Page 3 of Carry Me Home

I turn away first and ask, ‘Coming to the harbour?’

Jude is already standing.

The village in summer is its own creature.

The whole of Cornwall in summer is its own creature. Maybe a monster risen from the deeps, if you’re inclined to melodramatic thoughts, which I’m not.

It’s the same Sea Salt Bay it always is, with its four hundred permanent residents, one pub, one shop – post office and taxi included – one café, and enough opinions to fill a city. But currently it’s overloaded with a temporary population of visitors who’ve seen the Poldark filming locations and expect something from us that we’re not entirely sure we signed up to provide. The car park at the top of the hill will have been full since before nine, the overflow pushing down the lanes in a slow migration of roof boxes and optimistic cycling equipment. Someone has erected a windbreak directly in front of the lifeboat station, which Cal, our RNLI captain, will have words about.

A family in matching waterproofs are standing in the middle of the harbour-side lane examining their phones with the paralysis of people with too many options and no brain power to make a choice. A queue of eight has formed at the pasty kiosk. Cal’s mum raises a hand to us as we pass, and I nod back without breaking stride. Somewhere up the hill a seagull is engaged in a ferocious dispute and planning retribution its victim might never recover from.

The harbour itself is bright with boats and busyness. The tide is high, the water that impossible turquoise-over-sand colour it only gets in good weather, and the fishing boats are out early, trailing their wakes towards the headland. On the far quay, a man in a sunhat is painting the scene with more enthusiasm than accuracy or even talent. He’s given The Ship Inn a blue roof for some reason. Bill will have something to say about that if he sees it.

It is, in the Cornish way, both the village’s livelihood and its annual trial.

Brynn’s Land Rover is backed up to the boat shed, rear doors open, and she’s working through a stack of crates, hair pulled back, grease on her forearm. Brynn isn’t the sort of woman who worries about a smear of grease, or a whole tub of it. That’s why she’s perfect for Jude. That’s why Jude has been walking around with that smug expression on his face for two months now.

She arrived in March like a hurricane, claiming back her family space. Ferocious, unyielding, but with a heart the size of the Atlantic when you get through the tough outer layers. From the moment she arrived, alone, friendless, and in a village which had been fed lies about her family by Jude’s own family, she’d planted her roots back into the solid ground of Sea Salt Bay, and now it’s almost like she was never gone at all.

She glances up when she hears us, smoothing back dark waves of hair that have escaped from her ponytail, and shines moonbeams, or rays of sunlight, I’m not sure which, straight in Jude’s direction. Great.

‘He was still in bed,’ Jude tells her.

‘I wasn’t asleep,’ I say.

‘Just lying there?’ she asks, sharing a knowing glance with Jude that couples do so well and should definitely be fined for.

‘I was thinking.’ I shove my hands into my pockets and shrug. ‘A man’s allowed to think in bed on his day off.’

Jude cuts me a side-eye. ‘He was moping.’

Brynn gives a sympathetic nod. ‘Just call her, Tom, and ask when she’s coming back.’

It’s childish, yes, I know, but I roll my eyes so hard it nearly gives me a migraine. ‘You two need to drop this. It’s becoming boring and making me not want to spend time with you. The kissing was bad enough. The moon eyes. The general disgusting ickiness you’ve had going on. But the psychoanalysis and mood reading are really starting to piss me off.’

They look at each other, which totally proves my point. And also makes me want to launch myself off the nearest cliff.

‘Coffee’s in the flask,’ Brynn says finally, going back to the crates, but not before giving Jude a moon-eyed smile that they think I can’t see.

Ugh.

But the real problem here isn’t the moon eyes, isn’t the sun, or the tourists, or the endless feeling that this summer might never end and peace will never return. It’s the fact that the coffee is in the flask.

A bloody flask.

I hate coffee from a flask.

And it’s only in a flask because the café is closed. And the café is closed because my best friend has left, and I don’t know how long for, but it feels like the age of man has passed, but I reckon it’s only been a couple of weeks.

The morning unfolds in the way mornings do at the harbour. I drink coffee from the flask, wince and curse about it, and watch kayakers launch from the slipway with cheerful confidence that tells me they haven’t checked the tide times. Probably don’t even know there is an app you can do it on. I’m on call with the lifeboat this morning, and we on the crew have a summer game we like to play. Cal put a stop to us handing over money when we guessed the call correctly, so now we notch up points on a blackboard in the pub instead.

‘An hour,’ I say to no one in particular.

‘Forty minutes,’ Brynn says, without looking up. ‘It’s a Thursday. People are extra dumb on a Thursday.’

She’s closer to right. Damn it.

The pager goes off at half eleven.