by Sue Teddern
Steady on, Annie. You’re not up for an Oscar.
He’s pleased to see me, he really is. I’m glad I washed my hair this morning in the foaming gel the hotel provided. I’m a bit thicker round the middle than I was fifteen years ago but my T-shirt is loose and I bet he’s got a tum on him too.
‘What the heck are you doing here?’ he asks.
‘Oh, you know. In transit. Afternoon to kill. I just bought some wool.’
I hold up the brown paper bag to prove it. I haven’t been stalking you, Duncan, honest. As we chat, a customer approaches the stall and gives Duncan a wave of greeting.
‘Hey Jim,’ he shouts. ‘Won’t be a mo.’ Then to me, ‘Well, if you’ve got an evening to kill too, you must come to ours for supper.’
Ours, eh. So he’s a ‘we’, not a ‘me’. Stands to reason, he’s aged extremely well.
I do a ‘wouldn’t-want-to-be-any-trouble’ shrug but he insists. I’m to meet him back at the stall at 5.30 and we’ll head for his, if I don’t mind sharing a van with any unsold produce. He makes me a massive smoked mackerel sandwich and won’t let me pay.
I do another circuit of the city on the hop-on-hop-off bus, as planned, but my mind is racing and I barely take in any of Edinburgh’s sites. Duncan’s drop-dead gorgeousness, plus the obvious success of his fishy business, has caught me unawares.
When we parted back in Brighton all those years ago, his only plan was to take up a job as a journalist in Scotland, working for a trade paper. Hipsters had yet to be invented but I’d never have had him down for one anyway. Back then he wore contacts and blinked a lot. Heavy hornrims suit him. I suppress the blow job image yet again.
When I return to the Grassmarket, Duncan is all packed up and ready to go. The smell of smoky fish has seeped into the upholstery of his van; I inhale it as we drive off.
‘Oh God, is it really bad?’ he asks. ‘I hardly notice it any more.’
‘It’s noticeable but it isn’t bad. Far from it. And that sandwich was amazing.’
He doesn’t take his eyes off the road but I can see a happy grin. He’s as keen to impress me, after all this time, as I am him.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask, as we head east.
‘Portobello. We moved there when Calum was born.’
‘Duncan, you’re going to have to fill me in on who “we” is.’
He chuckles. ‘I do that a lot. I’ve forgotten how to be me in the singular any more. Okay, I live in Portobello with my wife, Yasmin – she’s an artist – and my two children. Calum is 10, Finlay is 7. My brother, Tom – remember Tom? – he and I set up Hawthorn Smokies in 2014. It was a bit of a punt but we’re finally making a name for ourselves.’
‘Wow, I’m impressed. I always thought you’d end up editor of the Scotsman.’
‘And I thought you’d be something amazing, whenever you decided what that might be. Do you have kids?’
‘I had an unofficial stepson for a while. Josh. But no. No kids.’ I can hear the regret in my voice so I swiftly change the subject. ‘Dad-hood suits you.’
‘It really does, Annie. Don’t know why it took me so long to get around to it.’
Duncan parks the van outside a redbrick house, with a smoky mauve front door and a neglected patch of lawn. An abandoned child’s bike and a stack of orange fish crates take up half the path. I help Duncan unload, as does his son, Fin, though he’s very shy around me.
I’m directed to the kitchen and the smell of smoked fish is replaced by something meaty and stewy, with a hint of burnt Le Creuset. Duncan’s wife wipes her hand on a tea towel to shake mine. She is big breasted and ample hipped, with long black hair caught up in a messy ponytail, kohl-rimmed eyes and a big smile.
‘Annie, hi. I’m Yasmin. Please tell me you’re not vegetarian. Duncan didn’t think to ask.’
‘I eat anything, everything.’
‘No change there then.’ Duncan grins, unscrewing a bottle of red.
Calum is sleeping over at a friend’s so it’s just us four for supper. We eat in the kitchen, a disorganized dumping ground, with piles of paperwork balancing on over-stuffed bookshelves and some half-constructed Lego castle on the sideboard. I am so envious. For all the chaos, it feels like a proper home with a beating heart. Duncan has made a life for himself. This life.
What have I made? What have I lost?
‘How do you know Daddy?’ Fin asks, finally finding his voice.
‘We were friends at university. Good friends. But then we lost touch.’
Duncan gives me a knowing look. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
I push a potato around my plate to wipe up the last bit of gravy. ‘I wanted to get in touch so many times. But you don’t have a presence on social media and whenever I Googled Duncan Hawes, all I could find were newspaper articles from years ago.’
‘That’s my fault,’ Yasmin chips in. ‘I said we should stitch our surnames together when we got married. Hawes plus Thornley equals Hawthorn.’
‘I’m Finlay Ranjit Hawthorn and Cal is Calum Ashok Hawthorn.’
Fin wants to read to Duncan once he’s in bed so Yasmin and I move into the slightly less chaotic front room. She shifts some cardboard boxes from the only armchair so that I can sit, then settles on the sofa.
‘Greetings cards,’ she says, nodding at the boxes. ‘I sell them around the city. I didn’t have the concentration for painting proper after the kids were born so I took a temporary detour. Duncan’s going to build me a studio at the end of the garden, when I’m ready to get back to it, but Smokies is going gangbusters so I’m not holding my breath.’
I see a card at the top of the box. It features a stylized watercolour of a fishing boat tied up at a quay with a seagull right up close in the foreground, as if it’s taking a selfie. It’s very cute.
‘Help yourself. Please, Annie, take a handful. They’re last year’s design so I really need to shift them.’
I take one to send to Bev, one to Kate . . . one to Rob? He doesn’t know about me stealing Dad’s ashes, unless Kate’s dobbed me in. She probably has. She likes being in charge of the news headlines.
‘What do you do?’ Yasmin asks, tucking her feet under her and squishing down a couple of cushions to get comfy. ‘I asked Duncan but he had no idea.’
‘I worked in the City for a bit, after Duncan and I, um, parted company. But it wasn’t for me so I did a PGCE to become a teacher. Geography. In St Albans where I grew up. That’s about it, really.’
‘Wow, that’s some gear shift. Do you love it? I bet you do.’
It’s been a while since I had to explain my downward/sideways career trajectory to anyone. ‘I’m taking a sabbatical,’ I reply, all perky and positive. ‘Health reasons. Stress. Chest pains that turned out to be nothing at all. Plus Mum died. And now Dad has too. Just recently. I’ll go back to it in a bit. Teaching, I mean. Or maybe I won’t. Who knows?’
Yasmin leans forward to pat me on the arm, but I’m not quite close enough. And I really don’t want her to, in case I cry.
‘Oh, Annie. That’s tough. That’s way too much to deal with. Are you dealing with it on your own?’
She wants to know if I have a partner. I would too, if I was her. ‘Mostly, yes. Along with my sister and – some other people. I’m doing okay. Really.’
Duncan comes in, bearing a bottle of whisky and three glasses. Before closing the door, he bellows up the stairs. ‘Lights off now, Finlay Ranjit. I mean it. We did “one more page” five minutes ago.’
He settles down next to Yasmin and pours us each a ‘wee dram’. I don’t normally drink whisky but it feels like warm honey as it goes down.
‘What have I missed?’ Duncan asks.
Now I feel awkward. It was so much easier opening up just to Yasmin because I don’t know her. Duncan took up a big chunk of my life all those years ago and everything I say now will be tinged with our shared history.
But, hey, why not? ‘My dad died and Bev, his lady friend, wanted to scatter
his ashes in the Tyrol so I stole his urn. I’m thinking about taking him on a tour of the Shipping Forecast.’
Yasmin’s eyes widen. Duncan frowns. ‘Sorry to hear that, Annie. I liked your dad. Not sure he liked me though. He was convinced I was the one distracting you from your essays.’
He holds up his glass for a toast so Yasmin and I follow suit.
‘To Paul.’
They clink and drink. I do too.
‘He did like you actually, Duncan. He thought you deserved a medal for taking me on. And it’s Peter, not Paul.’
We do it again. ‘To Peter.’
‘Sorry, Annie. My bad. Hey, what was his nickname for you? You used to get so hacked off whenever I used it.’
‘Annie Lummox. Because I was a lummox. I still am.’
Yasmin has been quietly processing my confession. ‘I’m just trying to work out how long it would take to visit all the sea areas. I don’t even know how many there are. Won’t it be expensive, getting to each one? Will you give the ashes back when you’ve finished?’
Good questions, all of them. ‘It wouldn’t take too long if I only covered the British coastline. Mum left me and Kate a bit of money when she died. Quite a bit actually. It was from an old aunt of hers; Mum was determined we should have a nest egg. I treated myself to a Persian rug and a weekend in New York but I’ve never known what to do with the rest. This feels right.’
‘And Bev doesn’t mind?’ Yasmin wants to know.
‘She says she doesn’t.’
Yasmin nods knowingly at the way I worded my answer. ‘That’s good,’ she finally responds.
‘You don’t think I should?’
Duncan attempts to speak for both of them. ‘It’s not for us to say, hen.’
But Yasmin’s having none of that. ‘I don’t know you, Annie. Even though I know of you, obviously. So you’re perfectly entitled to ignore what I think. And what I think is, if you reckon it will help you process your grief, bloody do it.’
I’m genuinely surprised. I wasn’t expecting that.
‘Does that help?’
‘It does, Yasmin. Thank you. I still have to work out how to do it, though. I only packed a small rucksack. I need clothes, an itinerary . . . a plan.’
Yasmin jumps up and heads for the door. ‘I’ve got a spare wheelie suitcase Duncan’s mum gave Fin. Have that. Everything else, you can sort out as you go along. What size are you?’
‘A 12, sometimes a 14.’
‘Perfect.’ I hear her thump up the stairs.
So Yasmin has a plan, even if I don’t.
I offer to order a cab but Duncan insists on driving me and my new Star Wars wheelie suitcase back to my hotel. ‘Save your money for sea area Malin,’ he tells me as we buckle up and drive off.
Duncan is quiet and just stares at the road ahead. It’s not until we’re passing Holyrood Park that I break the silence.
‘Yasmin’s great,’ I say. ‘And Fin. He’s the dead spit of you. Does Calum look like his mum?’
Duncan takes a deep breath before answering. Then it all comes out in one angry rush. ‘This trip, stealing your dad’s ashes, not having a plan but doing it anyway . . . That’s typical Annie Stanley. I thought you might have changed, fifteen years on, but you’re just the same.’
‘I’ve gone up a cup size,’ I reply, trying to lighten the tone.
‘Your dad was right. You really are Annie Lummox. Take something bad and make it even worse. Do you remember when we were staying with my folks that Christmas?’
Oh, dear God, please don’t mention the al fresco blow job.
‘And you broke a little Chinese vase in the guest room. But you didn’t come clean, you just swept all the bits into a drawer. And my mother didn’t find it for weeks. She hated the bloody vase – that’s why it was in the guest room – but what she hated more was that you didn’t bother to tell her.’
I have no recollection of doing that but I can’t let on to Duncan.
‘Take something bad and make it even worse. That’s you all over.’
Does he think saying it twice will give it added veracity?
‘I know I can be a bit klutzy sometimes,’ I say quietly.
He does a hollow laugh. I’d forgotten how good he was at those. ‘It’s klutzy when you break a vase. It’s more than klutzy when you mess with people’s lives and plans and emotions.’
‘Bev’s given her blessing. I swear she has.’
I nearly tell him that she even facilitated the ashes swap after I accidentally went off with Keith. But I sense that won’t help my defence.
Duncan pulls up with a judder and parks by the Meadows so he can totally concentrate on my character assassination.
‘I don’t mean Bev although, God knows, she must be pretty upset, whatever kind of blessing she felt obliged to give you. I mean us, Annie.’
Us? I took something bad and I made it even worse? Oh no, I’m not having that. Okay, I might have had a bit of a thing with his mate, but that was after he and I broke up.
‘We both knew it was time to grow up and move on, Duncan. You wanted to be a journalist, I wanted to be – actually, I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to be. We couldn’t live the student life when we weren’t students any more. You got the job in Scotland and we broke up.’
Duncan looks as if he’s going to self-combust. ‘It’s Mum’s vase all over again. Jesus! We didn’t break up, Annie, you dumped me. That’s why I took that cruddy job and had to move in with my folks for six months. And then you fucked my best pal, just to make sure I got the message.’
‘It was just sex. It didn’t mean anything.’
‘Not to you, maybe. Or to Simon. But I was gutted. You broke my heart and then you stamped on it in your Doc Martens, for good measure.’
‘I’m really sorry, Duncan. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
He starts the car again. He’s said his piece. He can draw a line and move on. Lucky old him. When he drops me outside my hotel, he looks calm again.
He kisses my cheek. ‘Maybe this is your moment to take a bad thing and not make it even worse. Reckon you can manage that, Annie Lummox?’
Chapter Ten
Tyne
I sleep fitfully, trying to recall Duncan’s mother’s sodding Chinese vase and why I didn’t tell her I’d broken it. I sift through his comments about me always making things worse, which I can’t help feeling is rather unfair. Yes, I’m a bit scattergun in how I deal with things and okay, I’ve been known to plough on with a stupid idea, convinced that it’s got legs, when all around have walked away. But I’m more than that, aren’t I? I’m not always a lummox.
I really didn’t think it through with Dad’s ashes, though. I took the urn from the Welsh dresser in a brief mad moment. Then, when I realized what I’d done, I justified it, rather than quietly returning it, before it was missed. I get that now. I do.
But why won’t anyone believe me when I tell them that Bev is one hundred per cent fine with this? I wouldn’t be here now if she wasn’t.
Also . . . I didn’t dump Duncan. I’m sure I didn’t. It was an amicable split, then we went our separate ways. And while I was adjusting to singledom, I had a fling with Simon, who just so happened to be a mate of Duncan’s. In retrospect, I could perhaps have chosen my fuck buddy more wisely but, guess what, I didn’t. Guilty as charged. I hurt someone I truly cared about. And, clearly, he’s never let it go. So pleased he was able to get it off his chest like that and dump it all back on me. How cleansing for him.
I wake up at five and listen to the Shipping Forecast. It’s soothing and hypnotic, like a Buddhist chant. It doesn’t make me cry, as it has often done over recent weeks. It’s like a prolonged hug from Dad. ‘I’m gone but we still have this, don’t we, An-An?’
Fair Isle, Faeroes, South-East Iceland.
I click open my Star Wars suitcase, thinking Dad and his urn will be happier stowed safely in there. Yasmin has packed me two Sea Salt T-shirts and a pair of boyfriend jeans, all w
ith the labels still attached. There’s also a card, one of her own designs, featuring the selfie-snapping seagull in front of Edinburgh Castle. She has very artistic handwriting.
Dear Annie
I hope these fit. Give them to your favourite charity shop if they don’t. I bought them last year as incentive to lose weight. But I like bread too much.
I hope you find what you’re looking for on your journey. Duncan often talks fondly of you and I’m sure he wishes you the very best too.
If you’re on Facebook, please do let me know how (and where) you are.
Love Yasmin xxx
So she definitely thinks I’m making this trip with Dad’s ashes, which is really sweet and trusting of her, while Duncan assumes I’ll klutz it up. I tell myself I should only do it if I can make things better, not ‘even worse’. That phrase of his will be stuck in my head forever.
The sea area after Forth is Tyne which, according to Google, stretches from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Flamborough Head. I unfurl my trusty tea towel and spread it out on the hotel bed to see where I am and it is. I’ve never been to the North-East of England and have no idea where to head for.
I take a safety pin from the complimentary sewing kit, close my eyes and stab it into the tea towel. On my first attempt, I spear a stylized fish in sea area Dogger. After two more goes, I strike land and yes, it’s in Tyne but it’s not by the sea. The nearest place I’ve heard of is, however, Scarborough.
I know someone in Scarborough: Kim Davenport-formerly-Gorringe, daughter of Maureen and Ray, our old neighbours. She was my first-ever best friend and pops up sporadically on my Facebook feed whenever our algorithms align. She’s still potty about Boyzone, judging by her posts, which generally fall into three categories:
1) All matters Ronan Keating-related, occasionally even a selfie of him and Kim, with her looking all shiny-faced and starstruck.
2) Grave warnings about the latest online scam, followed by a sheepish follow-up confirming it’s a hoax and . . .
3) Nights out with her gal pals; all clinking cocktails, pouty lips and bunny ears.
After my encounter with Duncan, I wonder how sensible it is to keep dredging up people from my past. Kim should be fine, though, because we were besties and we go back to a much more innocent time. She sent me such sweet notes of condolence, via her parents, when Mum and Dad died. Her words were brief, unflowery and came from the heart. I’d like to see her and thank her.
