Ash is standing outside the chipper exactly on time and does a double take when he sees me, which makes me instantly blush.Please don’t comment on the hair; let’s pretend it’s always been like this, I think.
“Looking sharp,” he says playfully.
“I’ve been to Happy Hair,” I reply, and can’t help shaking my head gently so the lighter crop sways slightly. “It’s French. Well French style. Obviously, it was done in Kent.”
“I didn’t know we were making an effort for a battered cod?” Ash is wearing his steel-colored overalls.
“I’ll pop in and get the dinner, and then I need a favor from you,” I say quickly.
“A favor?” he repeats, grinning and stuffing his hands into his pockets like a teenager. “Well, that explains the out-of-the-blue dinner invitation. And here was me thinking you wanted to hang.”
“Yes. A favor,” I say, snappier than I mean to.
“Sorry, sure. I’m teasing. What do you need?” he says now, looking sheepish. “I just... I’m busy tonight.”
“It will take no time at all,” I say.
I pick up our order of fish and chips, and we wander down past the Star and Anchor and out onto the pier to find a bench. I lookout to the sea and watch the swells rise and fall as the cackle of gulls pierces the rolling wall of ocean chorus. We sit quietly for a moment, engrossed in the smell of fatty battered fish and salt and vinegar.
“So, where are you off to tonight? Meeting friends?”
“You should really come out with us sometime,” he says, as he flicks his hair out of his eyes and focuses on me. He didn’t answer the question, exactly. I notice in the sunlight he has very small amber flecks in his deep brown eyes, and a small scar that runs through his left eyebrow. “Have you been in yet?”
I gaze at the old pub sitting there on the edge of the pier, the only bar in town, really, and where I will be meeting Josef. I shake my head.
“Actually, no,” I say, frowning. It really is the only going-out place in Broadgate, and I think, not for the first time, that I should have sent Joe to somewhere like Gaucho in London.
“We’ll have to take you for a night out. Best pub in Kent, if not England.”
“Sure it is,” I say, smiling wryly.
“It is! Built right on the edge of a pier, ten feet from the bar to the ocean. And it’s pretty much as it’s been for over three hundred years.”
“Bit of typhoid with my tipple, then?”
“On a warm night when the stars are out... ,” he says, suddenly lost in a daydream, “it’s the best pub on earth.”
“Everyone likes their local pub best,” I say.
“No one has my local, though,” he replies, his dark eyes fixed on mine like he’s searching for something.
Occasionally, Ash has a way of looking at me that makes me feel very exposed. Like he’s doing a live autopsy on my very spirit andcan’t find the cause of its death. Most of the time, however, he doesn’t look directly at me for very long at all. Like he’s thinking of something else entirely, making an actual effort to be looking elsewhere. I worry I’ve offended him.
“Yes, I think that would be nice. And hopefully one day you’ll meet my best friend, Charlie. She’s amazing. She lives in Margate.”
“Really?” he says, head snapping back to look at me.
“What? I do have friends, you know,” I say lightly. “And Charlie is my very best, even if I don’t see her much since she had the baby.”
He nods in understanding. But then, like a dog who’s spotted a squirrel, he jolts straight up, pointing ahead to an older lady making her way up the pier to settle on a bench across from us.
“Hey! Isn’t that Mrs. Watson?”
It was indeed my landlady.Ourlandlady.
“I think so?” I say, squinting through the golden light of the sun, which slightly silhouettes her fragile frame.
“She’s here for the sunset,” he says. “Come on, let’s go ask her about doing up the flat.”
