Lifeboat! Read Free Page B

waited together for the lifeboat to come back from the sea.
    Julie had grown from a spotty, gawky school-kid into a pretty college student and now, at this Bank Holiday weekend, Tim was two weeks past his eighteenth birthday and had just received the results of his A-level examinations. The cheeky boyish grin was still there, the springy fair hair and the brilliant blue eyes. He was tall and thin and slightly round-shouldered after months of swotting—a defect which was likely to be quickly rectified by his chosen career. His obsession with the local lifeboat had grown into a love for the sea and in a few weeks he was due to join the Royal Navy. So this weekend held a kind of poignancy for him. It was the end of an era in his life, the end of being there whenever the lifeboat was launched. The end of his easy friendship with each and every member of the crew, who had come to regard him as a kind of talisman.
    Was it to be the end too of his friendship with the Macready family? He would come back, of course, but could it ever be quite the same again?
    â€˜What is it this time?’
    She was standing in the open doorway of the empty boathouse as the launchers, Tim amongst them, manoeuvred the heavy trailer back into position to await the recall when the lifeboat was ready to beach.
    â€˜Hi, Julie.’ Tim moved towards her. ‘They’re not sure. Bill Luthwaite and Jack Hansard thought at first it could be a hoax call, but then the coastguard saw a flare down Dolan’s Sand way, but they’ve no idea yet what it is.’
    Julie pulled a face. ‘Oh, one of those. Then there’s no knowing what time he’ll be back.’
    â€˜No. I say—shall we go sailing tomorrow? Sandy would lend us his boat. I’m off in a couple of weeks, you know, so there won’t be many more times when …’
    â€˜Oh Tim, I’m sorry. I can’t. Is it so soon you go?’
    â€˜Yes—the fourteenth of September.’
    â€˜I am sorry. I’d have loved to have gone—really, but I’ve got this friend coming down for the weekend. Someone I met at college.’
    Knowing it to be an all-girls’college Julie attended, Tim blundered on, ‘Well, she wouldn’t mind, would she? I mean, we could all three go, couldn’t we?’
    There was a pink tinge to Julie’s cheeks and she avoided Tim’s gaze. ‘It’s not a she—it’s a he. He goes to the university adjoining our campus.’
    â€˜Oh. Oh, I see,’ Tim said flatly.
    There was an awkward silence between them, a constraint that had never been there throughout their childhood friendship.
    With the toe of his training shoe, Tim scuffed at the little heap of sand that had blown up against the boathouse door.
    â€˜Well then, I’d better be off to the shops,’ Julie murmured. ‘I’ll—er—see you again before you go, Tim.’
    â€˜Yes. Yes, of course.’ He tried to smile, but for once his cheery grin was difficult to summon.
    He watched her walk away from him. ‘Lucky sod!’ he muttered to himself of the unknown undergraduate, then he turned and went back into the boathouse.
    The two Milner boys dragged the orange-and-black inflatable from the square of back-yard behind the holiday flats. It was approximately six feet by four feet in heavy-duty PVC with paddles and five buoyancy compartments and blown up by means of a 12-volt inflator.
    Across the road they carried it, struggling and awkward, between them. Down the concrete steps and through the sunken gardens along the foreshore, past the bowling-greens and up again over the low sand-dune and across the promenade and down on to the beach itself. Reaching the sand they dropped it and towed it by its grab rope, slithering behind them towards the sea.
    No one saw them go—at least no one who could foresee the danger. The coastguard was occupied on the radio link to the out-going lifeboat; the beach