The Waffle House on the Pier - Tilly Tennant Page 0,3

toys, postcards and gifts, swimming costumes and wetsuits. One had freezers full of coloured ice cream standing in the shade of an opened-out frontage, one had tables set on the tarmac for fish and chip suppers and one had a little window-cum-counter where you could buy crab sandwiches and cockles and mussels caught out in the bay. As she passed this house, Reginald, who made the crab sandwiches, was outside rubbing something off the chalkboard menu that he must have sold out of. He looked across and, noticing Sadie, raised a hand.

‘How do, Sadie! How goes it?’

‘Good thanks,’ Sadie called back. ‘Business is good?’

‘Could be better but won’t complain,’ Reginald said, and Sadie smiled knowingly because he always said that even when business was astoundingly good. ‘Tell your folks I said hello!’ he added.

‘I will.’

At the last house the road forked off towards the Victorian pier. The pier was the jewel in the crown of Sea Salt Bay. It wasn’t much compared to the piers in other seaside resorts, but it was quaint and pretty and everyone loved it. The wrought iron of its fencing panels was painted a delicate sage green and it had old wooden boards that rattled and creaked as you walked them. If you looked down as you went you could see the waves below showing through the gaps between them. This was home to the amusement arcade and a gathering of tame rides, including the carousel and dodgems. And right at the end of the pier stood Sea Salt Bay Waffle House. It was perfectly square with a pointed roof, the exterior candy-striped pink and white like a stick of rock. The old paintwork was faded a little these days, battered by too many sea storms, and the shutters didn’t close properly at night and the posters in the windows had been bleached by the sun, but it still drew in a regular and faithful clientele. The best waffles on the South Coast, the sign outside said, and nobody could deny that they were.

Sea Salt Bay Waffle House made Sadie especially proud, because it was owned by her Gammy and Gampy. They’d be Grandma and Grandpa to anyone else, but as a small child Sadie had never quite got the pronunciation right and the names she’d given them by mistake had stuck. Gammy and Gampy were also known as April and Kenneth Schwartz, who’d moved to England from America before the birth of Sadie’s father and had run the waffle house in Sea Salt Bay for most of that time. When they’d first opened up in the sixties, for most of the locals waffles were an exotic treat that they’d never had. Through the sixties and seventies their business had grown, drawing customers from far and wide. People were used to waffles now, but for Gammy and Gampy, reputation had proved a powerful thing and business was still good – at least, good enough to keep them trading, even if the building was long overdue a facelift.

Sadie turned that way now. She’d pop in, say hello, see how things were going. If they needed help to clear up after the end of trading, she could do that too. But before she’d taken half a dozen steps she stopped and frowned at the sound of a siren. It was close, growing rapidly closer and louder. Looking around she saw the ambulance racing down the road that led to the promenade. It stopped at the gates of the pier, where it could go no further. Two paramedics leapt out, lugging black bags, one barking into a radio as they began to run across the old wooden boards.

Sadie watched them for a moment, something like fear building in her gut.

There had been two occasions in her life when Sadie had been struck by a strange, almost psychic feeling about something that was about to happen. One was when her dog, Binky, had been hit by a car. A neighbour had knocked on the door to tell her parents and, somehow, Sadie had known before they did. The second was when a girl at her school had drowned in the bay. Sadie had been about fourteen, and as the head teacher gathered them to announce the sad news, she’d already known that too, the information somehow beamed into her head moments before, yet nobody had told her. The last time had shaken her, and for a couple of years she’d lived in fear of it happening again. She hadn’t