Instead of heading to the town, they took a right and tramped down toward the beach and the golf course that ran parallel to it for almost two miles, separated only by the coast road and promenade. A man further down the road, hidden by the darkness, sang a drunken sea shanty, probably on his way home from the pub, but otherwise the winding lanes were quiet.
“I am sorry again, about yesterday,” said Fred. She kept her voice low as they passed by high hedgerows and fields of sleeping cattle, but it still sounded loud in the blanketing night.
“Me too. I shouldn’t have pushed.”
“I shouldn’t have been so tetchy. Friends?” she asked, holding out her hand.
“Always,” he said, shaking it.
—
The moon andstars had been swallowed by streamers of clouds the color of charcoal and straw bales, with the sea a motionless black line below them. Scant blueish light fromthe streetlamps dotting the coastal road illuminated grassy mounds along the golf course and threw the bunkers into pools of darkness, which offered some guidance as to how this undulating land might lie, but without Ryan’s head torch they’d be likely to twist an ankle at the very least.
“Can you remember which bunker we buried it in?” Fred asked.
They were stood in front of a line of prickly gorse bushes that marked the boundary line. From beyond the golf course came the gentle whisper of the sea kissing the pebbles and the occasional cry of a seabird caught out late, long after roosting time. There was thankfully very little wind tonight, which was unusual at any time of the day, so close to the sea, but the cold air seemed to press in around them.
“I wrote it down at the time so that I wouldn’t have to remember.” He pulled a crumpled piece of lined A4 paper from his jacket and handed it to her.
Using her phone torch, she studied the page. It was a rough Biro drawing of the golf course—in Ryan’s twelve-year-old hand—with all the bunkers marked along it, and a red cross over one of them; four pits in from the left of the first hole, if the sea was behind you, and directly in line with a sixth streetlamp after the Sea View Hotel.
“I don’t recall you doing that. How very forward thinking of you,” she remarked.
“If ‘X marks the spot’ was good enough for Captain Flint, it was good enough for me.”
“I’d forgotten about your pirate phase.”
He held his hand out and she gave him back the map. After a moment of study, he pointed. “There!” he said, triumphantly.
They moved forward cautiously, navigating a man-made path through the prickly gorse to reach the course.
“What if they’ve moved the bunkers over the years to keep things interesting? Or they’ve added to the street-lamps?” Fred asked, yanking her scarf back from the hooky twigs of the gorse.
Ryan turned back, flipping his head torch skyward so as not to blind her. “Oh, ye of little faith.” He grinned, holding out his hand.
She pulled a face but took it and gingerly picked her way along behind him, yelping when the spiky branches snagged her jeans.
They emerged from the gorse and slowly made their way across the golf course, traipsing up and down slopes, the short grass both crisp and slippery beneath their boots, clumps of snow emerging like molehills out of the shadows. Eventually, Ryan stopped at the edge of a bunker.
“This one,” he said, sounding assured.
Fred surveyed the pit. “It’s quite big.”
“Yes. But if you cast your mind back, we buried the capsule at the very center, so that it would be easier for our future selves to find.”
Not for the first time since being lured out of her bed that night, Fred wondered if this was a wise idea. They could get caught by some sort of golf course security outfit. What if they were on CCTV?
“Stop freaking out,” said Ryan. “You’re wearing the same look on your face you used to get before we went into exams at school.”
“And what look is that?”
“Constipated bush baby.”
She snorted. Ryan threw the spade he’d been carrying into the pit and shuffled down after it. Fred followed, the sand shifting beneath her feet.
When they’d buried their time capsule twenty years ago—on a night not dissimilar to this—she had wondered what the Fred of the future would be like. Hugely successful, she’d hoped. Maybe a writer who wore long drapey linen and wide-brimmed hats. She’d live in a London townhouse with her husband and their two children. A group of Pine Bluff scallywags would dig up their box and take it to the newspaper, and she and Ryan—who at the time of the capsule burial was determined he’d work for MI6—would be called by the BBC for an interview with Jonathan Ross. She thought now how deeply disappointed Fred of the past would be with how she’d turned out.
—
