The Endless Beach Read online

  “Does it matter? It looked like it had a funny horn thing.”

  “Really?!”

  “Yeah, on its nose. Or maybe it was eating something pointy.”

  Flora waited for the Internet to slowly download a picture of a narwhal—a large whale with a unicorn-style tusk on its snout. “Did it look like that?”

  Lorna squinted. “A nar-what? Are those real?”

  “What do you mean, are those real? Of course they’re real! Where do you think Scotland’s unicorn symbol comes from?!”

  “Um, I’ve never thought about it,” said Lorna.

  “What do they teach in schools these days?” said Flora, grinning. “The unicorn. On the union flag. The lion and the unicorn. Three lions on the chest for England. A unicorn for Scotland, described in ancient texts. Of course that’s not what they saw.”

  “That’s the thing I just saw?” said Lorna.

  “That’s the thing you just saw. Incredibly, incredibly rare.”

  “Is it lucky?”

  Flora paused. “The myths say . . . well. Opinion is divided. Could be either.”

  “I don’t believe in luck,” said Lorna.

  “I’m not sure if it matters whether you believe in it or not,” said Flora. “But we’d probably better alert the coastguard and whale rescue anyway. A narwhal is a very special thing.”

  “Yeah, all right, fish whisperer.”

  And they refilled their glasses, put a film on and finished the leek twists, and felt, for two girls in by themselves on a Saturday night, pretty contented with their lot.

  Chapter Eight

  Saif normally welcomed the distraction of work after his empty weekends, but today he was having a particularly trying morning. Old Mrs. Kennedy was in with her bunions. The waiting list on the mainland was over eighteen months but she could have gotten it done privately in a week. She owned a croft and four holiday cottages. He couldn’t explain to her that, in terms of her remaining life span, eighteen months represented probably quite a large percentage of it, and she really ought to spend the money.

  “Aye, och no, I don’t want to be a bother,” she’d said.

  “But wouldn’t you be less bothering if you could walk properly, Mrs. Kennedy?”

  Lorna had once told him, to his considerable surprise, that his normal timbre of speaking voice could sound aggressive to the locals, particularly the older ones, who’d watched too many American films where anyone who sounded Middle Eastern was automatically a terrorist. Even though he found this profoundly annoying, he had tried to soften his voice and follow the gentle singsong pattern characteristic of the island speakers. His English now, in fact, was both strange and very beautiful, a wonderful mix of both accents, with a music all of its own. Lorna loved to listen to it. When he was frustrated, however, it tended to sharpen up again.

  “Aye, but you never know when that money might be needed!”

  Saif blinked. What Mrs. Kennedy did with her own money was, of course, absolutely none of his business. But the difference between being able to walk and not . . .

  He shook his head and wrote her out another prescription for painkillers. She was putting weight on too, which meant she’d need cholesterol checks and could possibly develop gout . . . Still. Next!

  * * *

  Straight after was Gertie James, an incomer from Surrey who’d given up a high-pressure dual-income lifestyle to come and do weaving and fire her own pottery and grow her own vegetables. Her husband had lasted about fifteen minutes, then given up and decided to rejoin the rat race. Now she was raising three completely assimilated and semi-feral island children, who were happy as clams running around muddy streams all day, knowing every single person on the island, building their own kites, speaking a mix of two tongues, and eating tablet. They were no more likely to take to living back in a small Guildford semi with an au pair and after-school Mandarin, lacrosse, and Kumon math lessons than they were to fly to the moon.

  “I just feel . . . I just feel so . . .” Gertie mumbled.

  Saif had learned over the last few months that, in the West, going to the doctor and saying you were “feeling . . .” and just kind of letting the sentence run out was considered a totally acceptable and viable reason for accessing health care. This was new to him. Even before Syria had turned into a war zone, going to the doctor cost too much money for you not to be very clear that there was a distinctly pressing reason for you being there.

  He didn’t deny for a second that mental health issues were real and overt and almost certainly underdiagnosed in his home countries. He had been born in Syria and raised in Beirut; the irony of his moving back to Syria after medical school for a brighter future had never once been lost on him.

  But he found trying to guess the subtleties of people’s malaise a little tricky still. He was not an unempathetic doctor—not at all. There wasn’t a child who arrived scared and anxious who didn’t leave with a lollipop, a jolly Band-Aid, and the sense of being taken seriously. But in some areas, he was less tested than others, and the “I’ve just been feeling a bit . . .” symptoms he did find tricky.

  He looked up at Gertie, who, in common with more than a few of the single or divorced women on Mure, found the plight of the tall, handsome, lightly bearded doctor terribly romantic. Alas, despite the lasagnas that regularly turned up on his doorstep (he had, truly, no idea why people did this) and invitations to the town’s many social activities, he remained separate—a little distant, entirely focused on the old phone that was never far from his side. This only made him more attractive in many people’s minds. Gertie sighed.

  “I just . . . I just feel I’ve lost my sparkle.”

  “I do not know if the NHS does sparkle,” said Saif. This was a joke on his part, but like many people Gertie was unclear when he was joking and when he wasn’t, and simply looked concerned.

  “I mean,” he said, trying to look professional, “are you sure it isn’t just the time of year?”

  This was undeniably true. The very end of March was difficult for everyone; the winter had been long and dark, but Christmas had been wonderful. There was something cozy about the depths of winter. Now the evenings were meant to be getting longer; the equinox had been and gone; surely spring should be on its way? But lambs were being born into fierce storms and wet grass, into a world that still felt cruel, when it should start to feel welcoming and new. There were daffodils, yes, and crocuses, and the hardy little snowdrops, and green was beginning to wreathe its way across the land—but when you still had to scrape the ice off your car in the morning, when you still had to run across the road in howling gales and lashing rain, when it felt as if you were holding your breath, waiting for the year to begin, even as days of your life passed you by . . .

  Yes. He understood what the half sentence meant. He did. It was hard.

  He looked up at Gertie. “Spring will come,” he said. “Things will get better.”

  “Do you think?” said Gertie, her voice a little quavery. “The winter is just so long.”

  “The spring makes it worth it. Now, I could put you on the strong drugs, I suppose, but you have children, yes?”

  Gertie nodded. Everyone knew Gertie’s children. Lorna up at the school had wanted to tell Gertie this was actually a functioning modern island, not an Iron Age settlement, but she was slightly worried that Gertie would immediately withdraw them and attempt to homeschool, which, as well as making for a dangerous outlook for Mure’s cats, would lower the school roll yet again. It was a constant balancing act to keep the island’s only school open, but without it the island would die, and that was that, so Lorna was going to protect it to her dying breath.

  “You want to be present for them, yes? Feel their joys and sadnesses? Because it is not like that for everyone, but for some people . . . these drugs, they take away the lows but they can take away the highs too. They can isolate you from the world, you know? Wrap you in cotton wool . . . remove you a little. For people whose pain is unendurable, of co
urse. But can you wait, maybe for . . . ?”

  Gertie looked out of the window. That day, for what felt like the first time in so long, the sun was out again. It felt as if the world was coming alive. “Do you think?”

  “I do think,” said Saif. “I am old-fashioned doctor. If I could prescribe, I would say get dog. Take walk every day.”

  Gertie smiled. “Do you think that would help?”

  “I think that helps most things. But get outside. See the world. See how you are. And if you are still . . . no sparkle. Well. Then we have a problem. Please come back then.”

  Gertie nodded. “I’ll try it,” she said. “But I’ll blame you if it goes wrong.”

  Saif allowed himself a smile. “But of course.”

  He stood up politely as she left.

  * * *

  He wasn’t feeling any better though, and he tried to figure out why, as he considered wandering along to the Café by the Sea for lunch. Flora had tried her hand at falafel for him. They were terrible, absolutely awful, but she had tried so hard and so sweetly that he had told her they were great. Now she made them all the time and he felt slightly duty-bound to eat them as everyone looked at him expectantly. Old Mrs. Laird, who “did” for him, would nudge him and say, “Ooh look, there’s Flora’s flannels,” which was, to be strictly accurate, more or less what they tasted like. He’d much rather have one of her cheese scones, which were heavenly.

  He wasn’t in the mood for it today. He would stay here and finish off his paperwork . . . He swung round to the computer. And that was when he saw it.

  He didn’t know why. It must have been to do with how the dates looked so different on his computer—or in his mind, maybe? Because they were in English and not Arabic? Because—and this made him swallow—perhaps because he thought all the time now in English? He even dreamed in English; he dreamed sometimes that his family could not understand him, that he was shouting at them, shouting at them to come, and the only reason they did not was because he could no longer change his voice to the only language they understood. That had been a nightmare from which he had awoken sobbing, on damp sheets—sobbing even harder when he remembered, once again, that the nightmare was true. There was no respite from the nightmare that went on every day: he did not know. He did not know what had happened to his family.

  But now, as he glanced down at the phone, he realized. That he had missed it. That he had known on some level that it was today.

  The venetian blind on his window, with which Saif was not particularly familiar and usually got tangled horribly, was thankfully already down. He got up and locked the door, even though he knew he was never meant to lock the door from the inside. He glanced around one last time. The morning appointments were finished and the afternoon house calls were not due for an hour.

  Then he pulled down a roll of hospital paper, crouched down behind the examination bed, made himself as small and quiet as possible, and wept, quiet racking sobs that felt more painful the more he tried to stifle them, conscious that he must be making the oddest of noises. Ash, his youngest, was six years old. Today. Or would have been six. He didn’t even know that. Didn’t even know.

  And he had forgotten the day. And suddenly, once again, everything was too much to bear.

  Chapter Nine

  Mwah. Just one more kiss.”

  “Fintan!”

  Flora was trying to do the Café by the Sea accounts at the table, and listening to Fintan on the phone was too much.

  “Homophobe,” said Fintan, not looking remotely sorry.

  “I’m a show-off-o-phobe,” said Flora. “And you are showing off.”

  “She’s on her period,” said Fintan down the phone. “No, I don’t know either. Some girl thing.”

  “FINTAN! Hamish, eat the phone.”

  Hamish glanced up from the corner, looking quite happy at the prospect, but Fintan flicked them all two-finger Vs.

  “That’s it, I’m telling Dad,” said Flora. She looked around. “Where is he?”

  He wasn’t dozing in the armchair as usual. Bramble was gone too. Flora got nervous when her dad wandered off. She stood up from the accounts—she tried to tell herself she needed a break, but really it was because they were just such bad news—and went off to stretch her legs.

  “Colton says bye!” shouted Fintan jovially as she left. She would have slammed the door if it hadn’t been warped.

  She found her father round the front of the farmyard. He was leaning on the stone wall at the front of the property, over the wide mouth of the road that led down. It was quite the view: low-slung clouds across a wide sky, all the way down to the cobbled streets of Mure below, the beach beyond. He wasn’t doing anything. Flora thought he was from the last generation that were content just doing nothing—not fiddling with their phones, but simply standing, waiting, watching. When she was little, he used to smoke roll-ups, but that had stopped a long time ago. His ruddy face was perfectly still, contemplating the only world, really, that he’d ever known.

  Bramble’s tail thumped on the cobbles.

  “Hello dair, dhu,” he said. His voice retained the ancient speech patterns of his homeland.

  “Daddy.”

  He smiled.

  “Fintan getting a bit much for you?” Flora asked.

  Eck sighed. “Ach, Flora. You know.”

  Flora looked at him.

  “Don’t think of me as an ancient dinosaur.”

  “I don’t,” said Flora. She didn’t. She thought of him as a rock, deep set in the soil, immovable; reliable and strong.

  “It’s just . . . it’s very new to me, all this.”

  “I know,” nodded Flora.

  “I mean . . . do you think they’d get themselves married, do you?”

  This hadn’t occurred to Flora. She felt something of a little stab when she realized that Fintan would probably get married before she did. “I don’t know,” she said. “We haven’t really discussed it.”

  “I mean, it would have been all right for your maither.” His pale blue eyes scanned the horizon. “But, you know. I mean. What would the Thurso boys make of it?”

  Flora shrugged. “I think you might find these days there are more Thurso men with gay people in their families than you’d expect.”

  “You think that, so you do, do you?”

  “You might be surprised.”

  “I might at that.” He shook his head. “It was simpler when me and your ma were young.”

  “For you it was,” said Flora. “For other people it was impossible.”

  “Aye yes, that, right enough.” He sighed again. “I just want you all to be happy.”

  “Well,” pointed out Flora, “Fintan’s the happiest of all of us.”

  Eck’s eyebrows rose. “I suppose he is at that.”

  They both watched as Innes and Agot came marching up the hill from the ferry port. Agot was jumping up and down noisily at something. With her white hair she looked exactly like the new lambs bouncing in the fields.

  “Ach, that girl wants a maither and a faither,” said Eck. We all do, thought Flora, but she kept it to herself, kissed her dad on the cheek, and went down to try and get Innes to help her with the accounts, which he did with the highly disappointing outcome that she’d been right all along about how badly she was doing.

  Chapter Ten

  Colton was coming home for the evening—one evening!—and not bringing Joel. That was what really did it.

  He jetted in on Thursday, looking slim and a little drawn from working too hard, but nonetheless he threw a huge dinner at the Rock for everyone and they all went and had a rip-roaring time. Hamish tried to chat up Catriona Meakin, who was fifty-six if she was a day, a part-time barmaid, full-time sweetheart, comfortably upholstered, and very kind and welcoming on the whole; he looked unbelievably delighted when he succeeded.

  The Rock had been opened up; from the jetty there was a great red carpet leading up the steps, where braziers were lit to show the way to the old wo
oden front door. Toasts had been made and plans had been drawn up for when the venue would be open—all very speculative, it seemed.

  Flora had finished work and gone back to the farmhouse to find it empty; no one had thought to tell her where they all were. Eventually she’d figured it out and gone stomping down to the jetty, where Bertie Cooper, who helped Colton with transportation, beamed happily to see her (he’d always had a soft spot for her). He took her round the headland to save her walking the length of the Endless. It was a chilly night and Flora dug her hands into the sleeves of her sweater. She’d heard nothing about the lightning visit. But maybe, she thought, just maybe, Joel had come as a surprise . . .

  Colton was sitting holding court in the warm corner of the bar, next to the crackling fire, Fintan on his lap. Lots of people from the village had spied the lights on and “popped by” to see what was occurring; there was laughter and merriment and young Iona was singing in a corner, hardly pausing when she saw Flora except to wave cheerfully.

  Flora scanned the room slowly. No sign of Joel.

  “Hi, Colton,” she said, going over and kissing him, and he hugged her back.

  “You didn’t bring your lawyer with you?” she said, trying to sound playful and failing mightily.

  “He’s too busy,” said Colton, “doing good things for me.” He saw Flora’s face. “Aw, hey, listen. He just wants to get everything done. Sorry. I gave him a lot to do. I decided at the last minute, okay? I haven’t even seen him.” At least he had the grace to look ashamed of himself. He ruffled Fintan’s hair. “Sorry, Flora. I’ve had a lot on my mind.” He kissed Fintan lightly. “I just . . . I just had to get home, even for one night. I dropped everything.”

  Flora nodded. “Sure,” she said.

  She wandered back to town. It looked like being a jolly rowdy night, but she had to be up at the crack of dawn. And somehow, she just wasn’t in the mood. She picked up the phone to call Joel, then put it back down again. There was no point in starting a fight, even if he picked up at all.