The spell was broken and, like an eddy of sand, that indefinable moment dissolved. Sam was pulled back around and over the wall and into a tight embrace. For an unbearable flash, he felt a terrible loss, followed by the thought his mother had returned by some impossible means. He was wrapped in a hug both soft as proving dough yet hard as wood beneath. But his mother was never so ample nor so short as the woman who held him, nor had her hair been grey and haywire. He stood, rigid and off balance, with his arms pinned at his sides. Longing and loss, loss and longing, tumble turned in his stomach.

  “Sam Lorimer, you are welcome, my boy.” The woman rocked him side to side and then let him go to inspect him at arm’s length. She looked him up and down. “You’ve the Lorimer chin for sure,” she said, referring to the slight cleft. “Got the lanky legs too.”

  Sam clocked Michael looking almost as bemused as he felt and breathing a little heavily from the ascent up the railway sleepers. Surprisingly, Sam found this man, who’d appeared in his life merely a few days earlier, was something familiar to orientate himself back to reality.

  The woman began to shepherd Sam away from the dunes, back down the wooden path, with her arm firmly around his shoulders. ‘I’m Ma Tunstall. Ach! You’re as skinny as a whippet. Have you had lunch?’

  Sam shook his head. Thinking, who is this woman?

  ‘No! Michael, you’ve got to feed a growin’ boy.’

  Something flashed over Michael’s face, not anger, maybe a little embarrassment mixed with a realisation, a kind of crap-I-should-have-known-that look. The only thing missing was him slapping a palm to his forehead. Sam could see he was one of many items on a list Michael had to think about. He could also see he wasn’t near the top of that list. Ma Tunstall spun him around and gently pushed Sam ahead of her, clucking admonishments and shooing them back down the path to the beach house.

  ‘Don’t be going on the dunes by yourself, and certainly not until you’ve a full belly and a good night’s sleep.’

  Walking ahead of them, Michael called back over his shoulder, ‘We’re not staying the night.’

  Ma ignored him. Sam could smell her, even over the salt tang of the breeze. She gave off the scent of baked bread, freshly dug earth, and sweat, seasoned with a hint of lavender soap. ‘We’ll take you into town. Grab some lunch—’

  ‘We need to see about my car.’

  “—and see about your dad’s car. Show you around a little. Introduce you to folk.’

  ‘We’re not staying,’ Michael said again, striding up to the steps that led up to the balcony.

  ‘You’ll come for dinner at ours tonight.’

  Sam let himself be buoyed along; flotsam caught before the cutting prow of Ma Tunstall. He had no idea who this woman was, but he kind of liked that she didn’t give a shit about what Michael said or thought, just stormed over him, like a force of nature. Plus, she wanted to feed Sam and he was starving. She kept clucking and Michael kept protesting all the way to the kitchen, where she flung wide the fridge. She briefly ducked inside, leaning on the door, before rounding on Michael and pointing to the empty fridge.

  ‘There’s no food.’

  Michael’s eyebrows knitted together. ‘We’re not staying. Just meeting the estate agent and heading right back to London.’

  ‘And where is lunch in all that for the boy?’

  Sam ping ponged between the two adults.

  Michael opened his mouth like a fish, shut it again, and looked at the antique watch on his wrist and frowned even harder. ‘We’re not staying. Where is Nush?’

  Ma Tunstall shook her head in exasperation, shut the fridge door, and turned Sam by the shoulders just as his mother used to do if she was shooing him out of the flat for school or into the bathroom when he was dragging his heels, unwilling to go to bed on a school night. They bustled past Michael and out the front door.

  ‘Michael,’ Ma called back without turning. She wasn’t shouting but Sam thought that voice would carry for miles. ‘This fella’s going to blow away.’ She opened the door to her dirty Land Rover for Sam to hop in. Following him, Ma climbed behind the wheel and slammed the door. Then she leaned out of the window. ‘We’ll check on that precious car of yours too. Chop, chop!’ She gave the flank of the four-by-four a double slap.

  Michael paused at the top of the stairs, clearly considering protesting. He ran his hand through his hair, looking back into the beach house, and seemed to wilt a touch, accepting defeat, at least over the need for lunch and to check on the state of his beloved Merc. He shut and locked the front door, returned the key to its hiding place under the painted stone, and jogged to join them.

  The Land Rover bounced up the road, throwing up a haze of dust. Ma barely looked for traffic at the junction, and they swung around the corner at speed. All three of them sat in the front. Michael put his hand on the dash to steady himself as they hared down the road. Hedgerows, like riding crops, whipped at their flanks, encouraging Ma to go faster. Sam could see where that farmer, who must be this Ma Tunstall’s son, got his driving skills from. They raced out from between hedges to be presented with a fork in the road. For an instant, Sam thought they might plough headlong into the sign, but without indicating or slowing, she took the righthand trail at the last second, and they disappeared into the woods.

  ‘This is Hernshore Woods,’ Ma told Sam. ‘The town’s just on the other side. Be there in a few minutes.’ It was darker and cooler under the canopy of the trees, which stood dense on either side, and the road was as bone jarringly uneven as before. ‘Right, tell me everything, young Sam.’ She gave him a nudge with her elbow.

  The trees whooshed by in the flicker of old movie reels, strobing in a sepia of dappled sunlight. Ma’s driving rendered them at the double clip of Pathe news clips; the road was an unsteady hand on the camera, jouncing and confusing the image. Sam opened his mouth, not knowing what to say to Ma’s request. Maybe everything; probably nothing. What could he say? But Michael cut in.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  ‘His mother died a couple of weeks ago. I’m the only next of kin. We didn’t know about each other until his mother’s will. He moved in with me a few days ago, and we’ve come down to sell the beach house.’

  The revelation hung in the air. It stung Sam; a sticking plaster being ripped off a hole in his heart. Ma’s foot came off the accelerator a touch. Sam felt her tense beside him and could feel her sideways glance, before she downshifted and stamped on the juice, tearing on. Her hand squeezed Sam’s knee. It was warm and rough even through his jeans. The trees seemed to be going faster. They clunked over a pothole nearly as uncomfortable as the atmosphere in the cab and the suspension creaked.

  ‘Those expensive schools of yours didn’t teach you any tact, did they?’ Ma said.

  The tears were coming, heating up, ready to burn his eyes. But he wouldn’t let them fall, couldn’t let them. She was dead, it was true, and she was never coming back. As the foliage outside went by in a blur, the door to his mother’s bedroom began to creak ajar, bringing the bleeps and huffs of machinery. Those dead machines. Sam pulled himself back, bunching his fists and forcing himself to see the trees flying by, rays sieved through the leaves to shower the road with smatterings of gold.

  ‘I didn’t mean… I was…’ It was a consolation that Michael stuttered with discomfort, before fading to a whispered, ‘Fucking hell!’

  The Land Rover’s engine grumbled over the thick silence hanging between them. They approached a bend. Ma was heavy on the brake. She down shifted with a flatulent crunch of gears and shouldered them into the curve of the road before she broke the silence.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mum, pet.’ She patted his knee again. ‘I bet it’s a raw thing. Hard even to have an old bat like me mentioning it, let alone to have to think about it. It’s good you’ve got your dad, though.’

  Michael shifted uncomfortably in the seat next to Sam. How could Ma be so right about the first apart and so wrong about the second? How was it good to be lumbered with a guy who didn’t even want him around? Sam could see the negative answer written all over that. Maybe it was something that Michael had agreed to take him in, instead of landing him in foster care, but it was a pretty small something that wasn’t going to amount to anything. They weren’t even family in name. Sam was a Jackson and always would be.

  The woods ended in a sudden a glare of sunlight. That made Sam wince and shield his eyes. They shot past a road sign reading ‘Hernshore’ below another sign indicating a thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit, which apparently didn’t apply to Ma. The road widened, but only a little, into barely two lanes separated by a fading stitch of white lines. They were flanked by narrow pavements, with rows of old houses that leaned in, as if to see who was coming and pass whispered comments. Some of the buildings were rebricked, more were rendered smooth and coloured shades of white, blue, and even pink. A few others wore a belts and braces of aged beams, thatched roofs like straw bonnets.

  They sped past a couple of people walking the pavements, who raised their hands in recognition of the speeding Land Rover. Ma raised her hand in return. They reached the end of the road, and she broke hard and late, flinging them forward against their seatbelts. Michael white knuckled the dash. They hardly stopped at the junction; it was more like Ma was digging her heels in to make the turn. She did at least lean forward to check for traffic, as if coming up in the stirrups of a steed, before she hurled them around the corner. The vehicle definitely listed too much to one side.

  Michael drew a sharp breath. Sam felt a little exhilarated. This woman really was a force of nature, and he was a kid playing in a storm, giddy with the thrill that lightning could strike at any minute. It could hit a tree or light up the entire sky or spear him in the head and fire a million volts through you’re his body. Would he even notice when it killed him stone dead? Probably not. It would be quick, especially in the rain. Ride the lightning, baby! Roll on three, Sam heard Tom Hanks say in The Green Mile. There were far worse ways to die, Sam knew that – slow and painful and wasting ways. Ways where they didn’t wet the sponge and cooked you good and slow, so you felt every volt. Ways where they burned off your eyelids in case you tried to close them to the agony and horror of it all.

  God, he and his mother loved that movie. She even called her bath sponge ‘the Green Mile sponge.’ It was renewed a couple of times a year, but its name remained the same. She always bought one of those real sponges, shaggy things that used to be living sea creatures. When he was small, before they’d even watched the movie, and Sam was in the bath, there was ritual point when Sam complained about the soap from his hair running into his eyes. She would tell him to close his peepers and plunge the sponge into the water, then slap it on the crown of his head, shouting ‘Roll on three’ and make a sound effect like buzzing electricity and shake her hand. The water would gush over his face and sometimes he’d need a second go. She’d soak the sponge once more and cry, ‘Roll on three, bzzzzzz!’ Sam would laugh and, not knowing anything about the movie yet, he’d play along and pretend to get an electric shock. When they finally watched the movie together—and Sam had long since given up being bathed by his mother—and the moment came when the Chief was strapped into the chair to ride the lightning, Sam’s mouth went wide. Feigning shock, he turned to his mother.

  ‘Roll on three! You are sick.’

  She just grinned and threw popcorn in her mouth, eyes full of mischief, and then they broke into the giggles, and she hugged him, pulling him close to kiss his head, before putting her hand on his crown and shaking it: ‘Bzzzzz!’

  ‘So sick, mum, so sick.’

  And she was, or at least all too soon she would be for real. Roll on Three, like Percy neglected to wet the sponge for her.

  That was then. Back in the Land Rover, Sam rode the lightning of Ma’s driving. They appeared to be on the main street of Hernshore. It was wider and there were shopfronts here, some with hand-painted signs. It was a chocolate box image of an English town, the kind sold on tins of breakfast tea and boxes of biscuits to the multitude of tourists thronging the streets of London. Although, in this rendition Hernshore had the occasional modern building sprouting up between the ye-olde-Tudor-pubs and Victorian muses. A boxy Co-Op mini market gawked out through blue and white plastic signage. An off-licence chain store, Down the Hatch, stood next to it. Ma threw the highway code another insult with two fingers to the idea of mirror-signal-manoeuvrer, and suddenly cut in front of a vintage mustard yellow Datsun Sunny. Sam was thrown into Michael. Michael splayed a hand against the side window. The Datsun honked.

  ‘Toss-pot!’ Ma said in a level tone.

  As soon as the narrow alley swallowed them up, down a gullet of cobble stones, it vomited them out the other end into a small courtyard. Ma hit the brakes, and they skidded to a halt.

  Sam was smiling from a heady mix of relief spiced with exhilaration. ‘Wicked!’

  Ma shut off the engine with a wink.

  ‘My car,’ Michael said, fumbling to release his seatbelt.

  Two men in grubby, work-stained clothes stood looking at the front of the black Mercedes CLS. Its bumper was cracked and hanging half off. One of the front wheels turned in, while the other was aligned straight ahead, and the bonnet wore a large dent like broken nose running diagonally from fender to windscreen. One of the men was Toby Tunstall, broad backed and straw-headed. The other man was smaller, wiry under his baggy green coveralls, smoking the butt of a rolled cigarette. They both turned when the four-by-four appeared, and Toby’s face fell.