by Ali Shaw
Seb toyed with the pen for a moment, without speaking. ‘Okay,’ he said eventually, and touched the nib to the card as if it were a match to tinder.
A minute later he had filled the card with angrily scribbled sentences, and his fists were shaking.
‘Told you,’ said Hiroko.
Seb took a deep breath and pressed his hands together. Then he looked calm again. ‘Point taken,’ he said, ‘but I think it was worth it.’
Hiroko sighed. ‘Okay.’ She took the pen back off him. She chose another card, and wrote the kanji for Otosan in the top corner. That was Nihongo for Father.
Seb watched her. Hiroko waited for anger to move her pen.
It didn’t come.
She started to cry again. After a moment, Seb put an arm around her. She could feel Yasuo’s heartbeat through the fur against her neck.
I miss you, she wrote. That was all.
In the other half of the postcard she had to do the hardest part: her father’s Tokyo address. That horrible, sky-high apartment he’d asked her to think of as home. A place she had spent the last month and a half determined not to think of at all, telling herself it was because she hated it so. Hated the urbanity of it, the white paint, the right angles, the tidiness.
She clamped her teeth around the end of the pen. Suddenly she was hoping like crazy that the apartment hadn’t fallen down. She knew there was a picture of that happening, somewhere in the back of her mind, and she had been trying desperately to lock it up there. ‘See,’ she whispered to Seb, ‘you should keep this stuff shut away.’
If Tokyo had crumbled, falling into a sudden forest, and if her father had fallen with it, what had he thought of as it happened? What had crossed his mind while the floor trembled and gave way? His own impending death? Saori, who perhaps he held in his arms? Or had it been Hiroko’s mother, in the time when they’d been together, before their daughter was born?
‘Perhaps he’s thinking about you,’ said Seb. ‘Right now.’
The salt breeze rippled Hiroko’s hair. Yasuo pressed himself urgently against her ear.
‘I doubt it,’ she said.
‘Do you want to write any more?’
‘Do you?’
‘No. So . . . what shall we do?’
Hiroko removed her boots and socks.
‘What are you doing?’
She plucked Yasuo out of her hood and laid him on the rocks. She thought the fox might object, but he just sat calmly on his haunches and began to preen his fur. Then Hiroko jumped down into the shallows, ignoring the cold that at once lapped her ankles. She waved the postcards at Seb. ‘I’m posting these,’ she said. ‘What about you?’
Seb looked out towards the horizon and then laughed and removed his own footwear. He joined her with a splash. The tide inched back and forth around their rolled-up trouser legs.
They threw the postcards as far as they could, but a white breaker brought them back to shore. They fished them up again.
‘We have to go deeper,’ decided Hiroko. She pulled off her hoodie and returned to the rocks to put it there beside Yasuo. ‘Look after this,’ she instructed the fox, who immediately snuggled into it to make the most of its warmth. Hiroko undressed out of her top and her jeans and gave those to him too.
‘Er . . .’ said Seb, staring at her.
There she stood in nothing but her bra and knickers, feeling the goosebumps rising all along her thighs and arms.
‘What?’ she asked defiantly.
The sun was gone now entirely, and the night was full of the galaxy. Another shooting star scratched the heavens, then another and another.
‘Do yours,’ she said.
Seb nodded and undressed with sudden fearful determination. Clearly he felt the cold more keenly than she, trying in vain to wrap his arms around all of his body at once. She pulled them apart and pushed her own flesh against his, and slid her fingers through his hair to grasp his scalp. They didn’t kiss. They pushed their foreheads hard against one another’s, locking eyes point-blank in the dark.
‘Now swim,’ Hiroko commanded, and showed the way.
They front-crawled out through the white spume of the breakers, to where the sea was as black as the space the stars shot through. They trod water in the deep and the cold, and let go of the postcards there. The tide was gentle, but the chill bit so hard they could feel every drop of blood in their bodies. Despite that they laughed and pressed foreheads again, even though the water sloshed salt into their nostrils.
3
Gunman
Hannah could hardly believe that she’d used to find the sea so unlovable. As a little girl she had hated it, considering it the definition of monotony. Now, when she woke within earshot, its noise alone made her feel no bigger than a pebble washed up on its shores. Desiring more of that feeling of smallness, and though it was early in the morning, she left the others asleep in the tent and wandered down to the place where the breakers slid ashore.
She removed her boots and socks, rolled up her jeans and waded out. She flinched at first from the cold but pressed on enraptured, only having to paddle a short distance before the beach fell out of sight and she could pretend that all the world was empty sea under an empty sky. Standing there, submerged up to her knees, she thought she would have preferred some biblical flood to have swept the world, rather than the forest. It would have been cleaner, easier to comprehend.
When eventually she paddled back to the beach, she realised that the sea had another surprise in store for her. It had returned her appetite, and she was suddenly the hungriest she’d been since finding Zach. It seemed a fitting tribute to both her brother and the water to go coastal foraging, so she set out to scrounge through rock pools and thatches of seaweed. Yet, to her disappointment, all these were already picked bare. Anything that remained had been pulped by many boots, and even at that early hour several other people were already wading in those places, and their bored scampering children hunting for dribbles of kelp. Someone informed her that there had been a genocide of crabs and winkles, and poisonings and even deaths from badly cooked shellfish, and that such instances were increasing in frequency as more and more people emerged onto the beaches. Hannah sighed, and supposed she would have to venture back into the woods for food.
Everything fell very quiet when she stepped beneath the silent boughs of the forest. The trees here were shaggy with moss, so that even though the leaves were ageing the daylight caught in the tangles above. The undergrowth was dank and perfect for mushrooms, but within fifteen minutes Hannah had also found wild parsnips, horseradishes and long purple carrots. It made no sense to her that so many of the people on the beaches looked so hungry.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said the only other person she met under the branches. ‘Most of them have seen things in the woods they wish they could forget, and the rest are too terrified by the stories that the first lot tell. They’ll start to cut the trees down soon, once they’re brave enough, but for now they only want to keep away from them.’
Hannah kept on foraging, with nicks in her fingers from the thorns she searched through, and hands stained purple from the berries she picked. Small fussy birds hopped and croaked around her, and darted forth to snatch up anything she worked loose but did not gather. Squirrels with twitching noses raced her jealously when she gathered up hazelnuts. Flies whirred after the sugar of crab apples. Whether they had arrived thinking it spring or high summer, most trees were beginning to agree that it was early autumn: the first week of October, by Hannah’s reckoning. As she foraged she remembered, as if it were some deeply buried childhood memory, that she had used to love this time of year. Loved brisk autumn walks and the first chance to wear gloves and cosy scarves, loved conkers on strings and bonfire smoke on the air. She was just beginning to feel like something of her old self, when she saw the gunman.
He was, he had to be, a figment of her imagination. The real gunman was dead, left to rot in some unmarked ditch near Zach’s lodge. Yet there he stood,
in the middle distance in the woods, and his spectacles were upturned on his forehead and the sunlight twinkled on the exit wound that Hannah had put there. She spun away, heading at once for the sea, but stopped when she heard him groan behind her.
‘You’re dead,’ Hannah whispered. ‘There’s no way you’re here.’
But he groaned again, as if he had somehow clung to life and staggered all the way to the sea behind her. She took another pace away from him but found she could go no further. She remembered what the gunman had done to Zach, remembered the noise of the flies when they exited her brother’s chest.
‘You’re dead,’ she said again, this time with a growl. Then all of a sudden she was marching back towards him, her foraging knife held tight in her fist.
‘You’re dead!’ she yelled before realising, after a few more fierce paces, that the gunman was nothing but a stump the size of a person, with two branches shaped a bit like arms and a moist red fungus feeding on the bark at head height. Hannah drew to a halt beside it, and the decaying timber creaked in the breeze.
She stabbed her knife in. She pulled it out and stabbed again, then again and again until the blade wedged. She let go with a scream and flung herself down on the leaf litter. That it had all been a trick of the light was no relief. The gunman had been real, once upon a time, and it had been for long enough to ruin her life. She stood up and kicked away her foraging with a shout. Mushrooms and vegetables spun through the forest and rattled into the undergrowth, into which the squabbling birds and squirrels at once descended. Hannah yanked her knife free and stalked away, but only once she’d burst out of the woods and crossed the beach and splashed down into the shallows, into the vast cold sea that soaked her walking boots and jeans up to her knees, did she stop. The waves foamed and collapsed. Gulls shrieked in harsh voices.
Hannah could hardly believe that she’d used to find the woods so lovable.
That evening, Hannah found Adrien alone at the furthest end of the beach. Here it was easy to escape the crowds, for nobody wished to venture far from their campfires after sundown. She took a seat on the shingle alongside Adrien, both of them sitting cross-legged in the last of the light. ‘Has it been a bad day?’ she asked.
‘Something like that. I’m still trying to find out about boats. Asking everyone I can about them.’
‘Doesn’t sound like you got very far.’
Adrien sighed and leaned back to better face Hannah. ‘Nowhere at all. I didn’t think I’d want one this badly, but . . . things go strangely, don’t they? Or maybe it’s just me. I never really know what I want until I’m faced with not having it.’
‘Of course you wanted a boat. It makes perfect sense.’
‘Yeah . . .’ he said, and poked at the shingle. ‘But what about you? You don’t look too chirpy, either, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘I thought I saw the gunman. So I’m not doing too well, either.’
‘Oh. Shit. Where?’
She told him what had happened and, although she didn’t mean to, described in forensic detail the piece of fungus she’d mistaken for his head wound.
‘Hannah, listen,’ said Adrien when she’d finished. ‘You’re exhausted, and your mind is playing tricks on you. That’s all. I’m sure it’s not uncommon, among people who—’
‘Who have killed someone?’
‘That’s not what I was going to say. I meant you should try to forget about it, that’s all.’
Hannah smiled ruefully. ‘The funny thing is that I’d done just that. The moment before I saw him, I was enjoying the sea and feeling the best I have done since I shot him.’
‘You didn’t see him. Remember that. You saw a tree.’
She rubbed her eyes. ‘Do you think this is something that will keep happening? Because I don’t know if I have the strength for that. Didn’t he say something about this himself? That murderers can’t stop thinking about the people who they’ve killed.’
Adrien looked pained. ‘You’re not a murderer, Hannah.’
‘Aren’t I? What other word is there for me?’
‘Not that one. That’s the word we use for him.’
‘I did the same thing he did.’
Adrien looked frustrated. Eventually, he shook his head and said, ‘I just hate watching you torture yourself.’
Hannah looked out at the sea. The eddies of the surf spread out in white, then drained away leaving darkened sand in their wake. ‘It’s not much fun to watch you do it, either. Adrien . . . I think you might be looking too hard for this boat. And too close. Take a step back and you might see the bigger picture.’
Adrien swept a hand across the line of the horizon. ‘This is already a bloody big picture. Miles and miles of water and no way to get to Ireland.’
‘I can’t blame you for feeling frustrated. I know how much it means to you to find her.’
‘Uhh . . . yeah.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Yeah, I hope.’
‘You hope? What does that mean?’
‘I never much meant to go through with this. You must have known that all along. I thought I’d turn around and head home long before we got this far. It was supposed to be only a matter of time before people fixed everything, before I felt safe enough to sit back and wait for Michelle. But now that we’ve come all this way, things feel even more broken than they did at the start.’
Hannah could see he wasn’t finished. She waited for him to continue.
‘I actually expected to be satisfied with this,’ he said after a minute. ‘That the sea would save me my blushes. I could look like I was brave enough to cross, but never get the chance to. I thought there would be no shame in being defeated that way, and I think I could accept that Michelle might not want to rescue things. Sometimes I ask myself if I really want to. Wouldn’t I be braver, if I did? But . . . if my marriage is at an end . . . I want a proper finish. To tell her it’s alright. I don’t want it to just ebb out.’
‘Adrien . . . it hasn’t ebbed out.’
The moonlight showed the moisture on his eyelids. ‘I wouldn’t blame Michelle if she wanted it to have done. I wouldn’t blame her if she’d shacked up with Roland. I might do the same, if I was in her shoes. He’s handsome, he’s dignified . . . he still has all the hair on his bloody head. He has this soft, deep Irish accent, like rolling in caramel. I can’t help but think that, if some catastrophe trapped me with Roland and left my useless husband on the other side of the sea, I might roll around in caramel and thank my lucky stars for it.’
‘But you’re not in her shoes,’ said Hannah. ‘You’re in your own.’
Adrien took a long, composing breath. ‘And you,’ he said, with a touch of touché, ‘aren’t in the gunman’s.’
Hannah watched waves burst against the end of the breakwater. Above them the stars were shining, and the cliffs showed their backs to the moon.
‘We’re a pair of disasters, aren’t we?’ she said.
Adrien laughed.
‘But thank you, Adrien.’
‘For what?’
‘Having some belief in me.’
He looked surprised to be thanked for anything, but she was truly grateful for it.
‘You and I both need to face our demons,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘I might. For you, at least, not me.’
‘That wouldn’t be a favour I could promise to return.’
‘Doesn’t matter. What matters is to fix things.’
Adrien eyed her cautiously. ‘You’ve got something in mind, haven’t you?’
‘You won’t enjoy it,’ she said with a nod. ‘You’ll hate it, in fact. But that’s the nature of it, I suppose.’
In the morning, Hannah zigzagged between the beach’s many camps and chalets, summoning Adrien’s demons. The morning itself was no infernal one, for the sun shone unobstructed, warming her bare arms and glittering across the sea from headland to headland. In that light even the destruction along the shore looked picture
sque. Weeks of wind had sprinkled the ruined seafront with sand, and the sunshine winked off granules of shell amid the grit. Still Hannah was nervous. After she had organised everything and all that was required was Adrien’s presence, she hesitated in sight of their tent, where he sat in the shade sipping thistle tea.
She approached, and tried to sound jovial. ‘Are you ready, Adrien? Because it’s time.’
Adrien looked surprised, as if he had forgotten ever having agreed to this. Reluctantly, he rose and followed her to the edge of the beach, where she had arranged a grid of twenty deckchairs. In each sat a child, some very young, some nearly as old as Seb and Hiroko, the two of whom reclined in the back row like the bad kids in a class. Gathered to one side were several parents, waiting expectantly.
‘No,’ Adrien spat at once, sounding betrayed. ‘No, no, no! Hannah, how could you?’
She grabbed him to stop him from turning away.
‘Please, Adrien! These kids have got nothing here. They run around the beaches all day, frightened of the trees and frightened of wolves and frightened of their own imaginations. But at my merest suggestion that we should do this, they lit up! Their parents too! You’ll never have an easier class than this. Give them something.’
‘This is the last thing in the world,’ Adrien growled, ‘that I would have expected from somebody trying to help me.’
Hannah was no good at talking to audiences, but she knew she had to say something public now, to bind this one to Adrien. She hoped he’d forgive her eventually. ‘H-hello children,’ she announced, while Adrien went into a cower. ‘This is Mr Thomas, who’s kindly offered to teach you some . . . things. And, um, over to you, Mr Thomas.’
She stepped back and stood at his shoulder. Adrien said nothing, as tense as if he expected her to crack a whip off his back. The children began to fidget and stare into space. The parents muttered to one another. At the back of the class, Yasuo propped himself up on Hiroko’s shoulder, and was interested in everything on the beach except Adrien.
