You, Me & the Sea

by Elizabeth Haynes

  ‘Aye, of course it bloody is,’ Fraser says, raising his voice and smacking his palm on the table. ‘If you’d just given me another five minutes, you wee shite.’

  He sees Rachel flinch at the bang, and regrets it. Her eyes are wide, her face ghost-pale.

  ‘I’ll go away again,’ Lefty says casually.

  ‘There’s no point now, is there?’

  Rachel is looking from one of them to the other. Maybe she’s realised there’s something worse than being stuck in an isolated lighthouse with a man, and that’s being stuck with two of them.

  Lefty goes to the fridge and gets out a can of Coke, cracks it open and heads back for the door. ‘I get when I’m no’ wanted,’ he says, looking pointedly at their plates.

  Fraser watches him leave, gritting his teeth. It’s not as if he ever sits down to eat anyway. He glances at Rachel, at her pale face, her huge eyes staring back at the doorway through which Lefty has just disappeared.

  ‘That’s Lefty,’ he says. When she doesn’t speak, he takes a heavy breath in and continues, ‘He’s not supposed to be here. Nobody knows about him, other than Robert who runs the boat, but best not mention it to him either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she says. ‘What’s he doing here, then?’

  ‘He’s kind of … like an assistant.’

  ‘An assistant?’

  ‘Unofficial.’

  ‘How come nobody knows about him?’

  Even as he says it, having thought this through for weeks, he realises he’s phrasing this all wrong. ‘I mean, he’s not in trouble or anything like that.’

  Maybe that’s not even true. But it’s too late to take it back.

  ‘Trouble?’ she echoes. ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘He’s not – he’s just – well … he had nowhere else to go.’

  He sees the confusion chasing across her face. He’s painting himself as some kind of philanthropist, a rescuer of homeless youths. She is looking bewildered rather than cross, which he’s grateful for, but at the same time it’s making him wary. She doesn’t know him well enough to be on his side.

  ‘How long’s he staying?’

  Fraser clears his throat. ‘Until someone finds out, and kicks him off the island and back to the shithole he was in before.’ He says it and meets her eye, staring her out. Let her be in no doubt: she will either make or break things. If the lad is kicked off the island, she will be the one responsible for his situation worsening beyond measure, not to mention it likely costing Fraser his job, his home and his sanity.

  He doesn’t like having to trust people, much less women. Much less a woman he has only just met.

  ‘Where does he sleep?’ she asked.

  ‘Downstairs. I guess it was a study. It’s got a bathroom next to it.’

  He sees the relief flicker across her face.

  ‘And he’s – he’s all right? Is he?’

  Fraser has to think about how to answer this. He can understand her concern, in a way, seeing Lefty through a stranger’s eyes: he’s small but wiry, stronger than he looks, stronger than he used to be; but he’s still got that hunted look about him. Scrappy hair that he’s cut himself – and he did have wee bald patches for a while, so it looks decidedly uneven – and two missing teeth at the front, the rest of them in bad shape. He’s almost certainly never seen a dentist. Fraser, despite being huge, probably looks less of a threat to her than the feral-looking Lefty.

  Is he all right? For some reason he doesn’t want to lie to her – he hasn’t, so far, not really, and he suspects he is so out of practice at having to talk to people that she would see through him instantly – and so, carefully, he says, ‘He’s had a rough time. If he gives you any trouble, anything at all, you just tell me about it and I’ll sort him out. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ she says.

  He thinks she does not look very reassured. She is still wondering what exactly he might have meant by ‘trouble’. But she has no choice, after all. If she calls Marion and tells her that there’s a strange extra person on the island, that Fraser’s got an assistant, they’ll all be back off the island very quickly indeed. And she’s only just arrived.

  ‘Any more questions?’ he asks.

  ‘Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?’

  ‘Aye. But the wee idiot beat me to it.’

  ‘I thought—’ she says, and stops herself.

  ‘You thought what?’

  She smiles, the briefest of smiles. ‘I thought you were going to tell me I had to leave.’

  ‘Why would I tell you that?’

  ‘Because I fuck things up. It’s what I do. It’s the only thing I’m good at.’

  She smiles again, and he meets her eyes and sees again what’s behind them, what he recognised before. Pain. Fear. And some desperate sort of nameless need – a need to do the right thing, a need to belong. And something inside him twists.

  Rachel

  Rachel has spent her entire life lurching from one fuck-up to the next.

  She had been doing okay at school, trying hard, until Lucy’s GCSE results came in, and Rachel suddenly realised that her older sister was bright and, by comparison, Rachel wasn’t. After that there seemed little point in trying hard; she scraped enough passes to do her A-levels, scraped through those and managed to get on to an English course through clearing. She dropped out at the end of the first year, partly due to an extended period of illness and an unsympathetic tutor, partly because the course was hard and she was struggling with everything, and partly because Lucy had just graduated from Durham with a first and had already been headhunted into Ian’s dad’s accountancy firm as a junior. Rachel had worked two jobs for a while, trying to earn enough money to stay in her shared house so that she didn’t have to go back to Norwich and her parents, but then her housemates had decided they really wanted someone on their course to live with them, so they’d made things difficult for Rachel until she got the hint, and left. Two months back in her old bedroom, staring at the ceiling and going quietly mad.

  She got a job at Nando’s, which thankfully was nothing short of brilliant. It was hard work but good fun: the staff treated her like family, and she was able to pick up extra shifts here and there until she had saved enough money to go travelling. She made it to Thailand with some friends she’d picked up on the way, got mugged, broke her ankle and had to be brought home to the UK at phenomenal expense, since it turned out her travel insurance didn’t cover her for riding mopeds while drunk. Another fuck-up – and her parents had had to pay her medical bills. Probably they still were. She had heard all about it several times.

  Back in Norwich, she had tried to get back into Nando’s, but they’d had no jobs going. She’d done a bit of temping to keep her out of the house and out of Mum’s way, but then the darkness that had been chasing her finally caught up, and she ended up spending days in bed, nights awake, staring at the TV in her room.

  And then she’d gone to the doctor to try to get something to help her sleep, and met Mel in the waiting room, and then things had started to get better again.

  It was like a rollercoaster, she thought, or maybe it was like the undulating clifftop on the island – the bigger lows led to the bigger highs, and then on the other side of each high there was nothing but another massive low.

  On the other side of the high of making a friend, of moving in to Mel’s spare room and actually feeling half-sane again, of finding a proper job, a decent job, even if it was just temporary and not especially well paid, was another massive fuck-up.

  Amarjit.

  Rachel’s job was a maternity leave cover as a marketing assistant at Evans Pharma. She had limited office experience, just a few temp jobs which mainly involved those tasks that nobody else wanted to do: mass mailings, filing, copying, shredding. This felt like her first grown-up job. She didn’t want to mess it up. She was on time every day, listened, concentrated, remembered people’s names, made teas for everyone when she didn’t have anything more press
ing to do.

  She had been in a meeting on her second day, confused but trying not to show it, when in he strolled. The cardio team’s head of marketing – Amarjit Singh. She hadn’t known who he was, then. Sean, the sales director, made some comment about him turning up late and Amarjit just winked and smiled. And Rachel was trying not to stare, utterly dazzled. He was just beautiful. Light blue fitted shirt, sleeves partly rolled up, one of those heavy, expensive watches a little bit loose on his wrist. Dark hair, neatly trimmed beard, dark eyes, and his smile … bloody hell. He looked as if he’d stepped out from a magazine ad for men’s cologne.

  Within two weeks she was sleeping with him. Rachel cannot think of it now without cringing.

  Amarjit’s flat was in a new block in a really smart complex in the city centre. Walking distance from all the bars and clubs, a neat little car park at its base, one space per flat, a few visitors’ spaces that were always full. Not that she had a car; but he was always complaining about it: that people with two cars were just using the visitors’ spaces, which meant that nobody could ever invite visitors over.

  In hindsight, months later, she would wonder which other visitors he was talking about. But then, of course, the complaint had slipped underneath her like a satin sheet, disregarded. Back then she’d felt important, valued; she hadn’t heard the things that she should have heard. Did not even register them. Like the wife he’d mentioned very briefly in passing, and she could have sworn that at some point he’d used the word ‘separated’, or maybe ‘ex’, but afterwards she could never quite remember the moment he said it, or indeed if he actually had.

  There. He had casually invited her to come over to his flat the week after she started. The week after that, she had actually gone. If anyone had asked, Rachel would have said that he was all right, he was a bit of a laugh … that she thought they were mates outside of work. That evening they had been working at an event promoting Caleril to GPs, listening to an American heart surgeon who Rachel had thought was pompous and talking shit. In the bar, afterwards, she told Amarjit this rather loudly and he laughed and told her that the surgeon was a friend of his.

  Four drinks in, then several more at a too-crowded bar afterwards, and he said to her, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and got a taxi with her. They had been talking non-stop. She thought he would drop her at hers; was wondering whether he would want to come in. Whether Mel would be at home or not. Whether the kitchen was a mess. What Mel would have to say about it. Instead the taxi went to his first, and when it stopped he said to her, ‘Coming in?’

  Despite him taking her to his flat, she had not been expecting sex. Yes, she’d had a massive crush on him, but she had been careful to hide it. He had only ever done what she considered playful flirting; potentially it was nothing more than friendliness. He’d asked her to help out at that event, something not on her job description, not done by her predecessor and beyond her pay grade, and she’d believed that this meant he valued her, that he thought she was worth more than she was being paid. He had told Sean what a great job she was doing.

  And then he had opened the door to his flat and she’d gone inside, swaying on her heels down the narrow corridor into the living room at the end. It was small, blandly done in grey and sky-blue, as if he’d bought it furnished from the developer. He’d followed her into the living room and she’d heard a chink, and looked around and he had undone his belt, his trousers, was standing behind her with his hand inside his pants.

  She had looked open-mouthed from that to his face.

  ‘You don’t have to come,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to bed.’

  He had turned and gone back to one of the doors she had passed.

  Now, of course, she thinks that what she should have done was gone back out of the flat, shut the door behind her and called an Uber as she was going down the stairs. It wouldn’t have been too awkward. He could still have been her boss. A line had been drawn and she could have chosen not to cross it. He had even said precisely that, you don’t have to come, and of course she hadn’t had to. She hadn’t been threatened by him. He hadn’t done anything to assault her, or even scare her particularly.

  Although, she thinks in hindsight, undressing himself in front of her had more than a whiff of the Weinstein about it. Not to mention their relative power positions at that point.

  All of this is academic: because she did not walk out of the flat.

  She doesn’t want to think about him now.

  Instead, her thoughts lurch back to the weird lad who just strolled into the kitchen and strolled back out again. Fraser is talking about something else, about the septic tanks – she had forgotten about them, had almost got used to the smell; they’re being emptied on Tuesday, apparently.

  For a moment she wonders if that really just happened – the lad walking in – or if she’d had a peculiar hallucination brought on by tiredness. Lefty. His name’s Lefty. What sort of a name is that?

  ‘Is your knee okay?’ he asks.

  She flexes her leg experimentally. ‘Throbs a bit,’ she says. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘Want me to take a look?’

  ‘There’s nothing to see,’ she says, alarmed. As if she’s about to pull her leggings down in Fraser’s kitchen.

  He shrugs. ‘Suit yourself.’

  To distract her from the awkwardness, she drinks the last of the whisky.

  ‘Want another?’

  ‘No,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘Thanks, though. I’m going to get an early night again.’

  She takes her plate and the glass to the sink and washes them up, aware of him sitting at the table behind her. It’s as though something just happened. Something a little bit predatory. Suddenly that uneasiness is back, sitting uncomfortably on her chest.

  If there were another woman here, just one, she would feel a little less vulnerable. But there it is. She’s here now. What else can she do but get on with it?

  Fraser

  In the grubby bathroom mirror, he catches sight of himself while he’s cleaning his teeth.

  You stupid fucker, he thinks to himself. Look at you.

  He’s handled everything badly from start to finish. He should have told her about Lefty straight away. Because there was no way she was going to leave, was there?

  He spits into the sink. Can’t bear to look at himself any more. You idiot.

  Nevertheless, when he speaks to Craig next, he’s going to provide him with a shopping list that includes whisky. Maybe several bottles of wine.

  Bess is outside on the landing, looking up at him with concern in her brown eyes. He rubs her head, gives her a little ear-scratch, goes into his room and shuts the door. He strips down to shorts and T-shirt and climbs into bed, reads two pages of the Alex North thriller on his bedside table, and then two more. When he’s tired enough to be losing focus on the page he replaces the bookmark – a postcard of the house on the rock at Pittenweem, the Isle of May bathed in sunlight behind it – and turns off the light. From next door he hears a sound, that might be a sob. It might be a cough.

  The newspaper that Robert left him is on the chest of drawers where he put it earlier. He rereads the article, which doesn’t take long. The police have issued an appeal for information, but the tone of the article, a meagre two paragraphs, suggests they aren’t especially desperate for a response or even expecting one. There is a grainy image, that familiar CCTV still of a figure in a dark jacket standing next to the driver on a bus. No further trace of him after that. No evidence he has come to any harm. The well-used phrases seem to be even more half-hearted than usual. No mention of a family desperate to know he’s safe, because, while there is a family, they clearly don’t give a shit.

  No mention of where he’d spent the last few years before he disappeared off the face of the earth.

  No mention of what he’d done before that.

  Rachel

  Rachel is in bed, woken once more by a muffled shout from Fraser’s room. This time she’d known better tha
n to get up.

  Her thoughts wind their way back to the moment Lefty had walked into the kitchen and scared the shit out of her. And the look of him, too. He reminds her of school. Not quite the gang of lads who would regularly shout obscenities at the girls just for fun, the lads who hung around outside the school gates smoking – not them; instead Lefty calls to mind the loners, the ones who had clearly slipped through some sort of net. Every class had them. In particular there was one who joined her class in Year 10, in the middle of term. He’d come from Yarmouth or Thetford or somewhere, didn’t talk to anyone, spent lunchtimes strolling around the edge of the field kicking at the turf, avoiding people. Wouldn’t make eye contact, even when – proud of herself for being brave and kind – she’d asked him once if he was settling in okay. He’d sworn at her and leered and said something about her legs, and she’d blushed, horrified, and never spoken to him again.

  Ryan. That was his name. She couldn’t remember his surname.

  He’d left in Year 11, before the final set of mocks. Someone said he was fostered. That his mum was in prison. That he was on drugs, or she was – the story varied depending on who was telling it.

  Something about Lefty reminds her of Ryan, and this is making her uncomfortable. She’d been a bit scared of him, of Ryan, while at the same time feeling unbearably sad for him. If this was America, she had thought at the time, he might be the sort of loner who would be collecting guns.

  Now she thinks how very unkind it was of her to think these things and not do anything about it. Not be the one to make a difference, try harder, speak to him kindly and regularly instead of ignoring him the way all her friends did.

  Another thing to be ashamed of. As if she needs another stick to beat herself with.

  She wonders what happened to Ryan, and as much as she tries to imagine him off somewhere doing something amazing with a family of his own, a family who love him, she has now made the association of Ryan and Lefty, this weirdo without even a proper name, someone who isn’t supposed to be there, someone who doesn’t belong. And all she can think is that if Ryan is even still alive he’s twitchy and probably on something, and cannot look anyone in the eye.