by Emlyn Rees
‘That’s a shame.’
A thought occurred to him. ‘I could show you,’ he said, ‘if you like.’ He indicated the boat. ‘I’ve got to deliver some stuff out there now.’
He was as taken aback as she was by what he’d just said, but far from regretting it. All it did was spur him on. He could hardly believe he was doing it, actually chatting someone up, stone cold sober, in broad daylight. It had been so long that the sheer nervousness of the moment was giving him a buzz. It felt like a game, trying to detain her like this, trying to keep her attention hooked.
‘You could come along for the ride,’ he said. ‘It won’t take long.’
She looked him over, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘But I don’t even know you,’ she said.
He couldn’t tell whether she was flattered or annoyed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m the ferryman. Everyone knows me round here.’
‘Benjie!’
A woman in jeans, a red waterproof jacket and a blue woollen bobble hat came hurrying towards them down the quay.
‘See,’ Ben said. ‘What more proof do you need?’
‘You forgot your sandwiches, love,’ Ben’s mother told him, as she handed him a rectangular tin-foil packet. ‘Marmite. His favourite,’ she added for the younger woman’s benefit.
‘Thanks,’ Ben said, feeling himself starting to blush.
His mother then handed him an orange thermos flask as well. ‘Hot drinking chocolate,’ she said. ‘Nice and sweet. Why aren’t you wearing your scarf?’ she asked. ‘The one I gave you for your birthday.’
Ben smiled. ‘I don’t know, Mum. I suppose I just wasn’t in a green and purple paisley kind of a mood.’
He noticed the trace of a smile crossing the younger woman’s lips.
‘Well, don’t blame me if you catch your death of cold,’ his mother chided him. She looked the other woman up and down approvingly. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us, then?’ she asked Ben.
‘Mum, meet . . .’ Ben shrugged, ‘ . . . Meryl Streep. Meryl, my mum.’
The comment left Ben’s mother confused and the younger woman rolling her eyes.
‘Actually, it’s Kellie,’ she said. She turned to Ben. ‘And you’re . . . Benjie, right?’
‘Most people just call me Ben,’ he said, as he felt himself blush again.
‘Oh,’ his mother said, ‘so you two have only just met.’
‘Yes,’ Kellie said, ‘and I really should get going. Back to my hotel. I’m staying at the Excelsior.’
‘I was just saying to her,’ Ben interrupted, ‘to Kellie, Mum, that I could take her out to Brayner with me. She’s never been.’
‘Oh, you really should visit, dear,’ Ben’s mother said. She was an amateur historian and her enthusiasm for the islands knew no bounds. ‘Are you here with friends? Perhaps Ben could take them too?’
Ben looked at her expectantly. Was she here with someone? Well, thanks to his mother, he was about to find out.
Kellie shifted on her feet. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m here on my own.’
‘It would only take a couple of hours,’ Ben said.
It felt odd, trying to coax this woman he’d only just met into making a decision, especially in front of his mother, but his intrigue kept building. What was someone like Kellie doing here alone on Christmas Eve? And what was there to lose by asking her to take a trip? The worst that could happen was that she’d turn him down and she’d be back out of his life, exactly the same as she had been five minutes before.
Kellie looked back at the town, at the bus station and taxi ranks which could take her to the heliport, and the hotels and bars where she could while away the hours, keeping warm by the fire. The windows and rooftops of the seafront buildings looked as dull and dark as mud.
She was wavering, Ben could tell. He held up the tin-foil package his mother had given him.
‘What if I throw in lunch as well?’ he asked.
‘That’s very kind,’ she told him, ‘but no, I think I’m going to head back.’
Their eyes met and suddenly Ben felt foolish, like he’d been rejected, like he’d asked her out on a date and she’d told him no. Which in a way, he supposed, was exactly what had happened.
‘Maybe some other time,’ he said.
‘Maybe. Goodbye. And happy Christmas,’ Kellie added, ‘to you both.’
Ben and his mother watched her walk towards the town.
‘A pretty girl,’ Ben’s mother said.
‘Yep.’
‘But there’s something sad about her, as well,’ she added.She squeezed his hand. ‘It might have done you both good to spend some time together.’
Back on the boat, Ben started the engine and left it idling as he pulled on his lifejacket. He tried putting the girl out of his mind, but he kept picturing her, standing next to him, gazing out across the bay. He wondered again what she was doing here alone. St John’s wasn’t like Blackpool or Brighton. You didn’t just hop on a train and come here on a day trip. It took planning and effort, trains and taxis to get you to the coast, and then a ferry, a helicopter, or a plane to bring you out from the English mainland to here.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ a voice above him said.
He looked up to see Kellie smiling awkwardly down at him, as if she wasn’t quite sure whether she actually meant what she’d said.
He didn’t give her a chance to change her mind. He couldn’t believe she’d come back.
‘Great,’ he said, and reached out his arm to help her down into the boat.
‘I should warn you: I haven’t got any cash.’
‘You won’t need any,’ he said.
‘But I should pay you. For taking me.’
‘It was my idea.’
‘But still. I’d like to. When we get back.’
‘Call it an early Christmas present,’ he said. ‘Islanders’ hospitality,’ he added. ‘We’re famous for it, didn’t you know?’
He handed her a lifejacket, and she put it on before he could tell her how.
‘Looks like you know a bit about boats already, then?’ he said.
She sat on the stern seat, beside the beer barrel. ‘Enough not to get in your way.’
He didn’t want silence to fall between them. He said the first thing that came into his mind: ‘Favourite nautical movie?’
‘What? You’re checking to see whether my getting The French Lieutenant’s Woman thing was a fluke?’ She smiled.
‘Maybe. Or maybe I just like talking about films.’ Which he did. Almost as much as he liked watching them, because lately life had seemed so much less complicated to him, so much more ordered, when it was being acted out by other people on the screen.
‘Let me think,’ she reflected, gazing out at the horizon, as if the answers she was looking for might roll down off it like the credits at the end of a film. ‘Most recent: Pirates of the Caribbean or Master and Commander. Most charming: Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah in Splash. Most cheesy: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. But best of all time, that would have to be either Das Boot or The Crimson Pirate.’ Her eyes were a challenge and there was a triumphant twinkle in them.
‘Very impressive,’ he said. The last film she’d mentioned, a Burt Lancaster swashbuckler, was one of his favourites of all time. He reached into the port locker and pulled out a couple of hats. ‘And now for an easier question,’ he said. ‘Baseball, or woolly?’
‘I’m OK as I am. As you’ve already observed, this jacket’s got a hood.’
‘I’m serious,’ he said, holding up the hats, ‘take one. It gets bloody cold out there. You’ll be grateful for the extra layer, I swear.’
‘Baseball, then,’ she finally agreed.
‘It suits you,’ he told her, once she’d put it on.
‘Thanks.’ She didn’t look convinced. She pushed her hands into her jacket pockets. ‘So what exactly is it you run here?’ she asked. ‘A ferry service?’
He started the motor and cast off the lines. The boa
t drifted away from the quayside.
‘It’s more like a taxi,’ he said. ‘We run people out to Brayner and the other small islands, tourists on day trips, then pick them up later. Seal watching, too, and we take supplies out for the people who live on the islands full-time.’
‘We?’
‘My family. Or my dad, anyway.’
Ben nudged the boat’s throttle forward and began chugging out towards the open water of the bay. A cold wind whipped across them as they left the lee of the Old Quay.
Kellie joined him at the wheel, as Ben began taking the boat north-west, out past the headland on the left of the bay. He increased the boat’s speed and the engine’s noise rose to a growl. The RIB’s PVC hull began thudding against the waves. Ben looked across at Kellie, but she kept staring straight ahead, completely focused, almost as if she were willing Brayner into existence.
They rounded the headland and, within five minutes, there, in the distance, sandwiched between two closer islands, Brayner came into view, a craggy hump rising up against the horizon, a mountain growing out of the sea.
‘Hold on tight,’ Ben said as he pushed the throttle up towards full speed. ‘We’re in for a rough ride.’
He felt suddenly disarmed by her standing here with him on the boat, as the distance widened between them and solid ground. A tightness grew in his chest. This no longer felt like the game it had been when he’d first started chatting her up. What this suddenly felt, as they raced on towards Brayner, was very real.
Chapter 5
Michael, Simon and Taylor rounded a copse of hawthorn trees and the Wilson shaft engine house loomed into view. Set on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic rollers which raced across Hell Bay, it was a grey stone building, over eighty feet tall.
Michael had grown up with this sight, but today it looked different, unpredictable, and packed with possibilities. It was as if a stone statue had suddenly sprung to life.
They joined the ancient, grass-bearded road which ran along the west side of the island and terminated here at the mine. Simon raced ahead once more, wailing wolfishly and howling at the thickening sky.
On a flat half moon of land to the right of the engine house were the remnants of the deserted mining cottages, plundered of their brickwork over the years by the inhabitants of Green Bay harbour. All that remained was a ghost village. No one had lived here for a hundred years. The land was inhospitable, exposed to the elements, and raked by the icy Atlantic gales which raced in like Valkyries from Hell Bay. Broken slates glinted on the ground. The air stank of brine and Michael shivered as he felt the damp settling on to his skin like a claw.
He knew the history of this place well. He’d done a project on the Wilson tin mine for school. There’d been workings on the site for thousands of years. First Ancients, then Romans, and even Phoenician traders, had dug down into the ground like rabbits, carving out a warren of tunnels, scratching and sniffing out lodes of tin and wolfram, nickel and arsenic and lead. Then, in 1849, a London company, the Wilson Mining Corporation, had come along and made the mistake of thinking they could turn the site into a modern commercial venture. They’d been advised – falsely, as it was to turn out – that it would be possible to take the mine down to two hundred fathoms, maybe more, and even tunnel out beneath the sea.
They’d built their tower and started to sink their shaft. It was meant to have turned out like the bigger mines on the mainland, such as Geevor, and if the Wilson Corporation had got its way, the same as on the mainland, a mining community would have sprung up here where the few broken cottages now stood. There’d have been hundreds of men, and children as young as eight, working down the shaft and tunnels, six days a week, ten hours a day.
But it never happened. The deeper they sank their exploratory shaft, the less the Corporation found. Soon, they reached the only conclusion they could – that they’d been ripped off, scammed, stitched up.
The Wilson Mine Corporation folded in 1854. The mine was shut down, its entrances sealed up, and its engine house and the fledgling village abandoned. In 1919, an attempt had been made to convert the engine house to domestic accommodation, but that too had failed. It was now derelict and roofless, with its great doorway and windows bricked up.
‘Do you think it’s true what they say about it?’ Simon asked as they caught up to where he was waiting for them by the rusted barbed wire perimeter fence.
‘About the ghosts?’ Michael guessed.
‘Of the Romans . . .’
Folklore had it that the ghosts of the ancient miners who’d died here remained. If you visited Hell Bay at night, it was said you could still hear the sounds of their distant, muffled cries, and the knock and scrape of their tools as they attempted to dig themselves out from their rocky tomb inside the cliffs.
‘And the pirates . . . and their gold . . .’ Simon said.
That was another of the myths associated with the mine. Prince Rupert had operated a pirate fleet out of the islands during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, harrying Spanish treasure ships, with the Virgin Queen’s unofficial support and consent. He’d hidden his plunder in the islands’ caves, it was thought, before taking it back to the mainland, but some of it had got lost. Some of it was still waiting to be found.
‘That’s all bullshit,’ Taylor said, delivering a well-aimed kick at the rotten wooden gate set into the fence. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts. Or hidden treasure.’
‘Then why are we here?’ Simon asked.
‘Just because. Because no one’s been inside for years. Because it’s been locked up and that’s a good enough reason to break in.’
In spite of his growing apprehension, Michael was glad that they were doing this, together. Sometimes, hanging out here on the island on his own, it felt like nothing he did was real, because no one was here to witness it. That’s what Taylor did: she brought the island to life.
Tufts of snagged sheep’s wool fluttered on the fence in the breeze. Taylor kicked the gate again. The weather-blistered sign which had been hanging from it fell and landed in a brackish puddle. All that was legible of what it had once said was a zigzag of lightning, which, as they all knew, meant danger. Taylor stamped on the sign, cracking it in half.
She kicked the gate a third time and this time its rusted hinges gave up. It toppled backwards and landed with a soggy splat in the mud. Taylor stepped through and stood with her hands on her hips.
‘I wonder who owns this place,’ she said.
‘Government, probably,’ Michael said.
That was what his mother reckoned, anyway. Michael had asked around himself and had found out from Mr and Mrs Whelan, who prepared herbal remedies in a workshop outside the village, that the British Army had briefly commandeered the place during the Second World War. They’d shipped supplies here and guarded them inside the tunnels, but then they’d deserted the place as well, and left it locked up behind them.
Michael stared through the gateway, wary of the land beyond. The danger sign had been put there for a reason. A network of tunnels ran off the mine shaft like the roots of a tree. People said there were sink holes around here that could swallow a man whole. A few tourists’ dogs, and several of the hardy Jacob sheep which grazed freely across the island, had gone missing since Michael had been born. None of their bodies had been found.
‘What about the next person who comes along?’ he asked Taylor, leaning down and picking up the two parts of the broken sign. He propped them up against a fence post, and wedged two rocks up against them to pin them there. ‘They might not know how risky it is.’
‘Sometimes,’ Taylor told him, ‘you can be such a fucking square.’
Simon picked up a rock and threw it hard against a slate leant up against what was left of an old work hut on the other side of the fence. The resulting crack echoed like a bullwhip through the village. A rabbit, startled by the noise, ran from a nearby oak tree with its white tail flashing, and disappeared down a nearby hole.
When T
aylor and Michael had come here last, back at the end of the summer, they’d climbed over this fence and wandered through the ghost village. They’d sat on the warm bricks of a collapsed wall, drinking cans of Coke in the sun, and had then decided to try and find a way down to the beach. They’d not been looking for danger then. They’d just wanted to hang out. He remembered how he’d felt as if he could have walked with her all day. He’d wanted to tell her not to go back to London, but he hadn’t known how.
‘This place gives me the creeps,’ Simon said. He was looking at the remains of the cottages, stretched out in a jagged row, like the remains of a castle destroyed in a siege. ‘I’ve seen places like this in films and in comics and there’s always monsters and vampires and things hiding in the buildings . . . and what they do is wait for you to come past, and then they jump out at you and grab you and suck out your brains, or drink your blood . . . and no one ever finds your body, because they eat that too, or turn you into zombies, which is when you, like, become one of them and then go and suck other people’s brains out as well . . . and I don’t want that and I want to go home.’
‘Not until we do what we came here to do,’ Taylor told him. ‘Not until we get inside and have a look.’
‘Michael, you know about zombies and things, don’t you? We don’t want them to get us, do we?’ Simon asked.
Michael knew Simon had always looked up to him, and treated him like an adult, and Michael liked that, especially in front of Taylor, but Taylor didn’t give him a chance to answer Simon now.
‘Come on, Si,’ she said, resting her hands on her little cousin’s shoulders and squeezing them tight. ‘If we go back, we’ll only end up getting bored with the grown-ups. This is going to be much more fun. I promise. And you know I’m always right.’
Simon dug his hands into his pockets and made a brrrrring noise with his lips. He nodded his head.
Michael knew it was useless to try and change Taylor’s mind. Back in the summer, Taylor had told her father that they’d found a way into the mine, but instead of being excited as Taylor had hoped, Elliot had expressly forbidden them to set foot near this place ever again – and it had been then, by telling Taylor not to do it, that Elliot had virtually guaranteed that she would. Michael knew that if he turned back now, Taylor would only go on alone.
