Norfolk. Now it was called ‘home’. Five years of living here and even when the North Sea was throwing a tantrum and sixty-foot swells were hurling themselves angrily against those tall, hollow support-legs, she still felt infinitely safer here than she did ashore.
She heard the clack of hurried footsteps on the stairs outside her cabin. The door creaked open. ‘Breakfast time, Nanna.’
Jenny smiled wearily. ‘Morning, Hannah.’ She slipped her legs over the side of the cot, her feet flinching on the cold linoleum floor, and glanced at the empty bunk opposite, the blankets tossed scruffily aside. Leona was gone.
Hannah grinned cheerfully, eyes too big for such a small face tucked beneath a fuzz of curly strawberry-blonde hair.
‘Mummy’s up already?’ Jenny asked, surprised. Usually she had to kick Leona out of her bed in the mornings.
Hannah rolled her eyes. ‘Lee’s eating breakfast already.’
Jenny sighed. She tried to encourage Hannah to call her mother ‘Mummy’, but since Leona actually encouraged the first name thing - sometimes it seemed like she almost wanted to be more of a big sister than a mother - it was a futile effort on her part.
‘Okay . . . tell her I’ll be down in a minute, all right?’
Hannah nodded and skittered out of the cabin, her wooden sandals rapping noisily along the floor of the passageway.
Jenny unlatched the porthole and opened it a crack, feeling the chill morning air chase away the cosy fug in the cabin. She shivered - awake for sure now - and pulled a thick, chunky-knit cardigan around her shoulders and stood up.
‘Another day,’ she uttered to the woman in the mirror on the wall opposite. A woman approaching fifty, long untamed frizzy hair that had once been a light brown, but was now streaked with grey, and a slim jogger’s figure with sinews of muscle where soft humps of lazy cellulite had rested a decade ago.
A poor man’s Madonna.
Or so she liked to think.
She smiled. The Jenny of before, the Jenny of ten years ago, would probably have been thrilled to be told she’d have a gym figure like this at the age of forty-nine. But then that very different, long lost, Jenny would probably have been horrified by the scruffy New-Age-traveller state of her hair, the lined and drawn face, tight purse-string lips and the complete absence of any make-up.
She was a very different person now. ‘Very different,’ she whispered to no one but the reflection.
The smile in the mirror dipped and faded.
She pulled on a pair of well-worn khaki trousers and a pair of hardy Doc Martens that promised to out-live her, and clanked downstairs to join the others in the mess room.
Four long scuffed Formica-topped tables all but filled the mess; utilitarian, unchanged from the days when gas workers wearing orange overalls and smudged faces took a meal between shifts.
Busy right now. It always was with the first breakfast sitting of the day. There were nearly a hundred of them sitting shoulder to shoulder; those on the rota for early morning duties. Potato and fish chowder steamed from plastic bowls and the room was thick with chattering conversation and the chorus of too-hot stew being impatiently slurped.
Jenny spotted her daughter. She grabbed a plastic bowl, ladled it full of chowder and squeezed in beside her.
Leona looked up. ‘Mum? You okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘You were whimpering last night. Bad dreams again?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘Just dreams, Lee, we all have them.’
Leona managed a supportive half-smile. ‘Yeah.’ She had her nights too.
Jenny cautiously tested a mouthful with her lip. ‘I noticed it’s a good sea and fair wind out there today. We’re overdue a shore run. Could you get together a shopping list and I’ll grab it off you later?’
‘Yeah, okay,’ Leona replied, picking an escaped chunk of potato off the table and dropping it back into Hannah’s bowl. Nothing wasted here. Certainly not food.
‘Anything you want to put on the list?’
Jenny’s mouth pursed. ‘A couple of decent writing pens. Some socks, the thermal ones . . . oh, and how about booking me in at a posh health spa for a weekend of pampering.’
Leona grinned. ‘I’ll join you.’
Jenny hungrily finished her breakfast before it had a chance to cool; too much to do, too little time. She clapped her hands like a school-teacher and the hubbub of conversation slowly, reluctantly, faded to silence.
‘It looks like a good day for a shore run. The sea’s calm and we’ve got a westerly wind. So Leona’s going to be coming round this morning to get your “wants