Page 1 of Love from Pretty Beach
D arby Lovell waited until her third daughter, Molly, had finished waving from the train.
She then walked across the near-deserted waiting area of Pretty Beach train station, smiled briefly and said hello to a staff member coming the other way, and made her way to her car.
Once safely out of the station but battered by a freezing cold biting wind, she crossed her fingers and pressed the button on her key fob.
Saying a silent prayer, she looked up at the sky for a second and hoped her car or “old banger” as she referred to it, would start.
Luckily for her, it didn't let her down. Thank goodness for that.
As it started, she let out a sigh of relief, pressed the clutch in and putting it into gear, she tapped the steering wheel as if saying thank you to an old friend.
The relief of not being stranded in freezing temperatures on New Year’s Eve in the car park of Pretty Beach train station prompted Darby to let out a ginormous sigh and brought something else with it, too.
Something that had been bubbling under the surface for months.
It was far from pleasant. Swallowing as she felt herself get a very sudden, very horrible, very emotional fizz in the bottom of her nose, she tried to remain in control.
She’d kept the fizz at bay all over Christmas, along with her jolting up and down emotions.
She’d been strong, contained, and had performed, as ever, for the family.
Always being the adult as she’d always had to.
Now she was on her own and her tight grip on performing happy mum duties had waned and fast. Swiftly following the bottom of the nose fizzing, a prick at the corner of her eyes made itself known and a lump appeared in the back of her throat.
A bubble of emotion in her chest. Not great. At all.
Driving very slowly, things were not good.
Not trusting herself or her emotions whilst in control of an old banger, Darby pulled over not far from the ferry wharf and sat watching a ferry come in.
Around her, Pretty Beach sparkled in a layer of frost; on the roof of the ferry cabin, along the top of the railings running along the side of a calm, inky dark sea, kissing the lighthouse in the distance and along the top of the clock tower to her right.
Darby tried to let the beautiful sight of Pretty Beach cheer her. It didn’t really work.
Before she knew it, she’d turned the engine off, slumped back into her seat and burst into a flood of tears.
The gates had opened and oh my how they let the tears flow from deep within.
She'd just about made it through Christmas, and without a doubt, it had been a lovely time, but now it was over, she was low. So very horribly, disgustingly low. The lowest she’d ever been, which was saying something because for sure Darby Lovell had had some low points in her life.
Plus, there was more; it felt as if there was no possibility of ever coming back.
A new year loomed and the worst thing was that she couldn’t give a stuff.
About trying not to be low, about staying upbeat, about trying to be okay, about anything.
For all she cared, as the fresh new year made its way in, it could take a running jump. She might do the same, too.
Tapping her head on the steering wheel a few times, she tried to somehow quell the flood of emotion that had engulfed her after watching Molly leave.
Her attempts, however, were futile and deciding to just roll with it, she howled.
Oh, how she howled. She’d learnt a few things about grief over the years, especially when her mum had suddenly passed away when she was nineteen, and the best thing she’d done was to give in to the feelings if and when they’d arrived out of the blue.
She’d always told her three girls to do the same, too.
Letting emotion, tears, and downright, sorry-for-herself woefulness sabotage every single little part of her, she sobbed.
Like every single little part of her participated in the howling, and boy, was it not pretty.
From the hairs on her head to the tips of her toes, every part of her being seemed as if it were crying.
Sobbing, snivelling, sobbing, shivering.
Blinking and sniffing. A heap of patheticness.
She almost felt as if she was outside her body looking down; the creased-up woman in the front seat wasn’t a pretty sight.
Just so very lonely, woeful and definitely a trillion per cent sorry for herself.
What went deep: she felt she had the right to feel sorry for herself. For once in her life.
The crying was not attractive, if crying ever could be.
Her sobs not the sort of delicate little puffs you see in films when the heroine is sad.
The ones where the movie star’s make-up remains in situ and she stays in control as tiny little streams of perfectly formed tears stream down the sides of impeccably blushered cheeks.
Where mascara remains on lashes. This wasn’t movie-star crying or even Netflix-level crying.
Oh no. It was real girl sitting in a freezing cold old banger of a car desperate crying.
Long, big, heavy, ugly, snotty, crying. Throw in some gasping, lots of shoulder heaving and deep self-pity thrown in for good measure.
Add a bit of amateur dramatics via a crumpled-up face.
Very ugly, messy, not at all pleasant. Quietly, deliciously cathartic. A long time coming.
After letting the crying completely engulf her, Darby Lovell tried to recover herself, but didn't find it an easy ask at all. Frantically looking around for a tissue in her ginormous basket, eventually the sobs began to subside all of their own accord. Changing from huge gulps of garbled air and strange noises to little pops and hiccups, she gathered herself together a little bit. Not able to find a tissue, she tutted: nothing in her pocket, nothing in the centre console and nothing in her gigantic basket on the front seat. Flicking the button for the glove compartment to see if some long-lost tissue in there would make itself known to her, she immediately regretted it. Groaning at forgetting that the glove compartment was broken, she heard a strange, forlorn, cow-esque wail exit her mouth as the glove compartment door dropped out of its slot on the left-hand side. It landed lopsidedly with a funny little squeak and Darby rolled her eyes. To get it back in would require a fair amount of fiddling to make it fit back snugly in place. Now she’d have that to sort out, too.
The broken black plastic was like her life, really; a bit forlorn, somewhat lopsided, definitely worse for wear, not in quite the right position, tired both in body and mind and all at odds with the world.
Someone really needed to rejig Darby, that was for sure.
Yes, that would be fantastic. Someone could jiggle and fuss with her until she too fit snugly back in place, because, absolutely, right at that moment, she didn’t feel as if she fit anywhere at all.
Rummaging around in the glove compartment, she found a long-discarded, horribly plastic, thin napkin.
Clearly left over from some terrible idea of getting fast food on a motorway somewhere.
Opening it to its full width, she blew into it unceremoniously.
Like the crying, it wasn’t pretty nose blowing.
Nup. Rather, the sort of nose blowing you do when no one is around, not the gentle little poof of a nose blow when you were in company and thought that you might have something visible in your nostrils.
More a big, fat, ugly hooter of a nose blow that, when she heard it done by someone else, made Darby shudder.
Like a foghorn in some forgotten coastal town.
Trying to stop the last lingering remnants of crying, she shivered, took some deep breaths and blew her nose over and over again until the little bits of skin on her nostrils were sore.
Wondering if blowing out all the rubbish in her system would help, she blew again.
It didn't. Ten minutes later, she was still sitting in the same place, staring out the window in the abyss of a mostly deserted ferry wharf area. Hopeless, strange, upset, sad and out-and-out, kill-me-now lonely. The doldrums did not make her feel good. The freezing cold temperatures weren’t helping, either.
Exhaling a big blow of air, Darby tried to get a grip.
What in the world had happened as she’d started the car after dropping off Molly?
She didn’t know, but it didn’t bode well.
Her head felt like a football that had been pumped and pumped and pumped and was about to explode.
But it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t only that she was hormonal and tearful with an overfull, over-inflated football head about to be kicked around at Wembley.
She was sick of everything to her core - not sick enough to make her stop eating to stop the spare tyre that was slowly creeping onto her middle, just sick enough to constantly make her feel that all was not well in her world.
As if everything around her was falling apart.
As she finally stopped blowing her nose and the sobbing had turned into an every now and then shuddering, she restarted the engine, put her car into reverse, swept her hair out of the way, looked over her shoulder into her blind spot and reversed carefully out of the icy, sparkling car park.
At least it was a beautiful night, there was that.
Pretty Beach, the little coastal town she’d moved to five years before, doused in an ever-so-barely-there sprinkling of frost, had nipped and tucked its way into and onto everything.
On the old footbridge over the inlet near the wharf, on the branches of a gigantic Christmas tree not far from the gate to the ferry, on the bonnet of her old banger of a car.