Linc wasn’t so used to everything falling into place quite so neatly. ‘Thanks for the heads up, certainly worth thinking about,’ he agreed.
They chatted amongst themselves; Harvey recounted his days at the very school they were suggesting Linc apply to and Daniel had plenty of stories too. And before long it was Daniel who asked Linc about his real reasons for heading to the Cove and working through the entire summer holidays. ‘Didn’t you want to go off somewhere exotic, make the most of your long break?’ he wondered.
‘I needed a distraction.’ Linc turned a beer mat over and over beneath his palm. ‘I’ve been keeping myself busy for a while now rather than actually try to be a bit more settled or move my life forwards in any way. It sounds dramatic, but I’m not sure where I’m heading.’
‘You want a change of career?’ Harvey asked.
‘No, not at all. I like teaching. But my head was all over the place with Mum, then with Dad, and then with other stuff.’
‘Must be a girl involved,’ Daniel deduced.
‘There’s always a girl involved,’ added Harvey. ‘Take me and Melissa as an example, we’ve had our problems, then you and Lucy went through it.’
‘Let’s just say she needed a little convincing I was worth getting to know. I was a bit of a bad boy in my past,’ Daniel grinned, before telling Linc how he and a group of friends had once broken into the tea rooms. ‘We didn’t do any damage, just sat and had tea. But Etna caught us red-handed.’
‘Don’t tell me, she let you off with a warning.’
‘Are you kidding? The police came,’ he added to Linc’s astonishment. ‘Scared the life out of me – she was furious. She didn’t press charges but she did make us wash up everything we’d used and we had to pay to repair the damage to the door. But it could’ve been worse. In my defence, it was a long time ago.’
‘Etna loves him now,’ Harvey added for good measure. ‘Especially after the apology and the free waffles when he opened up the shack. Those went down a treat.’
‘She’s a good sort, your auntie,’ Daniel nodded.
Conversation stalled and Harvey turned the talk back the way it came, to why Linc had felt the need to take on extra jobs through what should be a summer of rest before the new term.
‘Mine might be a story for another time,’ said Linc.
‘Come on, we’re all mates now, what are you running from?’ Daniel sat back, enjoying his pint but ready to listen.
Linc supposed it might be good to finally get it all off his chest with people who didn’t know him all that well and so he found himself sharing details about him and Orla, how they’d been together for a while and everything was comfortable, right up until it wasn’t.
‘I thought that one day it might get serious,’ Linc told them, ‘but I wasn’t at that point and I know now that that should’ve been a warning sign that I was never going to be. I should’ve told her that at the time, but I didn’t. I stayed with her, and I didn’t see how serious she’d become about us. More so than I realised.’
‘And so, you ran,’ said Harvey.
‘It was more than that.’ He toyed with the beer mat again, its rounded edges already torn where someone else had probably done the same, perhaps trying to share a story with someone else as they did so. ‘I was about to finish things between us when she got pregnant.’
Harvey stopped drinking and Daniel’s pint didn’t quite reach his mouth. ‘Yeah, that’ll add a complication.’
‘I would’ve stepped up to my responsibility even though it was wrong when I wasn’t entirely sure I loved her enough.’ He kept his voice low in the busy pub. ‘She lost the baby at nine weeks.’ Even though he hadn’t been ready for a baby and wasn’t even sure he wanted to be with Orla, he never would’ve wished what happened on her. ‘She was understandably devastated, desperately sad, and I did my best to support her but I didn’t know how to. She kept pushing me away and in the end she went off to stay with her friend in America.
‘She didn’t contact me at all and part of me was angry she hadn’t let me in, but I thought perhaps she realised she didn’t really want to be with me long-term either. When she came back, she came to see me. All she kept saying was that her head was really messed up and she hadn’t been herself before she left. She wanted to try for another baby. She wasn’t really hearing what I was saying, that I didn’t think we should be together. It was crazy, it was like anything I said filtered through her mind and disintegrated into dust as though the words had never been there at all.
‘My dad was pretty sick at the same time that this was going on and my life was all over the place, with trying to look after him and keep working. Supply teaching was a godsend, it let me work in stints around when Dad was having better days, take time off when I needed to. Orla started to turn up at Dad’s house when I was staying there, sometimes when I wasn’t but didn’t answer my own front door. She’d come at all hours and hammer on the door and she didn’t let up for a long while.’
He paused when someone squeezed past their table to get outside. ‘Eventually Orla came to talk to me and revealed she’d been seeing the doctor and was on medication. By that point I was angry, which was probably more to do with the stress over Dad than her. But it was on that visit she told me she had to be honest and she admitted that when she’d got pregnant with our baby, she’d done it on purpose. She’d lost a baby five years previously with a man she was engaged to and I think she was so desperate to find someone and have a child that when we got together, she saw it as her chance.’
Linc shook his head and stared into his pint. ‘I couldn’t blame her entirely because I saw how much she was hurting, but what she did left its mark, it stopped me being willing to trust quite as easily as I once did.’ He sat back, hands on his thighs. ‘So, there you have it, my life in a tattered nutshell.’
‘You really should play the violin, you know,’ said Harvey, and it was his comment that released the tension, at last had Linc laughing.
‘Yeah, it’s pretty woeful, I’ll admit. My mate Toby thinks I should take a leaf out of his book and sleep around to avoid complications; even my dad thinks I’m existing, not living.’
‘Has there been anyone since?’ Daniel asked.
‘I dated someone for a couple of months before I came here, but it didn’t work out. No idea why.’ He had, but he wanted to stop the conversation there. No way was he ready to share that much personal information about himself. Perhaps another time, maybe never.
‘So, you’re in the Cove to escape,’ Harvey concluded.
