by Lisa Jewell
Kirsty returned, offered him a paper bag of Cola Cubes and some of his coins. He took a sweet. She put her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sharpness of the sun. ‘Two weeks,’ she said with a sigh.
‘Exactly.’
‘Shall we go and see if they’re showing anything half-decent at the cinema?’
Gray nodded and followed her away from the seafront towards the high road. The cinema was housed in a damp, one-storey breeze-block cave just off the main road. It showed one film at a time and seated a hundred people.
‘Cliffhanger,’ he read from the poster outside. ‘Fuck’s sake. I’ve already seen it.’
Kirsty shrugged. ‘I haven’t.’
‘Well, I don’t want to see it again. It’s all about not knowing how it ends.’
Gray looked closer to see if the programme was set to change at all over the next two weeks. Behind him stood his sister, sucking a Cola Cube, one hand in the pocket of her cagoule, entirely oblivious to the young man who’d just stopped on the other side of the street, his eye caught first by her long legs and then by the way her brown hair fell in damp waves around her face, framing high cheekbones and narrow brown eyes, her pretty mouth clamped around a sweet, sucking hard on it, her gaze neutral, placid, soft.
He continued to stare at Kirsty as she followed Gray towards the high street. He had inventoried everything about her by the time they turned the corner. Her big feet, slightly turned in. Her bust, larger than expected, cocooned beneath her shapeless jumper. Her face, devoid of make-up, natural, unlike so many girls his age. No earrings. A paper bag of sweets. The awkwardness of her gait as she followed behind that boy (her brother? There was a resemblance and she didn’t seem to have any need to be physically close to him).
Kirsty and Gray continued on their way and the man thought about following them, but in a town this small their paths would be sure to cross again so he walked on, a small smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, as though enjoying a private joke with himself.
Eight
Alice feels strange in her room at the top of the house. All day yesterday she’d felt strange because that man was sitting on the beach in the rain. Now she is feeling strange because that same man is in her shed. His presence is benign but somehow unnerving. The emptiness of him. All the spaces and gaps. But more than that, the pure maleness of him. Somehow his lack of identity has distilled him down to an essence of raw masculinity. The fact of his gender is irrefutable and Alice … well, Alice has not had sex for a long, long time and Alice is a woman who likes to have sex. Her whole life has been shaped – virtually destroyed – by her sexual desires.
She pulls on her reading glasses and she positions a map of Saint-Tropez under the anglepoise lamp. She has already sketched out the pieces of the rose petals and she slices through them now, slowly, adeptly, with a scalpel. The thought of Saint-Tropez, of steamer chairs and chilled champagne by an aqua pool, of waiters in white linen and tanned men in swimming trunks, is stirring her. She can almost hear the background murmur of muted conversation, feel the hands of some unknown lover rubbing cream into her shoulders, and soon enough those anonymous hands become the hands of the man in the shed and Alice is thinking of those same hands as they used a knife to saw effortlessly through the thick slab of farmhouse toast she’d made him earlier. Good hands. Good wrists. And then she is thinking of all of him, because clean and dry, in Kai’s hoodie, he cuts an impressive figure. Not too tall, probably just an inch or two taller than her, but solid. No weak points in his physiology. And his hazel eyes, soft with need and confusion.
Apart from that moment, when she’d suggested taking him to the police station. She’d seen something entirely different pass over him then. A wash of fear and anger, gone before she’d had a chance to analyse it, leaving her wondering if she’d imagined it.
She pushes the thought of him from her mind. Men are no longer on her agenda. Her children are her priority now. Her children and her job. She excises the petal-shaped pieces of map from the sheet and places them side by side. Avenue des Canebiers. Chemin de l’Estagnet. Rue Cavaillon. Names that talk of palm trees and open-top cars, hotels with striped awnings and valet parking. She shouldn’t feel jealous, though. She has so much here. There are even palm trees on the other side of the bay. Two of them.
A ringing of the brass bell above her front door below makes her jump slightly. This is followed by the clatter of three sets of dog claws against the wooden stairs and some exuberant barking. She peers over her desk and looks downwards where she sees the distinctive hennaed topknot of Derry Dynes.
‘Coming!’ she calls out. She has to part the dogs forcefully at the front door to reach the handle and then hold them back to prevent them from knocking Derry down.
‘Hello, friend,’ she says. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
Derry is peering over Alice’s shoulder with body language that doesn’t appear very social. ‘I saw Jasmine earlier,’ she says. ‘She told me that man is in your house.’
Alice sighs and pushes some hair behind her ear. She’s angry with herself for not briefing the children to keep Frank a secret. She doesn’t mind Derry knowing, but if anyone else found out …
‘He’s not in the house,’ she snaps. ‘He’s in the shed.’
She holds the door open and the dogs back so that Derry can pass through.
‘You’re mad,’ Derry says, looking this way and that as she passes through to the living room. ‘Jasmine says he has no memory.’
She turns, satisfied that ‘the man’ is not in the living room, and heads for the kitchen.
Alice sighs again and follows her. ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds.’
‘I told you not to get involved,’ Derry says. ‘You said you wouldn’t.’ She peers through the window in the back door across the courtyard towards the shed. ‘Christ, Al, what if the school find out? What if …’ She stops and sighs. ‘Come on. After last year, Al. You can’t just bring strange men into the house.’
Alice knows exactly what Derry’s talking about, but she’s not in the mood to hear it. ‘I told you. He’s not in the house. He’s in the shed. And we kept the back door double-locked last night.’
‘That’s not the point. It all sounds really dodgy. This whole “memory loss” thing. Sounds like a scam.’
Now Alice tuts. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. It is not a scam. You are such a conspiracy theorist.’
‘Is he out there now?’ she asks, pulling two of Alice’s mugs from a hook and flicking on the kettle.
‘As far as I know,’ says Alice. ‘I haven’t heard him leave.’
‘Get him in here,’ says Derry, dropping a green tea teabag into her mug and an Earl Grey into Alice’s.
Alice doesn’t move for a moment.
‘Go on,’ says Derry. ‘Tell him the kettle’s on.’
‘You do know I’m supposed to be working, don’t you?’
‘Later,’ she says, ‘you can work later. This won’t take long.’
Alice doesn’t argue. The basis of her friendship with Derry is that Derry is always right.
She touches her hair before opening the back door, checking that it’s in place. She cups her hand to her mouth and breathes into it; she grimaces. Tea breath. The curtains are open in the shed and she knocks gently at the door. ‘Frank,’ she says, ‘it’s me. Alice. Just taking a break from work, wondered if you fancied coming in for a cuppa.’
There’s no reply, so she knocks again. ‘Frank?’ She pushes open the door and peers through the gap. The bed is made, Kai’s hoodie and joggers are folded into a neat pile on the end. The room is empty.
‘Well,’ she says to Derry a moment later, ‘looks like you can stop freaking out. He’s gone.’
‘Gone, gone?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. She looks around the kitchen, notices the mug she’d made his tea in earlier, sitting on the draining board, upside down. She scouts for a note of some kind, but there’s nothing. Sadness plummet
s through her; she feels heavy-limbed with disappointment. And then she feels concern, a burn of anxiety and fear. She thinks of his hazel eyes, his woolly schoolboy hair, his utter vulnerability. She cannot imagine him out there, alone. She really cannot.
‘Well,’ says Derry, ‘let’s hope so. The last thing you need.’
‘Yes,’ says Alice, ‘he probably was.’
He feels as though he’s on a conveyor belt, being carried along by external forces. He feels like a sack of dust being dragged down the street. He sees a bench ahead and he veers towards it, almost getting knocked over by a woman on a bike with a pannier full of fruit. She looks at him strangely and he wonders if maybe he looks as mad as he feels.
As he lay on the bed in Alice’s shed after breakfast this morning he had experienced not memories as such, but strong sensations, much like the one he’d had when Alice had suggested taking him to the police station. Terrible dark waves of doom. A sense that something somewhere was horribly broken and that there was nothing he could do to fix it. But more than that, there were flashes of bright whiteness, like the ricochet of sunlight off a passing car, momentarily blinding and unbalancing, and behind the flashes were pictures, he knew, pieces of the jigsaw, if he could only see them.
He needs to keep walking. He needs to find the thing that brought him to this northern seaside town. But as he gets to his feet he has another flash of whiteness and falls back on to the bench. He squeezes his eyes closed tight, desperately trying to find the edges of the hidden image. And then he sees it. A barley-twist pole, a pastel-coloured horse, a girl with brown hair; she goes up, she goes down, she’s smiling and waving and then she’s gone.
He laughs at the power of it, after all these hours of nothing. ‘Shit!’ he says to himself. ‘Shit!’
He jumps up from the bench, feeling himself drawn towards the seafront across the road. He looks down at the crescent of the beach, empty on this brisk April day, and tries to pull something from the view, some essence of the moment he just remembered. But nothing comes and he heads down the steps built into the seawall. He runs his hand down the painted metal handrail; a few flakes of peeling paint come off under his grasp. He fits his feet carefully into each narrow step, breathing in the smell of fish-guts and brine. Has he been here before? Is it possible? And if he has, then why? And when? And who is the girl on the carousel, the smiling, beautiful girl with chestnut hair, lost in her moment, oblivious to his eyes upon her?
At the thought of the girl he feels another wave of doom wash over him. His body, no longer his own it seems, reacts by regurgitating the eggs and toast Alice cooked for him earlier on. Afterwards he is shaky and weak. He returns to the position he’d adopted during his first hours in Ridinghouse Bay, on his haunches, on the beach, staring out to sea as though waiting for the ocean to bring him something.
Nine
1993
After the damp start to their holiday, there followed three days of warm sunshine. And sunshine meant days on the beach. Beneath Rabbit Cottage, the beach was narrow and gravelly, full of glittering rock pools and fishing boats. As children they’d spent their days down there, picking their way across the slimy rocks in plastic boots and sou’westers. But now they were older they preferred to take towels and sun cream, a windbreak and folding chairs and walk a quarter of a mile across town to the wider sandy beach below the high street. Here there was a café hewn from the cliff face serving fast food and ice creams and beer in plastic cups. There was a shower and a lifeguard and various rides for small children. It wasn’t exactly Blackpool Pleasure Beach but it was fine for a small town like Ridinghouse Bay. So here they were, Tuesday morning, not yet warm enough for swimwear, Tony wearing a short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned over denim shorts, Pam in cycling shorts and a baggy T-shirt with a cartoon dog on the front, Gray in Hawaiian-print surfer shorts and Kirsty in a black halter-neck bikini top and a denim skirt. And there he was. That guy. Gray couldn’t quite think of him as a ‘man’. He looked around eighteen, Gray supposed. But unlike himself, he was not shackled to a family.
He’d been there on Sunday, and yesterday too: alone, stretched out on a white towel in black swimming trunks, black sunglasses, a paperback novel, a Walkman. Every now and then he would sit up, wrap his arms around his legs and stare out into the sea, moodily. He was sitting close enough for Gray to be able to see the towelling indents in the skin of his back, close enough to catch the smell of aftershave on every breeze, to hear the tinny beat of Cypress Hill through his earphones. It was a matter of a few inches, his infringement of their personal space, but Gray could feel it in every fibre of his being, like a Chinese burn.
The man stood up now, his back facing them, and stretched ostentatiously, letting each set of well-formed muscles ripple in turn. Then, feigning nonchalance, he rubbed at the stubble on his chin as if he alone possessed sufficient testosterone to produce such rough facial hair. Slowly he walked past them, and headed for the beachfront café where he bought himself a small beer and drank it standing up, his elbow against the bar, his legs crossed at an angle, his gaze fixed unabashedly on Kirsty.
‘I see your admirer’s back,’ said Tony, talking over the top of a Daily Express.
Kirsty shrugged and looked at the sand. ‘He’s not my admirer,’ she said unconvincingly.
Tony just smirked and went back to his newspaper.
‘He’s very good-looking, Kirst,’ said Pam, and Kirsty shushed furiously at her.
‘He can’t hear,’ said Pam. ‘He’s way over at the bar.’
‘Looks like a creep to me,’ said Gray.
Pam looked at him admonishingly. ‘No need to take everything so seriously, Graham.’
‘I’m not “taking things seriously”. I’m just expressing an opinion. I just think he looks like a creep. That’s all.’
Gray saw him from the corner of his eye, crumpling up his empty beer cup inside his fist, letting it drop into a bin, as though demonstrating again his superior levels of male hormone. He was good-looking, Gray could concede that. Good-looking and fit. Only a year or so older than Gray but far removed in degrees of physical maturity. But Gray had to question his motives. Why Kirsty? There were girls scattered across the beach, girls matching this man’s levels of preened attractiveness, girls in proper bikinis, girls with highlights and big earrings and pink lipstick. Girls not sitting with their mum and dad and big brother eating cockles out of a plastic cup with a toothpick.
The man returned slowly to his white towel, passing within inches of Kirsty as he did so, and Gray had to control an impulse to stick out his foot and trip him over. In fact he extracted a few moments’ pleasure from picturing the scenario and replaying it in his mind over and over until he found himself stifling a chuckle.
‘What?’ said Kirsty.
‘Oh, nothing.’
And no, Gray wasn’t jealous. What would Gray have to be jealous of? Gray was tall, reasonably good-looking in a boyish kind of way, somewhere between slim and average. Girls told him he was cute. Girls told him all sorts of things in fact. Mainly about other boys, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that he had their confidences. Girls liked Gray and he liked girls. Sometimes probably not in the way that the girls thought he liked them. Sometimes probably in a slightly darker way, under his covers, alone at night. But still, this guy, he reckoned, this guy wouldn’t know how to talk to a girl if his life depended on it. Gray wasn’t sure he could talk, full stop. He looked like the kind of guy who could grunt. Beat his chest. At a push.
And it was at the very moment that this thought passed through Gray’s head that the guy turned, looked at him, looked at Kirsty, looked at their parents and said in a voice straight from a James Bond movie: ‘Lovely when the sun’s out, isn’t it?’
Every member of the family turned like startled animals at this unexpected conversational opening. His mother put her hand to her collarbone and said, in a voice that Gray had never heard her use before, ‘Why, yes, it is.’
He saw K
irsty flash his mum a terrible look and then cast her gaze downwards, her face burning red.
‘You here on your holidays?’ he asked, somewhat superfluously.
Tony nodded. ‘Up from Surrey,’ he said, which was Dad’s posh way of not saying Croydon. ‘How about you?’
‘Harrogate. I’m here to keep my aunt company. Her husband just died and she couldn’t face coming alone.’
‘Oh,’ said Pam, her hand moving to her heart, ‘your poor aunt. And good for you. Not many young boys would sacrifice their summer holidays for a relative.’
‘Well, she’s a good person. She’s been there for me a lot. Plus, well, her house is kind of amazing.’ He smiled then and pointed across the bay towards the other side of town where the houses got bigger and bigger the further you went until his finger came to rest upon what looked like a stately home: pale walls and tall windows, surrounded by poplars and yew trees.
‘Oh!’ said Pam. ‘We always wondered who lived in that one, didn’t we, Tony?’
Tony nodded. ‘Thought it might be royalty.’
‘Not quite. My uncle made his fortune out of pig farming. Bacon, basically.’ He smiled. ‘And that’s just their summer home. You should see their place in the country.’
Gray’s parents nodded reverentially.
‘Oh,’ said the man, moving towards them, his hand outstretched. ‘My name’s Mark, by the way. Mark Tate.’
‘Nice to meet you, Mark.’ Tony wheezed slightly as he leaned forwards in his deckchair to reach Mark’s hand. ‘I’m Antony Ross – Tony. This is Pam, my wife; Graham, my son; and Kirsty, my daughter.’
