Chapter Text
If you ever go to Broadchurch, do me a favour. Do it properly.
Don't let them convince you otherwise; there are only two ways to truly arrive: get born there or wash up on the tide.
Forget driving up in your Golf rental and don't bother with the bus. Grabbing a cab from the station'd be a waste of money. Visitors just passing through take the road—arrive that way and that's all you'll ever be.
You can't call me a visitor—I was born in the town's three-room maternity wing—but when Mum shovelled us in the car and fled, I guess the journey was every bit as hard as a labour and we all got reborn at the other end of it.
Was it hard for her to drive away?
I'm not convinced she ever really escaped.
Because, turns out, just as there are only two ways into Broadchurch, there are only two ways out: over the waves or in a box.
Mum got us as far as London, and although she could turn her back on the town, I don't think she ever stopped looking over her shoulder.
When I was a kid I used to think she looked out of fear. I was too young to understand yearning.
Twenty-five years she's lived with the shadow of those cliffs on the western horizon. Their shadow was cold over us, her sons, too. Broadchurch was a name we never spoke but could never ignore. Family holidays, she took us east. To France, to Spain, to Scotland. But we never went any further southwest than Stonehenge, and that was only after months of whining. That's how far those cliffs loomed.
I knew why. Mum never lied or made up stories. Dad's in jail—he killed a Broadchurch boy—and even before I knew the details, I sensed the murder my father committed was a cut beyond the usual.
A deed so awful it reached out and swallowed Mum whole, making her an untouchable. Unforgivable.
But for all their threat, those cliffs—which I knew only from the pictures Tom squirrelled away—were like the moon to me. A beacon, a thing to look to: some nights a barely-there sliver pretending to look the other way, other times so round in my imagination all I could do was sit and wonder.
One day, I vowed, I was going to meet these cliffs head on. Because like it or not, I was born in Broadchurch and I had a right to be there.