Summer at Shell Cottage (22 page)

Olivia had never heard the word ‘chunder’ before but was pretty sure she knew what it meant.
She was pretty sure she was close to ‘chundering’ right now too.
‘I’m fine,’ she said through gritted teeth, trying to stop herself from pressing her right foot too obviously against the floor of the car, her reflexive braking reaction.

‘Bill always used to call me the Getaway Driver,’ Gloria went on, coasting over the brow of Longdown Hill, her hair flying back in the wind.
‘He said I drove as if I was trying
to get away from a bank heist with sacks of money in the boot.’
She hooted with laughter at the memory then gave another sidelong glance at Olivia.
‘Cheeky bastard.
He was one of those
stickler drivers, you know, braking through the gears and whatnot, letting other people go ahead of him, hands at ten to two on the wheel at all times.’
She flicked on the indicator and
turned right down a lane, and Olivia found herself praying that this one would be a little wider than the one they’d just careered along.
‘But opposites attract, right?’

‘So they say.’
There was a pause as if Gloria was expecting Olivia to respond with some similar nugget about her own relationship but Olivia had never been in the habit of
woman-to-woman confessionals about Alec.
Their marriage was their own business, in her opinion, not something to be served up in palatable slices for other people to pick over and devour.
She
folded her hands in her lap and stared out at the dense green hedgerows, so high in places it felt as if they were speeding through a leafy tunnel.
There were worse ways to die than in a fast car
on a summer’s day, she supposed.
And at least if this was her last day on the planet then the pain she was feeling for Alec would be over.

They rounded another corner and then the land seemed to drop away, a whole new vista unfolding of a sapphire sea and its crescent of biscuit-coloured sand.
‘I never get tired of this
view,’ Gloria said cheerfully as they headed down through the small village of Ennisbridge.
‘Lucky old us, eh?
Even on a cloudy day, it’s the business.
Right.
Here we go, just
over on the left.
One of those pop-up restaurants.
Very fancy.
I hope you’re hungry!’

Olivia’s family hadn’t come to Ennisbridge beach all that often, favouring their own Silver Sands Bay, which was prettier and far more convenient.
Ennisbridge was more touristy, with
a bus service that brought in day-trippers, and a parade of small hotels, souvenir shops and cafés.
And now it was home to the Lobster Pot, an unlovely bunker of a building with
white-painted breeze-block walls and a corrugated iron roof.
In front of it were set barrels for tables, each with parasols for shade, and stools that had been fashioned out of upturned crates with
vinyl seats on top.

Very fancy
, Gloria had said, but the two women clearly had different notions about what ‘fancy’ actually entailed.
Thanks to Alec, Olivia had dined at the Ledbury in London
and Le Bernardin in New York, neither of which had had a breeze block or an old crate in sight.
What on earth had possessed her to say yes to this magical mystery tour?
she wondered, as Gloria
hurled her car into a parking space and yanked on the handbrake.
Maybe moping about back at the house would have been the more sensible option on second thoughts.

Out of the car, though, Olivia could smell chips and garlic – and yes, definitely lobster – mingled with cigarette smoke, coconut tanning oil and the briny scent of sea.
Despite the
absence of sun, the air was warm and sultry with a fresh breeze occasionally ruffling in, and the waves made a pleasing rattle-crash as they rolled into the pebbly shore.
Ah well, they were here
now, Olivia thought, and she was actually quite hungry by this point.
She had barely eaten any dinner the night before and had only drunk a single coffee that morning.

‘This is nice,’ she said politely, but Gloria was already bustling forward, matily slapping the back of a broad-shouldered guy with salt and pepper hair perched at a table and
calling a cheerful hello to the two men working behind the counter of the shack.

‘Hey,
compadre
!
How’s the head this morning, eh?’
She turned back to wink at Olivia, then indicated Mr Broad Shoulders, who was wearing a faded green T-shirt and had a
copy of some motorbike magazine open in front of him.
‘We had a bit of a session last night, didn’t we?
Jägerbombs and karaoke.
Lord, it got messy, all right.’
A husky laugh
bubbled out of her at the memory.
‘Olivia, this is Mitch, Ennisbridge’s answer to Mick Jagger, last seen rocking out to a mash-up of – what was it?
Motörhead and Britney
Spears.
Hmm.
And Mitch, this is Olivia, my new .
.
.’
She was about to say ‘boss’, had her lips shaped to speak the word, then seemed to change her mind at the last minute, and
said ‘friend’ instead.
‘We’ve come for lunch.
Some of us have been working since seven o’clock and are starving.’

Olivia flushed, first because she hadn’t done a stroke of work in days, and second because Mitch was staring at her curiously and she felt very out of place, the stiff in a Jaeger outfit
rather than the cool chick doing Jägerbombs, whatever they might be.
‘Hello,’ she said, conscious of the clipped tone to her voice.

‘Hey, Glor,’ Mitch said, slipping off his stool to give her a hug.
He was in his late fifties, like the two of them, Olivia guessed, and dwarfed diminutive Gloria by at least a foot.
‘Olivia, nice to meet you,’ he added, turning his smile on her.
(He had a lovely face, she found herself thinking in surprise.
Craggy and weather-beaten now, he must have been a
heartbreaker in his day, with Slavic cheekbones and pale blue eyes that reminded her of the sea on a cool day.) ‘Don’t let Mrs here lead you astray, will you?
She’s trouble in a
tight dress, this one,’ Mitch said, then grinned and stepped back as Gloria pretended to cuff him.
‘Enjoy your lunch, ladies.
I’ve got to head off unfortunately.
Those
Jägerbombs won’t pay for themselves now, will they?’

‘See you soon, handsome,’ Gloria called after him as he strode away and he raised a hand in salute without turning.
‘He’s an artist,’ she explained to Olivia,
rather admiringly.
‘Kind of famous around these parts.
That’s the life, eh?
Party all night then get up at midday for some chips, before sauntering off to your studio to
draw.
All right for some.’

Olivia wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that Gloria’s friend had left as she settled herself gingerly on one of the stools.
In for a penny, in for a pound
,
she told herself.
This was a new experience and certainly better than slumping in a deckchair like a past-it geriatric, her brain cells gradually silting up.

Gloria ordered their food – a burger and chips for her, scallops and chips for Olivia – then spent several minutes leaning over the bar, gossiping with the chef, her behind sticking
out as she did so.
Olivia turned her gaze upon the beach which, despite the lack of sunshine, was crowded with families and sunbathers, the sea awash with lilos and dinghies and shrieking
wave-jumpers holding hands.
She smiled at the sight of a group of children nearby who were burying their father in the sand with great gusto.
Good times.

‘Here we are,’ said Gloria, returning just then with tall glasses of home-made lemonade, clinking with ice and half-slices of lemon.

‘Thank you,’ said Olivia, who was both parched and ravenous by now.
She sipped the lemonade and found it cool and refreshing, then her gaze was caught by an inky blue mark on
Gloria’s upper right arm as her companion shrugged off her jacket.
‘Is that a tattoo?’
she blurted out and immediately felt embarrassed.
She must seem such an ingénue to
Gloria.

Gloria looked amused at the question and swung round so that Olivia could see the design in its entirety: a dandelion clock, with a few loose seeds hanging like tiny gossamer parachutes as they
floated away up towards her shoulder.
Olivia had always written tattoos off much in the way she had breeze-block burger joints: not very classy and (frankly) not very nice.
Not the sort of thing
that a person like her would ever contemplate.
But she found herself having to rethink her prejudices.
She had expected to see something tacky and clichéd on Gloria’s arm: a red rose,
a skull, perhaps her and her husband’s names entwined in dark lettering, but the artistry of the dandelion clock had taken her by surprise, being fragile, pretty and .
.
.
yes, even feminine
too.

What a snob
, she thought, suddenly cross with herself and her preconceptions.
‘It’s lovely,’ she said, eyes still on the delicate lines of ink.
‘Really
lovely.’

‘Have you got one?’
Gloria asked, rummaging in her handbag for a cigarette and snapping her lighter to produce a yellow licking flame.

‘Me?
No.
It’s not really my .
.
.
No.’

Gloria drew on her cigarette and puffed out a stream of smoke, then offered the packet to Olivia.
‘Why not?
Scared of the pain?
It’s not as bad as you think.’

‘No, I – ’ She fumbled for the right reply but spread her hands helplessly.
Scared of pain?
Definitely not.
She’d gone through childbirth twice over and had gritted her
teeth throughout each time, barely making a sound.
‘My husband always hated them,’ she said in the end as Gloria gazed steadily at her, waiting for an answer.
‘So .
.
.’

‘So what?
He’s not here any more, right?’
Gloria’s lower lip twisted in awkwardness as soon as she realized just how blunt she’d been.
‘Sorry,’ she
added hastily.
‘That came out wrong.
Bill never liked them either.
Oh, it was all right for a
bloke
to have tats, he reckoned, but not a woman.’
She patted her arm with a grin.
‘I had this done after he died.
Not as a way of disrespecting him or anything.
Mitch talked me into it.
Having a tattoo changes you, he told me.
Gloria with a tattoo will be a different
person from broken-hearted, bereaved Gloria who is financially up shit creek.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘So I did it.’

‘Are you and Mitch .
.
.
together?’
Olivia found herself asking.

Gloria gave a roar of laughter.
‘Together?
No, love.
Just friends.
No, he’s the tattoo artist.
He’s the one who did it for me.’

Handsome Mitch was a
tattoo
artist?
For some reason Olivia had imagined him splodging oil paints into wild seascapes on huge canvases, not creating something as finely beautiful as the
floating dandelion head.
Had his thick fingers really worked such delicate lines?
She must have looked disbelieving because Gloria laughed.

‘He does bloody big dragons and Harley Davidsons for other people, mind.
Whatever floats your boat.
I’ve always loved dandelion clocks, though.
The way you see the seeds drifting on
the breeze, flying free, to who knows where.’
She chuckled.
‘Your nicest flower bed probably, or a good bit of lawn, knowing my luck, but never mind.
It seemed like the right design for
me, that’s all.’
She nudged Olivia.
‘You should get one.’

‘Oh, no,’ Olivia said at once.
‘I couldn’t.’

‘Couldn’t you?’

‘Well .
.
.’
Olivia floundered.
Of course she couldn’t.
Offer up her bare skin to be punctured by a tattoo artist’s needles?
The idea was ridiculous.
Imagine her
children’s faces!
‘Did it work like Mitch said it would?’
she found herself asking.
‘I mean, did it make you feel better?’

‘A million times better,’ Gloria told her.
She touched the tattoo with her fingertips.
‘It’s hard to explain but I just felt .
.
.
new.
Different.
Like the version of me
that I truly wanted to be.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Gawd, listen to me.
Hippy nonsense.’
She waved a hand self-consciously.
‘Sometimes a change is as good as a holiday as they
say.
You know.’