by Jenny Colgan
The woman sighed heavily and turned round.
‘Got to warm up toaster.’
Polly glanced at it. It was blackened and looked utterly filthy. She was beginning to regret the entire enterprise. Those friendly fishermen had made her feel fleetingly optimistic about her new home, but this was bringing her down again.
She glanced around awkwardly. The cabinets could do with a bit of a clean, too. The woman lugged her huge bulk over to one and picked up a soggy-looking pre-prepared sandwich, which she slapped into the toaster. Polly speedily changed her mind as to how hungry she was.
‘So, I’ve just moved here,’ she said brightly, trying to do her best. A positive mental attitude, that was what she needed. ‘It seems really nice! I was in Plymouth before.’
The woman stared at her rudely. ‘Right. So you’re here to push up our property prices, keeping local people out?’
‘No!’ said Polly, surprised. ‘Ha. No, it’s not like that at all. I’m… er, I’m taking some time out.’ She was trying this phrase out on people, and almost everyone got what she was aiming at and didn’t enquire too much further. ‘Then, you know, I’m going to start looking for a job.’
The woman sniffed and checked the toaster. ‘Well you won’t find one of those. Nothing for incomers to do round here. We’re not one of your pretty-pretty towns, you know. We’re for our own folk here.’
Polly raised her eyebrows at this, but simply took her sandwich, paid, and said goodbye. The woman didn’t answer until she was nearly at the door.
‘But you can still pay the rent?’
Polly turned back, surprised.
‘I’m Mrs Manse,’ said the woman, huffily. ‘I’m your landlady.’
Polly took the sandwich down to the other side of the harbour, away from her own place and the boats, and closer to the causeway. The wind was still blowing, but the wall provided some shelter. There was scarcely anyone about. To her right she saw a fishing boat chugging noisily out to sea, thick black smoke coming from its little funnel, a flash of yellow overalls visible on the bow. She took a bite of her sandwich. It was cheap, nasty, horrible bread, plasticky cheese, tinned pineapple. Somehow, it was also rather comforting.
Mrs Manse hadn’t said any more after that, but she hadn’t had to, reflected Polly rather glumly. That chilly warning had been enough.
She gazed out to sea, pulling her coat around her to keep herself warm. She needed a plan. Okay, positive thinking. So it was going to be hard to get a job that required her to turn up on the mainland at the same time every day, because of the tides. Yes, everyone had told her that and she had chosen to ignore it, but surely she’d figure something out.
In retrospect, she realised that she’d kind of imagined herself somewhere round here – she had accountancy skills, marketing experience, maybe a little local solicitor or something would take her on till she got going again. But now that she’d seen the town, that seemed a little less likely. Okay, a lot less likely.
Well, she had to be realistic about it. Maybe she’d let herself get carried away by the romance of living on a tidal island. But it was a short lease. She would find a job in town and move back. Of course she would. And until then she would use the peace and quiet to help her recover. That was the plan, remember? To slow down, chill out. Take deep breaths of salty sea air. Panic wasn’t going to help.
She finished up her lunch and gave the rest to the seagulls, who made a huge racket dive-bombing to the greasy bread.
Well. She was going to take things one day at a time. Once she’d thought years ahead, and look where that had got her. All her business plans and life schedules had come to absolutely nothing. You never knew what was behind the next door. But she knew what was behind her own new front door – a horrible mess that needed cleaning up pronto.
She smiled when she saw that Kerensa had put a ridiculous pair of rubber gloves with fake fur at the wrists in the box for her, as well as, at the bottom, a little bottle of ready-made gin and tonic, with a note round the top saying ‘Drink Me’. Polly went to work with a will, scrubbing the horrible old kitchenette units thoroughly and swearing to herself. Couldn’t that woman at least have put laminate veneer on them?
The bathroom had a grimy white suite that she guiltily attacked with powerful stain removers. At least there was a bath, she thought. One apartment she’d looked at had had a shower unit with a bed on top. Life when you were skint came down to taking your pleasures where you could find them, she decided.
The floor of the little bathroom, with its roof hanger for drying clothes, was filthy old rutted linoleum, but three rounds of scrubbing revealed a perfectly serviceable black and white pattern, and the frosted glass cleaned up to let in some of the afternoon light. The bedroom was small, but quiet and calm, and again she scrubbed the window, taking down the nets then cursing when she realised that of course she didn’t have a washing machine.
It wasn’t that her parents had been wealthy – in fact, she couldn’t have gone back to her mum’s even if she’d wanted to, as her mum lived on a tiny fixed income in a one-bedroom flat on a housing estate in Rochester – but she had never, ever, even as a student, lived in a house that didn’t have a washing machine.
I am not going to cry, she told herself, wondering if Mr Bassi and Mr Gardner had made away with their smart Bosch yet. I shall make a pile and find a launderette like plenty of people do all the time. Every day. I’ll pretend I’m on EastEnders or something. It’ll be great. GREAT.
She continued into the main room, feeling herself grow warmer with the exertion – which was a good thing – and as she leant out at an extremely dangerous angle to wash her filthy, salt-stained front windows, she noticed the clouds slowing down and the rain falling on one stretch of the ocean far away, like its own personal patch. She gazed out on to her new landscape and wondered: choppy waters? Calm seas?
She boiled the kettle and poured hot water into her favourite Scrabble mug. The mug had cost seven pounds. Suddenly that seemed like a ridiculous amount to spend on a mug. Had she even noticed? Had her life changed so very much? There was a small weekly amount forthcoming from the receivers, so she wouldn’t starve – very small, barely better than benefits – and it was possible that they might make a little money from the flat after everyone had been paid off. Maybe. It probably wasn’t worth counting on. For the last few months Chris hadn’t even let her see the accounts. It had come as a shock to realise how bad things really were. She should have insisted. Oh, she should have done a lot of things.
Polly dragged out an old-fashioned armchair she’d found in the bedroom – it was squashy and old, upholstered in a turquoise fabric, but actually not as tasteless as the other sparse furnishings – and placed it by the front-facing windows, which were swung wide open to dry. Then she sat down and put her legs up on the window ledge. From that angle she couldn’t see anything except sea and sky; she practically felt like she was flying. She sipped her coffee, breathing in the salty air and watching the waves, trying to time her breathing as they rolled in and out, in and out. Before long, she was in the deepest, calmest sleep she’d known for months.
Chapter Six
A positive attitude, Polly discovered, was a lot easier to fake at five o’clock in the afternoon than the early hours of the morning. She’d woken, chilled, then found it hard to get back to sleep, to stop the negative thoughts from creeping back.
And the flat was cold. As well as the wood-burner, which she wasn’t at all sure how to use, there was an exceedingly dangerous-looking black stove, so she’d turned that on, then, stupidly, gone and checked the meter, which, sure enough, was whizzing round and round at the speed of light. So she’d pulled a sweatshirt on over her pyjamas, wishing she hadn’t put her dressing gown into storage – what was she thinking? – and snuck under the lightweight breathable duvet that had been perfect for a small, modern, centrally heated apartment but wasn’t nearly adequate here, as the wind whistled through the last remaining holes in the roof a
nd she could hear the waves thundering on the shingle below. She thought longingly of the soft fluffy white duvet they’d used for visitors, or, increasingly, on the nights they’d slept apart because of Chris’s tossing and turning.
The strange noises were unnerving. At one point she dropped off and dreamt that she was down a hole and water was lapping at her; that she was being pulled under the water. Then, suddenly, she heard a bang and a scream.
Completely disorientated, she sat bolt upright, her heart thudding in her chest. Where was she? What was that? Where was Chris? Oh GOD, someone had broken in. News had got around of the lone female moving into town, into a house that wasn’t even vaguely secure. It was a posse. It was a crazy town where they sacrificed people. It was…
Gradually she got a grip on herself for long enough to check her phone. She cursed when she saw it: 2.30, the very dead of night. It was completely freezing in the flat, and pitch dark: the harbour street lights were few and far between, and beyond was just complete blackness. Suddenly, bright light flooded in underneath the bedroom door and she nearly screamed herself before realising that it must be the beam from the lighthouse on the point coming through the front windows. She realised she was trembling and gathered the duvet around her. She didn’t have a bedside light yet. She was going to have to fumble across the room in the dark. Or maybe wait till the lighthouse beam swept past again. She strained her ears but could hear nothing. It must have been a bad dream. A bad dream, that was all, something to do with the lighthouse…
This time when the scream came it sounded even closer.
‘OhSHITohSHITohSHITohSHIT,’ said Polly to herself, fighting a desire to stick her head underneath the duvet. Her heart was pounding like it wanted to leap out of her chest. It occurred to her that a gang of bloodthirsty pitchfork-wielding locals would be unlikely to scream at her, but that didn’t really help. What was it that the fishermen had said about ghosts?
‘He… hello…’ she called out tentatively into the dark. There was a kind of whimpering noise.
Oh God. Maybe there’d been an accident outside. Maybe someone – a child? – had been thrown from a car. Grasping her phone, she waited till the lighthouse swept its beam over her once again, then scuttled across the room to the main light switch. Flicking it on, she felt a tiny bit calmer, but only till the next yelp hit her ears.
‘All right, all right, I’m coming,’ she said, pulling on another jumper. Why hadn’t she brought a torch? Because the more she thought about it, the more sure she was that the noise was coming from downstairs. From the dark and dusty abandoned shop below. She wondered where the entrance was, then remembered a doorway leading off the stairs. It would be locked, though… She should probably phone the police right away. Yes, that was what she would do.
The cry that came was so lonesome and desolate, she steeled herself and headed down the stairs towards the door. Lance had given her a huge bunch of keys – when she’d asked why she needed so many, he’d shrugged and said he didn’t know, he was only a trainee – and she fumbled with them as she went.
Sure enough, the second Yale worked. She shook the warped old door hard and it popped open. She let it swing into the room beyond, holding her breath. She realised she was shaking.
‘Hello?’
No reply, but there was movement.
‘Hello?’ she said again. She glanced to the right. There was light coming in through one of the broken panes in the shop door. As she let her eyes adjust to the gloom, it occurred to her that it might be a cat or a dog – or a troll or a zombie, her subconscious added. She told her subconscious to shut it.
‘Hello!’
She hoped it wasn’t something that would bite her. On the other hand, she couldn’t wait for the police – she guessed there wasn’t a police station anywhere near here – whilst there was an animal in pain. She took a deep breath and stepped into the room.
There was the musty, dusty, heavy smell of a neglected space, and large shapes that must be counters and, in the corner, huge ovens. She could hear a funny kind of snuffling noise but there was no more screaming.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ she said, peering around the shapes, terrified of what she might find. ‘It’s only me,’ she added, which was obviously a totally stupid thing to say under the circumstances. If it was a gigantic mutant spider with lots of little spider babies, for example, she was going to stomp on them all, so being only me wasn’t exactly any use.
Finally, near the front, just behind a glass cabinet, she felt the snuffling grow closer. Holding her breath, she crouched down.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh dear me.’
Down in the corner was a tiny bird with black and white plumage and a huge yellow and orange beak. As Polly knelt next to it, it let rip with another overwhelming screech. It was a huge noise to come out of such a little creature.
‘What happened to you?’ she said. She could feel the bird’s little body trembling, and she tried to stretch her arms out in as unthreatening a way as possible. ‘Ssh, ssh.’
She could see from the light from the street that the bird’s wing was all twisted. It looked broken. She wondered what had happened, and then realised that it must have accidentally flown into the glass in the dark, and the glass must have been sufficiently weak to break. It had probably had a nasty bump on the head too, poor thing.
‘Come here, come here.’
The bird tried to flap away, but instantly squawked in pain and stopped. Continuing to make soothing noises, Polly gently picked up the little creature. She was temporarily worried she was going to give it a heart attack; she could feel its heart beating incredibly quickly in its chest.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ she said. ‘You know, I was absolutely more scared than you.’
She looked at the little thing.
‘Well, okay, maybe not quite as scared as you, but it was close.’
She glanced at the window. That would have to wait. She’d put some cardboard on it tomorrow, or tell the agents. Suddenly she was relieved she hadn’t phoned 999. Explaining that she had a poorly bird on her hands probably wouldn’t have gone down too well.
‘Well,’ she said, looking at it, ‘I don’t know much about puffins – I don’t know anything about puffins actually. I had no idea you could even fly – but I think you’d better come upstairs with me.’
Compared to the eerie deserted shop, upstairs, with the lights blazing and her familiar sofa and bed, seemed almost homely. She popped the kettle on out of habit, not feeling the least bit sleepy now, and pinned up a spare sheet over the front window to block out the sweeping lighthouse beam. Then she wrapped a towel round the puffin – his feathers were dense and soft; he must be a baby – and googled on her phone ‘how to fix a bird’s broken wing’. It suggested gauze tape, but since she only had packing tape from the move, that would have to do. The bird had stopped trying to flap itself free and was regarding her with its deep black eyes instead.
She taped the wing to its body, then cut some air holes in one of her packing boxes.
‘Bed,’ she said. ‘Bed for you.’
The website suggested cat food, which she also had none of, but she did have an emergency tin of tuna in her supplies box. She put a small dish of that and a saucer of water in front of the bird, who tried to waddle forward to inspect it, and promptly fell over.
Polly carefully righted him again. He looked at the two dishes, glanced at her fearfully – Polly found herself saying, ‘It’s all right, it’s fine’ – and then he started pecking at the fish. Polly found herself smiling as she watched him eat – partly out of relief at all the horrible things that could have gone bump in the night but hadn’t.
‘Okay,’ she said, after the bird seemed to have tired of the food. ‘I guess you’re going to be my flatmate for the night.’
She’d take him to the vet tomorrow – there must be somewhere that dealt with this kind of thing – but for now, she’d try him in the box. She put the towel under
neath him – ‘Basically, bird,’ she told him, ‘you’re wearing a nappy, right? And no hopping on my sofa’ – and the box on top. She expected him to grumble at that, but he didn’t; perhaps it was a bit like a nest. Instead he fluttered a little, then went quiet.
Polly got back into bed, with the duvet doubled over and the rest of her towels on top of it. To her surprise, she fell asleep straight away, and didn’t stir till the seagulls started to bark at the return of the fishing boats on a bright and sunny April morning.
Chapter Seven
‘The good thing,’ said Polly the next morning as the little bird pecked away at the remains of the tuna, ‘is that I’m not going to get very attached to you or start giving you a name or anything.’
The puffin attempted another wobble, but fell over again. She helped him up. ‘No matter how amusing you think you are,’ she said. The puffin cawed a little.
‘I know. When you’re better, I’ll set you free and you can fly off and find your mummy and daddy, okay? Scout’s honour.’
She sighed. ‘I will say this for you, puffin. Talking to a bird is definitely a step up from talking to a sofa.’
As she drank her coffee, she watched the men unloading the fish on the harbour. There were people around the crates staring in and poking and prodding, and a man had already set up a little bench and was gutting the fish and selling some straight off a boat. Polly watched him, fascinated. He was so quick with the knife it was almost impossible to follow his fingers; he slit and gutted the fish like lightning. Several vans were parked up with the names of famous Cornish fish restaurants on the sides. So this was how it was done, she thought. She should probably head down and buy some; it seemed unlikely she’d get fresher. And perhaps the little puffin would like some too…
The men coming off the boats looked tired. It must be a long night, she thought, realising as she considered it that she’d never given the life of a fisherman the least thought at all. She was tired too. She went over to unpack one of the food boxes she’d brought. She’d cleared out the store cupboards at the flat in Plymouth. Once upon a time she wouldn’t have bothered to keep a mostly empty tin of salt, and two little packets of yeast.
