Page 63 of The Winter of Second Chances
‘She’s not coming home!’
‘Says who?’
‘Says me!’
‘Shouldn’t Mari decide whether she gets to live in her own home or not?’
‘You have no idea of the relationship I have with my aunt or the discussions we’ve had about her future.’
‘Are those the ones where you sell her home out from under her to a business fat cat for mega bucks?’ Even Annie was surprised by her brazen rudeness.
John puffed out exasperatedly.
‘He’s a builder, I’ve known him for years. Despite what you may have heard, his plans are very sympathetic to the land.’
‘But not so sympathetic to your aunt’s wishes.’
John ran his hand through his hair and sucked air in through his teeth.
‘You are determined to think the worst of me,’ he said curtly.
It occurred to Annie that she might not be being entirely fair, but while she racked her brain for something conciliatory to say, John took her silence as confirmation.
‘Enjoy your Sunday,’ he said, turning to walk down the steps from the front door. ‘Perhaps if you would appraise me by myactualactions, rather than what you presuppose my intentions to be, you might judge me less harshly.’
‘Presuppose?’ Annie called after him. ‘Who even talks like that? Oh, wait a minute, the 1870s just called, they want their vocabulary back!’
John didn’t look back. In three long strides he had reached the gate and let himself out, fastening the latch carefully behind him. He climbed into his Range Rover and drove away.
Annie was struck by how quickly the conversation had turned. Was he right? Was she determined to think the worst of him? It was true that she had felt riled by John from the very first with his snitty email. And now, she found herself stuck in a kind of spite-rut, where whenever she saw his face, she felt overwhelmingly compelled to be rude to it.
Halloween has always been a big deal in Willow Bay, what with its shady past and dark history. The village itself is named after theWillow, a ship which ran aground on the rocks out past the peninsula on 1 October 1502. Before that it was known, somewhat unimaginatively, as Fish Beach, a rather difficult to reach, out of the way place that didn’t get much in the way of visitors. The story goes that there was a ferocious storm which had raged for three days and nights, and on the fourth night, lost and confused by the starless sky and the squalling tempest, theWillowsailed in close to the bay. The villagers ran to the beach waving flaming torches to warn the ship that it was too close but it was too late – either the crew didn’t see them or they couldn’t change course in time. TheWillowsailed headlong into the bay and was dashed against the rocks. The villagers gathered to help (or pilfer the cargo, depending on which accounts you read) but there were no survivors (again, this depends on which version of events you can stomach; there were accounts of sailors being drowned, so they couldn’t make a claim on the cargo). Either way, bodies continued to wash up on the shore for days and weeks after.
The villagers were a superstitious bunch. Though the name had been changed to All Hallows’ Eve by then, the old Samhain belief that the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest between the last days of October and the first days of November was still very much alive. As you can imagine, the village was gripped by a fear that they would be overrun with the souls of dead sailors, and so they carved scary faces into turnips and swedes and built fires along the beach to ward off any evil spirits which may have been looking for a spot of revenge.
Later on in the dubious history of Willow Bay, the smugglers used the nights between All Hallows’ Eve and Guy Fawkes Night – with the lighted fires on the beach and the near constant celebrations – as a mask to cover their illegal transportation of whisky and tea into the tunnels beneath Saltwater Nook; it was said to be their most prolific week of the year! At an agreed signal, the residents of the houses in the hillside would drop ropes down to the beach from the bottoms of their gardens and the smugglers would emerge from the Saltwater Nook cellar under cover of darkness with their hoard. They tied the ropes around the contraband barrels and the goods would be hauled up through the undergrowth and dished out to be hidden within the village.
And times after, when smuggling was no more and the smugglers had become all but legends, and when the tide was just right, the village children would gather by the mouth of the cave at Halloween – the older ones leading the way and bringing up the stragglers at the rear – and make a candlelit pilgrimage through the tunnels and up into the cellars at the Nook. It was still going on when I came to live here with my aunt. We would bang on the door to the cellar, half wild with fear and excitement, and she would open it up and feign surprise to find us all standing there, cold and wet and smelling of the sea.
‘Well!’ she would say, ‘you’d better come up since you’re already here!’ and up the stone cellar steps we tramped and into the tea room where she would have made toffee apples and ginger parkin enough to feed the five thousand! We’d play bob the apple and snap-dragon and one of the fishermen would tell the tale of how Willow Bay got its name, making sure to add in plenty of lost souls and shrieking selkies.
Over time the tunnel processions had to be abandoned; there were incidents, I’ll say no more about that. And what with the rockfalls, soon nobody went into the tunnels even for dares. Halloween became altogether tamer and eventually it was decided that even snap-dragon was not really in keeping with health and safety – children poking their fingers into bowls of brandy-flaming raisins probably wasn’t ideal on many levels. But my goodness, we had fun!
These days the costumes are a little fancier and the ghost stories a mite gentler but the Willow Bay folk still do a braw Halloween. I don’t want you to feel pressure to keep the old ways going. Time must move on. And you, whoever you are who is reading this, will have your own ideas about things. But I’ll tell you how it’s been done up to now and you can choose for yourself.
The children – with their parents these days, of course – begin to call at the houses in the village at the gloaming for their tricks and their treats. Then they gather at the top of the hill for the procession and down they come, all the way to Saltwater Nook. You’ll find in the attic some provisions for decorating the place. I used to dish out hot drinks and sundries but not for the last twenty years or so – I can’t keep up! So now I make sure I’ve a bucketload of sweets and the outside of the place is decorated with spooky things and Ely will frighten the bairns senseless with the tale of the sunken Willow and ghostly sailors. Legend has it that the captain’s bounty was never recovered and rests at the bottom of the ocean somewhere around these parts. Children love a sunken treasure tale. And they go home happily terrified and no doubt sleep with the lights on for days after, but it’s all in the name of fun.
Halloween had not been something Annie had seriously had to consider for years – beyond the obligatory carving of the jack-o’-lantern; usually she was working. Ever since reading Mari’s notebook, however, she had found herself thinking about Halloween with a surprising amount of glee; her list-making senses were tingling. She had picked up a veritable feast of tooth-shrivelling sweets and had been checking the internet for decorations. She had her eye on a few things, but she really needed to check what Mari already had before she committed.
The attic was reached by a small hatch in the hallway between the sitting room and the kitchen. Annie hauled the ladder from the cellar up the stairs to the flat. She pushed open the hatch and was greeted with a cold waft of dank air. Annie climbed up and crawled into the roof space. There was just room enough for her to stand up in places, and beneath her feet a skinny path of planks ran along some of the beams. On either side of the planks, balanced across the beams, was a sea of cardboard boxes. Annie shone her phone torch around and found, to her relief, that they were all neatly labelled. She stepped gingerly towards the boxes marked Halloween and set about opening them; she didn’t want to drag them all down to the flat if they weren’t things she would want to use. She had just taken a vegetable knife to the tape on the first box when the doorbell rang.Shit, Annie thought but then she thought,Fuck it, and decided to ignore it. She turned back to the box. The bell rang again. Annie huffed exasperatedly but carried on slitting the tape with the knife and pulled open the flaps. The doorbell rang again.
‘Go away!’ she yelled.
The first box contained Halloween fairy lights: strings of orange plastic jack-o’-lanterns, white grinning skeletons, bats and baubles with black cats silhouetted inside them. Some were indoor and some outdoor but there was enough here for an impressive display. Annie carefully replaced the flaps and pushed the box towards the hatch before going back to open the next one. She was just detangling two flying witches’ heads when she heard a knock at the door to the flat. She froze. The main front door to the building was locked, as was the door to the tea room; it must be someone with a key – John Granger! Annie’s initial fear morphed into anger.The bloody cheek of it!She was sure there must be a law against this sort of thing. The knocking came again.
‘Just wait a minute, would you!’ she yelled through the ceiling. ‘I’m right in the middle of something.’
She began to shuffle, as quickly as she dared, back the way she had come, the planks wobbling beneath her feet. ‘Bloody John bloody Granger, acting the bloody lord and master in someone else’s house,’ she muttered to herself. ‘I’m going to give that upstart a piece of my miiiiiiiii...’ In her haste she over-wobbled on the plank. She tried to regain her balance but it was no good. Gravity and self-preservation kicked in at the same time; she threw her arms out to steady herself but the wood beneath her feet was see-sawing wildly and her ankles were following suit. In another second one foot had slipped off the plank completely. Annie’s right foot clumped down hard between the beams and kept on going, straight through the ceiling below with an alarming crunch. She was kneeling on one leg as though waiting for a starter pistol to go off, both hands gripping the plank, her other leg dangling uselessly through the hole above what she could see, looking down, was the kitchen.
