Still Water Page 3
“To see someone who could have died, living. Being given a second chance. Imagine doing that, being that person who’d given someone a second chance at living.”
“People do that all the time, don’t they?”
She looked at him. “You mean doctors? But what if it isn’t your job, what if you’re just an ordinary person, and you save someone’s life.”
“Then you’ve earned your place in heaven.” He smiled. “Who was the man?”
“I don’t know.”
They sipped their wine. She shivered a little. “I just keep thinking, a boy is sleeping in his own bed tonight who maybe shouldn’t be.”
“But maybe he should, and that was the point.”
“That he was meant to be saved?” She thought about it. “It raises all the big questions doesn’t it, fate and courage and responsibility. What sort of person does that, do you think? Saves someone else’s life? Do you have to be very brave or very stupid to jump into the sea for someone else?”
After a moment Alex replied, “I don’t think it’s a question of bravery or stupidity. I think it’s about humanity.”
She considered this. It was true that she hadn’t recognised the man, but she had seen that he was young, that he had a mess of dark hair, that he was strong enough to haul a body through the water.
Her father said gently, “It’s upset you.”
“No. Not really. It’s just, it’s not often you get to witness an act of real life heroism, is it? And it gives you pause.”
“It does.”
She shivered again.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s getting chilly out here.”
“Thought you said it was nearly barbecue weather.”
“Freezing to death while you’re charcoaling the sausages is barbecue weather.”
She followed him inside, remembering beach parties spent huddled in towels for warmth, goosebumped and searing her fingers in the flames. “I want an idyllic summer,” she told him as he stood beating the moths from the conservatory with an old tea-towel.
He cast her a glance. “Don’t we all.”
Chapter Three
He bangs the door shut behind him, throws the bolt. He’s breathing hard, his hair damp and wild, and when he turns towards me his bloodshot eyes are those of a stranger. I gasp on a sob and then I’m lost, shaking and keening as I weep, out of anyone’s control. He stares at me, appalled.
“Why here?” he says at last, and the roughness of his voice tears at me. “Why here, of all places?”
I shake my head. I haven’t the energy or the will for any sort of fight.
“I mean, I get it, you want to run to the ends of the earth … but not when the ends of the earth is where you live.”
I gulp, wretched. “I just wanted to feel safe.”
And then my face is pressed into the wet leather of his jacket, his arms tight around me. Silence except for my snivelling. There’s nothing to say, when we know neither of us will ever be safe again.
“Okay.” After a minute he pulls back, his stubble scraping against my forehead. “Stop crying. Look at me.” I manage it, just. His eyes are wet and red-rimmed too. “You need money,” he says. “And your passport.”
I stare at him.
He runs his hand back through his hair, lets out a long breath. “Two choices. And you have to make that choice now. We walk into a police station tonight or we use the time we’ve got to get as far as we can. Justice or freedom. Which way do you want to go?”
“How long … how long d’you think it’ll be … ”
“A day? Two, maybe.”
“Do we have to go now?”
He looks exasperated, then catches sight of my den under the table. He can probably smell my puke as well. He says, more gently, “We do, yes. But you’ve time to wash, get your stuff together. You can sleep in the car.”
I think of the life I’ve had, everything I’ve ever known, all of it drifting away from me forever. But it’s the wrong image. It’s already gone, and it hasn’t sailed gently into the sunset; it’s burnt to ashes.
Upstairs I stand whimpering and trembling under the shower, clumsily soaping my skin. The water’s hot but I can’t feel it; my body’s clean again but I can’t care. I have to snap into action but I just want to crawl back under the table, fall asleep and never wake up. There are ways to make that happen, of course, several of them available to me in this house. The thought has been exploding intermittently in my head like flares in the dark.
Except Gil’s here.
I wrap a towel around myself, letting my hair drip, and find him standing desperate in the careless mess of my bedroom, my rucksack empty on my bed. He says, “You need to pack. We won’t be able to carry anything more than that.” He’s watching me, trying to determine what state I’m in, wary and impatient at the same time. I rub myself dry, squeeze the ends of my hair in the towel, pull on clean underwear, jeans, t-shirt and hoodie before cramming half a dozen of the same into my rucksack. My passport is in the bedside drawer as it always is. I fumble with wash stuff in the bathroom, find my bag and twist all the money I took from the station cashpoint into a tight roll, secure it with a hair bobble. I tuck this into my pocket, then let my gaze trawl helplessly round the room. I don’t know what else I’m going to need and everything I can see is so familiar and precious my heart contracts with panic and loss.
He sees this in my face. “Don’t think about it.”
I nod.
“Come on.” He pulls the drawstrings of my rucksack tight and hauls it easily over his shoulder. I follow him out onto the landing, pause outside the door at top of the stairs. For a moment I can go no further and my fist closes around the handle.
Gil, halfway down, stops and turns back towards me. “No. No, no. Come on. Don’t think about that either.” He marches up again, takes my hand. “You said you wanted to be safe? That’s what we have to think about now. What’s ahead of us, not what’s behind.”
I waver. “I’m never going to come back here, am I?”
“No,” he says.
I let him lead me down the stairs, out into the lane. It’s pitch dark and silent but even so he’s tucked the car out of sight. We slide in, the thunk of our doors shutting loud in the stillness. He’s taken one of the blankets from the kitchen and wraps it around me. “You all right?”
“No.”
“No,” he says. “No. Me either.”
He hesitates for the briefest of moments, both of us staring ahead through the wind-screen at the navy sky and black sea, and then the stench of fear and shame becomes too much, and he starts the engine.
Chapter Four
It was a morning less piercingly beautiful than the last. Cecily pulled on a cardigan as she pottered in her café, wiping down tables and topping up salt and pepper while the first batch of scones was baking, removing furling gerbera heads from the bud vases and replacing them with pale blown peonies. Outside the only movement in a deserted square was a gull on the window sill, snapping at the rain which dripped from the blue and white striped awning. She made herself a coffee from the Gaggia, its whooshing and squirting one of the background noises of her life, and sipped it whilst surveying her realm.
More years ago than she cared to calculate, she and her parents had spent the summer sanding this floor and painting these walls, driving across the county sourcing settles and tables and benches of reclaimed pine, installing industrial appliances in the kitchen she’d thought would never be free of mouse droppings. They’d said it was their investment in their old age, when they’d weighed in with more money than the bank would countenance, and then the minute they retired they’d buggered off to Spain. Not that she resented being able to spend the darkest days of a British winter on the Costa de la Luz, but it had meant that for better or worse the little café, the business, was all hers. She gazed around and wondered for the first time in a long time how much it was worth.
The ting of tubular bells as the door opened and she looked up, saw Henry amble in, push the door closed on the chill draught which had accompanied the tinging. He loped across the room, pulled out the chair opposite hers. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Groundhog day, she thought. One or more of the surf dudes stumbling in early doors, hung-over but too accustomed to dawn rising to sleep it off. She’d tease them about lack of commitment and they’d complain but not too much. Breakfast at Cecily’s was one of the ever-fixèd marks of their day. “Coffee?”
Henry grunted. She fetched him an Americano and he smiled at her from beneath the unwashed blond strands of his hair. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He was, she thought, an unexpected sort of build for a surfer, tall and heavy-shouldered, more weight on him than you’d imagine would be helpful when you were trying to balance on a strip of board in the middle of a crashing wave. But hey, what did she know. He was also the least chauvenistic of the surf dudes, the most sensitive, least tiresome. It had taken her some while to realise this, to make the effort to distinguish one from another. For a long time she had only seen them as they hung in Gil’s wake, Peter Pan and The Lost Boys.
“It was a good night, then?” she prodded.
He sipped his coffee, gestured that the state he was in was evidence of just how good the night had been. “Fine times, Cecily. Fine times.” It was a phrase from the old days. She smiled, remembering flames crackling in the dark, Buz playing 70s guitar solos, digging pits in the sand to cool the beers. Laughter and drunken philosophising and someone’s hand warm against her skin.
Henry was frowning. “What happened to you?”
“Last night? Oh, I was ... tired.” She shrugged. “Gil told you, about his heroics?” He wouldn’t have told them, she was sure, of her reaction because Gil had his flaws but he didn’t bitch.
“Didn’t have to. Couple of guys saw it, bought him drinks all night.”
“Ah.” She indicated his coffee mug. “You want something to go with that?”
Henry considered. “You know what I’d really like? Waffles. Do you do waffles?”
“I can do waffles.” She stood up. “Honey? Maple syrup?”
“With, like, cream?”
“With actual cream.” She tripped through to the kitchen, turned on the radio. After a moment Henry joined her, leaning against the arch of the threshold. “How’s your year been?” she asked him.
He watched her assembling ingredients, plugging in the waffle iron. “Yeah, it’s been good. Have to wonder how much longer I can keep going at the day job though.”
“Why? Is the work drying up?” Henry had begun as an Outward Bound instructor, dabbled in the waters of Management Team-Building weekends, taught sailing and wind-surfing at a recreational centre in Falmouth. None of it ever seemed to take up very much of his time.
“No, far from it. It’s just, you know, I’m gonna be thirty this year. Maybe it’s time I started taking something seriously.”
“Well absolutely,” she deadpanned. “Because if you pass thirty and you haven’t started taking something seriously, who knows what might happen? Floods, earthquakes, governments could topple.”
“All that was my fault?”
She laughed. He grinned. “Truthfully?” she said. “I know whereof you speak.”
“What, this place? This is grown-up stuff though isn’t it. Your own business.”
“Mm.” She added lightly, “But is it what I want for the rest of my life?”
He looked at her in surprise and she realised this wasn’t a conversation she was ready to have yet. She had barely formed the thought in her own head. The tubular bells tinged again. “Ooh,” she said. “Customers.”
Henry glanced back into the café. “Nah. S’just Gil.”
He sauntered in, wearing jeans and a short-sleeved check shirt, his dark curls still damp from the shower. “Hey. We’re making waffles.”
“We are,” Cecily agreed.
Gil glanced from one to the other, unused to finding them alone together and certainly unused, she thought, to the sense that he might be interrupting something. “So how are you two this morning?”
“Henry is hung-over, I am fine and you are … ?”
“Great.” He smiled. “Great.”
Henry snorted. “You were leathered.”
“What can I say? I can hold my drink. Henry have you worked out how to use that coffee machine yet?”
Gil stood close while Henry played with the Gaggia. “You okay?”
She gave the batter a whip, poured it carefully into the waffle iron. “Yeah. You gave me a scare last night, that’s all. Sorry.”
“That’s really all?” He held her gaze.
She looked back at him levelly. “Believe me.”
“Sure.” He paused, took a breath, got that mildly embarrassed look he did when he was about to say something tricky and didn’t want to lie about it. “Last night?”
“Mmmm.”
“Did you notice – on the beach, before the ambulance came – did you notice anyone watching?”
“There were lots of people watching, you attracted quite a crowd. Anyone specific?”
“No, I just … ” he shrugged. “Nah. Never mind. Probably just me.” He smiled, dropped a fleeting kiss on her forehead. “Need some help?” The bells tingled again and he picked up an apron, tying its strings above his bum as he went. “I’ll go.”
“Gil.” Henry, having beaten him to it, met him under the arch. Cecily and Gil looked past him to the slight redhead waiting in the midst of empty tables and peonies. “Lady from the press for you.”
The Walk was a narrow cobbled lane running parallel to the harbour. Here every year in its relentless carousel a trendy bistro or sandal-and-sarong boutique opened and a gallery of driftwood and seascapes closed. In winter a gusty tunnel offering shelter from the lashing rain, it was now a gauntlet of ice-creams, dog-leads, other people’s sunburned flesh. Jem shifted her display board beneath her arm and paused to assess the wares in the window of The Joshua Tree. Slouch suede bags in summerfruit colours; scarves of silk and lace and devoré velvet; tribal necklaces of dark and pale wood. She suspected her jewellery might be a bit too Gothic for their implicit target market, but you could never tell. Beyond the display, deep in the recesses of the shop, a woman was sitting at a white wrought-iron table typing into her Notebook, her blonde hair tied thick and blunt as a blusher brush at the nape of her neck, sleeveless cream top draping elegantly from her shoulders. Her appearance distinguished her; most people who lived and worked in this town looked as though the passage of time ground more slowly here than anywhere else on the planet. Jem was tempted to flee, to shut herself in her box room workshop with her wires and her silver. The thought of doing so and having to admit it to Alex propelled her onto the step, through the door and into the centre of the oiled wood floor of The Joshua Tree.
Grace Kelly looked up from her computer. Jem pasted on a broad smile and crossed the space between them. “My name’s Jemima Gregory.” She held out her hand. “I made an appointment to see you this morning.”
The woman glanced down at the open diary beside her keyboard, smiled. “Of course.” She rose, briefly took Jem’s hand. “Atlanta Fox. Have a seat. Shall I get us some coffee?”
Jem opened her display board and stood it on Atlanta Fox’s desk, rows of earrings jangling lightly in their holes as she adjusted the angle of the velvet boards. She unwrapped several silver pendants on leather thongs and a couple of intricately laced cord and pewter cuffs. As a child, she had been fascinated by the sets of plastic beads and acrylic threads she’d been given as presents, poring over the myriad shapes and colours, spending hours rapt in creations for which her parents had duly exchanged small change and milk bottle tops. But she had never quite been able to part from her treasures and had, to her parents’ amusement, insisted on collecting them all back in again afterwards. Even now, needing to earn a living, her heart contracted a little when a favourite piece was sold. She ought to loan them out, she sometimes thought, like designer jewels on Oscar night.
Atlanta returned with two white square mugs standing on white rectangular saucers which allowed room for a biscuit or two, in this case chocolate amaretti. “Thank you,” Jem smiled. Added bravely, “I love your name, by the way.”
Atlanta rolled her eyes. “My mother had a thing about Gone With the Wind. I have two sisters called Scarlett and Tara.”
“And a brother called Rhett?”
“Thankfully not. I think my father would have drawn the line at that.” She smiled, her gaze settling upon Jem’s display boards. “Oh. Heavens.” She touched the curve of a stylised pendant rose. “May I?”
Jem gestured. “Please do.” She watched as Atlanta examined her work, the gentle stroke of her fingers, the sharper appraisal of her eyes, and struggled to down her coffee feeling as if her own skin were under scrutiny. A lifetime ago this had been her normality, pasting on confidence with her smile, peddling her wares. She remembered how it felt as if it were a part she’d once played and she were recalling glimpses of the script.
“Are you local?” Atlanta asked her.
“Mm. I live just off the cliff road. Have done all my life.”
“How amazing, to have grown up here. You’re so lucky.”
“I am,” Jem agreed. “I appreciate it every day. My father thought that when I went away to uni he’d lost me to the world, but I felt lost in the world.”
“I know just what you mean. I’ve been here a couple of months and it is just such a relief. I don’t miss the city at all.” She unhooked a pair of earrings, turned them over to check their fastenings. “I must say, it’s been terribly easy to settle in. Everyone’s been so friendly.”
She paused, added lightly, “Is there a high turnover of businesses here?”
“It depends,” Jem said. “Your stock should have a pretty broad appeal, for example. End of the summer all the tourists go home but they’re plenty of us left still needing to shop.”
Atlanta looked at her gratefully. “That’s exactly what I was hoping. And it can be a bit of a trek, can’t it, into Penzance or Truro. Especially if the weather’s bad. Do you have other outlets, by the way? Apart from your website?”