Page 36 of I’ll Be Home for Christmas
They were stood in front of a line of prickly gorse bushes that marked the boundary line.
From beyond the golf course came the gentle whisper of the sea kissing the pebbles and the occasional cry of a seabird caught out late, long after roosting time.
There was thankfully very little wind tonight, which was unusual at any time of the day, so close to the sea, but the cold air seemed to press in around them.
“I wrote it down at the time so that I wouldn’t have to remember.” He pulled a crumpled piece of lined A4 paper from his jacket and handed it to her.
Using her phone torch, she studied the page.
It was a rough Biro drawing of the golf course—in Ryan’s twelve-year-old hand—with all the bunkers marked along it, and a red cross over one of them; four pits in from the left of the first hole, if the sea was behind you, and directly in line with a sixth streetlamp after the Sea View Hotel.
“I don’t recall you doing that. How very forward thinking of you,” she remarked.
“If ‘X marks the spot’ was good enough for Captain Flint, it was good enough for me.”
“I’d forgotten about your pirate phase.”
He held his hand out and she gave him back the map. After a moment of study, he pointed. “There!” he said, triumphantly.
They moved forward cautiously, navigating a man-made path through the prickly gorse to reach the course.
“What if they’ve moved the bunkers over the years to keep things interesting? Or they’ve added to the street-lamps?” Fred asked, yanking her scarf back from the hooky twigs of the gorse.
Ryan turned back, flipping his head torch skyward so as not to blind her. “Oh, ye of little faith.” He grinned, holding out his hand.
She pulled a face but took it and gingerly picked her way along behind him, yelping when the spiky branches snagged her jeans.
They emerged from the gorse and slowly made their way across the golf course, traipsing up and down slopes, the short grass both crisp and slippery beneath their boots, clumps of snow emerging like molehills out of the shadows. Eventually, Ryan stopped at the edge of a bunker.
“This one,” he said, sounding assured.
Fred surveyed the pit. “It’s quite big.”
“Yes. But if you cast your mind back, we buried the capsule at the very center, so that it would be easier for our future selves to find.”
Not for the first time since being lured out of her bed that night, Fred wondered if this was a wise idea. They could get caught by some sort of golf course security outfit. What if they were on CCTV?
“Stop freaking out,” said Ryan. “You’re wearing the same look on your face you used to get before we went into exams at school.”
“And what look is that?”
“Constipated bush baby.”
She snorted. Ryan threw the spade he’d been carrying into the pit and shuffled down after it. Fred followed, the sand shifting beneath her feet.
When they’d buried their time capsule twenty years ago—on a night not dissimilar to this—she had wondered what the Fred of the future would be like.
Hugely successful, she’d hoped. Maybe a writer who wore long drapey linen and wide-brimmed hats.
She’d live in a London townhouse with her husband and their two children.
A group of Pine Bluff scallywags would dig up their box and take it to the newspaper, and she and Ryan—who at the time of the capsule burial was determined he’d work for MI6—would be called by the BBC for an interview with Jonathan Ross.
She thought now how deeply disappointed Fred of the past would be with how she’d turned out.
—
“Are you sure we buried it this deep?” Fred asked after they’d been taking turns to dig and scrape at the sand for the last twenty minutes. On a positive note, the exercise was keeping her warm.
“Yeah, we were worried about dogs and golfers accidentally digging it up.”
She nodded, remembering. “So, you know about Warren,” she said, taking the spade from Ryan and beginning to dig again. “What about you? Are you seeing anyone?”
“Not for a while now.”
“Why not?” She wondered if this was wise. Getting personal hadn’t worked out so well for them thus far.
“I haven’t had much luck with dating since my last relationship ended. It’s tough out there,” said Ryan, scooping damp sand up the bank and pressing it down firmly so that it didn’t slip back into their hole.
“Tell me about it! I’ve been on some horrendous dates since Tim and I split up. There have been times I’ve wondered if I was being punked for a TV show.”
“Have they been worse than when your date takes out her chewing gum before the first course, sticks it to her dessert spoon and then proceeds to pop it back in between each course?”
“What did she do with it when it came time for dessert?”
“She stuck it to the saltshaker.”
“No!” Fred laughed. “Oh my god, that did not happen.”
“I swear on my rare shiny Pokémon card.”
She sniggered, remembering his deep and unyielding passion for collecting Pokémon cards, back in the day. “Okay, I can beat that.”
“There’s no way,” Ryan said, stooping and shoring up the cold sand around the hole with his gloved hands.
“You want to bet? So, my date tells me his best friend is his mum, because she’s kind and makes the best roast potatoes, and I’m thinking okay, he loves his mum, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I one hundred percent agree; you know I am a huge mama’s boy,” said Ryan.
“Exactly. So, I say, ‘That’s so sweet,’ and he goes on to tell me that she is everything a woman should be. Meek, subservient to men and knowing her place within the hierarchy of the family and society.”
“Whoa, was he serious? He wasn’t being weirdly ironic. Or like controversial, for a laugh?”
“I wish. He was hiding a whole misogynist ideology behind that six-pack.”
“He had a six-pack?”
She nodded.
“Dammit, now I hate him even more.” He straightened up, and Fred gratefully handed over the spade for him to have his turn.
“All right,” he went on, pushing the spade into the sand with his boot.
“How about this? Last year, I met a woman online who told me she was searching for someone who looked like Ted Bundy. Apparently, one of my photos had made her think I had ‘Bundy potential.’?”
She laughed. “What did you do?”
“I found out which picture it was, deleted it, blocked her and grew a beard.”
“Tim told me he fell for Veronica because she reminded him of what I used to be like before I let myself go.” She was using her hands to scoop at the sand in between Ryan’s shoveling.
“What?” The word exploded out of him in a humorless laugh. “Fred, that’s awful. What an absolute cock-weasel. What did you say?”
She sat back on her knees while he went back in with the spade.
“I was too shocked to say anything really. He didn’t even say it in a confrontational way, it was simply a passing comment, as if his words weren’t the equivalent of whizzing my self-esteem up in a blender. ” Why was she telling him all this?
“Jeez!” he said as he chucked another spadeful of sand onto the growing mound behind them. “And I thought my last breakup was bad.”
“Want to tell me about it? My bruised ego would love some company.” The mound began to slip, and Fred reached around and patted it all over to make it stick.
Ryan screwed his eyes up, like he was expecting a ball to fly at his face. “She broke up with me by writing on the back of the restaurant bill when I’d gone to use the gents; the bill that I’d just paid. When I got back to the table, she was gone.”
Now it was Fred’s turn to bark out a shocked laugh, which she tried to stifle with her sandy gloved hands. “I have to ask…”
“You want to know what it said?”
She nodded.
He leaned on the spade for a moment. “It said, and I quote: ‘I’ve met someone else. Didn’t know how to tell you. Sorry. Thanks for dinner. Sorry, again.’?” He shrugged and went back to digging.
“That is brutal. How long had you been together?”
“Three years.”
Fred dusted off her hands, took the spade from him and began to dig, while he shook his arms out. “You were together for three years and she broke up with you on the back of a receipt?”
“Yup,” he said, reaching into the hole to secure the sides that were threatening to spill back in. “Do you feel better now?”
“So much better!”
He smiled.
“And did you see her again?” Fred asked.
“We met in a coffee shop, a week or so later, to hand back the last bits and pieces we’d left at each other’s places.
She cried a lot; said she was sorry yet again and that she hadn’t gone out looking for anyone else, it just happened.
Things had been strained between us for a while.
I wasn’t working and I probably wasn’t always the best company.
We used to go out a lot, to clubs, fancy restaurants, all that jazz, but obviously all that stopped when I lost my job.
The fateful night, in the Nicely Spicy Indian restaurant, was the first time we’d been out in about six months. ”
Fred shook her head in sympathy. “Dumped at Nicely Spicy. That is rough. I’m sorry that happened to you, you didn’t deserve that.”
“Neither did you deserve what happened to you.”
“I guess what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?”
“Do you feel stronger?”
She nodded. “I do. I feel better than I have done for a long time.” She leaned her weight against the spade as it went in…and felt it hit something solid. She tapped it and looked up at Ryan, grinning broadly.
“Bingo!” He smiled back.
Abandoning the spade, she knelt beside Ryan, and they began to swish away the sand with their gloved hands, until the mottled green top of the strongbox was revealed.
Between them they ran their hands around the edges of the box to loosen the sand around it and then, taking a handle each, they pulled it out of the hole and placed it down on a flat area in the bunker.
“Do you have the key?” Fred asked.