by Jenny Colgan
‘Are you having a party?’ asked Selina, who rolled up her sleeves happily and joined in.
‘No,’ said Polly. ‘It’s really just a rehearsal. A practice. I got slightly carried away, I think.’
‘You think?’ said Selina. ‘Maybe if five thousand people turn up to hear Jesus speaking…’
Polly sighed. ‘I know. I’ve missed it.’
Selina stayed and chatted until Reuben turned up and they went down with the fire extinguisher.
‘Who are you?’ said Reuben rudely.
‘This is Selina,’ said Polly carefully. ‘She was married to Tarnie, the fisherman.’
‘You had a lovely party for him last year,’ added Selina. ‘It was really appreciated.’
‘Oh yes!’ said Reuben. ‘I remember you! You look a bit hot for a fisherman’s wife.’
‘REUBEN,’ said Polly. ‘Don’t be Reuben-y.’
‘I’m making a perfectly reasonable observation. He looked like a hairy stick. She looks hot.’
Polly’s hand flew to her mouth. But to her utter amazement, Selina burst into giggles.
‘He did!’ she laughed. ‘He did look like a hairy stick.’
Now Polly felt insulted on Tarnie’s behalf.
‘I thought he was nice-looking,’ she said. ‘Lovely blue eyes.’
‘Yes, but you know. Quite a lot of hair. On a stick.’ Selina was still laughing. ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Nobody has been rude about him for SO LONG.’
‘See!’ said Reuben. ‘Polly thinks she knows what I should say.’
‘I don’t!’ said Polly. ‘I mean, on balance, yes, I would probably err on the side of being polite about somebody who only died a year ago.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Selina. ‘I’m not in the least bit offended. I’m cheered up, in fact. Are you going to light the oven in the van? I’ve made tons of stuff.’
Selina’s part in the process had in fact been confined to a bit of dough-rolling, but Polly didn’t mention this.
‘I certainly am,’ said Reuben. ‘Stand well back.’
He stoked up the wood-burner, which was enhanced and super-heated by gas flames at the back and sides. It really was a state-of-the-art piece of equipment: it heated quickly, but still gave a fantastic, wood-smoked flavour to everything. A chimney with a little point came out of the top of the van, and they kept the side counter propped open for extra ventilation.
Polly had scrubbed the van down the day before, even though it was in impressively good nick and had really been hardly used at all. She wondered if Evan and his brother had given up too easily. Now she watched with bated breath, as Reuben leant in with an extra-long match and fired up the oven with a very faint crumping noise. As he stood back, the flames of the gas caught and the wood started to crackle.
‘I now pronounce this tiny weird cook van thing OPEN,’ he said. ‘For Polly and the hot widow.’
‘Reuben, if you don’t stop calling Selina hot, I’m telling Kerensa.’
‘What? Why? She doesn’t mind. I think loads and loads of women are hot, but there’s only one I want to bone all the time. It’s great.’
Polly rolled her eyes at Selina, who was still smiling and apparently found Reuben quite charming. Then she stepped inside the van, leaned out of the window and waved. Selina and Reuben took the official first pictures, with the lighthouse in the background.
‘So,’ Reuben was saying to Selina as he did so, ‘don’t you think it’s about time we found you a nice man?’
‘Can he be taller than you?’ Selina said.
‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ said Reuben. ‘I got it. I totally got your hairy-stick tendencies down, baby.’
‘Um, me and Nan the van would love a tiny bit of attention for ten seconds if that’s at all possible?’ Polly hollered cheerfully, putting in her very first loaves.
Polly woke that first bright summer morning at 4 a.m., before her alarm, bristling with excitement.
She called Huckle first off, but he was in a noisy bar with a clutch of the labourers, and she could barely hear him. There had been a fair amount of slacking off before Huckle had arrived, as the men had no direction and no motivation to do more than the absolute minimum. He’d had to come down pretty hard on all of them, and they’d complied and done their absolute best, turning the farm around in barely more than a month. He was utterly proud of how hard they’d worked, and felt they needed a night off, so they had all set off to town in the back of a pickup truck, and found the nearest sports bar. They sounded extremely exuberant.
Hearing all the noise around Huckle made Polly feel more isolated. Also, she couldn’t remember the last time she was in a packed bar having a good time with a bunch of people. It sounded fun.
‘No, no, I’m listening,’ said Huckle, as several hundred men shouted at a baseball game that was going on on the TV screen over his head. He was drinking gassy bottled beer and wishing he was at home with Polly; in fact it hit him so hard, he very briefly wanted to cry. Polly, however, sounded a bit impatient.
‘So!’ she was saying.
‘Um, uh-huh?’
‘SO! It’s TODAY!’
‘I thought it was Monday.’
‘It’s Tuesday, Huckle! It’s Tuesday where I am.’
‘Huckle blinked, confused. Another roar went up from the spectators.
‘It’s opening day! I’m starting today!’
‘Oh yeah? Uh, cool.’
‘You sound busy,’ said Polly, thoroughly deflated. Out of the lighthouse window she couldn’t see anything at all; it was like the rest of the world had simply cut its tethers and drifted off.
‘Work stuff.’
‘YAY!’ went the crowd, as their team scored a home run.
‘I’ll go outside,’ said Huckle hurriedly. Outside, everyone was dancing in the street and blowing horns.
‘Sorry, it’s kind of the World Series.’
‘Right,’ said Polly. ‘I hope the blues win.’
‘Seriously? No way! The Blues are rubbish!’
Polly half-smiled.
‘Well. Anyway. I just wanted to tell you. It’s Tuesday. I’m starting today.’
Huckle was about to wish her luck, but with a quick crackle and a hum, his phone conked out. He glanced at it. No battery at all, not even enough for a quick text. He cursed quietly, and wondered if he could make a run for it.
‘Huck! My man!’
It was Jackson, the chief stockman.
‘Come in, come in! We all owe you one. You’re going to save all our jobs! Come in and lemme buy you a beer! This has been a great day.’
Reluctantly Huckle let himself be led back inside.
This was not shaping up to be Polly’s great new day, she realised glumly. The clouds had rolled in and it was absolutely hosing it down outside. She wondered briefly if there was anything in Evan’s curse, but put the thought out of her mind completely as she expertly and automatically rolled loaves into tins and laid out her neat rows of buns to half-bake before finishing them off as needed in the van so they arrived with the customers fresh and warm. She eyed up her ingredients carefully. How many people, she wondered, would queue up in the rain in a car park for a loaf of bread?
Well, it was too late to think about that now. They were committed. She was in. Huckle was in. Nan the Van was downstairs…
Polly trudged in and out of the lighthouse four times carrying the bread and buns and placing them carefully in the steel trays. Then she started up the van. She had timed everything to hit low tide, but in fact the rain was sheeting across the cobbles, making everything damp and slippery, and she found herself faintly concerned that the van might skitter and slide into the water…
No, of course it wouldn’t, she told herself sternly, although she never drove across the causeway herself; she was always with Huckle in his sidecar.
Well. Huckle wasn’t here. He hadn’t been here for a while and he wasn’t here now and there was no point in thinking about that, she told herself crossly, seeing as he wa
s only off trying to help her out in the first place.
At 8 a.m. on a wet, filthy late May morning, clouds down around her ears, she parked up in the little municipal car park next to the causeway. On warm summer weekends it was mobbed, filled with people unpacking picnics and fishing rods; children with shrimping nets, excited about the thrill of a road that was sometimes exposed and sometimes underwater; red-foreheaded fathers bringing out windbreaks and sun cream and water bottles, as if they were tracking through the Sahara.
But this morning, there was absolutely nobody here at all. Old Jim the angler passed by, his rod held upright by his side.
‘Morning, Jim,’ said Polly.
‘Morning, Polly,’ said Jim, but he didn’t seem to be in the least bit inclined to ask what she was doing out here with a soggy hairnet on, erecting a canopy in a deserted grey car park first thing in the morning.
‘Can I interest you in a bun?’ asked Polly cheerfully.
Jim looked at her.
‘My mum makes my sandwiches,’ he said mournfully. ‘On my fishing days, like.’
‘You wouldn’t like to try something different?’
Jim shook his head emphatically.
‘My mum knows how I like my sandwiches, you see,’ he said. ‘Cheese and pickle, with the cheese not touching the pickle.’
‘Okay,’ said Polly. ‘I don’t have any like that. I have buns, though.’
Jim shook his head again.
‘Naw, you don’t want a bun after a sandwich. You want a Kit Kat.’
He sloshed on through the heavy rain, his oilskins well worn and a cheery yellow sou’wester on his grizzled head.
‘Bye then!’ said Polly. ‘Good luck with the fish!’
She got the canopy up; it wasn’t easy, and she wasn’t entirely sure it looked brilliant, but she got there in the end. Then she went back into the van – which was at least cosy from the oven. A little too cosy, in fact: she had to open the back door as the oven really heated up, which had the annoying result of letting in all the rain – and looked at her two hundred buns and wondered if perhaps she’d been a little bit optimistic for her first day.
She’d mentioned it a little bit around town, but not too much, given that she didn’t really want word to get out that she was starting up some kind of alternative service. She didn’t entirely trust Malcolm not to find a way to stop her, his loathing for her seemed so strong.
‘That’s your marketing plan?’ Kerensa had asked her. ‘Adventurous.’
And now she sat all alone in the cheery red van, wishing she’d brought a book, feeling like the only person for miles and miles around, the only person in Cornwall. She looked at the neat lines of buns, and told herself not to eat them all.
At 9 a.m., a seagull marched right up the steps into the van – they had been getting bolder for a while – and Polly told him where to go, with a swearword. The seagull was totally unfazed by this, and cawed at her, fixing its beady eyes on the buns.
‘I never kick birds,’ Polly told it, seriously. ‘Never. Not in a million years. But what I am going to do here is pretend to kick you, and see if that works.’
She threw her leg out in front of her. The seagull totally ignored it. She yelled at it again. It gave her a disdainful glance. Then she made a big lion roar. That worked, and it scuttered backwards and flapped down the stairs, but she didn’t know if she could do that all day.
She sighed and glanced at her phone.
How’s it going? Kerensa had texted. That was a bit early, Polly reckoned.
Brilliant, she typed back. The Duchess of Cambridge just came in and ordered 190 cakes for Prince George.
Then she thought better of that, and deleted it, and worked out what time it was in Savannah (3 a.m.), and sighed.
She was gazing out at the rain and telling herself not to worry, she’d got through worse than this, then crossly wondering precisely how many days she would have to say to herself, ‘not to worry, you’ve got through worse than this’, because as life philosophies went, it wasn’t the one she’d have chosen, when a car drew up; some kind of aggressive-looking BMW that was a little tatty round the edges. Polly put her hairnet back on in case it was the council, and also pasted on a cheery smile in case it was someone from the authorities. It was neither.
‘WHAT THE BLOODY HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?’
Malcolm danced out of the car like he was Rumpelstiltskin, puce with fury.
‘What the hell is THIS?’
Polly flushed bright red. She knew she probably had to expect this at some point, but confrontation was so far away from how she usually engaged with people, and now it was here, it was torture.
She glanced to the side, wishing that Reuben was here. Reuben loved this kind of thing. He’d have got into a fight straight away. And he’d have enjoyed it. Kerensa too, she’d have got stuck in. Even Huckle could probably have calmly defused the situation.
Instead, Polly felt absolutely horrible inside, frightened and panicky at the idea of dealing with somebody who was cross with her. Then she felt ridiculous for feeling that way; why must she take everything so personally? She was a grown-up, wasn’t she? She ought to be able to handle it; how on earth could she call herself a businesswoman otherwise?
‘It’s just a van,’ she squeaked.
‘It’s not! It’s a filthy plan to ruin my livelihood!’ screamed Malcolm, even though it was ten o’clock in the morning, and his livelihood really ought to have been up and running for five hours.
‘Are you trying to make my mother starve, is that your plan? Are you trying to ruin everything? Are you really such a bitch you would do that?’
Polly shook her head.
‘No,’ she started. ‘Not at all. It’s just…’ She told herself not to cry. Huckle wouldn’t cry. ‘It’s just… this is the only thing I know how to do.’
Malcolm stared at her.
‘So you’d take food out of the mouth of its rightful owner?’
‘What? No. Not on purpose! Well…’
He marched towards her, his red pimply face clashing unpleasantly with his mustard-coloured mackintosh.
‘You know,’ he spat, his eyes fierce, ‘I wanted to be a professional.’
‘What kind of professional?’ Polly asked in a shaky voice.
‘Trumpeter,’ replied Malcolm, as if it were patently obvious. ‘And when I couldn’t get a job – because the industry is totally stitched up, by the way, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know – when they locked me out of that, well I didn’t let it get me down, did I?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Polly, staring at the ground, realising she wasn’t really handling this very well and trying to remember all those assertiveness tips Kerensa had given her.
‘I picked myself up and never looked back, and look at me now.’
Jumping about in a wet car park at ten o’clock in the morning, Polly thought.
‘Stupid bloody trumpet.’
‘Do you miss playing the trumpet?’ Polly asked timidly.
Malcolm sighed for a moment, then looked cross again. His lips, Polly now noticed, did look about right for playing the trumpet: slightly splayed, and with a free run of spittle when he was exasperated, which he undoubtedly was now.
‘No,’ he said crossly. ‘A bit. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that YOU have to get wise to some life lessons now.’
‘It’s perfectly legal for me to be here,’ said Polly, trembling. ‘I have a licence.’
‘Yes,’ snarled Malcolm. ‘And that means it’s perfectly legal for ME to be here too.’
A car slowed down in the rain, windscreen wipers sloshing vehemently. Malcolm marched up and tapped on the window.
‘I hope you weren’t going to buy bread from here, mate,’ he said, unpleasantly chummy. ‘Because it’s bloody awful.’
Polly’s hand flew to her mouth.
‘But…’ she said.
‘You ruin my business,’ he said, standing upright and shouti
ng through the rain, ‘and I’ll ruin yours. And I reckon I’ll hold out the longer.’
Polly wanted to cry.
‘Why don’t you just go somewhere else?’ he said. ‘I don’t care where. Go away. Go back to where you came from.’
‘Plymouth?’
