by Mal Peet
Which seemed fair enough, but it took me a while. When I came back with the cans and two packets of crisps, Yoyo was flat on his back and apparently asleep. I snapped a Pepsi open and drank in the view. I saw now that the island was straight-sided and seemed to be made out of brown concrete, and that the ships parked out on the deep blue sea were warships, grey and bristling with guns and aerials.
I nudged Yoyo. “Drink? I got some crisps too. By your elbow.”
He wriggled his nose and mumbled but didn’t move or open his eyes. By the time I finished the Pepsi, his breathing was deep and steady again. I picked his pocket for the car keys and fetched map 108 from the bag in the boot.
With the map spread out on the grass, I could see that the mouth of the Tamar was some way off, to the west of the city. It flowed into a wide stretch of water with the strange, Japanese-looking name Hamoaze. I felt edgy, restless. I looked at my watch; unbelievably, it was almost five o’clock. It was ridiculous that we had come all this way, taken an entire day, only to stop just a few miles from the Tamar, almost in sight of it. At the same time, I still felt the urge to go home, to abandon the whole thing. Now that we were on the map, the scale of everything seemed huge and impossible to deal with. I felt lonely.
“Wake up, Yoyo. Yoyo? Come on, wake up. You’ll get sunburnt if you lie there much longer.”
We followed a different footpath back to the car park and found ourselves looking down onto a terrace of guesthouses, each with a dinky little awning over the door. The third one from the end was called The Tamar. It had a sign up saying NO VACANCIES. So did all the others, except for one called Avalon, so we went in there. The decor had a King Arthur theme; there was even a small suit of armour made of gold plastic at the foot of the stairs. We stood alone at the reception desk for a bit, and then Yoyo reached past me and shook a little brass bell that sat on the counter. When no one came, he did it again and then wandered back down the hall to a rack full of tourist leaflets.
I hissed at him to come back, and when I turned round again, a woman had magically appeared behind the desk. There must have been a secret door. She was fortyish and had sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair. Her white blouse was mostly unbuttoned and I could see the top of a turquoise bikini. She gave off a strong whiff of coconut.
“Can I help you?” She had a European accent of some sort. Help came out as ’alp.
“Er, yes. Hello. I was wondering, do you have two rooms for tonight?”
“For?” she asked.
I thought she’d said four. “No, two,” I said.
She stared at me, and then her eyes slid past me towards the hall. She couldn’t have seen Yoyo from her angle.
“For who? For your family?”
“Oh. No, for me and my friend. Actually, he’s not my friend; he’s my cousin. Sort of.”
“Cousin?”
I felt my neck getting warm and realized I was blushing. I was furious with myself, and that made it worse. I turned and hissed “Yoyo!” again. She leaned forward for a better view of the hall and immediately pulled back startled as Yoyo appeared, looming over her with his hand outstretched. She took it cautiously, and Yoyo shook it as if she was an old friend.
“Hello! Pleased to meet you,” he said, all smile and twinkle. “Yes, this is my cousin. We are here to investigate the Tamar River, which is also my cousin’s name. We have come from London. I am from Holland, actually. Johannes van Zant, how do you do? As she said, we are looking for two rooms. This seems a very nice place. I like the gold soldier just here. How much is it?”
She had retreated from this barrage of words as far as the little office would let her. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. I didn’t know whether to laugh or die.
“Is no for sale,” she managed finally.
“He means the room,” I said. “The rooms, I mean. Each.”
“Single room twenty-two pound fifty includes full English breakfast,” she said. “But I doan know . . .”
She kept her eyes on Yoyo as she reached below the counter and brought out an impressive-looking register. I didn’t think she needed to check how many vacant rooms she had. Behind her head there was a wooden board with hooks for keys, and there were only six of them.
She studied the book. “Ah, sorry. Only one double room free.”
“Okay,” I said quickly. “Thanks anyway. We’ll try somewhere else.”
“Is twin-bedded,” she said. “Nice. Thirty-five pound.”
“Twin-bedded?” Yoyo said. “Is that like one big bed for two, or two small ones?”
He was enjoying this, the sod. I turned away and took a deep interest in a terrible painting of a maiden chained to a rock and being menaced by a dragon. The knight in shining armour was some distance in the background. It looked to me that he was a little late showing up. When the receptionist led us upstairs, I made sure that Yoyo had a good view of my scowl.
But it was a nice room, I had to admit. It had SIR GAWAIN in fancy lettering on the outside of the door, and I was dreading more armour and whatnot inside, but it was big and cool and plain and smelled of artificial lemons. The beds were a decent three feet apart and there was a lock on the bathroom door. Yoyo went off to get the car and bring the bags up. The window looked down onto the Avalon’s garden, and the receptionist was stripped to her bikini again and back on her sun lounger. She was already browner than I’d ever be.
Yoyo came back, sweaty from lugging the luggage. He dumped everything and went to the window.
“Nice view. That colour and brown skin. Perfect, I think.”
“Pervert,” I said.
“Not at all. I was talking only about colours. I would say the colours here are very good, not like London. Everything is clearer, somehow, isn’t it?”
When Yoyo was in the shower, I called Mum and lied to her.
The next morning we crossed the Tamar. And I hardly saw it. The traffic was a torrent that swept us onto the bridge before we could pull over.
“Yoyo, slow down! I want to look!”
He tried. From behind, a vast truck blared rage at us.
“Shit!”
On my side, the view was wrecked by the huge iron arches of the Victorian railway bridge. All I could make out were flickering glimpses of a shapeless expanse of water, boats, humps of land in the distance. I turned, straining against my seat belt to see past Yoyo, and all I saw was the side of a big white van travelling alongside. I slumped back, wailing, and then we were in Cornwall. Or, as Yoyo soon started to call it, Tamarland. We passed houses called Tamar View, Tamar Nook, Tamar Villa. We passed the Tamar Restaurant, Tamar Auto Sales, the Tamar MiniMart, Tamar Marine Services, Tamar Insurance.
Yoyo, of course, thought it was hilarious. “So cool,” he said. “You are everything here! You’re famous. Maybe at these places you would get, you know, what-you-call-it, discount.”
“I think what I’m getting is an identity crisis,” I said.
Which was a bit melodramatic, maybe, but it is pretty weird when you see your name everywhere and it’s got nothing to do with you. Before this, if I heard someone say “Tamar,” I could be ninety-nine percent certain they were talking about me, not a café or a chocolate bar or something. In London, I was unique. But down here, where I was a bungalow one minute and a funeral parlour the next, I felt as though I was dissolving. I mean, if you’re everywhere, you’re nowhere. If you’re everything, you’re nothing. By the time we’d been in Tamarland for half an hour, I was grumpily wondering why I’d been given such a weird name in the first place.
We stopped for petrol at a garage called Tamar Services and Body Repair, which amused Yoyo so much that he made me pose for a photo. It’s here in front of me now, one of dozens he took over the next few days. I’m leaning against the side of the Saab. Yoyo had made me push my sunglasses up onto my head so that he could see my face, and because of that I look squinty and slightly bad-tempered, even though I wasn’t — yet. In the background, beyond the garage, is a flat swathe of f
airly uninteresting countryside. There’s nothing in the picture to tell you that my river is less than a mile away.
The evening before, we’d gone out to eat and found a place where you could sit outside, on one of the quays down on the Barbican. Afterwards we wandered about for a bit, then Yoyo bought four cans of lager and two Cokes and we went back to the Avalon to have our first really close look at the maps. The faint pencil marks told us that we had to go up the west side of the Tamar, the Cornwall side, but we quickly realized that there are no roads that actually follow the river. You can’t just drive up the Tamar. You can’t walk up it, either. There are footpaths here and there, but for most of its twisty complicated length, the Tamar stays out of reach. Whenever a road comes anywhere near it, the river snakes and wriggles off in the opposite direction. The map showed us every bend and every detail, showed us how it curled round hills and snuck through woods, showed us how wide or narrow it was. The map had the river pinned down, yet it was shy and secretive and sneaky. It seemed like you could never get a really good look at it.
“Like you,” Yoyo had said, and I’d whacked him and made him slop beer down his T-shirt.
But there were a few minor roads that crept close to the river before they retreated or petered out. Grandad’s marks were at several of these points, the first one at a place called Landulph. According to the map, there was nothing much there except for a church. It was only a mile or so up from the Tamar Bridge, but the main road took us away off to the west, so we had to double back to find it. For most of the way there were high banks on both sides of the narrow lane; it was like driving down a hot green tunnel.
The church was small, quaint, picturesque. Ancient grey stone, a low tower, a gate with a roof over it. The silence was so thick that I felt as though my ears had failed. The hedge alongside the churchyard glowed with wildflowers, and I realized I didn’t know the name of a single one. There was a house opposite, lurking behind evergreen trees, and no other building in sight. I couldn’t imagine what a church was doing in such a remote place. Why would people come here, and when?
Well, they came when they were dead, if the churchyard was anything to go by. It was small but crowded, so crammed with headstones and crosses and crumbled angels that it was hard to pick a way through them. Bodies must have been stacked ten deep underfoot. More landfill than Landulph. Most of the headstones were scoured by erosion or smothered by lichen. They looked like slabs of grey mouldy cheese.
“Late of this perish,” Yoyo said, peering at one of the few legible headstones. “What does that mean? Late for what?”
“Parish,” I said, “not perish. It means . . . Never mind. According to the map, the footpath to the river starts down this way. Come on, Yoyo. I want to see the river, not look at bloody graves!”
We came to a stile with a board next to it telling us that we were entering a nature reserve. The board had faded pictures of the birds that lived there. It would have been more honest if it had shown the biting and bloodsucking insects, but I suppose there wasn’t room on it for five million illustrations. It didn’t mention the ten-foot-tall stinging nettles either, or the brambles and the things that slip inside your sandals and stab you in the soft flesh under your toes. After fifty metres I was ready to give up, but Yoyo was a stubborn so-and-so and wouldn’t pay attention to my whimpers. So, limping and bitten and groaning, I came at last to where he took this next photo of me.
I’m sitting on the trunk of a dead tree that must have drifted down the river and got washed up here. Its roots look like the hand and fingers of a giant’s skeleton. Considering it was a brilliantly hot day in the middle of summer, it’s surprising there’s so little colour. I remember the sky being blue, but according to Yoyo’s camera it was almost white. The foreground is a beach of pale stones shrouded in seaweed that looks black in the photo. In fact, it was dark green, crunchy on top and slimy underneath. In the background there are two shades of silver. The one nearest me, the one speckled with black, is mud. The one farther away is a huge expanse of flat water, as you can tell by the little flecks of colour, the sails of boats. Beyond all that you can make out the towers that the Tamar Bridge hangs from, and next to it the long rib cage of the railway bridge. You can’t see the corpse of the gull that was the first thing we saw and smelled when the path ushered us onto the shore. You wouldn’t know that when we emerged from the wilderness the buzzing of flies blurred into the throb of traffic crossing the bridge so that it was a moment or two before we could tell the difference. You can’t trust photographs.
When he’d taken this one, Yoyo slithered over to me.
“Don’t tell me this is beautiful,” I said.
“I was not going to say that, actually.”
“Good.”
He slung a long leg over the dead tree and looked past me and then over towards the bridges and Plymouth. “It’s not what you expected?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. Don’t know what I expected. Something more like a proper river, I suppose. This doesn’t look like a river, does it? More like a . . .”
I didn’t know what it was like. More to the point, I didn’t know what I was doing here. At that moment, I was almost convinced I’d got everything wrong. Grandad could not have meant to bring me to this bleakness.
“Let me look at the map,” Yoyo said.
He studied it while I watched long-legged little birds poking their beaks into the mud.
Eventually he said, “This is not really the Tamar yet, I think. It says it is, here, but it is more like part of the sea. The sea will come in and out right up to here. And farther, too. What’s the word for this?”
“Tidal? Estuary? Is that what you mean?”
“Yes, I think so. So tonight, for example, this tree we are sitting on will be in the water, probably. And see that smaller bridge over there? It goes over another river that joins this one. And here and here there are other little rivers that join it also.”
“So?”
“So this water is a muddle of all sorts of rivers and the sea. Your Tamar ends here and gets mixed up with everything else and disappears.”
“What are you on about?” I said nastily.
He regarded me over the top of his sunglasses. “What I’m trying to explain to my sulky little cousin is that we are doing things backwards. We are going from the end of the river to the start of the river. And endings are always sad. We are doing the sad bit first, which is wrong. Strange.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and joggled me lightly. “Cheer up. The river will get more beautiful farther on. It will get clearer, more like you expected, I am sure.”
“I bloody hope so. This is deadly.”
“Here,” he said, “you see the next mark? It’s just round the bend here, this tiny village.”
I had to smile because I love the way he says village: willage.
He looked at his watch. “And I notice it has the sign that means pub.”
The willage was called Cargreen and the name of the pub was even weirder: the Crooked Spaniards. It sat on a big quay that was also a car park. Yoyo had been right: the river looked a lot lovelier just this short distance farther away from the estuary. Its surface rippled sky blue and silver, slicing and shuffling the reflections of the boats moored out in the deeper water. We looked upstream where the river vanished between the shoulders of the tilting hills. Yoyo took more photographs. Then we heard the rumbling of an engine and a chirpy toot. Turning, we saw a cruise boat sidling towards the quay. It carried a cargo of ancient ladies, their white and wind-fluffed heads like floral tributes on a coffin.
I thought of Gran. I wondered what she would think if she knew — if she could understand — what we were doing here. For some reason I was sure that she would be frightened. I suddenly felt very uneasy.
“Oh, my God,” Yoyo said, stuffing his camera into its case. “Come on, Tamar. If those old ladies get to the bar first, we’ll be the same age as them before we get served.”
As evening c
losed in on 4th March, a stocky man called Paul van Os was sitting in a bar at the top of Red Lion Street in Apeldoorn. Under his coat he wore an overall stained with blood and, from the smell of him, something worse. There were two cups on the table in front of him, one containing fake coffee, the other gin from a bottle that the café’s owner, Anje Mol, kept under the counter. Van Os had paid for these treats with half a kilo of fatty sausage meat that he had smuggled out of the abattoir at Epe.
For half an hour he was the only customer. The man who then came in was tall and hawkish. He came across to van Os and without speaking picked up one of the now-empty cups and took it over to the counter. Mrs. Mol reached into the darkness below her and brought out the gin and a second cup. The thin man made no move to pay, and it seemed that Mrs. Mol did not expect him to. He stood smiling at her for a few seconds. In the light of the bar’s single candle, his face resembled a primitive weapon carved from bone. Mrs. Mol glanced across at van Os, shrugged slightly, and went out through the door behind the counter that led up to her living rooms.
The thin man waited until he was sure she had climbed all the stairs, then went back to the street door and slid the bolt. He carried the two drinks to the table where the slaughterman was sitting.
“Cheers, Paul.”
Van Os chinked his cup against the other man’s. “Cheers, Koop. I’d almost given up on you.”
“I had to come the long way round. There are bloody SS and police everywhere.”
“I know,” van Os said. “I got stopped twice on the way here from work.” He grinned. “They don’t keep me long once they get a whiff of me.”
“No,” Koop said. “I wouldn’t fancy searching you. Dear God, Paul, you do stink.” He took a sip from his cup. “Anyway, that’s enough polite conversation. I understand there’s something you want to talk to me about.”
