The Old Boat Shed

Chapter 1

Tilly Bloomwood sat in a bar of a very fancy, very tropical five-star hotel in Fiji with a large gin in front of her, a glum look on her face and a tiny bead of sweat running down the inside of her sundress.

In the ginormous glass, a black straw sat next to a slice of dried lime as she stared at a little line of bubbles rising up the side.

With her feet dangling from the stool, thick tropical heat enveloped her as she looked across the beach at an inky blue, clear night sky.

Too-loud, too-cheesy hotel music pumped, and she wondered if the air conditioning had started working again in the staff quarters.

Shaking her head, she fiddled with the straw, not quite able to believe that yet again here she was sitting in a bar on her own, waiting.

Was "Waiting", indeed, Tilly Bloomwood’s new middle name? Perhaps.

It appeared that drinking for one at a bar had become somewhat of a theme in Tilly Bloomwood's life.

Sitting around on her own hadn't really been part of the plan when she'd left good old Blighty with a smile on her face and adventure in mind, but slowly doing just that had inched its way into the nitty-gritty of her life.

Back then, four years prior, as she'd sailed away from Southampton on a ship, the plan had been nothing other than a voyage to see the world. Free from the coercion of her ex-husband and having escaped a quite frankly terrifying marriage, she'd had one thing on her mind and one thing only: to be free. To fully release herself from his control. She’d intended to spread her wings, let loose, travel, escape. In some ways she’d accomplished just that; in others, so very much not.

At that stage, when she'd boarded the cruise ship, she'd not seen waiting in her future, but, for sure, she'd got to know it exponentially well.

Waiting had become her new best friend for sure.

The actual sitting by herself in a bar nursing a drink didn't bother her as such.

In actual fact, Tilly quite liked her own company, which, considering her current situation in life, was a lucky thing.

She'd rather sit on her own reading a book, scheme up plans or think about the future than have to make small talk with yet another cashed-up person on holiday in the sun.

Nope, being on her own wasn't a problem in the slightest. In fact, she quite embraced her inner introvert.

Nor really was the tropical heat a problem, the price of the gin, the bar or even the sun-damaged tourists.

It was more the premise that four years of waiting for her musician partner to hit the big time had become a little bit old. Just like her. And him.

She’d met her partner, Lennixx, on a cruise where she’d been working behind the bar, him playing the piano, and she’d been with him ever since.

He’d not been part of the plan in the beginning, but somehow he and she were still very much a thing or, at least, it seemed that way from the outside.

Washing the last of a complimentary dish of bar snacks down with gin, she wondered whether or not to get another drink, walk around to the beach bar to watch Lennixx play or go back to her room.

Decisions, decisions, none of them fun. Quite frankly, she was bored with the whole damn thing.

The adventures that had lived in her head to see the world had been dimmed by the reality of yet another hotel bar as she waited for Lennixx (real name Ben Jones) to finish performing.

Concluding that she’d stay where she was, she ordered another gin and decided to scroll through her Reddit and Facebook groups on her phone.

Not up for playing the game of girlfriend of the musician, she decided that her online groups would be more entertaining than watching Lennixx play the same old tune for the trillionth time.

Fulfilling the role of partner to Lennixx Woolf had meant that she'd seen the front and back end of a venue or six.

She'd got to know the ins and outs that had come with being the girlfriend of the man in a one-man band well.

She'd seen it all, or so she thought. The women who'd undone their top few buttons as they'd watched him play after too many drinks.

The freebie seekers who constantly messaged him on social media.

The excited groupie-style questions and bright eyes after he'd performed his best Tom Jones.

Tapping here and there on her phone, Tilly succumbed to a spot of doomscrolling and then navigated to her Facebook groups where she was a member of all sorts, but mostly those discussing, dissecting and deep-diving all things small business.

She loved her entrepreneurial groups, spent way too long perusing the ups and downs of start-up businesses galore, knew the ins and outs of how to earn from digital media and could give a TED Talk on ways to create a side hustle.

None of which she was even remotely near to.

Currently, Tilly Bloomwood was not even close to being an entrepreneur.

She did not have a small business and was not about to navigate a start-up anytime soon.

She was a cleaner in a five-star hotel on a tropical island who spent most, if not all, of her days pandering to guests and their seven-star needs.

There was not, as far as she was aware, a side hustle in sight.

There was, however, hope, or so she assumed.

It was just that she wasn’t quite there yet, which is why she continued to love her group.

Small business sat somewhere in her future; she just hadn’t quite worked out what.

Though the word “entrepreneurship” itself made her gag, there was no doubt that it was in her blood.

Back in the day, her dad had made his living buying and selling failing companies.

It hadn't made him a fortune, but it had kept quite a nice roof over the Bloomwoods' heads, and the ins and outs of it had somehow got into Tilly's blood.

Oh, how many ideas she'd had over the years. She’d cooked up more business start-ups to bootstrap from scratch than she'd had hot dinners.

She'd even thought about starting a cleaning business specifically for five-star hotels since she'd been working in cleaning jobs whilst touring the world, agog at how inefficient they were. It had not failed to astonish her how there was a gap in the market waiting to happen, but actually getting something like that off the ground wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded.

Scrolling down the posts in a Facebook group detailing small failing businesses for sale, she saw the same old things she always came across.

Listed over and over again, people were desperate to get shot of ideas to make money that had gone wrong: dry cleaners that had gone bust, cafés that had never taken off, gift shops full of stock, frozen yoghurt anyone?

Not only had she seen many similar adverts over the years, but she'd also worked in them.

Her dad had tried his hand at all sorts, and she'd been his willing and able assistant.

In her teenage years, she'd seen it all, worked in a party shop that had gone into liquidation, a stables without any horses, a laundrette with old coin machines and coffee shops galore.

For sure, small business was in Tilly Bloomwood's blood.

As statistics go, it was only a matter of time before she had one of her own.

Scanning, tapping and ingesting this and that, about halfway down, a small post caught her eye.

The Old Boat Shed

Seasonal shop in a small coastal town. #1 location.

Ongoing concern. Yearly revenue in summer season alone.

All equipment. Ready to go right away.

Come and experience the wonders of Darling Island.

Tilly nodded to herself. Darling Island, as far as she knew, was just off the south coast of England, and a very pretty part of the world.

Not quite remote as such, and definitely not like the tropical island she found herself on, but anchored to the UK mainland by a chain ferry with its own unique kind of blue sea.

Its residents liked to think of themselves as special, as far as Tilly could recall.

Tilly nodded; she supposed, really, they were.

Googling the business, hoping to find out a bit more, a strange thing occurred.

The wonderful World Wide Web did not actually dredge up much at all about the so-called ongoing concern.

As she tapped on the first result about Darling Island, Tilly’s heart thumped as homesickness plonked front and centre.

Her pining for England had first arrived as a bolt out of the blue on a cruise ship in the middle of the Maldives.

Now it accompanied her with all its angsty panging nearly every single day.

Who would have thought she would miss grey skies, fish and chips, PG and friendly faces? No one, but, oh, how she did.

Smiling as she read about Darling Island, Tilly sipped her gin and digested. Boasting its own microclimate, a chain ferry, and claiming to be so many miles from care, she liked the sound of it more and more as she tapped, read and scrolled.

Darling is a quiet seaside town on Darling Island known for its fine architecture and olde-worlde charm. Nestled on the beautiful, hazy waters of Darling Estuary, Darling's sandy beaches and bustling community are a well-kept secret just off the coast.

You know you've arrived on Darling when you step off The Pride of Darling floating bridge and take a trip up the main street on the tram.

With its beautiful sea mists, flora and fauna, and the sound of the old foghorn in the distance, Darling will hold you in her grasp and never let you go.

Darling Island ~ just off the mainland, so very far from care.

The further she perused, the more intrigued Tilly became.

Smiling to herself, she realised that if her dad had been alive, he would have jumped into the Facebook post with both feet.

As an image of him sitting at the kitchen table years before going through one of his business-for-sale papers with a biro and a half-drunk cup of tea came to mind, she chuckled.

He'd have looked at The Old Boat Shed ad and been in the car before he'd finished reading. Tapping on the photo of the Boat Shed, Tilly squinted. The photograph was truly awful and not selling much of a dream at all. Slightly out of focus, taken in the wrong light, grainy and the wrong way around, but the shed building itself looked okay-ish. The deck appeared quite nice, the main door a bit shabby around the edges, and the scenery wasn’t bad.

There was something about the place that kept making her have a second look.

With half an eye on a group of businessmen who’d just walked into the bar, daring any of them to approach her, after a spot more googling all things Darling Island, Tilly tapped her banking app and nodded.

Still sitting right there in an account doing nothing other than earning interest was the money from her failed marriage.

Nobody really knew about the money she'd received from her divorce. She’d certainly kept quiet that it had ended up being quite the tidy sum.

Lennixx absolutely knew nothing about it.

She'd kept it well away from his eyes and ears because, quite simply, he would have been all over it like a rash.

Wondering if she could be bothered to stroll around and say goodnight to Lennixx before he headed straight for an island cruise, Tilly signed out of the app and tapped back on the post about the shed.

From what she could see of Darling Island, to be quite honest, she'd be there in a heartbeat.

If only. She'd had enough of traipsing around the world on a cruise ship or being holed up in a five-star hotel watching the wealthy play the same old games over and over again.

Tilly Bloomwood was oh-so bored with the lot of it.

Sick to the back teeth of the designer watches over the tans, fed up with the muscle relaxants pumped into the sides of cheeks, bored of watching women on sunbeds with margaritas at three.

Over rolling her eyes at the couples dripping in sparkly things and doused in their holiday clothes at seven.

An old boat shed on a little island in England? Would that do her nicely? From where Tilly Bloomwood was sitting? Yes, it would, indeed.