‘Let there be a way through the water.’
She stared at it for a long time, then turned and walked to Shore Road, heading towards town. She went the front way this time, past the police station then past her own house. The downstairs lights were on, so Ben was back. She’d been right to get Sam out of there when she did.
She kept walking, past the Binks then the harbour, along the old High Street, charity shops and pubs, cobbles underfoot. She was striding by the time she got to the long stretch of seafront where the shows pitched up a couple of times a year, cars parked up there now, a middle-aged couple sitting in one eating bags of chips and staring at the view. That could’ve been her and Ben if things had worked out differently.
She thought of everything they’d been through together, more than twenty years. They met as students at Edinburgh Uni, both doing marine biology and ecology. They hadn’t hit it off initially, took three years of circling each other, dating others, before they got it together.
They had so much in common. Both from small coastal towns, her North Berwick, him Anstruther, both in love with the sea. Keen sailors and swimmers, as much at home on the water or in it as they were on land. He was almost a year older, born at the tail end of ’69, a running joke between them that he was a child of the sixties, an old hippy, while she belonged to the brave new world of punk.
Ellie had stayed on at uni after her degree, the offer of a PhD too good to ignore, while Ben scrabbled around doing the usual shit – pub jobs, office temp work, slowly getting a foot in the door with the marina and the sailing school, helping out in his spare time until they offered him shifts covering for other tutors. After her PhD, a lack of jobs for Ellie, no Scottish government then, no renewables programme, the only jobs in her field in London, a place so remote she could hardly imagine it.
Then marriage, a move to South Queensferry, the small seaside town that was theirs together. Ellie got a job working at Deep Sea World across in North Queensferry. She was stupidly over-qualified but she got to work with animals all day, getting into the tank to feed the sharks in front of gawping children, letting them handle starfish and crabs, making sure the rest of the fish were fed and cared for.
A string of miscarriages, six in three years. That seemed startling but it wasn’t so uncommon, she was on the statistical curve, not exceptional, just had to deal with it. After the first one she and Ben performed a little ceremony, a remembrance thing, and gave the baby a name, Stuart. They got the idea from some website and while it seemed new-age nonsense at first, it helped. But successive miscarriages numbed them, each dead foetus mocked the sincerity and sombreness of that first time with Stuart, and they didn’t give the others names. In Ellie’s mind they just piled up like the death toll of a tsunami only worse, a nameless horde of dead babies, mocking her inability to carry a child in her womb like the billions of women before her.
Then Logan came along.
No one could blame her for being over-protective. Seventh time lucky. Neither she nor Ben ever mentioned the others, not once they had their hands full with nappy changing and colic and six feeds a night and Logan’s hernia that had to be operated on, just a normal procedure they said, it happened to a lot of boys. They were lost in the fog of fatigue for a while but gradually found themselves again, discovered themselves as a family.
When Logan was around three, once Ellie felt ready, they tried again for another. Two quick miscarriages then a trip to a specialist who told them to cut their losses and count their blessings. Something had happened to Ellie’s insides giving birth to Logan. It was incredibly unlikely she could hold on to an embryo long enough, and she might kill herself trying.
So Ben got the snip and they settled down as a trio, the three stooges, the three musketeers, all that. They joked that the best things always came in threes anyway, happy just to have each other.
Ellie walked past the boarded up Two Bridges restaurant. There was a rumble up ahead then a train thudded out over the rail bridge heading north across the water. As the clack-clack faded Ellie strode past a bistro then the motorbike shop and the Hawes Inn, a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson, their most famous customer, on the chalkboard outside.
She crossed the road at Hawes Pier. The Maid of the Forth bobbed in the water, waiting to scoot tourists to Inchcolm Island tomorrow. Ellie had set off from this pier six years ago on a sponsored swim, back when she was really fit, when she was at her best. A team of eight of them in dry suits, the middle of summer, the most benign conditions possible, and still it nearly broke her. It wasn’t the distance, not much more than one and a half miles, but the height of the waves, a tidal range of over six metres to compete with. They had to alert coastguard and the harbourmaster beforehand, check for shipping traffic. But it had been worth it, the eight of them raising twenty thousand for the Sick Kids, and she was immortal for a brief moment afterwards. Staggering up the slipway at North Queensferry, hands on knees, she felt a mix of immense tiredness and overpowering adrenalin, bone-weary but unable to sleep until the small hours of the morning. It felt like she’d achieved something useful, and the glow of it had stayed with her for weeks.
She was directly under the rail bridge now, passing the huge stone legs supporting millions of tons of red steel. She wanted to feel the shudder of a train overhead, but none came.
It was only once she reached the lock-ups that she realised she didn’t have a clue what to do if she found Libby. There were six garages in a row, all in darkness, no street lights here. She went to the first one, listened. Silence. She tried to open the corrugated door but it was locked. She knocked on the door, which rattled in its fitting.
‘Hello?’
She went along the row doing the same, listening, trying the lock, knocking, but if Libby was in one of the later ones she would’ve heard Ellie coming, and would surely stay quiet.
After shaking the last door handle Ellie stood looking out to sea. The lights of the rail bridge stretched into the gloom over the Forth, like the promise of a brighter tomorrow. The sound of the waves, the salty smell, so familiar to her.
She unlocked her phone and opened Facebook. Checked out Logan’s page. A heart and three kisses from a girl called Melissa. A picture of the two of them together, in what looked like her bedroom. Ellie didn’t recognise her. How could your son be friends with a girl you’ve never heard of? How could he spend time in a teenage girl’s bedroom and you not know about it?
She typed in Sam McKenna, three mutual friends, apparently. She clicked through but it was no one direct, always once removed. That was the problem with Facebook, one you had a few hundred friends you were connected to the whole world, we’re all intertwined now, whether we like it or not.
She looked at Sam’s profile, not much there. Logan’s was the same, none of the kids cared about filling in their lives because they hadn’t lived much yet.
One hundred and thirty-five photos. She swiped through them, barely stopping to register. Gangs of mates hanging around the seafront, at school, in each other’s houses. Holiday photos. She slowed down at those, checking out his sister in a few of them, his mum and dad. Jack and Alison. They weren’t tagged in the pictures, so maybe they hadn’t succumbed to social media. Ellie tried to remember a time before she’d been on Facebook, but struggled. Just another crutch now.
She looked closer at the holiday pictures, flicking back and forth, then stopped at one that must’ve been taken by Sam. Libby and her mum and dad standing on a Scottish beach somewhere. Ellie zoomed in. What could you tell from the look on a face in a photograph? She stared at Libby, large-framed glasses on her face, a cluster of spots in the space between her eyebrows, those eyebrows brown but her hair tied in a blonde bun, so she was old enough to be dying her hair.