The Passenger by Daniel Hurst (great book club books TXT) 📕

can’t exactly miss the huge body of water to our left. But I’m mainly smiling because it reminds me of my daughter when she was that age. Louise always loved it down here too, and we spent many a happy afternoon playing on the pebbles and splashing at the shoreline. But those memories are now tinged with sadness because it’s been a long time since we came down here together. These days, I only venture down this way to run errands, and I know that Louise only comes here to drink alcohol with her school friends. I’m not happy about it, and neither are the local police, but there’s simply too much coastline for them to monitor, especially after dark. And my daughter must think I’m a fool if I haven’t noticed the occasional bottle of white wine going missing from my stash under the sink.

Thinking about more innocent times with my daughter makes my heart ache as I watch the young girl clutching her mother’s hand as she pulls her in the direction of the beach. That is exactly how Louise and I used to be, but those days are long gone now, swept away and confined to the past almost as easily as that sheet of newspaper that I can see fluttering around down on the pebbles.

In the end, it’s a relief to see the family ahead of me leave the Promenade and disappear down one of the ramps that lead to the beach because it means I don’t have to look at them and their happiness anymore. But it wasn’t just the mother and daughter relationship that has me harking back to past times in my life. It was also the sight of the man accompanying them both. He looked protective. He looked dependable. He looked like a guy who had his life in order.

Basically, he looked like the complete opposite of my current boyfriend.

I’ve been seeing Johnny for two years now, but things have hardly been a picnic between us. While I had envisioned many sunset strolls along the pier with him in the summer and cosy nights in front of the TV in the winter, it hasn’t been anywhere near that perfect. That’s because, unlike that man I just watched disappear down onto the beach with his family, my partner couldn’t be described as reliable and available.

I do my best to keep my hair from blowing all over my face as another strong gust of wind sweeps along the Prom before deciding to cut my losses and cross the street where the tall buildings should offer me a little more protection from the elements. As I walk over the crossing and reach the other side of the road, I think about the argument I had with Johnny two days ago. I haven’t seen him since. But unlike all the other times when he would come crawling back and beg for my forgiveness, so far I haven’t heard anything from him. Maybe it’s for the best. I’m not sure we had the healthiest relationship anyway. It was far too one-sided. I gave, and he would gratefully take.

Affection. Trust. Money.

Mainly money.

But it wasn’t that he was greedy. He was just an addict.

Johnny has been battling a serious gambling problem ever since I met him, and despite my best efforts and his best intentions, it is a habit he has never been able to fully control or defeat. While I have done what I could to help him beat his addiction, giving him a place to stay, lending him money, and even attending meetings with him and fellow addicts, it has never been enough. Johnny has to want to help himself, but despite what he keeps promising me, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of him really wanting to do that. Now I feel that our latest argument might have been our last. I haven’t seen or heard from him in forty-eight hours. But I know one thing; I’m not going to be the one who makes an effort this time. If he still wants to fight for what we have, then he is the one who is going to have to do the work to keep us together because I’m done with it. I’ve got enough on my plate without continuing to take on his problems. Trying to hold down my full-time job in London while bringing up a hell-raising teenager is more than enough for any woman to manage without adding a reckless gambler on top of that.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to Johnny’s problems. I am. It’s just that while he continues to waste his life on things that aren’t going to improve his situation, I’ve been focusing on things that will improve mine. Finally, for the first time in a long time, I have financial security. I’ve been saving hard for the past year, putting away as much of my wages as I can in order to give myself and Louise a better life. I am planning to move us out of our tiny flat by the station, where we get woken up by the sounds of the trains at all hours, and move into somewhere a little bigger in a nicer part of town. I’ve given up many luxuries over the past twelve months in order to do this, including takeaways, holidays, and shopping trips on the high street, but it has been worth it to finally give myself the cushion of having some money saved away. It’s not much. Only five grand. But it’s more than I have ever been able to save in my life after raising Louise as a single mum for the last fifteen years.

The only real drain on my finances besides my child, our flat, and my commute into London has been Johnny and the money I would give him whenever he hit rock bottom again. It was never much, sometimes as little as ten or twenty pounds, but even so, it added up, and that was