8. Sea Currents

8

Sea Currents

Despite barricading the door to her shack with an old table, Josie slept poorly, waking up to incessant rain outside. As she peered out of the door, wondering whether she would find a wicker man erected in the clearing outside, she couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret that Hilda had convinced her to stay.

First things first. As a teacher, making lists and keeping notes had kept her from going insane or being crushed beneath a pile of unfinished tasks. She stared out at the remains of the campsite, mentally taking stock of everything, wondering where she ought to start.

There was nothing much that could be done outside with the rain, but there were a number of cabins hidden away among the trees. She grabbed a raincoat and an umbrella and headed out. Within a few steps her shoes were caked with sloppy mud, and she could feel it getting right down into her toes. Wellington boots went on the list.

She found eight cabins, all padlocked. While vines had reclaimed a couple, through grimy windows the insides looked in relatively good order, even if the décor was a little out of date.

It was likely Nat had the padlock keys hidden away somewhere, but with no inclination to trudge up a muddy hillside to his house, she went looking around the campsite instead, wondering what else she might find. The play barn in the centre was also padlocked, but wandering about in the rain, she came across the shower and toilet block Nat had mentioned, with taps that actually worked, and to her even greater surprise, had hot water. While the drains immediately began to back up, clogged with years of mud and fallen leaves, the warm water felt good on her hands, and she even managed a smile.

‘Come on, Josie,’ she muttered to herself, glancing up at the tree canopy overhead as she realised that for the first time that morning the rain had actually stopped.

Things were looking up.

Near the edge of the trees, where the gravel road entered the forest, she found an old signboard lying in the hedge, its wooden legs rotted away. The surface, however, was durable plastic, and after wiping off thirty years of crusted dirt, she found herself presented with a map of the park.

To her surprise, there was a welcome cabin which doubled as a camping shop hidden behind vegetation not twenty yards away. After digging her way through ferns, brambles and vines, she peered through a grimy window to see a line of keys hung up on hooks behind a reception counter. The door itself required a regular key—which she of course didn’t have—but things were still looking up.

The map threw up some other surprises, too. It turned out that the tower thing she had found was a helter-skelter, the tallest permanent structure in Cornwall, and part of a wider children’s park and play area which included a section called ‘Treetop Adventure Land’. Josie scowled at a cartoonish picture of several interconnected treehouses with smiling children playing among the walkways, and vowed to reclaim them.

An hour later, she found herself trudging down the path to Nathaniel’s place. This time, Robinson was nowhere to be seen, but Nathaniel was outside, standing by a giant piece of driftwood, chipping away at it with a knife.

He grinned when she told him what she wanted.

‘Ah, maid, I don’t have coin for anything like that,’ he said. ‘Me’s a man of simple means.’

‘I can’t do it all myself,’ Josie said. ‘I mean, I can clean, and probably figure out how to patch a few things up, but I can’t do a place like that on my own. It’s too big.’

‘Hang on a sec.’

Nathaniel put down his knife, turned and stumbled, seemingly from memory, back to his shack. He went inside, then emerged again five minutes later.

‘Here’s what I’ve got, maid,’ he said, grinning. ‘This’ll start ’e on right path.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Transistor radio. You can listen to the cricket. Keep yer mind busy, free yer hands up for the task.’

‘It’s April.’

‘Ah, start them games early these days, don’t they?’

‘But—’

‘No need for no fancy tinternet down there, is there?’

‘Internet.’

‘Twas what I said. Tinternet.’

‘Right.’

‘And I got these for ’e.’

A gnarled old hand reached into his pocket and took out a keyring. Fingers as twisted as the driftwood he carved held up a key attached to a silver Cornish pasty.

‘What does that open?’

‘Barn. Inside, on left, you’ll find key for the shop hanging up. All other keys inside.’ He grinned, a gold tooth glinting in the sun. ‘Big on me security, me.’

‘But I need cleaning goods, tools. I just sold everything I owned to pay for a divorce lawyer who lost me everything.’

‘Who needs money?’ Nat said. ‘Get a bit of barter going. Tit for tat. But if you do go up garden centre, this’ll sort ’e out. Found him on the beach yesterday.’

He reached into his other pocket and held up a crumpled twenty-pound note which he handed to Josie.

‘You … found that on the beach? How? I thought you were—’

Nathaniel grinned. ‘Like any good wolf, I can smell the old spondoola.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Nah, ’twas in a bottle.’

‘Really?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘You found a bottle washed up on the beach with a twenty-pound note in it? Was there anything else inside?’

‘Yeah, message. Didn’t read it. The eyes, you know.’ He grinned, tapping the side of his sunglasses.

‘What did you do with it?’

‘Threw it back. Ain’t no one gonna find it down there. Give it six months, current’ll take it down Mount’s Bay.’

Josie could only shake her head. ‘Well, thanks.’

‘Go up garden centre, give ’em that, open me a tab. Tell ’em I’ll settle dreckly.’

‘Right.’

‘That all? Sorry lass, got to get back to work. Inspiration’s like a sea current, don’t you know. Catch it while it’s there or you’re becalmed for days.’

As he shuffled back to his sculpture, Josie turned and trudged back up the path to the road, a radio, a key and twenty pounds better off, but still with little clue how she was going to get the campsite open and running.

By the time she reached Hilda’s place in order to beg for a lift up to the garden centre, she realised she had forgotten to ask Nathaniel about the people living in the treehouses. With a sigh, she wondered if twenty pounds would be enough to bribe them to go away.

Hilda was only too happy to oblige, and an hour later, she dropped Josie back down at the campsite armed with several bags of cleaning materials—to Josie’s surprise, the garden centre’s manager had actually agreed to set a tab up for Nathaniel—a petrol strimmer on loan from Hilda, and a brand new pair of wellington boots. She had also gone so far as to buy some batteries for the transistor radio. To her surprise, she did manage to find a station airing the commentary for an cricket match abroad, but having no clue as to the rules or what any of the terminology meant, she tuned in to a radio drama station instead.

The barn padlock took a bit of wrestling with, but just as she was about to give up and go hunting for a sledgehammer, the lock turned with a rusty clunk and she was able to get inside. Again, to her surprise, the electric lights still worked, but as soon as she turned them on, half of the bulbs—likely not used for decades—blew out.

The ones that had survived, however, gave her just enough light to see as she padded up a concrete walkway that had once been covered with some kind of flooring, although little more than a few shreds now remained intact. While it might once have been blue, it was now a smeared, water-damaged green. In walled-off sections were ping pong and pool tables, an indoor play area for smaller children, and a seating area that might have once been a café, even if now all that remained was a dirty bar covered in vines that had got inside through a crack in the wall.

As she wandered from section to section, however, she stopped regarding it as essentially a ruin. Instead, she began to do something that she couldn’t remember doing in a long time: dream. Many of the campsite’s facilities were in decent repair, needing little more than a good clean up and a lick of paint. And while some parts revealed more of the passage of time than others, with a bit of work this campsite could be spectacular. And filled with the laughter of holidaymakers and their children, it could be a quite wonderful place indeed.

She was humming a little tune to herself as she walked back through the barn to the entrance. Just as she was coming out of the heavy gates, however, she caught sight of movement among the trees. She hurried to the edge of the barn just in time to see four figures dashing away through the forest in the direction of the treehouse village.

The squatters. Buoyed by her new aspirations, rather than feeling afraid, Josie’s temper rose. It was time they got a piece of her mind. They couldn’t stay here, and she wasn’t going to let them.

She went back to her cabin, where she had left the strimmer and the things she had bought. Everything looked untouched, and she couldn’t see anything that was missing. As she went to pick up one of her shopping bags, however, something fat and green jumped out, bounced off her chest, and hopped away into the undergrowth.

Josie patted her chest, aware she had let out a scream of fright. Only a frog, but it had been a really big one, perhaps a toad, although she wasn’t sure. It had been right inside one of her bags, even though she had put it down on the steps.

The four people she had seen running had been coming from the direction of her cabin.

Had they been responsible for the frog?

She checked in her other bags, but there were no others. Perhaps it had just got in there by itself. She sighed, then sat down on the bottom step to catch her breath, her heart still thundering after the shock.

And then she saw it.

In a patch of sticky mud just to the side of the steps, the print of a human foot.