Off Season

From October to March, Skerrow-on-Sea belonged to the gulls.

The tourists went home when the clocks changed. The fish-and-chip shop cut its hours to three days a week. The pier lights were switched to half power, so that the whole front looked like a very long, very cold sentence with half its words missing. And at the far end of the promenade, where the paint was thinnest and the wind came hardest off the water, Marlowe’s Amusements put up its shutters and sat out the winter in the dark.

Cass Marlowe had the key.

She wasn’t supposed to use it much. The arcade was closed; there was nothing to do there until Easter. But her parents were out at the cannery until six every night, and the house felt too quiet with only the radiator ticking, and so, most days, Cass let herself in through the side door and sat on an upturned crate among the dust-sheeted machines with a flask of tea and her homework.

It was a strange place in winter. All the gaudy lights switched off. All the music stilled. The air smelled of old carpet and cold metal, and the machines stood about under their white sheets like ghosts at a very bad party. She liked it. Nothing here asked her to be anything.

Especially not the one at the back.

It stood in the corner by itself, the way it had since 1987. A pinball machine, taller than she was, painted with a purple night sky and a streaming comet. STARFALL, it said, in chrome letters going green with age. Her grandad Joss had bought it new the year he opened the arcade. He’d polished the glass every Sunday. He’d taught her, when she was six, to stand on a milk crate and work the flippers. And in the autumn before last he had sat down on the bench beside it, said “Cass, love, I’m a bit tired,” and had gone quietly out like a light.

Starfall had broken that week too. Cass had always privately thought that was fair.

Now it sat under its dust-sheet, dead, with a handwritten note taped to the glass in her father’s blocky hand. SCRAP — COLLECTING 14TH MARCH.

She didn’t read the note any more. She just sat with her back to it, which was a different thing.

On the second Tuesday in November, someone knocked at the side door.

Cass jumped so hard that tea went up her sleeve. Nobody knocked at the arcade in winter. Nobody came in winter. She put down her flask, crept to the door and opened it a crack, and found herself looking at a tall boy in a wet blue anorak with a hood so deep she couldn’t see his face.

“Sorry,” said the hood. “Is this place open?”

“No.”

“Right.” A pause. “It says open on the sign.”

“Which sign?”

He pointed. Over the door, a large neon sign flickered feebly, and under the half-dead letters, a cardboard notice hung crooked on a string. It said OPEN on one side and CLOSED on the other, and she had turned it round herself only that morning, but the wind, apparently, had had views.

“It’s closed,” said Cass. “Obviously. It’s November.”

“I figured. I just—“ The hood lifted. Underneath was a pale, narrow, tired face with enormous dark eyes and an expression of faint apology, as though he were saying sorry for existing in her doorway. “I’ve been walking for an hour and everything’s shut. The chip shop. The café. The library. I thought if the arcade had a light on, there’d be, I don’t know, a person.”

“There’s a person.”

“I noticed,” he said, and almost smiled.

It was raining sideways. He was shivering. She had a flask of tea and a rule against letting strangers into the arcade, and she looked at the one for a long moment and the other for just under it.

“Five minutes,” said Cass, and opened the door.

His name was Theo Park. He was sixteen. He had come to Skerrow on the first of November, with his mum, who was the new locum doctor at the surgery, and he would be going home to Manchester in March when her contract ended. He told her all this in a rush, sitting on a crate with her tea in his hands, as if he’d been saving it up for weeks and had nobody to tell.

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s a nice town. It’s just—“ He flapped a hand at the window, at the grey sea and the empty pier. “It’s very finished, isn’t it? Like the party’s over and nobody told the building.”

“It’s called the off season.”

“I know what it’s called.”

“Everybody’s at the cannery or the surgery or their nan’s,” said Cass. “It picks up at Easter.”

“I’ll be gone by then.”

“That’s what March means, yes.”

There was a short, awkward silence. She couldn’t tell whether she’d been rude. Theo drank his tea and looked round the dim arcade, at the white-sheeted shapes. His gaze travelled over the air-hockey table, the claw machine, the booth for photo strips, and came to rest, with a faint, thoughtful frown, on the corner.

“What’s under that one?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“It’s the tallest thing in the room.”

“It’s scrap.”

But he’d already stood up. Before she could stop him he’d crossed the carpet and tugged the dust-sheet off in one smooth sweep, and Starfall glowered at them in the half-light, its purple sky a little faded, its comet a little chipped, its glass spotted with a million tiny scratches from forty years of ball bearings.

“Oh,” said Theo softly. “Oh, wow.”

Cass opened her mouth to tell him to put it back. Nothing came out.

“This is a real one,” he said. “A Williams. Not a replica. Look at the artwork. Look at the cabinet; nobody makes cabinets like that.” He had crouched down and was peering at the underside with a look on his face she’d only ever seen on people queueing for the Waltzers. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It stopped. Dead. The week my—“ She stopped. “Last year.”

“Did anyone look at it?”

“Dad called a man. The man said it’d cost more than it was worth.”

“The man,” said Theo, with great contempt, “was talking rubbish.”

He unzipped his anorak and from the inside pocket he took out a small roll of canvas, tied with string. He untied it. Inside lay a row of tiny screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a soldering iron the size of a pencil, and a jam jar of what looked like screws, resistors, and little black beetles that were not beetles.

“I fix things,” he said, a bit defensively. “It’s a hobby. My granddad had a repair shop. I used to sit on the counter.” He gave her an unexpectedly shy look. “Can I?”

Cass thought about her father’s note. She thought about the 14th of March.

“You’ve got five minutes,” she said. “You already used them.”

“I’ll be quick,” said Theo, and took off the back.

He wasn’t quick. It took them the whole of the winter.

It turned out that Starfall’s ailment was not a single thing but a long, slow list of small ones. A dead battery on the board. A fuse blown in the transformer. A solenoid that had seized, a lamp circuit gone brittle with age, a bumper that fired only when you kicked the cabinet. Theo lay on his back on the arcade carpet for hours at a time with a torch in his teeth, muttering to himself in a low continuous murmur, like a man calming a nervous horse. Cass held the other torch, handed him tools, and learned the names of a great many tiny pieces of metal.

After school, almost every day. Weekends, if his mum was on call. It became a thing they did, the way people do things in dead months, in the narrow bright pockets of time between the long dark ends of afternoons.

They talked while they worked. It was easier than she’d expected. Under a pinball machine, in a torch’s yellow circle, you didn’t have to look at anybody.

She told him about Skerrow: about how in August the whole front was so jammed you couldn’t push a pram, and how in January you could walk the length of the pier without seeing another soul; about the Pearly Queen of the Waltzers and the man who sold candy floss in a Viking helmet. He told her about Manchester, where he’d got used to a tram stop outside his house and eleven friends who’d all gone to different schools since Year Nine. He told her that he’d been the kind of kid who got lost in the corridor of a new school and had decided, around about October, that he wasn’t going to try again.

“Try what?”

“Making friends. It’s a lot of work to build something that’s going to end.” He turned a screw. “I thought I’d just wait out the winter.”

“Yet here you are.”

“Yet here I am,” said Theo. “Holding a very small screwdriver. In a closed amusement arcade. With a girl who made me stand in the rain for ten minutes before she’d let me in.”

“It was five.”

“It was ten, Cass.”

“It was five and a half.”

He laughed, a short, helpless laugh with his whole face in it, and she felt it somewhere under her ribs. She looked quickly at the underside of the machine.

By December, the lamps worked. By Christmas, the right flipper did a small, shy jig when you pressed the button. In January, the display lit up for a whole four seconds before dying, and they both screamed so loudly that a gull took off from the roof.

“It’s alive!” yelled Theo, and for no reason at all, they were hugging, hanging on to one another by the sleeves in the dim blue glow while the display flickered and went out again, and neither of them let go straight away.

Then they did. And Theo said “Sorry,” and Cass said “What for?” and he said “I’m not sure,” and they both looked at the machine for a long time, very hard, as if it might help.

February came in with a gale.

It had been blowing for two days by the time it really got going. The sea slammed at the pier. The promenade lamps swayed. Down in the arcade, Cass and Theo worked on by the light of the one working strip, with the shutters rattling on their hooks like a drumroll, because they were two weeks off finishing and neither of them was willing to say so.

The last fault was the worst: a ghost in the main board. The machine would power up, play its opening music, spit out a ball, and then, at some precise and wholly unpredictable moment, shudder, go dark, and die. They had replaced six capacitors. They had re-soldered every joint on the underside. Theo had worked out, in the end, that it must be something deep in the old wiring loom, and that unless they replaced the lot, it could go at any time.

“That’s eleven pounds of cable,” he said, “and about three weeks. We haven’t got three weeks.”

“We’ve got till the 14th.”

“I know.” He rubbed his eyes. “I know. I’m just saying, if it’s the loom, we might not—“

The lights went out.

It wasn’t just the strip. It was all of it: the pier, the street lamps, the glow from the café window across the road. The whole of Skerrow dropped into black at once, and into the sudden silence came the wind and the sea, loud as a train.

“Power cut,” said Cass, in the dark.

“I figured.”

“The substation. It always goes in a gale.” She found the torch by feel and clicked it on. His face swam up out of the shadows, wide-eyed and lit from below. “It’ll be back in an hour.”

“Right. Okay.”

They sat on the floor. She poured the last of the tea into the flask lid and gave it to him, and he gave it back, and they shared it, and the storm roared round the walls.

“My grandad had a repair shop,” said Theo into the quiet. “I said that, didn’t I? What I didn’t say was that he died last spring. And I stopped fixing things for a while. There didn’t seem to be a point.”

Cass looked at him.

“Mine too,” she said. “Last year. Joss. The machine, I mean, it was his. It stopped the week he did.”

“I know,” said Theo. “I guessed. The first day.”

“How?”

“Because you wouldn’t look at it.” He smiled, lopsided, in the torchlight. “I know what not-looking looks like. I did it with a toolbox for six months.”

She laughed, and then, unexpectedly, found that she was crying. Not noisily. Just a wet, sudden tipping over, like a cup filled too full. She felt Theo go still beside her.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. It’s just. I really, really want to turn it on again.”

“I know.”

“And I’m scared that if I do, it’ll be—it won’t be him. And if I don’t, it’ll be gone for good.”

“Yes,” said Theo quietly. He didn’t try to fix it. He just sat close, so that their shoulders touched, and let her talk. “That’s the worst bit of it. That it could be both.”

The wind dropped slowly. The rain eased. After a very long time, with her cheek against his anorak, Cass said, “You’re not bad at this, you know. The making-friends thing.”

“I’ve had a very good tutor.”

“You’ve had a bad one.”

“The best one,” said Theo, and she felt him say it more than heard it, a rumble in his chest, and for a moment the whole dark arcade seemed to hold its breath.

The lights came back on with a crash.

Cass shot upright. Theo said something that should not be repeated. The Waltzer music, forgotten on its timer, blared from the ceiling, tinny and enormous, and from the corner, a small ghostly sound answered it.

Ding.

They both turned.

Starfall’s lamps were on. Not flickering. Not dying. All of them, steady and purple and gold, blazing across the old painted sky, and the display read 000000 in green, and a ball sat waiting in the chute, and over the speakers came the theme tune, bright and bouncing and absurdly cheerful, that Cass had not heard in sixteen months.

“The loom,” said Theo, slowly. “It was the power surge. Something must’ve—“

“Shh.”

“I mean, I’d have to check, but I think the cut might have shaken some contact—“

“Theo. Shh.”

She stood in front of the machine. Her hands were shaking. The glass held her reflection over the painted stars, a girl with red eyes and her grandad’s chin. She put her fingers on the buttons.

“Go on,” said Theo, behind her. “It’s yours.”

She pulled back the plunger. She let it go.

They didn’t finish before the 14th of March.

They finished before the 12th, in fact, which meant Cass’s dad came in with his flat cap in his hands on the morning of the 13th, stood for a very long time in front of the glowing machine, and said nothing at all. Then he went out for a walk on the pier. When he came back his eyes were pink and he said, gruffly, “Reckon we’d better keep that, then.”

It should have been the best week of her life.

It was the worst, in fact, by a distance. Because it was the 13th, and it was March, and on the 14th the letter came.

Theo brought it to the arcade in his anorak pocket. She could tell the second he walked in. He was wearing the same face he’d had on the first day, the narrow, closed-up, apologetic one.

“It’s from the health board,” he said. “Mum’s contract. They’re sending her to a surgery in Leeds on the thirty-first. Straight on, no break.” He swallowed. “It’s a good move. It’s a permanent post. She’s been waiting for one. We leave on Easter Monday.”

Cass looked at the machine, and then at him, and then at the machine.

“That’s the week the season starts,” she said, stupidly.

“I know.”

“You’ll miss it. The whole summer. You said you wanted to see the front in August, with all the people on it.”

“I know.”

“Right,” she said. “Well.”

There seemed to be nothing else to say. She had known, of course. He’d told her the first day; March, he’d said, as if it were an item on a list. She had known it all winter and had gone on anyway, like a person walking toward a cliff edge saying, it’s not that close.

“I was going to tell you in a nice way,” said Theo miserably. “I had a speech.”

“What did it say?”

“It said—“ He shoved his hands in his pockets, took them out again. “It said that I was really glad I knocked on your door. It said I’d had the best winter of my entire life, and I’d thought it was going to be the worst, and that you’d made a whole closed-down town feel like somewhere. It said—“ He gave up. “That’s about it. Then there was a long bit about Williams pinball circuitry, because I got nervous.”

Cass laughed, wetly. Then she took a breath.

“I have a speech too.”

“Do you?”

“No,” said Cass. “I thought of one, and it was rubbish. So I’ll just say it plainly.” She stepped forward until she was standing in front of him in the arcade’s dim, colourful light. “I don’t want you to go. I know you have to. But I don’t want you to, and I wanted you to hear it once. Out loud. In case it’s the only thing I’m brave enough for.”

He looked at her. He looked at her for a long time.

“I think,” said Theo, with great care, “that I’d really like to kiss you. If that’s not completely mad.”

“It’s a bit mad.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a very mad yes.”

So he did, a quick, clumsy, enormously gentle kiss that tasted of tea and solder and the salty edge of the sea. It lasted perhaps three seconds. When it was over, they stood foreheads together, blinking, in the glow of an old purple sky.

“Oh,” said Cass.

“Yeah,” said Theo. “I thought so too.”

Easter Monday came in blue and gold.

The gulls were screaming. The pier lights were on at full. All along the front, the shutters were going up, one after another, like eyelids; the chip shop smelled of vinegar, the Waltzers were playing their bad old tune, and the first coach of the season hissed to a stop outside the amusements to disgorge a gaggle of grandmothers in sun-hats.

Cass stood at the arcade door with the key in her hand. She had flipped the sign. OPEN, it said, this time on the right side. Behind her the whole place blazed with light.

“You’ll miss the coach,” she said.

“I won’t. My mum’s only just finished packing the Tupperware.” Theo stood beside her with his bag at his feet, in the blue anorak, with his hood down. He looked taller than he had in November. “I came for the high score.”

“Starfall’s best is nine hundred and ninety thousand.”

“Joss Marlowe,” said Theo. “I know. It’s been on the screen since February. I’ve been trying to beat it in my head.”

“You can’t.”

“No. But I can try.” He crossed the carpet and stood in front of the machine. His fingers rested on the buttons, not pressing. “Come on. One game. Winner gets a promise.”

“What kind of promise?”

“The kind you keep,” said Theo. “One of those. I haven’t decided.”

She went to the other side. They played together, turn and turn about, a ball each, laughing, swearing, the flippers clacking like a thousand tiny applauses. The lights flashed. Comets streamed across the painted sky. Behind them, the first customers wandered in, a small girl who stood on tiptoe to watch, an old man who said, “Haven’t seen one of those in years,” and a pair of teenagers who stared at Theo and Cass with the particular interest of the young for the slightly in love.

Theo’s last ball went down the drain at 412,000. Cass’s last ball hit a bumper, bounced twice, and ran off the end of a lane to a ringing cascade of lights that she didn’t understand until Theo said, “You’ve got the extra ball.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you get to keep playing.”

She kept playing. The lights chased each other round the glass. She was on the edge of the old high score, and she could feel her grandad’s hand on hers, the way he used to guide it when she was six, flick, now, love, wait, wait, now. The ball curled up the right lane. She pressed.

“Come on,” whispered Theo.

It dropped down the middle of the table and into the dark, and the display read 987,450, and it flashed the words GAME OVER.

“Three thousand short,” said Cass, dazed.

“Three thousand,” Theo agreed, with a satisfied sigh. “That’s a really good score.”

“I didn’t beat him.”

“No,” said Theo. “But I think that’s all right, don’t you? I think he’d like you to keep trying.”

Outside, a car horn tooted.

“That’s Mum,” said Theo.

They stood a moment more. Then he turned, and held out his hand, and she took it, and neither of them let go all the way down the length of the promenade, past the gulls, the vinegar, and the shining sea. At the car he put his arms round her and she put her face against his shoulder, and they stood there until the horn went again, long, and patient, and resigned.

“Promise,” said Theo, into her hair. “The one I haven’t decided. I’ve decided.”

“Go on.”

“I’ll be back for the first week of August. Mum says she’s already looked up the train times. We’re going to do the pier in summer, with all the people. And we’re going to beat the score.”

“You said that you couldn’t.”

“I said I couldn’t tonight,” said Theo, and kissed her forehead, and got into the car.

She watched it all the way along the front, and round the bend where the hotel was, and out of sight. She stood very still, with her key in her hand and her heart in her mouth, while the Waltzers played and the grandmothers queued and the gulls wheeled in the enormous spring light.

Then she turned and walked back into the arcade, where a small girl was standing on a milk crate in front of Starfall, working the flippers, with an expression of ferocious joy.

“Careful,” said Cass, and went to show her how.

On the display behind the glass, the high-score table blinked its slow green list.

J.M. 990,000

C.M. 987,450

T.P. 412,000

And on the corner of the glass, where she hadn’t noticed it before, a strip of white label tape had been stuck, no bigger than a postage stamp. Someone had pressed it on very carefully, with a very small screwdriver, and written on it in tiny, neat capitals:

BACK IN AUGUST. BRING YOUR BEST BALL. — T.