‘I was,’ said Jenna, cautious. She had indeed spent considerable time hawking ice cream to the great and good of Tawcombe, from a booth down near the front, until her boss had done the dirty on her and shut up shop without paying her. Even now, people told her how much they missed her. Everyone, it seemed, loved ice cream.
Which was why she knew this was an opportunity she couldn’t afford to turn down. She would never have enough money for a proper place in town to sell from, but a vintage ice-cream van? That was within her reach. It was perfect in its simplicity. She had the contacts, the knowledge and a supplier: a dairy farmer who made thirty-two flavours of delicious Devon ice cream. She could get a pitch on the beach at Everdene; take the van round the campsites – the possibilities were endless.
She felt a tingle of excitement inside her that was like nothing she had felt for a long time. A shoot of optimism. The enticement of a challenge. The chance for a new beginning.
‘Twelve hundred,’ she said to Weasel.
He gave a leery sniff.
‘Sweetheart, I can get two grand no problem if I take it to auction up country.’
‘Fine. Do that then.’ Jenna shrugged and went to walk away. ‘See ya.’
She’d nearly reached the door when Weasel called her back.
‘Firteen hundred. Cash. By the weekend.’
‘Done.’
She held out her hand and took Weasel’s grimy one. Not that a handshake with him was worth anything. But she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to find another buyer too quickly. The thing with Weasel was that he was lazy. He wouldn’t want to be bothered. So she was confident she had a deal.
The only snag was where the hell was she going to get thirteen hundred quid from in the next three days? Jenna didn’t know, but she didn’t care either. She wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip through her fingers. She wanted this little baby really badly. It was going to be her future. It was going to make her feel good about herself again.
Her life had changed dramatically over the past year, since she had met Craig. There were things in her past Jenna wasn’t proud of. She had been able to justify some of them up to a point, because there was no doubt she’d been dealt a rough hand. Growing up in a deprived town like Tawcombe was tough. Oh, it looked all too pretty on the surface, with its picturesque little harbour nestled amidst the dramatic coastline and the impressive architecture, but underneath the facade there was little economic infrastructure and a lot of unemployment. And with that, disillusionment all too often blotted out by alcohol and drugs, for what else was there to do?
Jenna could easily have found herself going down that route. Some of her family already had. But Craig had saved her just as she was about to cross the line. He’d intervened, her knight in shining surf shorts. She gave a little shiver as she thought of his toned body and his strength. His strength, both inner and outer, that had helped her see there was a better way.
There was a better way, but it had still been tough. It still was tough. Craig had been working as a policeman up country, but had managed to get a transfer to Bamford, the nearest large town. He was away a lot at the moment, on training courses, and did a lot of night shifts. And they were still living with her mother, because he hadn’t sold his flat yet – once he had they were going to buy somewhere. Well, he was. Jenna was very conscious that she had nothing to contribute, and that made her feel useless and like some sort of sponger. While her family drove her insane, with their rowing and arguing and the constant drama and the dogs barking.
And in the meantime, she was finding it impossible to get a proper job, with proper money, because most of the work down here was minimum wage and seasonal and she had no qualifications. In the summer season she sang, doing cover nights twice a week at the George and Dragon in Tawcombe and the Ship Aground in Everdene, but the pay wasn’t fantastic. People seemed to think you should sing for the love of it, never mind that you were packing the place out and helping their tills ring. And in the winter, there was no one to listen – some locals, maybe, but there weren’t enough of them to make it worthwhile anyone paying her.
The ice-cream van was the answer to her dreams. She could get it done up easily enough – sometimes it was handy knowing everyone who was anyone in Tawcombe. She just needed to get her hands on the money.
One thing she was sure of. She wasn’t going to ask Craig for it. He had done so much for her already. And she wanted to prove herself to him. She wanted to prove that she wasn’t the low life she had been when he first met her, nicking money on the beach. If he hadn’t seen something good inside her, if he hadn’t believed in her, she’d have been up before the magistrate, she’d have a criminal record – like almost everyone else in her family – and she’d be in with even less chance of a new start.
Jenna thought she was probably the first person in her family to go and see the bank manager. They dealt strictly in cash. They didn’t have a mortgage or a credit card between them. They had a morbid fear of anyone official, so the bank was somewhere to be avoided like the plague. But she’d already committed the ultimate cardinal sin by going out with a copper, so she thought she’d give it a go.
She made an appointment with the high street branch. She put on a black polka dot skirt, a polo-neck and a pair of high boots, finishing off the ensemble with a pair of black glasses from the supermarket, hoping she looked both respectable and entrepreneurial. She put her business plan in a clear folder, and tried to remember everything she had ever gleaned from watching Dragons’ Den and The Apprentice.
She was left waiting for twenty minutes before being ushered into a glass cube with a round table and plastic chairs by a man in a cheap grey suit. Her details were called up onto the computer. Her stomach churned while the manager surveyed the figures.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally. ‘But you’re too high a risk for us. Your credit rating is very poor. You don’t have a regular wage, or any collateral.’
‘So that’s a no?’ said Jenna. She felt slightly sick.
‘Yes.’
She stood up. She felt humiliated but, more than that, she felt angry.
‘So here I am, trying to better myself, and you’re not prepared to invest in me?’
‘I’m afraid that’s how it works.’
‘So I just go back to where I was? Scumming about with the rest of them?’
‘I’m very sorry. But we can’t take the risk.’
Jenna picked up her paperwork. She felt sick with frustration. She’d been foolish to think that playing it straight was the way forward. Her family would laugh at her if they knew.
And she couldn’t tell Craig, because Craig would immediately offer to lend her the money, or, worse, give it to her, and the whole point of this was to prove, both to him and herself, that she was worth more, that she was capable, that she wasn’t just a thieving nobody.
As she left, she turned to the manager.
‘So, when I sort the money for myself, and go on to make a killing, you won’t be wanting me to bank the profits here, right?’
The manager held his hands up in a helpless shrug. ‘Listen, if it was up to me …’
‘I know, I know. The computer says no,’ said Jenna. ‘Thanks for your time. Not.’
She walked back up the high street and towards home. She passed a bin and shoved her business plan inside it, watching a half-eaten burger spill its entrails onto the carefully calculated figures. What was the point? Her dream was shattered. It was so frustrating, when she could picture it all so clearly. It was made for her, that van, but the chances of her getting her hands on it were so remote.
There were loan sharks, of course. They wouldn’t be mealy mouthed about her credit rating. Their exorbitant rates of interest soaked that up. It would take her two minutes to contact one of them; they roamed the estate where she lived with her family, enabling instant gratification and impulse
purchases.
She looked at the high street – the run-down shops, the bookies and the pubs where the underbelly of Tawcombe ran amok. This was her world, and she couldn’t see a way out, not without hanging onto Craig’s coat-tails. Maybe that didn’t matter? She knew he wouldn’t mind. But she had wanted to feel proud of herself. At the moment she felt worthless. She didn’t feel as if she deserved his attention. All sorts of horrible possibilities were wandering through her head, including compromising herself with Weasel. She sighed. She must be desperate to even give that head room.
She walked towards the harbour, pulling her jacket around her to shield herself from the wind. The tide was out, and the boats that had been left in the water over winter were wedged into the grey sludge. In a few hours the scene would change completely as the harbour filled up again. It was compelling. One of the reasons people were so drawn to Tawcombe. It was a never-ending story.
She turned along the back of the George and Dragon, which looked out over the sea. In the height of summer, you couldn’t move on the terrace for heaving bodies. Now, it was empty and desolate, the furniture stacked away. She decided she’d go in for a drink and see who was about. She didn’t want to go home yet. She couldn’t think at home. There was always too much going on, the telly thundering and the dogs wanting attention.
Inside, there were only three customers. One interacting with the fruit machine, one doing the Sun crossword and one sitting at the bar.
‘Hey, Chris.’ Jenna perched onto the stool next to his.
A pair of bloodshot eyes slid round to her, peering out from under a shaggy fringe. His hand was curled around a pint of lager. Jenna knew it would probably be his sixth or seventh, and he wouldn’t stop until gone midnight. He was part of the furniture in the George, although he might move on to another pub further down the pier later if he got bored.
She liked Chris. Everyone did. But there was nothing anyone could do about the way he was living his life. There was something broken inside him and no one knew what to do about it. It had been terrible to watch, his descent into self-destruction over the past twelve months, but it was starting to become part of the rhythm of Tawcombe; a given. People had stopped commenting and just accepted that was how he was and that he wasn’t going to change.
Chris gave her one of his sleepy smiles and raised a finger to the barman to get Jenna whatever she wanted to drink. He was infinitely generous. His slate was the biggest in town and he always settled it, every Friday, not seeming to care that he was subsidizing the drinking habits of most of the slackers in Tawcombe. It was easy to take advantage of him, but he didn’t care. ‘What else am I going to spend it on?’ he would ask.
Jenna got out her purse. ‘I’m good, thanks,’ she told him. She was going to pay her own way. She asked for a hot chocolate. She wanted the comfort of sugar, not alcohol.
‘So what’s going on?’ Chris leaned his head in one hand and rested his elbow on the bar, looking at her. He hadn’t shaved, and his hair was wildly overgrown, but he was still compellingly attractive – the boozing hadn’t raddled his fine features and his killer smile; the dark-blue eyes with the black rings round the iris might be bloodshot, but they still drew you in. He was always interested in people and what they were doing. He would help you weave your dream until four o’clock in the morning. He just wasn’t very good at weaving his own.
Hordes of women had tried to help him. He’d had no shortage of them queuing up at the beginning, thinking they could save the handsome fisherman with the tragic past from himself. But, in the end, none of them could cope with the car crash that was Chris after about seven o’clock in the evening. A shambling, incoherent wreck who slid from charming to obnoxious in the melting of an ice cube; who would get himself mixed up in fights with bellicose out-of-towners who didn’t know not to antagonize him and thought he was an easy target; who would turn over tables and then stumble home, veering from one side of the road to the other like the ball in a pinball machine. If it weren’t for the fact that Chris kept the tills ringing over the winter months, he would be banned from every pub in town.
Jenna fiddled with a beer mat. ‘Weasel has just shown me the future. I’m trying to get my head round it.’
‘Weasel?’ Chris made a face. ‘I don’t want any part of a future with Weasel in it. I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.’
Weasel was a necessary evil in Tawcombe, but he wasn’t popular.
‘He’s got an old ice-cream van for sale,’ Jenna told him. ‘He wants thirteen hundred quid for it. I was going to buy it and do it up. And sell ice cream. Obviously.’
‘Cool.’ Chris grinned at his lame attempt at a joke.
‘Ha ha.’ She started tearing the beer mat up, peeling the paper off in little strips. ‘There’s no way I can get the money. He wants it by the weekend. I just went to the bank and they pretty much laughed at me.’
Her hot chocolate arrived. She spooned the cream off the top. Chris ordered another pint. She frowned.
‘You’ve only just finished that one.’
Chris gave her a look. ‘Don’t start.’
She shrugged. ‘Listen, it’s none of my business. But you know what? I know you’ve been through it, but you’re luckier than a lot of people in this town.’
Before it happened, Chris had been totally together. A party animal, yes, but not a car crash. He and his brother Vince were the most eligible boys in town, working hard and playing hard. And then tragedy had struck.
Jenna could remember the day clearly. It was the sort of day that brought a community together. She could remember the feeling it gave her: that horrible realization that fate could intervene just whenever it liked; a realization that drove an icy skewer of fear into your heart. Although there were people who said that it had been reckless for them to take the boat out when the forecast was so bad. That it wasn’t fate; it was foolhardiness.
The Maskells had wanted to get the lobster pots in before the weather broke. If they left them out in the storms, the lines might break and get lost. And the conditions were set to be bad for nearly a week, so it was anyone’s guess when they would be able to get out again. They couldn’t afford to lose a catch.
The storm had taken them unawares while they were out at sea, hurling itself in hours earlier than forecast. Huge swells had appeared from nowhere, combined with lashing rain and high winds. They were pulling the lines in when Vince and Chris’s dad was washed overboard. One moment he was there; the next he had been sucked into the sea, a tiny little figure tossed out into the maelstrom. By the time the lifeboat got out to them it was too late. The brothers couldn’t have done anything without risking their own lives. There was no point in going in after him.
Jenna remembered everyone waiting at the harbour for the boat to be brought back in. Hunched figures waiting in the relentless downpour for news, hands shoved in pockets, heads bowed. Even now, she could feel them all willing the Maskells home to safety, a combination of prayer from the believers and hope from the non, but, it seemed, they didn’t have the power.
The boys came back but their dad never did.
As the news filtered through, people avoided each other’s eyes on the harbour front, shuffling their way into the pub to drink a farewell to John Maskell. The worst fear of a seaside town had been realized. They had lost one of their own. And then, over the next few months, they watched Chris drown himself, not in the sea but in drink, floundering helplessly from one day to the next, no one seemingly able to reach out a hand and help him, not his brother Vince or anyone else. It was as much of a waste as John Maskell’s death, only more painful to watch. Until it became normal, until everyone accepted that was just the way Chris was going to be, forever after.
And here he was, lagered up at two o’clock in the afternoon, deadbeat and defiant, because at this time of year they didn’t take the boat out much, so there was nothing else for him to do.
‘Lucky?’ he said to Jenna, his eyes narrowed. ‘How so?’ He picked up the pint the barman had poured him and drank defiantly.
Jenna sensed she had strayed into dangerous territory.
‘I just don’t know why you drink the way you do.’
‘I drink because it’s the only thing that stops me feeling guilty.’
‘But it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.’
Chris shook his head. Jenna had the feeling her words had been echoed a million times before.
‘I should have been able to save him. I should have been quicker. I should have been the one pulling in the line. It should have been me that went over …’
‘Chris – you have to stop torturing yourself. Thinking like that isn’t going to bring him back.’
‘I should have gone in after him.’
‘Oh yeah? You know the rules, Chris. No one but a fool goes in to rescue someone in those conditions. Both of you would have drowned.’
‘Yeah, well – maybe that would have been a good thing.’
‘I’m sure Vince wouldn’t think so.’
‘I bet he’d rather I’d drowned than dad. I can see it in his eyes. Why wasn’t I the one pulling in the line? Why didn’t I go overboard?’
‘You’re talking crap. Self-pitying crap. It was an accident – how many times do I have to say it?’
‘Whatever. He’s never going to come back, either way. And that’s why this helps.’ He held up his glass. ‘When I wake up in the morning the first thing I see is him falling out of that boat. And until I get my first drink, the image doesn’t leave me. The first drink makes the edges of the picture go blurry. By the second one it starts to fade. The third one makes it disappear altogether. And then I don’t have to think about it at all for the rest of the day. Until I wake up the next morning.’
‘And it starts all over again.’
‘You’ve got it.’
‘But you’re wasting your life.’
The Beach Hut Next Door Page 3
