by Tom Anderson
It was about ten oʼclock when we turned off the motorway at the Chapel Shores sign, and Dad phoned home to plan dinner about ten minutes before that.
‘Got you on speaker phone,’ he said to my mum as soon as she answered. ‘So don’t go slagging Jeff Rafferty off to me now coz he’ll hear.’
‘Me? Slag Jeff off?’ she said.
‘Hi Hannah,’ said Jeff, laughing and leaning towards the speaker.
‘Hi Jeff.’
‘You alright?’
‘Yes, fine. So how’d things go today then guys?’
‘Good,’ said my dad. ‘Got some really good possibilities for deals on the go. I can tell you more about that when we get in. What have you done for dinner?’
‘Nothing. Been waiting for you. Didn’t realise you’re gonna get in so late.’
‘Ah, we’re nearly home now. Howabout I stop off for a Domino’s – that one in the Marshes?’
‘Fine.’
‘Cool. See you in a bit.’
And he hung up, turning to Jeff. ‘You up for that then mate?’
‘Nah. Going down the pub, I am. Meeting that bird I was on about.’
My dad grinned and winked. ‘What. The young one? She still like you?’
‘Course,’ said Jeff.
‘Ah well, fair play then,’ said my dad.
I wondered why on earth anyone would want Jeff eating pizza in their house just before bedtime – or even why on earth someone would want to meet him in a pub for a date. At least my time with him was nearly at an end, for now. He’d be back, though. You could guarantee that.
Maybe it was the Domino’s that sweetened her, but somehow, when we got in my mum was being really soft on my dad too. Could have been the bottle of Mount Gay Barbados Rum that he bought her, mind – despite Jeff telling him he should never buy a drink with the word ‘gay’ in it.
With ice and rum in their glasses, pizza on their laps and me sitting off to the edge making do with value lemonade, Dad explained to her all about the deal. He pulled out several of the watches, which was the sort of thing that normally made her roll her eyes and scold him for being too keen to buy stuff. This time, though, she seemed to be taking an interest in it all.
‘They seem a reasonable buy,’ she said. ‘They’ll probably shift okay on eBay. Nice margin, too, even if you sell them for only 65% of their RRP.’
‘Exactly,’ he said, filling his face with a slice of Hawaiian.
Her real excitement, though, was spared for the idea of gold. Of course. He’d texted her from the market, hadn’t he?’
‘That’s why we’re drinking Mount Gay, isn’t it?’ she said, tipping her glass my dad’s way. ‘You remember that place we went in Barbados where they were flogging gold. How cool was that?’
‘I remember, Hannah! Of course I do. That’s what I was thinking. Remember how cool those stories we heard about those guys scoring gold in that wreck?’
‘Yeah!’
‘We should have dived with them, I knew it,’ he said. ‘That stuff about not having our scuba licence, it meant nothing, I’m telling you.’
‘Well, who cares,’ she said. ‘That was then. This is now. Did it have that look? You know, that kind of liquid shine? Like those coins we saw that they’d cleaned up?’
‘Probably. We only saw one little bar of this stuff and two coins. 99.99% quality though, it was. Looked good, don’t you reckon, Luca? And heavy too. Jeff was really positive about it.’
‘Ah forget Jeff,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you ask to see the rest?’
‘All in good time. Need to move these watches out first. Are you keen to help?’
‘Not really.’ She laughed and took a slice of pizza. ‘But I’m sure you can manage to do it.’
‘So you’re think these watches are a good idea, then?’ he said, lifting one out of the box and winding its turning face.
She didn’t reply, but took a sip of the rum.
‘We should do a family holiday to Barbados once I turn the gold over,’ he said.
Mum spluttered slightly through her nose, then half choked on her rum and had to sit forward to stop anything spilling.
‘What?’
‘Once you turn it over?’ she said.
‘Ah come on – don’t be like that now. You’re on-side and you know it.’
‘What makes you think that?’
My mum turned to me. ‘What d’you think, Lukee?’
‘I think the pepperoni dipping sauce is okay,’ I said, and they both looked at me like I was from outer space for a second before laughing their heads off. I laughed with them, and got stuck into another slice. After dipping it, of course.
‘He’s good value sometimes isn’t he, Steve,’ said my mum.
‘Who? Lukee? Yeah. He’s gonna be a neat little gold merchant one day. I can tell.’
‘He can be whatever he wants,’ said my mum.
‘Yeah, but I can teach him to want the right things.’
‘Can you?’ my mum laughed. ‘Like you taught me? Well, I’m looking forward to watching that happen.’
* * *
They put reggae on not long after that – ‘Good Thing Going’ – remembering when they travelled the Caribbean the year after they met. Just before they had me, and then responsibility. It was on loud, too, so that when I left them with their rum and his watches and her fake support, to go upstairs, the beats were rumbling through the floorboards.
‘Thanks for the pizza,’ I mumbled on the way out.
They had to know what they were doing, surely? There it was: my music. I know it was their music once but they’d given it to me. The only thing of theirs I didn’t mind having.
I opened the window and tried to get noises in from the street outside, but all I got was freezing air the flavour of saltmarsh and rust. It was all I could think: my parents were using my music.
I slammed a pillow to each ear, and tried to think of words that didn’t link up. I needed to take my head apart to fix the bugs before they realised they could seize control. Even now, they were everywhere, trying to get in the way of my reboot. I pressed cushions into each temple, and tried to tell myself stories that made no sense.
Long, long journey to settle from here. As big a task as DJ Luca could ever take on.
Chapter 11
D’you know when Wentloog used to creep me out the most? It was when he’d come by really late in the evenings – like after midnight.
I found out just after why he was doing it. Apparently he wanted to understand more about how I got to sleep. He had a theory that I got too alert to nod off properly. Then he reckoned not catching enough z’s was getting me down in the day because I had to get up early for school whether I slept or not.
I’ll pause there just the let you realise the genius of that conclusion… … … … There you go. Amazing, isn’t it? That’ll be a couple of grand probably, judging from the car he drives.
Anyway, I wonder if he ever picked anything up by watching me? It made me realise that the guy was sort of, loosely, in a roundabout way, almost snooping at the right stuff. Good sign? Bad sign? No sign, I hoped.
Also – even if he did spot something ‘wrong’, who was he to call it wrong? All the best people on earth do their stuff by dark. I realised that ages ago. It’s when your brain can forget the rules you spend all day telling it to stick to. There’s a music for the day and a music for the night. I reckon the people who hear them both are the ones who should run the world. They’d get everyone.
Anyway, I found out the one thing my mum did right in her whole life, too. Did anyone else know Wentloog offered to write them some kind of note saying I didn’t have to go to school the next day anytime I didn’t sleep well?
They were planning to keep that from me, too. Probably because my mum told him to piss off and that I was
going back to school anyway, as soon as I was allowed. Does it sound like her?
It was all there, in the notes I’m allowed to read, anytime I want.
Thing is, I’m not sure yet whether to be happy about that stuff or not. Part of me kind of likes her telling him to stick it. But then free days off school? Would have loved that idea a few weeks ago. Now though… Well, we’re not meant to get everything about ourselves, anyway, are we?
* * *
Somehow, I eventually got away that night and drifted. My earphones found their way to my head even though it seemed impure to play reggae at the same time as them downstairs, and I’d fired my brain back on track just about. Their borrowed music only, but up here in my room it was still playing on my terms, in my space.
‘Good music helps you see,’ I said aloud to myself. ‘In the dark, too!’
It was about three hours later when I pinged awake again, my heart and chest and head and soul all trying to tune into something else not too far off. I could still hear music from downstairs and looked at my bedroom clock. It was gone midnight and Mum and Dad were obviously yet to turn in. I listened out to see if I could recognise the tunes they were using. That might give me an indication what sort of mood they were in by now. I couldn’t be sure, though. It was something heavy, and lead guitar driven with a fast pace. I couldn’t hear either of their voices, either, above the din.
Now I had options, though. At least they’d left my music alone – for me and only me again. Now I could think. Now I could search out whatever else was calling for me.
A drum-roll and bout of guitar-feedback came through the floor from the living room. Maybe I should bang on the floor, to make them shut up. No. That would tell them I was up, then she’d stress out and get on my case.
I listened a little more. They had to have the stereo cranked close to full volume.
And that was when I realised I could probably sneak out again.
Why had I only just thought of this?
My cammo outfit was slumped over a box at the bottom of my bed, just where I’d left it after going down to the shoreline last Saturday night. It was all there, right where I needed it. The brown hat, the dark jeans – with Haz’s doubloon in the back pocket for extra luck – and hoodie. I put three T-shirts on underneath, over the warm one I’d been sleeping in. Snug and ready, I began tip-toeing downstairs.
I got past easily. The door to the living room was shut, with the key right by the front door. It was open, so I locked up from the outside, slipped the key into my hood pocket and fastened it to the sewn-in loop, like before. When they finally went to bed, Mum and Dad would go to lock the door and probably just think they’d already done it.
So, like that, I was out – into the night. And it was perfect.
There wasn’t a cloud anywhere above me and the stars were scattered overhead. The ground was so hard it felt like you could bounce back off it if you ran too heavily. It wasn’t a frost – getting a bit too far into Spring for them now – but the little lumps in the soil didn’t squash properly under my feet either. The gravel path at the bottom of our street felt somehow more solid than usual. Maybe it was just the blackness all around, making it so things didn’t need to worry about how they looked. The pavements, the mud and stones, and then the dunes – maybe with this lovely darkness to hide them from sight they could all just concentrate on being.
The moon was almost down to nothing, now. Where it had been a bright ball of gemstone light the first time I’d seen the men, now it was just a tiny, tiny crescent – a lost shaving of bleached lemon peel. It cast no reflection on the sea, although its illumination meant there was just enough visibility to make out the horizon, the sand, the wet shoreline and the troop of figures already beginning to rise from the ocean surface before me.
This time the tide was a bit lower. It must have been high earlier in the night, and had been dropping back for a couple of hours. That was why the sand was covered in soaking patches. It made their footprints really easy to make out.
The lead figure was just getting his feet to the sand, and the guy behind him was out up to his waist. The third was just a head starting to lift his beret-capped forehead out of the water. The beach slanted less when the tide was this low, so although they were the same distance apart as before, there was room for more of them to still be partly in the ocean at the same time. It meant that once the first had stepped clear of the shore’s last trickle the fourth was also starting to rise.
Having sunk back, free of the odd groups of rocks that normally swirled beneath the high-water mark, the outline of the sea was now a neat arc across the bay. As my eyes grew a little more used to the dark, I could make out mini waves as unbroken lines, travelling in horseshoe shapes towards land.
With the beach wider than before, more of the men could stride across the sand at once, and for the first time I was able to look at them as a straight line of marching people. The climb up the pebble bank – where I was sitting now – and the immediate start of the dunes behind meant that the other times I’d seen them their line was always rising and dipping. Now, though, I could see them slowly treading, one after the other along the level beach, the line of their footprints marking out a gradual bend towards where they could arrive at the dunes in the same place as usual.
They were close to me now – as close as they’d ever been – and despite it being so much darker, I could still make out the eyes of the lead figure. He didn’t move his head, or let his gaze slip at all, and went methodically past, up and behind the first of the dunes with that same, uniform pace. Behind him, as if programmed or towed by an invisible line, the second also followed.
All nineteen were there. With the further distance from shoreline to dry land, I counted seven being able to all be on the sand at the same time. Not one of them looked my way as they felt out the pebble bed beneath their careful feet. Not one head turned as they took their first sinking steps onto the ancient, dry sands of the dune – and like with their leader not one hint of distraction could be seen in any of their fixed, frozen gazes.
To the nineteenth man, yet again, they kept their routine. Over the wet sand, up the boulder shoreline, over the dunes and then merging with that wall of sand – each sinking smoothly into it, disappearing from sight again, and leaving me alone in the sweet night air, to lie back soothed by the sounds of the shore and looking at the stars.
Again, I thought it – You can’t walk into a dune like that – but again I had to stay, had to try something, whatever it might be.
* * *
On a small, flat, grass verge at the foot of the dunes, and right where the band of pebbles marked the start of the beach, I planted my back hard against the floor. My knees lined up with the ledge of earth and roots, leaving my feet dangling down. If I swung them back and forth slightly, my toes would brush gently against the boulders below.
As more and more pins of light seemed to turn on in the sky above, I felt my back sinking further and further into the cold floor of planet earth. I rolled my eyes up and down, feeling the nearly freezing, dry air in the corners of my eyelids and noting how many individual dots there were out there in the jet black sky. Stretching my sight to each horizon, there seemed less stars, as the oranges of the Chapel Shores streetlights diluted their flickering glow. But right overhead, the sky was awash with constellations, dancing as luminous dust.
I closed my eyes and gently hummed the little riff from ‘High Tide or Low Tide’. The lyrics rose in my mind, too. How someone was going to be a friend whatever. Couldn’t apply that to Gaby, I thought, or anyone else in my life. Perhaps this troop of maybe-ghosts that had just passed me by would be my friends no matter the tide. They were certainly looking for something. I hummed the riff harder, letting the tune take over the words. Closest I could get to relaxation tonight. Sleep was overrated, anyway. This was all I needed. This and to wait out the moment when my nineteen fi
gures would return and mark out the path.
A noise, nearer than anything before, broke my non-concentration.
It was the fox, and without thinking I stood up to greet him.
He was close. Maybe ten metres. I could see that he was wet, at least on the legs, and there was a little bit of blood around his mouth.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I’m Luca.’
‘So?’ he said back. I heard him. It didn’t matter if he really spoke.
‘I’m waiting,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But why not go onto the beach?’
‘You’re right,’ I said, and stepped across the pebbles towards the track of footprints coming out of the shoreline.
‘You’re welcome,’ he said, except that when I turned around he was gone.
I was tracing the marks in the damp sand that the men had left. The prints were always the same distance apart, and it seemed as if the men had all stepped in exactly the same place every time. It meant that I couldn’t make out any individual marks at all.That changed when I reached the actual shoreline itself, though, where the receding tide had allowed the last two or three men to step onto fresh sand. Their prints stood alone before joining the rest. They were wet, and gradually filling with water and silt, but the shapes were still as clear as I needed them to be.
I put my own foot over one, and noticed theirs were a lot smaller. The outlines seemed to go into a much sharper point at the toe ends, too. I remembered the way their boots had looked like they might be made only of cloth, or of leather so wet it had lost its shape. I was a size eight, so these guys must have been a five or six at the most. When I stepped away, my own print had left the grooves from the sole of my shoe as a perfect mould. I waited for it to fade, but it didn’t. The sand was hard enough to preserve it. That meant the men’s prints were probably unchanged too. Theirs had no rivets in them at all from soles, so it meant they weren’t wearing anything that had rubber or plastic on the underside.
I started walking back up the sand along the line of footprints, trying to take the exact same steps that they’d all taken. A quick rush came over me, like I was someone else for a moment, and then, just as I was getting used to the rhythm of the paces they had used, I looked ahead and saw the first shadow emerging back over the dunes.
