“It’s too far to jump!” I yelled above the din of the wind and sea.
His eyes rolled briefly to the heavens. Bloody tourists, I thought I read in his tired expression. He motioned impatiently with his hand to the ladder.
“Listen, Popeye, I’ll fall in!”
“Then I’ll turn back!” he grumbled. “Have it your way. I don’t care one way or the other.”
Cursing under my breath, I launched myself into the spray-drenched air and landed, thankfully, with a loud clank against the ladder, hauling myself up to the boards of the jetty. I shook my hands of water, and the next moment my suitcase was flung up and landed beside me, skidding across the boards. Then another. I lifted them, one in each hand, shouted at him that there might be something valuable in them, but he waved as if I’d paid him a compliment.
“What now?” I called, but the wind tore away my voice and ripped it to indecipherable shreds. He waved again and the boat reversed away from the jetty, spray shooting up in sheets as a wave hit the stern. “Wait a minute!” I yelled. “Where do I go? You can’t just leave me here!” Obviously he thought he could. The craft spun around and chugged away, and I decided I was in the better place, judging from the way it was being tipped perilously from side to side. Had I really come all that way in that thing – in this weather, I thought? I watched as it became a brilliant white speck on a thunderously grey ocean, merging with the breakers as it dipped from sight every now and then into the swells, the engine noise swallowed by the wind. It rounded the headland and vanished.
I turned at last to view the island of Eilean Mor up close, a weighty suitcase in each hand, the rain beginning to pelt down, driven by the wind and cutting across in front of me like tiny spears of ice. There was a narrow shingle beach, at that moment its pebbles hissing stridently as the waves threw themselves relentlessly and foaming onto it; seaweed, of various colours and hues, was strewn about the place like discarded plastic garlands following a party; a couple of huge gulls squabbled with each other over something that might once have been living, but it wasn’t easy to tell. Beyond this and straight ahead rose what can only be described as a wall of a hill, studded here and there with tough clumps of sparse, dark vegetation that looked to be shivering in the gusts of wind which tore noisily over the grey, lichen-spotted boulders. Part of the hill at some recent time had collapsed down onto the beach as if some tremendous ice-cream scoop had been at work.
I strode along the jetty and stepped off onto the shingle beach, putting my suitcases down by my side. To my left I could discern a narrow track that scoured its way over the hill; to my right there seemed no easy way to scale the earthen beast, the view that confronted me seemingly comprised of nothing but misshapen boulders and rocks weathered smooth by nature, and the incessant moaning and sighing of agitated water.
What do I do? Do I wait here, or do I set off and head for the track? I thought that Max would have at least sent someone to pick me up. You can’t just leave a person stranded in the middle of nowhere, I thought, the cold fingering its way beneath my damp and not too suitable clothing. It’s not like I’d stepped off a bloody bus. This was as close to wilderness as I’d ever been, and it became more unsettling the longer I was left to consider my lonely position.
Lonely position.
Wasn’t that always the case?
How do you describe the passage of time when that time is so full of dross that it might as well be full of nothing? So full of nothing it ceases to exist. Standing on that deserted beach I looked back at all my life in that way. Like it was a void, a timeline with nothing marked on it. Zero. Everything happened, and nothing happened. It felt to me like when Max took that eraser and wiped out Walton’s maths questions.
Twenty years. It had been twenty years since I last saw Max face to face. It makes no difference how fast you said it, I thought as the gale stirred up past emotions and past memories, as if they were there all the time hanging loosely in the air, waiting for this moment to be bundled together, twenty years is a long time to let slip by so easily, and not to be able to account for it properly seemed a tremendous sin. What would I tell him when we met again? Yeah, sure I’m doing OK. One affair, one divorce, two parents dead, living all alone. Moved out of that grotty job, though, at Boulton’s. What am I doing now? I work at a supermarket. Remember the Chronicle building? Well they pulled the whole lot down; the area’s an industrial estate now, supermarket, bowling alley, McDonalds drive thru. Someone bought the South Yorkshire Chronicle brand, though, and was about to start the paper back up again. But me, yeah, that’s right, I’m working in that supermarket by the canal. I’ve moved full circle, back to where I began, by the canal. Back to that fucking canal.
I sat down on my suitcase, wet head in wet hands, body all scrunched up against the chill. I hadn’t seen Ruby either, not for – I didn’t even want to think about it. The thought cut.
Ruby divorced me, eventually. Like a cumbersome and aged car we tried our best to keep the marriage going, patching it up, taking it out for a little spin, breaking down, repairing the damage. In the end the marriage was taken to the divorce courts and scrapped. There was immense sadness, and immense relief also. Adultery on my part meant we could get it over and done with faster. Remember the girl from Boulton’s tills? The one with the A Levels? Yeah, well, I needn’t say any more. I can’t blame Ruby, far from it. I blame myself entirely. You can want to hold onto something so tight you squeeze it to death, and I’d been strangling Ruby. She needed air, space. Her space, not mine. It was me who choked the life out of our marriage like a clumsy, pared-down Lenny.
When mum and dad died I moved into their old house, which became my old house once more, and I shared the place with dusty old memories that refused to budge even after the application of gallons of magnolia paint and reams of fresh wallpaper. I wanted to sell it, move out, but the simple truth was I couldn’t afford to, not on supermarket wages. So rather than take out a mortgage on something that wouldn’t be half as good, I decided to hang onto a house that was, after all, fully paid for. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
Mr. Radunski died, but not before his business had taken a nosedive after the miner’s strike, from which it was never to recover. And he kindly left me a gold crucifix I once admired in passing, which I remember he said he’d had for thirty years, but which turned out to be gold plated. I still hung onto it. Sentimental reasons. I wondered whether he might finally feel safe now that the Russians couldn’t get at him. I hoped so. He spent so much of his life nervously waiting for them he deserved a rest. Mrs. Radunski married again and moved away. The butcher’s shop closed down eventually, becoming a storage place for a man who did house clearances, a man who openly used to pray for bad winters so that the older folks would catch flu and die so that business might pick up. I used to pass it sometimes, looking up to see the room which Ruby and I had started our married life, now crowded with the looming shapes of dark-veneered wardrobes and bric-a-brac, the tired flotsam of someone else’s lost existence.
I still don’t know what happened to all those intervening years, and why so little could take up so much time. I used to pity Mr. Radunski, but in many ways we were very similar. When I wasn’t working I sat alone in the house, pretending to make a life out of watching TV, or listening to the hi-fi. My friends were my work colleagues, and any friendship was always terminated with clocking off. One by one my relatives either died or moved away, or I quite simply forgot to visit, until they were mere smudges at the back of my mind, only given real substance by the perfunctory sending and receiving of Christmas cards. Occasionally I had women friends. None of them stayed long. Perhaps I still used Ruby as a measure, and perhaps that measure had become too tall an order for others to compete with. Relationships were thus intense and fleeting. So like Mr. Radunski I sat and I waited, but I guess I didn’t know what I was waiting for. At least his waiting had a point, a focus, even if it was rooted in fear. I allowed myself to rot away, any hopes and ambition
s smothered by the aching dullness that was my life, by my own canker-like self-pity that corrupted and tainted my thoughts. I grew to despise myself.
And all the while Max taunted me.
Not directly, of course, because Max wasn’t around anymore. But we all knew of Max, the local boy from Overthorpe made good. If there was ever a light held up to brighten the sordid reality that was my hometown, then Max was inevitably that light. And rightly so, I guess. He took a job with BBC Radio, briefly, then moved on to television, doing exactly what we didn’t know, but there were all manner of rumours circulating, aided by Connie who thrived on rumours. I saw him a few times on the local news programs, but he seemed to disappear in the way people do that you’ve once known but lose track of.
My fragile world collapsed a little more when the impossible happened, the unthinkable thing that still affects me now.
Connie died.
Forgive me, for I know this is sounding like an obituary, but as you approach a certain age that’s when your life starts to disassemble at the edges like a ragged piece of material, and realization sets in that death is to be expected, is too in-your-face to be denied, or merely associated with the unfortunate lives of others. But even then, Connie’s death hit me hard.
She wasn’t old, and somehow I’d expected her to go on forever, unlike many others around me, people I felt had long ago used up their lives, were ready to wither and die as a natural next step. What’s more there was no reason for her to die. She was perfectly healthy, had achieved a modicum of happiness. But die she did, in her sleep. She stopped breathing and never woke up. The autopsy shed no further light on the matter. Inexplicably she simply stopped living. As always, even in death, she was guaranteed to start tongues wagging.
I went to see her, and was struck to the core by her still, ashen face, her skin even then reasonably young looking, her features still undeniably beautiful, aged but at the same time holding up some kind of youthful shield, and I could not believe she was actually dead, that not a single breath escaped those now bloodless lips, nor that her painted eyelids would ever again blink in unalloyed excitement.
I reached out and allowed my fingers to comb through her hair, musing that it had been something I’d always wanted to do but afraid to admit it. I half expected her to sit up with a start, her shrill voice chiming mischievously, “Collie, what on earth do you think you’re doing?” I smiled fondly as memories cascaded around her marble-like face, and I had the urge to bend, to touch my lips briefly to hers, my final goodbye, but something nudged at my conscience and I refrained.
I could not bring myself to think that already, even as I peered down on her lifeless form, her own body was silently devouring itself, her body fluids dissolving greedily fat and tissue, inevitably everything that had been Connie becoming a stinking soup of corruption. I could not bear it. I had often wondered how an educated man like D.G. Rossetti could ardently believe that the body of his wife, Elizabeth Siddall – exhumed to retrieve a book of poetry he’d buried with her – was as fresh as the day they interred her. Now I had some inkling. Connie was my very own Elizabeth. She would never crumble into dust. Even as I think of her now, I see her as complete as she had been in life. I see her as she appeared to me then. Serene, at peace. And beautiful for all eternity.
Days later her body was removed, presumably at Max’s instructions – there were no other relatives – the destination unknown. And, perhaps fittingly, Connie was snatched from my life as mysteriously and as suddenly as she’d entered it.
My mind often wandered to linger on the whereabouts of Max, accompanied by the rather selfish thought that, because I wasn’t doing particularly well, his fortunes were somehow mirroring mine, those fortunes following a steady downward trend. He had long ago, I liked to think, fallen foul of someone high up in the BBC and his temper had gotten the better of him, landing him the sack. He was scraping a living somewhere deep in the bowels of some ghastly inner-city slum or other. Better still he was unemployed within that same slum. And on days when I felt particularly sorry for myself he was homeless and attempting in vain to flog copies of The Big Issue. In the rain, naturally.
It wasn’t to be. I had an unexpected window into his life when I wandered into Waterstones, the book store, and was casually browsing through books I could rarely afford, when my eyes settled on the section where they displayed their signed copies. I felt sure I must have done a double take when I noticed the name Maxwell Stone splashed in gold across a line of books. I approached the shelf, lifted one of the novels off and opened it. There on the title page was his unmistakable signature. I uttered a gasp that caused a woman to look anxiously in my direction. Turning to the back flap of the dust jacket Max’s sullen face greeted me once again, this time from a studio portrait that enhanced his already good looks. Actually, I smiled broadly. He had changed so much, and yet he had changed not at all. It was still the same boy who nearly beat my brains out all those years ago. And it was Connie, too, who stared out of those eyes at me, and it was probably Connie that teased out the smile.
I took the book to the cash desk. “Oh,” said the cashier, her eyes widening, “you’ve missed him by a day. He was in here only yesterday signing copies.”
I felt both a sense of disappointment and relief. “I knew him,” I blurted out.
“Really?” she returned, a spark of interest in her voice. “He’s so lovely,” she admitted. “A real looker. Quiet, for all that. But yes, he’s a dish all right. Much better in real life than he appears on his photo.”
“I went to school with him.”
“Really?”
I felt myself fluffing out like a prize turkey because I’d managed to snare her attention. She was attractive, in a plain sort of way. Young, too. “We were – we are best friends,” I said matter-of-factly. “He once stayed with us, at our house. My house now, actually.”
She touched a colleague on the back and he turned around. “This gentleman knows Maxwell Stone. They’re friends.”
The middle-aged man eyed me warily, and I was very conscious of him taking in my lacklustre appearance. I was beginning to wish I’d put on a pair of shoes instead of grubby trainers. “This Maxwell Stone?” he said, pointing to the book.
“They’re friends,” the woman spoke for me. “What’s he like? I mean really like? How does he come up with the ideas for his books – they’re ever so good.”
Books? More than one? I hadn’t realised. “I’ve no idea really,” I admitted, shrugging an apology. “I haven’t seen him in quite a while.” I saw disappointment cloud her face and interest draining away as if a plug had been pulled. The sight of the man’s back indicated without a doubt he’d lost interest too. It was a case of ‘I knew him when…’ they’d heard it all before, no doubt, countless times. Fame squeezes out past acquaintances and hangers-on like nothing else. “We were best friends,” I reiterated helplessly, but the man’s back remained fixed, his head turning to flash me a brief, stale smile. He began serving someone else. The woman took my money and slipped my book into a carrier bag along with the receipt, sliding it towards me and offering me one of those porcelain doll expressions. I bristled at her sudden withdrawal of interest in me. “He’s a bit of a bastard, you know,” I said, taking up my carrier bag. “In fact he’s a lot of a bastard.” Her smile remained unwavering. “A bit potty too,” I said with a finger to my temple. “What’s more he’s terrible at maths!” I said, walking from the counter, embarrassed at myself even as I left the store, all too aware of my cheeks starting to smart. I threw the carrier bag and book into the first bin I came across.
Why, why, why? The word ran through my mind like acid. Why him, of all people? Why was it never me? What had he done to deserve all that attention, and likewise what heinous sin had I committed that condemned me to my malodorous bog of despair and hopelessness?
But all the same, something drew me back to the bin and I dug out the carrier bag, which had already acquired a veneer of something pink an
d sticky. I attracted the attention of passers-by who no doubt thought me a city tramp.
“What the hell are you staring at?” I snarled at an elderly couple whose joint expressions exuded pure contempt. I tossed the soiled carrier bag into the bin and clutched the book to my chest. “This is Maxwell Stone, this is!” I called, stabbing a thumb at the book. “I know him!” They hurried on their way. I could read their minds: the city was full of them, tramps high on some illegal substance or other…
I laughed inwardly at their preconceptions. “He’s gotta be stinking rich, you know!” I called after them, seeing their steps liven up a little. “And I’m the one that’s bloody poor! How’s that for irony, eh?”
I sat down on a nearby bench, which had, curiously, emptied of people at the sound of my raised voice. “I’m not a tramp,” I muttered beneath my breath. “I’m not a bloody tramp.” And I sat as alone on that bench in the middle of a teeming city as I did on the beach on Eilean Mor.
Apart from seeing Max’s novels appearing regularly in the bookstores, averaging one a year, I never came any closer to actually seeing him. We inhabited different planets. For all intents and purposes our lives had made different creatures out of us. I resolved eventually to wipe him from my system, my consciousness, and just at the point when I might have succeeded, an exorcism many years in the performing, I received the letter.
A letter from Max.
More than that, an invitation to Eilean Mor – wherever or whatever Eilean Mor was.
It had all been arranged, at my convenience, of course; Max would pay for me to travel by train to Inverness where a car had been laid on to take me west all the way to Ullapool; from there a chartered boat would ferry me to the island of Eilean Mor, apparently lying somewhere south west of The Summer Isles, but which did not merit a place on my atlas.
Incredibly he’d done it. Max had finally bought (or rented, leased, whatever) his Scottish island, just as he’d sworn he would as we lay on the grass thirty-odd years before, his magnificent realisation highlighting my own childish ambitions that lay strewn all around me like broken, discarded toys. Some of the old bitterness crept back, but it is fair to say that it was easily swamped by my desire to see him again and I didn’t take the time to ponder over the fact that Max was still embedded as deeply into my psyche as ever he had been.
Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller Page 25
