A Very Distant Shore

by Jenny Colgan

  The sky was almost fully light now. The first beams of what promised to be another shining day were creeping over the distant mainland. The ships were passing back and forth in the bay. The lights across the harbour were starting to blink out one by one.

  It was a day without her father in it. As bad a dawn as you could get. Her eyes were too tired to cry.

  Suddenly she felt a coat over her shoulders. She started, and looked up.

  Saif was standing there, not looking at her.

  ‘I’m sorry…’ she began, but he shook his head curtly and sat down beside her; not right beside her; a little way away.

  He too stared into the crashing white surf, and across to the lights popping out on the mainland as another day began. And he looked beyond, too. Beyond the bay and the inlets and the channel and the landlocked sea to oh so very far away.

  ‘There are things…’ he began, then stopped talking. Now he did move a little closer. Lorna realised she was shaking, but he laid a hand briefly, gently on her arm.

  ‘There are things,’ he tried again, and he sounded as if he had something in his throat. ‘Things that happen. Even when you think you are safe. There is nowhere safe if you love people, Lorna. I think that is just what being a grown-up is.’

  There was a pause, and suddenly Lorna felt her eyes loosening; tears gathering.

  ‘I don’t know anything else apart from that.’

  ‘Except you carry on,’ said Lorna.

  Saif nodded. ‘Of course you carry on. There is despair and there is hope.’

  Lorna shook her head. ‘There is no hope for me.’

  Saif tutted crossly. ‘You have an entire, safe, loving community here full of children who love you and friends who help you and people who wish you well. And yes, this is so sad, but listen to me. It happened in the right order.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘So,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t you dare tell me you have no hope.’

  Lorna let out a loud sob.

  He turned his head immediately. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That was far too harsh for today.’ He threw a pebble far into the surf. ‘I can’t… I never get things right here.’

  Lorna nodded. ‘It bloody was,’ she said. Tears were dripping down her nose. He felt in his pocket and pulled out a large clean handkerchief, like a magician, and she almost smiled as he handed it over.

  She trumpeted into it in a not very attractive manner.

  ‘I don’t need it back,’ he said gravely, and she almost smiled again, through the tears now flowing freely down her cheeks.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  They stared out to sea. Another ferry was starting to make its passage across the firth, sunlight glinting off its windows.

  ‘Will you ever give up hope?’ she said quietly to Saif, who was watching the movement of the ferry.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘One day. But not today.’

  Chapter 36

  Presently Saif looked at her.

  ‘There is a lot to do,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘My brother’s coming and I suppose everyone will, and there’ll be so much to organise…’

  ‘I can help.’

  Lorna stood up and handed him back his jacket. She shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘Yes. Of course you can.’

  She nodded. Then she turned in the watery early-morning northern light, so cool and clear, even as the sun spread across the stunning glens. A lone kestrel was circling somewhere far away, hooting on the morning breeze.

  Saif watched her as she steadily made her way across the dunes to face her new world alone. He watched as she walked along the bumpy track all the way up from the beach towards the quiet road, with its puttering tractors and small horses and stony headlands and wide fields of bracken. He watched until she disappeared from sight. Then he turned his face once more to the incoming tide that washed up on every shore with good news and with bad.

  And then he jumped up and ran and shouted her name, and called on her to wait. When he finally caught up with her, panting, she looked confused and a little worried.

  ‘No, please,’ he said. ‘Let me come. As a friend. Please. Can I… can I be with you as a friend?’

  When they reached the farmhouse, they found, before they even got to the end of the road, that everyone was already there: Jeannie, all the neighbours, Mrs Laird, Flora, of course, parents from the school, Ewan, Wullie, all of Angus’s farmhands, standing by. As they surged forward to meet her, to carry her home, Lorna stopped still and let herself be engulfed by the wave of people as it ebbed and flowed – and Saif joined the wave too, of her life and family and community, and was absorbed. And had you been looking, you would not have noticed any difference between them at all.

  Life on Mure island continues in

  The Summer Seaside Kitchen – read on

  for the beginning!

  The Summer Seaside Kitchen

  by

  Jenny Colgan

  Flora is definitely, absolutely sure that escaping from the quiet Scottish island where she grew up to the noise and hustle of the big city was the right choice. What was there for her on Mure? It’s a place where everyone has known her all her life, and no one will let her forget the past. In the city, she can be anonymous, ambitious and indulge herself in her hopeless crush on her gorgeous boss, Joel.

  When a new client demands Flora’s presence back on Mure, she’s suddenly swept back into life with her brothers (all strapping, loud and seemingly incapable of basic housework) and her father. As Flora indulges her new-found love of cooking and breathes life into the dusty little pink-fronted shop on the harbour, she’s also going to have to come to terms with past mistakes – and work out exactly where her future lies…

  Hiraeth (n): a homesickness for a home to which you can not return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places in your past.

  Chapter One

  If you have ever flown into London – I did originally type ‘You know when you fly into London?’ and then I thought, well, that might be a bit presumptuous, like hey-ho, here I am flying about all the time, whereas the reality is I’ve always bought the cheapie discount flight that meant I had to get up at 4.30 a.m. and therefore didn’t sleep at all the night before in case I missed the alarm and actually it ended up costing me more to get to the airport at an ungodly hour and then pour overpriced coffee down myself than it would have done just to buy a sensibly timed flight in the first place… but anyway.

  So.

  If you’ve ever flown into London, you’ll know that they often have to put you in a holding pattern, where you circle about, waiting for a landing slot. And I never usually mind it; I like seeing the vast expanse of the huge city below me, that unfathomable number of people busying away, the idea that every single one of them is full of hopes and dreams and disappointments, street after street after street, millions and millions of souls and dreams. I always find it pleasingly mind-boggling.

  And if you had been hovering over London on this particular day in early spring, then beneath you you would have seen the massive, endless sprawl; the surprising amount of green space clustered in the west, where it looks as if you could walk clear across the city through its parks, and on to the clustered, smoky east, the streets and spaces becoming ever more congested; the wheel along the river glinting in the early-morning sun, the ships moving up and down the sometimes dirty, sometimes gleaming water, and the great glass towers that seem to have sprung up without anyone asking for them as London changes in front of your eyes; past the Millennium Dome, getting lower now, and there’s the shining point of Canary Wharf, once the highest skyscraper in the country, with its train station that stops in the middle of the building, something that must have seemed pretty awesome in about 1988.

  But let’s imagine you could carry on; could zoom down like a living Google Maps in which you don’t only go and look at your o
wn house (or that might just be me).

  If you carry on down further, it would pretty soon stop looking so serene, less as if you were surveying it like a god in the sky, and you’d start to notice how crowded everything is and how grubby it all looks, and how many people are shoving past each other, even now, when it’s not long past 7 a.m., exhausted-looking cleaners who’ve just finished their dawn shifts trudging home in the opposite direction to the eager suited and booted young men and women; office jockeys and retail staff and mobile phone fixers and Uber drivers and window cleaners and Big Issue sellers and the many, many men wearing hi-vis vests who do mysterious things with traffic cones; and we’re nearly at ground level now, whizzing round corners, following the path of the Docklands Light Railway, with its passengers trying to hold their own against the early-morning crush, because there is no way around it, you have to stick your elbows out, otherwise you won’t get a place, might not even get to stand: the idea of possibly getting a seat stops miles back at Gallions Reach, but you might, you might just get a corner place to stand that isn’t pressed up against somebody’s armpit, the carriage thick with coffee and hungover breath and halitosis and the sense that everyone has been somehow ripped from their beds too soon, that even the watery sunlight tilting over the horizon in this early spring isn’t entirely convinced about it; but tough, because the great machine of London is all ready and waiting, hungry, always hungry, to swallow you up, squeeze everything it can out of you and send you back to do the entire thing in reverse.

  And there is Flora MacKenzie, with her elbows out, waiting to get on the little driverless train that will take her into the absurd spaghetti chaos of Bank station. You can see her: she’s just stepping on. Her hair is a strange colour; very, very pale. Not blonde, and not red exactly, and kind of possibly strawberry blonde, but more faded than that. It’s almost not a colour at all. And she is ever so slightly too tall; and her skin is pale as milk and her eyes are a watery colour and it’s sometimes quite difficult to tell exactly what colour they are. And there she is, her bag and her briefcase tight by her side, wearing a mac that she’s not sure is too light or too heavy for the day.

  At this moment in time, and still pretty early in the morning, Flora MacKenzie isn’t thinking about whether she’s happy or sad, although that is shortly going to become very, very important.

  If you could have stopped and asked her how she was feeling right at that moment, she’d probably have just said, ‘Tired.’ Because that’s what people in London are. They’re exhausted or knackered or absolutely frantic all the time because… well, nobody’s sure why, it just seems to be the law, along with walking quickly and queuing outside pop-up restaurants and never, ever going to Madame Tussauds.

  She’s thinking about whether she will be able to get into a position where she can read her book; about whether the waistband on her skirt has become tighter, while simultaneously and regretfully thinking that if that thought ever occurs to you, it almost certainly has; about whether the weather is going to get hotter, and if so, is she going to go bare-legged (this is problematic for many reasons, not least because Flora’s skin is paler than milk and resists any attempts to rectify this. She tried fake tan, but it looked as if she’d waded into a paddling pool full of Bisto. And as soon as she started walking, the backs of her knees got sweaty – she hadn’t even known the backs of your knees could get sweaty – and long dribbling white lines cut through the tan, as her office mate Kai kindly pointed out to her. Kai has the most creamy coffee-coloured skin and Flora envies it very much. She also prefers autumn in London, on the whole).

  She is thinking about the Tinder date she had the other night, where the guy who had seemed so nice online immediately started making fun of her accent, as everybody does, everywhere, all the time; then, when he saw this wasn’t impressing her, suggested they skip dinner and just go back to his house, and this is making her sigh.

  She’s twenty-six, and had a lovely party to prove it, and everyone got drunk and said that she was going to find a boyfriend any day, or, alternately, how it was that in London it was just impossible to meet anyone nice; there weren’t any men and the ones there were were gay or married or evil, and in fact not everyone got drunk because one of her friends was pregnant for the first time and kept making a massive deal out of it while pretending not to and being secretly delighted. Flora was pleased for her, of course she was. She doesn’t want to be pregnant. But even so.

  Flora is squashed up against a man in a smart suit. She glances up, briefly, just in case, which is ridiculous: she’s never seen him get the DLR; he always arrives looking absolutely spotless and uncreased and she knows he lives in town somewhere.

  As usual, at her birthday party, Flora’s friends knew better than to ask her about her boss after she’d had a couple of glasses of Prosecco. The boss on whom she has the most ridiculous, pointless crush.

  If you have ever had an utterly agonising crush, you will know what this is like. Kai knows exactly how pointless this crush is, because he works for him too, and can see their boss clearly for exactly what he is, which is a terrible bastard. But there is of course no point telling this to Flora.

  Anyway, the man on the train is not him. Flora feels stupid for looking. She feels fourteen whenever she so much as thinks about him, and her pale cheeks don’t hide her blushes at all. She knows it’s ridiculous and stupid and pointless. She still can’t help it.

  She starts half reading her book on her Kindle, crammed in the tiny carriage, trying not to swing into anyone; half looking out of the window, dreaming. Other things bubbling in her mind:

  a)

  She’s getting another new flatmate. People move so often in and out of her big Victorian flatshare, she rarely gets to know any of them. Their old mail piles up in the hallway amid the skeletons of dead bicycles, and she thinks someone should do something about it, but she doesn’t do anything about it.

  b)

  Whether she should move again.

  c)

  Boyfriend. Sigh.

  d)

  Time for Pret A Manger?

  e)

  Maybe a new hair colour? Something she could remove? Would that shiny grey suit her, or would she look like she had grey hair?

  f)

  Life, the future, everything.

  g)

  Whether to paint her room the same colour as her new hair, or whether that would mean she had to move too.

  h)

  Happiness and stuff.

  i)

  Cuticles.

  j)

  Maybe not silver, maybe blue? Maybe a bit blue? Would that be okay in the office? Could she buy a blue bit and put it in, then take it out?

  k)

  Cat?

  And she’s on her way to work, as a paralegal, in the centre of London, and she isn’t happy particularly, but she isn’t sad because, Flora thinks, this is just what everyone does, isn’t it? Cram themselves on to a commute. Eat too much cake when it’s someone’s birthday in the office. Vow to go to the gym at lunchtime but don’t make it. Stare at a screen for so long they get a headache. Order too much from ASOS then forget to send it back.

  Sometimes she goes from tube to house to office without even noticing what the weather is doing. It’s just a normal, tedious day.

  Although in two hours and forty-five minutes, it won’t be.