Chapter One
It was on days like this that Sadie wondered what the hell she was doing with her life.
Why was she training to be a teacher and not working out on the glorious bay, as her parents did and as her brother, Ewan, and his wife, Kat, did? Sadie had always told them that a life on the sea wasn’t for her, that she didn’t want to be reliant on the fickle whims of tourism for her livelihood, which in turn relied on the fickle whims of the weather, or the strength of the pound, or the rating that the little town of Sea Salt Bay – the place she called home – had been given on TripAdvisor that year. She’d wanted certainty, a guaranteed income, a career that she could – more or less – predict.
She’d tried for a while to follow the employment route that almost everyone else in Sea Salt Bay took, which mostly involved looking after tourists in some capacity, but the only work available had bored her and she’d quickly tired of doing the same thing every day. She wanted more; she wanted to explore her academic side, to satisfy the part of her with a thirst to learn and a curiosity about the world to match. And so she’d bucked the family trend and gone back into education – a little later than her classmates at the ripe old age of twenty-two – sat a degree in modern history, and then enrolled on a teacher training course. It meant leaving Sea Salt Bay and its charms behind every day to commute to the nearest big town to study, but that was OK.
Except on days like this, when the sand of the bay was as warm and soft as demerara sugar and the gulls sang their songs of the sea and the waves rolled onto the shore in a hypnotic rhythm, crystal clear and iced with foam, and the sun was like an old friend, warming her freckled skin while the breeze whispered words of love as it gently lifted the auburn hair from her neck. On days like this she wondered why she’d taken the decision to sit in a gloomy classroom when the bay was at its best and brightest, when children were squealing and splashing in the rolling waves, when couples were walking the spray-capped line of the shore hand in hand, eating chips from paper or ice creams from sugar cones, or simply walking and saying or doing nothing else at all because they didn’t need to.
She wondered why she spent her days listening to a lecturer who didn’t care if she was there or not when she could have been sitting outside her parents’ boatshed. On a day like today, the radio would be murmuring in the background while the sun shone down and excited tourists waited to board their boat, hoping to see dolphins or seals or puffins out on the grey rocks that stood proud of the sea – the same grey rocks that looked like tiny teeth from the shore, but mighty and mysterious up close. As a child, Sadie had loved to sail round them with her parents, happy enough just to be on the waves but always excited to see some wildlife when luck was on their side.
But now, while her parents spent their days at sea, smiling at marvelling visitors as they pointed out porpoises or sea birds, or the way the light played on the ancient chalky cliffs, or while her brother took the same tourists beneath the waves to swim through magical forests of silky green seaweed as the sun sent white daggers of light slicing through the cerulean depths, Sadie studied in a dark room. She learnt about how children learnt, how to keep them safe, how to measure their progress and intelligence, how to check charts and fill in forms, how to keep control, how to instil discipline, how to turn them into fine, moral, sensible adults. Where was the wonder in that? She’d had a grand vision, once, that she’d be the teacher to inspire, to fire curiosity, to nurture creativity, and she’d thought that was what she’d learn to do on her training course. She’d believed that she was going to make a difference, that her job would be important, that she was going to shape young lives. Maybe the kids she taught would remember her long after they’d left her care, and maybe as adults they’d think of