Nocturne

by Hurley, Graham

  I was sitting at a table in the far corner when he came for my glass. I moved my bag to let him wipe the table. He did it with a certain deftness, the way a woman might, and I thought at once of Witcher’s kitchen, how neat it was, and how pretty.

  According to the clock behind the bar, it was twenty past four.

  ‘I’d like to buy you a drink,’ I said. ‘When you’ve finished.’

  ‘You would?’ Frankie had a lovely smile.

  I nodded at the empty chair he’d just tidied into the table.

  ‘Yes…’ I said, giving him a £5 note, ‘…and bring another Pils for me.’

  Frankie joined me ten minutes later. In contrast to Witcher, he was a story looking for a willing ear. By six o’clock, I knew where he lived, where he came from, the clubs he liked best for dancing, and the pubs he cruised when he was in the mood for a one-night stand. My only problem was shutting him up.

  ‘There’s a man called Kevin Witcher,’ I managed to say at last.

  ‘Kev?’ he nodded, ever eager. ‘Yeah, I know Kev. Double vodkas and coke. No ice.’

  ‘You know him well?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

  ‘Might be, why?’

  For the first time, I could feel Frankie touch the brake. There might, after all, be limits to this candour of his. He might even want to know my name.

  I extended a hand across the table. I’d already decided to tell him more or less everything and three bottles of Pils confirmed what a wonderful decision that was. This could go on all evening, I thought. Maybe it will.

  ‘Julie,’ I said, ‘Julie Emerson.’

  He touched my hand, giving it a playful little squeeze. I told him about Gilbert, about the flat, and lastly about my brief call at Denman’s Hill. Nothing I said seemed to surprise Frankie in the least and I was beginning to wonder how much I really knew about life in Inner London, when Frankie beckoned me forward across the table. I’d been talking about Gilbert’s bruise and the fight he’d evidently had with Witcher. Frankie was very theatrical. I could feel his breath on my ear.

  ‘Kev and his candles,’ he said. ‘That was probably what triggered it.’ I remembered the line of candles on Kevin Witcher’s Welsh dresser.

  ‘How come?’ I queried.

  ‘Easy. Kev loves candles. The bigger the better, them scented sort preferably. It’s a real treat, really lovely, really nice, but you’ve got to want it. He likes to light them afterwards and then he plays funny music, you know, classical stuff. Requiems. All sorts. Brilliant, if you’re in the mood.’

  I was lost. Frankie could see it in my eyes and it made him laugh, though not unkindly. I decided to start with the obvious.

  ‘You see a lot of Kevin?’

  ‘Most weeks, yeah.’

  ‘You know he’s had some kind of accident?’

  ‘Of course, that’s why he’s been off work so long.’

  He started to tell me about Witcher’s job. It seemed he was a civil servant in Whitehall.

  ‘But this accident,’ I kept saying. ‘What happened?’

  Frankie was enjoying himself now, refusing to give me a straight answer. He’d sussed where I was coming from, what it was I really wanted to know, and he was determined to string the conversation out until either my patience gave out or we were both blind drunk. After six, at Frankie’s insistence, I’d switched to shorts - vodka and coke, no ice - and now I sat back, sprawled in the chair, listening to Frankie’s plans to launch himself into the world of film-making. This bit of the conversation was my own fault. I’d let slip what I did for a living, knowing at once it was a mistake. Frankie was bursting with ideas. He had access to a word processor. All he needed was a name, and an address, and he knew, he just knew that he’d be heading for the big time. The people he’d met. The stories he could tell. The strokes some guys would pull to get inside those amazing leather loons.

  At last, gone nine, I managed to pin him down. The pub was a blur of bodies around us. The sheer volume of noise made ordinary conversation impossible.

  ‘Kevin Witcher’s arm,’ I shouted. ‘Who broke it?’

  Frankie was blowing kisses at someone behind me. I grabbed his hand, hauling him towards me, repeating the question. Frankie frowned, the way you do when you’ve forgotten a detail or two.

  ‘That bloke,’ he said. ‘The one you mentioned.’

  ‘Gilbert?’

  ‘Yeah, him.’

  ‘Gilbert broke his arm?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he nodded vigorously. ‘And the rest, too.’

  We were listening to heavy metal now. I couldn’t hear a thing.

  ‘What rest?’ I yelled.

  Frankie’s hands began to pat various parts of his body. I pulled him closer, my ear practically in his mouth.

  ‘Plus his ribs,’ he was saying, ‘and his kidneys. And a couple of teeth. Kev told me about the X-rays. Real make-over. Geezer must have known what he was about.’

  ‘Gilbert?’ I shouted again.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Gilbert beat him up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I collapsed back in my chair. I’m probably slow on the uptake but there wasn’t enough vodka in the world to blanket the implications of what this boy was telling me. Gilbert, if I was to believe him, wasn’t just mad but violent too. So violent, he’d put the previous occupant of 31 Napier Road in hospital.

  A question occurred to me. Frankie was on his feet, swaying with the music, his arm round a blond youth with a pony tail. I beckoned him down. My time was nearly up.

  ‘Why?’ I mouthed.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why did Gilbert do it?’

  Frankie gazed at me for a moment and I saw the faraway look in his eye. Then he blinked.

  ‘Kevin can be a dickhead,’ he grinned. ‘Candles aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.’

  Candles? I woke up on Sunday morning with another blinding headache, half convinced I was back in Bournemouth. That last year, I’d lived in a bedsit about half a mile from the university. It was seedy in the extreme but I was passionately in love with a lecturer from the College of Art and Design and our snatched nights together blinded me to the damp-stained wallpaper and ever-dripping taps. He was married, of course, and it all ended in tears but there were Sunday mornings exactly like this when we’d awake to find the wine-stained duvet puddled with sunshine, and our mouths tasting of ashes, and we’d prove beyond doubt that no hangover on earth could survive a head- shattering orgasm and an hour or so of cosy oblivion afterwards.

  That option, alas, was no longer on offer and by the time I’d found my dressing gown and inspected my pale face in the bathroom mirror I realised that one of the feelings I was trying to keep at bay was loneliness. The pub that night had been full of people who knew each other, laughed a lot, got pissed together. Why was I always too busy to have any of that?

  The ding-dong of the front door chimes came an hour or so later. Three Nurofens and a pot of coffee had taken the edge off the headache but the rather bleak feeling that came with it was definitely in for the day. I opened the door to find Brendan standing in the sunshine. He was wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. We were a week or so into early spring, but even so he was making a very brave fashion statement indeed.

  ‘Borrowed it for the weekend. Thought you’d do the honours.’

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. His Mercedes stood at the kerbside. Lashed to a brand new roofrack was a sailboard. I began to laugh.

  ‘You want to go windsurfing? In February?’

  ‘Yep. And I want you to teach me.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Place called Jaywick,’ he nodded at the Mercedes. ‘An hour and a bit.’

  It too
k me about a second and a half to say yes. I had a loose arrangement with a firm of locksmiths for a get-together after lunch but to be frank the thought of spending my precious Sunday trying to decide between a five-lever Chubb and whatever else they might recommend was infinitely depressing. Brendan was right. The sun- shine was glorious. The day was still young. Real life could wait.

  Jaywick was out on the Essex coast, a huddle of wooden chalets and rickety bungalows sheltering behind a long stretch of seawall. It was far too early in the year for visitors and we bumped along the empty, pot-holed roads, following signs for the beach. There was something so sad about the place, so abandoned and makeshift and temporary, that it actually seemed attractive. Behind the broken, boarded-up windows, any number of people could be spinning out their lives, and I felt an enormous temptation to stop, and knock on a few doors, and inquire further. What did people do here? How on earth did they get by?

  I tried to share these thoughts with Brendan but he was too busy being technical about the wind. He’d been on to the weather people that very morning, and according to the forecast we could expect a force 3-4 south-westerly, backing to north-west during the day. I’d spent most of the journey down trying to explain the importance of wind direction but Brendan isn’t a natural listener and I don’t think he’d picked very much of it up. In this respect, it had become very obvious, very quickly, that Brendan and windsurfing were made for each other. It would, he implied, be like more or less everything else in his life. In other words, a doddle.

  The board, at least, was more or less OK, a Mistral Malibu, comfortably long, lots of flotation. When you start windsurfing, you need something solid to take your weight and the Malibu would certainly do that. Only later, when you’ve cracked it, can you start poncing around on those skimpy little short boards you see in the pages of the lifestyle mags.

  We got changed in the lee of a row of beach huts. The wind felt stiffer than a 4 to me, and it was cold down by the water, but Brendan was undaunted. He’d borrowed a wetsuit from the owner of the Malibu and he stripped down to his bathers before struggling into it. Given his lifestyle, he had a nice body, surprisingly well-muscled, and his chest was dusted with freckles and little whorls of reddish hair.

  He offered his back to me and I did up his zip while he peered out at the sheet of slate-grey water before us. He’d chosen Jaywick for his baptism on the recommendation of a friend of a friend. A reef of newly-dumped rocks formed a natural lagoon and the conditions were said to be ideal for novice work. Looking at the vicious little lop whipped up by the wind, I was far from convinced but the water in the lee of the rocks was much calmer and this is where we started.

  The flip side of over-confidence is impatience, and within an hour Brendan had given up. Most people teach in stages, a slow, methodical process that should get you out on the water, enjoying yourself, within a couple of days. Stage one involves something called The Uphaul, getting your balance on the board, stooping to heave the sail rig out of the water, and then transferring your weight and your grip so that the thing begins to move. It isn’t as easy as it sounds, and clambering back on the board after your umpteenth header can be knackering, as well as bad for morale. In Brendan’s case, it was the latter that was the real problem, and the more irritated he became, the less care he took to get the details right.

  It was, almost inevitably, my fault, an almost identical repetition of certain situations we’d been through at work.

  ‘Why won’t this fucking thing stay still?’

  ‘Because you’re not holding it right.’

  ‘I did exactly what you said.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘OK, you bloody do it.’

  I did. I’d brought my winter competition wetsuit up to London in the vague hope that I might - one day - use it, and I backed the board into the shallows before angling the sail across the wind and launching into a perfect beach start. I hauled in as much as I dared, testing my weight against the wind, and once I was sure about the limits of the rig I took the board out into the rougher water, tracking back and forth across the lagoon.

  The wind, as forecast, was beginning to shift and stiffen a little, and within minutes the last residues of my headache had gone completely and I was back in an element I understood far more thoroughly than either London or television. Out where the finger of rock curled to a point, the tide was ebbing fast and it was here that I was really able to put Brendan’s board through the whole repertoire, gybing and counter-gybing, exultant that the skills I’d worked so hard to master hadn’t left me.

  Once or twice, showing off, I planed back towards the beach, risking extravagant carve-gybes, wondering whether to bother stop- ping to make adjustments to the sail. The battens hadn’t been rigged properly, my own fault for not checking, but I was only looking at a tiny percentage improvement and while I was enjoying myself so much, it hardly seemed worth the effort. What was especially pleasing was the camera that had appeared in Brendan’s hands. He was sitting on the beach, huddled in my tracksuit top, steadying the long telephoto lens on his knees. I was beginning to wonder whether he hadn’t engineered the whole expedition to grab the odd snap when I heard the jet skis.

  There were two of them, identical youths on board, crop-haired, rubber-suited, mad. They must have launched further along the beach. They came roaring into the lagoon in line abreast, clearly intent on mischief. I was on a broad reach at this point, flat out across the wind, and they parted to let me through then hauled the jet-skis round with wild whoops of glee, the water fountaining behind them. I braced to hit the twin wakes, and I felt the board lift beneath my feet, light as a feather. Stable again, I gybed hard, meaning to head back towards the beach. I’d no taste for games like this. With the lagoon to myself, the sail had been perfect. That was the memory I wanted to keep.

  Back on a broad reach, shorebound this time, I picked up speed. The first jet ski came from my right, narrowly missing me. The second one I didn’t even see. The impact must have knocked me out because I was face down in the water when consciousness returned, my lungs beginning to fill with water. Dimly, I felt a pair of hands hauling me out. I tried to cough. Nothing happened. Someone was hitting me on the back. Hard. Then a voice I didn’t recognise, a flat, ugly, London accent. In situations like these, oddly enough, you recognise fear. Not mine. His.

  ‘Get her out, mate, get her out, she’s fucking drowning.’

  More hands. More shouting. Then the scrape of sand beneath my feet. I was being dragged up the beach. I could hear a third voice, Brendan’s. Soon, I knew, I’d start to choke.

  ‘You,’ I heard him snarl. ‘Don’t just stand there. Fuck off and get an ambulance.’

  ‘Steady mate.’

  ‘Just do what I say.’

  I felt myself being half-lifted, half-rolled, then a hand at my jaw and a voice in my ear. It sounded so warm, so close.

  ‘You’re OK, Jules, you’re gonna be OK.’

  A mouth over mine, warm air in my lungs, the strangest sensation. I started to groan, then I turned my head to one side, nauseous, the water frothing out of me. I began to convulse, coughing and coughing. I felt strong hands beneath my armpits, hauling me upright, ducking my head.

  ‘Is this the way you do it? Or have I got it wrong again?’

  It was Brendan’s voice. He was making a joke. I grinned feebly back. I was going to survive. I knew it.

  We drove back in the late afternoon. I’d dissuaded the ambulancemen from taking me to Colchester hospital for a check-up but I was grateful for the brandies Brendan had forced on me at a pub on Clacton seafront. Sitting in the car, watching the A12 race past, I felt sleepy and a bit sore but above all grateful. Brendan may have flunked the windsurfing but when it had come to saving my life he’d done just fine. He’d got me to dry land. He’d sorted out the bastards on the jet skis. And then, with a competence and authority I’d never suspected,
he’d done the full resus number.

  We’d stopped at a roundabout. A question had been intriguing me all day.

  ‘So where’s the wife?’ I murmured.

  Brendan aimed the Mercedes at a gap in the oncoming traffic. ‘Haven’t a clue,’ he said at last. ‘I left her on Friday.’

  That, of course, was ambiguous. It could have meant anything and though I was grateful and - yes, a bit surprised - my gratitude didn’t extend to anything as extravagant as the invitation to stay the night that Brendan clearly felt he’d earned. Instead, I offered to cook him a meal, wandering dozily round the kitchen, throwing together a spaghetti bolognaise while he drove down to the off-licence in Lordship Lane for a couple of celebratory bottles of Rioja.

  While he was away, I eyed the camera on the kitchen table. It was a top-of-the-range Minolta, one of the reasons he wasn’t keen on leaving it in the car, and looking at it I thought again about the jet skis. What had happened out there on the lagoon already seemed like history. I’d never been that close to drowning before but I marvelled at the way my subconscious seemed to have tucked the incident away. Only six hours later, it seemed ghostlike and slightly unreal, like something I’d read about in the paper. Had that really been me on the beach? Half dead, gasping for air?

  Brendan, when he came back, sensibly laid the subject to rest. He’d taken a couple of shots of the guys on the jet skis and he’d gone up the road and got the number of the 4x4 they’d been driving. Neither had volunteered a name but the photos of the incident should be pretty conclusive and he planned to send the file to the local police. They’d doubtless be in touch, and they’d probably want a detailed statement from both of us. When he decanted the Rioja and raised his glass the toast was to windsurfing. Mine, not his.