Follow a Star by Christine Stovell Page B

impossible to say anything to reassure him since she was too afraid to open her mouth. Unzipping her jacket, she took great lungfuls of sea air and tried to let her body go with the flow. It duly did, although not in quite the way she hoped. It was all very humiliating and not, she thought, given Bill’s earlier observations about her, exactly guaranteed to send him suddenly crazy with desire.
    ‘Here,’ he said, passing her a bottle of mineral water.
    Having sluiced out her mouth and wiped her face she felt marginally more human. ‘Let me steer for a bit. I’ll be all right now.’
    ‘Sure?’ He stood beside her, showing her their course and waiting until she was comfortable before sitting down.
    ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she mumbled.
    ‘Don’t apologise. Lots of sailors are sick before they get their sea legs back. It puts a lot of would-be yachtsmen off for good. You’re brave to come back for more.’
    May was relieved to use her nausea as an excuse not to respond to that one. Bill probably didn’t want to hear that she hadn’t really been at sea enough times to find out how prone she was to seasickness.
    ‘You’ve got guts,’ he told her, sounding impressed.
    ‘Yes, mainly over the side decks.’
    ‘May! Don’t you know how to take a compliment?’
    He was so near the mark that, for a horrible moment, she was afraid she would cry. ‘Try a few more,’ she said, hoping he would put her watery eyes down to the aftermath of barfing over the side. ‘I’ll see how I get on.’ Risking a quick glance in his direction, May found that for once he was smiling. Simultaneously she noticed the sun had come out; why else would the day seem suddenly brighter?
    By mid-afternoon it was so hot that May, sweltering in her jeans, had swapped them for shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. Hair piled up under a baseball cap, she stood at the helm guiding
Lucille
over the undulating green sea. There wasn’t a breath of wind in the sky, just the occasional wispy cloud trailing past the mast. This is what she had come for: to be away from land, to watch the waves turning over like molten glass and not let herself think about …
    ‘Beachy Head,’ said Bill, pointing out the chalk headland that was a notorious suicide hotspot just when she was trying to let go of all her negative thoughts. Even on a beautiful, benign day like today, there was a sense of despondency about the place. She’d read somewhere that the top of the cliff was studded with fingernails where suicides changed their minds seconds after jumping. It was an image that was hard to shake off. Shuddering, she looked away to where a recent landfall had created a chalk pier stretching out to sea, but even that felt, to her, as if the cliff had thrown itself at the lighthouse, unable to take any more.
    ‘It crumbles at an average of a metre a year,’ said Bill nodding towards the towering headland.
    Rather like her with Aiden, thought May.
    ‘The sea attacks from the bottom and ice from the top until the chalk comes away in great chunks. That white face is actually caused by constant erosion.’
    Yes, she knew how that felt too.
    ‘But of course it makes the most wonderful reflective surface,’ Bill went on. ‘Ghostly grey in the moonlight, blood red in the sunset or, like today, brushed with golden light. We’re lucky to see it from the sea like this, not many people do.’
    Those unhappy times could be sloughed away, May told herself firmly, and with them her previous life. Here, at sea, she could breathe freely.
    ‘… just as not many people know that I quite like talking to myself.’
    ‘Bill! Sorry, I
was
listening.’
    ‘Come on, it’s not too far to Sovereign Harbour now,’ he said, touching her lightly on the shoulder, bringing her back to the present. ‘You’ve done enough for a while, I’ll take over.’
    Stretching her stiff back against sun-warmed wood, she sank back gratefully and studied him from beneath her peaked cap. ‘Was it