Johnson climbed the rocks and rubbish-soggy pizza boxes, orange peels, beer cans-and stood up against the creviced pavement of the esplanade. It looked as if bombs had exploded there.
Out at sea nothing moved, but for the eternal sideways running of the waves.
At the beginning of the previous century, a steamboat had sailed across regularly from France, putting in by the pier, then a white confection like a bridal cake. The strange currents that beset this coast had made that the only safe spot. The fishing fleet had gone out from here too, this old part of the city-town, the roots of which had been there, it seemed, since Saxon times. Now the boats put off from the west end of Sandbourne, or at least they did so when the rest of Europe allowed it.
Johnson wondered whether it was worth the climb, awkward now with his leg, over the boarding and notices. By day there were no movements, no people. They were night dwellers very likely, eyes sore from skunk, skins scabrous from crack.
And by night, of course, this place would indeed be dangerous.
As he turned and started back along the shore, Johnson’s eye was attracted by something not the cloud-and-sea shades of the morning, lying at the very edge of the land. He took it at first for some unusual shell or sea-life washed ashore. Then decided it must be something manufactured, some gruesome modern fancy for Halloween, perhaps.
In fact, when he went down the beach and saw it clearly, lying there as if it had tried to clutch at the coast, kept its grip but let go of all else, he found it wasn’t plastic or rubber but quite real. A man’s hand, torn off raggedly just behind the wrist bone, a little of which stuck out from the bloated and discolouring skin.
Naturally he thought about it, the severed hand.
He had never, even in London, come across such an item. But then, probably, he’d never been in the right (wrong) place to do so.
Johnson imagined that one of the down-and-outs had killed another, for drugs or cash. Maybe even for a burger from the Alnite Caff.
He did wonder, briefly, if the near-starving dog might have liked to eat the hand. But there wasn’t much meat on a hand, was there?
That evening, after he had gone to the supermarket and walked all the way back along Bourne Road, he poured himself a Guinness and sat at his table in the little ‘study’ of the bungalow and wrote up his find in his journal. He had kept a journal ever since he started work in Staff Liaison. Case-notes, histories… people-cameos, whole bios sometimes.
Later he fried a couple of chops and ate them with a green salad.
Nothing on TV. He read Trollope until 11:36, then went to bed.
He dreamed of being in the sea, swimming with great strength and ability, although in reality he had always been an inadequate swimmer. In the dream he was aware of a dog nearby, but was not made afraid by this. Instead he felt a vague exhilaration, which on waking he labeled as a sort of puerile pleasure in unsafety. Physically he had long outgrown it. But there, deep in his own mind, perhaps not so?
The young man was leaning over his motorbike, adjusting something apparently. The action was reminiscent of a rider with his favourite steed, checking the animal for discomfort.
Johnson thought he had seen him before. He was what? Twenty-five, thirty? He had a thick shock of darkish fair hair, cut short the way they did now, and a lean face from which the summer tan was fading. In the sickly glare under the streetlight his clothes were good but ordinary. He had, Johnson thought, very long fingers, and his body was tall and almost athletic in build.
This was outside the pub they called in Sandbourne the “Biker Inn.”
Johnson didn’t know the make of the bike, but it was a powerful model, elegant.
Turning off Ship Street, Johnson went into the Cat In Clover. He wasn’t yet curious as to why he had noted the man with the bike. Johnson noted virtually everyone. An hour into the evening he did, however, recall where he had twice seen him before, which was in the same launderette Johnson himself frequented. Nice and clean then. Also perhaps, like Johnson, more interested in coming out to do the wash than in buying a machine.
During the rest of the week Johnson found he kept seeing the man he then named, for the convenience of the journal, Biker. The rather mundane region where Johnson lived was one of those village-in-city conurbations featured by London journalists writing on London -like Hampstead, for example, if without the dosh. You did get to be aware, indirectly, sometimes, of the locals, as they of you, perhaps. Johnson believed that in fact he wasn’t coincidentally and now constantly “bumping into” Biker, but that he had become aware of Biker. Therefore he noticed him now each time he saw him, whereas formerly he had frequently seen him without noticing, therefore without consciously seeing.
This kind of thing had happened before.
In the beginning, when in his teens, Johnson had thought it meant something profoundly important, particularly when it was a girl he abruptly kept on seeing-that was, noticing. Even in his thirties he had been misled by that idea, with Susan. He had realized, after their separation, that what had drawn him to her at first wasn’t love or sex but her own quirkiness and his observation of it. She had worked it out herself, eventually. In the final year of their life together she came to call those he especially studied (including those at Haine and Birch) his “prey.” “Which of your prey are you seeing tomorrow?” she would ask playfully.
Now grasping that it was some type of acuity in him that latched on to certain others in this fashion, Johnson had not an instant’s doubt that he had reacted differently to Biker.
So what was it then, with Biker? What had alerted Johnson there under the streetlamp on that moonless night?
During the next week, Johnson took his washing to the launderette about 6 p.m., and there Biker sat.
Biker was unloading his wash, but raised his eyes. They were very long eyes, extraordinarily clear, a pale, gleaming grey.
“Cold out,” said Johnson, dumping the washing.
“Yeah,” said Biker.
“Damn it, this machine isn’t working.”
“Yeah,” said Biker. He looked up again. “Try kicking it.”
“You’re joking,” said Johnson placidly.
“No,” said Biker, and he came over quite calmly, and did something astonishing. Which was he jumped straight upward with enormous agility and power, and fetched the washer the lightest but most expressive slap with his left foot. Landing, he was like a lion-totally co-ordinated, unfazed. While the machine, which had let out a rattling roar, now gulped straight into its cycle. Biker nodded and returned to his wash.
“Wow,” said Johnson. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“I owe you a drink. The girlfriend’s refused to come round till I get these bloody sheets done.”
Biker glanced at him.
Johnson saw there was neither reluctance nor interest in the smooth, lean face, hardly any expression at all. The eyes were only mercury and white china.
“I’ll be in the Victory,” he said.
Once Biker left, Johnson, not to seem too eager, stayed ten minutes with his washing. He had chosen the crank machine on purpose. And what a response he had got! Biker must be an acrobat. At the very least a trained dancer.
Perhaps, Johnson thought, he shouldn’t indulge this. Perhaps it was unwise. But then, he usually did indulge his observation. It had never led to anything bad. Except once.
Had being stabbed and disabled made him reckless? He thought not. Johnson wasn’t reckless. And he could afford the price of a couple of drinks.
When he got into the pub, the place was already full. The music machine filled the air with huge thuddings, while on every side other machines for gambling flashed like a firework display.
He looked round, then went to the bar and ordered a drink, whisky for the cold. He could already see Biker wasn’t there.
Which might mean he had distrusted Johnson, or that something else had called him away. Or anything, really.
Johnso
n was not unduly disappointed. Sometimes not knowing was the more intriguing state. Besides, going out of the door he heard a man say, as if signaling to him, “Yeah, there’s something out by the old pier sometimes. I seen it too. Big animal. Dolphin p’rhaps. But it was dark.”
Yet another week after the exchange with Biker, Johnson was leaving the smaller Sainsbury, near the Odeon, when he glimpsed his quarry, bikeless, driving by in a dark blue BMW.
Johnson knew he would thereafter keep his eyes open also for the car, whose number-plate he had at once memorized. He was sure, inevitably, that he had often seen the car as well. He was struck by an idea, too, that Biker, in some strange, low-key way, wished to be visible-the bike itself, the car, the habit of the launderette. And that in turn implied (perhaps) a wish to be less visible, or non-visible, on other occasions.
With his groceries Johnson picked up one of the local papers. He liked to glance at it; the doings of the city of Sandbourne amused and puzzled him. Accordingly he presently read in it that another late-season holiday maker had gone missing. There had apparently been two the previous summer, who vanished without a trace. Keen swimmers, they were thought to have fallen foul of the wild currents east of the town. The new case, however, one Alice Minerva McClunes, had been a talented lady from New York. On the south-east coast to visit a niece, she had gone out with her camera and sketch-pad and failed to return. “She wanted to stay on the beach,” the presumably woebegone niece reported, “till moonrise. It was the full moon.” Alice was, it seemed, known for her photography of moonlight on various things.
This small article stayed intransigently with Johnson for the rest of the evening. He reread it twice, not knowing quite why.
Johnson the observer had made no friendships in Sandbourne, but he had by now gained a few acquaintances to say “hello” to.
He went to the local library the next day, then to the fishmarket above the beach. There, in between the little shops, he met the man he knew as Reg. And then Biker appeared walking along from the east end of the town, from the direction actually of the eldritch pier. And Reg called out to him, “Hi, mate. Okay?” and Biker smiled and was gone.
As one might, Johnson said, “You know him? I’ve seen him around-nice bike. Drives a car, too, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, that’s Jason. Don’t know his other name. Lives in one of the rock-houses. Got a posh IT job in London -only goes up a couple of times a week. Oh, and once a month, three days and nights in Nores.” Reg pronounced this neighbouring, still parochial, town in the proper local way as Nor-ez. “Bit of money, yes.”
“A rock-house? They’re the ones built into the cliff, aren’t they?”
“Yep. Caves in back with pools of seawater. Pretty trendy now. Not so good when we get a freak high tide. Flooded out last year, all of ’em. Only, he was off at Nores-three days every time. Thought he might come back to see the damage but he never did. When I saw him he just says, I’ll just buy a new carpet. Okay for some.”
“Yes,” said Johnson regretfully.
But his mind was busy springing off along the last stretch of habitable Sandbourne, mentally inspecting the houses set back into the cliffs. Smugglers had put them to good use in the 1800s. Now renovated and “smart,” they engaged the wealthy and artistic. He was curious (of course he was) as to which house was Jason’s-Jason, who, after all, must be rich. He thought of the pools of sea that lay behind the facades, and the great stoops of bending cliff that overhung them. Johnson had seen photographs of these structures in History of Sandbourne.
He visualized acrobatic Jason leaping straight down into a glimmering, glittery, nocturnal pool, descending like a spear, wriggling effortless and subtle as an eel out through some pipe or fissure, and so into the black-emerald bowel of the sea. He pictured those cold silver eyes under the glazes of blind green water, and the whip of the two legs, working as one, like a merman’s tail. But somehow, too, Johnson pictured Jason as a sort of dog-hairy, unrecognizable, though swimming-as if there had been a dream of this, and now he, Johnson, recalled. As gradually he had remembered, was remembering all the rest, the sightings in launderette, car-all, everything.
Turquoise, blood-orange, daylight snagged the drips of nets under the skeletal arm of the pier. Bottle-green light gloomed through rotted struts, shining up the mud, debris, the crinkle of water like pleated glass…
And the day lifted to its zenith, and folded away. It was November now. Behind the west end, the sky bled through paintwork themes of amber and golden sienna. The sea blued. Sidelit, long tidal runners, like snakes with triangular pale indigo heads, swarmed inward on the land. Darkness began to stir in the east.
They forgot, people, how the dark began there, eastward, just as light did. The sun, the moon, rose always from the east. But so did night.
Never mind that. Soon the moon would be full again.
Under the pier, the mind was lying in its shell of skull. As dark filled in on dark, dark was in the brain, smooth and spontaneously ambient as the ink of a squid.
Under the pier.
Overhead the ruin, and the ancient ballroom, which a full moon might light better than sixteen chandeliers.
Something not a wave moved through the water.
Perhaps a late swimmer, indifferent to the cold.
***
Jason lived in the house behind the courtyard. It had high gates that were, most of the time, kept shut and presumably locked. A craning tree of a type unknown to Johnson grew up the wall, partly hiding with its bare, twisted slender branches an upper-storey window. Johnson discovered the correct house by knocking at another in the group, asking innocently for Jason, the man with the bike. An uninterested young woman said the man with the bike lived at the one with the courtyard. She didn’t want to know Johnson’s business. Johnson guessed the BMW would be parked in one of the garages above that corresponded with the rock terrace. The bike, according to the woman, was kept in the yard.
Having walked past the relevant house, he walked back and up Pelling Road to the clifftop. He sat on a bench there, looking down at the winter shore and the greyling sea. From here, away along the saucer curve of the earth, he could make out the pier like a thing of matchsticks. They said any storm destroyed always another piece of it. And yet there it still was, incredibly enduring.
He had visited the library again, looking at back numbers of the local papers. There had been a few disappearances mentioned in those past years he had viewed. But he supposed only tax-paying citizens or visitors would be counted. The coast’s flotsam might well vanish without a trace.
That night the moon came up like a white plate in the tree at the end of the bungalow’s small fenced garden.
The disk wasn’t yet full, but filling out; in another couple of nights it would be perfect.
Johnson put down the Graham Greene novel he was reading and went out into the dusk.
Sea-influencing, blood-influencing, mind-influencing moon.
He thought of Jason, perhaps in his rich-man’s house just above the beach, behind the high gates and the yard, inside stone walls with the sea in the back of them.
By midnight Johnson was in bed asleep. He dreamed clearly and concisely of standing inside the cliffs, in a huge cave that was pearl white, lit by a great flush of brilliance at either end. And the far end opened to the sea, long thick rollers combering in, and where they struck the inner floor of the cave, white chalk sprayed up in the surf. But then out of the sea a figure came, riding fast on a motorbike. He was clad in denim and had short and lustrous hair, but as he burst through the cave, brushing Johnson with the rush of his passage, anyone would have noticed that the biker had the face of a dog, and in his parted jaws, rather delicately, he held a man’s severed hand.
Waking from this, Johnson found he had sat bolt upright.
There was a dull, groaning ache in his lower gut and back, which he experienced off and on since the stabbing. He was barely aware of it.
Johnson was thinking of the c
hanges the moon brought. And how something so affected might well share an affinity with the lunar-tidal sea. But also Johnson thought of an old acquaintance of his, fussy Geoffry Prentiss, who had been fascinated by the sightings, detailed in papers, of strange fauna, such as the Beast of Bodmin. He’d coined a term for such a phenomenon: warg. An acronym, WARG stood for Weird Animal Reported Generally.
With a slow, inevitable movement, not really disturbing, Johnson got up, went into the bathroom, and presently returned to put on his clothes and boots.
By the time he reached St. Luke’s, the clock showed ten minutes to 3 a.m. There had been almost no one on the upper streets, just a young couple kissing. Soon though, a surreal distant pounding revealed the area of the nearest nightclubs, and outside the Jester a trio of youths were holding up another, who was being impressively sick. Compared to London, Sandbourne was a mild place. Or so it had seemed.
He wondered, when he turned east along the promenade, under the high lamps already strung with their Christmas neons of holly and stars, if he were sleepwalking. He considered this with complete calm, analytically. Never before had he taken his study of others to such an extremity. Had he in fact had a breakdown, or in more honest words, gone mad?
But the night was keen. He felt and smelled and saw and experienced the night. This was not a dream. He walked in the world.
The moon had vanished westward in cloud, as if in pretense of modesty. Beyond the line of land, the sea was jet-black under jet-black sky, yet the pale fringes of wavelets came in and in. Constant renewal. Repetition of the most elaborate and harmonious kind. Or the most relentless kind.
In the end, the seas would devour all the landmasses of the earth. The waters would cover them.
Several elderly men, drunk or drugged, sprawled on a bench and swore at him as he passed, less maliciously than in a sort of greeting for which, by now, they lacked other words.
Gulls, which never slept, circled high above the town, lit underneath translucently by the lamps.
Full MoonCity Page 9
