The Sea Gate

by Jane Johnson

  I can feel Reda’s grin in the air between us.

  Eddie gives one more defeated glance towards The Sea Gate, as if calculating his chances of bolting with it, then shakes his head. ‘I’m a shit, yes, I know.’ He shrugs, then lifts his chin. ‘But, hey, it took you ten years to work it out, didn’t it? Plenty more gullible fish in the sea.’ He holds out a hand. ‘Shake?’

  I frown. What a way to end ten years and a torrent of let-downs and betrayals. But I find myself offering my hand, if only to mark the ending. He takes my hand and his thumb plays over my palm, a final brief caress. Then his entire demeanour changes and suddenly he has his arm hooked around my neck, pressing hard against my windpipe. With his free hand he manoeuvres a knife out of his pocket, presses the button in the handle and the blade flicks open. He holds it out then tosses it in the air and catches it, a nonchalant assassin.

  ‘Out of the way, there’s a good chap,’ he says to Reda. ‘Plumber, eh? I bet you’d like to give her pipes a good clean. Shame about that.’ He pauses. ‘How about all that crap about the hair dye? That was nasty, wasn’t it? I didn’t know you had that in your repertoire, darling.’

  Reda takes a step towards him and at once Eddie transfers the blade to my throat, the tip pressing in painfully, preventing me from making a sound. ‘Oh, I don’t think so, do you? You need her to stick around or you aren’t going to get paid. No one does a job like this out of the goodness of their hearts. Though I can tell she fancies you, it’s all in the eyes. Perhaps she’s thinking about paying you in kind – something got her all hot and bothered this morning. Bet you want a British passport, don’t you, with that accent of yours? Shame you didn’t get together with her before now. You could have made off with the paintings, sold them for a small fortune and set yourselves up nicely. Look at you,’ he sneers, ‘desperation shining in your eyes as you try to reckon the odds of taking me down without me sticking this in her. See, that’s the difference: you care about her and I don’t – and that’s what gives me the whip hand. Now, you’re going to help me carry that painting back up to my vehicle like a good little mule – I’m sure there are plenty of those where you come from – and I’ll just follow along with Rebecca here, make sure you don’t do anything that might prejudice her health – what’s left of it, anyway. You know she’s not all that any more, don’t you, old boy? No tits, a scarred old chicken carcass. It’s only a matter of time: she’s just walking dead—’

  ‘Shut your mouth, putain,’ Reda says with quiet menace. ‘Every word shows me the filthy rot that is your soul. This woman is a fine woman. She has strength and compassion, honesty and determination. She is worth ten thousand of you. What she ever saw in you I cannot imagine.’

  ‘My cock, mate. She loved it. Even this morning when I gave her a final mercy ride, she loved every fucking moment of it.’

  I can tell by the way his muscles subtly tense that he expects to shock Reda with this revelation, to goad him, but Eddie was asleep when Reda looked in and saw us, so he doesn’t even get this small satisfaction. Reda just stares at him, his dark eyes like agates.

  Eddie’s knife sketches an insolent figure of eight in the air. ‘Ah, well. No time to waste. I’ve got a bloody five-hour drive back up to London from this out-of-the-way shithole. Place for washed-up losers if ever I saw one.’ He pauses. ‘You can take that down as well,’ he says, indicating the painting of the sunwashed bay, the little boat in a luminous cloud.

  I cough and try to speak but Eddie just tightens his chokehold till I’m struggling for air.

  Reda’s mouth is a hard, flat line. He strides across the room and takes the painting down. Behind it, a rectangle of bright wallpaper is revealed in its pristine pre-war state and I can suddenly picture the room as it must once have been, elegant and sunny, vibrant with colour, the heart of a lovely family home. Its current degradation, despite all I have done to try to bring it back to life, seems so poignant that tears fill my eyes and spill onto Eddie’s forearm.

  The moment of distraction as Eddie looks down in confusion is all Reda needs. With a single neat spin he jabs the corner of the painting into the angle between Eddie’s jaw and ear. Eddie screams and lets me go. Rather than run away, I turn and swing my fist into his face with a roundhouse punch that lands with astonishing force.

  Eddie drops without a sound.

  23

  I CRADLE MY HAND. VIOLENCE IS NEVER THE ANSWER TO anything, but I’ve never felt so weirdly euphoric. My knuckles are red and already starting to swell, but even if I can never hold another paintbrush it will have been worth it. I expect I’ll feel differently later, but for now I’m damn well going to treasure the moment.

  Reda is looking at me in astonishment. He holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender. ‘Don’t hit me.’ He grins.

  We both stare down at the unconscious form of Eddie, but I feel nothing. Not regret, or hatred or even repulsion. Nothing at all. All my emotions appear to have burst out of me in that one punch. I imagine them flowing down my arm like Popeye’s spinach, pumping up the muscles, exiting in a cartoon-bubble, POW!

  ‘What shall we do with him?’

  ‘Call the police,’ Reda says without hesitation.

  ‘Really? Can’t we just put him in his car and let him go?’

  ‘After what he did to you? After he came all this way to steal from an old lady? If you let him go, what’s to stop him coming back to hurt you again?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It’s all so complicated. I rub my throat: my voice is hoarse.

  Reda takes a pace towards me, moves my hand away and crooks his neck. ‘Look at what he’s done to you,’ he says, and there is such tenderness in his voice that my knees start to tremble.

  I step away. I want to step towards him, but I step away. Fear, confusion, embarrassment. I am fourteen all over again.

  Eddie has not moved, but I can see his chest moving up and down, so I know he’s not dead. Even so, I drop to one knee and place my hand in front of his slack mouth to be reassured by the rhythmic expulsions of warm air. Then his eyelids flicker and he stares up at me and groans.

  ‘Up you get,’ Reda says, heaving him to his feet, where he stands, swaying unsteadily.

  ‘Shouldn’t we check him for concussion?’ I ask.

  Reda shrugs. He holds a hand up in front of Eddie’s face, little finger and thumb folded down. ‘How many fingers?’

  ‘Fuck off!’ says Eddie.

  ‘He’s not concussed.’ Reda turns to me. ‘Phone the police?’ He digs in his pocket, removes his mobile, thumbs the code into it and passes it to me.

  ‘No signal.’ I show him the screen. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Go and open the cellar door,’ Reda tells me.

  I hesitate. Ever since finding the bone and making that single foray to check for more I have avoided the cellar and the tunnel down to the cove.

  ‘We can keep him there till the police come,’ Reda adds.

  Eddie stares at him incredulously. ‘You must be joking.’ But he’s still not quite with it and he’s too slow to prevent Reda taking hold of his arm and jamming it up behind his back till he yelps.

  I think of the Sparrow brothers down in that cellar, another thing I haven’t told Reda. I wonder whether there are traces of their nefarious goings on down there. What if Eddie finds the drugs? What if he takes them? It all seems too surreal. I almost laugh hysterically, but I run and unlock the cellar door and between us we manage to get a struggling Eddie safely down the steps. At the bottom, he looks around, confused. ‘Don’t leave me down here!’ he calls after us as we run back up the steps. ‘It’s fucking freezing! Ah, come on, Becks – I hurt you, you hit me – we’re even. Just call it quits, eh? Just let me go. I’ll leave and you’ll never see me again, I swear!’

  I turn back, unsure, but Reda hauls me through the door, locks it grimly and steers me into the kitchen. ‘You need a cup of strong tea. And I also prescribe biscuits.’

  I sit at the kitchen table beneath Olivia’
s portrait. I think today she looks rather bleak, disappointed in the shortcomings of humankind. Prompted by this, I tell Reda of my suspicions about the Sparrow brothers. I tell him about the rat. He stops pottering around with plates and biscuits and stares at me. ‘They pushed a dead rat through the letter box?’

  ‘I hope it was dead before they pushed it through. Poor thing. I buried it out in the orchard.’ I take a sip of the tea he has made me. It is massively oversweet and almost undrinkable, but I drink it anyway. He has, for some reason, used the best bone china cups and saucers: my cup is prettily decorated with little blue flowers; his with roses and a sprig of rosemary. It looks ridiculously dainty in his strong workman’s hands.

  He takes a sip from his own cup, wrinkles his nose and sets it down. It chimes against its dinky saucer. ‘I ran out of sugar,’ he says. ‘It tastes bad without it.’ Picking up a digestive, he devours it whole.

  ‘That’s a good trick!’ I try to emulate it and end up choking greedily. His delight at my idiocy lightens our mood and soon we’re giggling like children.

  When at last we stop laughing, I say, ‘I want to explain. About this morning.’ Was it really only this morning I slept with Eddie? It seems half a lifetime ago, and completely inexplicable.

  He shakes his head. ‘You really don’t need to explain anything. Really. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘I feel I do and…’ I hesitate. I was about to say ‘and I’d really like it to be your business’ but I just can’t muster the words. ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ I mumble in the end. ‘It was a mistake. A stupid, giant mistake.’

  He’s gazing at me intently and I can feel myself reddening. To hide my embarrassment, I get up and go to the cupboard and take out of it one of the mugs I usually use. I pour fresh tea into it but the sugar bowl is empty. In the cupboard above the kettle I find an old canister which when I shake it gives back the soft sifting sound of granulated sugar. I refill the sugar bowl, and am about to return the canister to the shelf when I see another tin shoved to the back of the shelf. I fiddle it down.

  It looks ancient, the label obscured by repeated handling and oxidization, but even so I can make out the words ‘Thomas Harley Ltd, Perth’ and ‘for beetles mix with soft sugar’, which makes no sense at all. Above this ‘… low phosphorus’ and in capitals – ‘RODINE’ and ‘PO…N’. A horrible thought occurs to me, and I fumble at the tin, which falls to the floor and rolls on its side across the slate tiles to fetch up at Reda’s boot, dislodging the lid. He bends to retrieve tin and lid, sniffs the contents and recoils. He jams the lid back on with some alacrity. ‘I think,’ he says slowly, putting the tin down on the table and pushing it away from him, ‘that this is rat poison. We use something like it back home.’

  ‘What on earth is it doing in a kitchen cupboard?’ I frown.

  We look at one another. I can feel the eyes of the figure in the portrait upon me. Reda gets up and examines the bowl of sugar, then the tea caddy. He shakes his head. ‘They seem fine. It’s a strange place to keep rat poison, though.’

  I remember something. Several somethings. My hand flies to my mouth. The somethings are beginning to join together in a distressing way.

  ‘I found letters from my mother to Cousin Olivia upstairs, some dating back years. In some of them she must have said she’d been ill because Mum replied saying she hoped Olivia was feeling better.’

  ‘She’s an old lady,’ Reda says slowly.

  ‘Ninety-odd, yes, I know – but it went on and on, from year to year, that she was sorry Olivia was feeling under the weather, “hope you’ve got over this wretched tummy bug”, “hope you’re feeling more yourself”… and Olivia isn’t one to complain: she’s a tough old bird. And when I was visiting her at the hospital, the nursing sister said there was something up with her liver, they were getting odd test results…’

  Reda shakes his head. ‘I don’t—’

  ‘All this time… and that stuff – well, it looks pretty old. Do you think rat poison goes off? Loses its potency? Do you think you can build up some resistance to it? If someone’s been trying to poison her, why isn’t she dead?’

  Reda blows a long breath out of his nose. ‘Perhaps whoever it is doesn’t want her dead. Perhaps it’s some sort of punishment?’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  He nods. ‘But who would do such a thing?’

  I feel the eyes of the girl in the portrait on me, mocking now. I look at the dainty porcelain cups and a wave of revulsion rises through me. I look up at Reda, feeling stricken. ‘No one will believe me.’ I haven’t even told him about the parrot’s utterances and my suspicion that Cousin Olivia was pushed down the stairs.

  Reda places the tin of rat poison in a plastic carrier bag and ties the neck. Then he undoes it and places the cups in there too. ‘Greed,’ he says firmly. ‘It’s at the heart of everything, isn’t it? The house, the paintings. It’s all about money.’ He shakes his head. ‘People are sadly predictable when it comes to money.’

  As if in answer to this, the heavens open again and rain batters the window. It’s getting dark. Reda checks his phone but there’s still no signal. ‘I’ll run up the hill and try to call the police from there,’ he says.

  ‘No, please.’ I put my hand on his arm. ‘I’m feeling very spooked by all this. I don’t want to be here on my own, not at the moment. Not with Eddie down in the cellar. Do you mind?’ I shiver, feeling a distinct chill even though the range is fired up.

  He nods. ‘Come on then. Let’s light the fire in the parrot’s room and we’ll see if I can teach him any more rude words in Darija.’

  Gabriel likes Reda. He perks up whenever he enters the room, jumping noisily around his cage, trying to catch his attention with affectionate little trills and whistles. Today is no different.

  ‘I should let him out for a bit,’ I say, feeling guilty that he’s not been let out of his cage for the past few days. ‘I’ve been reading up – he needs to exercise his wings, and it’ll make him happier. Body and soul. Makes sense – who would want to be trapped in a cage?’

  Which is what I have been, these past years, I realize even as I say it. Fear has trapped me, rendered me immobile and powerless: fear of losing Eddie, fear of the cancer, fear of everything, really. I’d forgotten I even had wings, let alone how to use them.

  ‘You think parrots have souls?’ Reda asks, regarding the bird askance.

  ‘I’m sure Gabriel does.’

  ‘Do you, Djibril?’

  The bird cocks his head at Reda, then bounces up and down as if in assent and lets out a piercing whistle. ‘Djibril!’

  ‘How did he learn that so quickly?’ I am astonished. ‘He’s a genius.’

  ‘It’s his name.’

  ‘Gabriel’s his name.’

  ‘It’s the same, in Arabic.’

  ‘But…’ My mind spins. Not knowing what to make of this, I concentrate on opening the cage door. Gabriel – Djibril – watches me closely. I have brought a handful of unshelled peanuts from the kitchen for him and I hand him one. He takes it politely in his hooked beak, holds it still with his talons and cracks it open efficiently. ‘That beak is quite a weapon,’ I laugh, as Gabriel plunders the nut inside.

  The parrot, having disappeared the peanut, comes questing after another. ‘Oh no, you don’t!’ I tell him, laughingly hiding the rest. ‘How else am I going to bribe you back in again?’

  He gives me a ceramic stare, then hops out of the cage onto my hand, unceremoniously claws his way up to my shoulder, then uses my head as a launchpad for his cold, scaly feet and sails across the room, giving us a magnificent display of his scarlet underfeathers.

  Just as he touches down on the bookcase there is an almighty grumble of thunder outside and the rain redoubles its force. ‘Whoo!’ says Reda. ‘Grandfather never said anything about weather like this here.’ He grins at me. ‘I’ll light the fire.’

  I am about to reply when there is a huge howl of wind, followed by a low hooting noise
, like the sound made by blowing over the top of a bottle. It’s eerie. I can see it’s unsettling Gabriel, whose feathers are ruffled, and a crest has risen on his head. Reda takes no notice: he is building a little pyramid of kindling in the crate, arranging logs carefully around it. He takes some newspaper from the pile I use to line the cage, tears it into strips and rolls and twists them into pretzel shapes, then takes a lighter from his pocket and starts the fire as quick as magic.

  ‘You’re very good at that,’ I observe.

  ‘Up in the hills where my family come from they keep fires burning all winter long – you’d die if you didn’t know how to light a fire!’

  ‘I thought Morocco was a hot country, with deserts and stuff.’

  ‘Morocco is all things to all men, from the poorest peasant to the richest lord. It has modern cities and villages where there’s no electricity; superfast Internet and mule carts; there are mountains covered in snow all year round, and of course deserts. In some places the temperature can hit fifty degrees in summer, yet be minus ten in winter. You learn to be adaptable. It’s not easy if you’re poor – that’s why we all send money home for the old people. It’s why I’m here.’

  He says something else but his words are drowned out by a particularly large rumble of thunder and then the ground shakes as if the land on which the house sits is convulsing, as if something in the world is shifting. I stumble against the door jamb and feel the wood trembling beneath my fingers as if it has come to life. There is a distant wail, muffled but distinct. Where did that come from?

  I know it came from the cellar.

  Gabriel squawks in panic and beats past my ear and out into the hall, because in the midst of all this the door has come open.

  ‘Gabriel!’ I go after him, as much for his own sake as in fear of losing him. I don’t want him hurting himself in his panic.

  Outside, the hall is freezing. Absolutely freezing. And silent. There is no sound of the storm; no trace of the parrot.

  Reda joins me. ‘What was that? An earthquake? A lightning strike?’