The Lifeboat Jar

On the seafront, everything had a price on it.

Asha had never noticed quite how many there were. It was Saturday 10 May, the first Saturday after the empty window, and the wind was coming off the sea cold and grey and smelling of chips that nobody had bought yet. She walked from the harbour end towards the pier with her hands deep in her pockets and read every sign she passed. She couldn't seem to stop.

SCOOPS: single cornet £3.50. The surf shack: bodyboards from £24.99, wetsuits £65.00. A rack of kites outside the gift shop, the biggest one shaped like a purple squid, £18.00. In the arcade, a claw machine full of stuffed lobsters said 3 GOES £1.

Two hundred and fourteen pounds.

She could have the squid kite and the wetsuit and the bodyboard, and still have more than a hundred pounds left over. She could have sixty-one cornets. She did that sum in her head and then, because her head did not feel very trustworthy this week, she did it again in biro on the back of her hand:

61 × £3.50 = £213.50
Left over: 50p

Nobody needed sixty-one cornets. That was the trouble. She didn't want a squid kite either, not really, or a wetsuit, or a lobster that was only stuffed with fluff. She wanted to want something. She wanted to walk into a shop and point and say that one, and have the empty feeling go away.

The money wasn't even in her pocket. It was a row of small grey numbers in the app on Mum's phone, sitting quietly with Kerry, earning its pennies of rent as if nothing had happened.

It was twenty past nine. On any other Saturday she would have been at Oddie's by now, with the duster and the pencil, checking the orange tree for buds.

Down on the slipway, the big doors of the lifeboat station were shut, and a man in a yellow jacket was hosing seaweed off the ramp. Asha leaned on the railing and watched him. It was the only thing on the whole seafront that didn't cost anything.

The first bang made her jump so hard she bit her plait.

The second one came a moment later, louder, from somewhere up behind the station roof. Two puffs of white smoke hung over the slipway and then tore apart in the wind. Every gull on the seafront went up at once, shrieking.

The man in the yellow jacket dropped the hose. It lay on the ramp, still running.

Asha knew what the bangs were. Everybody in Hollins Bay knew. Nani called them the maroons, and when Nani heard them she stopped whatever she was doing and said a small prayer, even in the middle of frying onions.

People came running. A woman in a fleece jumped out of a car and left the door wide open. A boy not much older than Ravi skidded up on a bike and threw it against the railings. Bernie Crowe came down Gull Street at a lumbering jog, still in his apron, flour on his elbows. Asha hadn't known Bernie was crew. The big doors rolled up, and within four minutes (she counted on the arcade clock) the orange boat was sliding down the ramp and hitting the water with a smack of spray.

Then there was nothing to do but wait.

The railings filled up. Shopkeepers stood in their doorways. The man from SCOOPS came out with a scoop still in his hand. Somebody said 'Paddleboarders. Off the Point,' and somebody else said 'In this wind?' and nobody answered.

Asha watched the boat get smaller until it was a dot past the harbour wall, then nothing at all.

It was thirty-five minutes before the dot came back. She knew because she checked the clock eleven times.

When the boat nosed into the slipway, there were two people sitting in the back, wrapped in silver blankets that crackled and flapped like crisp packets. One of them was crying. The other one waved, weakly, at the railings.

The whole seafront clapped.

By two o'clock there was a sign on the station doors. Somebody had written it in thick blue marker on the back of an old poster:

RADIOS CUT OUT TODAY. NEW SET NEEDED: £4,000. EVERY PENNY HELPS.

Underneath it stood a collection drum. It was orange, the same orange as the boat, with a slot in the lid and a painted anchor on the side.

Asha ran home. She took the stairs two at a time and stopped in front of her windowsill, out of breath.

The GIVE jar had been filling since September, one pound a week, without her really looking at it. She tipped it onto the duvet and counted. Then she counted again, the way she always did, in case the coins had bred.

Sat 10 May: GIVE jar £18.00
Out: lifeboat radios £18.00
GIVE jar £0.00
SAVE (with Kerry): £214.00

She looked at the last line for a long time. It hadn't moved. Not a penny.

'Are you buying something?' said Kit from the doorway. He had a cola bottle stuck to his chin.

'Sort of.'

'What?'

'Radios.'

Kit thought about this. 'For seagulls?'

The drum was heavier than it looked. Asha unscrewed the jar lid on the slipway and poured. The coins went in with a long rattle, like shingle when a wave pulls back. One pound coin stuck in the slot and she had to poke it through with her finger.

When she looked up, Bernie Crowe was standing beside her in a damp red jumper, his hair flat with salt. He still had a smear of flour by his ear. Somehow it had stayed there through all that sea.

'That was a whole jar,' he said.

'It was the giving one,' said Asha. 'It's meant for this.'

Bernie wiped his hand on his trousers and held it out. She shook it. His grip was big and cold and rough, and he shook her hand properly, twice, the way grown-ups did at the building society when something had been agreed.

'Thank you, Asha,' he said.

She hadn't known he knew her name.

Oddie's was open. Oddie's was always open. Asha stood on the step with the empty jam jar in her hand and the lid in her pocket, and for a moment she nearly turned round.

Mrs Oddie was behind the counter with the lifeguard on her nose, writing in a ledger of her own. She looked up.

'You missed your dusting,' she said.

'I was on the seafront.'

'I heard the maroons.' Mrs Oddie took off her glasses and let them drop on their chain. 'Barnaby, the young lady has been somewhere important. Don't sulk.'

The window looked wrong without the telescope. The orange tree had been moved into the space, in its cracked blue pot, and Dividend lay curled against it as if he had always slept there.

Mrs Oddie came round the counter, slowly, one hand on the shelves.

'I owe you something, Asha. Not money. A true thing.' She straightened a book that didn't need straightening. 'The gas bill came in March. All of winter at once. It was rather a lot more than last year.' She paused. 'Three hundred and nine pounds and sixty pence, if you want it exact, and I know you do.'

Asha did want it exact. She didn't say so.

'When that man offered the full price, I didn't make him sleep on it. I should have telephoned your mother first. I didn't.' Mrs Oddie looked at the window, not at Asha. 'I'm sorry. That's all.'

Asha had been ready to be cross with someone for a week. Now the person was standing right in front of her, and she found she couldn't be. She thought of the £128 on Mum's fridge, under the lighthouse magnet. She thought of Mrs Oddie in her cardigan in February, in this cold narrow shop.

'Were you warm, in the end?' she said.

'Toasty,' said Mrs Oddie.

Asha went to the window to check the tree, because that was her job and it was something to do with her hands. Two new leaves, glossy as wet paint. Dividend opened one eye.

Then she saw it, half hidden behind a leaf, on a thin low branch.

A flower. One. Small and white, with five curled petals and a yellow middle, and a smell coming off it like the inside of a marmalade jar.

'Mrs Oddie,' said Asha. 'You'd better come and look.'