But it was even colder down here than it’d been upstairs. Natalie hurried to turn on the heating, turning it all the way up. She thought she should go for a walk on the beach and wondered if she’d brought enough warm things to wear to do that without freezing.
There was a grimy espresso pot in the back of a kitchen cupboard. She gave it a good scrub and set about making coffee on the stove.
While she waited for it to boil, she opened the drawer she’d put the poetry book in the night before. It was almost a surprise to find it still sitting there. She touched a hand to its cover and felt reassured by its solidness.
It was real. It wasn’t a figment of her imagination. Because that’s what he’d say: that she was imagining things. That she was losing it. That she was paranoid.
That’s what he’d been saying for weeks.
Mike. Her partner, her love, her everything. The man who’d told her every day for nearly ten years that she was his everything too. They’d been best friends, then a couple, then a team. An incredible team. They’d been on their way to building something special (an empire, Mike liked to half-joke), a business that would give them the kind of wonderful, easy life Natalie secretly feared no one deserved. But something had gone wrong somewhere along the line and no matter how forensically she studied her memories, she couldn’t trace its origins. She’d missed it entirely and now it was too late.
And she missed him. Was missing him, now. It was a physical ache, a heaviness in her chest. She longed to feel his arms around her, to bury her face in his chest, to tell him what was wrong so he could try to make it better. But this time, he was what was wrong. So whenever she pictured the man that she loved, another, identical man stepped in front of him, blocking her view. She couldn’t ignore this other man, couldn’t move him, couldn’t see around him. But she could hear the man at the back telling her she was seeing things, repeatedly insisting that there was no other man there.
The espresso pot began to hiss.
Natalie closed the drawer.
The coffee was thick and black and much stronger than she liked – at home, there was a machine that swallowed a capsule and then spluttered out a mug made just right – but it was hot and it had caffeine in it and two out of three wasn’t bad. She held the cup with two hands and turned to go and sit at the table—
A man.
At the window.
The cup slid from Natalie’s fingers.
There was a man standing outside the wall of glass. Not five feet from her. Nose pressed against the glass. Looking in. Searching.
Natalie jumped as scalding hot coffee splattered her stockinged feet but she didn’t – couldn’t – take her eyes off him.
He was older. Greasy dark hair, longish and wild. A heavy coat, the kind with lots of pockets and zips. Old, loose jeans, muddied and ripped. A ruddy, lined face aged by the elements.
What the—
He was trying the handle.
Natalie could feel her heart thundering in her chest, hear the rush of blood in her ears. But she couldn’t move. Her whole body had locked up in fright. She could only watch as the handle wriggled, but – thank God – didn’t depress.
The door was locked. She’d double-checked that before going upstairs the night before.
My phone my phone my phone.
But her phone was dead. Drowned. Useless. And anyway, who would she ring? Everyone she knew was hundreds of miles away. The Gardaí, then. But she was in the middle of nowhere. She probably wouldn’t even have reception.
The man’s eyes found hers. He jerked away from the door and then, after a beat, started waving his hands about and mouthing something, shouting something through the glass.
At first, Natalie couldn’t make out the words. It was as if she was underwater and had to fight her way back to the surface, back to the present tense. But then:
‘Sorry!’
That’s what the man was shouting, holding his hands up like cops do on TV. See? I’m not armed.
‘Thought it was empty,’ he said, tapping the window with a fingernail.
She stared at him.
‘Handyman.’ He pointed at his chest. Then he pointed at her. Behind her. ‘Microwave.’
Natalie turned to look. There was a microwave on the countertop, its power cable ending in a bouquet of frayed electrical wires.
Her shoulders sagged. For feck’s sake.
She gave a little wave to show the man that she understood, then put a hand to her chest and laughed to signal that he had absolutely frightened the living shite out of her, but hey, no harm done. Except maybe knock next time, asshole? Or go to the front door?
‘Sorry. Again.’ His breath left a blur of condensation on the glass. Then he said, ‘I’ll come back,’ turned, and was gone.
_________
The cup had hit the edge of the rug under the dining table, which was good because it hadn’t broken but which was bad because it had left a large, spreading stain soaking into the fibres. By the time Natalie had taken care of that and showered and dressed, the clock on the TV screen was telling her it was almost eight and she was wondering what she should do next.
What was Mike doing now?
What did he think she was doing?
She didn’t quite know herself. This was, admittedly, a harebrained scheme. Natalie hadn’t given it a lot of thought and that approach, yesterday, had felt right, because there’d been way too much thinking going on lately. Overthinking. About everything, all the time. It had been a relief to do something different, to be different. Yesterday morning she’d watched Mike walk out of their front door and, not long afterwards, some unseen force had propelled her out the front door too. And down the road. On to a bus. To the train station. All the way here, to Shanamore. But what now?
She’d found the book. Was that enough? Or would he find a way to explain that away too?
Outside, a car door slammed.
When she went to the window, Natalie saw Andrew loading boxes into the boot of his car. On impulse, she grabbed her coat and hurried outside.
Andrew was bent over, leaning into the boot, when Natalie called out, ‘Morning!’ The word hadn’t even got all the way out of her mouth when she realised her mistake. The sound startled him and he jerked upwards, whacking his forehead off the underside of the boot’s lid.
‘Sorry!’ She half-ran to close the distance between them. ‘God, I’m so sorry—Are you okay?’
Andrew regarded her coldly.
Then he pulled his hand from his head and they both looked at that.
Clean. No blood.
Natalie exhaled.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again. ‘Are you all right?’
He grumbled something that sounded like, ‘Fine,’ and rubbed at the spot where his scalp had made contact with the car. ‘What did you …? What do you want?’
‘I’m, ah …’ What she wanted was to ask him the question, to ask him straight out about Mike, but now that she was standing here, the words wouldn’t come. She scrambled for an alternative. ‘I’m looking for directions to the beach?’
Andrew pointed over her shoulder. ‘Back down the road, turn left. Keep walking and you’ll reach the Far Strand. That’s the smaller beach. The Front Strand is the main one, where the hotel is. You can walk from one to the other. The tide will be out. You’ll have a grand stretch of sand.’
Natalie didn’t know what she’d do with a grand stretch of sand – or what she was supposed to do with it – but she thanked him for the information.
‘And that Kiln place, it opens at …?’
‘Nine,’ he said.
‘Is it only ever you on reception?’
Andrew looked taken aback. She’d just blurted it out; now, replaying the question in her head, Natalie realised it had the air of a complaint.
‘What I meant,’ she said quickly, ‘is do you meet every guest? Just because’ – she stuck a hand into her bag and started feeling around for her wallet – ‘a friend of mine sta
yed here. At least, I think it was here. Maybe you’d recognise him?’ She had the wallet out now. She flipped it open and slid the picture of her and Mike, taken at a wedding they’d been to last year, out of one of the card slots. She’d folded it in half so she was hidden on its back side. ‘This is him. Michael. Mike.’
She didn’t want Andrew to take the photo in case he opened it out fully, but she was also worried her hands might start to shake. Because this was it. The truth. Coming straight for her.
Andrew was frowning at the photo.
‘Ring any bells?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure it was here he said he stayed …’
‘You could just ask him,’ he said flatly.
‘Yes.’ Natalie smiled. ‘Yes, of course. I could. I just thought—’
‘It wasn’t here.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘No?’
‘No.’
‘He couldn’t have checked in without meeting you? Maybe someone else was on reception or—’
‘I check everyone in.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
Andrew glanced up at his own bedroom window then, prompting Natalie to do the same. There was no one there that she could see. She wondered if the woman from last night was still in Andrew’s cottage and who she was to Andrew.
And who she was.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘thanks anyway.’
As she turned to go back to her cottage, it occurred to her how odd it was that Andrew could be as sure as he’d seemed when he’d just glanced at a photograph. Would Mike have asked Andrew to lie? The idea of him doing such a thing made no sense. It would turn the man she’d known for nearly a decade into a total stranger. And even if she could find a way to reconcile that absurdity, why would Mike have been preparing for a day when she came here and asked Andrew the question?
But then the poetry book, and everything else …
Mike had been here. He must have been. So what other explanation could there be?
It was only after she’d gone back inside that she realised she’d never told Andrew about the handyman.
_________
There wasn’t much to do in Shanamore. Go to the beach. Go to The Kiln. Go to the pub. Two of those three things had people in them Natalie could potentially talk to, but those same two things weren’t open yet.
It took her half an hour to reach the Far Strand. The journey wasn’t the pleasant morning walk she’d been anticipating. Shanamore’s idea of a footpath was a few inches of space between the edge of the road’s crumbling surface and the muddy ditch that ran alongside. Keeping both feet within its parameters meant constantly ducking thorny branches while cars and trucks whipped past at such high speed that Natalie felt like she’d been unwittingly cast in a dangerous-driving commercial and absolute carnage awaited her up ahead. Each blind bend was a little death.
The beach wasn’t worth the risk. The tide was out, as Andrew had promised, but the ‘grand stretch’ of sand was rippled with pools of brown water and tangles of drying, dirty seaweed that seemed to have pinned an ocean’s worth of discarded plastic to the sand. Between her and that was a band of bleached pebbles, flecked, if you stopped to examine them, with cigarette buts and ring-pulls. The waves were too far away for her to hear them crashing and there was no one around except one or two distant dog-walkers. The icy wind whipped her hair and sandblasted her skin, and her eyes watered.
Again, she thought: Here? Really, Mike? This?
But the sky was blue and Natalie liked the smell of the sea, so she continued to walk, shoulders hunched against the wind, until she reached the Front Strand. She stopped at the first bench she came to on the path above the beach and sat down to take in the view, her coat pulled tightly around her.
At this range, the tiny blot of an island she’d seen yesterday was now a jagged tower of rock rising out of the sea. The winding road that connected the dock to the lighthouse was a crisscross of angular scars on its skin. The second, smaller island huddled behind it.
A shadow fell across her: a tall, looming shape.
It – he – said, ‘Well, hello again.’
Natalie looked up.
She didn’t recognise the man grinning down at her. But when he said, ‘Gave you a bit of a fright this morning, didn’t I?’ the penny dropped: he was the Peeping Tom turned maintenance man who’d almost caused her a coronary.
‘Oh.’ Natalie smiled tightly. ‘Yes. Hi.’
‘Mind if I …?’ Without waiting for a response, he sat down next to her on the bench. Inches apart, even though there was plenty of room to leave a couple of feet between them. He stuck out a hand. ‘Richard.’
After mentally playing out the potential consequences of alternative responses, Natalie opted for the path of least resistance: she shook it.
‘N—Marie.’
He squeezed her hand in his for a moment longer than was necessary. His skin felt ice-cold against hers.
‘Gorgeous morning, isn’t it?’ Richard said then, turning to look out over the water. ‘Weather like this, it blows all the cobwebs away.’
Natalie studied him. Up close, he didn’t look quite as old and dishevelled as he had during their earlier encounter. Late forties, she’d guess. He was in different clothes now. Wool trousers and a thick, padded jacket with a logo on its sleeve. But his face was deeply lined and rough with grey stubble, and the skin on the side of his nose was red raw and looked sore. His hair seemed even more wild here, whipping about in the sea breeze, but although it was long and there seemed to be lots of it, it looked matted with grease and patches of pink scalp showed through. His lips were badly chapped.
‘I prefer it here this time of the year,’ he was saying now. ‘We have the place to ourselves. No bloody tourists, eh?’ He smiled at her, revealing a row of honey-coloured teeth jostling with each other for space. ‘No offence.’
Natalie shifted her weight on the bench, trying to open up more space between them without being obvious about it.
‘You down here on your own, then?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Just fancied a walk.’
‘I meant here in Shanamore.’
She knew he had. ‘My husband’s coming later today.’ The lie came easily. He was a stranger who knew exactly where she was staying and where she was staying, alone, was in the middle of nowhere.
And he had access to it.
‘What does he do then, this husband?’
‘Finance.’
Richard snorted. ‘Lovely, we all do a bit of finance.’
Sweetheart, love, darling. Natalie was well used to these so-called terms of endearment from delivery men, waiters, the barista at her local coffee shop. They barely registered with her; she didn’t think it was worth fighting the feminist fight for what was, for most offenders, a verbal tic, a habit, an innocent if intensely annoying way of speaking to women that had slipped into their vocabulary and put down roots, especially when there was so much more important stuff to fight for. But there was something about that lovely, something intimate and yet also … Was it infantile? It made her skin crawl.
She realised that Richard hadn’t said anything else and was looking at her expectantly.
‘He works for a venture fund,’ she said.
‘I know what that is.’ His tone implied he thought she didn’t think he would. ‘Bet he makes a lot of dough doing that, eh?’
She felt his eyes travel down the side of her face and on to her neck and she was grateful for the winter coat that obscured the lines of her body and covered up the rest of her skin.
A scan of the beach clocked only two other people, a couple, and they were some distance away and walking in the opposite direction. It wasn’t worth the risk to be rude.
A few moments more so her departure wouldn’t look too abrupt, and then she was out of here.
‘He works very hard,’ she said. ‘So you work up at the cottages?’
‘I do a lot of things.’
Again, there was an indignant air about his answer, as if
she’d accused him of working there.
His accent was British, the ex-Etonian RADA-actor kind. Geography-wise, she wouldn’t have a clue, but he sounded posh. And not Irish at all.
‘How long have you lived in Shanamore?’
‘Oh.’ Richard shrugged. ‘A while.’
‘It’s nice.’
‘It’s lonely.’
Natalie didn’t take the bait.
And enough was enough. She moved as if to get up. ‘Well—’
He turned, surprised. ‘You’re not off already?’
‘I was just stopping for a second, I wasn’t …’ You don’t owe him an explanation. ‘Yes, I am. Well, it was nice—’
‘You’ve got your car?’ Richard made a show of looking around.
Natalie stood up, brushing something imaginary from her coat. ‘I’m walking.’
‘I’ll give you a lift.’ A statement, not an offer.
‘Thanks, but I want to walk.’
‘I’ll walk with you.’ Richard smiled as if he was doing her a favour, generously changing his plans to accommodate hers. ‘It’s no trouble.’
Natalie scanned the beach. The couple were even further away now, just a dark dot in the distance.
She said, ‘But you have your car.’
‘I do.’ Richard stood up now, too. ‘It’s down at the Far Strand.’
And there, finally, was her out. He was assuming that she was walking back the way she’d come, in the direction of his parked car.
‘Oh, I’m not heading back yet.’ Natalie pointed over her shoulder, down the beach. She didn’t even know what was down there, but anywhere in the opposite direction to where he was going would do. ‘I’m going to keep going.’
‘That’s all right,’ Richard said, ‘I’ll walk with you.’
‘There’s really no—’
‘I’ll keep you company. Then I can drop you back to the cottages whenever you’re ready to go.’
Natalie bit her lip. She wanted to scream.
‘Otherwise it’s a fair old walk,’ he went on, ‘and that road isn’t very safe for pedestrians. The speed of some of those cars—’
‘No offence,’ she said, cutting him off and hating herself for the polite smile she couldn’t help but temper this with, ‘but I’d rather be alone. Thanks anyway. Have a good day.’
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