he about to ruin a Belstaff for one of these numpties. He ran down to the water’s edge and kept on running, splashing in a rather ungainly fashion until he could launch himself on the waves and start swimming. A man running into the sea in his socks was almost as undignified as a man walking along licking an ice-cream cone.
The boy (or the wanker in the water, as he preferred to think of him) had gone under by the time Jackson got there. The other two bad boys were yelling like useless idiots, their bluster gone, replaced by blind panic. Jackson took a great breath and forced himself under the water. The sea had looked calm from the beach, but out here, less than a hundred feet from shore, it felt brutishly in command. The sea took no prisoners, you won or you lost.
Jackson, an awkward merman if ever there was, bobbed up and pushed himself back down again. He managed to hook the boy by grabbing a handful of hair and then snagging the back of his jeans until finally, somehow, God knows how, he was able to get them both up to the surface. It was not the most elegant piece of lifesaving, but it would have worked fine if Jackson hadn’t then tried to hold on to the worse-than-useless dinghy. It proved far too frail for the job and the other two boys were tipped, screaming, into the water. More drowning commenced. Had none of them ever learned to swim? They were a waste of space, all three of them, but not to their mothers, he supposed. (Or perhaps they were.) Waste of space or not, the instinct was to save them.
One was not so bad, but three was impossible. Jackson could feel exhaustion kicking in and for a brief second he thought, Is this it? But luckily for all of them, the inshore lifeboat motored up and started hauling them out of the water.
Back on dry land someone gave the drowned boy CPR on the sand, while people stood around offering mute encouragement. The other two boys – a pair of sodden water rats – stepped away from Jackson when he approached, ill-equipped to deal with gallantry, his or anyone else’s.
The drowned boy spluttered back to life – a miracle, Jackson thought, waste of space or not – reborn right there on the sands. He thought of Penny Trotter who was ‘born again’. Jackson himself had once been dead. He had been injured in a rail crash and his heart had stopped. (‘Briefly,’ the doctor in A&E had said – somewhat dismissively in Jackson’s opinion.) He had been revived by someone – a girl – at the side of the railway tracks and had for a long time afterwards felt the euphoria of the saved. It had worn off now, of course, the commonplace of everyday life having eventually defeated transcendence.
A paramedic draped Jackson in a blanket and wanted to take him to hospital, but he refused. ‘Dad?’ Nathan was hovering, pale and worried. Dido moved to Jackson’s side to offer silent, stoic support, which involved leaning rather heavily on him. ‘All right?’ Nathan asked.
‘Yeah,’ Jackson said. ‘Can we go now?’
Sugar and Spice
The scent of his dad’s breakfast – sausage, bacon, egg, black pudding, baked beans, fried bread – still lingered rather threateningly throughout the house (and it was a big house). ‘It’s going to kill you one day, Tommy,’ Crystal said nearly every time she put it in front of him. ‘Hasn’t happened yet,’ his father said cheerfully, as if that was a logical argument. (Harry imagined his mother saying, ‘Well, I haven’t fallen off a cliff yet,’ when warned about the dangers.)
His dad had driven off first thing this morning to the Port of Tyne to meet a DFDS ferry coming in from Rotterdam. ‘White goods,’ he said. He quite often met his trucks himself at Customs if they were coming in from the Continent. ‘Quality control,’ he said. ‘Vital if you’re going to keep customer loyalty.’ His dad used to express the wish that Harry would join the firm – ‘Holroyd and Son,’ he said – but he hadn’t mentioned this idea much lately, not really since Harry had said he wanted to do Theatre Studies. (‘Why not Engineering or something?’)
The other day Harry overheard him asking Crystal if she thought his son was gay. ‘I mean, he’s a bit light in his loafers, isn’t he?’ ‘Dunno,’ Crystal said. ‘Does it matter?’