Summer at Shell Cottage (23 page)

Olivia wasn’t sure she did know, especially as this holiday had turned out to be memorable for all the wrong reasons.
Mercifully, their food arrived before she had to reply, though, and
goodness, it looked wonderful: miniature silver buckets stuffed with salty skinny fries, scallops served in the shell with garlic and flecks of chilli, and Gloria’s burger which turned out to
be pieces of lobster crammed into a golden brioche, and came with its own tiny jug of garlic butter.
As the chef placed the final dishes on the table – a small jam jar of juicy red tomato
relish and a dish of green salad to share – he bid them, ‘Enjoy your food,’ and left them to it.

Oh my.
Olivia would never judge a pop-up breeze-block restaurant on appearances again.
The scallops were deliciously fresh and cooked to perfection, the fries crunchy and moreish, and the relish
properly tangy, with the tomatoes tasting as if they’d been picked just that morning.
The sun poked itself tentatively out from where it had lurked behind the clouds until now, and Olivia
felt her spirits lift.
Sitting here with good food and – yes – good company, however unconventional, felt much more like a holiday.
It reminded her, too, that she was most definitely
alive.

So there, Alec
, she thought defiantly dabbing her lips with a paper napkin.
I won’t let you destroy me.
Look how much fun I’m having without you.
Just look at me
go!

A few days after the kayaking trip, Molly lay back on the creaking camp bed and stared up at the sloping ceiling of Shell Cottage’s attic room.
Poky and hot, home to
about a million industrious spiders and with so little floor space that she was always tripping over her suitcase, this was not exactly the bedroom of any self-respecting teenager’s dreams.
Nor for that matter was this holiday.

So far this week, she had made approximately five thousand loom-band bracelets with Libby and played
Minecraft
with Dexter for a whole rainy morning; she had feigned interest in
Ted’s pebble collection and listened to all his many tedious dinosaur facts; she had kayaked and hiked (under duress), and then yesterday she, Mum and Robert had cycled all the way to
Salcombe and back, stopping for a pub lunch and a nosey around the swanky yachtie shops (‘Swanky with a silent “S”,’ Robert had said, eyeballing the price tag on a T-shirt
with a look of horror).
She had eaten a cream tea too, even though she knew it was, like, a million calories and would give her spots.
But she’d had enough of being here now, and badly missed
her friends.
She missed Ben even more.
Next year, she was either staying at home or going to go to Dad’s, and that was that.
Whatever Mum said.

She twisted her phone in her hand.
She still hadn’t heard back from Dad.
What was he up to?
she wondered.
How was life working out for him and Anne-Marie in France?
He had posted a picture
on Facebook recently which showed him raising a bottle of beer in the air as the sun set beyond the mountains in the background.
There was another one of Anne-Marie looking vastly pregnant in a
sundress and bare feet, standing on the terrace of their knackered-looking farmhouse and laughing.
She had very white teeth, Anne-Marie.
White teeth and thick, glossy black hair.
She was going to
have the cutest baby ever, probably.
A cuter baby than Molly, anyway, who had been a skinny, shrunken egghead for the first six months of her life.

Would Dad still love her when he and Anne-Marie had their cute French baby?
Would he even remember her, back in London, spots on her chin, slogging to school on drizzly autumn mornings?
Her
friend Chloe barely saw her dad these days, not since he’d married again and had two other children.
He had taken his new family off to California this summer, while Chloe and her mum, Jan,
were left in their small flat in Finchley.
The paint was peeling off Chloe’s bedroom wall where damp was getting in but Jan had been off work for six months with depression and they had no
chance of moving anywhere nicer.
When she spoke about her dad, Chloe didn’t sound bitter or even angry just sad.
Resigned to the fact that he loved these other kids more than her.
Molly had
often thought, quite fiercely, that if she ever saw Chloe’s dad again, she would give him a piece of her mind.

She hoped her own dad wasn’t about to flake out and go crap on her.
He wouldn’t, would he?
He’d always made such a fuss of her whenever they met, taking her out for grown-up
dinners, buying her things she wanted, pressing twenty-pound notes into her hand when she asked for money, even letting her have a glass of wine one afternoon in a pub garden last summer.
(‘For God’s sake, don’t tell your mother, or I’ll never hear the end of it,’ he’d said with a wink.)

Yes, okay, so he wasn’t the most reliable father in the world.
He hadn’t been to any of her school concerts for years, even though he always promised he’d be in the audience.
He sometimes even forgot to turn up when they’d arranged to meet at weekends – ‘Oh bollocks.
Love, I’m so sorry,’ he’d say when she rang him, having waited half
an hour already, heart sinking.
Mum had got really cross after it happened the third time and actually insisted on waiting with her after that, until Molly pretended she was meeting Chloe instead
and didn’t tell her where she was really going.

Molly didn’t mind anyway Well, not that much.
She always hated sloping off home on her own when he didn’t show, but then he would be so super-apologetic and nice when she spoke to
him afterwards that she couldn’t help forgiving him.
‘I’ll make it up to you, Molls,’ he said, and he always did.
Mostly.

But it would be ages until she saw him again now that he lived in France.
She’d taken for granted him being a few miles up the road in Mill Hill; she liked being able to slope round to his
flat every now and then, particularly if she had the hump with Mum about something.
Dad was always on her side, whatever happened.
He would make her a coffee (which she didn’t really like, to
be honest, but she drank it anyway) and give her a hug, and then they’d watch some boring sport thing on telly together (even though she didn’t really like watching sport either), and
within minutes she’d be feeling better again.

The girlfriends – well, she could take or leave them.
Dad was handsome and charming, it was no wonder women flocked around him like pigeons over a croissant.
He was also incapable of
speaking to a woman – be she the waitress serving him or a lady in a shop selling him a newspaper or whoever – without leaning in a fraction and giving her this kind of
look
, a
look that said,
I am really, deeply interested in you and everything you have to say.

He did the look on Molly too, of course, but then he
was
really interested in her and everything she had to say.
And if she turned up unexpectedly at his flat and there was a woman
round there, Dad always sent the woman packing so that he could be with Molly instead.
‘You’re top banana around here, kid,’ he said to her.
And while Molly wasn’t that
thrilled about being called a banana (she hated bananas and their evil smell), it gave her a warm glow knowing that she was top of Dad’s list, above all these random women who fell in love
with him.

Apart from Anne-Marie, it seemed.
Anne-Marie must have placed some kind of voodoo enchantment on him because in the space of a year, she had moved into his flat permanently (that had never
happened before), got herself pregnant and persuaded him to up sticks and move to bloody France, miles away from Mill Hill and miles away from Molly.
These days Molly was pretty sure that
Anne-Marie was top banana, not her.

In her darkest moments, Molly had fantasized just a little bit about Anne-Marie tripping over her stupid terrace in France and falling down the mountain, breaking her elegant tanned neck.
Maybe
that would stop her smiling quite so many toothy smiles.

There was a knock at her door and Dexter pushed his head in.
‘We’re going to the beach in a bit.
Dad’s going to blow up the lilo so we can go in the sea with it!’

Molly forced a smile.
‘Cool.’
Then because she couldn’t face another conversation about
Minecraft
, she held up her phone.
‘Just about to make a call, so .
.
.’

‘Sure,’ he said, vanishing again.

The door banged behind him and she dialled Dad’s number, feeling bad about her horrible Anne-Marie-down-the-mountain thoughts.

‘You have reached the answerphone of Simon Reynolds.
The signal isn’t great here so I might not get this for a few days.
But leave me a message and I’ll get back to you when I
can.’

There was a laugh in his voice, as if he couldn’t care less that the signal was terrible, as if he didn’t really want to hear from anyone anyway.
When the beep sounded, Molly drew a
breath in to speak, but then all of a sudden, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say any more.
So she hung up instead.

She lay there for a moment, unable to stir herself into excitement over the thought of going to the beach with a lilo.
Out of habit, she clicked Ben’s name on her phone with the usual stab
of longing.
She couldn’t help herself.
Ever since she’d been forced on this dumb holiday, he’d been in her head non-stop.
His slow, sexy smile.
The way his eyes fastened onto
hers, making everyone else around them blur and vanish.
His low rumbling voice, muttering dirty, suggestive things into her ear.
Lord have mercy!
as Chloe would say.
It was enough to make a girl
ache.

She threw her arms around her pillow, remembering how they had snogged in the book cupboard of her English classroom on the last day of term, her back pressed against piles of copies of
Macbeth
and
Of Mice and Men.
She actually
burned
inside with yearning when she thought about taking her clothes off in front of him and .
.
.
well, you know.
Doing it.
If
she was brave enough to ever go through with it, that was.
(Would it hurt?
Would she make stupid noises?
Would he laugh at her if she made stupid noises?) She just wanted to feel like a woman.
A
proper sexual woman.
She had never even
thought
like this until he had gazed at her, gimlet-eyed, across the classroom two weeks ago, and then brushed up against her in the corridor
afterwards, disturbingly close.
It was like receiving an electric shock; the hairs on her arms actually stood on end, her stomach seemed to drop away in sudden desire.

Oh, Ben.
Ben!
Maybe she should just drop him a quick line, a teeny, casual ‘hi’ so that he would think about her.
Should she?
They’d chatted on the phone and swapped
flirty messages a few times but she’d heard nothing in the last couple of days.
Was it too keen of her to text him again?

So boring here.
Wot u up 2?
she typed, then frowned.
No, that sounded moany Babyish, even.
She deleted it with a sigh.

I miss u
, she typed but hesitated again, fingers hovering above the keypad.
Too needy.
Way too needy.
Boys hated clingy girls, didn’t they?
‘Klingons’ they
called them at school, like something that needed to be peeled off and flicked away.
She didn’t want Ben to think she was a clinger.
She wanted him to be reminded she was fun.
And sexy.
And
still interested.

Hey
, she typed, then pressed send before she could stop herself.
Then she threw herself back on the bed, heart thudding.
A second later, her phone buzzed and she almost stopped
breathing, clammy fingers skidding over the screen in her haste.
Oh.
Just Chloe.

Why aren’t you here??
Loz having party 2nite.
Everyone going.
Inc Niall!!

Molly’s heart sank.
Gutted.
Their friend Lauren had been promising to throw a party all summer.
Why did she have to pick a date when Molly was stuck here in the middle of nowhere?
Typical!
She felt a rush of annoyance with her mum, for dragging her on this stupid holiday against her will, for taking her away from her friends, for not being nicer to Dad to stop him from moving to
France with smiley, pregnant Anne-Marie.
And now she was going to miss the best party of the year.
Great!

‘Molls?
Molly?’

Huh.
Speak of the devil.
There was the Evil Tyrant Motherlord herself, bellowing up the stairs.
Molly paid no attention, instead thinking glumly about how, if she was at home, she and Chloe
would be talking about the party this minute and what they were going to wear.
Actually, they’d probably be trying stuff on in Zara that they couldn’t afford and then going to buy
cheaper versions in Primark.
Chloe would be getting in a state about Niall, this lad from the sixth form that she’d fancied for, like, ages, and—

‘MOLLY!
Where are you?’

I am in hell
, Molly thought, but then her phone buzzed again with another text and it was from Ben.
Hey
, it said.
Miss u x

A smile slid across her face and warmth spread through her body.

‘Where
are
you?
MOLLY!’

I am in heaven
, Molly thought.
I must be in heaven.
Then, still smiling, she rolled off the bed and shoved the phone in her shorts pocket.
‘Did you call me, Mother
dearest?’