by Jenny Colgan
‘On Saturday morning, you have bagels. Everyone knows that.’
‘Did you bring the bagels?’
‘NO!’ he shouted. ‘That’s where you come in.’
‘Did you bring coffee?’
‘Nope!’
‘The newspapers?’
‘Nope!’
‘Fresh eggs?’
He shook his head.
‘I brought honey!’
Polly smiled. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I guess that’ll have to do.’
Bagels were tricky things, Polly knew, and she set the pot on the stove ready for boiling. Whereupon Neil, who’d been practising his new-found skills (Polly didn’t think he was ready to go to the sanctuary just yet), immediately hopped and fluttered up on to the table, and from there on to the countertop, and from there up on to the edge of the pot and, triumphantly, into it, gliding along the top like a rubber duck.
‘OUT of there,’ said Polly, exasperated. He did this every time she put water on the stove. Not only was it a waste of water, she was worried about boiling him to death one of these days.
‘I thought you and the puffin weren’t serious about living together,’ commented Huckle, returning after being dispatched to Muriel’s little store for fresh coffee, the papers, an onion and some cream cheese. He’d popped to the fishmonger’s van too, and brought back some smoked salmon and two lemons, and Polly smiled at him cheerfully.
‘That’s better!’
‘Most people like my honey.’
‘I like your honey,’ said Polly. ‘I like it very much. But man cannot live on honey alone. And neither can girls. Or puffins. Here, you knead this half.’
They set to work pounding and twisting the dough. Polly couldn’t help but notice how muscular Huckle’s forearms were, the hairs almost invisible against his lightly tanned skin.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Bees.’
‘Bees,’ he agreed.
‘You’re… a career bee-ist?’
‘An apiarist.’
‘Sure, I knew that.’
Polly pushed the dough hard with the flat of her hand. It rolled in a satisfying way.
‘Don’t overknead,’ she instructed Huckle, who looked as if he might squash the dough beneath his huge palms. ‘You’ll make them too chewy.’
‘I like ’em chewy.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You eat your half. I’ll eat my half.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘You didn’t answer my question about the bees.’
‘Yes. No.’
Polly glanced at him sideways.
‘Are you on the lam?’ she asked.
‘Huh? Me? No. Not exactly.’
‘When you say “not exactly”, that makes me think you’re absolutely on the lam. Did you shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die? You sound a bit like someone who might do that. Oh my God, I’m going to be like one of those terrible American women who write to prisoners on death row!’
Huckle smiled his slow grin.
‘I didn’t shoot anyone, no. The cops aren’t looking for me. Purely personal reasons.’
They kneaded on in silence.
‘I moved here for personal reasons too,’ said Polly. ‘My life went down the toilet.’
He raised an eyebrow politely, but didn’t push.
‘I suppose that’s why everyone moves here,’ she said, fishing, but all she got was the eyebrow-raise again.
‘Oh God, that sounded rude,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s lovely and everything…’
‘I think it’s lovely,’ said Huckle. ‘I think it’s completely beautiful.’
‘What’s it like where you come from?’
‘Flat,’ said Huckle. ‘Everything is flat, and big, and there aren’t many people and it goes on for miles. And lush, like a jungle. Lots of green plants that can eat you.’
‘Where are you from, the rainforest?’
‘Savannah, Georgia.’
‘What’s that like?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ he said simply. ‘In a different way. It’s very old-fashioned. Has all these little garden squares.’
‘In America?’ said Polly. ‘I thought America was all modern.’
‘It is, mostly,’ said Huckle. ‘Atlanta is. But Savannah they just kind of forgot about. It’s pretty quiet.’
‘Is it hot there?’
‘The summers are scorching.’
‘Like it’s meant to be, then,’ said Polly. ‘Here it’s just pretty much drizzle all the time.’
‘But when you do get a good day, you treasure it,’ said Huckle, in a way that indicated he wasn’t going to say any more. Then he smiled. ‘Okay, what do I do with this?’
The dough was well and truly pounded. Polly left it to rise in a bright spot protected from Neil, and they made coffee in her recently neglected coffee machine, and opened the windows to let the sunlight in.
‘You know, from the outside this place looks like it’s gonna kill you,’ observed Huckle, watching the dust motes play across the scrubbed wooden floorboards. ‘But from in here, it’s all right.’
‘I know!’ said Polly. ‘If I had any money, I’d do more. Buy curtains for starters,’ she said. ‘The lighthouse gets me every time, even through the back bedroom door. It’s like living in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’
‘I never thought of that,’ said Huckle.
‘And I’d varnish the floorboards.’
Huckle looked doubtful. ‘I could probably do that for you,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure the floor would hold the weight of the varnish. Have you seen the way it slopes?’
‘Seen it?’ said Polly. ‘I’m living it, thank you very much. It slopes on me every day. I keep nearly falling out of bed.’
He grinned, and Polly suddenly felt a bit strange about him thinking about her in bed. But he didn’t seem in the least bit flirtatious, just courteous (and a little bit hungry). There was no point thinking like that anyway, not least because, even though they had only exchanged a few cursory text messages, she didn’t feel she’d quite abandoned Chris. Still. She and Huckle were the only two strangers in town. It was natural they’d gravitate towards one another.
They got up to divide the dough.
‘This is hard,’ muttered Huckle, trying to stick the rings together.
‘Wait till we boil them,’ said Polly, putting the lid on the water pot this time and yelling at Neil every time he got too close.
The cooking, the tricky bit, was made even harder by the lack of proper utensils, and Polly burned herself slightly on the wrist trying to fish out a particularly recalcitrant bagel. Without thinking about it, Huckle took her wrist and ran it under the water way way longer than she would normally have bothered to.
‘You can’t let it deepen in,’ he said. ‘Even a little burn. You think they’ve stopped but they just go on and on. Hush.’
‘Do you ever get stung by your bees?’ Polly asked, curious.
‘Yeah, sure,’ he said nonchalantly.
‘Doesn’t it hurt?’
He smiled and tried to look unbothered. Then: ‘It sure does,’ he said. ‘It hurts like merry hell.’
‘You don’t get used to it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Man, I have to be careful. They sting you enough, you get allergic to the venom and then they can kill you.’
‘A bee can kill you?’
‘Happens all the time,’ he said. He let her take her wrist out from under the tap, tutted at her for not having a first aid kit and showed her a yellow pen in his pocket.
‘It’s an EpiPen,’ he said. ‘In case anyone gets stung by a bee and has a bad reaction.’
‘What if it’s you?’ she said.
‘I know,’ said Huckle. ‘I’d have to jam it in myself. I think about that quite a lot.’
They both stared at the pen.
‘Don’t,’ said Huckle.
‘What?’ said Polly, a smile playing on her lips.
‘Don’t think you might stick it in for fun.’
‘I wasn’t thinking that.’
‘I bet you were.’
‘Maybe a little bit. Maybe just about holding you to ransom.’
‘You see an EpiPen and you want to commit a crime. That’s a worrying characteristic.’
They were smiling at one another as Polly put the bagels in the oven. Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door.
‘So, we were just passing by,’ said Tarnie, as Jayden shuffled about next to him.
‘No you weren’t,’ pointed out Polly. ‘You work right here.’
Tarnie smiled. ‘Do you want a fish?’
‘You are VERY LUCKY,’ said Polly. ‘Anticipating something like this. I have made twenty-four bagels, which is about two more than I can eat.’
Huckle came downstairs too to see what the commotion was. Given that it was ten o’clock on a Saturday morning, and he was wearing a crumpled linen shirt and a pair of soft old chinos with bare feet, Polly felt suddenly very much like she had to give an explanation.
‘Huck just came by with some honey,’ she said. ‘About an hour ago. To make bagels.’
At the exact moment she said it, Huck chimed in with ‘I was just passing.’ This made her feel vaguely insulted that he was also so anxious to make it clear that she was someone he’d just run into, plus she rather suspected that by issuing such flagrant denials, they gave the impression that they had in fact been up to something. And why would she care what Tarnie thought anyway?
Jayden, the young fisherman, said, ‘What’s a bagel? Can I use your toilet? What’s a bagel?’
‘Jayden!’ said Tarnie. ‘Honestly, it’s like being a school teacher.’
‘You may use my loo,’ said Polly. ‘And you may all try a bagel.’
They carried the bagels – twelve onion, twelve cinnamon – plus honey, smoked salmon and cream cheese, lemon juice, knives and a coffee pot, down to the harbour’s edge and all the fishermen gathered round. They looked a little confused to begin with, but took to the food with a will, crumbs spattering everywhere, the bagels perfectly crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. It was very easy to tell the difference between the perfect circles Polly had made and Huckle’s rather apologetic shapes, which resembled a child’s plasticine creations, but they tasted incredibly good all the same, and made a fine feast for a breezy spring morning.
Jayden looked up at Polly’s windows.
‘Have you seen the ghost yet?’ he asked eagerly.
‘WHAT?’ said Polly, jolted. She suddenly remembered the shadowy figure she’d seen on the jetty. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
It had been nothing, she told herself. Just a trick of the light. Nonetheless, she felt her heart beat a little faster.
‘I’m not being stupid,’ said Jayden stubbornly. ‘There’s a harbour ghost. Everybody knows that.’
‘Jayden,’ said Tarnie in a warning voice. ‘Shut up.’
‘Well there is,’ he said sulkily.
‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ said Polly much more confidently than she felt. Jayden didn’t have to sleep up there by himself. ‘What kind of non-existent ghost?’
‘It’s the spirit of a young woman,’ said Jayden. ‘She walks up and down the harbour walls, waiting for her bloke. But he never comes back, right, because he’s been eaten by the fishes at the bottom of the sea. He went out fishing one day and never came home. And she just waits for him, calling like this: “Woooooo!”’
‘His name was Woo?’ said Polly.
‘It’s nonsense,’ said Tarnie. ‘Don’t listen to him, Polly, he’s basically an idiot.’
It was easy to laugh about it in the light of day, surrounded by people, especially when Jayden did an imitation of the ghost, eyes crossed, tongue hanging out. ‘She killed herself,’ he said. ‘Threw herself into the water. But her spirit still hangs on…’
‘So how’s the fishing business?’ Huckle asked Tarnie, changing the subject when he realised Polly was unsettled. Tarnie eyed him suspiciously.
‘It’s all right,’ he said shortly.
‘It’s awful,’ piped up Jayden, snapping out of his ghost impersonation.
Tarnie shot him a look.
‘What? If we do find the fish we’ve got a quota, and if we don’t we all go hungry. And it’s cold and wet and rubbish. I wish I hadn’t failed my GCSEs.’
‘Did you fail your GCSEs, Jayden?’ said Polly kindly. He hardly looked old enough to be shaving. ‘Can’t you sit them again?’
Jayden looked confused. ‘You can do that?’
‘Of course. Didn’t you listen at school?’
‘I think the answer to that’s obvious,’ said Tarnie. Jayden looked dismayed.
‘It’s not too late, you know,’ said Polly gently.
‘I’d never get into the blazer,’ mumbled Jayden.
‘I like it,’ said Archie, Tarnie’s second in command. He was fair and round, his cheeks ruddy from the spray and the sun. ‘I like setting off into the sun going down. I like seeing the birds on the water when we know we’re close to the fishing fields. I like the colour of the sky —’
One of the other men made a kissy-kissy noise.
‘Oi,’ said Polly. ‘Shush or no more bagels for you.’
The man shut up immediately, but Archie was blushing now, his cheeks flaming, and he stopped talking.
‘What about you?’ Polly asked Tarnie.
Tarnie turned and stared at the sea. The watery spring sunlight danced on the waves.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s what my father did. And his father. And so on. My mum always said I had salt water in my veins.’
His West Country accent deepened, and his eyes were suddenly far away.
‘Archie’s right,’ he said. ‘Sometimes when you’re out there, and it’s just you and the water, nothing else, and it’s the middle of the night and all you can see is the stars overhead and you’re out of sight of the lighthouse and you’re just moving to the rhythm of something so much bigger than you… then yeah, it’s all right.’
Polly looked at him for a second.
‘Wow,’ said Huckle. ‘That does sound kind of cool. Can I come out with you guys one night?’
The men looked at him and laughed, but Tarnie shrugged. ‘Reckon.’
‘Unless you throw up,’ said Jayden. ‘Don’t throw up on the fish. It’s a bad scene.’
Huckle nodded. ‘I can see how that might be a bad scene. I did sail a bit as a boy.’
The fishermen exchanged glances. They’d heard that one before.
‘How did you get into the honey business, then?’ asked Jayden.
Huckle shrugged. ‘Well, I hated my old job —’
‘What was that, jam?’ said Polly, slightly peeved that he was starting to talk to them when he’d been cagey with her.
‘Er, no,’ he said. ‘I was an… executive.’
‘A what?’ said Jayden, looking confused.
‘It’s something you can do with GCSEs,’ said Kendall. ‘Mebbe.’
‘Er, I don’t know what those are,’ said Huckle. ‘But it was in an office, yes.’
‘Inside?’ said Jayden. ‘All day? Were you ever soaking wet?’
‘Almost never,’ said Huckle.
‘Cor,’ said Jayden. ‘That sounds great.’
‘Well, it wasn’t.’
Huckle rubbed his eyes for a moment.
‘Anyway. Life takes a turn.’ He clammed up again. Polly was watching him very closely.
‘More money,’ said Jayden, still fixated. ‘That you make indoors. That sounds great.’
‘I’m going to look into night classes for you,’ said Polly.
‘So,’ said Huckle, ‘I thought I’d try something else.’
‘Honey,’ prompted Jayden.
‘No, being a cowboy,’ said Huckle. ‘Yes, honey.’
‘Now I’m confused,’ said Jayden. ‘Because you sound a bit like a cowboy.’
Huckle smiled his slow smile. ‘I’m not a cowboy.’
‘I bet if you put the hat on you’d look like one,’ said Jayden. ‘Maybe I should be a cowboy.’
‘Maybe you should stop talking for two minutes,’ said Tarnie, and Jayden lapsed back into silence.
‘But how can you do honey for a job after that?’ said Polly. He made it sound so easy – exchanging one way of life for another. She alone of everyone here knew it was anything but and was wondering if she could ever have left a safe job so lightly; not without a seismic shake-up. ‘I mean, does it make you any money?’
Huckle looked at her, and something in his eyes made her think he understood her own precarious position.
‘Er,’ he said. ‘Well, I kind of…’
Everyone was staring at him expectantly.
‘I kind of… I mean, the honey was very much a kind of lifestyle change, you know?’
Jayden clearly didn’t understand. Then he did.
‘You mean you don’t have to work?’ he said, eyes wide. ‘Are you rich?’
Huckle went slightly pink and looked away. ‘Aw, man, it’s not like that,’ he said, but he didn’t finish the sentence and looked shy.
‘Have you got a helicopter?’ said Jayden. Huckle laughed.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Damn,’ said Polly. ‘I should definitely have done it your way before my career change. Getting rich should have been on my to-do list.’
Now they all looked at her, and she blushed too and quickly changed the subject. ‘Anyway!’ she said, starting to scoop up crumbs. ‘Can anyone tell me how to get a bus to the puffin sanctuary?’
‘Why?’ said Tarnie, but he realised why when he saw her face. ‘Oh no. Not Neil?’
Neil was sitting next to Polly on the harbour wall, lazily pecking at a piece of bagel. He looked up when he heard his name.
‘Apparently I am being very cruel to him and not respecting his animal rights,’ said Polly sadly.
‘Well, he is getting fat,’ pointed out Tarnie.
‘My puffin is not fat!’ said Polly crossly. ‘Also, he’s still young. Don’t talk about him like that. You could really affect his self-image.’
‘Well, that would be good,’ said Tarnie. ‘Then he’ll know he’s fat and do something about it. No point ignoring the obvious.’
Polly stuck her tongue out at him. ‘He is a beautiful puffin.’
