by Emlyn Rees
‘Just relax, baby. He’ll show up soon enough.’ She pulled him by the lapels of his coat, steering him under the huge bunch of mistletoe which hung from the light in the hall. Stephanie hadn’t even noticed it was there.
‘Izzy, what are you doing?’ Elliot said, but there was a smile in his voice.
‘You don’t think you’re going to get away with it that easily, do you?’ Isabelle said, putting her arms up around his neck. ‘I want a proper Christmas hello from you, Mister.’
Stephanie looked away, as Isabelle leant in to kiss Elliot. She stepped silently into the bathroom, her heart beating fast.That was all she’d wanted when she’d got married: to be in love with David, just like Elliot and Isabelle were with each other.
She turned on the tap and washed her face. She watched the water swirling down the plug hole. She’d never considered that love could simply drain away through the cracks in a marriage, but that’s what had happened, and the fact that David wanted to carry on as normal, as if nothing had changed – especially at Christmas – made her want to punish him more than ever.
She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Next to Isabelle, she looked old and worn out, she thought. She reached into the pocket of her fleece, pulling out her purse, where she was sure she had a lipstick in amongst the change. As she opened the wallet, she saw the picture in the clear pouch. It was a miniature print of the photograph on the mantelpiece at home. She carried it everywhere with her.
It was a traditional portrait of her and David with their three children, taken at a photographer’s studio two years ago, and there was Paul, their second son, sitting on Stephanie’s lap, smiling without his front teeth, his expression so innocent and happy, his hair soft and dark, like hers. Her Paul, she thought. Her poor, poor Paul.
She turned away from the photo, its image etched on her memory. It was almost too painful to look at, because in none of their faces was a single trace of all the ruined Christmases stretching into the future.
Chapter 3
Michael grabbed the iron crowbar from where he’d stashed it under his bed, next to the old back issues of Playboy, which he’d nicked off his dad and now kept hidden from his mum. He took his grey Gortex jacket from his bed and pulled it on, then he zipped the crowbar in underneath and stuffed his black woollen balaclava into his pocket.
Rock, sport and film stars stared down at him from the walls he’d painted red himself: Brando, Rooney, Morrison, Lennon, Crowe, System of a Down, Muse, De Niro, Kasabian and Jack Johnson. There were photos of Michael and his school mates pinned up on the darts board and a shot of a surfer riding a tube.
Michael had never been to America or surfed a wave. One day, though, he was determined to do both. He was going to stick out school and then he’d travel. After that, he’d come back home and move to London and do something cool for a living, like maybe run a bar, or work for a radio station, or be a chef. He was going to retire early and kick back somewhere hot, like Thailand, or India, or even Californ-I-A.
He jogged down the grubby green-carpeted stairs and through to the kitchen, which smelt of Marmite and Mr Muscle. His stepfather, Roddy, who was wearing a jumper the colour of a wet teabag, glanced up at Michael from his TV show, before staring disinterestedly back at the screen and continuing to pick his teeth with a broken match.
‘Another important consideration when deciding where to relocate,’ the TV show’s host was saying, ‘is local amenities. Where will you shop? And where, if you have them, will you be able to send the kids to school?’
As Michael started pulling his mud-caked boots on by the back door, smoke curled up into his eyes from a half-extinguished cigarette in a fish-shaped ashtray on the blond pine kitchen table. Through the brown bead curtain which divided the kitchen from the living room came the whine of a hairdryer. Michael could see his mum through the beads, like a prisoner behind bars, crouched down by the radiator, teasing her corn-yellow hair up into a frizz on the top of her head.
Michael’s mum had first met Roddy at a friend’s birthday party on St John’s. That was a year ago, just after her divorce from Michael’s dad had come through. Roddy had only been over on a visit, seeing his cousin, but within three months he’d quit his job as a taxi driver in Truro and had moved in with Michael’s mum.
Which was fine by Michael, at least most of the time, anyway, because he wanted his mother to be happy, but then, six weeks ago, his mother and Roddy had announced that they’d decided to put the Windcheater up for sale. As soon as someone bought it, they’d informed him, they’d all move to the mainland. The idea was to run a tea shop there. In Truro. In Roddy’s home town. Even now, the thought made Michael want to spit.
Stepping outside was like stepping out of a sauna. Michael sucked in the cold air with relief as the back door banged shut. Roddy shouted out something in complaint, but the words came out muffled and Michael didn’t bother to reply.
The back half of the building, where Michael now stood, was where Michael, his mum and Roddy lived. The front half was the pub which they ran, the only pub on Brayner island. Michael had no memory of any other home.
He hurried now down the thin alleyway which ran along the side of the pub, past the broken flower pots and cracked slates stacked against the mildewed wall.
Wind whistled down the deserted road at the front of the house, whipping a hissing black plastic bag along the potholed tarmac. The dark wet plunge of Green Bay harbour was dead ahead, its unmanned lighthouse pointing up at the sky like a great fat forefinger.
To the right, the road led south, out through the village, then on, zigzagging down the east side of the island, connecting the village to the few scattered houses and hamlets beyond. There weren’t many cars on the island, on account of them having to be specially brought out from the mainland and then winched ashore, and the road was empty of them now.
Michael turned left and headed along the road to the north. There was no one else in sight this way either. He pulled his balaclava on, wearing it rolled up so that it looked like an ordinary woollen hat. He was fourteen, but could have passed for seventeen. He was fair-skinned and fair-haired, tall and thin. There was a fragility about him, and a vulnerability to his brown eyes, but he was stronger than he looked.
He’d watched The Deer Hunter for the first time the week before and hadn’t been able to get it out of his mind. Next to the characters in the film, he’d felt like no kind of a man at all. His life this year had been about exams and timetables, about thinking, not doing. The film had left him frustrated. He was sick of being a kid.
Michael wasn’t much good at drawing, what with History and English and Music being more his thing, but he still could have sketched out Green Bay harbour with his eyes shut, right down to the very last stone. The same went for much of the rest of Brayner, which was only three miles long and two miles wide. He’d been brought up here since he was three.
Green Bay harbour was so named on account of the emerald green seaweed which grew on its rocks and which exuded an alien subaqua gleam in the summertime. Michael had grown up slinging the slimy stuff around with his ex-best friend Greg, taking turns at playing Superman and Lex Luther, pretending the seaweed was kryptonite, or writing swear words with it on the pavement outside the post office, to get a rise out of Mrs Carling, who ran the shop there and thought that swearing, along with spitting and running in the street, was a mortal sin.
Michael missed Greg. He’d been the only other kid on the island Michael’s age and he’d moved away three years ago, up to Manchester, where his parents had inherited a big house after Greg’s grannie had died. Michael’s mum had promised Greg’s mum that they’d visit, but they never had.
Michael passed the school house, which had closed down in 1971, long before he’d been born. The school Michael attended was on St John’s. He had to catch a taxi boat, paid for by the government, there and back every day during termtime. His mates on St John’s thought this was the coolest thing in the world, but the fa
ct was that, most times, the sea was like wallpaper to Michael, just something that had always been there. The journey to St John’s and back chewed up an hour of free time each day.
He carried on north out of the village, along the empty road which cut through the wild scrubland, for almost a mile.He undid his coat and took out the iron crowbar, swinging it back and forth in time with his steps.
Then he saw them – Taylor and Simon – two stick figures up ahead, silhouetted against the sky on the slope of Solace Hill. Simon was Taylor’s eight-year-old cousin. He hadn’t been here yesterday when Michael and Taylor had arranged to hook up, and Michael was surprised to see him here now. Taylor shouted something, but all Michael caught of it was the word ‘fuck’. She was probably narked at him for being late. He broke into a run.
‘Sorry,’ he said as he reached her. He hated the way you couldn’t text here on Brayner, because phone signals were so unreliable. Most of the islands fell into a communications black spot, so that their inhabitants had to rely on radiotelephones for their day to day calls. Taylor always joked that it made socialising like living in the past.
‘So you should be, you unreliable git. Didn’t you know it was rude to keep a lady waiting?’
‘Is that what you are now?’ he asked. ‘A lady?’
‘That’s what I’ve always been, Michael,’ she said.
She was right and he knew it. The way she spoke, the way she dressed, Christ, even the way she walked, she was the poshest girl he’d ever met.
‘I had to help Mum peel potatoes,’ he said. ‘We’ve run out of frozen chips.’
Michael avoided Taylor’s eyes when he spoke. He was worried, the same as always, what might happen if he stared for too long into her eyes. He might blush and end up looking like a jerk. The times he did look at her were the times when she was looking at something else, and when he did, he never blinked, as if he was a camera, as if he was burning her image into his brain.
Simon screamed out, ‘Hello!’ and Michael turned to watch him racing, forging his way through the thick heather. He was making machine-gun noises, playing at being a soldier. His curly dark hair ruffled in the wind, as he leapt sideways with a great roar, pretending that he’d trodden on a mine. ‘What do you think?’ he demanded of Michael, getting up and running towards him.
‘Nine out of ten for style,’ Michael said, ‘but ten for effort.’
‘Ha!’ Simon said delighted, before holding up his right palm, which Michael dutifully high-fived.
‘How’ve you been?’ Michael asked. He hadn’t seen Simon since the summer.
Simon shifted his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. ‘OK. Yes, good. I got into the football team at school for a match and we beat Rainsford High one-nil, but it wasn’t me who scored the goal. It was Garry Egan and he’s really fast. And I came last in Maths and Science, as well. And Mum still makes me go to see the doctor about what happened to Paul. And it’s not fair, because she doesn’t make Nat go, because she says she’s too young . . . which is rubbish, right, because Nat says she has nightmares about it all the time, and she wakes me up crying sometimes . . . And Mum and Dad have made me have a tutor at home in the evenings for Maths, but they’re not making me do piano lessons any more, because I called Miss Perkins, my piano teacher, a fat, ugly witch and she said I made her cry, but that was only because she wouldn’t listen to me, no matter what I said, and she kept pushing my hands on to the keys and hurting my fingers –’
‘Sounds like you’ve been busy, then,’ Michael said, cutting Simon off as he took a breath, knowing that if you didn’t he was likely to carry on talking for ever.
‘Watch this!’ Simon shouted, turning and taking a running jump back into the heather.
Taylor and Michael watched him go.
‘Do you remember that time that you and me and Simon and Paul camped out in Granddad’s back garden and we convinced them that we were surrounded by zombies?’ Taylor asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘That was so funny,’ she said. ‘We kept them wound up for hours.’
That was three years ago, when both Michael and Taylor had been eleven. It was the last time they’d slept in a bed together, and therefore the last time, he guessed, that they’d really been kids.
Taylor was now five foot seven, a couple of inches shorter than Michael. Last year, her hair had been blonde. When she’d worn it loose it had hung as low as her waist. Now it was cropped close above the collar, low-lit, with streaks of black and pink mixed in (‘Just till I go back to school,’ she’d said, ‘because then the tossers will make me take it out’). She was wearing a green combat puffer jacket, a tatty denim skirt, stripy tights and tough black boots. She’d lost weight, too, since the summer – or ‘skinned down’, as she’d said. She looked hard, streetwise, like a character from a video game who’d been designed to fight.
She’d changed shape in the last year, and even more so since the summer holidays. She’d elongated, stretched, switched from angles into curves. She didn’t look like a kid any more, not to him. And he didn’t feel like a kid either, not when he looked at her.
Michael fancied her rotten. He’d thought about doing it with her ever since he’d had his first wet dream a little over a year ago – and even that had been about her. He’d imagined them in his bedroom, together under the duvet, kissing and exploring each other’s bodies with their hands. Then he’d imagined them getting bolder, trying out all the different kinds of positions he’d read about in mags and seen on the web: missionary, doggy, sixty-nines, her on top, or spooning side by side.
In reality they’d never done anything. They hadn’t even kissed. His biggest fear was that they never would. He hadn’t told her yet that he’d soon be moving away from the island. Whenever he was with her, he felt like it would last for ever. He didn’t want to ruin that feeling. Not yet.
‘What are you looking so intense about?’ she asked.
As he thought of something to say, he glanced across at her and watched her pulling her metallic-looking green G-STAR baseball cap down low on her brow.
‘Cool hat,’ he told her, guessing that she wouldn’t have been wearing it if it wasn’t.
Her expression softened. ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘but it’s a knock-off. I got it down Portobello market on the cheap.’
‘Even cooler,’ he said, though in truth he didn’t even know if ‘knock-off’ meant the hat was stolen or merely a fake.
It was an ignorance he kept to himself. Taylor came from London and Michael sometimes worried that she might think he was backward and completely out of touch, for having been brought up the way that he had, here on a tiny island in the ‘arsehole of nowhere’, or the ‘edge of the world’ – depending on whether you subscribed to Roddy’s or his mother’s point of view.
Michael compensated for his isolation by keeping up with things on the web and through magazines and TV shows. He knew what was in and what was out, what bands were cool and which were over, and he’d run all this past Taylor in the first ten minutes that they’d met, when she’d arrived on the island the day before, just so she wouldn’t think he wasn’t her equal, just to make sure that she’d know he was still pretty cool to be around.
A lick of hair hung down below the brow of her cap, trailing over her eye, flapping in the wind. He wished he had the confidence to reach out and brush it away, but his hands stayed by his sides.
‘You got the crowbar, then,’ she said, glancing down at his hands. ‘Good. Let’s go.’
He fell into step beside her and they walked on quickly, in silence. Up ahead of them, Simon became an aeroplane, as if he was running reconnaissance for them, scouting the ground over which they must travel. Arms outstretched, he set about shooting down imaginary MiGs, dogfighting across the brow of the hill.
The crowbar felt cold in Michael’s hand. The wind picked up and he shivered, remembering why they were here.
‘Do you really think it’s a good idea,’ he asked, ‘bringing
Simon along . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, look at him,’ Michael said, as Simon tore through a clump of heather with a roar. ‘He’s like a cyclone.’
‘What do you expect? He’s just arrived,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided it’s time he had some fun, away from his mum. She’d keep him locked up all day, given half a chance. She made me swear not to let him out of my sight.’
Taylor was an only child and she’d always treated Simon like her own kid brother. She said it was because she thought he was sweet, but Michael knew it was because she liked having him there to boss around too. Taylor was good at bossing people. She was the one who’d invented all the good games they’d played over the years as they’d grown up. It was she who’d always made the rules. Like today. Like where they were going. Today was her idea as well.
‘It could turn out to be dangerous in there,’ Michael reminded her.
‘Isn’t that the point?’ she asked.
In there . . . the old Wilson tin mine. That was where they were going. That’s what the crowbar was for. They were going to break into the mine and explore.
Sticking to the thin old track which generations of sheep had worn into the hillside, Taylor didn’t break her stride as they arced away from Simon and he disappeared from sight.
‘But what if he starts mucking about?’ Michael went on. ‘Or flips out. He could really hurt himself. Or one of us . . .’
Simon had a track record of doing that, of freaking out when things didn’t go his way.
‘So we’ll leave him by the entrance,’ Taylor said. ‘Then, if anything goes wrong, he can run and get help.’
‘He won’t want to be left on his own.’
Taylor shot Michael a glance. ‘He’ll do as he’s told, OK? And stop talking about him like he’s a loony, because he’s not. He’s not even on pills and I know a hell of a lot of kids more crazy than him. He’s just had a shit year and his Mum’s making it worse. I just want to give him a break.’
