A Flirty Dozen Box Set

Love Found on Lindisfarne-2

I made appropriate sounds of admiration before folding it carefully and putting it in my camera case. Then I took Kelis off to meet St Cuthbert and his pet cat, the latter of which impressed her far more than any of the old stones around us.

“Can we go to the beach, now?” she asked when the cat finally tired of all the attention and wandered off.

I consulted my map. “There’s a beach up that way, past the castle. It doesn’t look far.”

Kelis squinted in the direction of my pointing finger. She’d heard me say that sort of thing before. “It’s miles.”

“Buy you an ice-cream on the way?”

“Yay! Come on, Dad.” She tugged on my arm.

Our way out of the priory took us, of course, past the longboat and our two friendly Vikings. Ian was chatting with Balder, both of them leaning against the wall.

“Run out of tourists to terrify?” I asked.

Ian looked up and smiled. “Yeah, what with the tides, everyone coming over already got here a while ago. Off back to the mainland now, are you?”

I tried to tell myself I was imagining the note of regret in his voice. “No, we’re—”

Kelis cut me off in her excitement. “We’re going to get ice creams and go to the beach!”

“Lucky you. They didn’t have ice cream in Viking times, you know.” Ian made an exaggeratedly sad face at her.

I could practically see the cogs whirling round behind those big, brown eyes of Kelis’s. “Da-ad?”

“Ye-es?” I gave her my best stern look.

It didn’t work. Which, based on past experience, shouldn’t have surprised me. “Can Ulf come, too? It’ll be more fun with more of us. Pleeease.”

“Sweetheart, I’m sure Ian—Ulf—has got better things to do than play on the beach.”

Ian quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t know. Quite fancy a trip to the beach. Specially if there’s ice cream.” He turned to Balder. “You’ll be all right here without me, won’t you?”

Balder nodded his bald head, now faintly reddened from the sun. “Course I will. You go off and enjoy yourself.” He smiled as we turned to go, then called after us, “No pillaging, mind, and no sacking, neither!”

We bought our ice creams, which were of the traditional British seaside variety—swirls of pale creamy stuff with a chocolate flake jammed in tight. Kelis insisted on hers being smothered with chocolate sauce. Ian went for strawberry.

“Ulf, why didn’t you get chocolate sauce?” Kelis asked, before carefully licking around the melty bits at the top of the cone.

He grinned. “I like the red stuff better. Looks more like blood. And you can call me Ian, you know. Now I’m off duty.”

“Ian,” Kelis said thoughtfully. “If I was a Viking, what would my name be?”

He gazed at her for a moment, lips pursed. Kelis seemed to have been turned into a chunk of impatient stone, a dab of ice cream on her nose and chocolate sauce around her mouth. “Astrid,” he said firmly. “It means beautiful.”

She accepted it as her due. “What does Ulf mean?”

“Wolf,” Ian said mildly—then turned to growl at her. Kelis squealed and nearly dropped her ice cream.

“Oi, careful with that,” I said with a smile. “I’m not paying for another if you lose that one.”

She ignored me. “What about Dad? What would his name be?”

Ian took a thoughtful lick of his ice cream. I tried not to stare at his tongue. “Now, that’s tougher. Hmm. Einarr?”

“What’s it mean?”

“Lone warrior.”

“Dad’s not alone. He’s got me.” Kelis’s tone was scornful.

“All right, what about Triggr? It means trustworthy.”

I frowned. “I don’t care what it means. I’m not going through life being called Trigger.”

“Touchy, ain’t he?” Ian rolled his eyes at Kelis, and she giggled.

The sun on our backs was baking hot despite the fresh sea breeze, and I was glad I’d insisted Kelis slather herself with sunblock. The path skirted around the castle mound. When we got to the nearest point, where anyone wanting to visit the castle would have to turn off the path, we stood there for a moment, gazing up the hill at it. The road up to the castle gates looked extremely steep, and the castle, frankly, not all that impressive after you’d seen Bamburgh—Kelis had dubbed that one “Castle Awesome”.

“Dad,” Kelis began thoughtfully. “The castle still counts as our one-a-day if we don’t actually go in, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely,” I said, relieved.

Ian grinned. “Just as well. If I turned up there dressed like this, they’d think I’d come to invade the place.”

“What, and got held up several hundred years en route?”

“Took the long way around, didn’t I?”

“Where are you from, by the way?” I asked, as Kelis skipped on ahead. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I’m based in Bath right now, but I like to move around a bit. Always have.” That explained the hard-to-pin-down accent.

“Nice part of the country.” I paused. “You live alone?”

“Nah, I’ve got a flatmate. But that’s all he is. Young, free and single, that’s what I am.” Ian grinned.

“Whereas I’m old, encumbered and, yes, still single.”

“You don’t look that old to me. Early thirties?”

“Thirty-two,” I confirmed. “Feels old enough, sometimes. Especially when I’m explaining to blokes I can’t take them home because my daughter’s there.”

Ian didn’t react to my outing myself, confirming my suspicions he already had a pretty good reading of me. “If they’re not worth explaining to your daughter, they’re probably not worth taking home in the first place.”

“Yeah, but it’s not always easy to tell the difference on first meeting.”

He raised a shaggy, pierced eyebrow. “How about me? Would I be worth it?”

I stared at the path at my feet, shaking my head. It was so peaceful here, the only sounds our footsteps and the calls of seagulls. “I honestly can’t imagine the question ever coming up, under normal circumstances.”

“Okaaaay. Nice to know where I stand.”

I looked up sharply. “What? No—that’s not what I meant. I just…you’re the kind of bloke who, well, doesn’t look twice at a bloke like me.”

“A bloke like you? And what sort of bloke is that?”

“You know.” I gestured down at myself. “Boring.”

“Do I look like I’m falling asleep?”

“No, but it’s only been half an hour. Give it time.”

He laughed. “You’re the one who’s in a hurry to leave, not me. Where’s home for you, anyway?”

“Cambridge. Well, just on the edge of it, really. I’m a software designer. I work from home these days. Means I can be there when Kelis gets in from school.” I paused. “What do you do, when you’re not hacking off limbs?”

“Hack off more limbs, as it happens.” He laughed at my expression, then launched himself over a stile with easy grace. “I’m a tree surgeon.”

Kelis’s voice cut through our conversation. “Da-ad! Ian! Come on, we’re nearly there!”

After meandering through a field of lazy, cud-chewing sheep, we reached the beach. It was entirely made of stones and driftwood, very different from the broad expanse of golden sand over at Alnmouth. There, you could almost imagine yourself somewhere southern and exotic—until you were reckless enough to dip an unprotected toe into the icy North Sea. Here, there wasn’t the remotest temptation to go for a swim, but there were stones to be skimmed, and shells to hunt for.

We crunched and slipped our way along the pebble beach, picking things up and either pocketing them or lobbing them into the water, as appropriate. I wondered, if there had been anyone else but us on this lonely stretch of coastline, would they have thought us a family? Two dads, raising a presumably adopted daughter? Would they think we were sweet? Or would they look away, disgusted?

Then I reflected anyone observing us would probably be too hung up on the fact that one of us was dressed as a Viking to even think about alternative family dynamics.

“It’s great, her still wanting to do this sort of thing,” Ian said, watching the stone he’d just skimmed as it skipped across the water, bouncing roughly twice as many times as my best effort before sinking with a plop.

“I know. A lot of girls her age are teenagers already. We’ve seen a few of them while we’ve been on holiday—slathered in eyeliner, whining for their X-boxes and complaining how boring everything is. I’m glad my Kelis is still a little girl at heart.”

“Dad! Ian! Come see!” We looked up at her shout, to see she’d got a fair way ahead of us down the beach. She was standing next to something that’d been washed up by the sea—a larger-than usual bit of driftwood? It was a rusty brown in colour.

“Come on!”

We hurried up—and then the stench hit me. It was like a fishmonger’s dustbin. In a heat wave. After the bin men had been on strike for a month. “God, what is that?”

“It’s a dead seal! Look, you can see its bones through its face! That is just so gross.” Brown eyes wide, she gazed at it with horrified glee.

“Ah, little girls. Got to love ‘em,” Ian said with a grin.

I groaned. “Thanks, sweetheart. My holiday is now complete. This trip’s been sadly lacking in rotting corpses up until now.”

Kelis ignored my sarcasm with the ease of long practice. “Aren’t you going to take a picture?”

“Trust me, I’m not going to forget this sight.”

“Da-ad! Come on. I want Ian in it, too.”

Ian didn’t hesitate, just scrambled over the stones to my daughter and her new best friend. He didn’t seem to mind having to share the limelight with a putrid corpse.

I ended up snapping off a whole string of shots of the three of them. It felt strange, knowing I’d be able to see Ian’s face in our holiday photos for years to come. Years after I’d last seen him in person, no doubt. Even if we got something going now, it wouldn’t last, would it?

He liked to move around. He’d told me that himself. And Kelis needed stability.

“Dad, Dad, I want the camera.”

I handed it over with a sigh. At least I was able to back off to a less nauseating distance while Kelis took picture after picture of the fetid thing from every conceivable angle.

“Why’s it that colour?” she demanded. “I thought seals were grey. All the seals we saw on the Far Islands were grey.”

“Farne Islands. And, er, I think it’s because of bacteria. Or something.” I looked at Ian, but he shrugged in a search me kind of way.

“Are they eating it? That’s so gross.” She crouched down to peer at it even more closely.

“That’s natural recycling, that is,” Ian said, bending down next to her. Didn’t the smell bother him? Or was it just me, letting excessive squeamishness keep me from a bonding experience with my daughter? I took a step towards them, and gagged as the odour hit me afresh. No, I decided. Ian clearly had no sense of smell. That thing was foul.

Eventually I managed to persuade her away from the festering carcase, and she slip-slid back over the pebbles to me with Ian by her side, the camera swinging wildly on its strap from her neck and threatening to brain one of them any minute. She yanked it over her head and handed it back to me. “You can carry it now.”

“Thanks. Come on, it’s time we were heading back. Tides, remember?”

“Do you think the seal died of old age? Or did something kill it?” Kelis bombarded me with questions as we started on our way back to the village. “I hope it died of old age. Do you think it had any babies?”