She and his parents would have been near neighbours: something about keeping all the strange people in one place came into his mind but he ignored it and walked on. The hill ran down towards the town centre and from there he could see the whole sweep of the bay, from Porthminster Point out to the north of the town, along St Ives's own beachfront to the harbour and then away to The Island to the south. For all that he felt St Ives represented repression, misery, bourgeois values and empty traditionalism, it still held a certain picturesque charm. He had been away long enough to recognise that. The town nestled neatly as if held with a mother's love in the two arms of the bay. And it had held him. He was aware for a moment of just how safe this place had always felt. That's why he had wanted to leave it, of course. But now? Did it still feel that way? Harvey walked down Church Road, past the church where he had gone as a child to Sunday school and where he had first learned to smoke; past the little car park with the great white wall where he had once sprayed the Batman logo in gold paint; and down onto the high street where he and Rob and Jack used to go shoplifting on a Saturday afternoon. 'My life of crime,' Harvey muttered. It was odd to think, now that he had time to think, that the most criminal thing he had ever done had happened in safe little St Ives. And it had happened this afternoon. What he needed, he realised, was a drink. Several drinks.
St Ives had a lot of pubs. Most made their money in the summer but they all stayed open throughout the year. In theory, there was a wide selection to choose from, but like most people in their home town Harvey could only really think of going into a handful. And all carried baggage. There was the Lifeboat on the harbourfront where tonight there would be a juke box and on Fridays a local band; that was where he had first thrown up into a public toilet and first dragged self-consciously on a joint. There was the Golden Lion, which would be quieter but might contain one or two hard lads with shaven heads and tattoos; that was where he and Rob had fought and won against two rugby players from the rival secondary school. Or there was the Blue Bar, which would be the quietest of all with a bit of folk music playing on CD; and that was where he had taken Jill Penhaligon on the night her parents were away at a funeral, so there was somewhere to go back to, for the first time. And all these memories were tied up with the places and meant that he needed to get the choice right. And although a part of him felt that distractions were just what he needed or that toughing it out might be the best option, he went to the Blue Bar because a larger part knew that he needed to think and to feel safe and to be cared for by the gentler ghosts he would find there.
The lounge bar of the Blue Bar had been redecorated since he was last there, the walls painted in a pale lime green and the floor laid to stripped pine. The walls were enlivened by pictures by a local artist, which featured beach scenes where there was a lot of blue for the sky and a lot of blue for the sea and a tiny strip of yellow in the middle for the sand. They were not like any Cornish beach Harvey had ever seen. He found them depressing. The Blue Bar had always been more of a wine bar than a pub and there had been a time, around the age of sixteen, when Harvey had considered wine bars the height of sophistication. On a damp night in February it was almost deserted and just seemed rather hopeless and displaced. The bare whitewood tables and chairs had the appearance of a set of deck-chairs laid out on some forgotten liner. He ordered a pint of Guinness from a bored student and found a corner. What he wanted was peace and he had found it. It crossed his mind that it was possible to have too much peace because his thoughts began at once to crowd