Cold, salted air gushed under Blackpool Pier, whistling between the flaking struts. The beach seemed endless this time of year, the sand grey and empty without the regular punctuation of umbrellas.
Kate was glad of the peace, as much as she loved the docile donkeys, draped in brightly striped blankets, picking their way through clusters of holidaying families.
The ice cream hut was closed, it always was this time of year, but she’d found a spar two streets from the waterfront that sold the same soft, fondant ice cream coiled atop a wafer cone. It had always dripped in the summer sun, sweet and sticky, down her fist, straight over the plasticy tissue failing to absorb it.
Concrete slabs towered behind her, a barrier between land and sea. Kate sat on the protruding edge of the bottom slab, cold seeping through her jeans, the distant ocean lapping its way back up the shore as she turned the cone against her tongue. The whipped ice cream was crisp and creamy, the flavor drawn out in the sharp February air.
The drive hadn’t taken long, 45 mins down the motorway. She’d be back home before Elijah got out of nursery. Maybe one day she’d be able to bring him with her, tell him about his grandma, and the day trips she took them on to Blackpool.
Crammed in the car at the crack of dawn, her brother fast asleep, the boot filled with beach chairs and badly folded inflatables, the picnic basket stacked with far too many sandwiches - that never ended up being enough - balanced on top. The radio blaring, the sun cooking the thin tin roof. Pulling in at a pay phone while her mum called the school with her latest creative excuse. “Yes Mrs Bosterton ... I don’t know how she always gets so many summer colds … well I hardly think she plans to be ill at all … but yes, she should be back in tomorrow... ” And then that next day back at school, Mrs Bosterton glaring over her pearl rimmed spectacles, taking in Kate’s bloom of freckles and inquiring after her sudden health improvement.
It was worth it, those days at the beach stretched out like a cat in the hot sun. Hours digging holes with her brother that somehow never got that much deeper, sandcastles precariously stacked atop sandcastles, hunting for shells to adorn the top. The tide, creeping up towards them, only to slip away again, leaving wet, pliable sand in its wake.
The ice cream hut, the last of the vendors open as the sun began to blush down the sky, that whiskery smile as he handed her mum three cones. It was the only thing she ever paid for, no matter how much they’d both begged their mum for chips. Sat atop the sun baked sea wall, the final moments of those stolen days, savoring each melting lick.
Kate didn’t have many memories of the woman who’d passed away when she was seven, the few she had were as well worn as the stupidly uncomfortable jelly shoes she’d got that last summer.
She lifted the ice cream cone as if a toast.
“This ones for you mum”
