"Steel clouds in the sky. Thunder cracking the ground. Waters of a frightful evil colour all around. They're ill tidings, the lot of them! I can feel it in my bones, there's a storm over us!"
The radio's crackle ceased and hushed Old Norton's frantic exclamations. "Codswallop," Jim growled, tossing the box away. "Have us starving out of our skins, he would."
Nestled in the corner of the living room sofa, Sally snapped out of her daze as the radio clattered to the floorboards. She did not know how long she had been staring without reading at the book in her hand, but she assumed it was too long to be stuck re-reading the first few scenes of The Tempest. "He might be right, Dad. It's rough out there," she said, peeking through the heavy sunset-toned curtain by her side. "Not a boat out right now. Everybody's shoring up indoors for the night, looks like."
The cottage's living room was a close space, the available standing room slight enough for Sally's brother to cover from doorway to bay window in two decent strides. A plush sofa and a sturdy armchair sat in large swathes of space, both stitched together in sleek smoke-coloured fabric and overlaid with red and blue tartan blankets. Bare bricks circled around the fireplace on the back wall, the void behind the cast-iron grille lying dormant now despite Sally's wish to spark the core to vibrant life. Just as quiet was the television set in the corner opposite her, its dark screen reflecting the pensive silence filling Ronan's features. The radio settled at her brother's feet, speechless.
"What care have I what folk are doing? Folk can be hiding in their beds when the weather's a bit blustery if that tickles their fancy, but some of us have to pay to keep the lights on," her father grumbled as he eyed the doorway into the cottage's main passage. "I'm going out."
Ronan sprang from the armchair. "A bit blustery? Dad, look out there! The wind's howling like a banshee, the village is swimming in rain, and the sea's nothing but a wall of water!" Taking the radio from the floor, he set it back on its shelf and locked eyes with Jim. "I'm just as sick of Old Norton's whinging as you are, believe me. But heading out there now...you'd have to be a right muggins to do that!"
Poised on the line between living room and hallway, Jim countered his son's slight height advantage with audible flares of his nostrils. "Muggins, am I? And what have you got set aside for the taxman, lad?" He weighed up Ronan's wordless response and, finding no resistance, tapped his son back a step. "I've said I'm going out, son, and that's what I'm doing."
"Then I'm coming with you," Ronan said, pulling at his long hair. To his amusement, Jim's expression fell into one of honest shock. "You shouldn't be going out at all, never mind going alone! After all, someone has to be fishing your boots out when the sea swallows you up."
Jim leaned on the doorframe, staring at the lines of his scarred palms and sighing under an invisible weight. "Now hold on, you –"
"I've said I'm coming with you, Dad, and that's what I'm doing." The smirk on Ronan's lips was infectious, and Sally hid behind her raised knees as the riposte registered on her father's face.
Pushing into the corridor, Jim stroked his beard. "Be ready in ten, lad," he muttered, glancing between the door and further into the cottage before settling on joining his wife in the candlelit kitchen and dining room.
Sally's glee fizzled out as soon as her father left her sight. "You're joking, Ronan. You can't seriously be going out on the water now, on the one day there's an actual storm hitting us!" As she spoke, a strike of thunder snapped near the wall and shook the cottage's skeleton around them.
Shifting his weight between his feet, Ronan oozed with uncertainty. "I'll try and talk some sense into him, but you know better than I do what Dad's like. You're just as stubborn as he is when you want to be." With a weak smile, he wrapped an arm around Sally's shoulders and pulled her into a hug, his force tighter than usual. "It'll be alright. Whatever happens, I'll bring him back in one piece. Don't you be worrying about that."
"Bring yourself back whole and all, too," Sally answered, disguising the sharp sickness in her gut with a misty-eyed mask. "If you don't, Mam'll drain the ocean to roar at your ghost."
"Too right she would," Ronan uttered with a dreadful shudder. Squeezing Sally one last time, he left her in the heart of the living room and waved from the doorway. "Be back before you know it, lass."
Sally tucked herself back into her book nook and set her eyes on the paperback, determined to power through the remainder of the play text before the night grew too long. She cheered herself on for five hard-fought turns of a page, yet the forceful shuffle of her mother's slippers cut her off just as her eyes settled into a steady flow. "Men!" Julie cried, a half-emptied glass of white wine in her clutches. "I knew that blasted husband of mine could be a right dimwit, but I'd hoped our son had at least some marbles up there!"
Peeking through the crack in the curtains, Sally searched for her father's fishing boat on the water. If it lay in her line of sight at all, the waves swelled too high for her to see it. "They'll be fine," she said under her breath, fiddling with the edge of the curtain. "They've got to be fine."
"And you, lass!" Sliding into the living room, Julie slammed her drink onto the shelf, the wine leaping up the side of the glass with the vigour of a surging wave. "What's up with you and all?"
As she jolted out of her nook, Sally fell away from the window. "What do you mean?" she asked, stuttering under the full force of her mother's glare.
Julie stormed forward to loom over the sofa, her shadow washing over her daughter's shape. "I couldn't keep you in the house not so long ago for all your slipping out, causing havoc like it was the end times. These past few days, now, I couldn't be rid of you if I shipped you out to sea! I was thanking the heavens when your brother took you out to market." She bit her tongue and shook her head, keeping her eyes shut until she landed on her next words. "Tell me what's up with you. Something up at school? Are you poorly? Is it trouble with a lad?"
"There's no lad, Mam," Sally groaned as she slipped a bookmark into her paperback and tossed it aside. "I'm fine, honest. I just haven't felt like going out lately."
"I was a young thing too you know, a long time ago," her mother answered, easing herself into the seat beside Sally. The woollen cloak around Julie's shoulders wore the holes and bobbles of its many years of service, yet it still held a softness that Sally had never found in newer coverings. "And when I was, I could've won gold medals in sulking. Your granny, bless her heart, would have said so herself, so don't think I'll shut my trap for I'm fine, lass."
Sally bit her lip and tugged at the sleeves of her cardigan. "It's not fair," she finally muttered, glancing out of the window at the rain-swept village. "She gets to leave, and I'll be stuck here forever."
"What are you going on about now?" Her mother leaned towards Sally, creaking the sofa cushions as she shifted. "You won't be stuck! With your degree and your hard-working graft, any place would be lucky to have you. You'll be able to go where you want!"
"Not where she is, I won't!" Without meaning to, Sally smacked the back of the chair with her outstretched arm, but her burst of frustration powered her through the embarrassment. "And without her, what's the point of going anywhere at all?"
Julie blinked, unable to shift the confusion fogging her eyes. "Without who?"
Heat bubbled up from Sally's stomach, rising until it erupted in one violent cry. "Flick!"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Sally!" Her mother rose from the sofa with her head in her hands. "Your father and I have told you, you're not to be going on about that trouble anymore."
"She's not trouble, Mam! She's my friend, I..." The words dangled on the tip of Sally's tongue. Until now, she had even kept unspoken the fact she considered Flick a friend, and that slight admission coupled with her mother's expectant stare encouraged her to let her pent-up emotions flow. "I miss her, Mam."
Unimpressed, Julie placed a hand on Sally's shoulder. "You'll find more friends, lass, and better ones. And find ones that aren't blasted pains in the neck like she was, if you don't mind!"
"I don't want just more friends." Sally shut her eyes, shrunk into her cardigan, and shivered as the thought spiralled from her mind and out past her lips. "I want her."
"You what? Rubbish, child. Stop moping, you're making a fuss over nought."
"She's not nought!" Her body shaking, Sally shot out of her seat with enough force to blow back the tails of her mother's cloak. "I've had more fun in a few weeks with Flick than I've had in my whole life in this village. She pushes me to try things I never normally would, she goes out of her way to see me, she...wants me around."
Julie laughed to herself. "Wants to drag you around while she raises hell, sure," she scoffed, shaking her head and pinning her fists to her hips. "I know her like. She just wants a cheerleader for her trouble, lass. What does she know about you? I bet she never even asks what you want, what you like!"
Sally choked back a wounded gasp. The urge to leap to Flick's defence tensed her muscles again, yet this time her gut failed to produce the torrent of passion she needed to repel the attack. In a few words, her mother punctured the bubble Flick had occupied in Sally's mind, letting in reality's sickly air. Cold, hard facts were an everyday currency in plain-speaking Porthdruro, yet her mother's piercing observations far exceeded familiar frankness in every way. Sally was stranded in a barren ice cave, trapped by a blizzard that piled up snow to cut off the last dregs of starlight.
Suddenly, the hallway filled with the chime of the landline phone. Julie left with a muttered promise to pick the conversation up later, her mouthed words delivering extra strikes to Sally's chest. Falling into her moulded shape in the sofa, Sally sank into the bitterness that pooled around her, hot scars of humiliation branded into her cheeks.
"How do you mean, they've stopped responding?" her mother said, shock racking her tone. "Don't just sit here wagging chins with me, call them again!"
As she crept into the corridor, Sally found her mother peering through the window by the entryway, the telephone cord stretched to its fullest. The voice through the receiver crackled lower than she could make out, yet the frantic expressions flickering across her mother's face told her the news was nothing good.
Her mother flapped her arms as she paced at the limits of the taut telephone cable. "Nothing? No, it can't be nothing. Keep calling, Norton, they have to answer!" She returned to the phone's table, waving Sally out of her way. "Come on, you horrors..."
Listening out for the hiss of the receiver's voice, Sally twiddled the cuffs of her sleeves. "Are Dad and Ronan alright?" she asked, more to say something than to get an answer.
"An SOS broadcast? They haven't beached the boat, have they? Oh, heck..." Julie muttered, scribbling something in shaky handwriting on the notepad by the phone. "Keep on trying to reach them, I'll call the lifeboats. Don't stop for anything until you hear from my lads, so help you!"
A gale howled past the cottage, and the windowpanes ground against their frames with an ear-piercing screech. Sally gritted her teeth at the ache, drifting away from the walls to escape the noise. Without warning, a loud snap rushed through the walls, and a heaving mass crashed to earth beyond their door. The tremor blew the front door open, and Sally looked out to see a splintered lump of sodden wood rocking on the stone floor, its midsection choked by thick black cables.
Her mother planted her palm against her chest as if to stuff her galloping heart back into place. "Did you hear – hello? Norton?" She stared at the receiver, held it to her ear again, then shoved it back into its cradle. "Brilliant. Blasted line's dead!"
Grappling with the gale outside, Sally threw her whole body weight into closing the front door, stumbling into the frame as it slammed shut. "How are we going to call for a lifeboat now?" she asked, peeking down at her own phone's indecisive icons. "The mobile service isn't playing either."
"Typical blasted technology, never wants to work when it matters." Julie tore off the note she had written and stared at it, hands shaking more violently than Sally had ever seen before. After a moment of silent thought, she turned to her daughter and held up the paper. "I swear, that Martin Rowe said once that his office has a direct line to all the emergency services, including the boats. I'll go knock on his door now and let him know."
"Mam, don't be daft. Your joints won't last in this storm," Sally answered, placing a hand on the notepaper. "Tell me what to say, and I'll go do it."
Instead of the hard-headed resistance Sally expected when going against her mother's wishes, Julie's eyes welled up with pure concern. "You're not invincible yourself, you know. Are you sure, lass?"
Sally winced as sheets of rain barraged the front of the cottage, battering the windows with dogged determination. "No," she said, and another wave of thundering rain swept over their home. "Not one bit."
Her mother's lack of enthusiasm bled through her sigh, yet she released the message into Sally's care without another word. "Don't forget your coat," she muttered, earning a groan from her daughter.
Within minutes, Sally was stood at the front door with a tight grip on its handle. Her eyes fixed on the white tips of her trainers, and she said a silent goodbye to their tidy sheen. She took a deep breath, then wrenched the handle.
"Don't think this makes up for your sulking session earlier," her mother called. "Come straight back, you will. And be careful! I love you, lass."
Smiling through her dread, Sally nodded. "I love you too, Mam. I'll not be gone long, I promise."
The shrieking wind drowned out whatever her mother said afterwards, and Sally's face scrunched up to keep the rain from flooding her eyes. Fighting for balance, she started the long, slow march to Rosbannes Farm.