Page 8 of Pull Me Under

The thought lands wrong – not sarcastic, but raw. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? He gets to be here. Gets to roll out of bed and smell the salt and hear the gulls and feel the pull of the tide like a second heartbeat. He’s had that every single day of his life, and I’ve spent twenty years aching for it in landlocked flats and dockside bedsits that were close but never close enough.

The key scrapes in the lock, scratching into the silence like it’s forgotten how to work. Takes three tries and some creative swearing before the door groans open, releasing twenty years of trapped air that smells like damp and dust and faintly, and worryingly, animal. Behind the door a mountain of post slides in an avalanche. I push at it with my feet so I can walk in without slipping onto my arse.

‘Fuck.’

It’s worse than I imagined, and I’d imagined pretty bad. The solicitor’s photos were apparently taken through a filter of extreme optimism and probable cataracts.

The front room is thick with neglect. Wallpaper peeling off in great curls, a dark stain spreading across one corner of the ceiling where the roof’s letting the weather in. Damp has crept up the skirting boards, and there’s a smell – not rot exactly, more like abandonment has its own particular scent – that’s bloody revolting and is going to live inside my nostrils for the foreseeable future. The kitchen is dusty and bare, cupboard doors hanging open on ancient hinges, mouse droppings on the counter.

A setback. That’s all this is. I’ve weathered worse. That Bristol flat with no hot water for three months. The Southampton bedsit where the ceiling leaked directly onto the bed. That memorable week sleeping in the Land Rover in a Tesco car park when everything went to shit after the garage in Taunton let me go. This is just … a project.

My laugh echoes off the stone walls, hollow as a gull’s cry – startling, joyless, a sound I don’t entirely recognise anymore.

Grandad would have walked in here and started a list. He was a list man – everything in order, everything solvable if you broke it down small enough. I can see him now, stood in this doorway in his ancient, waxed jacket, pencil behind his ear, squinting at the ceiling with that expression he got when things needed fixing. Not angry. Never angry. Just … assessing. He assessed everything – boats, weather, me – with a patience that made you believe things could be put right.

His toolbox is in the back of the Land Rover. His actual toolbox, the one with his initials scratched into the lid and the socket set he taught me to use when I was eleven. Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, and if that doesn’t work, hit it. The memory ambushes me – his hands over mine on a spanner, engine grease on both our fingers, his low laugh when I overtightened a bolt and stripped the thread.

‘Patience, Brynn. It’s not a fight. You’re having a conversation with it.’

Christ, I miss him.

A different brand of Trelawney – that’s what I’m going to be. Not the kind who got run out of town. A Trelawney who comes back and plants her feet and stays.

I’m not fixing this place up to sell it. I’m not passing through.

This is mine. He left it to me. And I’m keeping it.

The floorboards creak but hold as I pick my way through the ground floor. Newspapers from 2004, mail addressed to my grandfather piled behind the door like paper accusations. A photograph face-down on the mantle that I don’t turn over because I know that it will be a captured image of Dad and Grandad, probably, standing in front of some boat, back when things were simpler. Before Dad faded and Grandad picked up all the pieces, including me.

In the kitchen, a small darting shape scurries away from my footsteps. Excellent. Wildlife. That’s what the animal smell was.

But the bones of the place are good. Stone walls thick enough to withstand Atlantic storms, beams that are probably older than most of the boats in the harbour. The structure’s sound – I can feel it in the way the walls take my weight when I lean against them, in the floors that give but don’t crack. It needs the roof sorting, heating, a full cosmetic overhaul and a deep clean that might take the rest of my natural life. But the building itself has survived twenty years of nothing. It can survive me.

I pull out my notebook from the holdall that contains literally everything else I own that matters. Three changes of clothes, a battered laptop that probably shouldn’t work anymore but still wheezes to life, the letter from Dad I still haven’t read, and this notebook that’s going to be my bible for the next however long it takes.

Grandad’s handwriting is in my head as I write. Neat, clear-lettered words, never cursive or scrawled, the way he labelled everything in the workshop. I write the way he taught me – practical, no self-pity, one thing at a time.

Priority One – Make Habitable

Roof (leak in the front room corner, spreading damp – urgent)

Electrics (check with utility company – can they reconnect?)

Plumbing (turned off, not broken – hopefully)

Deep clean everything

Mouse situation (traps, poison, stern conversation)

Priority Two – Make Liveable

Heating (currently none)

Insulation

Actual furniture

Kitchen appliances