by Emlyn Rees
Michael wouldn’t have let anyone else his age talk to him like this, but Taylor was different. He took it on the chin. He didn’t answer back. She always said what she thought, even to adults, and he admired her for it. She was also fiercely loyal to the people she liked, and protective of the people she knew, and he admired her for that too.
‘Forget I even spoke,’ he said.
‘I will,’ she answered, and out of the corner of his eye he watched her smile.
He smiled too as the last of his anger left him. Conflict was like sport to her. She always got the last word, no matter what.
Michael had first met her eight years ago, when he’d been invited over to her grandfather’s house to play. Her family, the Thornes, had been coming to the island for their holidays for years, from long before Michael’s mum and dad had bought the Windcheater.
Michael loved having Taylor here. The school holidays got so boring whenever she wasn’t around, especially since Greg had split. Sure, Michael sometimes went to St John’s, to hang out and crash over with his school mates, with Dougie and Gaz, but that still left a lot of lonely days. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the island. He did. He loved it. It was his home. It’s just that he liked it even more when he got to share it with her.
She stopped now as they approached the brow of Solace Hill. She sniffed the air, like an animal out hunting, he thought, scenting out prey. She took off her cap and ran her hand through her hair.
The island stretched away from them in every direction. Its coast was uneven and scattered with bays, leaving it looking from here as it did on the maps, like a jigsaw piece, or a chunk of cheese that had been gnawed at by rats.
Apart from the three of them, there wasn’t another soul in sight. This was how it always was in the winter. Summertime, it was different. June to October, you’d get European school parties visiting on geography field trips. They’d wander the island, filling out questionnaires, eating crisps and cheese and salad sandwiches, coolly smoking cigarettes in hidden places, or sneaking round first and second bases behind their teachers’ backs. You’d see them from up here, dotted amongst the gorse in their brightly coloured wind-proof jackets, like so many downed, abandoned kites flapping in the breeze.
‘God, I love it here,’ she said. ‘Once you’re away from the house and there’s no one to tell you what to do. I’ve been looking forward to this for months. School’s so fucking tedious it makes me sick.’
Taylor went to boarding school, seven days a week, ten weeks a term. She said it was like a prison. She said they had a million rules. She hated her parents for making her go.
She smiled at him, then cartwheeled, once, twice, ahead along the edge of the path. She rubbed her muddy hands together before wiping them carelessly on her skirt.
‘Impressed?’ she asked.
‘Amazed.’
‘Simon!’ she called out. ‘Where the fuck –’
They watched him surface twenty yards away, like a diver emerging from a green sea and coming up for air.
Michael’s eyes returned to Taylor, as Simon came sprinting back. Then they walked on together, past the gnarled black stump of a lightning-scorched silver birch. They were already a mile and a half away from the village. They’d soon be at the mine.
Chapter 4
Ben stood steady on the boat as the waves rocked it back and forth against the stone wall of the Old Quay in Fleet Town harbour. He clicked the built-in bow locker shut and lashed the steel beer barrel against the back of the cockpit with two lengths of fluorescent yellow rope.
A Gorillaz track, ‘Feel Good Inc.’, was being played on a radio in one of the nearby boat-building sheds, and it drifted out towards Ben in snatches on the cold breeze. Ben knew the song well. It was from an album he’d bought at the start of the summer, when he’d still been getting used to being single. He’d bought it to cheer himself up, but now it only served to remind him of how desperate and miserable he’d been.
As he wiped the back of his hand across his burning brow, the familiar stink of engine oil filled his nostrils. It was a smell he’d grown up around. It had always been there on his father, as pungent as an aftershave, and on his grandfather, too. Time was when Ben had thought it was a smell he’d scrubbed off for the last time, but he’d been wrong.
Ben’s sandy blond hair was matted and still tangled from when he’d got out of the shower that morning. Snagged woollen threads trailed from the back of his black crewneck jumper. His once pristine Nike trainers and CK jeans were spattered with paint and smeared with oil. Only his hands were well-groomed, manicured and trimmed.
He gazed at the copper band which he wore on his right wrist. It countered rheumatism, he’d been told one summer, well over a decade ago now, when he’d still been a teenager. He’d worn it as a kind of talisman since, though the fact was that his luck of late had been dire – and it had stained his skin a dirty green beneath. On his left wrist was an expensive TAG Heuer watch. A crack like a bolt of lightning ran across its face. Ben had smashed it on a door handle ten minutes before, but not even that had managed to sabotage his good mood.
‘Thanks, Mick,’ he called up to the thickset, beer-bellied, older man, who was standing on the quayside, zipping up his worn black leather jacket over his Ry Cooder sweatshirt.
Mick spat and lit a cigarette. A bead of sweat ran down his cheek and hung from his jaw like a pearl. His face still bore the patina of ancient adolescent acne and his thinning, pony-tailed black hair had started to turn grey. Mick was forty, nearly ten years older than Ben, and his father owned the Fleet Town general store. A long time ago, when Ben had been no more than a skinny little boy, Mick had taught him how to swim by throwing him into the deep end of the local lido and shouting at him to kick.
The boat Ben stood on belonged to Ben’s father, George Stone. It was a red RIB, a rigid inflatable boat, twelve feet long, and it was capable of carrying eight people.
Ben and Mick would sometimes use it for water-skiing in the summer, always going out near twilight, when the sun cast the sea into a silver block. They’d take turns at the wheel, charging across the shimmering waves, leaving a widening V of rippling foam churning in their wake. Ben was athletic and could mono like a pro and stay up for an hour, whereas Mick had the grace of a hippo on ice skates, and would hit the water like a whale dropped from space whenever he wiped out.
Today, however, the boat was about work, not play, and the two of them had just finished loading her up with provisions that Ben would now take out to Brayner island on his own.
Ben sucked cold air deep into his lungs and smiled. His back and his arms ached from the recent exertion, but a sense of satisfaction underpinned the fatigue. This was the last trip the boat would be making this side of Christmas and Ben was glad that it would be with him at the wheel. It was good to be here, with a sense of purpose, taking charge of himself and his future once more.
‘Smoke?’ Mick asked, waggling a red and white Marlboro packet at Ben.
‘I quit.’
‘When?’
‘This morning.’
Because of a dream, Ben thought, a dream he’d had last night, a dream where he’d been sitting in a damp armchair in a gloomy earthen burrow – the kind which an animal might carve out of the ground to hibernate in – with a cigarette in his hand and a full ashtray on the arm of the chair, and a TV on in front of him, showing a black and white show of him doing exactly the same thing, like the TV screen was a mirror, reflecting how his whole life had ground to a halt.
‘Why not wait until New Year?’ Mick asked.
‘Because then I’d have a hangover and would need all the comfort I could get.’
Ben had woken sweating from his dream. Was that really all his life had left to offer him? Depression and decline? The first thing he’d done had been to reach for the packet of cigarettes lying by his bed. He’d crushed it in his fist and thrown it in the bin.
Mick stared at the smoking tip of his cigarette, as if he t
oo were contemplating throwing it away and quitting, but instead, he took a long drag and smiled.
‘Good for you,’ was all he said.
Ben had actually only taken up smoking again a year ago. Before that, he hadn’t touched a cigarette for over a decade. He hadn’t needed to. He’d been self-disciplined and driven. He’d built a secure life which hadn’t needed props of any kind. Then it had all turned sour. He’d taken an emotional beating, at the hands of his ex, Marie, which had left him reeling. He’d turned to cigarettes. And booze. And boozy friends. His last six months had been a cycle of late nights and hungover days. It had got so bad that four weeks ago he’d stopped going out in the evenings, just to give himself a break, and then, today, had come this dream, an affirmation of what he already knew.
What his dream had been telling him, he’d decided, was this: it was time to get involved again, not to return to his bad old friends and his bad old ways, but instead to start picking up the broken pieces of his life and stick them back together again. It was time to get back to who he was before it had all gone wrong. That’s what the quitting represented to him: a step forward, a step out of the gloom and into the light.
His father had been moaning that morning about his back and so Ben had told him to take the day off. Ben had been dressed and out of the house and here on the quay with a list of things to do by eight. He’d already taken a couple of Canadian tourists out round Skeen island and had taxied a family over to Brayner for their Christmas break.
‘No more trips, then?’ Mick asked.
‘That’s the plan.’
Unless, of course, Ben thought, the father of the family he’d just dropped off on Brayner – Elliot something – really meant what he’d said about perhaps coming back here to Fleet Town some time over the next few days.
Ben doubted it. People stayed put over Christmas. TV, comfort food, red wine, and sleep . . . everyone was a sucker for the same, and no doubt that guy would be no different. But not Ben. Not this year. He was going to set up his laptop, which he hadn’t even switched on for weeks. He was going to get online and check out his business mail and start making plans for next year. No more stasis, he told himself. It was time he started making things happen for himself.
‘Did you hear the forecast?’ Mick asked. He glanced up at the sky, which was as white and smoky as breath on glass.
Ben reached for his coat, a navy-blue donkey jacket he’d borrowed off his Dad, which was hanging over the boat’s wheel. Now that the physical work of loading up the boat was over, the cold wind had begun to bite.
‘Let me guess,’ he joked. ‘They’re expecting a heat wave.’
Mick grinned. ‘Snow, actually. Tonight. Several inches of it.’
‘They think it’s going to stick?’
‘So they say. Storms too. Saw it on the webcast this morning. If the temperature stays low long enough, they reckon there’s even a chance there’ll be sea ice by tomorrow or the day after.’
Snow settling here on the islands . . . Ben had seen it before, but not often. As for sea ice . . . well, the only time he’d ever seen that had been in the old sepia photographs, hanging up in the Atlantic Arms on Rupert Street, which had been taken during the Big Freeze of 1962, and then, more recently, in 1976, when Ben had been alive, but too young to remember. Ben’s grandpa had told him about the ice, though, about how it spread like crazy paving off the coasts, confining all but the biggest ships to their harbours. Ben’s grandpa had said it looked like magic, like an enchantress had cast a spell across the sea.
‘The sooner I get this lot out to Brayner, the better, then, eh?’ Ben said.
Mick laughed. ‘Too right. And say hi from me to Sally and Roddy at the Windcheater, when you drop off that beer. Tell them I’ll be out in the new year for a couple of pints.’
The Windcheater did a brisk business in the summer, when the bigger ferries shuttled tourists back and forth, but the ferries didn’t run during the winter months, on account of there not being enough customers to make it worth their while. That’s where boats like Ben’s father’s came into their own, cashing in on the remaining titbits of trade that the bigger boats had spurned, like starlings by a pond of well-fed ducks.
‘Right, well that’s me done,’ Mick said, flicking his cigarette into the choppy harbour waters. ‘The old man’s shutting up the shop early, so I’m going to slope off down the pub.’
Ben climbed out of the boat and joined him up on the quay. He shook Mick’s hand.
‘Thanks for the help,’ he said.
Mick opened his mouth to reply, but then they both fell silent, because that’s when they saw her, walking down the quayside towards them.
The woman was wrapped up tightly in a shiny-looking jacket. She was in her mid to late twenties, Ben guessed, a few years younger than him. Her hair was brown and curly and held up on top of her head with a tortoiseshell clip.
He wouldn’t have described her as beautiful – at least, not in a conventional sense, anyway. Hers wasn’t the kind of face he could imagine gracing the cover of a glossy magazine, it was too unusual for that, but there was an intensity to her features, he saw, as she came closer, an intelligence, which drew the eye.
Something else compelled the two men to stare. The woman was incongruous, here among the chipped paint-work of the weathered boatsheds, with their grimy, cobwebbed windows and rusted gutters.
As she drew level with them and stepped over an oily puddle in her spotless chunky black leather boots, she didn’t so much as spare them a glance. She was concentrating on her phone instead. She looked frustrated, but instead of finding this unattractive, Ben wondered what she’d look like if she smiled. She slipped her phone into her pocket and pulled the hood of her jacket up.
‘Well, she’s not from round here, and that’s for sure,’ Mick said once she was out of earshot. ‘And trust me,’ he added, ‘I never forget a pair of legs.’
Ben stared after her. His friend was right. She wasn’t the kind of girl you’d forget. He felt a sudden and intense sense of pique that he’d noticed her but she’d failed to notice him, and this surprised him, because the fact was that, since Marie, he’d not been paying much attention to women at all, whether they looked at him or not.
‘She must be a tourist,’ he said.
‘Here today, gone tomorrow,’ Mick said, as if that was an end of it. Because that’s what they’d grown up thinking, that tourist women were only worth pursuing for a fling or a one-night stand, and this woman hardly seemed a likely candidate for either. Mick slapped Ben’s back with his fat paw of a hand. ‘I’ll be in the Mermaid’s Rest,’ he said. ‘Pop in for a jar when you get back.’
‘Sure,’ Ben said, ‘I’ll see you there.’
But Ben wasn’t really paying attention. His eyes were still fixed on the woman. She’d reached the end of the Old Quay and was gazing back at the town, across Town Beach, the lifeboat station, and Torthmellon Beach. She then stared out past Hench Island, to where the churning sea met the sky in a blur of grey.
Ben was still standing by the RIB, waiting, when the woman returned. He’d expected her to be meeting someone, but no one had come to join her. It must have been ten minutes that she’d waited alone out there on the point. Had she been stood up? Had she gone there to be on her own, or to get away from someone else?
As she reached Ben now, he racked his brains for something to say. It suddenly struck him as vital that he did speak. It felt like a compulsion. Like his usual urge to take a cigarette when it was offered to him and thread it between his lips, it was simply something that he knew he had to do. Why not talk to her? he thought. Why not see if he still had it in him to make someone stay and talk to him? It’s what his female friends had been urging him to do since he and Marie had split. ‘You get back only what you put out,’ one of them had said. He was in a chipper mood and he liked the look of this stranger, so now felt as good a time as any to find out if his friend had been right.
‘You should get
a cloak,’ he told the woman, half-stepping into her path.
‘What?’ She stopped and dropped her hood, so that he could again see her face.
‘You know, a cloak, with a hood like your jacket, only long and black, as well. Then you’d look the part.’
‘What part?’
‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman . . .’
Her expression remained blank.
‘What you were doing just then,’ he explained. ‘Staring out to sea, brooding . . . waiting for your lover to return . . .’
Finally she got it. And there: he got the smile he’d wondered about. It changed her face completely, like a ripple running across a pond of clear water, bringing it to life.
‘You’re talking about that film,’ she said. Her accent, he realised, was Australian.
‘With Meryl Streep in it . . .’
‘Based on that book . . .’
‘By John Fowles.’
‘That’s a kind of obscure film reference to fire at a total stranger, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘Well, you got it, didn’t you?’
‘I guess I did.’
He suddenly wished he’d had a shave, but he hadn’t, not for a week. He wondered how he must look through her eyes. Like a wild man, he guessed, someone who’d come down from the hills, scavenging for food. He pushed his hair back from his face.
‘So were you waiting for someone?’ he asked.
‘I was trying to see Brayner island.’
‘You’d have a job managing that . . .’ he said, pointing in the opposite direction from the one she’d been looking in, ‘ . . . when it’s actually over there.’
The woman blushed, embarrassed at her mistake. Her eyelashes were long, her eyes green, as crystal-like as seawater in a rock pool on a summer’s day. She pulled a folded piece of paper out of her jacket pocket and weighed it in her hand. ‘I never was much good at map reading,’ she said, turning to face the direction he’d shown her. ‘Brayner’s meant to be beautiful.’
‘It is, but it’s too far to see . . . today, anyway . . . in this visibility . . .’
