‘No, even taller and broader. He must be six foot three or four, I reckon, and his shoulders are like—’ I put my hands out to estimate the width.
‘Good-looking?’ Rach asks curiously.
I pull a face and shrug. ‘I mean, yeah, he has nice eyes and very, very dark blond hair and a very, very solid facial structure.’
They grin at each other.
‘What’s that look for?’
‘Very, very,’ Rach replies, while at the same time, Amy says, ‘Facial structure.’
Okay, so one is picking on my limited vocabulary and the other is taking the piss out of me for noticing these things. What can I say? I’m a figurative sculptor; I do pay an unusual amount of attention to the shape of a skull.
As for having the headspace to form eloquent sentences, I’ve been working my arse off and I’m knackered.
‘What do you mean by “very, very dark blond hair” anyway? Isn’t that brown?’
‘No, it’s very, very dark blond,’ I insist. ‘If it catches the sun, I’m sure it’ll go a lighter shade of blond.’
Amy bursts out laughing at my conjecturing.
‘Are you sure he’s the sand artist?’ Rach asks over the sound of our friend’s hooting.
‘Well, no one else has drawn anything on the sand this week, so I assume so. And he did say, “Not any more.”’ I put on a stupid deep voice, mimicking him.
‘I’m bummed that he’s booked the place for the whole month of June,’ Rach says, irked. ‘I was looking forward to a few summer barbecues at yours.’
I’m relieved he did because I can’t pass up that sort of money, but I know what she means – the prospect of being able to use the garden was the only silver lining of the cancellation. The downstairs apartment is booked every week through to the end of September, so we’ll just have to hope that early October will be mild and we can have some outdoor parties then. I miss having access to the garden when guests are staying.
‘Amy, what do you want doing with the carrots?’ Dan calls through from the kitchen.
‘Leave them in for a bit longer. I’m going to do them with pomegranate molasses and maple syrup,’ she calls back.
‘Ooh, fancy,’ Rach interjects.
Amy and Dan are both excellent cooks. Amy is a midwife and Dan is an accountant, but sometimes I plead with them to give up their jobs and come and work with me at Seaglass. Joining them for dinner is always a pleasure and I can practically roll home afterwards since they live at the top of a hill on the outskirts of the village.
‘Have you sorted out that problem with your photographer yet?’ I ask Amy, spearing an olive with a toothpick and popping it into my mouth.
‘Yep, she’s roped in her nephew to assist,’ Amy replies.
Amy and Dan are getting married in a couple of months and they just found out that their photographer’s regular assistant had double-booked himself.
I’m so happy that two of my closest friends will be tying the knot, but I know that the weekend will be bittersweet when it comes. They set the date for the tenth of August, which is the day before the sixth anniversary of my parents’ deaths.
They struggled to book a reception venue, so I don’t think the significance of the date even occurred to Amy. I don’t usually make a big thing of it, at least not with my friends.
My stomach churns as I wonder, not for the first time, if Finn will make it back this summer. Surely he’ll want to attend the wedding, if nothing else …
‘I’m gutted that he’s stopped drawing on the sand,’ Amysays out of the blue, returning to the subject of our one-time mystery artist. ‘I was hoping to see his drawings in person.’
‘They really were beautiful,’ I reply sadly.
‘The pictures you posted were incredible,’ Rach says.
I never took a photograph of the girl in the sand. She had been washed away when I went back to work later that day and for reasons I don’t understand, I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone about her.
Her.
