Beaches

Part 3

He woke at first light, wrapped in a tangle of thin sheets, moist with his sweat. His gasping breath was the only sound in the room. He sat up and looked around, after a while he started to believe it had only been a nightmare, that there was nothing he could do, that it was too late.

(Why weren't you there?)

There was water in the pipes, so he washed, dressed and left the house. He shivered in the warmth, still trying to put the dream behind him, but knowing that until he went to the house he wouldn't be able to.

What did he hope to get out of this? What, was the best-case scenario?

There was no good outcome, but he still needed to go, still needed to see for himself. He needed to know what had happened to them, to know if there had ever been anything he could have done.

There were ghosts haunting these streets, calling out to him and asking why it had taken him so long to come back. If he'd come sooner then he might have been able to do something, but now it was too late. Now he was just a tourist.

When his grandparents had moved to Furness, it had seemed like the coolest thing in the world. He'd imagined their days would be spent building sandcastles on the beach and eating ice-cream. The best part though, was that he got to visit them every summer. His mum hadn't been able to understand why they would retire to a place so far away from their family, but to him it had made perfect sense.

His own parents hadn't moved until his grandmother had died. By then Jacob had been at university, but of course Emma hadn't. She was his older sister, by five years, but no one had any expectation that education was going to feature in her life. She had moved with them.

When he'd finished school, he could have joined them, but by then he'd been having too much fun on his own. He'd gone to visit occasionally, but the seaside is a very different place in your twenties than your teens and it hadn't held the same fascination for him. By then his grandfather had been on his way out anyway and his parents had been planning to move back to the city afterwards.

In the end, his grandfather had held on until the virus came. Although he was among the first wave of deaths - the old, the young and the already dying - it had all happened so quickly that it didn't make much difference. From first to final wave took less than a month.

It was easier to tell himself that there was nothing he could have done, and for the most part that was true. He couldn't have saved them, but - and this was the crux of it, the reason he had come back - he could have helped.