by Con Riley
“What do you know, Jude?” The lack of endearment didn’t stop Jude from answering and moving closer.
“I know he had his own ideas for you—about you—but don’t you think that this might be him saying sorry?” He didn’t even know that he’d reached out until his fingers slid through Rob’s hair, palm cupping the nape of his neck. One tug and they were as close as when they’d just kissed, foreheads pressed together. “He should see what you’ve made happen,” Jude said, fervent. “What you’ve made out of almost nothing. It’s amazing. You are too, and he should get to see that firsthand.”
The huff Rob let out was tiny. “That’s what Lou keeps saying too.”
“Then maybe take the hint?” Besides, Rob might need to open a line of communication if going back to London was his next plan once his loan was repaid.
The sensation of something tangling seaweed-like around his ribs this time instead of around Jude’s ankles only tightened as Rob nodded slowly.
Business improving through their soft opening didn’t bring a tidal wave of money, more the gradual rise of a financial tide that showed no sign of stopping. For once, it was a flood the Anchor could do with, soaking up the increased turnover like a sponge Louise wrung out into decorating budgets to renovate the last two bedrooms. She attacked her own room first, Marc her perpetual shadow, far more boxes of her possessions ending up at his place than seemed temporary. The batik she chose to brighten the room she’d stripped bare was a fiery shade that warmed its new white walls, a touch of herself remaining, like the blue in Jude’s, which just left one room to work on.
Jude took a breather after a dinner service that had been much busier than expected, hopeful diners turning up on spec that Rob had welcomed like long-lost family members. He searched for him once he’d cleared down only for Louise to catch him before he could, cornering him in the hallway. “Come on,” was all she said, one finger through the apron string tied around his middle. That sharp tug meant business.
“It’s past midnight, Lou.” Jude looked over his shoulder, Rob nowhere in sight. “I was kinda hoping to go to bed in a minute.”
“Me too, but there’s something we’ve got to get settled before the weekend.” She led the way to their parents’ bedroom. “Do you really want to leave everything here as it is?” The dressing table was still cluttered.
“God no.”
“Me either.” She crossed to the dressing table and started sorting through perfume bottles and combs. Jude took one that she lingered over from her hand and slid it into her hair. “Mum would be all right with you borrowing her combs, you know?”
Louise’s eyes glistened as she tried to joke. “Are you saying that my hair’s a mess or something?”
“I’m saying that you’re all the best bits of her already,” Jude said, truthful. “But I wouldn’t mind seeing some of her favourite things more often. It would be like she was still here if you—”
Footsteps pounded up the stairs interrupted, Rob lurching through the doorway moments later.
“There’s a call for you in the office,” he said breathless, gaze fixed on Jude. “From the Aphrodite.”
A hundred different scenarios filled Jude’s head between his parents’ bedroom and the office, a thousand different reasons for Tom to call him out of the blue like this.
Perhaps he’d got a charter that would take him out of Jude’s search radius at the end of the summer, and was calling to warn him. He’d have contacts though; other skippers who might hire him, Jude knew as he took the stairs down two, three, four at a time. He’d point Jude in the right direction so he could keep on searching.
Or…
He stopped dead in the hallway, Rob almost slamming into his back with Louise close behind him.
Or…
Rob gripped his shoulder. “Go on,” he said, his hold firm and his voice steady. “Better not keep him waiting.”
The old wooden office chair was still warm when Jude sat at the desk, the pencil Rob must have been using only minutes before lying atop his pad of paper. Jude put the phone on speaker and picked up the pencil, holding it tight while his hands were shaking. He was glad Rob’s hand was still on his shoulder, securing him while a hot bubble of hope rose at the same time that dread tried to drag his heart down to the ocean bottom.
“Tom?” Jude’s voice sounded weird to his ears. “Any news?”
He didn’t want to hear Tom’s answer, yet he strained everything to listen.
Tom said something about a survey team and the height of floodwaters, but all Jude heard were his last words. The pencil snapped in his hands as Jude finally grasped Tom’s meaning, Louise’s sobs nearly drowning him out as Rob asked Tom to repeat them.
Tom said, “A survey team have found some wreckage,” and Jude’s whole world stopped turning.
32
“This is stupid,” Jude said, the wind outside cooling his hot face while waves lashed against the far end of the harbour. “So bloody stupid. I don’t know why I’m crying,” he gulped, angry, dashing away tears he had no control over and zero power to stop falling. “We all knew they had to be dead. Wreckage finally turning up solves a lot of problems.” He drew in a breath that staggered so his next words were breathless. “I’ll call the coroner tomorrow. I’ll do it as soon as Tom sends more details.” More tears seeped. “For fuck sake.” He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, pressing so hard that the horizon blurred once he dropped his hands. “It’s so stupid that I—”
“That you what?” Rob stood behind him again, like he had done since Tom’s phone call, arms around Jude’s middle, with one hand over his belly and the other exactly where it felt like his chest must now gape wide open. “Tell me, Jude.”
“I just…” Jude wiped at his face again. “Fuck, saying it is so stupid.”
“Saying what?”
Jude didn’t—couldn’t—answer.
Rob murmured just loud enough to hear over the waves and gulls. “You’re allowed to be upset,” Rob promised. “This has been a long time coming. You’ve been amazing, both of you. At least with my mum… well, we knew, and we got to say goodbye to each other, and if Dad and I reacted differently, maybe I can see now why he kept so busy. But you two have been in a holding pattern of having no news for a long time.” His quick kiss to the back of Jude’s neck was cool against skin that felt hot enough to blister. “Both you and Lou kept going and going and going, no matter what, no matter how far apart you were. Both of you kept hoping. Being emotional now is normal.”
“That’s not what I’m feeling stupid about. Mad about. I-don’t-even-know-what about.”
“What do you mean?” Rob shivered against his back but showed no sign of letting go until Jude was ready.
Jude tried to swallow around a vain wish that now seemed to choke him. “You said that we both kept hope, right up until now.” He let out another hitching breath before asking. “It’s stupid to still hope, isn’t it? Despite everything?”
Rob’s hands which had rubbed in soothing circles over Jude’s chest now stilled. He asked, “Because your dad could fix anything in his boatshed? And because your mum was once a nurse who knew how to cook whole meals from rock pools and hedgerows?” He sounded nearly as choked as Jude felt, his next words thick with what could be laughter if he didn’t sound so gutted. “Like both of them chucking their kids over the sea wall meant they had to be great sea swimmers as well?”
“Yeah,” Jude blurted, hope that had been lodged between his ribs for so long still firmly embedded. He couldn’t shift it, even now; especially now. He knew he must sound desperate. “I can’t stop thinking that if anyone could survive capsizing… If anyone might have to swim to safety… Set up camp, light a fire and find ways to collect fresh water… If I just keep looking…” he turned in Rob’s arms, face wedged against his throat, his voice hoarse. “I’d get to tell them.”
“About?”
“Me. And about you.” He looked up to find Rob’s face just a
s tear-streaked as his must be. “And about what you and Lou have done with the Anchor.” Once he started, the words kept coming, unstoppable instead of dammed by that old wall of shame inside him, a tide that spilt now, endless, flooding over its top to drench him. “I didn’t get to tell them about Marc not being gay, or that he painted Lou like a French girl, or about Susan beating cancer and Carl turning into a massive softy. They don’t know about how special Betsy is to you, or why, or about your dad being almost as much as a dickhead as you, who keeps trying to say sorry by giving you restaurants and Range Rovers that you throw back at him, you numpty, instead of sitting down and talking. I need to tell them about you being a good chef, but a much better hotelier, and a terrible liar, and my best friend on the planet, and about how much I love you, and Jesus fuck we used the last of Mum’s blackberries from the freezer. She’d kill me for that, but I’d tell her, right now, if I could.”
Rob heard what was important. “You love me?”
Jude’s chest hitched a few more times and he nodded, more words so far beyond him right then, or even a half-hour later when photos sent by Tom arrived in an email that took forever to open. It was way beyond midnight by then, with the first paying guests arriving the next morning, but Lou sat on Jude’s lap clutching Trevor’s postcards as an image finally appeared, pixel by painful pixel.
The faces of the survey team emerged first, young yet terribly solemn, the same logo on all their T-shirts. The wreckage they held was about as raw-edged as Jude felt, splintered around two words Jude remembered his dad painting with careful, steady brush strokes.
One and for appeared on the screen.
Only Luck was missing.
Later, dawn streaked the sky pink and purple when Rob came to find Jude.
“Woke up and you were gone,” he mumbled after Jude had chosen to look at photos of wreckage rather than stare sightlessly out of the portholes in the boat shed for any longer. “What are you doing here, Jude?”
Jude shook his head, his eyes sore as he picked up a postcard Lou had left on the desk, one of the last his dad had ever written.
Rob’s voice was low and soothing. “You know, if you want to fly back and keep looking right now, we’ll find a way to make that happen.” Rob ignored the second shake of Jude’s head and went on to discount everything that Jude knew was true about their current cash flow, months away yet from clearing enough profit for any more wild-goose chases. “I’ll buy you a ticket to the closest airport to the Aphrodite.”
“What with?” That came out harsher than he intended. Closer to a shout too.
“I’ll find the money,” Rob promised. “I’ll phone the bank; get my credit limit increased,” he said even though they both knew that couldn’t happen.
“No.” Outside, Carl chugged past in his trawler, life going on as normal, making Jude butt in before Rob could speak again. “And I’m not asking Carl or Susan for cash or getting you to ask your dad for any either. We’ve spent too much already. Besides… I do have some cash left.”
“But not enough to fly halfway around the planet.”
Not after paying to stay in St Ives, or chipping in towards the last of the redecoration, money he’d hoped to replace by the end of the summer. Now, leaving it that long to go back seemed pointless, only… “I want you to tell me something.”
“Anything.”
Jude dug deep and admitted what he couldn’t stop thinking; hadn’t been able to let go of; needed to say at least once before quitting. “Tell me it’s pointless to phone Trevor right now.” He turned the postcard over, the picture on this side just as brightly vibrant as his mother’s hair had been.
“Not pointless, but maybe leave it until later?” Rob offered. “He’ll want to know about the wreckage, I’m sure, but maybe tell him about it when it isn’t so early in the morning.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Jude turned the postcard over again, rubbing a thumb over the raised corner of its stamp, maybe as his Dad had right before he sent it, hoping to rebuild a bridge with his friend, never knowing how pleased Trevor had been to read it. “Tell me not to waste his time.”
“How?” Rob asked quietly.
“He’s got all that software, doesn’t he?” Jude closed his eyes and pictured a myriad dots locating yachts, tankers, and cruise liners. “Tell me there’s no point asking him to figure out where they might have….” Gone down was too hard to say aloud. Sunk just as impossible.
“You want him to plot where they found the wreckage into his navigation programs? Get him to work backwards using all his tide and weather records until…?”
What Jude next hoped for was much harder to picture. Which coastguard or Navy did he expect to lend yet more manpower to a months-old search that spanned so many bodies of water? Jude said what both he and Rob had heard from Trevor firsthand. “There are still too many variables for him to be anywhere near accurate.” Rob stayed silent but his arms tightened around him as Jude continued. “We don’t know exactly when this wreckage washed up. It could have been right after…” His swallow was a dry click. “Or it could have been months later, and Trevor said he’d need as close a date as possible along with a last known location.” That alone was impossible. Suddenly, tiredness overwhelmed him, the postcard loose now in his hold, Jude unresisting as Rob took it from him to scan the writing closely while frowning. Jude didn’t argue either when Rob steered him upstairs, Lou asleep next to a wide-awake Marc in their parents’ old room. Marc switched places without comment, leaving Jude to lie next to his sister while dawn lit the horizon visible through his parents’ window with a warm blush.
“No. None of that,” Rob said, drawing the curtains. He said, “Close your eyes, fish face,” very softly, and Jude did.
He closed his eyes and let hope go as sleep slowly took him.
Jude woke at the sound of footsteps in the hallway outside his mum and dad’s room, Louise’s side of the mattress vacant. She was outside, he realised. He heard her say, “I do hope you enjoy your stay with us at the New Anchor,” to someone.
Jesus.
Their first guests of the summer, here right when he felt least able to put on a brave face.
He rolled over to face the wall rather than people he should welcome only to realise that one of the maps plotting his parents’ route was missing. He didn’t blame Louise for taking it down. It rubbed in how off course his initial search had been, wreckage found so far from any of the ports featuring one of their blue pushpins. He’d have ripped that map down too if she hadn’t got to it first. Ripped it down and torn it into a thousand pieces to scatter where the waves churned, white-tipped, outside the harbour.
Those scraps stood as much chance of washing up anywhere near where the One for Luck had.
His entire search had been useless.
Footsteps sounded again—Louise, he thought as they paused outside the door before moving on, noise receding. She took the stairs instead of coming in to wake him. A quick look at his watch had him sitting bolt upright. Nearly lunchtime already and he’d prepared exactly nothing. He let himself out, praying not to meet any of Guy Parsons’ posh readers prepared to pay five-star prices while he was still sleep-rumpled. Taking the stairs came with a jolt of remembering the moment the PC screen had filled with the faces of that survey team who’d all got closer to his parents than Jude had ever managed. He pushed open the door to the kitchen, tired to the bone like it was night instead of late morning, only to find lunch prepped already, mise en place arranged just how he liked it. Even fresh stock simmered on the range, clear and fragrant. He checked the refrigerator. That morning’s fresh catch from Carl already lay in neat fillets.
Rob.
“I don’t think he slept,” Lou said from behind him. “I found him and Carl down here first thing this morning.” She smoothed a frizz-free strand of hair behind her ear. “Susan came too, a bit later. She did my hair.” She sniffed, eyes welling even as she drew back shoulders surely far too narrow to bear this grief that
kept on coming. “She’s running the bar while I….” Her lips pressed together. “How are we gonna do this, Jude?” she blurted, saying just what he’d been thinking, her reserves worn down to nothing too after keeping going for so long. “How do we carry on now that we know they’re…? How do we keep going like normal?”
Rob answered before Jude could. “You don’t.” He looked so much like his own dad in the shadow of the doorway that Jude blinked, that stern illusion shattered the moment Rob stepped into the light, kindness right there on the surface. “Because we’re all here to do it for you.” His kiss on Jude’s cheek was quick, his squeeze of Jude’s arm reassuring. “You don’t even have to be here. Take the day off. Both of you. Stay out of the kitchen. Leave it to us.”
Jude might have done as instructed if Rob hadn’t added a last order. “And stay out of the office.”
“Why?”
Rob opened his mouth and then closed it before breaking eye-contact so completely that Jude was halfway across the kitchen before Rob managed to get out a desperate-sounding, “Wait!”
Jude didn’t. His hand was on the office door before Rob caught up with him, this time his grip on Jude’s arm was much tighter. “Jude…. Listen…. It might come to nothing,” he said, wincing as Jude pushed the door open.
Marc glanced up from where he was writing, the office phone cradled against his shoulder, frozen until someone on the end of the line must have repeated a question. “Oui,” he said, pen poised over a pad of paper. His next burst of French was impossible to keep up with, let alone try to translate.
“What’s he saying?” Jude stood to one side as Lou joined them, her fingers twining with his. “Who’s he speaking to?” Jude noticed what should have been obvious from the start. “And why have you brought one of Mum and Dad’s maps down here?” Four more steps brought him to it, Marc’s fast-paced conversation barely registering when Jude saw that someone had added new pushpins, red this time instead of blue, showing a different course than his parents had planned. He reached for one of the new pins at the same time Rob said, “Leave it.”
