I Let You Go

by Clare Mackintosh

  ‘We’re getting close,’ Kate said, her eyes shining. ‘I can feel it.’

  Ray grinned. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What other work have you got on at the moment?’

  She counted jobs off on her fingers. ‘The Londis robbery, series of assaults on Asian taxi-drivers, and a possible sexual assault coming our way from shift. Oh, and I’ve got a two-day Diversity course next week.’

  Ray snorted. ‘Consider yourself off the Diversity hook,’ he said. ‘And pass your other jobs to me to reallocate. I want you working full-time on the hit-and-run.’

  ‘Officially, this time?’ Kate said, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Totally above board,’ Ray said, grinning. ‘But go easy on the overtime.’

  18

  As the bus arrives in Port Ellis, Patrick is already waiting for me. We’ve met on the beach every morning for the last fortnight, and when he suggested we spend his afternoon off together, I only hesitated for a moment. I can’t spend my whole life afraid.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask, looking around for clues. His house is in the opposite direction, and we pass the village pub without stopping.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  We leave the village and follow the road that drops down towards the sea. As we walk, our hands touch and his fingers lace between mine. I feel a jolt of electricity and I let my hand relax into his.

  The news that I have been spending time with Patrick has spread through Penfach at an astonishing rate. Yesterday I ran into Iestyn at the village shop.

  ‘I hear you’ve been seeing Alun Mathews’ boy,’ he said, with a lop-sided smile. ‘He’s a good lad, Patrick, you could do a lot worse for yourself.’ I felt myself redden.

  ‘When will you be able to look at my front door?’ I asked him, changing the subject. ‘It’s no better: the lock sticks so badly the key sometimes won’t turn at all.’

  ‘You don’t need to be worrying about that,’ Iestyn replied. ‘There’s no one would be stealing anything around here.’

  I had to take a breath before answering, knowing he found me strange for locking the door at all. ‘All the same,’ I said to him, ‘I’d feel better if it were fixed.’

  Once again Iestyn promised to come up to the cottage to sort it out, but when I left at lunchtime there had been no sign of him, and it took me a full ten minutes to force the door shut.

  The road continues to narrow, and I can see the swell of the ocean at the end of the lane. The water is grey and unforgiving, white spray bursting into the air from the wrestling waves. The gulls sweep in dizzying circles, buffeted by the winds that wrap themselves around the bay. Finally I realise where Patrick is taking me.

  ‘The lifeboat station! Can we go in?’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ he says. ‘You’ve seen the vet’s surgery; I thought you might like to see this place – I seem to spend almost as much time here.’

  Port Ellis Lifeboat Station is an odd, squat building, which could be mistaken for industrial premises, were it not for the lookout tower perched on top; its four glass windows reminding me of an aircraft control tower.

  We walk past a huge pair of blue sliding doors at the front of the building, and Patrick presses an entry-code into a grey box next to a smaller door to one side.

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you around.’

  Inside, the station smells of sweat and the sea; of the sharp tang of salt that lingers on clothing. The boathouse is dominated by what Patrick tells me is called ‘the Craft’; a bright orange rigid inflatable boat.

  ‘We’re clipped on,’ he says, ‘but when the weather’s bad, sometimes it’s all you can do to stay in the boat.’

  I wander around the boathouse, taking in the notices pinned to the door, the equipment lists carefully ticked off with each daily check. On the wall is a plaque, commemorating three volunteers who lost their lives in 1916.

  ‘Coxswain P. Grant and Crew Members Harry Ellis and Glyn Barry,’ I read aloud. ‘How awful.’

  ‘They were responding to a steamship in distress off the Gower peninsula,’ Patrick says, joining me and putting an arm around my shoulder. He must see my face, because he adds, ‘It was very different then – they didn’t have half the kit we have now.’

  He takes my hand and leads me out of the boathouse into a small room where a man in a blue fleece is making coffee. His face has the leathery complexion of someone who has spent a lifetime outside.

  ‘All right, David?’ Patrick says. ‘This is Jenna.’

  ‘Showing you the ropes, is he?’ David winks at me, and I smile at what is clearly a well-worn joke.

  ‘I never gave much thought to lifeboats before,’ I say. ‘I just took for granted the fact they were there.’

  ‘They won’t be here for much longer if we don’t keep fighting for them,’ David says, stirring a heaped spoon of sugar into syrupy coffee. ‘Our running costs are paid by the RNLI, not the government, so we’re forever trying to raise money, not to mention looking for volunteers.’

  ‘David is our operations manager,’ says Patrick. ‘He runs the station – keeps us all in check.’

  David laughs. ‘He’s not far wrong.’

  A telephone rings, the sound shrill in the empty crewroom, and David excuses himself. Seconds later he is back, unzipping his fleece and running into the boat room.

  ‘Canoe capsized off Rhossili Bay,’ he shouts to Patrick. ‘Father and son missing. Helen’s called Gary and Aled.’

  Patrick opens a locker and pulls out a tangle of yellow rubber, a red life vest and a dark blue oilskin. ‘I’m sorry, Jenna, I have to go.’ He tugs the waterproofs over his jeans and sweatshirt. ‘Take the keys and wait at my house. I’ll be back before you know it.’ He moves quickly and before I can reply he runs into the boat room, just as two men rush in through the sliding door, pulled wide open in readiness. Within minutes, the four men are dragging the craft down to the water, leaping effortlessly aboard. One of the crew – I can’t tell which – pulls the cord to start the outboard motor, and the boat shoots away from the beach, bouncing over the choppy waves.

  I stand there, watching the speck of orange get smaller, until it is swallowed up by grey.

  ‘Fast, aren’t they?’

  I turn to see a woman leaning against the door to the crewroom. She is well into her fifties, with streaks of grey through her dark hair, and she wears a patterned blouse with an RNLI badge pinned to one side.

  ‘I’m Helen,’ she says. ‘I answer the phone, show visitors around, that sort of thing. You must be Patrick’s girl.’

  I redden at the familiarity. ‘I’m Jenna. My head’s spinning: that can’t have taken more than fifteen minutes from start to finish.’

  ‘Twelve minutes, thirty-five seconds,’ Helen says. She smiles at my obvious surprise. ‘We have to keep a record of all shouts and our response times. All our volunteers live just a few minutes away. Gary’s up the road, and Aled has the butcher’s in the high street.’

  ‘What happens to the shop when he’s called out?’

  ‘He hangs a sign in the door. The locals are used to it – he’s been doing it for twenty years.’

  I turn back to watch the water, empty of boats now, save for a huge vessel far out to sea. Heavy clouds have sunk so low the horizon has disappeared, the sky and the ocean a single mass of swirling grey.

  ‘They’ll be okay,’ Helen says, softly. ‘You never quite stop worrying, but you get used to it.’

  I look at her, curious.

  ‘David’s my husband,’ Helen explains. ‘After he retired he was spending more time at the station than at home, so eventually I thought: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I hated it the first time I saw him head off on a shout. It was one thing waving him off at home, but to actually see them get in the boat … and when the weather’s like this – well…’ She gives a shiver. ‘But they come back. They always come back.’

  She puts a hand on my arm, and I am grateful for the older woman’s understanding.
/>   ‘It makes you realise, doesn’t it?’ I say. ‘How much…’ I stop, unable to admit it, even to myself.

  ‘How much you need them to come home?’ Helen says quietly.

  I nod. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want me to show you around the rest of the station?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ I say. ‘I think I’ll go back to Patrick’s house and wait for him there.’

  ‘He’s a good man.’

  I wonder if she’s right. I wonder how she knows. I walk up the hill, turning every few paces in the hope of seeing the orange boat again. But I can’t see anything, and my stomach is gripped with anxiety. Something bad is going to happen, I just know it.

  It feels strange to be at Patrick’s house without him, and I resist the temptation to go upstairs and look around. For want of anything to do, I tune the radio to a local station, and do the washing-up, which is piled high in the sink.

  ‘A man and his teenage son are missing, after their canoe capsized a mile from Rhossili Bay.’

  The radio crackles with static and I fiddle with the tuning button in an attempt to find a better signal.

  ‘Port Ellis lifeboat was launched after locals raised the alarm, but so far they have been unable to recover the two missing men. We’ll have more on this story later.’

  The wind is battering the trees until they are almost bent double. I can’t see the sea from the house, and I’m not sure if I’m glad of this fact, or if I should give in to the pull I feel to walk down to the lifeboat station and watch for that tiny orange speck.

  I finish the washing-up and dry my hands with a tea-towel as I walk around the kitchen. The dresser is piled high with papers and I find its haphazardness curiously comforting. I put my hand on the cupboard handle, hearing Patrick’s words in my head.

  Whatever you do, don’t open the doors.

  What’s in there he doesn’t want me to see? I look over my shoulder, as though he might walk in at any moment, and pull open the door decisively. Immediately something falls towards me and I gasp, putting out a hand and catching a vase before it falls on to the tiled floor and shatters. I replace it among the jumble of glassware; the air inside the dresser is perfumed with a trace of musty lavender from the stacked linen within. There is nothing sinister here: just a collection of memories.

  I am about to close the door when I see the silver edge of a photo frame protruding from between a pile of tablecloths. I pull it out carefully. It’s a photo of Patrick, his arm around a woman with short blonde hair and straight white teeth. They are both smiling, not at the camera, but at each other. I wonder who she is, and why Patrick has hidden the photo from me. Is this the woman he thought he was going to marry? I look at the photo, trying to find something that will tell me when it was taken. Patrick looks the same as he does now, and I wonder if this woman is in his past, or still a part of his life. Perhaps I’m not the only one keeping secrets. I replace the photo frame between the tablecloths and shut the cupboard door, leaving the contents as I found them.

  I pace the kitchen, but grow tired of my restlessness, and make a cup of tea, which I sit at the table to drink.

  The rain stings my face, blurring my eyes and filling my vision with shadowy shapes. I can barely hear the noise of the engine above the wind, but still I hear the thud as he hits the bonnet, the slam as he smashes on to the tarmac.

  And then suddenly the water in my eyes isn’t rain, but seawater. And the engine isn’t a car, but the chug chug chug of the lifeboat. And although the scream is my own, the face that looks up at me – the dark pools of eyes with their clumps of wet lashes – that face isn’t Jacob’s, but Patrick’s.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, unsure if I am speaking out loud, ‘I never meant—’

  I feel a hand shake my shoulder, pulling me roughly from sleep. Confused, I raise my head from my folded arms, the square of wooden table still warm from my breath, and feel the chill of the kitchen hit my face. I screw up my eyes against the harsh electric light, pulling up my arm to cover my face. ‘No!’

  ‘Jenna, wake up. Jenna, you’re dreaming.’

  Slowly, I drop my arm, opening my eyes to see Patrick kneeling in front of my chair. I open my mouth, but can’t speak, hungover from my nightmare and overwhelmed with relief that he is there.

  ‘What were you dreaming about?’

  I drag the words together. ‘I – I’m not sure. I was frightened.’

  ‘You don’t have to be frightened any more,’ Patrick says, and he smooths the damp hair from my temples and cups my face between his hands. ‘I’m here.’

  His face is pale, and there is rain on his hair and clinging to his eyelashes. His eyes, which usually seem so full of light, are empty and dark. He looks broken, and without stopping to think, I lean forward and kiss him on the lips. He responds hungrily, holding my face in his hands, then he suddenly releases me and rests his forehead against mine.

  ‘They called off the search.’

  ‘Called it off? You mean they’re still missing?’

  Patrick nods, and I see the weight of emotion fill his eyes. He sinks back on to his heels. ‘We’ll go out again at first light,’ he says, flatly, ‘but no one’s pretending any more.’ Then he closes his eyes and rests his head on my lap, and weeps openly for the father and teenage son who had so confidently taken out their boat despite all the warning signs.

  I stroke his hair and let my own tears fall. I cry for a teenage boy alone in the sea; I cry for his mother; I cry for the dreams that haunt my nights; for Jacob; for my baby boy.

  19

  It is Christmas Eve when the bodies are washed up, days after Patrick and the rest of the crew have stopped searching for them. I had naively assumed they would appear together, but I should have known by now the tide is never predictable. The son came first, carried gently into Rhossili Bay by a rippling sea that seemed too mild to have inflicted the terrible injuries seen on his father, washed up a mile down the coast.

  We are on the beach when Patrick gets the call, and I know from his grimly set jaw that the news is not good. He walks a little away from me, as if to shield me, and turns to stare at the sea as he listens in silence to David. After he finishes the call, he stays rooted to the spot, scanning the horizon as if searching for answers. I walk over to him and place my hand on his arm, and he jumps, as though he has forgotten I was there at all.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, hopelessly trying to find the right words.

  ‘I was seeing a girl,’ he says, still looking out to sea. ‘I met her at university and we lived together in Leeds.’

  I listen, unsure where this is going.

  ‘When I came back here I brought her with me. She didn’t want to come, but we didn’t want to be apart, so she gave up her job and came to live in Port Ellis with me. She hated it. It was too small, too quiet, too slow for her.’

  I feel a sense of discomfort, as though I am intruding. I want to tell him to stop talking, that he doesn’t need to tell me this, but it’s as if he can’t stop.

  ‘We had a row one day, in the middle of summer. It was the same old argument: she wanted to return to Leeds, I wanted to stay here and build up the practice. She stormed off and went down to the beach to surf, but she got caught in a riptide and never came back.’

  ‘Oh God, Patrick.’ There is a lump in my throat. ‘How awful.’

  He finally turns to look at me. ‘Her surfboard washed up the next day, but we never found her body.’

  ‘“We”,’ I say. ‘You searched for her yourself?’ I can’t imagine how painful that must have been.

  He shrugged. ‘We all did. That’s our job, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but…’ I trail off. Of course he searched for her – how could he not?

  I put my arms around Patrick and he leans into me, his face pressed into my neck. I had imagined his life to be perfect: for there to be nothing more to him than the funny, easy-going persona he presents. But the ghosts he battles are as real as my own. For the first t
ime I’m with someone who needs me as much as I need him.

  We walk slowly to the cottage, where Patrick tells me to wait for him while he fetches something from his car.

  ‘What is it?’ I say, intrigued.

  ‘You’ll see.’ The sparkle is back in his eyes now, and I marvel at his ability to cope with such sadness in his life. I wonder if it’s the passing years that have given him the strength, and hope that one day I will find the same.

  When Patrick returns, he has a Christmas tree slung casually across his shoulder. I feel a pang of sadness as I recall how excited I used to get about Christmas. When we were children, Eve and I would follow strict rituals of decoration: lights first, then tinsel, then the solemn placing of baubles, and finally the battered angel teetering at the top of the tree. I imagine her following those traditions with her own children.

  I don’t want a tree in my house. Decorations are for children; for families. But Patrick insists. ‘I’m not taking it away now,’ he says, pulling it through the doorway and leaving a scattering of pine-needles on the floor. He sets it on its crude wooden stand and checks that it is standing upright. ‘Besides, it’s Christmas. You have to have a tree.’

  ‘But I don’t have anything to put on it!’ I protest.

  ‘Take a look in my bag.’

  I open Patrick’s navy rucksack, and see a battered shoebox, the lid held on with a thick rubber band. Lifting the lid, I find a dozen red baubles, the glass crazed with age.

  ‘Oh,’ I whisper, ‘they’re so beautiful.’ I hold one up and it spins in dizzying circles, reflecting my face a hundred times.

  ‘They were my grandmother’s. I told you there was all sorts in that old dresser of hers.’

  I hide a blush at the memory of searching through Patrick’s cupboards, and at the discovery of the photograph of Patrick with the woman I now realise must be the girl who drowned.

  ‘They’re lovely. Thank you.’