Shane can taste salt in the air. Gulls squawk loudly overhead, and he remembers the three of them making endless fish-processing plant jokes when they pulled up in town, all those years ago. Someone in his family had worked in one of the fish factories here, Shane had told them. It was his late father – this was the only fact Shane had ever been able to extract about him – but he didn’t want to go into all that.
‘What does that even mean?’ Ravi had asked with a shudder. ‘Process them into what?’
As he and Josie make their way into the little wooden office, he remembers the air smelling just like this, and how he’d filled his lungs with it. He remembers the guest house in town, and how they’d giggled after the owner – in her pink velour tracksuit – had shown them their room and left them to it. Bunk beds, as if they were kids, plus a double bed. ‘My family room,’ the woman had announced in her raspy smoker’s voice.
That felt right, Shane decided later as he lay there on the bottom bunk. Josie and Ravi were his family; the family he’d chosen. Or rather, they’d chosen him.
He’d felt the luckiest boy in the world that night. But now, as an amiable man in a flat cap tells them where to park the van, he tries to ready himself for a very different sort of night.
He is trying not to think about that.
17
JOSIE
‘So, I’ve been looking into it more and it seems like it’s pretty crowded.’
I’m striding away from the van, across the damp grass towards the low stone wall at the edge of the site. When I saw Lloyd’s name on my phone, I knew I didn’t want Shane to hear any of this.
‘What’s crowded?’ I ask.
‘The foot market!’ Lloyd exclaims. ‘Y’know, when it started, you really could make a packet just with your basic pics.’
‘How d’you know all this?’
He makes a pfff sound. ‘Everyone does.’ Do they? There are many things which apparently everyone knows but I do not. Like how to tidy my pubes without triggering a shaving rash. How to create a capsule wardrobe incorporating what the magazines term a ‘crisp white shirt’. And why vintage trainers are so much more expensive than new ones. Lloyd has a vast collection, but even more mind-boggling is his highly organised tool store in his spare room. Screwdrivers attached to a board on the wall in ascending order of size! An enticingly named ‘biscuit joiner’ and several jigsaws, which until then I’d thought were only ever puzzles with lots of pieces! These days I’m hardly ever invited over. ‘Much cosier here at yours,’ he’s insisted.
‘So I’m thinking we need to go more niche,’ Lloyd continues.
‘Niche? What d’you mean, niche?’
‘Well, for one thing, we can make a feature of your USP.’
‘What’s my USP?’ I ask.
‘Your unique selling point.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ I say impatiently. ‘But what is it?’
‘Um… your little deformity.’
‘You’re saying my feet are deformed now? I’m a deformed peasant?’
‘I mean your little toes, babe.’ Ah, I know what he’s on about now. My tiny, misshapen little toes, he means – crushed up against the others as if cowering in fright. The result of cramming my hooves into shoes that were far too narrow all through the eighties, when Lloyd was a mere child. ‘And we’ll also need them in action,’ he adds.
‘My deformed little toes?’ I lower myself onto the wall.
He laughs. ‘No, your whole feet. We need them doing stuff.’
‘Like what?’ I ask.
‘Anything. You can come up with some ideas?—’
‘What, like holding a paintbrush? Or beating the ingredients for a cake?’
He snorts. ‘Maybe… but we could start with crushing things? That’s popular.’
‘Crushing what?’ Crisps? Hula Hoops? Or grapes for wine – maybe that would work. I’ve already done a tour of the site, having told Shane I wanted to ‘get my bearings’, but really it was to check for licensed premises. My findings have revealed that there are none. ‘I’m really not sure about this,’ I admit.
