High Island Blues

High Island Blues Read Free Page A

Book: High Island Blues Read Free
Author: Ann Cleeves
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straight road from Winnie, rice fields all around her. She was wearing a sleeveless vest, ripped jeans and scuffed boots. A stained leather cowboy hat hung by a thong round her neck and binoculars were slung over her shoulders like a cartridge case. She stuck out her thumb for a lift and the atmosphere in the clapped-out hire car changed. Each of them wanted her. This was what they’d hoped would happen all along. A real American adventure.
    The fajitas came, with refried beans, more salsa and tortillas. They ate hungrily. Airline meals, Rob said, were always crap. He should know. He was an expert. He hadn’t eaten anything decent since London the day before. He never ate on planes. They all relaxed. They talked about university, the paranoid Polish landlady in their first year digs.
    ‘She could smell a girl in your room through two closed doors,’ Oliver said.
    ‘And it was always fish fingers for breakfast on Fridays,’ Mick and Rob said together.
    They laughed. It was a safe subject. They said they should have done this years ago.
    When the meal was finished Rob and Oliver phoned for a cab to take them to their hotel. Oliver and Julia were spending the night at the Galleria Marriott too. Mick phoned for Laurie to collect him. She was in the office, he said. Working late. It was only round the corner. He didn’t explain why he didn’t have a car, or offer the others a lift.
    Laurie’s car arrived before the cab but it was still raining and she didn’t get out. They had a tantalizing glimpse of her through the steamed-up window, a profile against the street light, a brief wave. Then she drove off very fast.
    Laurie drove home in silence and Mick wondered if he had done something to upset her. He found it hard, these days, to judge her mood. It was still raining and already the flash flood-water was collecting in the playing fields by the side of the road.
    The evening’s reminiscences had triggered his memory of another rainy night. It was more than twenty years ago and he was driving down a Devon lane overgrown with campion and bramble and dripping cow parsley. The summer after university had been wet and business in the holiday trade had been bad. His father had taken the lack of bookings as a personal insult. He had blamed the charter operators with their cheap flights to the sun, the weather forecasters who prophesied gloom and his son for planning to run away to America.
    In Wilf Brownscombe’s eyes university had been bad enough, though he had taken some pride in seeing Mick’s graduation picture in the North Devon Journal Herald. And why zoology, which was no use to man nor beast? Certainly not to an overworked businessman running a holiday complex. He’d been pleased when all that was over and Mick had come home to take some of the work off him. Then the boy had the nerve to say that he wanted three months off the following year to go bird watching in America. What sort of interest was that for a grown man anyway?
    ‘It’s before the season really starts Dad,’ Mick had said. Wilf had thought it was pathetic really. Sometimes he wished his son would lose his temper, shout, behave like a real man. ‘Easter’s late next year.’
    ‘Still busy though, isn’t it? Still work to be done. Still your mother and me that’ll have to do it all,’ said his father.
    So that summer and autumn, Mick had worked from dawn until the early hours of the following morning. He drove through the rain between the sites accumulated by his father: the new hotel which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Torremolinos, the Marisco Tavern in the village by the sea, the caravan park on the headland. Supervising his father’s empire, proving that he wasn’t a waster, earning his three months leave without pay, his holiday with the only friends he’d made at university. He’d even given up birding that autumn. There’d been a red-eyed vireo in the churchyard at Lee. It had stayed for a week, even made the local paper.

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