the time she got to the long stretch of seafront where the shows pitched up a couple of times a year, cars parked up there now, a middle-aged couple sitting in one eating bags of chips and staring at the view. That could’ve been her and Ben if things had worked out differently.
She thought of everything they’d been through together, more than twenty years. They met as students at Edinburgh Uni, both doing marine biology and ecology. They hadn’t hit it off initially, took three years of circling each other, dating others, before they got it together.
They had so much in common. Both from small coastal towns, her North Berwick, him Anstruther, both in love with the sea. Keen sailors and swimmers, as much at home on the water or in it as they were on land. He was almost a year older, born at the tail end of ’69, a running joke between them that he was a child of the sixties, an old hippy, while she belonged to the brave new world of punk.
Ellie had stayed on at uni after her degree, the offer of a PhD too good to ignore, while Ben scrabbled around doing the usual shit – pub jobs, office temp work, slowly getting a foot in the door with the marina and the sailing school, helping out in his spare time until they offered him shifts covering for other tutors. After her PhD, a lack of jobs for Ellie, no Scottish government then, no renewables programme, the only jobs in her field in London, a place so remote she could hardly imagine it.
Then marriage, a move to South Queensferry, the small seaside town that was theirs together. Ellie got a job working at Deep Sea World across in North Queensferry. She was stupidly over-qualified but she got to work with animals all day, getting into the tank to feed the sharks in front of gawping children, letting them handle starfish and crabs, making sure the rest of the fish were fed and cared for.
A string of miscarriages, six in three years. That seemed startling but it wasn’t so uncommon, she was on the statistical curve, not exceptional, just had to deal with it. After the first one she and Ben performed a little ceremony, a remembrance thing, and gave the baby a name, Stuart. They got the idea from some website and while it seemed new-age nonsense at first, it helped. But successive miscarriages numbed them, each dead foetus mocked the sincerity and sombreness of that first time with Stuart, and they didn’t give the others names. In Ellie’s mind they just piled up like the death toll of a tsunami only worse, a nameless horde of dead babies, mocking her inability to carry a child in her womb like the billions of women before her.
Then Logan came along.
No one could blame her for being over-protective. Seventh time lucky. Neither she nor Ben ever mentioned the others, not once they had their hands full with nappy changing and colic and six feeds a night and Logan’s hernia that had to be operated on, just a normal procedure they said, it happened to a lot of boys. They were lost in the fog of fatigue for a while but gradually found themselves again, discovered themselves as a family.
When Logan was around three, once Ellie felt ready, they tried again for another. Two quick miscarriages then a trip to a specialist who told them to cut their losses and count their blessings. Something had happened to Ellie’s insides giving birth to Logan. It was incredibly unlikely she could hold on to an embryo long enough, and she might kill herself trying.
So Ben got the snip and they settled down as a trio, the three stooges, the three musketeers, all that. They joked that the best things always came in threes anyway, happy just to have each other.
Ellie walked past the boarded up Two Bridges restaurant. There was a rumble up ahead then a train thudded out over the rail bridge heading north across the water. As the clack-clack faded Ellie strode past a bistro then the motorbike shop and the Hawes Inn, a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson, their most famous customer, on the
She thought of everything they’d been through together, more than twenty years. They met as students at Edinburgh Uni, both doing marine biology and ecology. They hadn’t hit it off initially, took three years of circling each other, dating others, before they got it together.
They had so much in common. Both from small coastal towns, her North Berwick, him Anstruther, both in love with the sea. Keen sailors and swimmers, as much at home on the water or in it as they were on land. He was almost a year older, born at the tail end of ’69, a running joke between them that he was a child of the sixties, an old hippy, while she belonged to the brave new world of punk.
Ellie had stayed on at uni after her degree, the offer of a PhD too good to ignore, while Ben scrabbled around doing the usual shit – pub jobs, office temp work, slowly getting a foot in the door with the marina and the sailing school, helping out in his spare time until they offered him shifts covering for other tutors. After her PhD, a lack of jobs for Ellie, no Scottish government then, no renewables programme, the only jobs in her field in London, a place so remote she could hardly imagine it.
Then marriage, a move to South Queensferry, the small seaside town that was theirs together. Ellie got a job working at Deep Sea World across in North Queensferry. She was stupidly over-qualified but she got to work with animals all day, getting into the tank to feed the sharks in front of gawping children, letting them handle starfish and crabs, making sure the rest of the fish were fed and cared for.
A string of miscarriages, six in three years. That seemed startling but it wasn’t so uncommon, she was on the statistical curve, not exceptional, just had to deal with it. After the first one she and Ben performed a little ceremony, a remembrance thing, and gave the baby a name, Stuart. They got the idea from some website and while it seemed new-age nonsense at first, it helped. But successive miscarriages numbed them, each dead foetus mocked the sincerity and sombreness of that first time with Stuart, and they didn’t give the others names. In Ellie’s mind they just piled up like the death toll of a tsunami only worse, a nameless horde of dead babies, mocking her inability to carry a child in her womb like the billions of women before her.
Then Logan came along.
No one could blame her for being over-protective. Seventh time lucky. Neither she nor Ben ever mentioned the others, not once they had their hands full with nappy changing and colic and six feeds a night and Logan’s hernia that had to be operated on, just a normal procedure they said, it happened to a lot of boys. They were lost in the fog of fatigue for a while but gradually found themselves again, discovered themselves as a family.
When Logan was around three, once Ellie felt ready, they tried again for another. Two quick miscarriages then a trip to a specialist who told them to cut their losses and count their blessings. Something had happened to Ellie’s insides giving birth to Logan. It was incredibly unlikely she could hold on to an embryo long enough, and she might kill herself trying.
So Ben got the snip and they settled down as a trio, the three stooges, the three musketeers, all that. They joked that the best things always came in threes anyway, happy just to have each other.
Ellie walked past the boarded up Two Bridges restaurant. There was a rumble up ahead then a train thudded out over the rail bridge heading north across the water. As the clack-clack faded Ellie strode past a bistro then the motorbike shop and the Hawes Inn, a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson, their most famous customer, on the
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