Deadland

by William Shaw

  Sloth revved the throttle in neutral, making the little engine whine. He pushed the scooter back a little, down the alleyway.

  ‘I’m going if you’re not.’

  ‘Fuck sake,’ said Tap, replacing his weed in his pocket and putting his helmet back on. ‘He’ll be mad if he sees us spying on him.’

  ‘Won’t see us,’ said Sloth.

  And they waited until the red motorbike roared past them, and then Sloth nudged the scooter back into gear and started to follow it down the A106.

  But the 50cc engine was so useless they lost him in five minutes.

  TWO

  Ross Clough loathed his work at the Turner Contemporary. He should have never taken it in the first place. He had never wanted a job. He was an artist.

  You’re thirty-one. You need to get out there. You’ll meet people. Important people. It’s one of the best modern art galleries in the world.

  When, on his first day here, he had told the gallery director he was an artist too, he had smiled thinly. ‘How nice.’

  The conventional art world was a fortress that built clean white walls around itself to protect the favoured few. It was uninterested in people who hadn’t come up through the system.

  He wasn’t even suited to this kind of work. He hated the public, the dull ones who came here and shuffled round the rooms, awed by the art just because they were supposed to be. They bought postcards and canvas bags and believed they had experienced something.

  Now one of them stood in front of him, crying.

  ‘I can’t find my daughter,’ she whispered, the angular old woman in the maroon paisley.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘She’s . . . gone,’ she was saying. ‘My daughter.’

  Panic rose. ‘Where is she?’ he blurted.

  ‘I don’t know. She’s lost.’

  He hadn’t been trained for missing persons. Shouldn’t he have been trained? Or had he forgotten what they had told him? He looked around, but his supervisor was nowhere to be seen. All the other staff members seemed to have disappeared. ‘Which room were you in when you last saw her?’

  ‘She went to the toilet. But she’s not there.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Six. No . . . five.’

  He left his desk, running towards the security man who was standing just outside the front door. It was April. A cold wind was blowing off the North Sea.

  ‘Missing girl,’ he panted.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Ross repeated what he’d just said as the man spoke into his walkie-talkie.

  What if she had been kidnapped? Assaulted? He looked around, hoping that when he pushed open the door and returned to the large reception area he would see mother and daughter reunited and the problem solved. Instead, his line manager, a woman in her thirties, was standing behind the desk giving a visitor directions to the Antony Gormley sculpture. ‘I told you, you are not supposed to leave the desk unattended,’ she scolded.

  ‘Missing child,’ Ross explained. He spotted the mother again, alone by the big window. ‘That woman there.’

  The manager broke into a smile.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, trying to stifle the laughter.

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘That’s Lucy. She comes in most days and says her daughter’s missing. Or that her handbag’s been stolen. One time she had everyone looking for a floral bouquet she said she’d put down somewhere. We should have warned you.’

  The white room seemed suddenly over-lit by sunshine. Now that he thought about it, the woman who had approached the reception area in tears had been in her seventies, too old to have a daughter of five. ‘Stay at the desk. Use the phone. Alert someone. Don’t leave your post unless it’s an emergency.’

  It was pointless to reply that it had been an emergency.

  Five minutes later it was an elderly man, a European of some sort, complaining of an unusual smell in the main gallery room, demanding he come upstairs to do something about it. ‘I am not able to leave the desk,’ Ross replied.

  The man leaned towards him and said, ‘Like old meat. Horrible.’

  His wife was thin, with a shock of blonde hair. She peered at Ross through large black spectacles, explaining, ‘Oscar is very sensitive. He was a perfumer for over thirty years. He is very aware of aromas.’

  ‘I’ll report it, obviously,’ he said. He pulled out the incident book, and wrote: Tuesday. 4.15 p.m. Visitor complained of nasty odour in main gallery.

  *

  By Thursday there was a regular trickle of visitors coming to the front desk, mentioning the stench. On his break, Ross went up to the large gallery room to experience it for himself. The attendant said someone had just asked whether the smell was an artwork of some sort.

  It was like a room full of bad breath; curiously sweet, but fetid. Almost peppery. It pleased Ross. The art in here stinks. The room was too hot anyway. A fault with the heating and ventilation, apparently, that couldn’t be fixed till Monday.

  That afternoon, the Visitor Experience Manager complained to the Gallery Manager. He was supposed to be working from home that day, but he came in and walked around the large white room.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Disgusting.’

  He ordered employees to thoroughly clean the floor overnight, but in the morning, when they opened the doors, it was much worse. They closed the room; staff wandered around sniffing the air.

  ‘What if something’s crawled into the heating system and died?’ suggested the Operations Manager.

  For now, it seemed the most likely explanation. There was talk of vermin. The gallery, designed by a well-known architect, sat on the seafront of the seaside town, on the site of an old boarding house where the artist Turner had stayed when he had come to paint his famous sunsets here. Sometimes you saw rats in the Old Town, scurrying along gutters.

  They fixed signs: We are sorry. This gallery is temporarily closed for maintenance.

  Early on Saturday morning, engineers came to see if there was a problem within the ducting. Non-staff were not supposed to be unsupervised in the gallery, so Ross was ordered to go with them.

  He watched the two workers shine torches into the white vents on the angled ceiling and peer inside. If anything, the smell had subsided a little since the day before. Whatever it was had probably done all the rotting it needed to.

  Of course, if it was under the floor, that would be a problem. They would have to move the art. You couldn’t just lift this stuff up and dump it in the corner.

  Ross took the chance to wander round. In the centre of the room was a large-scale sculpture by a British artist whose work had become popular recently. It was made from found materials, sheets of brightly painted wood and rectangles of dull concrete; the piece scared him a little. Its planes seemed to swell as he walked around them, filling the space. Its solidity and confidence were intimidating. His own work was so delicate and flimsy. But he was as good as this, wasn’t he? Better, in fact. He deserved to be in this gallery as much as the next artist.

  Ross moved on to the next plinth. A pot by a Chinese artist, whose work he loathed on principle because of its obviousness, stood within a perspex cube. Carefully drawn faces were etched into the black glaze; a picture of an X Factor contestant, another of Kurt Cobain. Ross found it crass.

  He found it amusing that a fly had somehow worked its way into the perspex box. It had assailed the perspex defences of art and insinuated itself into the world of privilege. How had it managed to get in there? Not one, but two flies, he realised.

  ‘Nothing,’ said the man, carefully descending the long ladder.

  That’s when Ross noticed a darker patch, just where the base of the black jar sat on the white paint of the square wooden plinth. The flies buzzed in the perspex box. Three of them now. Bizarre. If art was not about talent, but about context, then these insects were being transformed into art by the very act of being here on a plinth. He stared, fasc
inated.

  The flies somehow had become much more significant than anything in this room, he realised. Art didn’t need to be big and overpowering. Scale was such a cheap way to get attention.

  He shouldn’t be here at all. He should be in his studio.

  He put his ear to the perspex and listened to them. The buzzing seemed much louder, as if there were more insects inside the big jar, longing to escape.

  THREE

  William South was coming home.

  Alexandra Cupidi had only heard the previous morning; a brief call from Maghaberry Prison. ‘I’ve been paroled. I’m catching the first plane from Belfast to Gatwick tomorrow.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  And almost before Cupidi had had time to absorb the news, the call was over. William South, a man who had lived at Dungeness all his adult life, then served two years of a sentence for the manslaughter of his own father, was now coming home to Dungeness where he belonged. Energised, Cupidi rose early Saturday morning, spooned freshly ground coffee into the jug.

  ‘Why don’t you make a cake for him?’ she suggested to her daughter Zoë. ‘A welcome gift.’

  A groan. ‘Mum.’ Zoë; seventeen years old, still wearing Harry Potter pyjamas that she had been given for Christmas when she was thirteen.

  ‘I’m going to go and clean his cottage up a bit. Get the windows open. That place gets damp. Then go into Lydd and get him some milk and bread. Maybe some flowers to brighten it up a little.’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Mum.’

  ‘It’s neighbourly.’

  ‘It’s ’cause you feel guilty,’ said Zoë. ‘On account of sending him to prison in the first place.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ replied Cupidi. ‘I don’t feel guilty at all.’

  ‘Well you should.’

  ‘No I shouldn’t. I was doing my job.’

  ‘Stupid,’ muttered Zoë.

  One of the first things Detective Sergeant Alexandra Cupidi had done when she had joined the Kent Serious Crime Directorate was uncover a difficult truth about a fellow police officer, William South, a good man, well-liked. At the age of fifteen, South had killed his own father. That his father had been violent and abusive had been taken into account, but South had still lost his job on the Kent police force. The arrest had not made her popular with her colleagues, or her daughter. Arriving here two years ago from London with no friends, young Zoë had worshipped William South, calm and quiet-spoken and so unlike her own mother.

  ‘It wasn’t like I wanted to do it. If you’re in the police, you don’t make the rules. I discovered what he’d done. I couldn’t un-know it.’

  ‘Of course you could,’ said Zoë. ‘Nobody actually cared about what had happened. Nobody apart from you. You could have just pretended.’

  ‘I don’t do this job to pretend things haven’t happened.’

  ‘Stupid,’ muttered Zoë again.

  But now William South was coming and everything would be like it was again.

  ‘Get some coconut oil for the cake,’ said Zoë. ‘And oat milk.’

  Cupidi was about to say that William South wasn’t a vegan, but stopped herself. She had asked her daughter to make him a cake. Zoë was doing it. That was good enough.

  *

  After fetching the ingredients for the cake, Cupidi left Zoë at home, still in her pyjamas.

  A clear blue sky. Though the spring wind was chilly, there was some heat in the sun, bringing out fat bees that circled the yellow gorse bushes. Purple orchids pushed through the shingle. It had been a long grey winter. Dungeness was coming alive again.

  They lived just three hundred metres away from South’s small wooden bungalow. Of all the oddly shaped shacks, cottages, converted railway carriages and caravans that dotted the flat landscape of Dungeness, Arum Cottage was the closest to the nuclear power station that blocked the sea views it must have once had. From the front, as she approached, its symmetrical eaves formed a perfect ‘M’-shape. Cupidi let herself in, carried in her bag of shopping and looked around. The shack felt dark and unloved, the timbers damp.

  She was hoovering in a half-hearted way when Zoë appeared at the door. Cupidi switched off the vacuum cleaner, and followed her daughter’s gaze towards the pot of irises. ‘They were all they had.’

  ‘They exploit migrant labour to grow those,’ said Zoë.

  ‘I’m a terrible person.’

  ‘Awful.’ Her daughter agreed. ‘He’s probably changed. They treat coppers differently in prison, don’t they? Do you think he was picked on?’

  ‘Are you trying to make me feel bad?’

  Zoë shrugged. ‘If you feel bad, it’s all your own doing.’ Cupidi switched on the vacuum cleaner again. ‘I better go,’ said Zoë. ‘Cake will be burning.’

  Her daughter was not an easy girl. Last Christmas Zoë had announced she was dropping out of sixth form college. Cupidi had tried reasoning with her about the need for qualifications, but Zoë had been scornful. The science courses she had been studying were irrelevant to what was really happening in the world, she said. So Cupidi had hoped her daughter would find a job instead, but she hadn’t. Over the last few weeks, Cupidi would see her waiting at the bus stop by the light railway station, hood up, head down. If she offered a lift, Zoë would decline it, saying the bus was fine. When she returned, Cupidi would ask her who she’d been with all day. Zoë would list names Cupidi had never heard of. ‘Pinky, Jon and Juliette. You don’t know them.’

  In March Cupidi had been at work when a call from her mother had come through. ‘Don’t worry, but Zoë has been arrested in London. She’s fine. Everything is OK.’

  ‘Arrested? What the hell was she doing?’ Cupidi had demanded.

  ‘Some demonstration outside the High Court. They charged her with a public order offence but they’re not going to do anything about it. She’ll be fine.’ Helen, her mother, had moved back to London, back to her house in Stoke Newington. ‘She can stay here overnight, OK? I’ll put her on a train in the morning.’

  ‘A demonstration?’

  ‘Anti-fascist, she says. Look on the bright side,’ her mother had said. ‘You were always wanting her to hang out with people her own age.’

  *

  Back at home, she was in the kitchen, the smell of Zoë’s cake filling the room with sweet warmth, when Zoë came downstairs. ‘I think I saw a taxi.’

  It was impossible to see South’s house from the ground-floor windows. Their cottages had been built within the banks of an eighteenth-century gun battery, a large circular earthwork that surrounded the buildings.

  Cupidi walked out of the front door, out to the lane. She reached the gap in the bank in time to see the taxi driving away.

  ‘Shall we go and say hi?’ said Zoë.

  Cupidi stood on the track, looking. ‘I expect he’ll pop up and say hello in a minute. You could ask if he wants to go birdwatching with you.’

  ‘I’m not fifteen any more, Mum.’

  They went back inside and waited for a knock on the door. The oven timer pinged. Zoë took the cake out and looked at it, disappointed. ‘I thought it would rise more.’ The edges were dark; it dipped low in the middle.

  It was almost midday when they finally ventured down the road, side by side, Zoë holding the cake carefully as she walked.

  ‘Do you think he’s changed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I mean, he’s lost his job and everything.’ Another rebuke.

  It was true, though. Twenty years of service and he was out with no pension. It would be hard for him now. ‘I thought you didn’t like the police anyway.’

  ‘You knock,’ Zoë said, when they reached the door of the cottage. The new woodstain Cupidi had painted onto its timber last spring had already peeled away. Winters here were hard.

  Cupidi rapped. There was no answer.

  ‘You sure the taxi came here?’

  ‘Positive,’ said Zoë.

  Cupidi knocked again.
‘Weird. Maybe he’s gone out?’

  ‘I can hear him,’ whispered Zoë.

  Sure enough, from behind the door came the sound of footsteps on the bare boards. The door opened.

  That he looked so much older was a shock, but maybe that was because he hadn’t shaved in a while. Grey stubble coated much of his face.

  Zoë held her cake forward. ‘Ta-da!’

  ‘What?’ South stood in the doorway, staring at the gift, as if confused by it – and by her. It wasn’t just him who had changed. Zoë had been fifteen when he had last seen her, a slight, vulnerable girl. Now her hair was cut within an inch of her scalp and there was a line of rings through the top of her right ear.

  ‘I made you a cake. To say welcome home.’

  That was the moment Cupidi’s phone started ringing in her jacket pocket.

  ‘I didn’t put a file in it or anything,’ said Zoë.

  ‘Just a minute.’ Cupidi looked at the number on the screen of her phone. ‘It’s work.’

  ‘Sorry, bad joke.’ Zoë held the plate a little further towards William South, who made no move to take it from her. ‘I wouldn’t have needed to put a file in it, because you’re out already.’

  ‘A body part?’ Cupidi was saying, into her handset.

  She turned away from the cottage, from her daughter and William South, towards the power station. Gulls were rising in the warm air, way above the huge squat concrete block. ‘I’m on my way.’

  She turned. Zoë was standing alone in front of the door of Arum Cottage which had been closed again. ‘What happened?’ Cupidi asked.

  ‘Nothing, really. It was a bit weird. He just took the cake and went back inside. I thought he would be more happy to see me.’

  ‘I’m sure he was happy to see you. Of course he was.’

  ‘It was a bit rude, if you ask me.’

  Cupidi frowned. ‘I expect he just wants some time to himself.’

  They walked back, north along the track.

  ‘What kind of body part?’ asked Zoë.

  ‘They didn’t say.’

  ‘A head? A lung? Or a toenail? I mean, they’re all body parts, aren’t they?’