Annie Stanley, All At Sea

by Sue Teddern

  ‘For the money?’

  ‘Probably. You’ll be working your whole life, An-An. Just think about that. What you do has to be about more than just “the money” or you’ll go mad. How about teaching? I reckon you’d be brilliant at that.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘We both think so, your mum and me. No pressure, though. It’s your decision.’ He delved into the Tesco carrier bag. ‘Bread pudding o’clock, d’you reckon? That Mrs Stanley of ours makes an ace bread pudding. How about we share one bit now and keep the rest for the drive home?’

  He began to unwrap the cling film, then stopped and gazed out at the horizon again. ‘I hope she’s okay. You know what she’s like when she’s under the weather. Won’t make a fuss, won’t say what hurts or how much. I hope she’s okay.’

  It started to rain. They grabbed their things and made a dash for the car. It was time to drive back to Norwich anyway, if they didn’t want to be late for the open day.

  Chapter Twelve

  Humber

  Before going to sleep, I watch Newsnight and start to knit another square. The wool came from a charity shop near Scarborough station. It’s school-jumper maroon and it feels synthetic so no sheep caught a chill in the spinning of this yarn. It very much looks like I’m knitting squares for a blanket of my own, one for each sea area: Cromarty, Forth and now Tyne. Like taking Dad on this tour of the Shipping Forecast, I’ll do it until I stop.

  The other thing I do before bed is book a hire car, one that can be dropped off at my destination, wherever that may be, for the next leg of my journey. Dad taught me to drive over one summer before I went to uni. He also instilled in me the joy of the open road. I need a break from train platforms, bad coffee and small talk with strangers who want to know where I’m going and why. The only down side is that I can’t knit while I drive.

  Next morning, I load up on the full breakfast at my hotel: from tinned grapefruit and poached eggs to two rounds of toast and a chocolate muffin. Starter, dinner and pudding all in one meal. Last night’s barman is now this morning’s waiter. He gives me a knowing wink as he brings over coffee and directs me to the hot buffet. They have one of those annoying conveyor belt toasters where the bread tumbles down the slide either pale white or pure charcoal.

  I pack Dad carefully into my Star Wars wheelie suitcase, knowing he may have to lie on his side in the car boot. I wrap him in Yasmin’s T-shirts, after introducing them to each other. I have seriously lost it.

  The car is a Kia, which I’m used to. The car-hire bloke – ‘Wesley’ – mansplains the dashboard, as if I’ve just popped in from the 1950s, and makes me check the bodywork for scratches. ‘Not that we don’t trust you, my love, but you never know what you might bump into.’

  Soon I’m on the A64, heading south. White clouds scud across the ceiling of the sky and there’s a refreshing breeze if I open both windows. In the rear-view mirror, I catch sight of myself smiling. This is good. I am mistress of my own destiny, God of my very own moving metal box. I can talk to myself, sing to myself, swear to myself.

  I am on my way. I don’t have a specific destination in Humber, which stretches, I think, from Flamborough Head to Great Yarmouth. But I hope I’ll know when I get there.

  I haven’t forgotten last night with Kim and have plenty of time to rerun it as I tootle down the A165, direction Bridlington. She thinks I’m still the dog’s bollocks because I once was. She’ll be telling her workmates – and Stuart and Jenna and Jackson – what a laugh she had with her wild ’n’ crazy bestest bestie ever. She might even think we’ll pick up where we left off, despite the two hundred or so miles between us.

  I feel my cheeks burn. I don’t deserve her friendship. I chucked her overboard, just to avoid a ticking-off and a week without pocket money. Dad didn’t want me associating with someone who he regarded as ‘no better than she ought to be’. He took my lie on trust. He never doubted my version of what happened and I let him believe it.

  My lie soured our family’s friendship with the Gorringes. Nothing was said, but something had changed. The post-Christmas get-togethers continued. Plants were still watered, cats fed, lilos lent. But now we were just neighbours, nothing more. Auntie Maureen and Uncle Ray were sidelined by proxy and they’d done nothing wrong either. They came to both funerals, for fuck’s sake.

  And all for a snog with Malcolm Robbins. Which I didn’t even get.

  ‘Look, Dad! Bridlington,’ I hear myself say as I’m funnelled round the predictable ring road of Lidls, car showrooms and self-storage solutions. Bridlington is, of course, one of the coastal stations of the Shipping Forecast, after Boulmer and before Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic.

  I wonder why Dad was never on Mastermind. If he’d chosen the Shipping Forecast as his specialist subject for round one, he could have nailed it with Dr Feelgood for round two. I visualize him in an open-neck shirt and his best sports jacket in the Mastermind chair, looking dead pleased with himself for sailing through it with no passes, and my eyes fill.

  I drive through Lissett and Beeford and Brandesburton and they don’t make much of a mark. Then a sign appears on the road. I mean, literally, a sign that reminds me why I’m doing this.

  Beverley. I am passing the outskirts of Beverley.

  Before I have time to think, I depart from my route and follow signs for the town centre. I park in Ladygate, buy some boring beige wool and find a newsagent’s selling postcards. I choose one of Beverley Minster in bright sunshine, just like today, and buy a book of stamps, while I’m at it. I’m not ready for food yet, after my massive breakfast, but I could murder an Americano so I settle in a Costa and write the postcard.

  Greetings from Beverley, Beverley.

  I put my pen down. What do I say? ‘Hi there. I haven’t scattered Dad yet because I don’t know where to do it and I’m not ready to let go of him. But doing this has to be better than sitting on my arse, doing sweet fuck all. Please bear with me while I put your grief on hold. I’m sorry I don’t like you as much as I should but now that Dad’s dead, it doesn’t matter any more, does it. Kind regards, Annie.’

  Instead I make up some guff about the nice weather and the nice town and has she ever been here and I better get back on the road. I try to write ‘love’ but my hand just won’t cooperate. There is no love. I sign with a flourish and post the card before I can tear it up.

  Back in the car, I check my route on my phone. It would be a lot easier if I actually had a destination so I tap in King’s Lynn, for want of anywhere better. And I’m off.

  It’s a long drive. A really, really long drive. Why didn’t I spot that when I set off? Crossing the Humber Bridge feels symbolic, significant. But it isn’t. It just gets me to the next bit: the long, flat, uninspiring landscape of Lincolnshire, with place names that sound like Dickens characters – Utterby and Sutterby – or throat clearings – Haugh and Louth – or Fifties film stars – Mavis Enderby and Gayton le Marsh.

  The car radio manages to keep me distracted from the distance I still have to cover. I dip into local phone-ins about the controversial new bypass and interviews with stars of the latest production at the Embassy Theatre, Skegness. I re-tune to Radio 4 for an interesting documentary about suffragettes. Hurrah for Sylvia Pankhurst.

  But ultimately it’s Capital Gold that sustains me; I sing along to everything. I give good Garfunkel on ‘The Boxer’; I show Emeli Sandé how it’s done on ‘Read All About It’; I even get to singalong to Dr Feelgood’s ‘Back in the Night’. If I had one of Dad’s home-made CDs, I’d happily play his favourite band all the way to East Anglia.

  Rob used to hate me singing in the car. Even when I wasn’t giving it total welly, I’d absentmindedly la-la-la, then chuck in a random lyric or two, hum a bit more, maybe noodle in some harmony. In my head, it sounded awesome.

  When you love someone, you’re meant to love everything about them. Even their singing. Not Rob. And he’d get ridiculously wound up if I got a lyric wrong. What did it matter that I sa
ng: ‘Ebony and I agree . . .’ or ‘Don’t sleep in the subway doorway’? His intolerance of my singing wasn’t the reason I broke up with him. But it probably didn’t help.

  Beyond Boston, I stop at some services to stretch my legs and buy a road atlas so that I can get a better sense of distances. Back in the car, I allow myself five minutes’ shut-eye but it turns into nearly an hour. It would have been longer if it hadn’t been for some pesky kids banging on the window as they pass, screeching with lolz when they see me jolt to life.

  Two hours and change later, I have reached my destination. Not King’s Lynn, not Great Yarmouth or Southwold, where Toby and I once went to a ludicrously fancy wedding and had a massive row on the drive home.

  I am in Happisburgh.

  As soon as I saw it on the map, my destination was obvious. I park, take Dad’s urn out of the suitcase and pop it in my backpack, just in case I have a sudden urge to scatter him here. Then I head for the lighthouse; so old, so sturdy and wind-battered, still standing up to the elements.

  When I came here with Dad, on our detour from the UEA open day, I had yet to study geography, let alone cover the subject of coastal erosion with a classroom full of kids. If you want to see it in reality, go to Happisburgh. I don’t recall where the land ended on my last visit, but it must have retreated incrementally since then, crumbling away, inch by inch, day by day. When (or if) I go back to teaching, I really should bring my students here, to see for themselves what the wrath of the sea can do.

  It’s weird and a bit loopy, I know it is, to sit on the grass with Dad beside me. I have no cheese-and-Branston sandwiches. No bread pudding made by Mum. No frantic dash to Norwich afterwards to check out the university . . . which I decided not to study at anyway.

  Just Dad and me and the North Sea, here, now, sitting on my spread-out jean jacket. And a big gaping hole in my life where he should still be. Like the Happisburgh coastline, he’s inching away from me, day by day. Will my memory of his face – his over-exuberant eyebrows and that slight chin dimple – will that memory crumble away too? Coming to Happy’s Berg maybe wasn’t such a great idea. Please may I rename it Sad Berg?

  The clouds darken to grey and a shiver runs through me. I haul myself up from the damp grass and shake out my jacket. If I wasn’t sure before, I am now. I have no choice. If I scatter Dad here, I end our time together and I’m not ready to do that.

  I know I can’t take him to every sea area because some of them are just that: areas of sea, like Sole, Bailey and Forties. And some are attached to other countries and will make the trip much more complicated and costly, like Fitzroy, Biscay and German Bight. So, together, we’ll cover every sea area of our coastline. I feel a pang of guilt that I can’t do all thirty-one but I couldn’t bear to fail; fourteen feels at least do-able.

  ‘Mum’s bread pudding was brilliant, wasn’t it, Dad?’ I say out loud as I pack him away. That whole day was brilliant. Just me and him going on an adventure. I could have done without the non-stop Dr Feelgood though.

  I can almost hear his reply: ‘That’s proper music, Miss Lummox. Listen and learn, listen and learn.’

  What’s to stay for in Happisburgh, pretty though it is? I’ve done what I needed to do. An hour later, I’m checked into a room above a pub in Bungay, on the Norfolk/Suffolk borders. While my few grubby clothes get soaked and spun in the nearby launderette, I wolf down fish and chips on a bench under an ornate shelter called the Butter Cross and ignore a small gang of disaffected youth who want me gone so that they can sit here, as they probably do most nights.

  They cycle and circle round each other in some kind of ancient mating ritual. The girls ignore the boys, the boys ignore the girls. Kim and I did just the same outside Burger King. We ignored Malcolm Robbins and Chris Walling. (We should have kept ignoring them.) The world keeps turning . . .

  My Sadburgh sadness won’t shift. Watching the shyest girl in the group smile at the cockiest boy, seeing them slouch off together down the deserted high street, feigning lack of interest, I wonder if they know what they’re letting themselves in for. Be nice, I want to tell them. Don’t sing in the car, just to wind him up. Don’t play games. Don’t cause pain.

  Don’t take something bad and make it even worse.

  I resist an urge to ring Rob. He’ll be with Fi, doing all the couply stuff you do together when you’ve only just hooked up and the novelty has yet to wear off: midweek meals out, Netflix and chill on the sofa, shagging every which way instead of Newsnight. They won’t have started farting in front of each other yet or having stand-up rows in Ikea or finishing the milk without asking. They won’t have lost that first glow of ‘Phew, I’m not single any more’. Yep, they’ll definitely be shagging now. We were, at every opportunity, when we first got together.

  I can’t phone Rob. So I phone Kate. She picks up on the first ring and sounds disappointed that it’s me.

  ‘Annie. You’re still alive then.’

  ‘Kate. You’re still grumpy then.’

  She sighs, as if she really doesn’t need this right now. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. Plus I thought you were someone else. I’m waiting on a call from – a colleague. So how the heck are you, stranger?’

  O-kay. This conversation isn’t going to lift my spirits or shrug off my sadness. I wonder why I bothered.

  ‘I’m fine. I’m in Bungay. That’s sea area Humber. Off to sea area Thames tomorrow. Quite possibly Canvey Island because of Dr Feelgood. Because they came from Canvey Island.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Dad reckoned they were the best band ever. You must remember that?’

  ‘The Gospel according to Dad. He also loved salami but that doesn’t mean you have to trek off to—wherever salami comes from.’

  ‘Italy.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re seriously still doing this.’

  ‘We agreed that Dad would have wanted me to. We did, Kate.’

  ‘I was humouring you.’

  ‘Why are you being such a cow?’

  ‘Because you’re being such a child, stomping off like that. You’ll still be throwing your toys out of the pram when you’re on a Zimmer frame.’

  I hang up. I don’t need this. I leave the shelter of the Butter Cross and return to the launderette to retrieve my clothes from the tumble dryer. The remaining disaffected youth reclaim their bench and make just-within-earshot snarky comments about me as I retreat. But I do have a lard arse, so I can’t argue.

  My room at the pub is even cosier than the B&B in Cromarty, probably because it’s not heaving with nautical knick-knacks. The bed is hard, just how I like it, the towels are soft and there’s a kettle and the usual cocoa sachet to go with some pre-sleep knitting. This maroon ‘wool’ may be synthetic but it slides from needle to needle like a dream. Or maybe I’m finally learning to slacken off on my tension. A lesson for life . . .

  I’ve just turned off the bedside light, a good hour before the Shipping Forecast, when my phone rings. It’s Kate.

  ‘I’m sorry, An-An. You’re right. I was a cow.’

  ‘You really were.’

  There’s a long pause at the other end. ‘This isn’t a great time for me right now,’ she finally admits. ‘And not just because of Dad.’

  I can only imagine she’s being given the runaround by her latest married man. I stopped asking ages ago. Her business, not mine. But maybe this time, she wants me to.

  ‘Is it, um, Rory?’

  Her laugh is hollow. ‘Rory’s ancient history. Remind me to tell you about Rory some time. Sheesh, what a charmer he turned out to be.’

  Another pause. I wait.

  ‘I’ve just come back from a work thing in Coventry. Overnight. Work’s a bit fraught at the mo. Nothing I can’t deal with but, well, it’s all a bit fraught.’

  ‘Tell me, Katkin. Maybe I can help.’

  ‘You! Hardly!’ She actually bursts out laughing.

  I am shocked and hurt into silence. Where did that come from?

  ‘I
’m sorry,’ she says, sounding calmer. ‘I didn’t ring to have a go. Bit of a shit apology, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve heard nicer.’

  ‘It’s just, I’m still not convinced you should be doing this. This trip around Britain. Are you sure it’s helping? Because if it isn’t, you need to come home first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I reply. Because, honestly, I’m not. ‘But I’m not ready to come home.’

  ‘If that’s how you feel.’

  ‘You know what would help, Kate? What would really, really help.’

  ‘Go on,’ she prompts cautiously.

  ‘Come to Canvey Island. Do the next bit with me. Please, Katkin. It would help us both.’

  ‘Of course I can’t come with you,’ she snaps. ‘Have you even listened to what I’ve been saying? About work being difficult right now. I can’t take time away. I just can’t.’

  ‘Not even one measly day?’

  ‘No! This is your project, not mine. I’m sorry if I’m still being a cow. That wasn’t my intention. But no, I absolutely can’t join you. Now, let’s both get some sleep, okay.’

  I lie in bed rerunning our conversation. Was I wrong to invite her to join me? Why is she so bitter and brittle? We’re both grieving, but can’t we process it better together?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thames

  It’s an easy drive to Essex. My phone estimates it will take two hours and it does. I declined my breakfast in Bungay, just wanting to be on the road, so the sausage sandwich and mug of coffee at a pitstop near Needham Market are just the ticket. There are short stretches of pretty village and windy road on the first leg of the journey but, once I’m on the A14, skirting past Ipswich, Colchester, Chelmsford, it’s just mindless dual carriageway. I can do mindless, with the help of Radio 2.

  Canvey Island really is an island. I had no idea. But once you’ve driven over the thin stretch of water that separates it from the ‘mainland’, you could be in any densely built suburb. I don’t know what I’m looking for or where best to take in the essence of Essex so I drive until I reach the far coast, which doesn’t take too long. I park by a low-key fairground, optimistically called Fantasy Island. Despite the bracing, salty wind, it’s far from deserted: dog walkers, cyclists, a noisy bunch of Orthodox Jewish children chasing each other.