Chapter 1

So Northgate-on-Sea is a lovely town by the ocean, packed with visitors flip-flopping their way to the beach or just spending their time on the other side of the promenade while they drink martinis and spritzs full with ice and orange slices and summer and sun and smiles and all the colours in Main Street. Up to the rim.

Nothing lasts forever, though.

Just let the first unsettling breeze show and you will see everyone walking off like bats out of hell. Thus, in such a British manner, Autumn arrives and all the vibrant energy of the tourists spending money and the come-and-enjoy-your-seaside-vacation brochures and the good-goood-gooood vibrations and the elation and the excitations are swept away, along with the beach boys. If you aren’t careful enough, a seagull might dive-bomb at you and steal the ice cream away from your own hands.

After all —that’s what Avner says, at least— and despite the summer splendor, Northgate is always in a winter state of mind. Avner also enjoys adding more dramatic statements, something like ‘Here it is barren winter all year long, with his wrathful nipping cold’. Apart from the Shakespearean quotation and the swearing, I bet you can hear the hammer about to fall upon your head, too. Bang, bang!

To be honest, now that the hounds of the coldest season are howling, I’m starting to think that maybe he has a point. But don’t get carried away. Just because of the weather. You know. Rain. Cold hands. Short days. Quite an issue, if you ask me, considering this is going to be my first Autumn here.

By mentioning things like that, I think Avner has no intention to talk about British weather at all. In fact, he seizes every possible opportunity to widen the remark by saying that all compasses in Northgate-on-Sea are actually broken. He has an obscure theory about Northgate being called N-o-r-th-gate —here he grovels the nasal sound as if he were exposed to the most disgusting smell in the world, then emphasizing the ‘o’ with his nostrils round in awe, making the ‘r’ a subtle detonation and finally pronouncing the ‘th’ sound with the cruelty of an executioner’s axe being sharpened— when it really is in the south coast of England; then he goes on and on with something about every fucking thing gone wrong here and Northgaters being completely disoriented for life and what-the-fuck-can-one-expect-‘bout-this-godforsaken-place where everything tends to be upside down. Imagine him showing his own broken compass on the palm of his hand. Someone told me the other day that every Northgater who comes to legal age receives a cheap compass by mail. It’s kind of a gift from the town-hall, you know, a way of saying ‘Good luck with your life and here you have all you need to confront the way ahead’. Bullshit, to put it on Avner’s words.

It is also said that no seafarer should sail away with this compass, because they tend to mark south or north without a real conviction, if you know what I mean. Even when I think Northgate-on-Sea compasses are a great idea and it would be lovely to have one of my own, Avner thinks it is a pointless gesture with no other meaning than a mock to the future of people.

In fact, he is always ready and willing to add that people in Northgate are just random numbers, living here as they could be doing it anywhere else. He adds a lot of information about this point, joking with age and door numbers and statistics of all kinds. But let me observe that I don’t have a clue about what he really means when he says things like these, though I suspect it has to do with his job —he is on big data and algorithms and, of course, numbers… who would dedicate his whole life at the very precise subject which is devastating us as human beings?— and with the less obvious fact that the guy has got some kind of long-run issue with his birthplace. As a matter of fact, he has been trying really hard not to get involved with anybody since he arrived in Northgate last summer —he came back in order to take care of his old grandad, Pat, right before dying—, to such an extent that he always sends me to run his errands and go shopping and things like that.

I sometimes cook for them, too. Most of the times, in fact. Frankly, I don’t mind doing it. Pat is simply adorable and Avner is not a geeky jerk as it may seem. Whenever he is not in his wrecking ball mode, he has a deep sense of humour and his eyes spark like stars when he is daydreaming or reading or listening to How to disappear completely by Radiohead, which is a song he’s really fond of. And I love cooking and I did it for Pat everyday before Avner’s unexpected arrival. So I guess there’s nothing special in this matter.

But let me tell you about old Pat: he used to say he was ninety-something and that, back in the days when he was born, time was not measured by dates, but by harvests, first, and bombs, afterwards. That’s why he didn’t know his own age. He used to offer me everyday his yellow raincoat as a present, but he would take it next morning back, no matter what. Then he died and the raincoat remained hung there, behind the door, so now I believe it belongs to me, even if it’s too big for my thin body. I used  to think that Pat’s days were a newborn miracle, ‘cause he kept forgetting everything every night. Everything meant actions, people and places. Whenever the dawn broke, he grabbed his yellow raincoat, went outside the deck of his boat-house and raised his telescope mumbling to himself, as if anticipating a storm ahead in the horizon. The things he had seen or lived. I’ve been told that he was one of the people who helped in Dunkirk and that’s where he found his love for the sea. Imagine.

It was part of Pat’s routine to forget about me in the early mornings while he was enjoying his endless walks down in Main Street, but by lunchtime he told me that I was a gift from heaven and the best cook he had ever met, as if he’d just remembered I was an essential part of his life. He loved my meatballs and my pisto and everything I cooked for him. Even when he got lost within himself, the only food he would eat was the one prepared by me. When fish and chips or beans were somewhere near his mouth, he immediately drew back his teeth and sweared for hours. And how I laughed.

In his last days, Pat used to get absorbed by the sea somehow, as if the ocean and the waves and tides were his real home. But he always managed to get out of it at some point and his gaze got back to me with that daunting look of his. Pat’s eyes were mesmerizing. Then it was me the one swallowed by them. And they talked about home and said ‘One day you will get your own compass, ‘cause you belong here. Northgate’. And this last word sounded so different to when it is pronounced by his grandson Avner.

And the compass, too. No broken compasses with Pat around.

He was a singular man, old Pat. Kind of a philosopher, as anyone who knew him would agree. One day, as I was serving his meal, he told me ‘We have our cinema, we have one shop for this, one shop for that. We have one post office and one train coming and going to the city. We have one florist and one priest and one bit of everything which is needed for a place to be called a place. But we don’t have a proper winter restaurant, my girl. We just have that silly London business people who come every summer to serve rubbish to silly one-day-visitors and lock the restaurants for the rest of the year. You could be the cook for Northgate. You could serve there your magnificent rice with that volcano-egg-thing you put on the top of it. Just imagine: you could put real plates on real tables. For us real people.’ And I still can see his incredibly yellowish eyes when I cut the volcano thing for him and the half done egg sprawl on the top of it and he tasted my special rice. Or I should say Ai’s rice. I guess I’ll talk about her later as well.

Uh-hu. Yeah.

Lovely idea. The volcano omelette could be a good choice for tonight’s dinner. If I cook it for them, I would have to stay until the omelette is placed on the top, so I would be able to write my witty cooking explanation on my white blackboard —I’ll explain this later, too—and take a close look at this Helen and maybe, just maybe, give my blessing to Avner.

Anyways.

Today is a busy day for him. For Avner, I mean. He has to take care of the stupid couple who are buying old Pat’s boat-house. Such a pity. I know for a fact that old Pat would have never put his boat-home in the market to be sold. Nor in a million years. Even less to a holiday rental couple, with all this overtourism problem. Avner should be ashamed of the mere mention, ‘cause he is always bawling out against airbnbs and complaining about the global market and the gentrification process and tourism system that nowadays are destroying the world as we know it. And yet.

Be as it may, Avner has spent the last days clumsily boasting about Helen coming to town. At least, now it’s Helen. It is frustrating how language works on this kind of relationship field: I have witnessed the ‘friend’ period, when he used to refer Helen as my ‘London friend’, which was a vague and embarrassing term. When I started frowning my eyebrows, he moved to the ‘girlfriend’ phase, which is even more embarrassing, ‘cause it sounds hopelessly adolescent. So he is now in his ‘fiancée’ talking. What a word to avoid the real fact: does he really love her? And the other way around? Anyway, I wonder if he talks like that in his fancy office in London and if he wears a tailored suit and tie there. To be honest, I can’t picture him out without his sneakers and stained t-shirts with funny prints on them. As I was saying, I haven’t decided yet whether I will hug Helen or I’ll pinch her in the forearm, where it hurts that much. I guess I will decide when I pick her up at the train station.

‘Cause —God, I am so so positive about this—, since Avner is so busy and clearly is not gonna think about such a small detail as his fiancee’s first and last supper in Northgate until it’s too late, it will be me the one in charge of sorting out and getting things done. Guess his big data analysis won’t predict something like that, uh?

So. Volcano omelet. What else? Let me think. A nice dessert, maybe? Yeah, it’s always a good feeling to finish things and stages of life with a sweet taste in your mouth. Triffle? Scones? One of the famous Charlie Cliff’s ice-creams?

I know.

It’s raining and it’s cold and no tourist is to been seen in Northgate-on-Sea. Look at the sky. A winter blast is coming. But dinner is not going to be cooked by itself, is it?

So I will have to buy the ingredients in town, where people are just numbers and any sense of community is just not possible —like finding North with a broken compass, according to Avner.

Well, Main Street, here we go.