Page 11 of Pull Me Under

The question is whether they’ll let me.

The floor’s hard beneath my back. I pull the sleeping bag up to my chin, listen to the cottage settling around me – groans and creaks like an old boat finding its rhythm.

Tomorrow I’ll deal with the harbour master. Tomorrow I’ll start fighting for what’s mine. Maybe I’ll check out the old Trelawney boat shed down at the harbour too – see what’s left of what Grandad built. That shed is where it starts. The cottage is where I live. The shed is where I build.

Tonight, I’m sleeping on the floor of a rough-around-the-edges cottage on a cliff in Cornwall, and somehow that feels more like home than anywhere I’ve been in twenty years.

‘Welcome back, Trelawney,’ I whisper to the darkness, and it doesn’t sound like defeat.

It sounds like a beginning.

Chapter Four

JUDE

The Mary Jane is being a temperamental bitch this morning, and Dad’s mood isn’t helping.

The harbour’s barely woken up – half five, the sky that bruised grey-blue you only get in early March, seagulls starting their shift with half-arsed screaming. The dock’s already busy, though. Always is. This is a working harbour, not a postcard. Fish crates stacked three high along the south wall, nets draped over the drying racks like enormous spiderwebs, the sharp stink of diesel and brine and yesterday’s catch rising off the wet concrete. Lobster pots are piled by the fuel pump in towers that lean at angles that would give a health and safety inspector a coronary. The rigging on the moored boats clinks and taps in the wind – a sound so constant I only notice it when it stops.

Dad’s running his hand along the Mary Jane’s gear housing like it’s personally offended him.

‘You didn’t check the hydraulics before bringing her in,’ he says. ‘Kit always checks the hydraulics.’

‘I checked them.’ I had. Sort of. A glance counts as checking. ‘They were fine yesterday.’

‘Fine doesn’t mean functional.’ He’s got that tone that suggests I’m about twelve and have just tracked mud through the house. ‘Fine is what people say when they haven’t looked properly. Peter would’ve⁠—’

He stops. We all do that – hit Peter’s name like a wall and can’t get past it. We both know what Peter would’ve done. Peter would’ve stripped the whole system down, rebuilt it with spare parts and wishful thinking, and somehow made it work better than factory standard. Peter, who’d been the harbour’s unofficial mechanic for the better part of two decades, working out of the old Trelawney shed down by the slipway like he’d been born to do it. Which, in a way, he had – he’d married into the trade, learned from the old man himself, kept the Trelawney workshop ticking over long after the family left. Half the boats in this harbour owe their continued existence to Peter and that shed.

Six months. Christ. Six months and we still can’t talk about him without the sentence trailing off into nothing.

‘The buyers were happy with the catch,’ I offer, trying to redirect. ‘Got eighteen per cent above asking for the turbot. Negotiated the Dover sole up too – seasonal premium, new supplier contract. The margins are the best they’ve been since⁠—’

‘Should’ve been twenty.’

‘Market price was⁠—’

‘I know what market price was.’ Dad straightens, his back creaking loud enough to hear over the harbour noise. ‘Been selling fish since before you were born.’

Right. One of those mornings, then. The kind where nothing I do is the right thing, because the right thing would be Kit doing it instead. Kit, with his easy confidence and his feel for the mechanical side, the engines and the rigging and the physical work that Dad respects because it looks like effort. Not the spreadsheets, the supplier negotiations, the licence renewals and quota management and all the invisible labour that keeps Harding and Sons afloat. That’s just paperwork. Anyone can do paperwork.

He wanders off to find someone else to correct – Frankie, probably, who’s trying to patch nets by the far wall.

‘All right, Reuben?’ I hear him call.

Then, quieter, Dad replies with, ‘Good morning, er—’ A pause. ‘Frankie.’ His laugh is off key. ‘Those nets won’t mend themselves.’

I go still. He hesitated on the name. Just for a second – a beat where his eyes went somewhere else, searching – before landing on it. Frankie. A man he’s known for forty years.

It’s nothing. He’s tired. Early start, cold morning. Happens to everyone.

I turn back to the Mary Jane and her mysterious hydraulic issues. The manual’s already spread on the dock, pages held down with a rusty shackle because the wind’s picking up. The harbour around me is settling into its morning routine – Cal hosing down the deck of the Celtic Pride, Bill checking his pots with the grim determination of a man who’s been catching along the same stretch of coast for three decades, a couple of the weekend boats bobbing smugly in the visitors’ berths, all polished fibreglass and money.

The diagram might as well be in Japanese. No, that’s unfair to Japanese – at least that has consistent patterns. This is just lines and numbers and arrows pointing to things that don’t look anything like what I’m staring at in the engine.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ I mutter, leaning deeper into the housing.

Twenty minutes later, I’ve got oil on my shirt, grease in my hair, and I’m no closer to fixing anything. The spanner slips, I graze my knuckles on the metallic sharp edge of – well, whatever the fuck this bit is I’m fixing. Automatically, I let out a string of cursing that would make Dad proud, and it echoes across the water.