No one answers and we listen as the harbour-master speaks into the radio and the coastguard answers.
Calm.
Measured.
Terrifying.
“RNLI Porth Ewan tasked. All-weather lifeboat launching.”
A fisherman curses. Another nods and it dawns on me that a few weeks ago the Porth Ewan lifeboat wouldn’t have been there. That we’d have been waiting on a rescue vessel from twenty miles up the coast. Or a chopper that can’t launch in this wind, a fact the first fisherman confirms. “You’d be jeffin’ bonkers to put a bird up in this.”
He’s not wrong.
But I have nothing, and I turn away, drifting from the crowd, Skylar my silent shadow as rain hits my face sideways. The storm is clipping the harbour for real now, violent gusts rattling the rocks and sending high spray over the wall.
Skylar steers me from that too, but I resist. I need to feel it. I need to see the lightning split low over the water and face the ocean beyond the headland. The wall of white and black that holds my whole heart.
Where are you, Sol?
The lifeboat launches. I hear it over the radio. Hear Mal telling me and I picture it without a conscious decision to do so. The tow vehicle hauling her down the slip. Door sealing, enginesroaring. Crew who’d been at their dinner tables ten minutes ago now motoring headlong into Mother Nature’s roar.
“I’m going to Porth Ewan.” I make for the coast road without waiting for Skylar’s response. Set off at a run, cursing the day I took that mortar fire and made myself this helpless flailing thing that can’t drive or think for himself.
Ableist bullshit.
But I’m too flayed to catch it, even as I hear Sol’s gentle admonishment in my head. As I pound the pavement and run and run and run, leaving Porth Luck behind.
Porth Ewan is two miles uphill, the incline one I’m grateful I’ve run with Skylar while Mal was gone. My lungs strain and lactic acid burns my muscles, but I make it knowing I could run to the moon if Sol was there.
The harbour here is bigger than Porth Luck. But Porth Ewan is a fishing town too and the quayside is alive with urgent activity. Coastguard volunteers. Fishermen standing by, ready to go at the slightest break in the storm.
There is none. The rain hammers and the wind is fucking unspeakable. A living hellscape as thunder rolls and booms until I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be quiet.
The lifeboat station is at the end of the quay. I make for it as Mal falls into step beside me, shaking his hair back from his face. “Warn me before you scarper on a mad tab next time, eh?
I ignore him, but as we near the hub of activity in the base, I let him surge ahead.
Let him talk for me.
Listen for me.
Let him take care of everything I can’t.
I don’t even go inside. I go to the wall and scan the horizon. For the first time in hours, I see lights in the distance, but they’re fading out, not getting closer. Then they’re gone and it feels like an omen. Like the end of the world and I think I might die righthere in this harbour that isn’t home. In this storm. In this life that isn’t real without Sol dancing in the rain.
Maybe I am dead and this is hell. A notion that settles until the ear-splitting racket of motorbike engines shatter the air.
Rebel Kings roll up.
Saint Malone.
Folk.
Another I don’t recognise until I remember I saw him kissing Orla O’Brian the night she rescued me from the trickster in the Joker.
This feels like a trick too. Like I’ve drawn the worst cards and there’s no way back. No resolution beyond the bitter end.
My chest hurts.