Silver Bay by Jojo Moyes Page B

easing the hours along from the inside. I had no customers that day. I’d had to admit my numbers had dropped a lot since I’d graffitied the boat. Liza had helped me paint over it at the weekend, and told me briskly that if I kept my mouth shut everyone would have forgotten about it in a week or two. And I did – I was going to have to work like a bloody dog to pay the kind of settlement that that ex of mine was demanding.
    ‘A clean break’, they called it. The same phrase doctors use when they talk about a snapped limb. And that was how it felt, I can tell you. So painful that if I thought about it too hard it made me feel physically sick.
    But for now I sat in my cab in the car park thinking of how I had watched the tourists totter down Whale Jetty in their high heels, clutching their video cameras and their whalesong CDs, and eye Suzanne warily, as if she might jump out of the water to reveal some other blasphemy.
    If I hadn’t had other plans that day, I would have taken her out by myself. Even after a beer. I’d found that sometimes just sitting in the bay watching the bottlenose made me feel better. They stick their heads up with those stupid old smiles as if they’re having a joke with you, and sometimes you can’t help but laugh, even on days when you want to slit your wrists. I guess we were all a bit like that, the crews. We knew that was the best bit – just you and those creatures, out in the silence of the water.
    ‘At least you didn’t have kids,’ the solicitor had remarked, checking out the joint account. She’d no idea what she’d said.
    I’d finished the second beer when I saw him. I’d crumpled the tin in my fist and was about to chuck it into the passenger footwell when I clocked him. You couldn’t miss him. He stood there in his dark blue pen-pusher’s suit, flanked by two oversized matching suitcases, gazing back towards the main street. I stared at him until he clocked me back, then stuck my head out of the window. ‘You all right, mate?’
    He hesitated, then picked up his cases and stepped forward. His black lace-up shoes had been polished to within an inch of their lives. Not the kind of bloke I’d normally have got chatting to, but he looked dead beat, and I guess I felt sorry for him. One deadbeat to another, like.
    When he reached my window, he dropped the cases and fished a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘I think my taxi’s dropped me at the wrong place. Can you tell me if there’s a hotel near here?’
    A Pom. I might have guessed. I squinted at him. ‘There’s a few, mate. Which end of Silver Bay you after?’
    He glanced at his piece of paper again. ‘It just says the . . . ah . . . Silver Bay Hotel.’
    ‘Kathleen’s place? It’s not a hotel as such. Not any more.’
    ‘Is it much of a walk?’
    I guess curiosity got the better of me. You don’t often see men dressed up like a dog’s dinner in this neck of the woods. ‘She’s a way up the road. Hop in. Got a bit of business over there myself. You can sling your bags in the back.’
    I saw doubt pass over his face, as if an offer of a lift was to be mistrusted. Or perhaps he didn’t want his smart luggage touching my seaweedy gear in the back. This bugged me a little, and I nearly changed my mind. But he dragged his cases round to the tailgate and I watched him haul them over the side. Then he opened the door and climbed in, struggling as his feet made contact with the pile of empties.
    ‘Mind your shoes on those tinnies,’ I said, as I pulled off. ‘The beer should be long gone, but I can’t promise.’
    As a name ‘Silver Bay’ is a little misleading. It’s not really one bay at all but two, separated by Whale Jetty, which sticks out on the piece of land that cuts through them. From above, I used to say, the sea looks like a giant blue backside. (Suzanne would raise her eyebrows at that but, then, she raised her eyebrows at almost everything I said.)
    Kathleen’s place sat on one of the