C andelina steered towards the daylight. It was not easy to control the forklift in the confined spaces between arcade machines, particularly with one broken arm. And she wasn’t taking the most direct route out, either, as she had been unable to turn the whole thing round.
The fire alarm had cleared out the tourists. Some of the louder arcade machines could still be heard through the shrill alarm. She had almost reached the double door leading onto the boardwalk when a silhouette stepped in front of her, arms waving.
Candelina’s foot faltered on the accelerator in surprise.
“Stop! Stop!” the woman shouted.
Candelina tried to make her out but she was looking at her through the claw machine and the smudgy glass robbed the view of details.
“This has gone too far!” the woman shouted, and there was a familiarity of tone that suggested the woman knew her.
Candelina leaned around and looked at the woman blocking her way. She did look sort of familiar.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I…” The woman pulled her chin in and frowned, apparently surprised that Candelina didn’t know. “I’m Sam Applewhite.”
Candelina vaguely recalled her. A woman in one of the caravans. The daughter of Weenie’s stage magician friend.
“I’m a bit busy,” Candelina shouted.
Sam Applewhite shook her head. “It’s over. We know everything. Well, we know some things.”
“This is none of your business,” said Candelina.
“Given enough time, everything seems to become my business,” Sam replied. “No wonder I’m so tired.”
And then the mound of toys inside the claw machine parted and Bradley Gordon, the cleaner, knelt up and put his hands to the glass.
“Can I just get out?” he asked. “I don’t want to do this any more.”
Candelina coughed in surprise and might have said something but there was another interruption.
“Stop! Police!” came a man’s shout from behind.
A tall slender man was running up through the arcade towards her.
“Get out of the vehicle!” he yelled.
Shorelines and the edges of forests fascinate me , Rudi Haugen had written in her book. The borderline between one place and another. They call to me. The spirit of the world moves me. I want to run inside, to splash through the shallows or go into the forests in search of trolls .
Never be afraid to plunge across the borders, thought Candelina, gripped by a sudden and vast knowledge of what she must do. Now was not the time to lack conviction.
* * *
Sam could see the crazy woman’s intention a second before she enacted it.
Sam stepped smartly aside as the forklift accelerated forward. The big box of the claw machine clipped her shoulder, and one of the forklift blades whacked her leg aside. Sam spun, and for a fraction of a moment was staring directly into Bradley Gordon’s horrified face.
The little cabin of the forklift rumbled by and Sam’s brain, deciding that the forklift wasn’t going any faster than a running person, grabbed at it. Sam latched onto a piping strut, felt her shoulder nearly yanked from its socket and half-stepped aboard, half-slumped against the vehicle.
The forklift rumbled and rattled along the open boardwalk. Seagulls scattered before it.
The woman was steering, a manic grin fixed to her face. The forklift wobbled from side to side.
Sam’s foot clung to the tiny running plate, slipped, bounced on the boardwalk and tried to find purchase again.
“Stop! You’ve got nowhere to go!”
Only then did the woman seem to notice her. She laughed and shouted something in what Sam supposed was Norwegian.
“Literally nowhere to go!” Sam cried.
Skegness’s pier was not an overly long one. She’d heard it had once been much longer, but the end had been lost to a storm decades ago. Very soon, they were going to run out of pier. The forklift veered, leaning at an angle that looked impossible to recover from. Then it glanced the back of one of the fixed benches along the length of the boardwalk, sending it over in the opposite direction. Inside his glass cage, Bradley Gordon was screaming.
The forklift felt like it was tilting on two wheels. Sam suddenly had a very clear picture of herself, crushed, dead through her own stupidity, a forklift lying on top of her.
“We must —!” she gasped and reached for the controls.
The woman gave her a shove in the chest. Sam fell back. Her hip collided with the metal supports of a bench as they passed. She spun away, losing her grip.
The forklift hit the railing at the end of the pier. As she fell away from the forklift, Sam saw and felt it pivot over the railings, top-heavy with the weight of the claw machine above it.
Victorian railings popped explosively from their sockets.
The claw machine slid from the forks, flipped over the edge and dropped away. Sam fell hard on her backside on the end decking. The forklift, half off the edge, seemed to hang motionless for a moment. Sam thought she saw the woman still smiling as it slipped forward and dropped into the dark waters, but that couldn’t have been right.
Camara came clattering down to the end of the pier and looked over the edge. He had a radio in his hand and was giving urgent instructions.
Sam pushed herself to her feet. Her shoulder hurt. Her back hurt. There was an exciting new pain in her hip that was probably going to turn into bloody agony once the adrenaline had left her system. She limped to Camara and, leaning on him, looked down.
The claw machine was whole and upside down in the sea, twenty feet below. The powerful outgoing tide had already caught it and it was being pulled, inch by inch, into deeper water. To the side of it, the forklift was jammed forks straight down in the shallows. Waves beat about it. The woman was gone from the driving seat.
Sam looked out, wondering if she could see a head or a glimpse of clothing among the waves.
People were running across the sand to the scene of the accident.
Sam shifted and grunted at the mounting pain in her hip. Yes, agony was definitely where this was heading. She took the weight off that leg and leaned more heavily into Camara.
“I’m an idiot, aren’t I?” she said.
“Mmm,” he said, tilting his head. “Although, in you, it’s sort of attractive.”
“Sam Applewhite, attractive idiot?”
“You should put that on your business cards.”