by Tim Lebbon
She nodded and started past him, and Ray half turned on the narrow path.
“Really. Thank you.”
“No need,” she said, but her breath was harsh now she was walking again. He watched her go, then turned and trotted down the steps to the wider path that led to the harbour.
This was the back end of Skentipple, the part where only the most adventurous tourists explored. There were no shops or cafés here, no pasty bakers or souvenir sellers, and it was rare that he saw anyone he didn’t know walking this route. The path curved across the base of the hillside and opened up into the wide area around the harbour, and then he was among people.
As he walked, Ray had to force himself to look up from his shoes. He’d never understood where the shame of grief came from. At first it had been nervousness about people talking to him, and how they would deal with what had happened: some tried to act as if nothing had changed, and he hated that; others approached with sadness and uncertainty, and he hated that more. He’d soon come to realize that he preferred being left alone, and somehow and somewhere he’d managed to exude that desire. Occasionally he wondered what they thought of him now, but usually he didn’t care. It was all part of blaming himself.
He walked around the harbour front, shops and pubs and cafés on his right, the harbour to his left. The tide was out with the boats, and the few crafts left were tilted over like one-legged men waiting to be lifted again. Dead fish silvered the silty bed, and seagulls strutted their stuff, taking their fill of the free meat. In one area, hundreds of crabs’ claws lay half-buried where a crab fisherman tied his boat. The stream cut a path through the muddy bed, eventually joining the sea where it lapped at the harbour entrance.
Ray saw several people he knew. Max, the Weird Fish clothing shop owner, was taking in the jackets and sweaters he always hung across the outside of the shop’s hoarding. He nodded once; Ray nodded and turned away. Next to Max’s shop was the Seaview Café, and Muriel the owner sat outside, smoking. A huge mug of tea was on the table beside her, and from inside he heard some unidentifiable music rustling through the radio. Tourist season almost over, Muriel would adjust her opening times now to cater for the fishermen when they went out and came back in. She caught his eye and breathed out smoke, hiding behind it. She’s Elizabeth’s, Ray thought. He hated how what had happened to him and Elizabeth had polarized their friends.
“Afternoon, Muriel,” he said as he passed by, not expecting or receiving an answer.
Jeff the seafood seller, his stall down on the harbour front where it had been for years. Franz the beachcomber, an old guy who lived a few miles inland, but who spent every Tuesday on Skentipple’s small beach with his metal detector and rucksack. Where he spent the other days, Ray had never asked. Susan the barmaid. Philip, Pete, and other people, he knew them all but had stopped knowing them so well after Toby died. A few acknowledged him, and Franz tried briefly to engage him in conversation, but he always wanted to be somewhere else. Somewhere quieter. After staring at the sea for a few minutes — Toby haunting him with sandcastles and orange crab-fishing lines, calls for ice cream and startled giggles when the waves splashed him — he turned and started walking inland.
A few minutes later he saw Elizabeth. Just a flash of her hair to begin with, moving behind a window and lurking in the shadows beyond. He stood outside the Flag & Fisherman, a pub they had rarely frequented together because it was favoured by the younger generation from the village. Like every pub in Skentipple it possessed an undeniable aged charm, but went out of its way to advertise its large screen for viewing sporting events, and its three-pints-for-the-price-of-two happy hours. He frowned and tried to peer in the window. It had been her, he knew from the way his heart was thumping and a flush slowly faded across his face.
Pressing his face to the glass and shading his eyes, he scanned the pub’s front bar. As he saw a youngster gesture to him and say something to his laughing friend, Elizabeth’s face became clear to him. She was sitting by the old fireplace, slouched back on a bench with a large glass of wine on the table on front of her. Beside her sat Jason, the fisherman, his old friend. His large weathered hand rested on her leg, and she was leaning into his shoulder, laughing at something he was still saying. His lips moved soundlessly, Ray’s ex-wife’s shoulders shook, and she found humour in Jason’s company.
Ray wondered how many glasses of wine she’d had before this one. He’d tried turning to drink, but found that it only brought Toby’s memories closer to him, and changed his dreams into nightmares that lingered through the following day’s hangover. He had no idea whether Elizabeth had resorted to alcohol. She’d never been a big drinker before, but losing Toby had made new people of them both.
He stayed there for a few panicked seconds, angry at Jason — who had once been his friend, lost now in the same casual way as his wife — and raging at Elizabeth. When she looked up and saw him, her expression changed into something awful. The laughter faded, leaving behind a painted-on smile, and she seemed to pause, growing so motionless that she was his only focus, and the rest of the world orbited around her. Then her mouth fell open. Ray did not hear the name that tumbled out.
Making his way back across the harbour toward the hillside, he tried to understand why he felt so angry. He’d known about Jason and Elizabeth for a couple of months. But this was the first time he’d seen them together. And as he climbed the steps and steep paths toward his house, he came to realize what troubled him so much. It wasn’t Jason’s big hand on her thigh, with all of its implications, and it wasn’t the fact that she appeared so at ease with another man. It wasn’t even his mumbled comments and her easy laughter.
It was the idea that Elizabeth was moving on. She had left him alone out in the street, and after what they had been through, she could still find it in herself to laugh.
By the time he reached his house, he was crying. And by the time he’d managed to unlock the door, fall inside and slam it behind him, he knew what he had to do.
2
We rise from the sad house with the crying man and submit to the breeze, now carrying the growing chill of dusk. The sun is setting behind the opposite valley ridge, silhouetting the sparse trees growing up there in defiance of the storms that sweep this coast. They throw long shadows out across the valley, and if the confusion of buildings and water was not so extreme, they might even be visible down there. But street lights are flickering on to kill the shadows, and windows throughout the village are illuminated from within.
Up to the ridge and along from the village, and a fox gambols on the slope of bracken and ferns leading to the sheer cliffs. Several shapes play around it, but they’re too quick and shy to manifest properly. The wild welcomes the dusk, as it has since the advent of humanity. People have taken the day for themselves, putting limits on it, sectioning it, adjusting it for their own means and ends. But nighttime, an absence, still belongs to the land.
Yet there are those who walk the night. People who tread carefully, but relish the freedom inherent in the dark winds. Their minds are often closer to the nature of things, or the nature in things, and they understand more than most that the wild is a cycle like everything else. There are the aeons, and the ages, the years and the seasons, but there is also day and night, and there lies the truest of nature’s distinctions.
The cliff path is deserted tonight, swept of fallen leaves by the sea breeze. The hawthorn trees on either side are mostly leafless now, and the ferns are fading to brown, readying to die back and give way to new growth in several months’ time. Some life hibernates over seasons, and some hides for much shorter periods.
Below, down through the thick ferns and gorse, clinging to the edge of the cliff like a huge barnacle, we see the old stone structure. Forever, it has been a forgotten remnant of the village’s past. Perhaps a lookout post for fishermen, or a refuge of some sort. Maybe it is even a folly, built by a rich villager of yesteryear to a love that might or might not have been his. There is little vandal
ism here. None of the casual spraypainted exhortations of youths, or the intentional removal of blocks to tumble over the cliff, whose sheer edge is only a few short steps away. It could be that kids don’t know about it, or maybe there are other reasons. Perhaps animals use it for a shelter sometimes, but today . . .
There’s a spread of things outside the small building’s seaward opening, and from inside . . . is that a light? Faint, a feeble glow like the echo of the sun’s setting beams that to most would not even be visible.
And here we are: sitting in the doorway is a man, where perhaps he wasn’t before.
He’s an old man. He’s smoking a pipe, and its intermittent glow gives him a lighthouse face. Something sways in his hand as he works his fingers. He stretches, and feels the bones in his shoulder grate together. The first sign of age. Many other aches and pain have developed since then, but these are still the worst. At least his fingers can still flex, and his hands still grip, and at least his sight is still sharp.
The shape in his hand is an old beanie doll, and tonight he will give it a new leg.
He stopped crying before he opened the door, because he had spilled enough tears in that room.
Ray had used to read a lot of fiction. But since Toby had passed away, what reading he did usually revolved around real life, and was lighter. Sports commentaries, biographies, humorous books . . . fiction was inevitably about conflict and loss, and his life had suffered enough of those for real. He couldn’t lose himself anymore. His disbelief could no longer be suspended, because he was always in the here and now. But when he’d used to read, one of the things he’d scoffed at was some people’s approach to bereavement. The room was exactly the same as the day his wife was murdered, a line in a book would say, and Ray would joke about it to Elizabeth. He’d tell her that when she was murdered he’d clear their room out straight away, move to the spare room, and take in a lodger. A pair of Swedish au pairs, he’d suggested one day, to his wife’s strained laughter. Back then he had demanded that his fiction be realistic — truth in lies — and he could not imagine anyone handling loss in that way. It was the clichéd idea of being stuck in the moment, and not moving on.
Ray rested his hand on Toby’s bedroom door, readying himself for what he would see. The room beyond was not as it had been on the day Toby died. He was not in it, for a start, motionless and cold in his bed, waiting to be found by his adoring parents, who couldn’t understand why he was still asleep — they’d never had to wake him before; he was always up before them, ready to poke them in the ear and force them to rise . . .
The bed was stripped now, all the bedding discarded. Elizabeth had bought a load of new bedding, but left it on the old mattress in its packets, never to be made. Later, after she left, Ray had spread blankets across the mattress to hide as much as he could, but still had not made the bed properly. That would be like waiting for someone else to come.
“Rise and shine, Tobes,” he said, pushing the door open. The room smelled of dust and damp — there was a problem with the old stone walling in one corner, something their local builder had never been able to solve. The curtains were permanently open, the view out onto the dusky garden obscured only by glass that desperately needed cleaning.
He still came in here sometimes. It wasn’t a shrine or anything; he’d tried many times to convince himself of that. There were a couple of boxes of books that he’d packed away, stacked in one corner and still awaiting their trip to the charity shop. A pair of folded curtains were dropped casually on the floor in one corner. It wasn’t a bedroom anymore, but it was still Toby’s room. That was for sure. He felt his son in here, and as he knelt by the bed, he experienced a shattering flashback.
The worst memories were those he thought he’d forgotten.
He and Toby kneel by the bed because his son has been taught how to pray in school. Ray’s not comfortable with this. I don’t want him force-fed and brainwashed, he’d said. But Elizabeth had calmed his anger. We were. We made up our own minds. So just for that evening Ray kneels with his son, and smiles when the boy makes up his own prayers. Thank God for Mummy and Daddy, and the sea, and chocolate ice cream, and the Power Rangers, the film not the telly program. Thank God for pancakes and Mars Bars, and crisps, and curry, and . . . He frowns, glancing sidelong at Ray to make sure he has his eyes closed.
Dad!
Sorry, son. Carry on.
Thank God for food and drink, and stuff. Oh, and for Jesus Christ. Amen. He glances up at Ray. The man in the collar said God knew his son was going to die. Why did he let that happen?
It’s just a story, son. Made up. Like Aesop’s Fables, only not as good.
Okay. Dad, my Ben 10 watch is broken.
Ray squeezed his lips tight at the memory, and frowned. Had he ever fixed that watch? Had he? He remembered telling Toby he’d look at it, that maybe the batteries had run out, but he couldn’t recall ever hearing its strange distorted sound again, nor seeing its glow on his son’s wrist.
He reached under the bed. There was a plastic box under there where he’d stored a load of Toby’s toys, and as he pulled it out, he knew he was about to be assailed by memories. The blue click-on lid was covered with dust.
Removing the lid, he leaned it against the bed and just stared. Inside the box was a riot of colours and shapes, toys he remembered and some he did not. Action figures pointed weapons at him, remote controlled cars sat motionless, cuddly toys huddled together in the box’s corners. He moved some toys aside and something growled.
Ray gasped and sat back, listening to the noise. He remembered it, a long low growl that emanated from an alligator with a man’s body. He couldn’t recall which TV program or comic it came from, but he pictured Toby sitting on their living room floor with this and other figures, indulging in some unreachable battle or scenario expressed through sound and movement. Most of it took place in his head, and that was gone now. When he was alive, memories of those battles would have existed somewhere in his child’s brain. But now those conflicts could never exist again.
The alligator fell silent and Ray delved farther into the box. He was sad, but the familiar crippling grief remained at bay. The toys felt good in his hands. Some of them he put in a pile on the carpet; others — mostly action figures — he stood in uneven ranks on the bed, like startled mercenaries brought out of retirement. They’d been in hiding for almost a year, and now they were exposed once again, but this time there would be no play.
They were being sorted out. It wasn’t just this box under the bed; there were toys and books everywhere. The top of the wardrobe was stacked with board games. Another box at the foot of the bed held thousands of building blocks and associated pieces — boards, ties, small motors, wheels, batteries. A book case beside the door was home to over a hundred books, ranging from the first cloth book they’d bought Toby as a baby, through picture and pop-up books they’d read to him when very young, to volumes he’d started to read himself. There was a book about a talking dragon, and one about a boy who tried to catch a star. He’d been a good reader, one of the best in his school class.
There were a few books that were too old for him, but which Ray hadn’t been able to resist buying. He paused, staring at these, because Toby would never know their stories. He might have looked at them — he’d liked to fan pages and scan pictures — but their uniqueness would never be known to him, and that brought on Ray’s first tear since entering the room.
“No,” he said. “Not now. Not yet.” He tipped the plastic box, spilling toys across the floor. Something bounced from his leg, and he froze. There was the Ben 10 watch that had broken. He picked it up and turned it in his hand, looking for the battery compartment. The battery was still inside. He turned the dial that exposed different monsters, snapped the front of the watch shut, and a small spring tumbled out.
Ray couldn’t see where the missing part had come from, but guessed it was the reason the watch no longer worked. It was supposed to light up and make a noise, but now
it was just a lump of plastic . . . a lump of useless plastic, pointless, and —
He stood and was about to throw the thing against the wall, but then paused. The toys on the bed watched him, and he went from one to the next, checking each until he found what was wrong. With some it was obvious — a missing arm, a torn joint, a crushed head. With others, the fault was not so noticeable, but he always found it.
Every toy was broken. Ray frowned, clutching the Ben 10 watch and trying to remember when they’d all been consigned to the box beneath the bed. He’d thought it was after they lost Toby, but now he wasn’t so sure. Now, he seemed to remember piling all those broken toys in there himself, and there had likely been an empty promise to his son that he would fix them all soon.
But he never had mended the broken watch.
“Damn it,” Ray said softly, gathering the toys from the floor and adding them to those on the bed. He made sure they were spread evenly, none of them hiding another, because they each deserved his attention. A year ago, two, three, he should have given them his attention then. But other things had conspired, more urgent matters like what they’d have for dinner, the latest bill that needed paying, which movie he and Elizabeth would watch when Toby had been tucked up in bed. . . .
“Sorry, Toby,” he said. “Really, son, I’m so sorry.” He’d been a terrible father. He hadn’t deserved such a wonderful boy. People would judge him and he wanted that, because he was so unable to judge himself. All these thoughts harried at him, though he knew none of them were completely true.
Grabbing the Ben 10 watch, he turned from the room, shutting off the light behind him and closing the door.
Standing on the landing, Ray heard raindrops tapping at the window. They were blown by a strengthening sea breeze. He took a deep breath and thought of the cliff top, how wild and untouched it was up there, and how alone he would be.
