Page 29 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘What?’ he says. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘But the bones of this place . . . ’ starts Essie. ‘What you could do with the northern light . . . you could make it so beautiful and maybe Scandinavian.’

‘Or give it a nice beachy vibe,’ says Janey. ‘Everyone likes that.’

‘No, Mum,’ says Essie. ‘Oh, my God, you’ll be putting up aLive Laugh Lovesign next.’

‘I quite like those signs that sayTo the Beach,’ says Janey mildly, because it’s perfectly okay to like what she likes. ‘And pale blue. And slatted wood. And ticking.’

‘Happy 2011, Karen,’ says Essie.

‘Ach, well,’ says Dwight, turning away. ‘I wouldn’t know, I don’t have a brain in my head.’

Essie thinks about how in the city you hardly ever run into anyone you know, and how much she prefers that way of doing things, and turns to head back when suddenly she hears a noise from upstairs.

It’s an odd noise, not a cat, but not unlike a mew or a howl. They all freeze. Essie feels the hairs on her neck stand up.

‘Did you hear that?’ says Janey, and Essie wants to roll her eyes because her mother always has to be the queen of whether or not people can hear things.

‘Ssh,’ she says, and then the odd, unearthly sound comes again.

‘Sounds like Mrs MacAleese doesn’t want you to take over her cottage,’ says Janey, and Dwight starts for a moment.

‘What?’ he says.

Janey grins. ‘I’m kidding.’

‘Well, don’t kid,’ he says crossly. ‘You see some strange things on the rigs, I’ll tell you that.’

‘I’m heading out,’ says Essie.

‘You can’t,’ says Janey. ‘What if it’s an animal in distress? Come on.’

Essie frowns. ‘It’ll be a stupid seagull shouting at another seagull. You know what they’re like: total thugs.’

Seagullsarethugs; this is indisputable.

‘Yes, but if it’s stuck?’ says Janey.

‘One less seagull in the world, oh, no,’ says Essie, but she knows when she’s beaten. ‘Are the stairs safe?’

Dwight shrugs. ‘They carried Mrs MacAleese, and she was the size of a Highland coo.’

‘Dwight!’

‘What? I’m estimating. It can’t have been far off. Took me long enough to clear the Tunnocks teacake wrappers out.’

‘Actually they’re surprisingly low-calorie,’ says Janey.

Essie looks at her, having delivered many lectures about diet culture over the years.

‘Stop with the accusing glances,’ says Janey. ‘You’ll have a fifty-year-old metabolism yourself one day. You’ll need to know these things.’

The noise comes again and Janey heads towards the stairwell. ‘Please not bats, please not bats,’ she says. Essie quickly ties her hair up in a bun. Dwight turns the torch on on his phone. All of them nervous, they advance slowly up the stairs, quietly.

When Essie gets to the top and peers in – there is light streaming in from missing slates on the roof; it is genuinely incredible Mrs MacAleese lived here for so long – she isn’t sure at first what she’s looking at. Her brain, ludicrously, thinks it is a dragon curled up in a corner, with wings sticking out of it. This makes no sense at all.

‘Oh, my goodness, poor lamb,’ says Janey suddenly, and Essie thinks,that isn’t a lamb!just as her mother bolts forward, across the rickety floors and under the sloping roof.

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