The Beach Café

by Lucy Diamond

  I jotted down a couple of numbers and went to make peace with Matthew.

  The next day in the office I waited until everyone had gone for their lunch breaks and then phoned one of the estate agents, who was based in Padstow, a few miles from Carrawen. I spoke to a very friendly bloke, who took down all my details and sounded extremely interested when I said I’d inherited the café and was wondering what to do with it. I could almost hear him rubbing his hands with glee in fact, when he told me he knew the very café I meant, and that it would be a splendid investment for a businessperson or a company – it was a prime spot of land, and absolutely ripe for redeveloping.

  ‘What, you mean a buyer might just . . . knock it down and build something else there?’ I said uncertainly. I hated the idea of someone ripping apart the beautiful old building, tearing down the wooden frame, dismantling the windows and doors. I had a vision of all the tables and chairs, the coffee machine, even the framed photos from the walls being dumped in a skip, and winced. I didn’t like the thought of the café being anything other than what it already was.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he enthused. ‘Obviously any purchaser would need to apply to the council first, in order to change the use of the building, but I wouldn’t think it would be a problem. It’s a wonderful beach; I’m amazed the area hasn’t been developed further before now, to be honest. When you look at what has happened to Padstow and Rock, the opportunity is there for the taking, frankly.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘We also get lots of clients interested in second homes in Carrawen Bay,’ he went on, not seeming to hear me. ‘Lots of clients. And it would be very easy for someone to turn the café into a luxury holiday home, for instance. Those views would make it a very special property.’

  I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling disloyal to Jo as his words gushed into my ear. I could just imagine the look of horror on her face if she could hear me having this conversation. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Only – well, there are people working in the café at the moment, you know, they have jobs, so I wouldn’t want them to lose out if I sold the place. And if I was going to sell it, I’d definitely want it to carry on being a café, so—’

  He gave a cheerful laugh. ‘It doesn’t really work like that, I’m afraid, Miss Flynn,’ he replied. ‘It would be up to the buyer to do what they liked with it, once a sale had gone through. Do you want me to pop round, have a proper look at the place and give you a valuation? I could drop in later this week, if that’s convenient. Then, if you’re happy with the price, we can get the ball rolling, measure up, take some good photos and book in some viewings. I can think of at least five clients off the top of my head who’d be very interested. Yeah?’

  I hesitated. This was all happening too quickly. I only wanted to sell the café if . . . Well, if someone like Jo was going to be there at the helm, keeping the place just as it had been run for all those years.

  I sighed. I was dreaming, wasn’t I? I was kidding myself.

  ‘Miss Flynn?’ the estate agent prompted. ‘I could drop in on Thursday if—’

  ‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘No. Um . . . I need to think about this for a bit longer. Thanks for your help, though.’

  ‘Well, if you change your mind, give me a call back; my name’s Greg, and I’d be delighted to have this property on our books.’

  I bet you would, Greg, I thought miserably, replacing the receiver. Greg wouldn’t care about the kind of person he sold it to. He wouldn’t vet all the potential customers to make sure they were nice, decent people who would be custodians of the café, look after the staff and the building properly, would he? No. He’d be all too happy to flog it to the richest person who came along with plans to turn it into a spa complex for swanky types, as long as he got his big fat commission.

  I sighed again and put my head on the desk. I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t let that happen. But what was I supposed to do?

  I slammed the front door behind me, threw my bag onto the floor and kicked off my shoes, sending one smacking against the hall radiator with a dull clang. ‘That bloody, bloody, bloody, BLOODY sex-pest,’ I fumed.

  It was Wednesday, and I’d just had the worst day in the office ever. I’d overslept and then had a bike puncture on the way to work, making me doubly late, and meaning a bollocking from Jacqueline, followed by a ton of punishment filing. A crampy PMT had kicked in halfway through the morning, then at lunchtime I’d managed to wrench my ankle on one of the cobbled lanes off the High Street, and snapped the heel of my shoe clean off. Just to put the icing on the cake, later that afternoon Fatso Davis had ‘accidentally’ brushed his hand against my breast in the lift, making my skin crawl. I had jerked away from him in revulsion, but the smirk on his face let me know he’d copped a good old feel.

  ‘Bloody, bloody, BLOODY DISGUSTING – Oh. Hello, Saul.’ I broke off my tirade as I stormed into the kitchen and saw him at the table there, doing a jigsaw with Matthew. Saul was the absolute nicest kid in the world. He usually stayed with us on Wednesday and Saturday nights, and even in my worst PMT-and-sex-pest rage, just the sight of him was enough to make me feel better, as if the world had shifted onto its rightful axis again.

  He jumped off his chair and ran over to hug me, and I wrapped my arms around him, kissing his lovely tufty brown hair.

  ‘I forgot it was Wednesday. Oooh, am I glad to see you, it feels like ages. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘I finished that Lego dinosaur, you know – do you want to see a picture of it?’

  ‘Too right I do,’ I replied, giving him a last squeeze before letting him go. It had taken Matthew a full six months to tell me he had a son, when we started seeing each other, and when he’d finally broken the news he’d been a bag of nerves, apologetic even, that there was this child in his life, this boy from his doomed first marriage. He shouldn’t have been nervous or apologetic, though: in my eyes, Saul was nothing but wonderful. Since I’d been introduced to Saul, my life had grown accordingly to encompass the joys of Lego, Play-Doh and football, and more recently Gogos (small plastic alien-type creatures), Match Attax card-collecting and Beast Quest. I loved it.

  ‘Hey, Evie, your hair’s gone all short,’ he said, his eyes wide as if he’d only just noticed. ‘You look really cool, like a boy.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, knowing that this was surely the ultimate compliment.

  ‘Hi,’ Matthew said, coming over to kiss my cheek. ‘Everything all right?’

  I kissed him back and a heavy sigh gusted out of me. ‘Not the best day of my life,’ I told him, withholding the full details as Saul’s bright, interested eyes were still fixed on me. I hoped he hadn’t heard my earlier shout. Matthew would kill me if Saul went back to his mum tomorrow and asked, ‘Mummy, what’s a sex-pest?’ in his innocent, piping voice. Emily, Matthew’s ex, would be on the phone within five seconds and I’d be in the doghouse for at least a year.

  Matthew went to finish some work while I got on with making dinner. I wasn’t the most accomplished cook, it had to be said. I had wrecked several saucepans in the past, the most memorable occasion being the time I forgot about the egg I was boiling and left the pan on a flaming gas ring for several hours. The water had boiled dry, the egg had exploded, and the pan was giving off a foul burning smell by the second hour. ‘How can anyone forget that they’re boiling an egg?’ Matthew had shouted in exasperation. ‘You only have to remember for three flipping minutes, Evie!’

  ‘I know,’ I’d said sheepishly. ‘I just . . . forgot.’

  The one and only time I’d tried to cook a roast, I’d given us food poisoning (‘This chicken is so raw it’s practically still alive!’ Matthew had realized after the first fatal mouthful). The birthday cake I’d attempted to bake for Matthew had mysteriously vanished into the bin after that first revolting slice we’d each had (it seemed to taste of curry powder; I had no idea why or how). And I’d never been able to make a cheese sauce without having to sieve the lumps out of it.

  I
could do toast, though, and a half-decent fry-up. And anything that just needed putting in the oven I was mostly okay with. Luckily Saul’s favourite food was pizza. Even I could manage that.

  We decorated the pizza together in our traditional way, leaving a quarter of it as a margherita for Saul, arranging mushrooms and ham on my section, and olives and pepperoni and extra cheese on Matthew’s. Saul loved spending ages lining up the shiny olive halves in patterns, and sprinkling the grated cheddar just so. ‘It’s snowing cheese,’ he said, as he let the pale-yellow curls fall from his fingers.

  ‘Or maybe it’s sand,’ I suggested. ‘Cheesy sand, on a cheesy beach.’

  He grinned. ‘Dad said you’d been to the beach at the weekend. Did you go rock-pooling?’

  I lifted the pizza carefully and slid it into the oven. ‘Not this time, no,’ I said. ‘Do you like rock-pooling?’

  ‘Yeah!’ he said, as if that was the most stupid question he’d ever heard. ‘Course I do! It’s my favourite thing on holiday. My aunty Amanda lives by the sea. She is soooo lucky, lucky, lucky.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said distractedly, shutting the oven door. ‘My aunty used to live by the beach too. She loved having the sea as her next-door neighbour.’

  ‘When I’m a grown-up, I’m going to live right on a beach,’ he told me, wiping his cheesy hands on his school trousers before I could stop him. Oops. Emily wouldn’t thank me for that. ‘I’m going to build myself a sand CASTLE to live in – do you get it, a real castle, made of sand? – and I’m going to go rock-pooling ALL DAY.’

  ‘That sounds good,’ I said, ‘but only if I’m allowed to visit you.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ll build a special bit of the castle just for you,’ he promised. ‘A whole wing!’ He laughed. ‘Hey, isn’t it weird that castles have wings, like birds do? As if they could fly away!’

  I ruffled his hair, a surge of love for him stopping me speaking for a moment. ‘You’re a sweetheart,’ I told him. ‘Now – are we going to set this table, or what?’

  I dreamed of the beach at Carrawen that night. It was a cold, crisp day in my dream, with that pale-blue early-morning light you get at the coast in winter. The sea was luminescent, sleek and calm, the weak sunlight glittering on its rippled surface like a million sequins. I was the only person there and I stood right in the centre of the bay, gazing out at the indigo-blue line of the horizon, letting the peace and stillness fill me all the way up. I was so happy. So content. So calm . . .

  Then the radio sprang into life beside my head, burbling DJ nonsense and shattering that perfect peaceful moment. I groaned, stretching out a hand and fumbling to hit the Snooze button. I wanted to slip back into my dream, wanted to be swallowed up again by the empty calm of that winter beach, but annoyingly I couldn’t return a second time.

  I rolled over towards Matthew’s side of the bed, but it was empty and I guessed he must already be up and having breakfast with Saul. He had to take him in to school on Thursday mornings, and lived in fear of running late and thereby suffering the wrath of Emily. She had spies at the school, according to Matthew; a crack team of mums who clocked what time he arrived with Saul and reported back every detail of the viewing.

  Emily was always perfectly civil to me, if not actually friendly. She was a nurse: a brisk, uber-organized sort of a person, who seemed to iron everything that had a crease in it (even Saul’s pants, for goodness’ sake), and generally ran her house, and life, like clockwork. Hospital corners on all of her beds, I bet. I got the impression that she judged our household accordingly. (Not a whole lot of ironing attempted, and not a single properly made bed, needless to say.)

  Matthew and Emily had split up five and a half years ago when she’d gone off with a dashing young paramedic called Dan, whom Saul (and presumably Emily) idolized, although Matthew professed to loathe him, disparagingly calling him ‘Doctor Dan’ whenever he was forced to refer to him. A fleeting shadow passed over Matthew’s face whenever Saul talked about Dan, and I sympathized – it must have been hard for Matthew, having his son grow up with another man. Not just that, but another man who, according to Saul, told the best jokes ever, was brilliant at football, and had spent an entire weekend painting a really cool Doctor Who mural on his bedroom wall as a birthday surprise.

  I went downstairs now to find Saul munching his way through a bowl of cornflakes in the kitchen, while Matthew made his school lunch. I watched Saul carefully spoon in more cereal, his face dreamy with the early hour, his eyes absent, jaws working mechanically. He was gorgeous. It was the one thing I envied Emily for – that he was hers, properly hers, and not mine. I pretended for a moment what I always did: that he was my son, mine and Matthew’s, and we were a happy family waking up to another happy day. Forget my parents and sisters, this was one family scenario where I felt I truly belonged.

  Temp Hell that day was . . . well, hellish. I started a tally of how many times I was asked to do a particular job without anyone saying ‘please’, and was up to twenty-seven by midday. Then the intercom buzzed and the SlugMan spoke. ‘Can you come into my office for a minute,’ he said.

  Twenty-eight.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied, trying not to wilt too visibly. I knew he’d be watching me from his glass-walled Office of Power in the corner and that the slightest grimace or eye-roll would be noted and held against me.

  ‘Oh, and bring your notepad and a pen,’ he added as an afterthought.

  Twenty-nine.

  ‘Sure,’ I repeated tonelessly, feeling like a robot.

  Mr Davis had the best office in the whole building, with huge windows along one side of the room, giving him a perfect view of the city centre, packed with the domed roof of the Radcliffe Camera and various church spires and college towers, all in the beautiful mellow Cotswold stone. It was just as well he had the view, because he hadn’t exactly done much to doll up the rest of the space. He had one of those I’m-the-boss-style desks, vast and imitation mahogany, with a smart black laptop open on top, alongside a framed photo of what looked suspiciously like his mum. There were shelves crammed with files behind his head and dull grey filing cabinets below the windows, one of which sported a sickly looking aspidistra with dust on its parched leaves.

  ‘So, Miss Flynn,’ he said, his voice smarming over my name. I hated his affectation of refusing to call me Evie like any normal person would. ‘You smell very nice today. New perfume? Or is it what they call pheromones, eh?’

  My face felt hot at his words. Pheromones indeed. In his dreams. I tapped my pen against the notepad, determined to get this over with quickly. I didn’t want to hang around here exchanging innuendo-loaded chit-chat with this creep for any longer than I absolutely had to. ‘You said you wanted me for something?’ I asked briskly.

  There was a horrible juicy silence. Damn. That had come out wrong.

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’ he replied after a pause just long enough that my cheeks had turned scarlet with embarrassment. Oh God. He was actually licking his lips. ‘I do want you for something, Miss Flynn, believe me. I’ve always wanted you, Miss Flynn.’

  I inadvertently took a step backwards and bumped into a filing cabinet. My flesh was goosebumping all over at his words, but I uncapped the pen and held it over the pad, willing him to give me my orders and let me go again. I badly needed some fresh air.

  ‘Miss Flynn,’ he began. ‘I’d like you to take down . . .’ then he paused and looked right at me, bug-eyed and leering, ‘your knickers. I mean – a letter.’

  Blood pounded in my ears. I couldn’t believe he had actually just said that. I’d like you to take down . . . your knickers. The dirty, lecherous bastard.

  He was smirking, his lips parted in a way that I could see his horrible red tongue in the wet cavern of his mouth. ‘I don’t think so,’ I managed to say after a moment of stunned shock.

  He sneered. ‘Oh, right, lost your sense of humour, have you? Feeling frigid today? Very well, let’s get on with it, if you’re not going to play. Dear Mr Baxter, I am wri
ting in reference to your letter of—’

  I shut my eyes briefly as he began rattling off the letter, and had an image of the beach in my dream the night before. The glittering water, the cool blue morning, the calmness that had descended upon me. I gripped my pen, unable to bring myself to move it across the paper. I didn’t want to be here any more. Amber was right. Life was too damn short.

  ‘It is with great pleasure that we . . .’ he droned, then looked up and noticed that I wasn’t doing anything. ‘Miss Flynn! Are you listening?’ he snapped. ‘Have you written a single word yet?’

  I stared him full in the face, hating him. ‘No,’ I said softly. ‘I haven’t.’ Adrenaline spiked through me, and then the music from Working Girl suddenly started up in my head, Carly Simon singing ‘Let the river run . . .’, the chords swelling louder, stirring me into action. Sod this for a life. I’d had enough of being a working girl, if it meant putting up with creeps like Davis. I chucked my pen and notepad onto his desk.

  ‘I quit,’ I told him. ‘You are the most disgusting and vile person I’ve ever had to work for. You repulse me, you and your . . . your sweaty hands and your horrible froggy eyes.’ Yikes. I wasn’t quite sure where the froggy-eyes bit had come from, but they looked as if they were about to explode out of their sockets right now. I stared him down. Moral high ground – I owned it. ‘So I quit,’ I said again, turning away, nose in the air. ‘You can shove your job somewhere painful.’

  ‘Miss Flynn!’ he spluttered, but I didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. I walked out, head high, straight back to my desk where I wasted no time in turning off the PC and gathering up my possessions. My phone started ringing, and the intercom was flashing, but I ignored them both. Not my job any more.

  Jacqueline appeared by my side like a heat-seeking missile. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she snapped. ‘Bit early for lunch, isn’t it?’

  ‘Get stuffed, Jacqueline,’ I replied. ‘I’m off. You’ll have to get a new skivvy from now on. Oh yeah, and by the way, I’ve left something in the cupboard for you.’ I indicated the spot where I’d dumped a huge armful of filing earlier that week. ‘Have a nice life.’