To My Best Friends. Sam Baker

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СКАЧАТЬ dad, can’t be left alone for five minutes. The ones who recognised him were worse. There were days he feared he might drown in other people’s pity.

      Then it dawned on him: Whitstable. The beach hut had been one of Nicci’s favourite places, especially in the winter. (‘Fewer tourists, more personality,’ she’d said, neatly sidestepping the fact that owning a beach hut in Whitstable didn’t exactly make her a local.) They hadn’t been since the end of last summer. Once the chemo started, and the radio, Nicci wasn’t well enough to go back.

      ‘Let’s go to the beach!’ he announced, tiggering into the living room in his best children’s TV presenter manner.

      Two small blond heads turned to watch him, two pairs of brown eyes gave him a look of withering contempt, usually reserved for idiots who thought they might eat green stuff.

      Harrie cocked her head on one side, Charlie the other. ‘But, Daddy,’ they said, ‘it raining.’

      * * *

      Angry waves lashed the shingle just short of the row of weather-beaten huts. There was no horizon that David could see. The unforgiving grey of the North Sea merged with a steely, rain-laden sky. Only the occasional tuft of green showed where feisty blades fought their way through spits of land, only to wonder what the point was when they got there. The usually cheerful pastel pinks and blues of the beach huts failed to inject any joy into the landscape.

      He tried to see what Nicci would have seen if she’d been here. Spirit! Nature! A challenge! Without her to show it to him, all David could see was a cold beach; nature in the grip of the meanest of mean reds.

      He’d come here looking for comfort. But there was nothing comforting on this bleak stretch of shingle.

      The beach was empty in both directions. Not so much as a dog scavenging for scraps. Even the oyster stalls weren’t open, not that David would be using them if they had been. The memory of trying to force-feed the girls oysters – working on Nicci’s theory that they should get them used to everything early – and the look of disgust on their faces as they spat five quid’s worth of seafood across the table gave David his first smile of the day. ‘Heathens!’ Nicci had declared.

      The only tourists dumb enough to brave the Kent coastline in the coldest March for thirty-one years had taken refuge in Nicci’s favourite café, Tea & Times, nursing steaming mugs and the papers. This was where David and the girls had been, eating cheese on toast and drinking hot chocolate until half an hour ago. And where, it was painfully clear, they should have stayed.

      His was the only beach hut open, and David was rapidly wishing he hadn’t bothered. The interior – which in his mind’s eye was a stylish combination of nautical blue and white – was, in reality, drab and faded, the rattan sofa coated with grit that had crept through the cracks in the clapboard. The Calor Gas heater was empty. And he hadn’t thought to bring a new bottle. The beach hut was as desolate inside as it was out.

      ‘Need a wee-wee,’ Charlie announced.

      David counted backwards from ten. ‘Sweetie,’ he said, when he reached zero, ‘you just had a wee-wee in the café. Come and help me tidy Mummy’s hut.’

      ‘Need one now.’

      ‘Right,’ David said. ‘We’d better go outside then.’

      ‘Co-old,’ Harrie said, plonking herself heavily on the gritty sand at his feet, as David helped Charlie crouch. ‘Harrie need a wee.’

      Any second now the grizzling would start. Who could blame them? The afternoon was cold and wet and, frankly, no fun at all. Given the chance, he would happily sit down next to them on the damp shingle and grizzle along with them.

      ‘Come on, girls,’ he said, trying to sound convincing. ‘Let’s go for a walk. It’ll be fun.’

      They weren’t fooled. ‘Cold, Daddy!’ Their little faces looked pinched and blue.

      David closed his eyes and prayed for help; for a hot-water bottle, thicker coats for the girls, a teleporter, brandy, anything to get him through this.

      ‘Excuse me, are you OK?’ A kind voice out of the blue.

      The woman’s trench coat was so wet it had turned dark grey, her cheeks were red with cold and her hair stuck to her face in tendrils. Not exactly the angel of mercy he’d had in mind.

      ‘No . . . I mean, yes. Thanks. I’m just, erm, regrouping.’ He forced a smile.

      There was a yelp from behind. They both turned to see a black and white mongrel sniffing Harrie’s Peppa Pig lunch box, the only pink thing Nicci allowed houseroom, except pink wine.

      ‘Stop it, Norman,’ the woman yelled, tugging at the dog’s collar. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added. ‘He’s such a piglet. He thinks there might be second lunch in there.’

      David’s smile was weak. ‘Afraid he’s out of luck. Nothing in there but dolls, clothes and KitKat wrappers.’

      ‘You’re David, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I thought I recognised you. Your girls have got so big.’

      He racked his brains. The woman was vaguely familiar, but only in the way people you see in the street or on television are.

      ‘Jilly,’ she said. ‘Three huts down from yours. Usually see more of you guys in the winter. How’s Nicci? Seems like an age since you were here. Must have been what, September?’

      ‘August Bank Holiday,’ David said.

      It was only seven months ago, but his mood could scarcely have been more different.

      Back then, they’d known Nicci was ill. The cancer had been given a name and a stage. There was still hope. Not a lot, but it was there. The date for Nicci’s operation was just days away. So this was their last family weekend away before the unavoidable weeks of treatment and, they hoped, recovery. This time, next August, they’d be back, they told themselves, drinking ice-cold rosé, David barbecuing Cumberland sausages, Nicci unpacking tubs of salad and olives, tearing crusty French bread into a basket. Far too much food for the four of them.

      The girls had been crouching on the sand, wearing pants and Hello Kitty T-shirts, their shorts and crocs long discarded, faces comical masks of concentration as they built sandcastles for their Baby Alives, which Nicci had let David’s mother buy them. She’d stalled at the accoutrements. Fortunately, Jo and Lizzie hadn’t. The sky had been a perfect August blue, broken by a smattering of cartoon clouds the twins could have drawn.

      Despite the Choos, and the Chanel, and the designer jeans that replaced her vintage frocks and Doc Martens, Nicci was the same girl he’d fallen in love with the moment he saw her. The knackered denim cut-offs with a hole in the bum where, if he looked hard enough, he could see a flash of black lace knickers, were gone. And so was the faded Stone Roses T-shirt – the one he’d bought her the first birthday after they’d got together. Although, knowing Nicci, it was folded in a box or bin bag somewhere. She’d worn it to grey and with sleeves rolled up to reveal slim tanned upper arms. The peroxide had been replaced by a pricey, professional dye-job, and the skinny tanned legs ended in orange toenails and clashing pink Havaianas, not the battered Docs she’d lived in when they first met. But she was still his Nicci.

      He could see now that her face that day had been brave. With hindsight, her exhaustion СКАЧАТЬ