At Kings Ness she stares at the crumbly earthen barrier, the remains of Warren’s sea wall.
‘I’ve read about it,’ she says, ‘about how the coast is eroding, but I had never imagined it this way. So . . . romantic.’
I ask what she means by that.
‘It reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich. Maybe because of what you’ve already told me about it.’
Involuntarily, the image arises of her as an art-loving single girl. Perhaps she even uses the word unattached. Perhaps she goes on group tours to ruined cities in Jordan and cloisters in Georgia, exchanges photos and reminiscences on the Internet for a time afterwards, then she’s alone again and no one thinks about her anymore.
I tell her about Warren Feldman and how he, when the district council decided not to extend the concrete seawall from Alburgh to Kings Ness, took things into his own hands. He wrote to construction companies and road builders, offering them the opportunity to dump their rubble along his cliff for half the price they would pay elsewhere. In that way he obtained both income and the material he could use to protect Kings Ness against the sea. At the time, fourteen houses were still standing there. During the war there had been twice as many.
Warren Feldman had powerful opponents. The most grief was given him by Natural England. According to their particular conservationist doctrine, the sea was to be given free play on the coast around Alburgh; the huge quantity of fossils that appeared from the cliffs after heavy storms was purportedly a topographical novelty. The cliff was put on the list of SSSIs, Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
‘First people, then fossils,’ Warren said, and commenced a struggle that would last the rest of his life.
It started with ninety thousand tons of peat from the South Lowestoft Relief Road. That was the basis for his seawall. It had to be spread out along the entire foot of Kings Ness, over a length of almost a kilometer. Trucks carrying sand, clay and stones dumped their loads on the cliff, a dragline pulled the debris from all those building projects out across the seawall and piled it into a grim barrier. Chunks of stone protruded from it, boulders of reinforced concrete, sometimes an old shoe. I remembered Warren up there, on the cliff, overseeing the work on the wall down below. The wind blew tears in his eyes and crumbs from his beard, which served as the archive of many meals. He leaned on his walking stick, a thin raincoat flapping around his upper body – he never bothered to zip it shut. He had a mysterious preference for wearing layers of two or three T-shirts, with two sweaters over that. He never wore anything but outdoor sandals. In the summertime his unusually big toes stuck out of them.
King Knut, they called him, based on a legend that is usually misconstrued. It was long ago that Catherine had told me the story of Knut, who ruled over England and Scandinavia sometime around the eleventh century. It started with the courtiers flattering their king, telling him how all the world would bow to his will.
‘The sea as well?’ Knut asked.
‘The sea as well,’ the nobles echoed.
Upon which Knut had his throne carried down to the beach and waited for the tide to come in. The water approached. Knut ordered the sea to withdraw. The water rushed in around his ankles, and again he called on the waves to obey him. The courtiers retreated to safety, and only when Knut was up to his knees in the water did he stand up and wade to the beach. Throwing his crown onto the sand, he said to his followers, ‘There is only one King worthy of the name, and that is He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws. Reserve your praise for Him.’
I remember finding that a strange, Christian ending to a story about a Viking king and the sea, but Catherine – serious-minded Catholic that she was – was taken aback by my skepticism.
‘If you were my child, oh, oh, oh . . .’
Later I learned that a wading bird, calidris canutus, otherwise known as the red knot, takes his name from this same legend.
A couple is walking towards us down the beach. Hand in hand, both wearing orange body warmers. I once walked with someone hand in hand, on Venice Beach, after I had left Kings Ness. I don’t know how I would react if Linny would suddenly take my hand, as one of my own sort in search of warmth.
I show her the place where the broken pipes which once led to our house were now sticking out of the cliff. Erosion having continued unabated, we might even be standing where the house once stood. She looks at the surf, you can hear gravel rolling in the undertow.
‘So here England disappears foot by foot,’ she says.
We walk on and climb Kings Ness from the north. Dull yellow light is filtered in downy spots across the water. On the horizon we can see a mirage, a flat, glistening surface, as though an ice floe were sliding in this direction.
‘Oh, yuck,’ Linny says when we get to Flint Road.
‘Via Dolorosa,’ I mumble.
She hops to avoid the dead rabbits and potholes.
‘And I cried so hard at the end of Watership Down!’ she shouts.
After number 17 we leave the road and climb the overgrown path that once led to our house. In my memory it still stands there. I can walk up to the door, open it and smell the furniture wax and cleaning fluids that Margareth keeps in the cupboard beside the back door. It comes as a deep, never-ending surprise to find that things that no longer exist still live on inexorably in my head, and will remain there until the end of days. I understand now, better than ever, why people put up memorials and place inscriptions on benches. Our life’s work must not come to dust.
The gorse has stretched its tortured limbs across the path. The little shock at the emptiness along the edge, where memory has placed a house.
‘This is where it was,’ I say.
‘Which number?’ she asks.
I don’t understand what she means.
‘The house number.’
‘Fifteen. Over there is where it was. And there’ – I point to a spot even further away, across the sea – ‘there lay Castrum.’
The bar is quiet that evening. I knock off early. Linny is the only one in the place, except for a man who takes a sip of whiskey and a sip of water by turns.
‘Hello there, old night owl,’ Leland says.
I sit down beside Linny, the only person in the world now who really knows anything about me. She’s drinking a kir cocktail, I eat the cherry. She says, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’
I nod and realize that Warren’s funeral is tomorrow as well. That I’m supposed to play in the church. I don’t even know what time.
Later, in the lounge, a bottle of water and a bottle of Chivas Regal within arm’s reach, we slip back into our conversation like a hand into warm water. I tell her about Selwyn, who opened my eyes. It was with him that things started.
I’m impressed by his physique and his handsome head of blond hair, he finds me interesting I believe because I am hors categorie. We both play in the reserves. In the shower after matches I can hardly take my eyes off him – Michelangelo’s David, but then with a bigger cock. During the match, when we’re attacking, I tend to stay close to him; by means of sheer force or a fluid sidestep he’s always able to force a couple of breaks, it’s worthwhile to operate in his wake. A few times I even score after he gets tackled just before the line and passes the ball to me as he falls. Scouts from Bath and Leeds come to see him play, but his parents have forbidden him to take up a professional career; he can play rugby at Oxford or Cambridge as well. It’s easy to imagine him studying economics or medicine, rolling right through it and then going on to lead a smooth and easy life. In amazement I see how an even-tempered, friendly person like Selwyn can also be merciless – on the playing field, but also during the hunt. He owns his own rifle, a Mannlicher-Schoenauer with a walnut stock; I’ve watched him shoot wood pigeons, grey squirrels and magpies without blinking an eye. His ruthlessness contains no rage, not even cruelty – it is as even-keeled as the rest of his personality.
One frosty February morning we go out with a group of hunters, including his father. They�
�re decked with bandoleers, a tractor with a trailer full of hay takes the nine of us from one hunting area on the estate to the other. We comb the woods in search of vermin. That’s what they call them. Selwyn blows a grey squirrel to pieces and says that it’s an exotic species, a kind that doesn’t belong here. I glance over to see if it’s a joke, a sly reference to yours truly, but I see nothing of the sort. Norvie, the game warden, says grey squirrels are harmful, they eat the bark from the trees. I can’t avoid the feeling that we’re more harmful to these animals than they are to us, but I keep such soft thoughts to myself; I will be like them, and laugh loudly at their jokes.
‘It’s open season for pigeons, rabbits, hares, blackies and deer.’
‘Blackies, Norvie?’
‘Pakis, wogs . . . I’m no racist, mind you, I just can’t stand the blackies.’
I will not bat an eyelid when Selwyn asks me to take a photograph of him with that animal in his hand, the top of its body dangling by a few shreds from the rest. Gun smoke and a lacy mist hover between the trees and sometimes, when we step out into the open field and see on the horizon a row of Scots pine with flattened crowns, it’s like being on the savanna – Africa, just before the sun breaks through the clouds.
The tractor takes us to Bunyans Walk, the hill on the coast just north of Kings Ness. The erosion is eating the land away there as it is at our place, but more dramatically, taking heavy old trees down with it. When you look up from the beach you can see the web of roots clutching naked and panicky at the yellow sand.
The forest seems to cringe when we enter. We work our way in a long line through dead brown ferns, break off branches that get in the way. The men shoot at the bends in branches, someone shouts, ‘That’s no tree, that’s a hotel!’
A series of shots follows – loud, dry cracks and an explosion of activity amid the leaves and branches on high. I cover my ears and see Selwyn smile.
‘There!’ a man screams at the tenth squirrel.
The animal hides on the side of the trunk where we’re not. The men circle the tree and keep firing until they hit it. The squirrel is stuck between two branches, its head hanging, blood dripping onto the forest floor. Selwyn’s father shoots a jay, someone else kills a woodcock, others magpies and a pair of grey squirrels. We move on in a long row towards the edge of the cliff, a roebuck bursts through our lines. In the surf ahead bobs a heavy tree trunk, the kind you find on the beach sometimes, soaked and heavy as lead, who knows how long it’s been floating across the oceans.
We leave Bunyans Walk to the south, moving into the reed flats that separate the hill from Kings Ness. The reeds grow here behind a sort of dyke of sand through which the sea breaks at times. In the pale light of the February sun, the reed stems look like a million strokes of a single-haired brush. A slow, fluid shiver spreads across the flats, an invisible hand petting a cat’s back. Here amid the reed is where the barking Chinese water deer, muntjacs, hide, another exotic species. At dusk, when I walk the secret paths through the reeds (I know the hidden thatchers’ spots, I know where the poaching goes on), I’m sometimes startled half to death when one of them suddenly goes racing off. I’ve never actually seen one, but you can hear them splashing away for the longest time. In China they think the muntjac has magic powers, because of its lightning speed.
Selwyn asks if I’d like to shoot some; I don’t feel like it much, but I let him hand me the gun. I turn to face the wood’s edge, and he points to a crow’s nest in an oak tree. I aim and shoot, but hit only branches. Shrugging, I hand the rifle back to him – not cut out for it, see? In the distance, the game warden shouts that we’re moving on. We’re the last ones to the trailer, where they’re smoking and talking about a bachelor party in Amsterdam.
‘All you need’s a pair of clean shorts and a suitcase full of condoms, hahaha!’
The undisputed highpoint of the trip was when the groom-to-be ate a peeled banana from a Thai cunt. Selwyn’s father says they should keep their filthy talk to themselves, there are young people about, but he laughs too loudly for anyone to believe him.
The decisive story, the one in which Selwyn played a role, took place in late winter. It had been foggy for days. Going outside in the morning on my way to school, the wet, gray dampness would seep into my clothes and finally into my head as well. After seeing nothing but diffuse gray for days on end, you start to feel like you’ve turned into fog yourself. I wrote little notes to myself, things like We have been in the mist now for six days; whether anything is still alive outside this we do not know. Sometimes, when you heard a plane flying overhead, you knew the world had not yet come to an end. The sea could not be seen, only the surf could be heard. The window was a blind square, luminescent as a picture screen.
One ash-gray afternoon I was out looking for amber amid the thick gravel on the beach by Bunyans Walk. I could see little more than the stones beneath my feet. The mist was blowing around me in tatters. In the distance I saw a phantom approaching, a tenuous, shivering pillar. Slowly it changed into a human, into Selwyn with the family dog, once they came close enough. But without the friendliness. I had noticed it in the canteen recently as well, something was weighing on him. And it had to do with me. Out of sight now, the German shepherd sniffed and growled.
‘Kaiser!’ Selwyn shouted.
The dog appeared from the mist. It jumped up against me and left sandy footprints on my trousers and coat.
‘So are you going to tell me about it?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘About what’s up.’
He peered into the fog. Then he said I should come to his house at three. I stared at his back until he dissolved.
A little later I climbed the path to Kings Ness. The field to my right had been recently plowed, the soil was gleaming. Further up the fog turned thin and yellowy, above it at last the sun was shining. I heard the jubilant song of a lark, but the pounding in my chest was produced by a sense of impending calamity.
I arrived at three o’clock sharp. Selwyn led me into the TV room. He pointed to a chair. From beneath his jumper he then pulled out a videotape, without the box. He slid the tape into the recorder, the television jumped of its own accord to AV.
‘This is what I want to show you,’ he said with his back to me. ‘My brother came home with it.’
A metallic-sounding jingle, the logo of a film company, warnings concerning the unauthorized screening and reproduction of the material, then the first images. A landscape somewhere in Southeast Asia, the camera panned over a bay by morning, canoes being poled along by standing fishermen in reed hats, then across a beach to the patio of a villa on a green hill. A company of Caucasians, colonial and bored. The camera’s eye rested on the individual players. This was where the cast of characters was pointed out, who mattered and who would remain unimportant. It zoomed in on a young woman holding a cigarette between her long fingers. She exhaled a thin stream of smoke. The smoke curled into the title of the film, LILITH, then the letters faded into butterflies and hummingbirds that flew off screen one by one. We were back at the beautiful young woman – in whom by then I had recognized my mother. Or rather, a woman who resembled her to a tee, an extremely young version of her. She was Lilith. I edged up to the TV to get a closer look, but behind me Selwyn had pressed the fast-forward button and events were rushing past at a baffling speed. Men, women, intrigues and searching looks, the villa amid the dark green hills, a swimming pool and a hairy-chested man in a loincloth . . .
‘Stop the film!’ I shrieked.
And there she was again, at the edge of the pool, resting languorously on a divan. I knew that body, it had figured in my erotic fantasies. Now there it was beside a swimming pool in god-knows-where, and that guy with the loincloth was up to something – you could see his cock plainly behind the fabric. She didn’t react, only lay there challenging the gods stoically, a pair of large black sunglasses on the bridge of her nose. He said something to her about the temperature of the pool. She said there was no
thing wrong with it. Things began picking up a bit after that, when the man said, ‘Now that you’ve gone to bed with Richard . . .’
‘Oh, Henry, please. It didn’t mean a thing.’
‘You’re a slut. And you know what we do with sluts.’
‘Oh?’ the woman said ironically.
He dropped the loincloth, the camera zoomed in on his organ, a big one with thick veins. I looked around in desperation. Selwyn was leaning against the wall, the remote in his hand.
‘What is this?’ I exclaimed.
‘What do you think?’ he said tersely.
She had her slender fingers around the penis and pulled back the foreskin. Her gaze was ironic as ever. He straddled, oh horror, the divan and pressed his cock to her mouth. It disappeared into it almost completely. Slowly, he fucked her like that. She sniffed and gagged. Spittle was forced from the corner of her mouth. I vomited on the carpet. I clenched my teeth but it shot out my nose and from behind my molars; I held my hand in front of my mouth and ran for the toilet. For a moment the immediacy of vomiting displaced the flashes in my head, the knowledge that it was my mother, my young mother, being fucked in the mouth. Something came to a close there, at that moment. Nothing would ever be the same. Because it was her. No doubt about it. Not just the face. The hands. My mother’s hands.
I hung over the pot, everything swirled, the world a washer drum. Sweat dripped from my forehead. I remained kneeling there, because I didn’t know what else to do. There was nowhere for me to go. I knew of no better place than the toilet floor. The veils had been ripped away, I had seen what had been concealed from my eyes. It wasn’t a lie, it was worse than that. I had been blind and deaf, this had been hidden from me behind continually shifting backdrops – new pieces of decor had been slid between me and the truth, again and again. Who knew about this? Had they all been whispering about it behind my back for years?
Little Caesar Page 8
