a good look on her except that she was smeared with blood and had a nasty slash across her face, courtesy of the make-up department. ‘Been attacked by a serial killer,’ she said cheerfully to Jackson. Nathan was already shying away from her as she approached him with arms open for a hug. ‘Hold him down for me, will you?’ she said to Jackson. He chose sides and declined. Nathan ducked and dived but Julia managed to get hold of him and plant a noisy, smacking kiss on him while he wriggled like a fish on a hook in an attempt to escape the maternal embrace. ‘Mum, please, stop.’ He broke free.
‘He loves it really,’ Julia said to Jackson.
‘You look disgusting,’ Nathan said to her.
‘I know. Brilliant, isn’t it?’ She dropped to her knees and embraced Dido almost as effusively as she had embraced her son. The dog, unlike the child, responded in kind.
They were running late, she said, she was going to be ages. ‘You’d better go home with Dad.’
‘No problem,’ ‘Dad’ said.
Julia made an excessively pouty clown-face of sorrow, and said to Nathan, ‘And I was so looking forward to spending time with my baby. Come back and see me tomorrow, sweetie?’ To Jackson, less pouty, more efficient, she said, ‘I’ve got a day off tomorrow. Can you bring him down to the hotel?’
‘No problem. Come on,’ Jackson said to Nathan. ‘We’ll go and get a fish supper.’
They ate their fish and chips on the hoof, out of cardboard boxes while walking along the foreshore. Jackson missed the greasy, vinegary newspaper of the fish suppers of his boyhood. He was becoming a walking, talking history lesson, a one-man folk museum, except that nobody was interested in learning anything from him. Jackson pushed their finished boxes into an overflowing bin. So much for the obstructive bin lorry.
There were still a lot of people on the beach, making the most of the balmy early-evening weather. In the part of Yorkshire in which Jackson had been born and bred it had rained every day, all day, since time began, and he had been pleasantly surprised how literally bright and breezy the East Coast could be. And it had been a great summer too, the sun showing his face, sometimes even with his hat on, for at least a few hours every day.
The tide was currently halfway out, or halfway in, Jackson couldn’t tell which. (Was this a glass-half-full/half-empty kind of thing?) He was still learning what it meant to live on the coast. If he stayed here long enough perhaps he would feel the ebb and flow of the sea in his blood and would no longer need to consult the tide table every time he went for a run on the beach.
‘Come on,’ Jackson said to Nathan. ‘Let’s walk on the sand.’
‘Walk?’
‘Yeah, walk, it’s easy. I’ll show you how, if you like. See – this foot first, and then follow it with the other one.’
‘Ha, ha.’
‘Come on. Then we’ll catch the funicular back to the car. It’s fun, that’s why it’s called that.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘True, but you’ll like it.’
‘Oh, hold me back,’ Nathan muttered, which was something Jackson himself said, in moments of high cynicism. Strange and rather flattering to hear the boy speaking like the man.
‘Come on,’ Jackson encouraged when they reached the beach.
‘O-kay.’
‘Do you know that “okay” is the most recognizable word in the world?’
‘Yeah?’ Nathan shrugged his disinterest but trudged along beside him. Men had trekked across deserts beneath a boiling sun with more enthusiasm.
‘Go on, ask me,’ Jackson said, ‘because I know you’re dying to – what’s the second most recognizable word in the world?’
‘Dad?’ The cynical teenager was gone and for a moment he was just a boy again.
‘What?’
‘Look.’ Nathan pointed out to the bay, where there was some kind of commotion taking place in the water. ‘There’s no sharks here, are there?’ he said doubtfully.
‘Plenty, but they’re not necessarily in the sea,’ Jackson said. Not a shark attack, but the trio of bad boys from earlier in the car park. Two of them were in a ramshackle-looking inflatable, more of a kids’ toy than a seaworthy vessel. The third was presumably the one causing pandemonium by inconveniently drowning in the water. Jackson looked around for a lifeguard, but couldn’t see one. Surely they didn’t keep office hours? He sighed. Just his luck to be the one on watch. He pulled off his Magnum boots and handed his jacket to Nathan – no way was