Free Firefly Gadroon by Jonathan Gash

Lily had got the three carvings from, either. I slammed the phone down in a temper. A harassed woman was waiting for the phone. She had this little girl with eyes like blue saucers.
    ‘I’m so sorry to ask you,’ she said to me. ‘But could you watch Bernice while I phone? I’ll only be a second—’
    Feeling a right nerk, I sat on the pedestrian railing holding this little girl’s hand outside the phone-box. Brad happened by on his way to viewing day at the auction. Seeing me there looking daft he drew breath to guffaw but I raised a warning finger and he soberly crossed over looking everywhere but at me. Bernice was about three, and obviously a real traffic lover. She kept trying to crawl under everybody’s feet into the motor-car maelstrom. She told me about her toy, a wooden donkey pulling a cart. And the cart was full of seashells. I thought about it a lot. Pewter sheen, like sun on an estuary. Donkey. Cart. Seashells. And a little hut. I showed her my coal carvings, trying to keep my legs out of everybody’s way.
    Bernice’s mother came out, breathlessly dropping parcels like they do. ‘Thank you so much. Was she good? It’s the traffic I’m worried about . . .’
    ‘My pleasure,’ I said. And I meant it.
    If I’d had time I might have chatted the bird up. As it was, the baby’s toy donkey-cart full of seashells had reminded me that down in the estuary Drummer and Germoline, pride of the seaside sands, made an honest if precarious living. I tore up the streets looking for a lift and saw Dolly’s car by the war memorial.

Chapter 6
    Dolly ran me down to the estuary going on for three o’clock. Our whole coast hereabouts is indented by creeks, inlets, tidal mudflats and marshes. As you approach the sealands you notice that the trees become less enthusiastic, stunted and leaning away from gales on the low skyline. They have a buttoned-up look about them even on the mildest day. Then the sea marshes show between the long runs of banks and dykes. You see the masts foresting thinly among the dunes’ tufted undulations. Anglers abound, sitting gawping at their strings in all weathers. A few blokes can be seen digging in the marsh flats among the weeds. Well, whatever turns you on, but it’s a hell of a hobby in a rainstorm. A lot of visitors come to lurk among the reeds with binoculars when they could be holidaying in a lovely smokey town among the antique shops, which only goes to show what a rum lot people are.
    ‘Head for the staithe, Dolly.’
    ‘I must be mad in this weather, Lovejoy.’
    The birds are different, too, sort of runners and shovellers instead of the bouncy peckers that raise Cain in my patch if you’re slow with their morning cheese.
    There seemed a lot of fresh air about. The wind was whipping up as Dolly’s motor lurched us down the gravelpath between the sea dykes, blowing in gusts and hurtling white clouds low over the water. A staithe is a wharf alongside a creek where boats can come and lie tilted on sands at low water. You tie them to buoys or these iron rings and leave them just to hang about. Tides come and go, and the boats float or sag as the case may be. The main river’s estuary’s littered with the wretched things.
    ‘There’s nobody here, Lovejoy.’ Accusations again.
    ‘Drummer’s bound to be.’
    ‘I should have brought an extra cardigan.’
    We got out. The wind whipped my hair across to blind me and roared in my ears. The force of it was literally staggering. For a moment I wondered what the terrible racket was. It sounded like a thousand crystal chandeliers tinkling in weird cacophony. Then I realized. The masts. They’re not wood any more. They’re some tin stuff, hollow all the way down. And the wind was jerking the ropes and wires, thrashing every one against its mast. There’s never less than a hundred boats at least, either drawn up or slumped on the flats at low water. Say three taps a second, that’s three hundred musical chimes every pulse beat,