Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [16]
Number 43 was the house his father was renovating. It was how he had made his living since giving up his city job and bringing the family back to Devon; buying houses that were neglected, sad and damp, fixing them up, calling them something like ‘Fisherman’s Cottage’ and selling them to outsiders. They were holiday houses – second homes, mostly – ‘grockle cottages,’ the locals sneeringly called them. In the past, they had lived in each house while it was being rebuilt and then, just as it stopped being a building site and began to resemble a proper home, they had sold it and moved into another ruin. Fortunately, they couldn’t live in Number 43 – it had no roof – so they were allowed to stay on in Moor Lane and call it home for the present, or at least until Number 43 was habitable.
There was no sign of Grandad in the boat shed. There were the usual smells of freshly planed wood and varnish, smells that so permeated Grandad’s clothing that they travelled with him wherever he went and would hang in the air of a room for some time after he left it. The back door of the shed was ajar and competing estuary smells of weed and mud entered on the little gusts that swung the door on its rusty hinges.
In the centre of the shed stood the bare spine of the open, wooden rowing boat that Grandad had just begun building. Another skeleton, thought Zaki, running his hand over the silky-smooth timber.
He made his way through the clutter of the shed and out on to the slipway behind to see if the launch was there. If it wasn’t, Grandad would be somewhere out on the water. It was and Grandad was kneeling on the boat’s floor, his back a round hump, as he peered into the engine compartment. Jenna sat, patiently panting, watching her master. Hearing Zaki approach, she barked once and began to wag her tail.
‘Engine not working?’ asked Zaki.
‘Will be, soon as I get all these bits back in their proper manner,’ said Grandad, without looking up from what he was doing.
Zaki knew better than to distract his grandfather during the tricky business of reassembling the engine. Instead, he made himself comfortable on a bollard and watched two men on the jetty opposite loading crab pots on to a brightly painted fishing boat. He felt something rub against his leg and, glancing down, saw a pale grey cat.
‘Hello, puss,’ he said, scratching the cat behind an ear. ‘Who do you belong to? I haven’t seen you before.’
The cat sat by Zaki’s foot and regarded him with an unblinking stare and then, as though satisfied that it now knew all there was to know about him, stretched and sauntered across to the other side of the slipway to watch the grey mullet feeding on the weed-covered mooring lines.
Eventually, Grandad heaved himself up off the floor of the launch and started the engine. He let it run for a couple of minutes and then shut it off.
‘What was the problem?’ asked Zaki.
‘Sucked up a bit o’ weed.’ Grandad put the spanners back into his toolbox and wiped the grease off his hands with a piece of rag. ‘What did the doctor say?’
‘Said it was cracked. They took an X-ray.’
‘Teach you to be more careful, you great gawk,’ said Grandad.
Zaki followed his grandfather back into the shed. The grey cat followed Zaki, and Jenna, as though wary of the cat, followed her, tail down, a few metres behind.
‘Whose cat’s that?’ asked Zaki.
‘She’s been hanging around the last few days. Never seen her before. If you’re makin’ us a cuppa, you can give her a dollop of milk.’
Zaki took the hint, put the kettle on and poured some milk into a cleanish plastic bowl for the cat, then, seeing the dog looking jealous, made a fuss of her until, satisfied that she was still loved, she went to lie down in her box under the workbench.
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When the tea was made,