Jim saw Ronny’s ribs, all clearly articulated and distinct, protruding like half a dozen slim book spines. He struggled against the impulse to reach out his fingers to grasp and withdraw one of these small pale volumes. Ronny released the fabric of his T-shirt, bent down to pick up the trowel and then paused. “So where did you get to?”
He didn’t turn as he spoke.
Jim was taken aback. He’d supposed himself invisible.
“A walk.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?”
“You sounded…uh…” Ronny couldn’t summon up the word.
“Nothing’s wrong. I just didn’t want to disturb you.”
“The trowel. See the tip? I saw your head reflected in it. At first I thought you were the moon.”
Ronny chuckled at this idea, and the light punctuated his amusement by turning off and then on again.
Jim frowned. “I think the light’s…”
It went.
“Even in the dark,” Ronny muttered, “I still have this red glow in the centre of my eyes.”
Jim saw the grey outline of Ronny’s head and arm. He was vigorously rubbing his eyes again.
“A red glow?”
Jim grabbed hold of the lamp and yanked at its wire. The plug came free and he felt the fitment’s full weight in his hand.
“I was staring into the sun this afternoon and now I have this red glow.”
“In both eyes?”
“I don’t know. How would I tell?”
“Close one eye at a time.”
“But the light’s still there when I close them.”
While Ronny spoke, Jim turned and peered out into the darkness.
“Did you hear something?” he asked softly. “Can you see anything?”
Ronny turned. “I see splotches. Red ones.”
“For quite a while now I’ve just had this feeling…” Jim was almost whispering, “my hackles…”
Ronny dusted the sand off his hands on to the front of his trousers.
“I thought only dogs had those. And wolves.”
“Yes…” Jim was vague and prickly.
“And cats…”
Before Ronny could complete what he was saying, a distant rumble of thunder precipitated a wild, honking squeal, higher in pitch than the thunder’s low grumble, but much closer by and infinitely more affecting.
Jim swore, threw the lamp randomly out into the darkness – another grunt followed, more confused, less alarmed – then yanked Ronny up and dragged him at full pelt down between the prefabs. They turned sharply and rushed straight in through the front door. Jim slammed it shut behind them and reached out his hand for the light switch, but Ronny stopped him, panting. “Leave it off…”
As he spoke, he felt his way to the window, pulled back the nets and peered out. Jim stayed where he was. “Did something follow us?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t see it then?”
“No. But…”
Ronny’s voice was suddenly hushed and awestruck. Jim could see his hand waving in the darkness, beckoning him over. Jim pulled off his wet shoes and then joined him by the window. It was a small window, dirtied by salt and ocean spray. The tide had gone out a little but the wind played with the waves like a rough hand tousling a child’s curls. Just their white tips were visible; rushing, mounting, toppling, crashing.
“To the left.”
Ronny rubbed at the pane where his breath had steamed it up, then pointed. “See? Far left. Next to Luke’s prefab.”
Jim stared. He could distinguish a small, sloping expanse of beach and the pale waves devouring it, that was all. He felt Ronny next to him. His arm. His shoulder. And then he remembered Connie’s ears. Her ears. So small. Like tiny conches.
The moon came out. Not properly. It didn’t beam or radiate. It peeked quickly from behind the clouds like a commuter glancing up briefly from his newspaper. But that was long enough. “Oh shit,” Jim’s heart was struck wide, “what’s he doing?”
Ronny’s fingers gripped a hold of his arm. They were damp and cold from their previous contact with the windowpane. Jim felt them, just above his elbow.
“You know what?” Ronny whispered. “I think he’s looking at the sea.”
A giant, shaggy beast, perfectly still, his four feet firmly planted in the sand and the shells and the shingle, staring, mesmerized, at the sea.
“He’s wondering whether he might challenge it,” Jim said.
“He isn’t.”
“Yes. He’s a wild beast. He longs to dominate everything.”
“No. He’s just staring. He’s probably never seen the sea before. He’s struggling to understand it.”
The boar lifted its head and sniffed.
“Pigs have poor eyesight,” Jim said.
“What does he make of it?” Ronny wondered. “What do you think he makes of it?”
Jim couldn’t answer immediately. He felt Ronny’s fingers.
“He’s probably thinking that today’s been worthwhile after all,” he said, finally.
Ronny’s eyes shifted from the boar and focused in on Jim for a second. “You really think so?”
Jim had been joking, but the instant Ronny reacted with such sweet credulity he swallowed the joke down like a headache tablet. “Yes. The escape, the stress, the risk, everything. Today was worth it. Just to get to see the sea.”
Ronny’s eyes returned to the beast. “He isn’t moving.”
“He’s in a trance.” Jim paused and then he found himself saying, with perfect calmness, “Perhaps we should leave this place.”
Ronny didn’t react. Jim repeated himself. “Let’s leave this place. Soon. Tonight.” He didn’t really know what he meant or what he wanted. Ronny continued to stare at the boar. “Why?” he asked softly. “Everything’s closing in,” Jim said.
“No.” Ronny’s mouth was smiling. “It’s opening up,” he murmured gently, “don’t you see? It’s opening.” He squeezed Jim’s arm, one more time, and then let go.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Forty-Two
“This was the spot,” Lily said, interrupting the kind of silence all but the most vocally assertive might think twice before violating.
“Here?” Sara’s head rotated fiercely, like a hawk’s. “You’re sure?”
“Yep.”
Nathan stopped the car. It was raining heavily. It was horribly dark. He didn’t like the dark. It was always too deep, too inpenetrable.
“And this is where you think you saw Luke?”
“Luke?” Lily fingered her chin. “Is that his name?”
Sara didn’t weaken. “That’s his name.”
“No. He was down the road a way.”
“Then we should drive on. He must’ve walked further.”
“But he was intending to turn back, wasn’t he?” Nathan interjected, he thought, quite helpfully.
Sara looked confused. “Why?”
“Because he was walking in the wrong direction. For the pub. He was after cigarettes.”
Sara continued to stare at him. “But that isn’t logical. The pub’s a half mile further on up this road.”
“Oh,” Nathan withdrew, “I must’ve got my wires crossed.”
“Yes,” Lily said tightly, choosing, however, not to elucidate.
Sara wound down her window and the rain hit her in the face.
“It’s bucketing. There’s no visibility.”
Nathan felt a moment’s concern about the car’s upholstery. “Perhaps he left the road and walked over the fields or something.”
Sara shook her head. “He wouldn’t risk it. Especially in the dark. He’s new to the area.”
“He’s probably home and dry by now.”
This was Lily’s deeply unperturbed contribution from the back seat.
“Don’t be stupid,” Sara’s jaw was stiff. “We should drive on.”
Nathan did exactly as he was instructed. He drove slowly. But even squi
nting, he could see only a few feet in front of the car’s bonnet. After a couple of minutes, when he was beginning to lose all faith in the existence of anything beyond the dull glare of the headlights, he suddenly noticed something vague and ghostly reflecting in their shine. A shirt, a pale face, two white hands. Like a scarecrow, cowering close to the dark hedgerow.
“Look,” he pointed, “is that anything?”
Luke. Drenched, depressed, desperately seeking shelter next to a stunted hawthorn. Lily chuckled at the sight of him. They pulled up adjacent and Sara opened her door a fraction. “Luke!” she yelled. “Climb in.”
Luke looked towards the car, his expression awash with suspicious antipathy. It took him a moment to recognize Sara. Once he had, his frown deepened. “No. I’m fine.”
“What?” Sara could barely hear him over the engine and the wind.
“I’m fine. I don’t need a lift.”
He waved her away like she was a dirty pigeon eyeing up a slice of pizza.
Lily began sniggering again. Sara ignored her and clambered out of the car, leaving the door wide behind her. “You’re drenched,” she said, “get in.”
Luke was shivering. Improperly dressed in Farahs, a cotton shirt and a cardigan. Sara noted that he still wore his hospital bangle.
She lowered her voice. “Come on,” she said, “get in the car. One of my boars has escaped. It’s risky walking.”
Luke glanced over at the car. The light was on. He saw Lily gurning at him from the back seat.
“I don’t want a lift,” he said coolly, “I’m fine walking.”
Sara felt rain water slithering past her collar and down her neck. She shuddered. “This is silly…”
He resented her quick selection of such a nursery-style word to describe his distinctly tragic predicament. “It’s not silly at all,” he said, brimming with righteousness, “I simply want to be left.”
Sara lowered her voice even further. “I can’t leave you here. It’s much too risky. You might get hurt and then I’d be held responsible.”
Lily was leaning forward in her seat, listening intently. “I’m not getting into that car.”
“Why?”
He said nothing.
“Why? You’re soaking wet. You’re being ridiculous.”
“That’s enough.”
Luke stepped off the grassy verge and on to the rough tarmac of the road. He began walking. Sara followed. “I won’t leave you here. Are you listening? It wouldn’t be professional.”
“Oh yes,” Luke sniped, “I understand all about professionalism…” he spat out water as he spoke, “after all, I’m a real pornographer.”
Sara was nonplussed. “What does that mean?”
“You should know,” Luke glared forward resentfully, “you said it.”
“I said what?”
He was walking at a good speed. “A real pornographer.”
Sara slowed down for a moment – as if thinking posed an obstacle to concerted motion – then speeded up and stuck at his shoulder, easily keeping his pace again.
Nathan trailed along behind them in first gear. From the rear, the car’s lights were disorientating. It felt like being on stage in the world’s most inhospitable theatre.
“Stop following me!” Luke bellowed.
“But I don’t even remember saying that pornography thing.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“No, truly.”
Sara felt a slight glow inside her. That she might have said something so impulsive and profound and deeply affecting, all in the heat of the moment, without even thinking! But what had she meant? A real pornographer? And how could she wriggle her way out of it now?
“I was talking rubbish,” she said, “just off the top of my head. What the hell do I know about pornography?”
“It’s a cold thing,” Luke said, almost to himself, “but your pictures were cold too. They were colder.”
Sara stiffened. She remained sensitive. His rejection was still new and raw.
Luke sniffed. His face was streaming. The rain hurt his skin. It felt like he was being trampled by a swarm of damp ants in army boots.
“I don’t think I like it here,” he announced soulfully.
“What?”
Sara had heard him, but she couldn’t take him seriously. She was out of breath and had begun to worry that the rain might get into the gun and jam its mechanism.
“It isn’t like the moon after all,” Luke continued, “it’s like hell. Or purgatory.”
“It’s beautiful here in the summer,” she said, lifting the gun up and inspecting its barrel, “with the clear light and everything. But you missed the summer.”
“The sea’s freezing cold, and it isn’t even the sea.”
“Of course it is. What else could you call it?”
Luke didn’t respond.
“What else could you call it, Luke?”
Again. No response.
“Fine,” Sara muttered, “if that’s the way you want to play it.” She stopped walking, waited for the car to catch up with her and climbed back inside.
“Right,” she said, carefully supporting the gun between her knees, “just follow him.”
“And I’ll pay for the petrol,” she added, registering Nathan’s expression of mute disgruntlement as she slicked back her wet hair until it stuck to her skull and glistened like it was oiled.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Forty-Three
To see Nathan like that, completely out of context. Nathan. It had shaken her. Because at some basic level she’d found his previous performance convincing. He’d been gentle. He’d had this quality…a naivety, an innocence. A detachment. And she’d believed in him, somehow, when he’d said that Ronny was no longer any part of his life. Even after discovering the lost property form with the Sheppey connection. Even then.
She was sitting, slumped at the kitchen table, exhausted, cradling one of the cauliflowers in her hands and waiting. How long before they returned? And would Nathan be with them? What did he want? From her? From Ronny?
Just an hour ago she’d been lost in the maize and Jim had saved her. Jim. She touched the head of the cauliflower with her fingertips, then absentmindedly pulled back the green fronds which sheltered its heart, pushed her fingers underneath its neck, yanked a small floret free and inspected it. She sniffed. The smell reminded her of the letters. That first extraordinary moment when she’d discovered them gone.
She tried to spur herself on, mentally, to investigate her position, her needs, her options, but it was too difficult. She was too tired. She glanced down at herself. She wore only an old robe which she’d found hung on the back of the bathroom door. Green, made of towelling. It swamped her and draped on the floor around her ankles. Her feet were uncovered though, and her toes tingled against the kitchen flags.
Jim. She touched the small cauliflower floret to her lips then popped it into her mouth. The belt of the robe was slack and the front section fell open as she moved her arm to her mouth.
She looked down at herself as she chewed, at her chest and her belly. Corpse-white. And the green of the robe? She felt hard and cold like a vegetable, with her soft towelling leaves pulling loose. She watched blankly as her skin tightened up into goose-bumps. She swallowed, closed her eyes and saw Jim’s face. His skin looked so bright. It glowed like a light bulb. Or was the brightness she imagined, in fact, just the fluorescent kitchen strip peeking in through her lashes?
For three seconds she contemplated this possibility, too exhausted to consider opening her eyes to find out conclusively. She felt her jaw loosening, her mouth falling open. Her brain was all flashes and crackles. I am asleep, she told herself, I am finally asleep, but then a chill began creeping, up her fingers, through her toes. Death is sudden, she found herself thinking. Sudden. It was not always as gradual as Monica had described it.
Her father; he was there and then he was gone. One door opened, another closed. She tried to picture him in her min
d’s eye but she couldn’t. Every time she thought she’d got him cornered, turned him around to face her, tried to focus, to identify, he was sucked down and out from the space behind her eyes like a slick of oily water being dragged through a plughole.
Connie opened her eyes. My father was a good man, she told herself, tearfully, a good man. Ronny knew. Jim knew. Maybe even Nathan knew. Soon they would confirm everything. Soon. Soon they would confirm.
Yes. Yes. She kept repeating.
♦
The lights were still off. Ronny remained by the window, obscured by the nets, cocooned, like a giant pallid chrysalis. Jim’s eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. He was crouching next to the fireplace, debating whether he could risk burning something. His clothes were damp. He was beginning to feel the cold.
“He’s back again,” Ronny whispered, “that’s his seventh circuit.”
“Where does he go?” Jim asked idly.
“Luke’s prefab. Something’s attracting him to it. Do you think Luke’s inside there? The lights are all off.”
“I don’t know. Perhaps not.”
“So where is he?”
“Luke? The pub. He was planning to walk there if he grew desperate enough.”
“It’s the smell,” Ronny intoned softly, “don’t you think?”
“The smell?”
“That fishy smell. It’s like his calling card.”
Jim half-smiled. “You really think that’s why the boar’s here?”
“Why not? He senses a rival.”
“I thought we’d decided he’d come to see the sea.”
“He came to find Luke and then ended up seeing the sea. The sea was an added bonus.”
Jim stretched out his hand and tentatively ran it along the wall next to the fireplace. He was feeling for the ball of paper he’d thrown there earlier.
“I have the letter,” Ronny said quietly, “if that’s what you’re after.”
Jim paused.
“I’ve been watching you,” Ronny smiled, “through the nets.”
He moved away from the window, towards the sofa, felt his way around it and then sat down. Jim remained crouched where he was.
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