The Endless Beach

by Jenny Colgan

  The next time Joel was home they’d talk. They had to talk. She’d said this the last four times he’d come home, then he’d walked through the door and pulled off all her clothes and somehow the moment had gone. She sighed and pulled out her notebook to see if there was anything she didn’t have organized for the wedding of the . . .

  Speak of the devil, for Charlie himself was walking up the main street pursued, as usual, by a long line of mites—wan, thin children from deprived areas of the big cities of the mainland. Flora waved to him. “Well met, Teàrlach,” she hailed him cheerily. “I haven’t seen you since I heard the good news. This is great!”

  Charlie didn’t say that he had been deliberately avoiding her. He had had a very soft spot for Flora the previous summer, and had hoped that they might be able to start something. But as soon as he’d set eyes on the handsome, square-jawed lawyer up from London, he’d realized he didn’t have a chance.

  And he had known Jan for a long time. They worked together. She had a good heart. They were a good match. All would be fine. It was only for a millisecond, watching Flora’s pale hair flutter in the breeze, that he felt a tiny twinge for what might have been. And what was even more difficult, if he was honest with himself, was the sense that she genuinely was very happy for him and Jan—that she was not thinking about what might have been at all.

  “Thank you,” he said, going up to her and accepting her kiss on each cheek, although they got it slightly wrong and Flora remembered about halfway through it was only people from London who did this and it might look a bit weird. It was too late to extricate herself even though both of them separately wished that actually people still just shook hands.

  “And where are you all from then?” she said, deflecting attention on to the boys.

  “Govan!” said one, and the rest all cheered.

  “And how are you liking it here?”

  They shrugged. “There’s nae PlayStation,” said one and they all nodded.

  “And nae Irn-Bru.”

  Flora looked at Charlie mock crossly. “I can’t believe you’re depriving them so badly!”

  “Och no, it’s all right, it’s good, it’s all right,” said one of the boys, a tiny mite dwarfed in the orange raincoats they wore in the hills. He looked terrified, as if Flora had the power to send him home.

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” chorused the others rapidly.

  Flora smiled. “Well, you can stay then.”

  She glanced at Charlie. “We have some leftover raisin scones tonight—Isla was on Snapchat and let them burn a little bit. We can’t sell them, but if you’d like them, they won’t kill you.”

  Charlie smiled gratefully as the boys jumped up and down in delight. “Thank you,” he said, and she darted in to get the bag.

  He turned to go with the boys. “I am really pleased for you, you know,” Flora said as he walked away. He glanced back. His blond hair glistened in the evening sun, and his kind face looked a little conflicted.

  “I know you are,” he said. “I know.”

  But Flora was already looking back down at her phone. Maybe she should call him after all.

  * * *

  Lorna passed by five minutes later, seeing Flora still trying desperately to get a signal. “Are you not coming up to the Rock?” she said. “There’s a hooley on.”

  “I know,” said Flora crossly.

  “Well, why don’t you just go there?” Lorna was saying. “For the weekend. Can’t Colton take you back?”

  Flora blinked. “But there’s so much on . . .”

  “There’s always a lot on,” said Lorna.

  “Fly to New York for the weekend?” said Flora. “Don’t be mad. I might as well fly to the moon. Plus, I’d still have to get a flight home. Anyway, Colton wouldn’t take me in case I distract Joel.”

  “Come on,” said Lorna. “Just buy yourself a ticket then. Joel is absolutely minted.”

  “Well, that’s got nothing to do with me,” said Flora stiffly. She didn’t like discussing Joel’s money; it felt grubby, like it got in the way. She didn’t even know how much he made. “And I’ve got a wedding to organize.”

  “Don’t be daft. Four vol-au-vents per head and a few sausage rolls and they’ll be delighted. You could do it standing on your head. Haven’t you got that farm money?”

  Flora looked uncomfortable. Last year the farm had been sold to Colton, who was using it entirely to supply his own enterprises. Her share, obviously, hadn’t been as big as her father’s or her brothers’, who’d worked on it and run it. But she had gotten a share nonetheless.

  “I was saving it,” she said. “This place . . . it doesn’t give me a pension or anything, and I didn’t save a penny from London, even though I had a big salary.”

  Lorna found this astonishing. “Why not?”

  “Because rent is insane and travel is insane and lunch and going out and . . .”

  “Could you not have gone out less?”

  “No,” explained Flora patiently. “Because all your money goes on renting a horrible place, so you want to be out as much as possible.”

  Lorna nodded like this made sense.

  “Anyway. I should probably keep it. For a rainy day. I don’t think the café is going to make me rich.”

  “But if you’re as worried as you say . . .” Lorna let the sentence trail off. “I mean, are you in a relationship or not?”

  “Possibly not if I turn up by surprise.”

  “Well, tell him you’re coming.”

  Flora looked up, and Lorna was amazed suddenly by how unhappy her friend looked. “What if he says no?” Flora said simply.

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Flora. “I don’t know if he’s playing at being here, or what. He e-mailed me yesterday to say he’s going to be away another full month. I mean, for God’s sake . . .”

  “Well then. I don’t think you have any choice. Come back to the Rock with me.”

  “No,” said Flora. “But I will think about it.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Colleen McNulty, of Liverpool, England, did not talk about her job. It made people act weirdly toward her, either overly empathetic or massively racist—and both were, she didn’t really like to admit, quite equally tiresome.

  “I’m a civil servant,” she would say coolly, in a way that discouraged further conversation. Her grown daughter (Colleen had been divorced for a long time) was always interested, but otherwise the line between interest and prurience was hard to navigate sometimes, and she certainly had no interest talking to those who’d never known a day’s hardship in their entire lives but thought that desperate people should be allowed to drown in the Mediterranean Sea for want of a little humanity.

  She was equally dispassionate in the office, a featureless building on a forgettable industrial project with only the tiniest of Home Office logos on the signage. She carried out the wishes of the government of the day, that was all. It wasn’t her fault or her responsibility; she did it or she didn’t. This wasn’t cruel: there was simply no other way to deal with it without being overwhelmed—in the same way battlefield doctors kept up a black sense of humor. You had to distance yourself, otherwise it became unbearable. You couldn’t get involved in individual people’s stories—individual families—because then you couldn’t do your job, couldn’t function, and that was useful to precisely nobody.

  If you had to deal with her, you might have thought her rude, curt, and unfeeling. In fact, Colleen McNulty thought being efficient was the very best way to get through her day, and to please the God she fervently believed in.

  As she took off her large, practical parka that morning, hung it on the back of the door where it always went, checked that no one had touched “her” mug, and murmured good morning to her opposite number, Ken Foley, with whom she’d shared an office for six years and had never had a personal conversation, she expected little as she powered up the computer and looked down to see what the day would brin
g. It would be numbers on a page, that was all, boxes on a spreadsheet: not people but problems to be organized and sorted out and arranged until she left promptly at 5:30 to heat up her M&S pasta sauce carefully at home and watch YouTube videos about crafting.

  She glanced at the header of the first e-mail. And for the first time in six years, Ken Foley heard the very upright Mrs. McNulty let out a tiny gasp.

  “Colleen?” he said, daring to use her first name.

  “Excuse me,” said Colleen at once, recovering her composure.

  Every Friday, regular as clockwork . . . You could set your watch by it, month after month, every week, the English growing more confident—even the accent coming in—the doctor she’d placed miles and miles away, up on that tiny island, asked if she had any news. She didn’t get involved, ever, with her clients.

  But he had always been so polite. Never ranted or raged like some family members (and indeed, of course, who could blame them?). Never accused her of being unfeeling or being responsible for the government’s policies. Never beseeched or begged. Simply asked politely, his gentle voice calm, with only the slightest quiver betraying the desperate angst behind the question. And every week she reassured him that if they had any news, they would contact him immediately, of course, and he would apologize and say that he knew that, of course, but just in case, and she would politely shut him down. But she didn’t mind him calling—she never did.

  She took a peek at the e-mail again, but she knew the boys’ names off by heart. One of them, she noticed, had just had a birthday.

  Colleen made it a rule never to look into circumstances—it was prurient, and not her job.

  Today she found herself making an exception. Found in a military hospital. Sheltered in a school by what looked like a clutch of rebels and some leftover nuns, of all things. No mother, but the brothers together. Alive.

  Colleen McNulty, who never displayed emotion over the exceptionally hard task she did day in, day out—well . . . She swallowed hard.

  She wanted to enjoy this call—to savor it. She really, truly did. She glanced over at Ken and did a most uncharacteristic thing.

  “I would like to make a private phone call,” she announced pointedly. “Would you mind?” And she indicated the door.

  Ken was delighted to go down to the little kitchen area and announce to all and sundry that the buttoned-up and silent Mrs. McNulty was almost certainly in the throes of some tumultuous affair, probably with Lawrence the stock boy.

  Chapter Twelve

  The woman in the examining room was crying. Saif handed over the box of tissues he kept for when this happened, which was regularly, although not normally for this reason.

  “I was just so sure,” she was saying. It was Mrs. Baillie, who had four enormous dogs currently all baying their heads off outside the office. Mrs. Baillie herself was a tiny woman. If he had had to put money on why Mrs. Baillie would have to visit a doctor, he would have suggested that one of the dogs had fallen on her. He hoped she remembered to feed them on time.

  “I was just so sure it was a tumor,” she said again.

  Saif nodded. “That is why we tell you not to look up things on the Internet,” he said.

  She sobbed again, repeating her grateful thanks. “I can’t believe what you’ve done for me,” she said again. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “It was my pleasure,” said Saif, standing up. Lancing boils wasn’t his favorite part of the job, but this level of gratitude was both unusual and pleasant.

  “I’ll make sure to drop you in a wee cake!” Mrs. Baillie smiled up at him through her tears as she got up to go. Saif privately wondered how much dog hair would get into a cake mix in Mrs. Baillie’s house but smiled politely and stood up as she went to exit. His phone rang, and he frowned. He had at least one more patient before lunch, and he wanted to check back on little Seerie Campbell’s whooping cough. He pressed the intercom.

  “Jeannie, I’m not done,” he said to his receptionist.

  “I know,” she said apologetically. “Sorry. It’s the Home Office.”

  Saif sat back down. They rang from time to time to check on his paperwork. It was routine, nothing to get excited about. Although he couldn’t help it; he always, always did.

  The voice was calm on the phone. “Dr. Hassan?”

  He recognized the voice; it wasn’t his London caseworker.

  It was Mrs. McNulty at the Complex Casework Directorate.

  He found his eyes straying to the blood pressure sleeve on his desk. He wouldn’t, he found himself thinking ridiculously, want to try that at the moment. “Hel- . . . hello,” he stuttered.

  “This is Mrs. McNulty.”

  “I know who you are.” His heart was racing, incredulous.

  “I believe I have some good news for you.”

  Saif’s breath caught in his throat.

  “We have managed to locate two children we believe may be your sons.”

  There was a long pause. Saif could hear his own heartbeat. He felt slightly disconnected, slightly out of body, as if this were happening to someone else.

  “Ibrahim?” he said, realizing that he had not said the name out loud in so long. Whenever he had spoken to her, he had always said “my family.”

  “Ibrahim Saif Hassan, date of birth twenty-fifth of July 2007?” said Mrs. McNulty.

  “Yes!” Saif found himself shouting. “YES!”

  Outside, Jeannie glanced up from her notes, but the remaining patient hadn’t turned up, so she carried on tidying up morning office hours.

  “Ash Mohammed Hassan, date of birth twenty-ninth of March 2012?”

  Saif found himself simply saying thank you over and over again. Oddly, he sounded not entirely unlike Mrs. Baillie. But he was babbling, and he realized he had to say something.

  Mrs. McNulty smiled to herself and let it play out.

  “I’m going to e-mail you through all the details, Dr. Hassan. The nearest center is in Glasgow. They’ll be taken there . . . there are various protocols . . .”

  Saif couldn’t hear any of this.

  “And . . .” he said when he’d managed to wrest back control of his breathing. “And of my wife?”

  “There is no news,” said Colleen. “Yet.”

  “Yet,” said Saif. “Yes, of course. Yet.”

  And they both pretended that it was simply a matter of time.

  “Oh my goodness,” said Saif suddenly, astounded anew. “The boys! The boys are here! My boys! My boys! My boys . . .”

  “I am,” said the unemotional Mrs. McNulty, “very, very pleased for you, Dr. Hassan.”

  And she made herself put the phone down on his overenthusiastic thanks, as there was a team briefing at 11 A.M. and she had to redo her makeup because she was chairing the project’s subcommittee.

  “Good luck to you,” she said quietly.

  Five hundred miles north-northeast, a tall, slender man with a neatly trimmed beard jumped up and punched the air, shouting so loud a flock of magpies took off into the nearby field, up across the scarecrows and into the clouded sky.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lorna continued on down the harbor, enjoying a bit of sun on her lunch break even as work was piling up back at school, relishing just a tiny break from the sticky clatter of tiny hands, however fond of them she was.

  She headed back to the farmhouse to pick up some of the leftover grading she’d forgotten. Unusually, someone was waiting for her there; she heard the shout before she made it up the track.

  “LOREN-AH!”

  She blinked. She knew immediately it was of course Saif.

  “Lorenah . . . !” Saif stopped short when he realized she was right there. He hadn’t even known what he was doing. Jeannie was away on her lunch break; he had had to get out, do something before he burst.

  The e-mail had come through but the details had swum in front of his eyes. Lorna was the obvious solution. He’d run fleetly through the town to worried looks from passersby who assumed ther
e was a medical emergency in progress, but he noticed none of it.

  The chickens pecked noisily around his feet as he stood there, panting. Lorna lifted her eyebrows. In his agitation, his tie was loose around his neck, his top buttons undone. She looked away quickly from the smooth skin beneath it. He was out of breath, and wild around the eyes, and in his hand he was waving something frantically.

  “Where were you?”

  “At school, of course! What is it? What’s the matter? It’s just a whale!”

  Saif shook his head. “Read this! Read this! Um . . . Please. Please to read it. Thank you.”

  He proffered it. Lorna squinted at him. “You can read English perfectly,” she said reprovingly.

  “I need . . . I need to be sure,” panted Saif.

  Only the noise of the birds in the trees and the chickens crooning and looking for their breakfast broke the surrounding silence. Lorna looked down.

  It was an official e-mail. From the Home Office. Lorna checked the stub of the sender address first. There were so many scams around these days; she got e-mails from fake iTunes accounts practically every day. But it was legit.

  Then she read down slowly, aware of Saif’s agonized trembling a yard away from her. Then, to check, she read it again.

  “Do you need to sit down?” Lorna said, keeping her voice very calm in order to be understood by someone in a highly strung emotional state, something she was well trained in.

  Saif nodded, feeling as if the blood were rushing to his head, as if he were somehow outside his body just for a second. He staggered over to the wooden bench outside the farmyard door. Lorna went straight inside the house and brought out two glasses of water. Saif hadn’t moved. She handed him the water and he took it without thanking her, just staring straight ahead.

  “Yes,” said Lorna simply and softly into the clear air. Saif’s gaze was still rigid. “Yes,” she said again. She grew worried about him; his face was completely frozen. Then she realized, a millisecond too late, that he was trying with every fiber of his being not to cry. “Your boys are here. They’re coming home. Um . . . Here . . . They’re coming here.”