Page 4 of Take Me Away

The Ritz it is not.

I took Maggie there once, before schedules and press junkets devoured every spare second. She came to London to see one of my premieres and I booked us a suite. She’d nodded politely, admired everything, then I’d come out of the bathroom to find her running her finger along the edges of the windowsill looking for dust.

See, she hated it.

I need to clean this place if I’m going to sell it.

Am I going to sell it? I could stay for a week or two, pack up her belongings and put them in storage. After that, I don’t know. What would I do with it all long-term? What would I do with teacups and old cigar boxes filled with buttons and cotton? All I know is that it’s the only place I want to be right now. Off-grid. Off camera.

London isn’t home. Not anymore. Maybe it never was.

The headlines call me a meltdown. Maggie used to call me her rose.

One of them must be right. I just don’t know which.

I change into some faded old jeans, and rifle through my suitcase trying to find anything that will keep me warm, and not like an A-list alien docking down on Cornish sands. In the end I tug on an old denim jacket, one I haven’t worn since a film premiere in Edinburgh. It was vintage chic that night, styled over a borrowed dress I can’t remember. Diamonds on loan. The fashion mags had said I was styled with a careless, breathtaking grace. They didn’t know that my stylist had full-on melted down when I’d suggested it. Now it’s one gust away from falling apart. The fawn Celine I arrived in, I place in Maggie’s wardrobe. Out of sight.

Outside, the wind does that trick where it slaps you across the face and says welcome home. A seagull screams like it’s got personal beef with me, and I march down the lane towards the harbour before I change my mind.

The town hasn’t changed much. The butcher still has a cartoon pig on the window. Reminds me why I’m pescatarian. The newsagent still has mint humbugs in a jar older than I am. I can still feel them stuck to the back of my teeth. Can’t remember when I last had anything like that. And The Ship Inn, God bless it, still has hanging baskets with dead trailing lobelia and a handwritten sign for karaoke Wednesdays.

There’s an optimistically early pumpkin on a cottage doorstep – already carved, already slumping at the edges. A little too soon, a little too hopeful. Like it doesn’t know the frost is coming.

I’ve been away ten years, but it could have been yesterday.

Ten summers I came here. Ten summers of arriving in July with a suitcase full of sundresses and leaving in September with salt in my hair and Kit Harding’s goodbye kiss still burning on my lips.

Every year, the same pattern. The train pulling into the station, Maggie waiting with her handbag and sensible shoes, then when we were old enough, Kit – Kit leaning against his truck, trying to look casual, like he hadn’t been counting down the days.

We had two months. Sixty days. And we made every single one of them count.

Swimming at dawn. Midnight walks to the lighthouse. His hands in my hair, my name on his lips like a prayer. We were summer itself – golden and fleeting and hopelessly, achingly temporary.

Every August, he’d ask me to stay. Every August, I’d promise to come back.

Until I didn’t.

It’s been ten years, but my body remembers. Remembers the weight of his hand in mine. The taste of salt and Kit and teenage dreams. Remembers what it felt like to be loved like that – completely, desperately, like every sunset was our last.

Maybe it was.

I keep my head down. Some people look twice, always unsure if they saw correctly the first time. Others look away fast, as if catching my eye might make them part of the headline. I can’t blame them.

I don’t want to be part of the headline either.

I walk past the fishing boats first. Their names are painted in fading letters: Morning Glory, Sea Witch… Another one is so faded and peeled that the name is now illegible. Then of course there’s the tourist boats, all shiny and polished, more statement than livelihood.

Beyond the fishing boats sits the lifeboat station, the RNLI flag snapping in the wind. The boathouse doors are open, and I can see the orange and blue hull of the all-weather lifeboat inside, ready. Always ready.

In LA, lifeguards are professionals. Tanned, trained, working beaches like it’s a nine-to-five. I’d forgotten until this very moment how different it is here. The men who haul nets at dawn are the same ones who drop everything when their pagers go off. Who launch into storms to pull strangers from sinking boats. Who risk their lives for free.

Volunteers. All of them.

And I’d forgotten, blinkered by glitzy glamour and photo-shoot calls.

I hunker down into the old coat. What would Maggie say if she could see me now?

There’s a few men down at the Lifeboat Station, next to the old community boat shed. I hold my hand up to shield my eyes as I try and see who they are. Is that Cal Morrison? I shake my head and try not to wonder if Kit Harding might be on the crew like his dad, and his grandfather, and his great grandfather.