The Bookshop on the Shore

by Jenny Colgan

  ‘Christ,’ said Ramsay. ‘Oh Christ. Come on. Bugger, where’s my phone?’

  It was lying dead on the counter, Larissa’s repeated calls having utterly exhausted it.

  ‘I’ve got mine,’ said Zoe, her voice shaking. ‘Mrs MacGlone, stay here and keep . . . watch the boys . . .’

  The boys she didn’t take was the phrase left unspoken in the air. Mrs MacGlone nodded, mouth a thin line, and turned round.

  ‘Don’t scare them!’ shouted Zoe rather pointlessly, as both of them were down in the kitchen, watching her and Ramsay dive out into the overgrown lawn. Shackleton caught them up in moments.

  ‘I’ll check the woods,’ he said, and his voice, suddenly low, made both Zoe and Ramsay turn back briefly as he seemed so much older than his age.

  Outlined in the grey morning light, Zoe suddenly got a flash of the house behind her. The trees were bending in the wind, the sky was full of grey scudding clouds and the windows of the house were blind, like eyes that couldn’t see.

  ‘HARI!’

  The rain was swirling, throwing leaves here and there; the fierce rustling in the trees and the eerie whispering grasses and the house which had began to look like home suddenly looked like the most frightening place she could imagine.

  ‘MARY!’ Ramsay was calling too, desperately, neither of them able to believe that the children were gone – they couldn’t, they couldn’t be gone.

  In her mind, Zoe ran through the world they were living in. The hills, freezing now, a real risk of exposure. The rough scrub of the hillside, so easy to get lost.

  The loch. The loch.

  Ramsay came to the same conclusion at exactly the same time and suddenly they were both running against the wind, crying out names that got lost in the wind, faster and faster.

  They reached the shingle beach at the same time, the waves pounding on the shore, and looked at each other in disbelief.

  The little rowing boat was gone.

  ‘She wouldn’t,’ Ramsay muttered to himself. ‘She wouldn’t. Why would she?’

  Zoe’s trembling fingers were dialling the phone. She dropped it on the shore and Ramsay picked it up and dialled quickly.

  ‘Coastguard,’ he said in a clipped voice. ‘East side of Loch Ness.’

  He stared at Zoe, both of them unable to believe what he was saying even as he said it.

  ‘I think two children have taken a boat out, and we don’t know where they are.’

  Zoe barked a little sob as Ramsay gave them more details. She walked towards the very edge of the water. There was nothing to be seen and the water was choppy; the grey water and the grey sky made everything look the same.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure!’ Ramsay was saying, clearly doing his best to keep under control. ‘The Beeches. Check it.’

  He waited. ‘Okay. Yes.’

  He handed the phone to Zoe.

  ‘They can’t send a helicopter. It’s too stormy’

  Zoe suddenly felt her knees gave way, and Ramsay caught her just before she fell to the ground.

  Chapter Three

  Ramsay held her up but she shook him off. She didn’t have time, she couldn’t be weak. She couldn’t. She grabbed her phone, her hand shaking. Ramsay would have carried on supporting her, but she backed away, not even realising she was shaking her head at him. She fumbled again but managed to find Murdo’s number.

  ‘Oh hello!’

  Murdo was his cheerful self – had been, in fact, since Agnieszka had come over to comfort him over his abortive date – and Zoe found herself clinging to the normality of his voice.

  ‘What have you got for me? Yes, I loved the Cherry-Garrard. I loved it. Every day it wasn’t zero degrees and I wasn’t trying to kill penguins for food. I told Agnieszka to try making some penguin but—’

  ‘Murdo,’ said Zoe desperately and he finally caught the tone of her voice.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s Hari . . . he’s disappeared. On the loch.’

  ‘The lad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What . . . ?’

  ‘We don’t know. We think Mary took him out . . .’

  ‘But there’s a storm coming in.’

  Ramsay was staring at her desperately. Zoe fought back her rage and terror.

  ‘She . . . she didn’t know that,’ she said finally.

  ‘Where . . . where are they?’

  ‘They can’t have got far,’ said Zoe. ‘It’s a rowing boat.’

  ‘Aye, but there’s currents out there on the water . . .’ said Murdo, and Zoe whimpered in terror.

  ‘Aye, right, don’t worry. I’m on my way.’

  * * *

  Murdo sent out an APB then shot across the loch in the boat that went faster than any of his guests could ever have imagined. It pitched and bounced in the heavy water. He picked up his binoculars and looked around. He knew every inch.

  Zoe was standing, looking out alone, on the shore at the foot of The Beeches, her arms wrapped around herself, her face utterly desolate, Ramsay some distance away.

  Murdo peeled off, the boat bouncing from side to side in the choppy water, veering from side to side. He was soaked through, the water getting in between his oilskins and down the back of his neck. It was a gnarly day, there was no doubt about that at all. This time of year, the weather barrelled in from the west and you never quite knew what it would be until it hit you – but when it hit you, oh boy. Squalls pitched here and there, never quite all in the same direction, and it was as much as Murdo could do to keep the boat level and scan for the children at the same time. The idea of children being out here in this chilled him to the core. He would never ever come out in this with guests.

  He looked at the radio again, but suddenly it became unnecessary as, through his thick hat, a noise hit him: an old, stuttering motor boat. Turning round he saw that it was Alasdair from the pub, accompanied by old Ben, both with worried expressions on their faces.

  ‘We’ll take the north,’ said Alasdair, shooting round.

  Behind him were, as it turned out, the cavalry, and, to Zoe standing on the shore, it was astonishing: an array of every type of boat – weekend yachts, small tubs, rowing boats, sleek pleasure boats. Hamish McTavish had to be dissuaded from bringing down his canal barge.

  It was a flotilla. Murdo was keeping the channels clear to coordinate and be in charge.

  Zoe couldn’t believe who was out there. The colonel, who had done nothing but complain about how Nina knew what he liked, was puttering along in a tiny little tub with an outboard motor. And there was Wullie, who had sold Nina the van in the first place and done nothing but complain about it. The water was choppy, the sky was tearing itself apart, but there was Lennox in a rowing boat of all things, his muscles straining against the ferocity of the tide. The entire village was there.

  Murdo reached her first, and she scrambled aboard, not tripping this time.

  ‘They can’t have got far,’ said Murdo, ‘if they took the wee boat.’

  Nobody said the awful inevitable: you didn’t have to go far. If there was a fault in the boat, the riptide would pull you down soon as look at you. You could drown ten feet off the shore. If the rip didn’t get you, you could die from exposure in half an hour or so this time of year. The loch was the worst kind of dangerous: beautiful and tempting.

  ‘Can he swim?’ said Murdo.

  ‘He’s four!’

  Murdo would have liked to have said or done something comforting at that point. But he knew what Zoe didn’t: people died in the loch. Not every year. But it happened. He looked at her pale drawn face, every nightmare scenario playing out on her features, and could think of nothing else to do but take off his own coat and put it round her, as if it could stop the shaking, as if it had a chance.

  Chapter Four

  Murdo coordinated the boats as they separated; they crossed the loch in strictly organised areas. The helicopter soon added its stuttering noise to the crashing wind. In Murdo’s boat, Zoe and Ramsay
were not near each other; both trying to block out the worst thoughts in their heads, the worst of all possible worlds.

  Everything was grey and the rain swept in off the mountains and visibility dropped to almost nothing, and now Zoe stared about her in despair: you couldn’t see three feet in front of you.

  A powerful police launch had joined the force and it had a high light beam in front of it, but it still felt as if they might be in the middle of the night, not eight o’clock in the morning. Noises across the lake, across the storm, took on a strange otherworldly power. It was impossible to tell how near or far you were from the rest of the boats. Time lost its meaning as they moved slowly in among the rushes of the shore or around the tiny islets that appeared at low tide. Only Zoe stood defiant in the prow of the boat, hollering over and over, ‘Hari! Hari! Hari!’

  And every bit of her little boy was suddenly in her head at the same time: him chuckling to himself as he learned to walk in the little bedsit, and the sleepy little face as she breastfed him in the early deep endless hours of early motherhood, shocked and bamboozled by the fierce strength of her love, even as she could see him, flashes of him, pale, washed up on the shore, pulled down by the mermen deep beneath the sea, fish eating his eyes . . . no.

  ‘HARI! HARI! HARI!’

  She would remember him dancing to music on the television; remember the happiness on his face the first time she had let Patrick go with him to nursery; the look as he intently caught red leaves in the late autumn sun; the extraordinary life in him; his surprisingly heavy, intent little body; the weight of his head as he slept in her arms; the scent of his hair, stuck up in the bath with shampoo like a tiny Mohican.

  ‘HARI! HARI!’

  And Ramsay hollered, ‘HARI! MARY! HARI! MARY!’ staring out in every direction.

  Chapter Five

  All of a sudden, something swelled beneath them. Murdo swore. Zoe, knowing nothing about boating, didn’t realise anything was amiss and carried on shouting the name of her lost boy, the name she would shout for evermore.

  The boat lurched suddenly to one side, all of them instinctively grabbing on to the port side.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Murdo again.

  ‘What is it?’ said Zoe. The pressure was immense, the engine whining as it felt the strain.

  ‘Um . . . it must be an undertow,’ said Murdo, seizing the tiller. But it was no good; the boat was caught and would only bend in the way the water seemed to be forcing it to go. He pulled the tiller again, and his hand was knocked off, stung.

  He glanced around. There wasn’t another boat anywhere near them and the rain was pounding harder than ever. Visibility was terrible.

  ‘HARI!’ Zoe screamed, using her phone as a torch, a useless pimple of light in the deep grey.

  ‘Shit!’ said Murdo suddenly. Out of nowhere, a large rocky outcrop had appeared, right in the centre of the lake. ‘The water is low. Shit!’

  He tried to work the tiller, again to no avail.

  ‘Shit!’

  They were heading closer and closer to the rocks at a high speed. ‘Oh God,’ said Murdo. ‘Put your lifejackets on . . . We might have to abandon ship. What the hell is going on . . . ?’

  He threw the lifejackets to Ramsay and to Zoe, who was staring terrified at the large rocks bearing down towards them, high and sharp and ready to dash them to pieces, whether, Murdo thought in horror, they jumped out of the boat or not. The current was dragging them there regardless. Drenched through, they could do nothing more than stare at the cruel waves crashing at the base of the rocks and brace themselves for impact.

  It was impossible to hear anything over the noise of the engine, the pounding rain, the helicopter overhead. The noise was deafening. It took Zoe a while before she realised in the maelstrom, just as they were about to hit and she was coming to a terrible realisation, that one) Mary and Hari couldn’t possibly be alive in this, and two) that she too was going to die and, that being the case, she didn’t really care.

  So it took a moment. And even when she heard it, she didn’t believe it. Assumed it was a trick of the wind and the water, or even the sprites – some malevolent spirit under the water who would do this to add to the horror, or something her imagination was conjuring up in its very last moments, something of a dream, as if the whole thing were a dream . . .

  She turned to Ramsay and screamed at him to make herself heard.

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  He went still, stopped trying to control the uncontrollable boat, and stood stock-still. And she saw from his face that he had heard it too.

  ‘M-mmmm-mummy.’

  Chapter Six

  Zoe stared at Ramsay in anguish. Ramsay didn’t think twice. He grabbed the rope out of the bottom of the boat and did a very brave and foolish thing. He dived straight into the water and headed straight for the rocks. He was pushed against the first one pretty hard but, undaunted, he took the rope between his teeth and disappeared underneath the water until he found what he was looking for – a twist of rock to tether the boat to.

  He burst above the waves to grab a breath, then disappeared again. The storm had stirred up the sediment which made it almost impossible to see, but there had been boats and buoys on this loch since time immemorial and sure enough, down here he found a hole in the rock that he could slip the rope through, make a tight bowline and signal to Murdo, who tied it tight the other end. Then he jumped up on the rocks, bare-footed, oblivious to the cuts and bruises covering his body, and held the boat, actually held it, pulling it one direction or another when it got too close, swinging it away from the rocks; all the while Zoe could hear ‘Mummy! Mummy!’

  She had to see. As Ramsay, who now looked nine foot tall to her, held the boat off the rocks by, it seemed, sheer force of will, she had to know. With her lifejacket on, and before Murdo had the chance to stop her, she too dived into the freezing water and made a desperate doggy paddle for the rocks. Ramsay, incredibly, was able to keep one hand holding the boat and one grabbing her out of the water when, as soon as Zoe left the boat, the engine roared back into life and Murdo could move out after all. Murdo unhitched the bowline from his side as Ramsay knelt down to help Zoe out onto the rock side, and he accelerated away, calling all the other boats at the same time.

  * * *

  Together, Ramsay and Zoe scrambled up the harsh side of the rocks, Zoe’s feet slipping, Ramsay’s utterly bloody. At the top they looked down the other side, and what they saw changed everything, all at once, in a heartbeat.

  Chapter Seven

  Water is a living thing. It moves; it flows; it cannot be contained. Water is stronger than anything in its way. It can wear down mountains, bring down houses, turn everything to slush and mush. Water always gets its way.

  And at low tide, these stones were revealed, but only for a few hours a day until they reclaimed their position once more in the mysterious depths. And here was an upflung rowing boat, its paint peeling, not remotely seaworthy, flung by chance upon a tiny shingle beach, the smallest lick of sand, a shallow outcrop in an area so deep, it couldn’t be measured until they invented satellites.

  And next to the rowing boat, cowering, shuddering, were two children staring up as Ramsay and then, being heaved up, Zoe, who clambered over the top and stared back in amazement, in absolute disbelief at the found children.

  And the voice came again: ‘Mummy.’

  Zoe gaped, the wind and the shock already having knocked the breath from her. Ramsay thought she might fall. Instead, she slipped and slithered down the other side of the shingle, weighed down and soaking.

  ‘Hari. HARI!’ she shrieked.

  ‘Mummy!’ he said brightly.

  Mary jumped up immediately, and Zoe was terrified of how furious she felt.

  ‘What were you DOING?’ she shrieked. ‘What the hell were you DOING?’

  She had never felt a fury like it. It came from a deep, primal place, from the depths of her lizard brain, and she couldn’t possibly have controlled it.r />
  Mary was shivering and sobbing in her white nightgown, her hair drenched around her shoulders, looking once again like the ghost that had haunted the corridors and pathways when Zoe had arrived.

  ‘Christ, Mary,’ said Ramsay, walking down towards her. ‘You could . . . you could . . .’

  He couldn’t even finish the sentence.

  Zoe had Hari in her arms. She was choking up seawater, and his little body was soaked right through and utterly freezing so she pressed any warmth she could feel onto him.

  ‘Ma sister she found me,’ he announced so confidently that Zoe’s jaw dropped open. ‘We go boat.’

  ‘Hari,’ said Zoe, shaking. ‘Oh my God. Hari. You’re talking.’

  But it was more than that. As he beamed up, all fear forgotten and nothing but pride on his face, Zoe clocked something she would only realise later: Hari had the most Scottish accent you could possibly imagine.

  ‘I’s going on boat,’ said Hari. ‘Bit cauld.’

  Zoe shook her head.

  ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’

  Suddenly the lights of the police boat illuminated the tiny, implausibly narrow spit they had landed on. The helicopter, as soon as it heard, sheared off to land on the nearest part of the coast to take them to the hospital, its clattering a welcome sound.

  Zoe burrowed her face in Hari’s little shoulder. Something else plucked her coat and she twitched round.

  Mary was standing there.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she was saying over and over again. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He went and found the boat, and I was trying to stop him. I promise, I was trying to stop him!’

  ‘I go on yon boat wi’ ma sister,’ said Hari proudly.

  ‘It was his idea,’ said Mary. ‘It was! He’d pushed it off! I was trying to stop him!’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Zoe. ‘But you let him! You let him!’

  Mary shook her head.

  ‘I was getting him!’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Ramsay, and Mary stared up at him, terror in her eyes.