Page 4 of Carry Me Home

The shout is a rubber ring. Two of them, in fact. A father and son from somewhere outside Wolverhampton who have drifted out past the headland on matching inflatables shaped like flamingos, which is information I absorb without comment.

Our launch is quick, and we are efficient. I’ve been part of this crew so long now that my body knows what to do without consulting my brain. The boat, the water, that rhythm that lives inside a shout that isn’t life or death but isn’t nothing either. The sea is calm enough that the recovery is more logistics than drama, though the father, who is spectacularly sunburned, middle-aged and philosophically underprepared for the Atlantic, spends most of it explaining to his son that the current was much stronger than it looked.

‘Happens all the time,’ Cal confirms to him with a sympathetic nod, and a straight face I appreciate professionally. ‘Nothing to be embarrassed about.’

The father’s face relaxes, although with that sunburn he might not be able to move at all tomorrow. The son gives his dad such a direct look of derision that Cal and I meet gazes, both of us clamping our lips together to stop from laughing.

‘How old are you, mate?’ I ask him.

‘Eight.’ Another look at his dad. ‘And I told him the tide was too strong.’

I have to turn my face away because I can’t hold in my grin.

We get them back to the beach, although the flamingos, sadly, haven’t survived the experience. One has developed a fatal puncture, the other has simply given up and deflated with an air of existential resignation. The boy looks at them with grief, running his hand down one lopsided flamingo head.

‘Can I be on the crew?’ he asks as we’re coiling the lines.

His father claps him on the shoulder. On the bright sand, his skin is almost fluorescent. ‘Maybe when you’re older, mate.’

‘I’m eight,’ the boy says, with dignity. ‘That’s older than I was yesterday.’

I like this kid.

We’re back at the station by half twelve. I change and hand in the log, exchanging the usual words with Cal about the usual things. The rhythm of it is familiar in a way that settles something in my chest. The knowledge that this is what I do. This is who I am. That whatever else is happening in my life, there is this.

Home.

Sea Salt Bay just is, and it always will be.

The sun is properly hot now. A couple are sitting on the sea wall eating fish and chips from paper, their legs dangling over the water. Children run past with nets and buckets, heading for the rock pools at the far end of the cove. The smell of salt and seaweed and sun cream hangs in the air, underlaid with the permanent base note of diesel from the boats.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Jenny’s Dream sits at her mooring, lines neatly coiled, lucky cap hanging on the cabin hook where it always hangs. Peter’s lucky mermaid air freshener is still hanging where he left it, but it’s faded now so the mermaid is nothing but washed-out smears of pink, blue and yellow.

I don’t look at her.

I don’t not look at her either.

She’s just there, the way she’s always there, and I’ve learned not to think too hard about what that means.

That Peter is gone.

Peter, whom I loved but also hated.

Peter, who went into the water on a call-out with me and never came back.

Peter, whom Nina is still mourning and possibly always will be.

‘So are you going to call Nina and see if she’s still with her mum? Or when she’s coming back, because we are all having lavender shortbread withdrawals?’ Jude says, reading my damn mind.

‘Don’t know.’ I shrug and Jude narrows his eyes, which I dutifully ignore.

This is the truth. Nina and I have been best friends for our entire adult lives. Nina doesn’t know that I fell in love with her the day we met and have been ever since.

There’s a distinct chance she never will.

But it’s okay, because I’m finally moving on. The weekend showed me that, even drunk and remorseful, I’ve proved to myself that I am capable of moving on. It’s not like I haven’t dated other people, seen other people, Cara for example, but they’ve always been in the shade of Nina. Like she blots them out. The process of moving on started when she began dating Peter and I realised he was more than competition for my best friend’s affections. A process that deepened when Peter told me he was going to ask her to marry him about three weeks before he died, a secret that’s been tormenting me ever since. And a process that’s near enough complete now that I know it’s impossible to compete with a man’s ghost.

Nope. Tom Darcy is moving on.