These two impressive facts had kept the other children quiet for a while, but Shelley had remained an outsider. Veronica Turner had taught her daughter to keep her head down and not make waves. Not to invite people back to the house unless she was really certain that she liked them, and, more importantly, that they liked her. It was better to be considered cold than to risk rejection.
But then, Shelley’s mother had known all about rejection. It was a force that had shaped her whole life—a dark, shameful secret she’d kept hidden away. Only Drew knew the full story and Shelley still remembered the day she had told him.
She had been counting cars, sitting on a low wall which separated their little group of houses from the big main road which brought all the holiday-makers into Milmouth during the summer months.
A red car had whizzed by and Shelley had stuck her tongue out between her lips and wrote it down in her notebook.
Drew had been on his way home from the boatyard, where he worked after school, drinking from a can of cola. He’d peered over her shoulder as he passed, then paused.
‘What are you doing?’
Shelley shrugged. ‘Counting cars.’
He grinned. ‘Oh? Make a habit of that, do you?’
‘It’s for my maths,’ she explained. ‘Averages and probability.’
He pulled a face and came to perch beside her. ‘Who’s winning?’
‘Blue,’ she said. ‘I’ve counted eleven, so far.’
‘Oh.’ He offered her the can. ‘Fancy a slug?’
Shelley shook her head. Money was tight in the Turner household. Never take what you can’t repay—her mother had drummed that in to her time and time again. ‘No, thanks.’
He stared at her serious little profile. ‘Why do you never see your father?’ he asked suddenly.
Shelley shrugged. If it had been anyone other than Drew who had asked it, she might have told them to mind their own business. But Drew was Drew.
‘I saw him once,’ she explained. ‘When I was a baby.’
‘Just the once?’
‘That’s right. I was three weeks old.’
‘And didn’t he want to see you again?’
Shelley blinked furiously as she ticked off another black car in her column. ‘That’s seven black,’ she gulped.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said instantly. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s all right for you!’ she said, her voice wobbling. ‘You’ve got a mother and a father, and two sisters!’
He laughed cynically. ‘Oh, yeah—it’s all right for me! When there are five of us crammed into a house you can’t swing a cat in. And my parents are always arguing. So are my sisters! I’ll tell you something, Shelley—sometimes I just want to smash my way out of there and never come back!’ His blue gaze was piercing. ‘Do you really think that everyone’s life is so perfect except your own?’
Shelley shook her head in amazement. Drew felt like that inside? ‘Of course I don’t!’
‘I won’t ask you about your father again,’ he told her gently. ‘It isn’t important.’
But it was important. He had taken her into his confidence and she wanted to tell him. Secrets could become unbearable burdens if you didn’t share them.
‘My father was…is a dentist. My mother used to work for him—she was his nurse. They had, like, a big romance. Well, my mum thought it was a big romance,’ Shelley shrugged. ‘She’d come down from Scotland and she didn’t know very much about men.’
Drew nodded thoughtfully, but he didn’t say anything.
‘Then she found out she was pregnant with me, so she told him…she told him…and he got really mad with her. Said that it had all been a big mistake. And that there was no point in her trying to trap him into marriage—because he already had a wife and children, and they were his “real” children—’
Drew scowled. ‘And your mother didn’t know that?’
Shelley rounded on him. ‘Of course she didn’t know that! If she had done she would never have got involved with him in the first place! What sort of woman do you think she is?’
‘I didn’t mean to insult your mother, Shelley,’ he told her, with dignity. ‘It just makes me mad when men treat women that way.’ He brushed dark, untidy hair back from his face. ‘So what happened?’
‘Oh, he went back to America with his wife and “real” children and Mum brought me here to live. That was the last she ever saw of him.’
‘And why Milmouth?’ he asked, with interest.
She was grateful for the fact that her instinct had been correct—that Drew wasn’t judging her or her mother and finding them wanting.
‘She wanted somewhere cheap to live, and couldn’t face going back to Scotland with a baby and no father. And she loves the sea.’
He smiled. ‘So do I, as a matter of fact. I never want to be away from the sea.’
‘Me neither,’ she said shyly, smiling back, realising that she had found her true-life hero.
But after that she rarely saw him—their lives diverged and the age-gap was all wrong. Seven years could seem like a generation gap. She knew that he had done well in his school exams, and knew that his teachers had been disappointed when he became an apprentice carpenter. Everyone thought that he’d go away to college.
‘It’s because he’s good at making things,’ his mother explained to Shelley on the way back from the shops one day. ‘Good with his hands. And he likes the open air—says he doesn’t want to be cooped up inside in an office all day. Good luck to him, I say!’
Shelley saw him on the day he left school, with the best grades of his year, and it took every bit of courage she possessed to go up to him and congratulate him. ‘I hear you’re going to be a carpenter?’
He narrowed his blue eyes at her assessingly. ‘What’s the matter, Shelley—don’t you think I’m aiming high enough?’
She shrugged her shoulders awkwardly. She was only eleven—so what did she know? ‘It’s not that,’ she lied.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No. I just thought that you’d be—’
‘A pilot?’ he grinned. ‘Or a doctor?’
‘Maybe.’
‘It’s an insecure world, kitten—and people always need houses.’
‘I guess they do.’ And she blushed with pleasure to hear him call her ‘kitten’.
Sometimes, when Shelley was up in her bedroom reading, she used to glimpse him wandering home, stripped to the waist, all honed muscle and bronzed perfection. And the words used to dance like hieroglyphics on the page in front of her.
She was seventeen when he went travelling, originally for a year, but the wanderlust caught him and he was gone for much longer.
She remembered one of the last times she had seen him before he’d left. She’d gone sunbathing further up the bay with a couple of schoolfriends—hidden, they thought, by a large screen of rocks. Feeling liberated and daring, they had removed their bikini tops. But Drew had been out running along the beach, and had seen them. He had gone absolutely ballistic, with Shelley in particular, and her friends had teased her afterwards and said that must mean that he fancied her.