammering and the earth is shifting beneath me.
But I’m a trained, award-winning actress; there is not a chance in hell I’m going to let it show.
‘So, Kit’s still here then?’ I ask. Innocent.
Nonchalant. Like my lungs aren’t going to cave in while I wait for an answer that takes far too long to come.
Frankie gives me a long look. And yes, it’s pointed. ‘He’s got a little girl now. Maisie. Wife passed two years back.’
My stomach twists again and it’s got nothing to do with hunger pangs.
Married.
A father.
Widower.
‘Cancer,’ Bill adds softly. ‘Jess was a good sort. Kit’s not been the same, and who can blame him.’
I swallow hard, but my fingers have the lightest tremor while my mouth takes a moment to find something suitable to say. ‘I didn’t know.’ It’s the truth. It’s also pathetic.
‘Course you didn’t,’ Frankie mutters. ‘Not like you ever came back, is it?’ He’s only stating facts, but they slice down deep into wounds that are too big for me to patch up.
‘It wasn’t that easy,’ I say, although I know it sounds pathetic.