A Sea Change (3 page)

He came towards her with a smile. He reached out his hand and ran the back of his fingers down her cheek. His breath was stale and sour.

‘Get me the rent. By Monday. And if I were you, I’d keep your opinions to yourself.’

Jenna jerked her head away. She could see that she’d rattled him. Something she’d said had touched a nerve. At least he hadn’t mentioned interest. Even so, she still didn’t have the rent. She hadn’t got anything to sell. No jewellery, no nice watch, no computer, fancy phone or iPod. Those had all gone ages ago. At least she’d bought herself some time, though.

He looked at her steadily. She could see the stubble starting to poke through on his chin.

‘I’ll be back first thing on Monday.’

She thought he was probably enjoying torturing her. It’s not as if he needed the money that much. He owned several houses around the town. He must be coining in thousands a week. He could afford to wait. If she pointed out that fact, she knew what he’d say. ‘If I let you get away with it, they’ll all want to pay late.’

At last he left the room. Jenna hadn’t thought that she was going to get rid of him that easily, but maybe he had someone else to pick on. Her landlord was scum. He wasn’t the only one of his kind around, though. There were quite a few ‘entrepreneurs’ in Tawcombe who’d bought up the big old Victorian houses that had been so
splendid in their heyday. Especially now the town was a run-down seaside resort filled with unemployed and disillusioned people with no hope of escape. The landlords slapped up chipboard walls and cheap kitchens and crammed in as many tenants as they could find.

Jenna certainly wasn’t the only person struggling. There were no decent jobs out here in the sticks. You could pick up casual work during the summer season if you were lucky, but there was slim chance of a proper career. She’d wanted to go to college but her mum had just laughed. She’d refused to support Jenna while she studied.

‘Cheers for that, Mum,’ she thought bitterly, though she shouldn’t have been surprised. Her mum had never gone out of her way to help her with anything. Jenna had thought she’d be able to make a better life for herself on her own, but her plan had backfired big time. She was worse off now than she’d ever been, but no way was she going to go crawling back home. She knew she could just step outside and get on the bus that would take her two miles up the road to the estate where her mum lived, but she couldn’t bear the thought of the look on her mum’s face.

‘Look what the cat’s brought in,’ she could hear her mother saying gleefully.

Never, thought Jenna. I’m never going back there. Instead, she had to find nearly four hundred quid by Monday morning, or she’d be out on the pavement surrounded by what little she had left.

Her landlord, The Prof, didn’t make idle threats. She knew that for certain.

When night had fallen, the beach was wrapped in a soft navy-blue blanket spattered with stars. Craig unrolled his sleeping bag and curled up on one of the bunks in the beach hut, leaving the door slightly open. It was unlikely that anyone would try to get in, and he loved to go to sleep with the sound of the waves in the background. It was so soothing, more soothing than any lullaby. He loved the sound of the constant ‘shushing’ as the tide went in and out.

He checked the weather forecast on his phone before he fell asleep. Tomorrow was set fair. He’d get up early and hit the surf before anyone else.

Two minutes after his head hit the pillow, Craig was asleep.

Jenna was still wide awake at midnight. Her room was stifling, but if she opened her window the noise came in from outside the pub opposite. Her mind was whirling as she thought about the unfairness of the day. The full weight of being sacked was gradually beginning to hit her. Not only did she not have the money for the rent – her immediate problem – but what was she going to live on?

As she closed her eyes and tried to shut out the laughter of the pub-goers, her mind began to wander. What was the point of playing by the rules? It didn’t seem to get you anywhere. The people she knew who’d done best in life, like The Prof, didn’t seem to bother. Her family had never played it straight, any of them. They were on to every scam going, and they were all as happy as Larry. If you played it straight, it seemed as if you just sank to the bottom.

How was she going to get out of this trap? There would be no work going in Tawcombe for the rest of the summer. All the jobs were already taken. Maybe she could move to a bigger place? Bamford was the nearest big town, but she couldn’t see a life for herself there. She didn’t know anyone, for a start. Or a bigger city? Plymouth? Exeter? The thought
of that terrified her. She’d only really known Tawcombe her whole life.

Jenna sighed. She was stuck here. She couldn’t even afford a lottery ticket.

She turned onto her side and curled her legs up, tucking herself into a ball. All she could think about was The Prof’s face on Monday morning. She bet he was hoping she wouldn’t have the money. She was sure he enjoyed kicking people out of his scuzzy rooms so that he could lure someone else in and get the deposit from them.

Even if she found a job tomorrow morning, she couldn’t get the money she needed in time. Nobody would pay her in advance. There were girls she knew who would know how to get that kind of money quickly. In a seaside town, there were always ways that you could supplement your income. Jenna wasn’t going to take that path. Once you got into that, there was no way out. Anyway, the thought made her skin crawl. If she’d wanted to sell herself, she’d have made a deal with The Prof already . . .

As she felt the music from the pub pound through her body, she began to turn over possibilities in her mind.

Five minutes later, Jenna sat up as an idea occurred to her. Her heart thumped. Was it
crazy? It seemed so simple. Of course it was wrong, but in the grand scheme of ‘wrong’, it was way down the scale. There were far, far worse things she could do.

She asked herself which was better – to be straight and penniless, or crooked and in the black, as far as money was concerned? She’d spent enough time already being the former, and it had nothing to recommend it. She’d always had a clear conscience, but you couldn’t eat a strong set of moral values.

The more she thought about it, the more enticing her idea became.

As she went over the details and eventually drifted off to sleep, she told herself she only had to do it once, just once, until she got herself back on her feet.

Chapter Four

There was nothing more perfect than waking up by the sea and watching the sunrise.

Every time he saw it, Craig couldn’t believe how lucky he was. By six o’clock in the morning, the copper from the Midlands was walking towards the sea with his surfboard tucked under his arms, his footprints in the damp sand the first of the day. He reached the water’s edge.

The white frill of surf had looked like nothing from the hut, but once he got up close he realised the waves were pretty big. He ran straight into the water without stopping. His breath was taken away for a split second by the cold, but he carried on, paddling out behind the waves.

He surfed for nearly an hour. Craig was no expert and he envied the surfers who cut through the water with grace and elegance, as if they were at one with the waves. He knew that came with years of practice. These guys were devoted. They surfed every day, in all conditions. They were fanatics.

He’d heard their tales in the bar often enough. They told him about the surfing hot spots as far away as Hawaii, India and Australia, and their stories inspired him. He admired their devil-may-care attitude to life. They lived to surf. That was it. They picked up work when they could, where they could. They didn’t worry about anything else. They had no responsibilities.

That kind of mindset didn’t really suit him, being in the police. Until recently, Craig figured he had the best of both worlds. Where were these guys going to be in their old age? None of them would have a pension, just their memories. It was only now that he’d started to have doubts, to begin thinking differently, that he wondered about whether he’d really got it right.

Craig had given everything to his career. He loved his home town, and he’d wanted to contribute to its future. He wanted to make it a safe place, to protect his fellow townspeople from harm, to give them hope. Someone had once given him hope, after all, which was why he was lucky enough to be here now, enjoying the crystal-clear water.

By the time he got back to the beach hut with his surfboard, the early-morning sun had
nearly dried him off after his dip in the sea. He pulled on his jeans and walked up the beach to the café in the arcade, taking a table outside. He ordered a surfer’s breakfast of bacon, sausage, egg, mushrooms, tomato, beans, hash browns, toast and a pot of tea.

A guy he knew vaguely, Rusty, pulled up a chair next to him and sat down. That was the great thing about Everdene. You didn’t see someone for months, but when you bumped into them, it was as if you’d seen them yesterday.

‘Hey, buddy, how’s it going?’

Rusty was from South Africa and was a photographer. He took pictures of the sea, blew them up onto canvas and sold them out of a camper van on the front. The tourists loved these shots, which funded Rusty’s lifestyle. He didn’t have to answer to anyone. He’d helped Craig out when he’d started surfing last summer. And Craig knew he would never be as good as Rusty could be in the water.

‘Good, thanks,’ replied Craig. ‘Though I’ve had a rough time of it the past few weeks.’

He didn’t know if Rusty would even remember he was a copper.

Rusty nodded. He looked up at the sky. ‘Bad times, man.’

His hair was bleached blond by the sun. His skin was tanned, and his bright blue eyes shone out. Craig felt a twinge of envy at his lifestyle. Rusty would never have experienced the stress that Craig went through on a daily basis because of his job. The dryness in your mouth because you didn’t know how things were going to turn out, or whether you were going to make the right decisions. And even if you did, whether you were going to make a difference.

And even if you did make a difference, whether it was then going to backfire.

Craig sighed. He didn’t want to turn into a cliché of the disillusioned cop.

‘So what have you been up to?’ he asked.

Rusty took a tiny roll-up cigarette out of a tin in his pocket and lit it. He took a drag, sucked in the smoke, then blew it in a thin stream up in the air. Then he began to tell Craig what he’d been doing. He’d spent two months in Goa, then a month in Ireland, playing at festivals with some friends who had a band. Now he was back in Everdene to spend August teaching surfing to the tourists until the days grew short.

Craig put his head back and let the sun warm up the skin on his face as he listened. Rusty’s life was as far away from his own as you could
get. Every minute of Craig’s life was accounted for. He didn’t have a choice from the second he woke up.

Did he envy Rusty? He had very little, just his camper van, his surfboard and some worn and faded clothes, but he took opportunities as they presented themselves. Craig thought of his one-bedroomed apartment by the waterfront. The furniture he’d filled it with was all bought and paid for. He had a car, a wardrobe full of clothes and a top-of-the-range entertainment system. They were all the rewards of a tough job. Yet somehow the thought that nothing was going to change was constantly nagging at him. In the future, Craig would get a promotion, then probably a wife and kids, then maybe a house. There was nothing wrong with any of that, but would he ever see the world, like Rusty? Would he ever wake up in the morning and think, ‘What now? Where next?’ Who knew?

Even when he was down here at Everdene, he knew he was on borrowed time. It wouldn’t be long before it was time to get back into the car and drive up the motorway. Then he would have to get back into his uniform and clock on. He’d be out in his police squad car, patrolling the streets, never knowing how much trouble
the day was going to bring. He rarely came home feeling he’d done a good job. It wasn’t that he was shocked by what people did, far from it. It was because he knew why they did it. The saying, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ was often in his thoughts.

Next morning, Jenna woke at seven and listened to the sound of seagulls circling. She knew they would be feasting on the packets of leftover chips and kebabs dropped in the streets. They were scavengers to the end, those seagulls. She lay for a moment looking at the ceiling. There was a huge brown stain in the middle of it that seemed to bulge. She lived in fear of the roof caving in, imagining the bloke upstairs falling through the floor and landing on top of her, leaving a man-shaped hole.

She gave herself five minutes to decide whether she was going to go through with her plan. Even though it would mean she had failed. She had been so determined to prove herself.

‘You think you’re better than I am, don’t you?’ This had been her mother’s parting shot.

‘Yes, I do,’ Jenna had told her, and her mum had just laughed. She could hear the cackle now, fuelled by fags and cheap bottles of
supermarket own-brand vodka. Her mother’s bloke went and bought a bottle of vodka every morning from the corner shop, and by four o’clock in the afternoon the pair of them would have polished it off, just in time to head to the pub.

Of course she thought she was better than that.

Jenna had dreamed that, if she got away from the grimy house where she had been brought up, she could make something of herself. She had to escape the lazy, drunken woman who had given birth to her and four other kids. Her Mum had never been a proper mother to any of them. If anything, they had to look after her. There were days when Jenna hadn’t gone to school because her mum was so drunk that she was scared to leave her.

Jenna could remember going back to her friends’ houses sometimes. She had looked on, wide-eyed, as their mothers fussed over them, made them tea and asked about their day. She had sat in the bedrooms of her schoolfriends, with their crisply ironed duvet covers and matching curtains, and fluffy dressing gowns and slippers. They had clean towels hanging in the bathroom and toilet paper on a holder. There were proper mealtimes when the whole
family sat round the table. They had fathers who came home and hugged them. They had fathers who would never raise a voice, let alone a hand, to their wife or kids.