Star was up a stepladder reaching for a box of silver necklace clasps when the wind chime that she had placed against the shop door tinkled to alert her of a customer.
‘Won’t be a sec,’ she called down, wobbling slightly.
‘I think I’ve seen that peachy little bottom of yours more times than I’ve seen your face.’ The Irish accent made her freeze for a second. She made her way carefully down and turned to face the beauty that was Conor Brady.
‘But I’m not complaining.’ He smiled The Smile, causing Star to fixate on his one dimple and become temporarily mute. ‘Just checking you got the flowers then?’
Star ran a hand through her hair. ‘Yes, sorry. I meant to text you last night and I fell asleep.’
‘Sweet dreams about me, I hope.’
Star laughed. ‘You’re relentless. And the flowers, they’re beautiful. Thank you so much, you really shouldn’t have.’
‘Oh, I really should. I mean, however else am I going to get that drink you promised me? After all, Kara told me that the dahlia flower can mean finding a balance between adventure and relaxation.’
‘Did she now? But it’s market day tomorrow and I’ve got so much to do that I have time for neither of those enviable pursuits, unfortunately.’
‘So, it’s not a flat no then?’ Conor Brady’s tone was that of a man who wasn’t used to being turned down.
The wind chime tinkled again as a girl with long jet-black hair and multiple piercings arrived and started to look at the earring display stand on the counter.
‘I’ll be in touch, I promise,’ Star said briefly to the waiting Irishman, then turned to assist her customer.
‘OK, and I’ll sure be up for the craic when you’re ready for either of those … pursuits, that is,’ Conor said and left the shop.
With a pink face, Star served her customer then went through to her work table in the room at the back of the shop. She had bought it off eBay and loved the fact that it was covered in chisel marks and had nonsensical writing all over it, plus a variety of coloured pen doodles. The table was perfect for her jewellery-making venture. Linking her phone to her portable Bose speaker, she searched for the download of The Very Best of Enya album. Kara had always said that she had an old soul; Star’s outlook on life and her choice of music were certainly not typical for her thirty-something years. She herself knew that it was because Estelle always used to have music playing in their cramped home, whatever time of day or night, and these melodies had stayed locked in her memory vault.
As the haunting sound of ‘Only Time’ drifted around her little workroom, she shut her eyes for a second. What was the worst that could happen if she dated Conor Brady and fell for him? she asked herself. Maybe she had just been holding on to Jack because there was nothing else to hold on to. Maybe what she had felt for him was just lust, because they certainly had had a lot of sex in a short period of time. Sadly, that’s all it had been, just one evening of passion. In fact, she hadn’t even woken up with him the next morning as Skye had been out with a friend and was due to come home. Star remembered feeling guilty and flustered as she passed her daughter in the hallway almost the very second after he had left to go back to Kara’s flat down on the estuary. Jack had been staying in the room her friend had been renting out as an Airbnb then. Rushing to the bathroom, Star had climbed into a hot bubble bath with a huge grin on her face, thinking over and over what had just happened.
Love at first sight was surely a myth, she thought now. Yes, they had clicked, had even finished each other’s sentences at one point. And who else had even heard of Blaise Pascal, let alone be able to quote back her favourite ever saying: The heart has its reasons which reason knows not. Star whispered the words to herself and felt her breath quicken as she relived the touch of Jack’s hand as he had stroked her neck before kissing her for the very first time. He had smelled so good too. And his shoes … Fickle it might be, but shoes mattered to Star, and Jack had been wearing good trainers.
She had always believed that when the time was right, the universe would open up and her love angels would send her the man she was supposed to be with. But Jack was not only thousands of miles away but had been in a relationship already; surely her angels wouldn’t make her chance at love that complicated? And if he had felt anything for her, he would surely have followed it up and been in touch with her. He had told Kara to tell Star that he was sorry. Why couldn’t he have sent a message to tell her that himself? And now that she didn’t even know where he worked, short of flying to New York in the hope that he might still live in a block of flats overlooking Central Park and then camping outside until she saw him, her options were decidedly limited. And anyway, that idea was perilously close to stalking.
Maybe it was time to let him go from her thoughts. Was that possible? Could you really do that? she wondered. If you didn’t love someone, surely the memories of them would fade. Like when your heart felt as if it was breaking, and then one day, you suddenly realised you hadn’t thought about that person for a long time. ‘Only Time’ would tell. Star sang along to the final lyric of the Enya song. Time was definitely a healer, but it was also a funny thing. You wanted it to go fast when you were sitting in a school classroom during a boring lesson or at a desk in an office doing a job you hated, or freezing on a platform waiting for a train to arrive. Then sometimes you ached for it to go slowly, like those delicious few hours she had spent with Jack.
Star made herself a coffee, then went back to fixing a light green peridot stone to the delicate necklace she was creating. She loved it when she had moments like this, alone with her thoughts whilst she became absorbed in the work she was so passionate about.
Jack again crossed her mind. Could she really love him after just one meeting? It couldn’t be possible, surely? If she was honest with herself, Star didn’t think that she had ever been in ‘real’ love with anyone, so how was she to know?
This was her fault for not putting herself out there after having Skye, she decided. Yes, she had felt devastated when Danny Ball had dumped her in her teens at school, but had that been love? At the time she had thought so, experiencing a heartbreak so painful that she had thrown herself into a destructive spell of drinking and smoking weed. This reckless path had led her to become involved with an older married man, and soon it was ‘Danny who?’ The fact that her new lover was twenty-eight made it all the more exciting, as did having sex in his car, with his insistence that it was their secret and that no one should know about them. An experienced lover, he had taken her to sexual heights she had not known existed. He gave her free weed from the stash he regularly scored from her mother and even money for cigarettes.
It had all seemed like some kind of distorted fairy tale until the day she told him she was pregnant. His expression had changed then, become frightening. He said he would have known if the condom had split. Told her that she was a lying little bitch. Had then swiped his hand across her cheek so hard he had cut her skin and created a bruise so colourful she had to keep her hair pulled around her face for over a week so that nobody would notice. She wept, begged, promised him that she was not sleeping with anyone else and that he was her everything. For fear of repercussions, he immediately gave her cash for an abortion, even drove her to the private clinic she was to go to. Then he ordered her never, ever to contact him again. It was over. He would find somewhere else to get his weed. And if she ever tried to communicate with him in any form, he would deny even knowing her name.
Star had been just sixteen years old. She was also five months pregnant at the time, as her irregular periods and tiny flat tummy had given her no indication of what was going on within. It was Estelle who, on seeing her naked one day, had suspected and gone out to buy her a pregnancy test. And when the result was positive, it was Estelle who told her that she would accompany her to the doctor straight away so that she could get all the pre-natal care she needed.
Flashbacks to the day when, thanks to her mother’s intervention, she had found out she was pregnant, were so painful. It had seemed like the end of her world then. Not only was she losing the man she had become totally obsessed with, but she was also now going to be a mother at just sixteen years old. When Estelle asked who the father was, she had lied, telling her that it had been a casual encounter with another teenager, a holidaymaker on the beach. She said she didn’t even have the boy’s number or surname, so they would never be able to trace him.
Once Star had had her scan and could see just how well formed and far along the little baby was inside of her, there was no question of an abortion; she was going to have this baby. This decision was the one her mother had convinced her was the right one, despite Star going on to doubt it for the next four and a bit months of her pregnancy. It wasn’t until the tiny five-pound wrinkly and screaming red baby was handed to her with her big round blue eyes and wispy white hair, that Star and Estelle Bligh instantly fell in love. And from that day on, little Skye Lilian became the fourth generation of Bligh women to live in the dark green static home high up on Hartmouth Head.