Winterton Blue

by Trezza Azzopardi

  Behind him, a notice says Danger! Buried Ironworks. To his left, another notice is pinned to a post warning dog owners that little terns are nesting. A lone seal breaks the surface of the water, his big head bobbing like a black dog, waiting for a stick to be thrown. The seal goes under again, only to emerge a few metres further south, still staring at Lewis with shining eyes. Behind the seal, Lewis sees the wind-farm out at Scroby sands. The turbines are no more than tiny, glittering specks. He puts up his finger and thumb and pinches one between them. Even at this distance, there’s no escaping what he feels; Anna is in everything he sees.

  Above him, the putter of a helicopter. He’s counted three so far today. Shielding his eyes, he catches sight of a figure waving from a window. Lewis waves back, drops his arm. His hand is really sore. He should bathe it. He’s heard that seawater is good for wounds.

  The landlord at the Fisherman’s Return said the lodge was easy to find—a five-minute walk—but Anna’s already lost her way. She took the back lane, but when it forked she couldn’t remember if he said left or right. The only house in sight is a clapboard cottage on a spit of higher ground. In the front garden, a To Let sign has sagged sideways across the path, the estate agent’s details weathered to almost nothing. Anna stands at the garden wall and looks back down the street to the fork in the road. Running up the middle is a footpath leading to the dunes, and on the right-hand side is a white building, almost invisible against the sky. It’s not what Anna expects a lodge to look like, but as she gets close, she sees a brass plaque on the front wall bearing its name. Below the plaque is a board with a handwritten list of dates and measurements, and pinned to one side are various photographs of a garden with a shed, a garden without a shed, and a piece of ragged grass with a criss-cross of tape spun around it. Anna takes a few seconds to realize that these pictures are of the same view, photographed over a period of months.

  Inside, the reception is deserted except for a parrot in an ornate bronze bird-cage. As soon as it sees her, it starts to whistle and chatter, which brings a woman out of a darkened corner of the foyer.

  Talk about Piccadilly Circus, she mutters, folding her newspaper as she moves behind the desk.

  My mother would love him, Anna says, She’s crazy about birds.

  Don’t let him hear you call him that, says the woman, with a quick smile, He thinks he’s human. Don’t you, Gardner? Now, is it a single room you’re looking for, or a double?

  Actually, I’m looking for a person, says Anna, A man, tall, dark-skinned. He’s got a scar here, she says, running her finger across her chin.

  The woman gives her a weary look.

  There’s no one of that description staying here, she says, But I’ll tell you what I told the other two who came asking: we’re a guest-house, not an information service.

  So he was here? says Anna, making sure she heard the hint.

  About an hour ago. You could try the pub, or the beach, says the woman, If he’s planning on staying, there’s nowhere else for him to go.

  Anna thanks her and turns away. She gets as far as the door before she stops. The woman is passing behind her, back into the far corner of the room, where a fire burns low in the hearth.

  The other two, Anna calls, You said there were another two?

  The woman shrugs; she’s lost interest in Anna now.

  Two men, an old chap and a younger fella. You’ve just missed them.

  Out in the chill air, Anna only half notices the Suzuki with the personalized plate, and the van parked next to it.

  She walks the middle of the fork, keeping her eyes on the track, the path growing steadily more hazardous, until she runs out of ground. Now she knows where she is: she’s on the edge of a cliff. It’s not so far down, maybe thirty feet, and there’s a channel cut into the side of the bank. Far out on the horizon, Anna recognizes Scroby wind-farm, dazzling stripes of light in the setting sun; below her is a ribbon of purple sand. She takes the path down carefully, losing her footing and scrambling the last few metres onto the beach. The waves make a raw, gravelling sound as they wash on and off the pebbles at the tide-line. In the distance, two black-cut figures are walking the water’s edge, and a third dashes into the sea, following a retreating wave. Anna watches as he bends over double, then starts back, shaking the water off his hands in diamond drops. It can’t be him, chasing the surf like a child at play. She stares hard as the man lifts his jacket off the sand and strides along the shoreline. It is him: Anna starts to run.

  Lewis knows the voice calling at his back; he stands perfectly still for a second: he must not be dreaming this. Spinning on his heel, he swerves past Manny and lands a blow directly on the chin of the other man. Carl drops like a stone, more from shock than the force of it, but Lewis isn’t going to stop. He shrugs Manny off his back, launching him onto the wet sand, and hammers at Carl’s head. On his knees, Carl makes to crawl away, but Lewis hasn’t finished with him yet: gripping him in a headlock, he drags him towards the sea, the heels of Carl’s boots marking a frantic pattern on the sand. With his cargo wedged under his arm, Lewis strides long and easy into the waves. Manny yells at him to stop, but Lewis hears nothing except the sound of the sea, a fantastic silver noise which he’s been hearing all day. It’s deeper inside him now than his own heartbeat. He forces Carl under the water, plunging his head down as the tide retreats, grinding his face against the wet sand and stones and screaming at the top of his voice.

  How does it feel to drown, cunt? Feel nice, cunt?

  Carl is screaming and Manny is screaming, but Lewis hears only the wish-sigh of the waves as they take him, drag them both, further away from the land.

  From the corner of his eye, Manny sees a woman in a windcheater running on the sand: she spears herself into the waves, diving headlong as the water surges over the top of her head. For a black minute, he can only see the ocean; he can only hear the ocean. More black minutes as the light dies completely behind the dunes. Only the white tips of the waves are visible as they suck at the sand; then, on the horizon, a thin sliver of moon lifts itself out of the sea. Fixed directly beneath it are two heads, gleaming in the half-light.

  Manny’s crying a prayer: Please God don’t let them drown, Please God, please God, moving into the waves, his body jarring with the sudden cold. He wades out to meet them; between the two figures, the girl is slumped like a doll. Manny grabs Anna’s waist and as he does so Carl lets go, buckling onto the sand. Lewis kneels down in the darkness and wraps his arms around her.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The voices must be in her head; she’s left the radio on again, and the presenter is talking about the threat of London flooding. Two of the men on the panel are having a fierce debate.

  You could have drowned him, says the one who calls himself Manny.

  Another voice, filling her ear full of static, shouts,

  Wrong! I would have drowned him.

  Who’s drowned? Anna asks, Am I drowned?

  There’s a third voice, now, farther off, as if on a distant telephone line.

  No one drowned anyone, okay? I take it back. It weren’t your fault. You can’t take a joke, see? It was just a joke.

  Am I laughing, twat? Am I?

  Anna feels her body being carried by the water. She’s moving through a cold blue space, through wave after wave of noise.

  But he’s got your van here, so there’s no harm done.

  For the last—fucking—time, it’s not my van. This is not about a stinking van!

  Then there’s no harm done, repeats the Manny voice.

  Anna’s trying to follow the argument but her good ear is full of liquid. She turns her head towards the sounds, hears crackling and white noise.

  No one’s drowned, thank God, says Manny.

  My brother drowned.

  And we all wish he hadn’t. But no one’s to blame, son. It stops here.

  Anna doesn’t know who she is, but she knows where: her bed is floating out on the ocean. She has to drink the sea to
save London, it tastes mint and sharp, like pastis and lemon, and she can do this easily. But then she has to eat the moon. Above her, she sees it, sitting in the sky like a slice of boiled egg. The taste of it makes her sick, and all the water she has swallowed comes back up again in a hot salt rush. She turns her head, spitting scales of light onto the sand.

  We need an ambulance, the man on the phone line says.

  She’ll be alright, says Lewis, You’ll be alright, Anna, just take a breath, that’s it, and another one. You’re going to be all right.

  It took Lewis all day to walk from Yarmouth to Winterton, but it will take him just half an hour to drive back. Anna remains silent, curling herself up in the passenger seat, Vernon’s blanket pulled tight around her. It’s as much as she can do to stop her teeth chattering. She has never been so cold before. In the glare of the oncoming headlights, Lewis steals a glance at her face: he’s caught again, with an even deeper anguish than the first time, by the black shadows under her eyes, the way her mouth turns down at the corners.

  I’m sorry, he says, Anna, I’m really sorry.

  She doesn’t reply to this; she can’t hear anything over the sound of the engine and the wind gusting through the broken quarter window behind her. They turn off the main road out of Somerton, passing the turbines on Blood Hill, and straight into a hairpin bend. Lewis feels rather than sees the curve the road takes; he accelerates into the first corner, but isn’t ready for the second. As he pulls on the steering wheel, the car shudders, rocking up onto two wheels and skimming the verge, so Lewis feels a flare of terror run through him. Then it’s over; they’re safe again. He looks across to Anna, smiling with relief, and so he doesn’t notice the wooden warning sign at the side of the road. He clips it with his front wheel, sends it flipping over the top of the car and beyond, sailing into a field. They hit the mud slick ten seconds later, spinning like skaters on ice.

  He shouldn’t have pulled that stunt. But he was sick to the bones, of Carl, but of himself especially, for agreeing to be in Carl’s company. They’d gone to recce the house in his van, Carl up front, unable to stop bragging to Barrett: his van when he got it would be twice the size; this old heap of metal was only to be expected, seeing as it belonged to Lewis; and he was only letting him in on the job in the first place because Manny had begged him.

  Lewis could bear all of this, silently watching the road, not paying attention to Carl, who was rummaging around in the footwell, pinging what sounded like small stones at Barrett, who was telling him to fuck off you child, for fuck’s sake. He was concentrating, trying to ignore the throbbing pain behind his eye. But then Carl did something Lewis couldn’t bear: he started rewriting history.

  Just like old times, mate, innit? Carl grinned, licking his lips, We used to go cruising, Gaz. Me and him and his brother. What was he called, again, your brother?

  Shut up, said Lewis, his eyes on the road.

  Carl turned round to Barrett, who had composed his face into a frown.

  Wayne, he was called, answered Barrett, I’ve heard about it from your mam.

  He rested his hand on Lewis’s shoulder,

  Bad business, that.

  That’s right, said Carl, But Wayne, now he wasn’t a very good passenger, was he?

  I said, shut up, said Lewis.

  So we got this car, right, Gaz, and we’re steaming, and Wayne, Wayne, he goes apeshit, goes la-la on us, and next thing you know, he tips us in the river.

  It was you, said Lewis, looking for the first time at Carl.

  Me? Me? C’mon, butt, that’s not how it was!

  As if to distance himself, Barrett leaned back into the interior of the van and let out a sigh.

  Give it a rest, Carl.

  Carl wasn’t listening.

  It was your spaz of a brother doing his dancing, he said, turning round to Barrett to demonstrate, flailing his arms in the air, And suddenly, Gaz, I’m not kidding, the whole world goes mental!

  Like this, you mean? shouted Lewis, flicking off the headlights and accelerating into the trees. Through the darkness, scything through a gap in the bushes and further into the black, he thought to murder the three of them. The realization filled him with bliss: here we are again. Time has been unravelled. Only now I’m driving. And this time, we’ll stay down.

  Lewis pressed the pedal to the floor and jolted the van over a steep bank of earth. Directly below, a wide, shining heart-shape appeared in his vision. The second before they dropped into the black, Lewis saw that the heart was no vision; the heart was a lake. It was a reflex—not a thought or a wish—that made his foot hit the brake. It was the same reflex, twenty years earlier, which made him turn and batter the window behind his head, made him push himself up from the darkness, not caring that Wayne was still underwater, not caring about anything except getting air in his lungs and seeing the daylight break above his head.

  It took them an hour to free the van from the sinking mud; by which time, Carl had recovered enough colour in his face to laugh about it.

  Jokes a joke, mate, but that’s going a bit far, he said, Thought we were on for another log flume.

  The following morning, Lewis remembered nothing of the night before; not the recce of the house, nor the wild drive through the trees, nor Carl on the journey back, sitting where Barrett had sat, silently smoking one cigarette after another. Lewis had tried to check his kitbag the next day, as he always did, as he had to do. But his hangover was mighty, and Manny was talking at him, nagging Lewis about the mud on his boots and how he shouldn’t get it on the carpet. At the time, Lewis didn’t consider why his boots would be so muddy: it was as if he couldn’t even see them, as if Manny had been talking to someone else entirely. Try as hard as he might, Lewis couldn’t put himself in the memory at all.

  But now here he is with Anna, and the empty space which had been moving around inside his head, and which he had begun to think of as a fog, is clearing. It wasn’t the recce he needed to blank out, it was the memory it brought to the surface. It was remembering the crash; remembering how he had left his brother, remembering the relief at rising through the cold water, the ecstasy of breathing air, and seeing daylight and trees and people after the chill black suck of the river. Remembering how he had left his brother, and not caring, because he was alive, he was breathing air. Lewis wills the whiteness to expand again and cover this memory. He would prefer any void to this; he would like bury the moment for good. The idea that everything will be unearthed terrifies him.

  Anna’s head is bent to her chest; she is very still. Lewis stretches over and rests his hand on her hair.

  Marta was right, she says, her voice very small, You’re too dangerous to love.

  Feeling about in the glove compartment, she draws out Vernon’s flask, unscrewing the top with shaking fingers. It’s neat whisky, and she gulps it quickly, her eyes watering at the sting and at the confession she’s just made. She daren’t look at Lewis now, but when she’s had enough, she passes the flask to him. He takes one sip, then another, longer pull on the neck, and passes it back. He’s not sure he heard her properly; he’s not sure of anything except that he loves her back, and dangerous or not, he ought to tell her.

  Who were those people on the beach? she asks, finally turning her gaze on him. The engine coughs into life as Lewis turns the key; they crawl now along the deserted road.

  They were part of the problem, he says, I don’t really want to discuss it.

  She keeps her eyes fixed on his profile, persistent.

  And you still have this problem?

  Lewis laughs, but it’s a bitter sound.

  Take your pick, he says, I have problems cubed.

  Give me one, she says, holding out her palm in front of him.

  He drops his speed as he approaches the town centre. He knows his time with her is nearly up.

  I have these migraines—I don’t know what they are. Absences. Just don’t ask, okay?

  Anna glares out through the windscreen.

&
nbsp; I think I’m owed an explanation, she says. She’s about to add, If we’ve got a future together, but he’s too quick for her, his voice rising up like a slap.

  No, you’re not, he says, I didn’t ask you to get involved, right? So back off. No one asked you to butt in.

  You’d have drowned that man, she says.

  Just when she thinks he isn’t going to speak again, he takes a deep breath.

  Yes. I would have drowned him.

  Then I can’t help you, she says.

  He slows up in front of the guest-house. All the lights are on, and Vernon, like a worried father, is at the window, holding the net curtains above his head.

  I know you can’t, he says, pulling into the kerb.

  Anna’s mother stands in the doorway of the Nelson Suite in her old dressing-gown, a towelling turban wrapped round her head. She smells of bath salts and safety and Anna cries out when she sees her. As the mother holds her daughter, stroking her damp hair, pulling her closer, she stares at Lewis. She takes in his wet clothes and the greyness of his face as she feels her daughter shivering through the blanket. A rage, fine and sharp, courses through her.

  Marta, she calls, Go and run a bath for Anna, and get her a hot drink. And you—she fixes on Lewis—You come with me.

  Anna peels off her clothes and abandons them in a heap on the floor. They are stiff and streaked with salt marks. Her skin feels sore all over; the creases of her elbows, the back of her knees; she has bruises on her feet and scores of tiny scratches on her hands. In the mirror, her skin’s mottled pink and blue with the cold. She rummages on the floor of the wardrobe for her towelling robe, and hears Marta calling her from the bathroom down the hall. She waits, staring at the dark wood at the back of the wardrobe, willing Marta to call again. When she does, Anna shakes her head in wonder.