Sidewinder Cafe

PROLOGUE

Right now I’m cold. Really cold. What time is it? The chill of my fingers as I touch my face tells me I have been out here for hours. I want to lie down and sleep, but my body won’t do it anymore. I think about going home, but memories of how I came to be here in the first place assail me. There is nothing there for me. I left my family because of fear and found safety in this place. ‘I am safe now, I am safe here, with him.’ That was what I knew then.

Now, I am no longer safe with him, not sure where I am going, nor with whom. How can I stay if I am not actually safe with him? Where do you go when you really don’t know where to go because you can’t trust your own instincts anymore, let alone take your own advice to quit while you can? Always now the words of another echo in my head.

‘Come and live with me before he kills you.’

CHAPTER ONE

Hester Birdlip, owner of Birdlip and Associates, Estate Agents in coastal Scarsbury, replaces the receiver on her desk phone, smiles and gets an enquiring look in return from her assistant Maisie.

‘Maggie Matthews! Says she’s keen to start viewing houses for her and the Inspector to buy not just rent.’

‘Really?’ Millie’s surprise is clear.

‘I knew she’d win him round.’

‘They’ve not been here five minutes, I thought they only wanted a short term thing.’

‘She has decided they are staying.’

‘Wonder what he thinks of that?’ Millie looks unconvinced. ‘He seems a fish out of water here.’

‘Well, yes, but she’s asked me to send her our, ‘Your New Home in Scarsbury’ brochure to help convince him.’

Maisie laughs, ‘That thing’s way off, says it’s a friendly welcoming town!’

‘Well, it is,’ Hester’s gaze drifts through the window to where she can see Jonny Fairbord and his pals fooling about in the bus shelter across the road, ‘well, mostly.’

‘Does your Diane agree? Twenty odd years here and people still talk like she’s a blow-in. Wait until Inspector Matthews has to arrest one of that lot out there,’ Maisie gestures to the boys who are standing on the benches in the bus shelter, ‘and Ted Fairbord turns up to sort it! Even Maggie Matthews may have second thoughts then.’

While Maisie is talking, Hester has picked a copy of the brochure from the stand by the door and is flicking through it. ‘Don’t talk to me about that man, can you believe he invited me out?’ Maisie laughs as Hester carries on, ‘sent him away with a flea in his ear. Told him to find someone who was actually interested, though to be honest I can’t imagine why anyone would want an offer from him.’

‘Not me, for one,’ affirms Maisie, but she’s still laughing, ‘no disrespect but he’s way younger than you.’

‘You said it! Barely older than my son, all very creepy.’ Hester continues to turn the pages of the brochure. ‘Oh goodness, how time passes, this thing needs updating, there’s a picture of the skate park when it was still a paddling pool. I remember taking Harry to sail his plastic ducks in that.’

‘He’s twenty seven now, I’m not sure he’d like to know you are telling me about him playing with plastic ducks.’ Maisie’s laughing again, and now so is Hester.

‘This is crazy,’ Hester says, ‘there’s also a picture of buses and the toilet block in the town square and the palm tree that was outside it.’

‘Toilets in the square with a palm tree? When?’

‘When I was a kid, and Julian Court flats were still the old Devon Inn complete with ballroom.’

Millie’s face is a picture of stunned horror. ‘Crikey, maybe we need to rename that booklet ‘Back in the day Scarsbury’, does it give prices in shillings and pennies?

*

Viewed from Scarsbury Hill cliff side the horizon stretches unbroken around the little fishing town from farthest left to farthest right. A ship-high ribbon of glowing pinky-orange light separates the grey blue of the sea from the peachy blue of the sky as the late winter dawn finally spreads. The pier immediately below Hester’s sister-in-law, Diane Bradley, is a dark silhouette, stiff and crisp-edged as a cardboard cut-out. The only thing vying for her attention is the gentle shimmer of the first rays of sun off the mast of a yacht anchored in the middle of the bay.

Sitting on the bench reserved for those hearty enough to complete the trek this high, Diane has the world to herself. Few are the hearty at this time of day. There is a patchy, slow departing sea mist lurking, and finding footholds to reach this height is still risky in the half-dark. Dawn brightens the sea and the sky as she watches. A light breeze further chills the sweat on her forehead, the only visible sign of the steepness of her climb up here.

The clock on the church by the pier strikes eight. And, although he can’t be seen, Diane knows, like half the town does, for it’s that kind of town, that Father Walter is opening the huge wooden doors preparing for a service blessing the new lifeboat to be held later this morning. A minute or two passes and a bright blue and orange fishing boat appears in the bay. The Blue Boy is her husband Cory Bradley’s boat. Or, rather, he was the Skipper until two days ago when he was found in a heap in the alley between The Ship Inn and the fish quay at two am. He had a nasty blow to the side of his head, could only groan when spoken to and had, apparently, no memory of anything. Jim Fairbord, who found him, called 999 at once, but it looked like Cory had been there a while and he felt very cold to the touch. The tutting about town is that he was drinking heavily in The Ferryboat Inn on the quay, by the bay, after unloading his catch around five the previous evening, He had declared himself on holiday on account of the storm coming in. Around midnight that same day, having taken a ‘phone call that seemed to sober him up dramatically, he told the assembled company that he was off to ‘…sort out some business with that silly bitch…’ Not for the first time in recent years he is now in the intensive care ward and, for the foreseeable future, it will be his nephew Harry, Hester’s son, Cory’s assistant Skipper, who lands any catches.

*

Cory, whose life is now tied to the efficiency of the machines at Scarsbury General to which he is currently attached, met his future wife up here. It was a long time ago now and, Diane reflects, such a lot of water has flowed under so many bridges since then. Eighteen and owning only the clothes she stood up in and the contents of the soft canvas bag at her feet, she had looked to him like a lost flower girl, the kind of girl pictured on the front of a birthday card he figured his sister Hester might choose. This girl was willowy, pale and interesting with an air of somewhere other than this place. Looking down at her feet he noticed her battered sandals and dusty toes and, glancing at the cliff path and then back at her feet again, his first words were full of admiration.

‘You climbed up here in those?’

‘Only ones I managed to grab. Used to them now.’

When he had not known what else to say, but had not moved away either, she had told him he was welcome to share the bench, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Thanking her, he had taken the weight off his feet and they had sat in silence for quite some time before he spoke again.

‘Not being funny or anything but you don’t come from round here, I’d know if you did, I’m Cory, who are you?’

‘Diane,’ she offered.

‘Pleased to meet you Diane…’

‘And you,’ she said, taking his offered hand before lapsing back into silence.

Again the quiet, this time broken vaguely by the breeze getting up. Cory waited then before adding, ‘I came up just to get a walk, now I’m away for my lunch at the Sidewinder Café–will you come with me? My treat.’

Their eyes met then and, by and large, that, and a wedding with pageboys and flower girls in sailor suits at Father Walter’s church, sealed the deal for the next twenty odd years. Then the Blue Boy capsized.

*

The church clock is striking nine. The wind is up and Diane is feeling the chill. So much to work through. She’s only just begun but her brain is tired of this day already. She’s remembering that other fatal February day now, five years ago. She was leaning on the railing on the promenade, as she often did, watching the Blue Boy bringing her boys home. There was, as ever, a moving coronet of seagulls above the boat, rising and falling above its fishy mass. What is it they say about rats and sinking ships? As the trawler approached the harbour entrance that grim winter’s day there were just two brave birds left, battling the wind, rising and falling with the swell then, suddenly, rising and falling and not rising. The gulls mirrored the trawler that had dipped and risen but was now listing, precariously and fast, as the hull wedged on to the sandbar. The next rush of the rising tide crashed through, and around, and over the boat, and she could not see how they would get out. She’d seen this scene before. It played regularly inside her head in the half-awake 3 am consciousness that often strikes the wife of any man who goes to sea. Time and her breathing stopped, until, above the spume and spray, rose a cracking sound and a golden flare lit up the sky.

*

The young man and the young woman are on the beach – storming waves crash around although the tide is still quite far out. They have to shout to hear each other against the wind.

‘I’m afraid! He’s a bully, the way he looks at me...’ Her words hang a second, then fly off in the fury of the waves. He barely hears her, responds nonetheless as he has done before.

‘Just do as he says, he’ll sort the paperwork, he fixed it for me; it’s not for long.’ He can barely catch her response but it seems to be language he wishes she wouldn’t use, not helpful he feels. Things are what they are, this is about survival.

‘But he’s a bully.’ She is trying one last time.

‘If he says you do something you do it, or we find ourselves running again. He’s getting me a car, he’s giving you a job, he’ll sort it out, just make him happy.’ Her response is drowned out by the roar of the sea as the wind blows yet harder.

*

At first, the days after the Blue Boy went down were punctured by the beeps and whistles of the machines around Cory and Diane heard nothing beyond a few feet of his bed. The background drone was low and rhythmic, but persistent. The kind of hum one only really notices when it stops, the way in which the room lets you know it’s there, waiting patiently as must you. There was no lasting peace though. Turn by turn a drip, and then a monitor, or pump, or a fan, would stutter, a shriek or beep would sound. Each time she would gasp at the lurch of a suspended breath restored – the same kind of lurch she had first experienced as she watched from the promenade. The lurch would bump her chest and reverberate until someone in the calm efficiency of a nurses uniform appeared to reinstate calm, and her breathing could shudder on, although when any update was given it included variations on the words, “we just don’t know what the outcome will be. He might be perfectly fine, he’s resilient, a fighter, just a matter of time to see…” Mostly, not a word was spoken.

A week in and Harry, who had had a luckier escape than Cory, felt strong enough to join her vigil periodically. They would try to chat, but he was still suffering the effects of the near drowning he’d endured as he pulled Cory from the hold and up to the lifeboat. Just then, even being in the room was a struggle for him.

‘What if he doesn’t make it?’

‘He will!’ Diane had to believe it. ‘He won’t give up, he won’t…’

They colonised the three plastic chairs outside the ward, and waited. Yes, three: Harry, to the left of Diane, shivering despite a battalion of Victorian radiators lining the corridor walls and, on the other side, Hester. She doesn’t think she can safely think about Hester right this minute though.

*

The big guy, with the crisp cut suit and the open wallet, pushed a piece of paper into the young man’s hand.

‘If you get a passage over, call me, I’ll find you a place. He hesitates only a minute as the young man looks in the direction of the bar and says,

‘If I leave they’ll go for her.’

‘I’ll find her one too.’ The guy takes the paper back, scribbles something further then, pointing to what he has just written: ‘This Skipper needs a hostess, tell her to say I sent her.’

*

Somewhere, six whole months disappeared for Diane, in tiny chunks mainly. They were punctuated with travel to and from the house, eating and sleeping and, very occasionally, going to the office, or paying bills and doing housework. Cory woke up thirty seven days and fourteen hours after being admitted, and shortly after Diane had finished counting all the ridges on all the tiles making up the suspended ceiling of his side room. She wasn’t sure who had endured the most successfully. Cory had limited movement, as if his body had forgotten that it was made of moving parts; Diane felt hers needed its joints oiled after all the hours spent hunched in the one position permitted by hospital furniture. It had seemed to her that keeping still and being vigilant was the only thing that would save him, or perhaps that was what she had needed to save her? Either way, she figured, the worst was now over and they just needed to get rolling again. Time to go home and get on with life.

*

Long weeks, and a lot of hard work, and Cory made it home. There was not a mark on him to record what had happened. To the world he was the same Cory, it was simply a matter that they had not seen him about for a while. That August bank holiday Harry took him to see the Blue Boy in the dockyard where it had gone for refit, having been salvaged off the back of a higher tide two days after the accident.

‘It was crazy,’ Harry reported back to Diane, ‘he demanded to know why I sold his boat and when I reminded him it was just in the yard for repairs, not sold, he screamed at me that there was nothing wrong with it!’

‘He’s bound to be a bit confused,’ she told him, heart racing a little. ‘He doesn’t really remember the accident at all…’ It was a feeble response. She felt cold all over. She’d had too many such conversations with him herself. That same night, with that 3am half consciousness that any Skipper’s wife must learn to live with when she has a husband married to the sea, came the spectacle of Cory kneeling over her with a pillow held high above his head.

‘Get back, get out of my way, you’re suffocating me,’ he hissed.

To Diane this man was awake but was not the Cory she knew, he must be dreaming. She made no attempt to move as he lunged toward her with the pillow then, seeing him make no move to stop, rolled sideways and out of his reach. Cory tumbled forward on to the bed and instantly fell back to sleep. It took Diane much longer to find rest.

Five days later a similar thing happened. In fact, Diane has lost count of how often this has been repeated. She’s certain he doesn’t mean it, is not even sure he realises when it happens.

*

Hitchhiking to the coast, then a shift on a cargo vessel, landed him as a sailor in Scarsbury port just days after the encounter in the bar. She took a little longer, for a more direct route. The trader’s referral brought her the mixed blessing of an uncomfortably intimate stay with a man she did not care for, but also passage, as his hostess, on a pleasure yacht. Thereafter, escape when they docked in Portsmouth found her just a short, hitchhikeable ride from her desired destination.