Page 2 of Summer in Sunset Harbour
Josie felt a pang of regret at the mention of her daughter. Off at university in Leeds, Josie was lucky to get a monthly phone call. Reid, who had promised to support their daughter using the divorce settlement, had boasted at the court hearing that he was called once a week.
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s no real point until the poison’s run its course, is there?’
She movedout on a blustery April morning. She packed everything she owned that the cost of her legal bills didn’t require her to sell into the back of the Volvo and drove across Bristol from Redfield to Knowle West, where a distant cousin had offered her a flat for a month until she could get herself back on her feet.
The rubbish strewn in the tiny front garden downstairs didn’t bode well, and the damp stains on the wall in the kitchen were worryingly fresh, but Josie couldn’t stand to stay in her old house while she waited for it to be sold. Too many memories, too much turned sour, and too many regrets. She needed to make a clean break, even if ‘clean’ was a misnomer, judging by the dust collecting in the corners of the flat’s poky living room. The view through the grimy window of the charred frame of a burnt-out townhouse was hardly memorable either, but with no curtains, all Josie could do was pull the threadbare sofa around so that it faced the inner wall. That she quickly discovered the corpse of a mouse underneath was probably a good thing; she was able to dispose of it before she needed to go hunting for the source of the smell.
Still, she had to be grateful. She had a roof over her head, even if it was leaking in a couple of places, and the heating worked, even if the immersion heater in the hall gave off a gassy smell. Just in case, she opened the kitchen window a crack, brushing away a few dead flies in the process. The water in the taps ran brown for a few seconds before going clear, but that was okay: she had brought a bottle of wine with her to toast the end of her marriage.
Covering the sofa with the blanket she had kept in the back of her car for those times Reid had locked her out—just in case there were any mice nests hidden down among the springs—she poured a glass of wine, sat down in her new—old, very, very old—lodgings, and lifted the glass.
‘To the future,’ she said to no one, trying to sound positive while refusing at the same time to cry.
2
A Possible Change in Fortune
Her divorcefrom Reid Euphrates had not only left Josie financially destitute but it had somehow managed to destroy her reputation at the same time. Once upon a time she had been a respected secondary school geography teacher, but when Reid—a journeyman singer-songwriter who had subsisted on lengthy pub tours for the last twenty years—had decided to drag her name through the mud rather than simply climbing onto his rusty old tour bus and driving away, the fallout had begun to manifest itself wherever Josie looked. She lost her job over a test scores dispute which normally would have been shrugged off, then found herself barred from both her local pub and local supermarket.
Not to worry, she had a car.
Then an article appeared in the local paper claiming she had tried to sabotage her husband’s career, and suddenly her neighbours wouldn’t talk to her, closing ranks around Reid, a Bristol local. She had got by thanks to a handful of loyal private students, and had thought that since she had been paying her and Reid’s mortgage since day one, she might have got to keep her house.
Reid, somehow, had been able to afford an expensive lawyer who claimed he had sacrificed his income in order to be a house husband for Josie and a stay-at-home dad for Tiffany. The reality that he had spent most of their spare money on long and expensive nationwide tours during which he had done god-knows-what and left them owing enough money to promoters that Josie had needed to take a second job private tutoring to pay for, hadn’t mattered when everything was said and done. Reid had suffered; she had sponged.
And now he had taken almost everything, and what he hadn’t taken, she would need to sell to pay for her attempt to fight it.
The final nail in Josie’s coffin had been hammered in by finding out just how Reid had managed to afford to take her legally to the cleaners in the first place.
It turned out that his new fiancée was a wealthy heiress by the name of Lady Evangeline of Suffolk. Fifty-five years old and clearly out of her mind, she had decided to finance the career of her new singer-songwriter boyfriend, and the first thing that entailed was throwing his long-suffering ex-wife into the nearest juicer and squeezing out every last drop.
‘So, have you waited tables before?’ asked Jonathan Able of Pebbles Fine Wine and Dining from his seat across the table, looking up from the clipboard Josie assumed held a copy of her resume and peering over the top of a vase of dried flowers.
‘I helped out at a friend’s wedding once,’ Josie said. ‘I didn’t drop anything.’
‘I should hope not. How are you at working under pressure?’
‘I was a secondary school teacher. Pressure was my middle name.’
‘It says Flora on here.’
‘I didn’t mean literally.’
‘I see.’ Jonathan squinted at the clipboard. ‘There’s no related reference. Was it a job you were fired from?’
‘I took an offered redundancy,’ Josie said, forcing a smile.
Jonathan looked up and smiled, the first time Josie had seen any genuine emotion since the interview had started. ‘That’s what we call it, too,’ he said. ‘So, no experience, and no references.’
‘There’s one from my university.’
‘Yes, but it’s more than twenty years old. The person who wrote it could quite literally be dead.’
‘So?’
‘Have you experienced any changes in your life over the last … generation?’
‘Yes, a few things.’
