‘Isn’t it? Proper English seaside.’ Shane remembers it vividly – being here with Josie and Ravi on day two of their tour. Playing the slot machines and Ravi trying to shake the Penny Falls machine to make money fall out, as if a handful of 2p pieces were essential to their survival – despite the fierce-looking woman presiding over the arcade from a raised booth.
Nostalgia washes over him, making him quite light-headed as they stroll past sandcastles at various stages of construction and decay. He’s still concerned about Josie’s ‘turn’, although he is being careful not to refer to it that way again, as she’s scoffed, ‘It wasn’t a turn, Shane. It was just… a thing.’
Shane nodded, deciding she probably just wanted to forget it. With every passing minute he is enjoying her company more and more, and he doesn’t want to annoy her. He knows this trip isn’t about them; dutifully, they are just carrying out the instructions of their dead friend. But occasionally he forgets about Ravi’s letter and the itinerary, and it’s just him and Josie on a mad adventure.
She seems to flip, he’s noticed, from quiet introspection to stand-offishness, with the occasional glimmer of the light-hearted sunniness that he remembers so well. Dare he even think it? Shane has detected a hint of the closeness they once had, seemingly buried but catching the sunlight occasionally – like a golden sweet wrapper peeking out of the sand.
‘How about here?’ Josie indicates an empty spot on the beach.
‘Perfect.’ They spread out their towels and sit down, facing the sea. The beach is busy despite the cool, bracing wind. There are babies in buggies and a big, jovial group armed with blankets and windbreaks and cool boxes, clearly revving up for a bit of a party. Dance music starts playing tinnily.
‘Shane?’ Josie turns to him. She has pulled off her jeans and T-shirt and is looking only mildly hypothermic in a sporty navy-blue swimsuit.
‘Yeah?’
‘I was thinking,’ she says, looking hesitant, ‘if you wanted to do any detours at all… I mean, if you wanted to add on anywhere else on this trip? I wouldn’t mind at all…’
He looks at her, genuinely not understanding. ‘You mean extend it?’
‘No, no,’ she says quickly. ‘Not like that. I mean… visit your mum, maybe? Seeing as we’ve come up all this way. She’s still in the same house, right?’
Shane nods, turning this over. ‘Yes, she is.’
‘And… she’s still with Pete?’
‘Yeah. But I don’t want to visit. I mean, I haven’t even thought about it?—’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, her cheeks flushing. ‘I just thought I’d mention it.’
‘Definitely not,’ he says. ‘But thanks for thinking of it.’ He looks at her, and he knows what she’s thinking – that she understands. She knew everything, he always suspected. More than she ever let on. He busies himself by pulling off his clothes and jumps up, shivering only slightly in his swimming shorts. ‘So,’ he says brightly, ‘are we going in, or what?’
‘Sure!’ she announces.
‘You feel okay to swim, do you? After the driving thing?’
‘Stop fussing,’ she exclaims, eye-rolling him like an adolescent, which makes him laugh as they stride towards the sea. In they plunge, with Shane pretending that the bitterly cold waters off Yorkshire’s east coast are, in fact, balmy, and that he wouldn’t have been quite content to watch other hardy swimmers from the beach.
‘Great, isn’t it?’ Josie calls out.
‘It is!’ It’s true – sort of. At least, he can barely remember a time when he felt so fully alive. He’s still tingling all over as, shrouded by towels, they struggle clumsily back into their clothes.
‘Fancy an ice cream?’ Josie asks.
‘Sure!’ Because his teeth aren’t quite chattering enough.
‘C’mon, then.’ She smiles, and he notices that she has already caught the sun across her nose and cheeks. Her blue eyes are shining, the precise colour of the sky.
Two older women – perhaps even as old as Shane’s great-aunt Sylvia the last time he saw her – are strolling slowly, arms linked, along the promenade. It was Sylvia whose box room they had all stayed in here: Josie and Ravi crammed into the narrow single bed, and Shane on a partly deflated airbed on the floor.
He hadn’t even known Sylvia, not really. But Shane and his big brother were in touch sporadically – by letter, it seems so antiquated now – and he’d suggested that she might be able to put them up for the night. Shane valued David’s letters. There were seven years between them and straight after school, David had moved to southern Germany to work in construction, and rarely came home after that. Good for him, Shane had thought bitterly: having the means to get away from Pete. But he didn’t blame him, really.
Shane didn’t know much about his family background. He remembered his dad only as a faded image, strolling along a seafront somewhere, buying Shane a stick of rock, and holding his hand. Taking him on a big wheel and shooting a gun at a fairground side show. He’d ‘gone away’, Shane knew that much, and when he’d pressed his mum on it, she’d said he’d died. ‘Just leave it in the past, Shane.’ But he was just a child, and he didn’t have a past to conveniently park difficult things in.
He and Josie queue at the kiosk, the breeze flapping the laminated menu tacked to a board. ‘What would you like?’ he asks.
‘Can’t decide. You go first,’ she urges him.
‘A vanilla cone, please,’ Shane tells the girl behind the counter.
