Page 23 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘Excuse me?’ says Owen, bright pink and shouting over from the table. ‘But we have three minutes to work out which of these names are Grand National winners and which are Crufts winners.’

‘Yeah, I’d had enough,’ says Dwight, ignoring Owen completely. ‘And I’ve got a plan.’

‘He thinks he’s going to be Billy Big Bollocks of Carso,’ remarks Shelby loudly.

‘Shut it, you,’ says Dwight crossly.

‘Mr Property Developer,’says Shelby, rolling her eyes.

‘Ooh,’ says Janey, impressed. And, it’s property. Always interesting. ‘Whereabouts?’

Dwight shrugged. ‘I’ve bought Seagate. Going to do it up for holiday cottages.’

Janey blinks. ‘You’ve bought the houses next door to me?’

‘Is that where you are, aye?’

‘Yes! I thought they’d just gone up – the For Sale sign arrived yesterday!’

‘Aye,’ smiles Dwight. ‘But there’s a . . . ’ He obviously can’t remember the word. ‘There’s a condition on them – they can only get sold locally. So I just swooped in and . . . swoosh!’

Janey raises her eyebrows, which is a bit harder to do since she’d gone to Caithness for Botox. Hector the dentist does it in town, but the idea of entrusting her face to Hector, and going in and out of his office in front of everyone, is a bit much for Janey. It isn’t that she lies toher mates about it specifically. Everyone politely doesn’t ask the questions, that’s all. Well, she’d once tried to bring it up with Lish, but predictably Lish has never had anything done and has completely wrinkle-free skin and couldn’t understand what Janey was on about or why she should mess with her perfectly serviceable face, so Janey had retreated timidly. It’s a nice thing, Janey sometimes thinks, to have a friend who is so confident and secure in everything. But it is also, quite often, incredibly annoying. Janey tries to watch what she eats, so she can still get into her jeans. Lish thinks this is ridiculous behaviour, eats cake whenever she feels like it, and just wears a larger size.

‘Hang on,’ Janey says, frowning, which she can still do. ‘Does this mean I’m going to be living next to a building site for the next year?’

‘We will be quiet as mice, ma’am,’ says Dwight, cocking his ridiculous cowboy hat at her again. ‘And by the time we’re done, your road will be the smartest in Carso.’

‘Hmm.’ Mind you, she can’t help thinking, it will be nice to have the street tidied up, and everything fresh and nice.

‘Well, well done,’ she says finally in genuine admiration. ‘There must have been loads of vultures circling.’

‘Aye,’ says Dwight. ‘There was a bunch of consortiums wanting them.Codicil. That’s what it’s called. Something written in the will.’ He smiles, looking cocky. ‘I did pretty well on the rigs.’

‘You must have done,’ says Janey admiringly. Essie looks up. She couldn’t help hearing her mother’s admiring tone, something she hasn’t heard applied to herself for quite a while. So Shelby is running the bar and Dwight is clearly doing well. Essie remembers, with some bitterness, being smug about the fact that she’d got her qualifications and was moving away, and these guys were stuck here. It doesn’t seem quite like that now. Her student loan is still enormous. Whereas these guys won’t have any.

‘Grand National,’ she says automatically to Owen, who is pushing a piece of paper in her face.

‘Lord Floss-Floss of Cardingdale?’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have thought so. What do you think to Prince Nero Verashan dell’Antico?’

‘Foreign is horses, local is dogs,’ says Lowell unexpectedly. He has proven to be a quiet yet valuable member of the quiz team, killed it on architectural terms, and is the only person Owen can currently look at with respect, even though they are all getting thrashed by a team of out-of-town ringers, all men,who are sitting in the corner not talking to anyone and pretending to be local even though they clearly aren’t. Hector had taken many complaints about ringers in the quiz night (admittedly many of them from Owen) and had attempted to establish a ten-mile village perimeter from where people were allowed to enter, but it didn’t work well for visiting relatives and friends and people having to dig out utility bills, and frankly absolutely nobody could get on board with it, so the £50 fish shop voucher was still at risk from the shark ringers. The only good thing anyone could see was that all four were drinking, which meant they’dbe catching the bus back to wherever they’d plotted the evil scheme from, and that bus was always late, incredibly draughty and meandered round the houses for hours, and that was without factoring in the upturned tractor on the B47, so they had to hope it was worth it for their stupid fish voucher.

‘Huh,’ says Owen, as Hector reads out the answers and Lowell is proved to be right. Janey, meanwhile, on a few glasses of the white Lowell had bought, is doing that thing where you try not to be an idiot in front of your children, but somehow you just can’t help yourself. She can hear her own voice in her head, sounding ridiculous.

‘Dwight, you remember my daughter, Essie, don’t you?’

Essie is shooting her a look she knows only too well, and doesn’t even stand up as Dwight ambles over, sticking out his hand.

‘I sure do – hi there. Aren’t you in the big city now?’ he says, still with that politeness Janey remembers from his days of talent shows and town fêtes. He never got tall, she notices; he’s wiry, not big like Shelby. He’s a little taller than Essie, but then his boots probably have heels.

‘I’m back. For a bit,’ says Essie, giving an ‘and now we’re done’ thin-lipped smile in a way that makes Janey want to shake her. Shelby is watching all of this, her face like fizz.

‘Oh, good,’ says Dwight, amiably enough, then, to Al, ‘Let’s catch up, eh?’ just as Hector says, ‘And now, the round is Eighties song lyrics’ and the entire table of quizzers says ‘Ooooh!’ and (finally, thinks Owen, darkly) starts paying attention.

*

Owen sits with his arms folded as the final tally comes in. Everyone else was more or less completely uninterested, and a coupleof people who’d hit the wine quite hard had appeared to have forgotten they were in any kind of a quiz altogether. The Ancillary Justices have come in third, to Janey’s evident surprise; they never normally win anything. There is even a prize, a bottle of prosecco, which Shelby hands over rather reluctantly, but they open it right away in delight.

‘You got all the questions!’ Janey says, grinning at Lowell, who had obviously made the difference.

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