by Kevin Brooks
Without stopping to turn off the engine he leapt off the motorbike and started running. I snapped out of my trance and followed him. As we waded through the flooded banks of the bridge I heard Dad splashing around behind us.
‘Cut across to the left!’ he shouted. ‘It’s quicker.’
I emerged from the rainpool first and sprinted off across the sand with Dominic close behind. Up ahead I could see the crowd edging towards the Point. Those in front were slowing to let the others catch up. They could see Lucas waiting for them and they didn’t want to face him alone. I was running faster than I’d ever run before. The ground disappeared beneath my feet and the beach passed by in a blur. I was vaguely aware of the rain falling and Dad shouting and Deefer barking, but it didn’t mean anything to me. My senses were turned inside out. Nothing mattered, only running. The stormy smell of the sea, the sand, the strangely cool air – nothing. The pain in my legs and my aching lungs – nothing. The pillbox, a grey concrete lump fenced with blue and white tape, a flattened bowl of sand where the helicopter had landed … the pillbox. A dirty darkness of stale beer, whiskey, urine, fear … damp sand beneath my feet … skin, glass, cloth, hair, hands, fingers, contours, shivering flesh, opening mouths, a broken face rigid with need …
Nothing.
Run.
Around the edge of the bay, under the clouds, through the air, across the sand, running hard, down to the shore, down to the sea, down to the flats, where the world begins and ends … and then I was there, breaking through a wall of people, shoving, pushing, shouting …
‘Get out of the way! Move! MOVE!’
They moved. Their bodies were soft and quiet. Eyes blank, heads empty, they shuffled apart and let me through without caring who or what I was. They only had eyes for Lucas. And as I broke through to the front of the crowd and stumbled breathlessly to the edge of flats, I could see why. He was walking slowly across the mud flats towards the woods … walking his walk, whispering secrets … a walking dream. The rain had stopped and faint bubbling noises drifted from the surface of the mud. Drips, clicks, and watery pops, the sound of worms and molluscs going about their muddy business, just as they had for millions of years. This is how it is, I thought. Light, darkness, games of hate, twisted hearts … things without grown spirit. No tomorrow. No history. A heartbeat …
How do you know where you’re going?
Lucas’s voice whispered in the wind: It’s easy, you can see the solid ground. Look. See how it colours the air?
I could see it now.
The coloured air.
Clear and bright.
Easy.
I stepped forward. A familiar voice called out my name. I think it was Dad’s. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I was stepping into the coloured air …
And then it was gone.
The air was grey and the mud was brown and I didn’t know where I was going. I never had. Something pulled me back from the edge. Something made me take a breath and raise my eyes … and I looked out across the mud flats. The air was still and the sea was unnaturally quiet. Nothing moved. No birds, no wind, no waves.
The moment is eternal.
Lucas had stopped by the remains of the old wooden boat and was gazing across the mud towards the woods.
He was facing away from me, resting his hand on a blackened joist sticking up through the mud. I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t have to. His features were engraved in my mind – his pale blue eyes, his sad smile, his fleeting presence. The clouds parted and a pillar of sunlight fell from the sky and shrouded him in gold. I saw his skin, his clothes, his hair, his body … I saw him pick a shard of damp wood from the wrecked boat and crumble it in his fingers. I saw him gaze past the wreck into the soul of the mud.
And then, in one simple movement, he stepped out of the sunlight and sank down into the airless depths.
twenty-three
D
ad was right when he said that writing this wouldn’t make me feel any better – it hasn’t. It’s straightened out a few things in my mind. It’s taught me a little bit about myself. It’s shown me what I am, or what I was, or what I thought I was. And, yes, it’s given the sadness some life. But I don’t think it’s helped me to understand anything. It hasn’t answered any questions. It hasn’t changed anything.
But at least I’ve done it – I’ve cried myself a story.
And that’s something, I suppose.
Now, as I sit here at my desk, looking into the faces I know, I’m wondering how it ends.
When Lucas stepped out of the sunlight and sank down into the mud, when I watched that mop of straw-blond hair being sucked down into the shimmering ooze … that was the moment’s end. He was gone. It was finished. Over. Done. I know it now, and I knew it then. Even as the mud settled and the bubbles stopped rising – I knew it. Even as I cried and screamed and launched myself into the mud – I knew it. Even as Dad and Dominic jumped in and dragged me out, clawing the mud from my mouth – I knew it. It was over. I knew it in my heart.
That was my end.
But the rest of it went on.
The world kept turning.
I have no conscious recollection of the immediate aftermath. I can vaguely remember being carried back to the house, kicking and wailing, screaming at the sky, hitting Dad, cursing him, cursing the world … and I can remember the feel of the cold rain streaming down my face, mingling with the mud and tears, filling my mouth and the back of my throat with the grainy taste of salt and decay. Yes … I remember that. I can taste it now – the taste of age-old blackened mud. But that’s about all I can remember with any real clarity. The rest of it is just a blur. Dad must have carried me all the way back; across the beach, over the creek, up the lane, through the yard, and into the house. He must have helped me out of my mud-soaked clothes, washed me, dried me, got me into bed, settled me down, called the doctor … but I don’t remember anything about it. I wasn’t there. I was disembodied, spiritless, lost in hell. My conscious mind had been ripped into a million pieces.
Over the next few days the outside world disappeared and I lived a dream of curtained light and muttered voices. I slept without sleeping, floating in a curious state somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. Strange things happened. The dimensions of my room lost control. The walls, the windows, the ceiling, the floor, everything shimmered like a dream. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a fevered perception in which a thousand miles and an inch were the same. The world grew elastic. Angles and planes assumed alien qualities, turning themselves inside out. Colours formed and connected and then reformed in the shapeless light. I saw blood-reds and drifting greens and infinite blacks, shifting white flashes, searchlights, stars, and burning suns. I saw rogue shapes, shapes and colours that no one has ever seen. I saw kites of things in a ghost wind. My inner senses were deranged. The things that should have told me where I was and who I was stopped working. My limbs belonged to someone else, a long-armed giant, or a paralysed fool with giant fingers stretching up to the sky. I wasn’t me. I was a little girl marooned on a desert island. I was a blood-drenched girl lying in a stone bunker. I was a teenage boy, a fisherman, scraping blindly through the underground mud looking for oysters. I was hot, cold, tired. I was ill. Sick. My body fought against me. It wouldn’t do what it was told. Sometimes I couldn’t move to save my life, and other times I couldn’t stop moving; twisting, turning, crawling, twitching, wrapping myself in sweat-soaked sheets, crying, crying, crying …
I don’t know what it was.
It was senseless.
This went on for two, three, maybe four days, and then I gradually started coming back to myself. I slowly became aware of my surroundings. I recognised the people who came to see me. Dad, the doctor, Lenny, Dominic. Simon. Bill and Rita. I could hear what they were saying. I listened. I talked. I thought. And after a few more days in bed I realised that – physically – I was myself again. I was Caitlin McCann. I could get up in the morning, get dressed, eat, drink, breathe. I could walk, I co
uld talk, I could see things and hear things and feel things and do things … but that was all on the surface. In the place where it counts – my heart, my soul, my self – I was nowhere.
I didn’t stop crying for a long time. Days, weeks, months … time didn’t have any meaning. Days came and went, the summer passed by, school started, Dominic went back to university, the leaves on the trees turned yellow, and all the time the tears kept flowing. Some days were better than others. School days, busy days, days when I didn’t have time to think … some days I hardly cried at all. But at night, alone in the silence of my bed, that’s when it really hurt. When there was nowhere else to go and nowhere to hide, when the wind whispered in the trees and the breath of the sea hushed the night …
When I cried the summer rain.
I cried so much …
I didn’t think I’d ever stop.
There was no reason to stop. There was nothing to look forward to, nothing to smile about, nothing to want or need, just long days and endless nights of pain and emptiness. Sometimes it got so bad I almost lost myself. Dark thoughts settled in my mind. Black questions: what kind of life is this? is it worth it? is it really worth living?
I didn’t have any answers. I didn’t know even where to look for them. Maybe there weren’t any answers? Maybe that’s why it hurt so much? I even started thinking about God. Maybe that’s what he’s for, I thought, to fill the gap when there aren’t any answers, to ease the uneasable pain …?
It still didn’t make any sense.
One night, about a month after it all happened, Dad heard me crying and came into my room. It was about midnight. The window was open and the sky was bright with stars. A faint smell of gorse sweetened the air, bringing back bittersweet memories of a summer’s day beside a tide pool, fishing for crabs. Me and Lucas … we were in a slight shallow, shaded by gorse-laden dunes and marram grass. Although the sun was still high, the ground all around us had a fresh, moist feel to it, and the air was cool. I could smell the faint scent of coconut from the gorse flowers, the seaweed in the pool, the earthiness of the mud, the sand, the salt in the breeze, and from the shore I could hear the plaintive cry of a curlew. Lucas pulled on the line and I watched the bait edge slowly past the rock. He let it rest for a second then gave the twine a slight tug. Something moved beneath the rock, a rapid scything motion that stirred up a small cloud of silt, and then it settled again.
Lucas laughed, reeling in the line. ‘He’s smart, this one. He remembers what happened to his friend.’
As he concentrated on the tide pool the colour of his eyes seemed to waver in the reflected light. I watched, fascinated, as they faded from the pale blue of flax to an almost transparent tone, as faint as the blue of a single drop of water. Then, as he cast the line and the sunlight rippled the surface of the water, they darkened again. He began the process again, pulling on the line, letting it rest, a slight tug, pulling, a rest …
When Dad knocked quietly on my door and asked if he could come in, the memory spiralled in on itself and scuttled away. I sat up and wiped my eyes and made room for Dad on the bed. He sat down gently and gazed out of the window.
‘It’s a lovely night …’
He’d been drinking, but not much. His voice was clear, his eyes were tired but bright, and his breath carried just the faintest tang of good Irish whiskey. Since Lucas’s death he’d cut down a lot on his drinking. He still drank regularly, but never enough to lose control. Just enough, I think, to soften the pain. He often came into my room at night. We didn’t talk much. Most of the time we just sat together, being together, until one of us finally fell asleep. He listened if I wanted to talk, but I hardly ever did. We both knew there wasn’t much to say.
But that night, after we’d been sitting together for a while, breathing the night air, he told me something I’ve never forgotten. I’m not sure if it was meant to help or if it was just something he felt he had to say. And I’m still not sure what all of it means. But it stuck with me, and when something sticks with you it’s usually worth remembering.
He told me that grief lasts for ever, that if it didn’t last for ever then it wasn’t true grief. He said, ‘I know it sounds hard to believe, but once you stop fighting it and accept it as part of you, it’s not such a bad thing. It’ll still hurt, it’ll still tear you apart, but in a different way. A more intimate way. You can use it. It’s yours. It belongs to you. But the pain of grief …’ He hesitated. ‘The pain you’re feeling now doesn’t last for ever, Cait. It can’t. It hurts too much. You can’t live with that much pain – not for ever. Your body can’t take it. Your mind can’t take it. It knows that if you don’t get over it, it’s going to kill you. And it doesn’t want that. So it makes you get over it.’
‘But I don’t want to—’
‘I know … I know. But listen, getting over it doesn’t mean forgetting it, it doesn’t mean betraying your feelings, it just means reducing the pain to a tolerable level, a level that doesn’t destroy you. I know that right now the idea of getting over it is unimaginable. It’s impossible. Inconceivable. Unthinkable. You don’t want to get over it. Why should you? It’s all you’ve got. You don’t want kind words, you don’t care what other people think or say, you don’t want to know how they felt when they lost someone. They’re not you, are they? They can’t feel what you feel. The only thing you want is the thing you can’t have. It’s gone. Never coming back. No one knows how that feels. No one knows what it’s like to reach out and touch someone who isn’t there and will never be there again. No one knows that unfillable emptiness. No one but you.’ He looked at me, a single tear in his eye. ‘You and me, love. We don’t want anything. We want to die. But life won’t let us. We’re all it’s got.’
After that I told him everything. I told him about meeting Jamie Tait at the beach. I told him what happened in Joe Rampton’s lane. I told him how I felt about Lucas, about the day he took me to his place in the woods, about what he did to Jamie, and what he tried to do. Everything. I was surprised at how calmly Dad took it. He didn’t shout or scream or threaten murder, he just held my hand and listened, nodding every now and then and comforting me when it got too much. And when it was all over, when I’d got it all out of my system, he sat quietly with me for an hour or so asking questions, clearing up a few little details, going over things he didn’t quite understand, and then he started talking.
Apart from a daily trip to the beach, I hadn’t been anywhere since Lucas’s death. I hadn’t been to the village, I hadn’t talked to anyone. I didn’t know what was happening elsewhere on the island. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I hadn’t even talked to anyone about what happened to Lucas. Not Dad, not anyone. It was too painful. Lenny had come round a couple of times to ask me some questions, but we’d never gone into much detail. I think Dad had probably asked him to leave me alone as much as possible. I suppose I must have been aware that things were going on – investigations, news reports, that kind of thing – but none of it seemed to have any significance. It was all happening out there … and out there was beyond my comprehension. It was nothing. Sounds, movement, words … nothing. And while I knew I’d have to think about it some time, I also knew that some time wasn’t now. Some time was always later; a time always on the horizon.
That night, as Dad started talking, the horizon came home.
‘You don’t have to worry about Jamie Tait any more,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to worry about anything. Lucas left a full account of everything in a notebook in his bag. Dates, times, places, people—’
‘Everything?’ I said.
Dad nodded. ‘After I brought you back from the beach that day, I found the bag in my room and hid it away. I was worried about the mob on the beach. I thought they might come back looking for more trouble … I needn’t have bothered, though. Most of them just wandered off along the beach back to the village. I saw Jamie and his boys coming up the lane about an hour or so later, but the fight had gone out of them. They’d lost interest
.’
‘They’d got what they wanted,’ I said bitterly.
‘I don’t think they ever knew what they wanted. Maybe Jamie did in a twisted kind of way, and Sara, but the rest of them …’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. They just got in their cars and drove away. Didn’t even glance at the house. They looked half dead. Confused. Shocked. Ashamed. As if they’d only just realised what they’d got themselves into … as if they couldn’t quite understand it.’
‘What about Bob Toms?’ I asked.
‘I’ll come to him in a minute.’ He got up and went over to the window. He stood there for a while stroking his beard and gazing up at the stars, and then he started talking again. ‘As soon as the storm died out and the Stand cleared, the place went crazy. There were police all over the island. Police, ambulances, helicopters, coastguards … it was like something out of a disaster movie. Most of the police were from Moulton, and I didn’t know if I could trust them or not, so I kept quiet about Lucas’s bag until Lenny showed up later that night. I told him as much as I knew and I gave him the notebook and bag, and then I left him to it.’ He turned from the window and looked at me. ‘Jamie and Sara were arrested the next morning and Bob Toms was suspended from duty pending a full investigation.’
‘What about the rest of them?’ I asked. ‘Lee Brendell, the bikers, Tully Jones and Mick Buck—’
‘It’s still going on. It’s a complicated process, Cait. The entire Moulton police force are involved. There’s a lot to sort out. Various charges of assault, attempted rape, deception, corruption, complicity … I’ve been interviewed about a dozen times. Dominic’s been interviewed. Bill, Rita, Shev … the whole island’s under investigation.’
‘Good,’ I said.
‘The police want to talk to you, too.’
‘What about?’ I snapped.
He gave me a gentle look of admonishment, and for the first time in ages I felt the hint of a smile on my face. It was a pretty stupid question.
