by Fiona Harper
‘You need cheering up,’ he says, ‘and I know just the way to do it.’
Heather thinks he’s insane, but he’s holding out his hand and she’s been longing to touch him again ever since the tap-dancing display, so she stands and lets him lead her.
They end up five minutes’ walk away, standing outside a little hut. Jason hands over some cash and in return the man inside gives him two putters and two golf balls. Jason passes her one of each, and she turns and looks at the tacky pirate-themed course full of plastic palm trees and even a Spanish galleon about the size of a small van. ‘You’re not serious,’ she says.
He grins cheekily. ‘You can’t back out now, I’ve handed over the money.’ He turns to the man behind the counter. ‘And it’s nonrefundable, right?’
The man stares at Jason, confused, but then catches on. ‘Right.’
Heather doesn’t believe either of them, but she’s never really developed the skill of fighting her own corner – except maybe with her sister – so she mutely turns and walks to the first hole.
She’s irritated with Jason, even though she knows he’s trying to be kind, so she decides he needs to pay; she’s going to win this round if it kills her. Besides, concentrating on the little yellow ball, using her latent maths and physics skills to weigh up direction and force, keeps her from thinking about the wary look in the young mother’s eyes. Heather knows what she was thinking when she knocked on her door, asking about someone she’d never heard of and certainly didn’t care about: Freak.
Heather’s tenacity pays off. By the time they’re halfway round, she’s five points ahead. She doesn’t even notice that it’s started to rain properly. It’s hard to tell on this crazy-golf course anyway, because it’s full of waterfalls and things that spit at you when you’re trying to aim a shot. As they continue round by the galleon – which is playing a tinny recording of cannon fire and growled pirate threats – there is a booming sound and then suddenly, just as she’s got one eye closed and her ball is lined up perfectly for the hole, someone tips a bucket of water over her.
‘Hey!’ She drops her club and looks over at Jason, ready to blame him, but his hands are empty. He’s smiling though, the rotter, and it makes her lips twitch too, but then there’s another booming sound and she turns towards the galleon, only to be rewarded with a face full of water from a hidden jet inside one of the cannons. Jason can’t help himself now, and he starts to laugh.
It’s a really lovely sound, low and deep, and she finds herself joining in, even though she’s wet through from the crown of her head to the waistband of her jeans. Thankfully, she’s still wearing the leather jacket Jason leant her, because she’s not sure she’s a wet T-shirt kind of girl, both when it comes to the confidence of wearing one and having the physical assets needed to look good in one.
‘Right, that’s it!’ she tells him. ‘You’re toast!’
‘What?’ He’s trying to look mock-offended but he can’t stop smiling. ‘That had nothing to do with me. That was pure bad luck!’
Heather narrows her eyes. ‘I’m not sure I believe you,’ she tells him, then makes good on her promise. She wins by a clear ten points and Jason accuses her of being a crazy-golf hustler and asks her how she got so good.
‘I have no idea,’ she says, genuinely bemused at her own genius. ‘I must just have a natural knack for it.’
‘A likely story,’ he says as they head back to the shack and hand in their equipment.
‘I want to go and have another look at the sea,’ Heather says as they walk away. ‘I was too preoccupied before, and it’s been ages since I’ve been on a beach. I used to love them so much, even the stony ones like this.’
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Your day, your call.’
They fall into step beside each other and head down to the shore. The tide has come in a bit and there’s a wide shelf of shingle at the water’s edge. Heather stands there, just looking at the lacy froth of the waves as they tumble in one after another, never stopping, never giving up. She can hear Jason moving around beside her but she doesn’t turn to look at him until he comes close and says, ‘Here…’
She turns her head then drops her gaze to his open palm. A delicate orange shell is sitting there.
‘I thought you should have at least one good thing to take home with you today. I’m sorry the trip’s been a waste.’
Heather can’t answer because there’s a ball of something in her throat: all the words she wants to say but probably never will. She looks down at the shell in his hand. If someone had asked her this morning if she’d bring anything home from the beach – shells, feathers, unusual pebbles – she’d have told them they were mad. That’s the sort of thing her mother did, not her. Never her.
Yet she reaches out and takes it from him, her fingertips grazing the soft skin of his palm. She closes her fingers around it, holding it tight, both elated at the thought of having something tangible to tie her to this moment and terrified that the idea appeals to her so much.
When she looks back up at Jason, she notices they’re only inches apart. The wind is whipping his hair across his forehead and he is searching her face, waiting for her reaction.
‘Thank you…’ she begins to whisper, but she doesn’t get past the first syllable, because Jason dips his head and kisses her.
CHAPTER THIRTY
NOW
Heather is stunned at first. She doesn’t move, doesn’t react, doesn’t really know what to do, and not just because Jason has taken her completely by surprise. But then he must feel her lack of response and she senses him hesitating. There’s only one thing for it – she’s going to have to kiss him back.
And she does, reaching up towards him, holding onto the front of his leather jacket and pulling him closer.
Oh, my. It’s as if the beach and the surf and the gaudy colours of the seafront fade away and all that exists is her and Jason, the places where they’re touching. His hands come up to hold her face, framing it so tenderly that she’s afraid she’ll just melt into a puddle of nothing and then will be washed away with the tide.
She has no idea how much time has passed when he pulls away. Her eyes stay closed, her face tilted up, the small orange shell still clutched in her right hand.
‘Are you okay?’ he asks, his voice low and full of concern.
Heather doesn’t want to move her lips to speak, afraid she’ll wipe the tingling sensation away, so she just nods.
‘You’re shaking.’
Heather opens her eyes. ‘I… Because…’ She swallows and tries again. ‘Sorry.’
His smile is soft, puzzled. ‘What are you apologizing for now?’
‘I… I’m just not used to this.’
He smiles. ‘Kissing on beaches? I’d say it’s pretty much the same as kissing anywhere else.’
She closes her eyes again before admitting the next bit. ‘No, I mean just kissing. That was my first…’ She trails off, not quite able to say the words. Jason goes still, his eyes wide. She shakes her head. He’s misunderstood. ‘Not my first ever.’ Not quite. ‘But my first for a very long time, that’s all.’ She doesn’t tell him about the other kisses, about the other boy. Those ones don’t count. They were stolen, not given. Taken under false pretences.
He looks down at her, studies her face, but she feels no sting of judgement, no sense of regret. ‘I like you, Heather,’ he whispers.
She wills the tears not to come. That might ruin everything. It’s just that she’s not sure anyone has ever said that to her before, not so clearly and plainly. But instead of warming her heart, his words turn it to ice. It’s dangerous to want it this much. She shakes her head, pulls back a little. ‘I’m not so sure this is a good idea.’
‘Oh, God! I’m so sorry. Here you are, going through this humongous thing, and I’m… I should have thought!’
She grips his jacket tighter with her left hand, stops him stepping away. ‘No, it’s not that. It’s not you. It’s…’ She knows what she’s about
to say and she cringes. She’s heard it and read it so many times before and has always wondered how people can be so unoriginal. Now she understands. ‘It’s me. You don’t really want someone like me.’
He shuts her up by kissing her again, more decisively this time, communicating his disagreement with actions not words, and something breaks inside of Heather. A dam she didn’t even know was there.
She shoves the shell in her pocket and winds both hands around his neck, pulls him as close as she can. It’s probably stupid to let him know she wants him this badly, but she’s powerless to stop herself. Even though there’s a voice whispering in her head, You did this before, remember? Got lost like this… and look how that ended up. She ignores it. That was different. This is Jason. He’s not like the other one.
* * *
They go and get fish and chips from one of the tacky-looking places along the front and take it away in hot paper parcels. They don’t wait to find somewhere to sit before they start eating; they just unwrap and dive in. It’s surprisingly good, the tastiest, juiciest scampi Heather has had in a long time.
The renovated pier is calling to her again, and this time Heather gives in. What harm can it do? And it seems the perfect way to end the day, so they start walking in that direction.
The rain has stopped and the sun has come out again. It’s as if Hastings can’t quite make up its mind what it wants to do with itself today. But the clouds are parting and the sky is both gold and grey in equal measures, reflected on a rumpled, slate sea. They stroll towards the end of the pier, tasting the salt in the air and the sting of vinegar on hot fried potato.
The pier isn’t empty but it isn’t crowded either. Families have headed home to their hotels for dinner or out to fast-food outlets or family-friendly restaurants, leaving older couples and teenagers. Jason and Heather head towards an empty patch of railings punctuated by a lone figure, a woman. Heather feels a slight crackle of electricity across her skin as she lays eyes on her, but she ignores it – she’s been feeling all sorts of strange things since she climbed onto the back of Jason’s motorbike this morning.
The woman braces her hands on the railings, standing straighter, and the crackling sensation intensifies. Heather’s fingers remain frozen above the chip she was about to pluck from her paper parcel and she stares at the woman. There’s something…
That’s when it happens – bang! – an image from the depths of her memory so loud and clear and forceful that it stops her dead in her tracks.
The red coat.
There’s a strange flickering between the woman standing with her back to them, leaning on the railings, and a similar image of another woman from another time, arranged just the same way. Heather’s stomach drops.
She’s just about got the real one – the figure in a dark skirt and a turquoise anorak – pinned into place when the woman must sense her standing there, staring, only ten feet away. She turns. Her eyes are empty. Far away. They belong in a shop window, the staring sad eyes of a mannequin.
Heather drops her fish and chips. The packet lands on the wooden boards of the pier with a thump. ‘You!’ she says, quite loudly, although she has no idea who this person is, only that buried in the shadows deep inside her is a recognition that cannot be denied as she stares into this stranger’s eyes.
Jason steps forward. For a moment she’d forgotten he was there. ‘Heather?’
The woman’s expression had been guarded, quizzical, but now her jaw goes slack. ‘Heather?’ she says, almost croaking the name out, and her hand reaches towards the young woman in front of her.
But then it all shuts down. The moment stops being slow motion and is ripped back into real time, real speed. The woman seems to know this, because she turns and flees.
‘Who was that?’ Jason says behind Heather.
Heather tries to speak but she can’t. She has nothing to say. Nothing that makes sense, anyway. How does this woman seem so familiar? And why did she see her wearing Aunt Kathy’s red coat?
It clicks into place then. Not by logical deduction or a process of elimination, but by a gut feeling so intense it can’t be squashed or ignored because the taste of truth about it is so strong it’s almost suffocating.
‘It’s her,’ Heather rasps. ‘That woman. It’s her – the one who took me.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
NOW
The ride home is nowhere near as joyous as the one out. Heather presses her cheek against Jason’s shoulder blades and holds him tight, but the hills and valleys, the quaint villages and stunning views over the chalk downs are all a dark blur.
They tried to chase the woman as she ran off the pier, but she’d got quite a head start on them. There had been tantalizing glimpses of the turquoise waterproof jacket through the tourists milling around the broad space of the pier, but once the woman was back on dry land she had darted off across the main road and down a side street. They’d roamed the area for more than an hour hoping to catch another sight of her, but had eventually given up.
‘You’re sure that was her?’ Jason had said more than once as they’d scoured the streets.
It had been hard to give a definitive answer. On a logical level, Heather knows it’s a chance in a million just running into her here, that maybe her mind – and her memory – is playing new and devious tricks on her, but deep down inside, on a more intuitive level, she just knows.
As night falls, Heather finds it hard to get back on the bike and head back up the A21. It feels as if she’s leaving a piece of herself behind. But, as the miles increase between herself and Hastings, the weighty sadness gives way to something else, something hotter and fiercer. Patricia Waites – if that’s who the woman on the pier was – is a total and utter coward, running away like that. How dare she? How dare she flee, taking all those precious answers with her? It’s just so selfish.
By the time they draw up on their driveway in Shortlands, Heather is buzzing. She swings her leg over the bike almost before it’s stopped fully and marches towards the house, knowing but not caring that Jason is staring after her. She leaves her front door open so he can follow, peels the crash helmet off and leaves it on the sofa in the living room as she fetches a key from her desk, then she strides back to the spare room.
After taking in a couple of noisy breaths through her nostrils, she shoves the door open with such force it bounces off a pile of junk, springs back and almost hits her in the face. She has to wedge the bottom against a bin liner full of clothes to make it stay open.
And then Heather just starts pulling things towards her – she doesn’t care what – and flinging them into the hallway. She needs a skip. Once she’s filled the hall, she’s going to get on the internet and order one. Hopefully she’ll find somewhere that can deliver one on Monday.
A creak on the floorboards further up the corridor reminds her that Jason exists, and that he’s followed her into her flat. She glances over her shoulder at him but doesn’t stop grabbing and throwing. She can’t.
‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m doing something I should have done a long time ago – I’m having a clear-out! It’s going. All of it. Right now.’
He sounds infuriatingly calm when he replies. ‘This isn’t the way to solve it.’
‘Oh no?’ she snaps back, aware she’s taking it out on the wrong person, but if Jason is stupid enough to get in the firing line, so be it. ‘What do you suggest instead? Hang around Hastings every weekend, hoping we’ll run into her again? Now she knows someone’s looking, she’s going to be much more careful. We’ll never find her again.’
Jason walks over and puts a gentle hand on her arm. The pressure is light, but it’s enough to stop her in her tracks. ‘I get it,’ he says softly.
‘Do you?’ she replies, on the verge of hysterical laughter. ‘Because I certainly don’t!’
‘You’re angry,’ he says simply. ‘And with good reason.’
And just like that, his sensible words are a pin in the balloon
of her rage. But she doesn’t want to stop feeling like this – it’s the only thing keeping the tears at bay and she doesn’t want to be that weak in front of him.
He leads her away from the spare room, carefully stepping over the upturned boxes and crates in the hallway, and takes her into the living room. Somehow he knows to shut the door, blocking all the chaos out.
‘It’s very satisfying in the moment, the anger,’ he says, ‘but it’s not good in the long term. Believe me.’
She nods, reminded once again that when he says he gets it, maybe he does. He’s not just placating her. How awful that she’s been on her own for so long that she sometimes forgets that other people have issues too, that it’s not just her who’s messed up and damaged. ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ she admits shakily.
‘There must be a reason you kept all your mum’s stuff,’ Jason says. ‘It’d be a shame to throw out the good things – the memories and family treasures – along with the junk. If you really want to deal with it, maybe you should do what your mum never managed to do and sort through it properly.’
Heather exhales. ‘Maybe.’ His words make sense, but that still doesn’t mean she wants to go rooting around in her mother’s belongings, and the alternative – chucking it out wholesale – is just so appealing.
‘I thought you’d have been good at that kind of thing, given your job.’
Heather’s head jerks up and she looks at him.
‘I mean, that’s what you do for a living, isn’t it? Sort through people’s belongings, catalogue and categorize? Maybe it’s time to do that for your mum. A fitting way to say goodbye to the hoard.’
Heather stays silent. She’s thinking. He might have something here. She’s never thought of her mother’s things that way – the same way she does the items she comes across in the course of her work – maybe because her mother’s stuff feels like dirty junk, whereas the possessions of someone like Cameron Linford feel significant.
To her mother, every item was important in a way Heather could never fathom. It was if she had another range of vision, a hoarder version of ultraviolet or infra-red, that allowed her to see value in things that no one else could.
