Oh God, why had he said that? Jake was still asking himself the question when he made his breakfast the next morning and opened a pouch of cat food for Leo, who had decided to wander in as soon as Jake had opened the door.
‘Why did I say it, Leo?’ he asked, leaning against the worktop while Leo sniffed disdainfully at the dish of food. Jake’s feet were bare under the pyjama bottoms he’d thrown on in case anyone passed by the kitchen window.
Leo spared him a brief glance as if to say ‘Dunno, mate. Because you’re a bit of a plonker like all humans?’ before finally wolfing down his Luxury Hare and Badger Potage, or whatever disgusting stuff had squirted out of the pouch.
Jake decided he’d rather have toast than hare and badger so he sawed off a slice of loaf while reflecting on last night’s events at the Moor’s Head. Before they were halfway down the road from the pub, he’d apologised for saying he would have prints in the gallery without consulting Poppy.
‘I’m sorry. It just came out but Minty was being so … Minty-ish. I couldn’t resist it.’
Poppy hadn’t seemed annoyed. Far from it. She’d seemed happy with the idea.
‘It’s OK and you don’t have to do it. Even the offer was worth hearing to see her face … I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. She’s your friend and also I really do want her work in the Starfish.’
‘I wouldn’t have said she’s a friend …’ Jake had begun, then decided that it was better to keep things simple where Minty Cavendish was concerned, if that was humanly possible, since Minty’s raison d’etre seemed to be to make life complicated for anyone she came into contact with. ‘And if you do want some exclusive prints, I’m happy to provide some. If my work fits in with your ethos, that is.’
‘Happy’ hadn’t been quite the right word, in hindsight.
Poppy had laughed, and jokingly said she’d consider it: ‘But I will have to charge you the forty per cent commission.’
Jake had said ‘fine’ and they’d parted at the door of his grandpa’s cottage, laughing.
He’d watched her walk off to the studio with the moonlight on her back. Her step was light and he could hear her faintly humming a tune they’d heard in the bar once she thought she was out of his hearing. He’d closed the door behind him, still smiling, and fallen asleep with the same tune burrowing away like an earworm at his mind …
How different things seemed this morning. Leo finished his breakfast while Jake sat at the ancient kitchen table and buttered his third slice of toast. When he’d woken, rain was lashing the cottage windows and the wind was howling. Last night’s euphoria had evaporated.
Whether it was the rain or stubbing his toe on the crate of paintings, he wasn’t sure. He’d agreed to supply some prints to Poppy … which sounded simple enough – but wasn’t.
He did sell signed limited editions of his landscapes and wildlife shots through a handful of high-quality galleries. However, if the prints were to be any use to Poppy they did have to fit in with her ‘vision’ for the gallery, which meant that, really, they needed to be of Scilly – specifically of St Piran’s.
The problem was he didn’t have a single shot of the island.
Prior to Harriet’s death, he’d had hundreds – thousands – of photographs of his family and of Harriet on the isles. Then, a few weeks after she died, in the grip of overwhelming grief, he’d erased every file from his cameras and his laptop. He’d burnt all the memory cards too and started deleting everything relating to the island from the external hard drive. He’d even tried to remove all the St Piran’s shots from his online photo storage account. Eventually he’d calmed down a little and come to realise that it would be almost impossible to delete everything he’d ever taken. There were pictures he’d shared on the internet and social media that he had no control over.
Looking back now, Jake realised the awful state he’d been in those first few months after he’d lost Harriet. He must have been trying to deal with his grief and guilt by attempting to wipe out the source of it.
Even if he could find some photos of St Piran’s from that time, he didn’t want to put them on public display. They would show St Piran’s before he lost Harriet, and the way he’d felt about his homeland then wasn’t the way he felt he about it now.
The only thing to do was to take some new pictures: could he do that, when that view was coloured by grief and unhappiness? Some people might think that it couldn’t hurt to look at a place through a lens, as long as he didn’t actually revisit the scene of the accident. He was already here, for God’s sake, with the studio, the harbour, the cottage and sea in front of him every day.
Choosing a location and a subject, truly looking at it – interacting with it – was a totally different matter though. While taking pictures, he couldn’t help but think very deeply about his subject matter or the way he felt about it. A stone, a wave, the grass – they weren’t simply inanimate objects to him; here, they seethed with memories and emotions and Jake worried he might be pulled back into the abyss.
The rattle of the cat flap startled him and Leo entered the room. The cat stalked off, spraying the doorframe on his way out, but his arrival had at least snapped Jake out of his maudlin thoughts.
He went upstairs to get dressed, ready for the day’s work at the Starfish Studio. The crate of Grandpa’s paintings sat in the bedroom. He wasn’t exactly sure what the paintings would show, but he was certain that many memories lay inside, waiting to be unlocked. Everything seemed to be conspiring to keep him on St Piran’s: Grandpa’s paintings, helping Poppy to renovate the studio, and now, the need to take more photographs. He’d moved so far out of his comfort zone in the past few days …
Was that wholly a bad thing?
Jake didn’t know the answer, so he decided to focus on practical matters and get over to the studio and start work.
After dragging on jeans and a T-shirt, he looked around for some footwear and found one of his new Adidas trainers wedged under the divan. He could have sworn he’d kicked off both the previous evening before he got undressed, but there was no sign of the other.
‘Oh, for God’s sake …’ He said it out loud, on his hands and knees hunting under the bed. ‘Ow!’ He caught his head on the corner of the crate as he straightened up.
Feeling sick for a moment, he sat on the bed, rubbing his head. He had to shift that thing into Grandpa’s room. It was like the crate in Raiders of the Lost Ark: glowing and throbbing with some mystical power. When he eventually did open it, he half expected evil spirits would fly out and melt his face.
Suddenly laughing at the craziness of his own thoughts, he padded downstairs, wondering where the hell the other trainer was. He didn’t remember throwing them around the cottage when he’d got in from the pub last night … Surely it wasn’t in the kitchen … No one could have moved it … no human anyway …
‘Oh. Shit.’
Leo was back inside now, sitting in a pool of sunlight in the kitchen, looking distinctly smug. And there was his other trainer, neatly upturned in the centre of the litter tray – and if Jake wasn’t mistaken, it was carefully concealing one of Leo’s poos.