Chapter 1

Steve was choosing his A-Level options, he desperately wanted to do Art, but one module terrified him, Life Drawing, a six-week module where he would have to produce a canvas of a nude model.

Steve was painfully shy, but he had a burning desire to become a commercial artist. Both his parents were creative, his mum, Diane, was a writer, mostly children’s books, some of which Steve had illustrated, and his dad, Jerry, was a musician, he was moderately famous, having played bass guitar in a band in the early 90’s. Now his wild rock & roll days were over, although he does a lot of session work, recording with many successful chart bands, even going on tour for a few weeks a couple of times a year. These days though, most of Jerry’s work was recording jingles for radio and TV ads, and TV soundtracks, which he recorded in his home studio.

Both his parents earned enough to send Steve and his sister Lucy to a pretty respectable boarding school in the north of England, and this school did not allow students to coast through their studies, no matter how much money their parents paid. They were expected to work, and to work hard. In return, the school provided the best facilities, and professionals in many fields of endeavour would regularly visit the school to provide coaching and inspiration.

It was one such visit that sealed Steve’s desire to become a commercial artist. A former student who now worked in the music business drawing sleeve artwork, tour posters and concept work for promo videos.

Emma had once worked with a band his dad had toured with, and had met Jerry a few times, this minor connection provided a small familial link that let Steve relax in Emma’s company.

They chatted for 20 minutes, and Emma looked through his portfolio and seemed to like a lot of it, feeling he had that spark of creativity that would let him shine on the course.

Steve’s style was rooted in street art, bold colours sprayed onto walls, art work 10 feet high and 30 feet long. Images that were up to the minute but ultimately temporary, soon to be sprayed over by another artist with an equal claim to the public display area.

Emma reassured Steve that his talents were real and valued, and that his skill set could be used across multiple fields.

Still, the module on life drawing troubled him, he hated having to look at other people, and if it was a girl he had to paint, oh god, how could he possibly handle being in a room with a naked girl and other people?

That would be Year 13 though, he had Year 12 to work through first, so he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

Year 12 flew by, he loved all the work he did, especially the project involving painting separate 12” squares, each student painting 5 or 6 squares from different parts of an image, when pieced together they made a huge 20 foot by 30 foot jigsaw of the London skyline at night, each square painted in a different style, but all perfectly aligned to make one huge image.

During the summer break Steve began obsessing over the life drawing module, it took over his every waking moment, and his nightmares, stuck in a classroom full of naked people, it filled him with a cold dread.

His mood lifted when they went for a month-long break on a small private island off the coast of New England. Diane was on a deadline to hand over a book, her first proper adult novel, and one of Jerry’s friends had loaned them the island for a month so she could finish the book totally undisturbed, the island had no internet, no phone line, a very poor indoor mobile signal, and the electric was powered from a wind turbine and battery pack, so had to be used sparingly.

So, despite the beautiful weather and scenery, Diane was mostly locked away indoors writing. In turn, Jerry was making use of the basement recording studio to polish off the soundtrack to a TV show for Netflix.

This meant Steve and Lucy were free to wander around on their own.

It was amazingly peaceful, they were the only people on the island, which was roughly lozenge shaped, about a mile and a half long, and half a mile wide, mostly covered in tall yellow grass, the house a round black blob about a third of the way down the island. As they flew in by helicopter Lucy said the island looked like a Minion, she was spot on.

The nearest large island with shops was about 10 miles away, which was easily reached using the motorboat that came with the house.

Steve and Lucy did the run to the island a couple of times a week to go shopping, visit the small cinema or just to hang out at Joe’s ice cream parlour by the marina, otherwise they would stay on their island, reading, sunbathing or just relaxing after a tough year at school.

Naturally Steve also spent a lot of the time drawing, the few trees on the island, the house, the statues around the grounds; Diane had also asked him to draw a design for the cover of her new novel, which was a political thriller about a president who was turning the people against each other with vile, and usually untruthful statements about immigrants and political opponents, all the while slowly milking the national coffers dry. Steve had no idea what he was going to draw, and he had just two weeks to work something out. Oh well, it was keeping his mind off the second year of his course, and the looming life drawing module.

He was thinking about this task as he looked out across the ocean, all he could see was blue, the unbroken sky, the calm ocean. The only other colour was the golden sand and a grey cruise liner on the horizon.

Oh, and Lucy, who was walking past wearing a baggy black t-shirt and shorts.

“Hey Steve,” she called, “I fancy running across to the island this afternoon, are you OK coming with me, mum still won’t let me drive the boat.”

“Yeah, no problem, I need to buy a new sketch pad, this one’s nearly finished.”

“Great, when do you want to go?”

“Any time, I’ve been trying to think of a design for mum’s book, but I just can’t come up with anything. I’ve wasted this whole pad and not had a single decent idea, so I’m going to look at the books in the library.”

“Cool, let me get my bag and we’ll go now, it’ll give you more time in the library.”

Steve followed Lucy back to the house to grab a shirt and his wallet. The day was touching 90°, but out on the open water with the boat pushing 50 knots it could be quite chilly.

It was about a 15 minute run between the islands, and as usual, as soon as they were out of sight Steve handed over the controls to Lucy, she was a far better driver, showing no signs of the crippling anxiety that ruined Steve’s life.

Lucy was 15 and popular around school, her cool confidence meant she did well academically but managed not to come across as a bossy swot, she didn’t antagonise the popular girls and seemed to be devoid of enemies.

As Steve sat in the passenger seat across from Lucy he watched her as she concentrated on smoothly navigating the boat around the sand bars at a speed he didn’t think was possible, the boat tipping steeply side to side on each turn.

At school they rarely met, Lucy was in a different boarding house to Steve at the opposite end of the school, and as she was two years younger, studying for purely academic GCSE courses, their paths rarely crossed during term time.

This holiday was their first chance since Christmas to spend time together, as Lucy had spent Easter with their grandparents skiing in France while Steve went to Scotland with his parents, and he was shocked to realise his sister had blossomed into a very pretty young woman.

Her long blonde hair streamed behind her as they sped across the water, her full lips curled into a smile as she looked down at the clock and realised she had just broken her personal record for the run.

“13 minutes and 40 seconds, if you just grew a pair and put your foot down for the first bit of the run instead of pootling away from the dock we could break the 13 minute barrier I reckon.”

“I don’t know, I just can’t handle the boat the way you do.”

“Of course you can, you can do anything you want if you put your mind to it. The only thing holding you back Steve, is you. Stop over-thinking everything and chill, then you might start to relax and get stuff done. Now hop out and tie us up and we can do some shopping,”

Steve climbed out of the boat and tied the line to the post on the dock, as usual Lucy refused his helping hand and hopped easily from the boat to the dock.

They separated at the shops, agreeing to meet back at the ice cream parlour in an hour.

The island was a bit of an artist colony, and there was a really great art supplies shop next door to the library. Steve bought a couple of large drawing pads and some coloured pencils before popping into the library where he spent half an hour looking at book covers and sketching parts of ideas into one of his pads.

The librarian eventually came over, curious as to why Steve was looking at so many books for a few seconds then putting them back.

He explained what he was doing and she laughed, it was a nice laugh, “ahh honey, you need to look in the art department, over here.”

She ushered Steve into a section on a mezzanine and showed him a book full of book cover designs, duh!

Steve thanked the librarian, then he explained he didn’t have a library card to borrow the book, also he’d had run out of time to look through it, so she kindly placed it behind her desk so he could look at it thoroughly when he visited again, which would probably be in a couple of days.

He’d spent longer than expected in the library, so he ran down the road to Joe’s by the dock, from the doorway he saw Lucy sitting in their usual booth. She looked to be angrily fending off a couple of boys.

Although loath to get into confrontations, hating being angry or aggressive, he also hated the thought of someone hitting on his sister when she clearly wasn’t interested.

So, striding purposefully up to the booth he slammed his shopping bag onto the seat and tapped the nearest boy on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, can’t you see she isn’t interested.”

“We were here first, so just fuck off”

“No, I don’t think so, see, Lucy is my sister and I don’t think she wants you in her face right now.”

The guy turned quickly and punched Steve in the stomach, “nah pal, I think it’s time for you to leave while we have some fun with Lucy here.”

Then Steve did something totally unexpected, he straightened up, faced up to the guy and headbutted him, hitting him square on the nose with the hardest part of his skull. The guy dropped to the floor like his legs had been kicked out from under him, his nose pouring with blood.

“Holy shit, why did you do that?” cried the second guy.

“He started it,” Steve panted, “you’d better help him out,” he added as he took Lucy’s hand, she picked up his shopping and they walked out as calmly as possible.

“Shit Steve, did you really just do that?”

“The pain in my head says I did.”

“Wow, that’s amazing. I could have handled them myself, but thanks.”

“Is there anywhere else we can have a drink, I need a beer I think.”

“There’s a bar over the road, it looks rough, but you’re a street fighter now, so you’ll fit right in.”

“Ha ha ha...”

The bar didn’t look like the kind of place that would bother about ID, which was lucky, as they didn’t have any. Steve ordered a couple of beers, which came in tall steins with handles and took them to Lucy who was at a table at the back of the room, well away from the doors and the jukebox, which was playing some terrible soft rock tunes.

Steve was trying to rationalise what he’d done, and why he’d done it. Normally he would have spoken calmly to the guy, no, normally he would have turned and ran as fast as he could in the opposite direction at the first sign of trouble.

Something in his mind flicked back to watching Lucy driving the boat earlier in the day, how pretty, no, how beautiful she looked, and he realised other boys could see how beautiful she was and a primal feeling reared its head, he had needed to protect his sister.

He sat down in the booth opposite Lucy and drained the whole glass of beer in one draught and settled back, breathing deeply.

“Steve, you OK?”

“I’m not really sure, who were those boys?”

“They’d been following me around all over town while I was shopping. The one you took out started hitting on me while I was trying to buy some clothes in that thrift store on the corner by the art supplies shop. He followed me round town like a sad puppy. I kept telling him to leave me alone, but he ignored me. He was joined by his friend when I went into Joe’s.”

“So, I didn’t overreact then?”

“Well, it wasn’t strictly necessary for you to do that, I’d have got rid of him eventually, but he wasn’t taking the hint as quickly as I’d hoped, so you hurried things along a little. More to the point though, why did you do it, because you’d normally have left the building and phoned the police or something. Direct action really isn’t your style at all Steve.”