The Beach Hut Next Door (4 page)

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.’

‘I haven’t got a bloody life.’

Jenna wasn’t sure where the anger came from. Whether it was her recent humiliation, or a genuine sense of waste, or a combination of both. She slammed down her cup, the watery brown liquid sloshing over the edge.

‘You could have,’ she told him. ‘You could have if you stopped blaming yourself and feeling sorry for yourself and wallowing in it all. I mean, what’s the point? It’s like
Groundhog Day
. Chris gets up. Maybe he gets on the boat to help Vince. Maybe he doesn’t. Then he drinks himself into oblivion, and pisses off everyone in the pub. Gets into a fight or pulls some bird whose name he can’t remember the next morning.’

‘Yep,’ agreed Chris. ‘That’s pretty much how I roll.’

‘But you’ve got loads going for you.’ Jenna leaned into him; looked into his eyes in the hope of getting through. ‘You’ve got more going for you than most people in this godforsaken town. You’ve got a bloody business that makes money, for a start. Have you got any idea how hard it is for most people here? They’d give their eye teeth for an opportunity like you’ve got.’

Chris glared at her. ‘My dad drowned, Jenna. Right in front of my eyes. There was nothing I could do about it. Don’t you lecture me when you don’t know what it’s like to live with that.’ His eyes burned bright with rage.

‘I might not know what it’s like but I do know that drinking yourself to death isn’t going to make any difference. It’s not going to bring him back. It’s not going to make things better. And, apart from anything, what do you think your dad would think if he knew? Do you think he’d think: great, that was worth dying for?’

She knew her words were harsh, but at this stage there was no point in holding back. Maybe no one had ever got through to Chris before. Maybe she wouldn’t now, but she was damned if she was going to let him wallow and defend himself to her.

He looked furious. He gripped his glass even more tightly.

‘Fuck off and save someone else, Pollyanna,’ he said.

Jenna shrugged. ‘You know I’m right. I
am
right. But you’re too much of a coward to do anything about it. It’s much easier to slosh about in seventeen pints of lager than get help. You’re just on a massive self-pity trip. Poor little me. Well, Vince went through it too and I don’t see him on self-destruct.’

‘Vince is different.’

‘Vince isn’t a self-indulgent tosser.’ She widened her eyes at him. ‘Yep. That’s what I said. Because that’s what you are, Chris. You’re a total waste of space. If you had anything about you, you’d get out there and make your dad proud. You’d create something in his memory. Instead of making yourself a laughing stock for the whole town to roll their eyes at. John Maskell’s son, the drunken loser.’

Chris held his glass to his mouth and drank deep, holding her gaze, then slammed his glass down on the bar top.

Jenna felt as if she had run out of steam. ‘Sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘But that’s what I’m seeing and I find it upsetting.’

Chris got off his bar stool. Even at this hour of the afternoon he swayed slightly. He leaned in towards Jenna.

‘I’ll leave you to it, then, if you find it so upsetting.’

There was menace in his tone. Jenna gave a wry smile and a small shrug. Chris turned and swaggered out of the pub. She felt sad as she watched him go. He had so much to offer. He would make any girl in the world happy. But he was destroying everything he had: his looks, his living, his relationships, his reputation. His health, no doubt.

The landlord caught her eye.

‘That went well,’ he said.

‘Someone had to tell him.’ She looked at him witheringly. ‘Although I suppose you wouldn’t. It would put a right hole in your profits.’

Jenna slumped into a decline that evening, which carried on for the next few days. She knew she would have to snap out of it before Craig came back at the weekend, because she didn’t want to put a downer on things. He worked hard, and he lived for his time at the beach hut with her. And she lived to see him. She just wished she could sort out something that gave her life meaning in between. Not to mention some money. Craig was incredibly generous, but Jenna wanted to pay her own way.

On Friday afternoon, she still hadn’t come up with a solution. She stared at the bedroom ceiling, looking for inspiration in the cracked Artex. She could feel the Tawcombe torpor seeping into her bones; it sapped you of your energy and drive; sucked any ambition you might have right out of you. She’d felt it before. It was soul-destroying. She was damned if she was going to let it get her again.

She rolled off the bed, jumped to her feet and ran out of the door. She wasn’t going to stop and think. She was acting on impulse, fuelled by rage and frustration and the injustice. It took her fifteen minutes to get to the bank, and by the time she arrived she was red-faced and dishevelled. This time, she wasn’t dressed to impress. She was in jeans and a hoodie and trainers. She didn’t care. She marched up to the first cashier to become vacant.

‘I want to see the manager,’ she said. ‘The actual branch manager, not one of his gofers. And I want to see him now.’ She paused. ‘Or her. And, actually, I hope it is a her, because she’ll probably have more sense.’

The cashiers could tell by the tone of her voice, and the volume of it, that it was in their interests to do what she said. They quite often had disruptions, and usually they called Security. But, miraculously, within five minutes Jenna was seated in a slightly larger glass cubicle than the one she’d been directed to earlier in the week, and an upbeat, businesslike woman marched in and shook her hand before sitting down.

‘Well? What can I do for you?’

Jenna took a deep breath. ‘It’s your responsibility to take a chance on me,’ she said. ‘The man who saw me earlier in the week didn’t even look at my business plan. He just crunched a few numbers on the computer and said no. What kind of bank are you, if you can’t see a good idea when you’re hit over the head with it? If you’re not prepared to take risks?’

‘Well, we tend to take
calculated
risks … We can’t just go throwing money out at random to anyone who wanders in here, I’m afraid. We have a checklist. If you don’t meet the criteria …’

‘But that’s so short-sighted. My plan is as watertight as they come. I know this area. I know the market. I know I can make it work. I might not have a good credit rating but I’ve got experience. I made my last boss loads of money. It wasn’t my fault he threw it all away at the bookies. If it had been me, if it had been my business, it wouldn’t have gone under. It’s just common sense. Common sense and hard graft.’

‘So where is your plan? Let me have a look.’

Jenna hesitated. ‘I chucked it in the bin.’

The woman raised an eyebrow.

‘But I can talk you through it. I can remember every detail. It’s a no-brainer. And it’s not as if I’m asking for millions. Five grand. That’s all.’

The woman held up her hand. ‘Slow down. Start at the beginning. Explain to me just what it is you want to do.’

Jenna shut her eyes. This was her only chance. ‘I’ve been offered a vintage ice-cream van. Thirteen hundred quid. And I need some money to do it up and buy some stock …’

Half an hour later, Jenna walked out of the bank having signed a loan agreement. Five thousand pounds would be in her account the next day.

‘You better not let me down,’ the manager told her. ‘I’ve put my job on the line for this.’

‘You can have free ice cream for life,’ smiled Jenna.

‘I don’t want ice cream. I just want you to make your repayments.’

‘You won’t regret it.’ Jenna thought it probably wasn’t on to hug your bank manager, so she resisted the urge.

She did want to celebrate, though, and share her news with someone, so she made her way down to the George and Dragon. She was surprised to find no sign of Chris.

‘I haven’t seen him for two days,’ the landlord told her gloomily. ‘My profits are plummeting.’

Jenna felt unsettled. She knew she’d been pretty harsh. What if Chris had buckled under her diatribe? He must be fragile, after all, and she’d given it to him with both barrels. Then just left him to it. She’d been so absorbed in her own affairs she hadn’t thought of the consequences. Feeling slightly sick, she hurried up the hill to Fore Street where Vince and Chris still lived in the house they had grown up in. It was a narrow, cobbled street lined with crooked fisherman’s cottages, picturesque but run-down, more attractive in the height of summer when the windowsills sported geraniums than in the gloomy light of winter.