In the Approaches
Nicola Barker
Nicola Barker’s readers are primed to expect surprises, but her tenth novel delivers mind-meld on a metaphysical scale. From quiet beginnings in the picturesque English seaside enclave of Pett Level, ‘In The Approaches’ ultimately constructs its own anarchic city-state on the previously undiscovered common ground between G.K. Chesterton and Philip K. Dick. On the one hand, this is an old-fashioned romantic comedy of fused buttocks, shrunken heads and Irish-Aboriginal saints; on the other it’s Barker’s wildest and most haunting book since 2007’s Booker Prize-shortlisted ‘Darkmans’.Following previous celebrations of the enduring allure of the posted letter (’Burley Cross Postbox Theft’) and the pre-lapsarian innocence of pre-Twitter celebrity (Booker-longlisted ‘The Yips’), this concluding instalment of Barker’s subliminally affiliated ‘digital trilogy’ imagines a basis for the internet in Catholic theology. Set in a 1984 which seems almost as distantly located in the past as Orwell’s was in the future, ‘In the Approaches’ offers a captivating glimpse of something more shocking than any dystopia – the possibility of faith.
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Copyright (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
Fourth Estate
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This eBook edition first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Nicola Barker 2014
Nicola Barker asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007583706
Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007583713
Version 2015-03-31
Contents
Cover (#u6d09db31-bc3a-5458-b356-4eb24018b84b)
Title Page (#ulink_d5d0ce87-a3f7-56d2-8558-dd642eded80b)
Copyright (#ulink_1d57733b-93dd-561d-93a1-2b39fce73673)
Dedication (#ulink_5a2e7679-277d-56e6-bda5-8fe47c0a69c7)
1 Miss Carla Hahn (#ulink_67cabd37-5e66-54f1-a0ed-506e0e6a7d21)
2 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ulink_1289e9d2-0871-5991-8b36-4b8d55a3aec7)
3 Miss Carla Hahn (#ulink_8f0f5195-ea18-5563-bf5d-3734fa1105d5)
4 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ulink_3cd69b63-ebe4-546a-915b-6af49ec2b7fb)
5 Miss Carla Hahn (#ulink_6410458a-a7ec-5c8e-b3e4-befead4a0af9)
6 Teobaldo (#ulink_3fd11579-930c-557c-b743-9378baf0ba7f)
7 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ulink_f0fe18b1-d0b3-54c9-98ca-51a5c61873ae)
8 Miss Carla Hahn (#ulink_e7c4b2fc-faf1-507c-bec7-86dcd2553509)
9 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ulink_d3fc3535-ba7b-53ad-bb4b-fb031503601c)
10 Miss Carla Hahn (#ulink_95ebe723-0748-5462-9913-6070ae758f72)
11 Mr Clifford Bickerton (#ulink_e39bb9d7-3982-5d25-9c26-d535f476c1c8)
12 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ulink_e6585b8c-26e5-58f4-8452-6a9a949ca020)
13 Miss Carla Hahn (#ulink_dfc9fb00-c207-562a-b1eb-d39973d73fb9)
14 Teobaldo (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Teobaldo (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Mr Clifford Bickerton (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Mr Franklin D. Huff
24 Miss Carla Hahn
25 Mr Franklin D. Huff
26 Teobaldo (#litres_trial_promo)
27 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
28 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
29 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Mr Clifford Bickerton (#litres_trial_promo)
31 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
32 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Mr Clifford Bickerton (#litres_trial_promo)
34 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
35 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
36 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
37 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
38 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
39 Mr Clifford Bickerton (#litres_trial_promo)
40 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
41 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
42 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
43 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
44 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
45 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
46 Miss Alys Jane Drury (and Baldo!) (#litres_trial_promo)
47 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
48 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
49 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
50 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
51 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
52 Miss Carla Hahn (#litres_trial_promo)
53 Mr Franklin D. Huff (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Nicola Barker (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
For my dear friend, Claire Clifton;
Hastings’ favourite Floridian
1
Miss Carla Hahn (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
‘Well I suppose as we must all seem very dull and pedestrian to such a bold and cosmopolitan gentleman as the likes of our Mr Franklin B. Huff!’ Mrs Barrow ruminates, borderline resentful, as I hand over a crisp, ten pound note and she shoves it – unacknowledged – into the pocket of her pristine housecoat. ‘What with all his escapades amongst them hordes of filthy banditos and drug-smugglers and what-not in the dusty prairies of Mexicano.’
‘Mr Franklin D. Huff,’ I correct her.
‘He was only telling me the other day as how he keeps a collection of shrunken heads,’ she continues, eyes widening. ‘Stores ’em in an old suitcase, he does. No word of a lie, Carla! Thinks as they’re historical artlifacts!’ she snorts. ‘I says, “Wouldn’t those be the actual heads of real-life dead folk, Mr Huff? Isn’t that a sort of sacrelig?” But he just lowers his book and peers at me over his spectacles, all lofty-like. “It’s the culture there, Mrs Barrow. They have a different way of going about things. Everything’s fast and loose. Life is cheap.”
‘“The men are men and the women are glad of it!” I jokes, but he just returns to his reading, face sour as a slapped arse. So I says, “It must all seem very dull and pedestrian here in Pett Level to a chap such as yourself, Mr Huff, what with all your adventurings amongst them buckaroos and rancheros and the shrunken heads and what-not …” and he says, “I can’t pretend I’m not finding it a little flat, Mrs Barrow, a tad wispy and windswept and prarochial for my tastes, perhaps.”’
As Mrs Barrow finishes speaking we both gaze up from the bus-stop, in unison, towards the large, concrete block of the old Look Out which crowns the top end of Toot Rock. It is here that Mr Franklin D. Huff is currently sitting, in glorious isolation, fully suited and booted, intermittently gusted by the sea wind, partaking of a picnic lunch.
‘They say as he “went native” out amongst all them strumpets and gunsels,’ Mrs Barrow murmurs, squinting, ominously, into the eternally drab yet still pitifully hopeful early autumn light, ‘but I find that hard to believe, Carla, when I sees him of a morning, sitting on the balcony in his socks and his braces, smoking his pipe like one of those right and proper gentlemen straight off the cover of an old sewing pattern.’
‘Who says that, exactly?’ I ask, frowning.
‘I beg yours?’
‘Who says he—?’
‘Them Sullivan boys down at the New Beach Club for one,’ Mrs Barrow interrupts. ‘Seems as he’s got his-self temporary membership,’ she snorts, ‘by hook or by crook …’
She gives me a significant look. ‘Glory O’Dowd says as how he drank up their whole stock of gin in the first week after Mrs Huff left. On the second week he comes out in hives. Both cheeks was covered!’ She chuckles. ‘I thought, That’s the gin, that is! Mother’s Ruin! But I kept it schtum as your old dad would say.’
She taps her lips with a thick, brown, heavily calloused finger.
‘You mentioned that he’d broken the dining table,’ I interject, ‘and a chair in the living room?’
Mrs Barrow promptly removes the finger. ‘I’ve never known a man so accident-prone!’ she gasps. ‘This morning I heard a yell as I was hanging out the washing. I rushes round there, Carla, and Mr Huff – as God is my witness – is lying flat on his face in the middle of the allotment, his head in the last of the season’s cabbages. Turns out as he tripped in a badger hole! Sprained his wrist! I says, “Did you put out them monkey nuts for the badgers last night, Mr Huff? You know them’s the rules at Mulberry Cottage. Miss Hahn is very particular on the monkey nuts being put out. She has herself an arrangement with them badgers, Mr Huff, and they don’t likes it one bit if gets itself broke.”’
She shakes her head, forlornly. ‘I mean there was holes dug all over the lawn, Carla! The leeks was all pulled up! It was chaos – pure chaos! But he just cusses and rolls about, belly-aching like a big girl! I mean imagine a man such as that surviving in the tundra, Carla, where there’s no laws and no pavements and no manners and no taps? Doesn’t bear thinking of!’
‘The dining table …’ I persist.
‘Later on I see as he’s thrown some old soup tins, a fly paper and a broken milk bottle into the flower bed by the little girl’s shrine,’ she adds, scowling. ‘I thought, Well that’s as why you ended up arse-over-tit, Mr Huff! Shrunken heads or no! You don’t need to be messing around with forces beyond your ken, my friend. The tundra’s your business, Mr Huff, but we has our own ways of going about things up here on Toot Rock. Wispy and prarochial, indeed! Ignore ’em at your peril, sir!’
She shakes her head, scowling.
‘I suppose I should have a quick word with him,’ I murmur, registering the hungry grumble of the Rye bus on the Fairlight Road as Mrs Barrow takes out a scarf and ties it around her head, forming a small knot under the chin and pulling the two ends tight with such a jerk that one might almost imagine the cosmopolitan Mr Huff’s head compressed between them.
‘I won’t pretend as I’m not prone to having the odd grumble about the quality of the furniture in Mulberry,’ she confides. ‘I know as it has historical value, Carla, and all the rest of it’ – she raises a jaundiced brow – ‘but it’s just a pile of old driftwood and matchsticks for the most part. Even so, how one middle-aged man on his lonesome-ownsome can cause so much mess and mayhem is quite beyond me, I swear!’
She reaches out her hand towards the oncoming bus and it slows to a gradual halt with a blood-curdlingly cacophonous squeal of brakes, as if each of her calloused fingers has summoned a banshee from between its wheels.
‘All as I can say is: I hope his poor wife paid you the full deposit – in cold hard cash – before she upped and ran off!’ Mrs Barrow barks over the engine noise, then clambers on board. I pass over her old shopping trolley. It has a tricky wheel on the right-hand side which is sometimes given to seizing up. She grabs it, gives the offending wheel a practised kick, then disappears into the bus with a sharp – and suitably conclusive – bantam-like cluck.
2
Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
In the end it was Carla Hahn who approached me. I knew the only way to draw her in – the only way – would be to ignore her completely. It had taken six weeks, in total. I was sitting on top of the gun emplacement eating a stale, unbuttered roll and a jar of pickled walnuts. She was slightly out of breath after cycling up. I’d seen her from atop my airy lookout talking to Mrs Barrow at the request bus-stop on the Sea Road. Mrs Barrow – like so many of the permanent residents on Toot Rock, not to mention those of Pett Level in the flatlands below (although the weekenders, I confess, are of a different complexion altogether) – appears to hail from an indeterminate epoch. She seems to have no presentiment whatsoever that she’s living in a modern age: the 1980s for heaven’s sake!
This morning, as she skivvied, we had an extraordinary discussion about the Home Computing Revolution. She’d gleaned via the elusive Mr Barrow’s tabloid rag (Mr Barrow is Toot Rock’s very own smooth-skinned McCavity; he may only ever be apprehended as an absence) that something called the ‘Apple Mackintosh’ was, as of this very day, to be made available, for money, in shops, to the general public. She was unable to comprehend how or why this much heralded object would be in any way better or more useful than a standard typewriter: ‘And they only ever as write out bills to torment us poor working folk with those!’ she muttered. I silently held up my book. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ she grumbled. ‘Words is words is words is words.’
‘Well, thank goodness Trollope and De Quincey weren’t of your blinkered mind-set, Mrs Barrow!’ I quipped, then went on to laboriously explain the demarcation between mechanical, electronic, analogue and digital technologies – even drawing a little diagram on the inside back cover of my jotter. I cogently summarized Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication and Moore’s Law in what I hoped were layman’s terms. I said, ‘This is the Third Industrial Revolution, Mrs Barrow. You are witness to the genesis of a new era: the Information Age – the paperless office, the revolutionary concept of information sharing. This is bigger than people walking on the moon,’ I said. ‘One day our entire lives – everything, literally everything: transport, personal hygiene, sex – will be digitized.’
As Mrs Barrow brushed out and then re-set the fire I explained how I’d been posted as a foreign correspondent to California during the late 1960s and how it’d been – by a lucky coincidence – the fertile breeding ground, the hub, of all these extraordinary, nay game-changing hypotheses. I told her how the scientists had discovered a way of sending letters to each other via computer: digital letters! Mrs Barrow paid great heed as she flitted about the cottage – a spry grey squirrel in pleated skirt and pop socks – with her bucket, her broom and her mop. Then, once I’d completed my lecture, she placed her hands on her hips, laboriously cleared her throat and said, ‘I remember as when they invented the ballpoint pen, Mr Huff. Everyone making a big old fuss about it, they was. Now it’s just something and nothing. I’m as happy to be using a pencil myself! Nobody cares about the ballpoint pen no more, Mr Huff. This’ll be the same. A flush in the pan. You mark my words.’
‘Those walnuts have been in the cupboard for at least five Christmases, Mr Huff!’ Miss Hahn yells up at me, throwing down her bike into the long grass. I’ve seen her throw it down before. Many times. Toss it down, without a care. I find it difficult to marry this apparent recklessness with her complete fastidiousness in regard to every detail connected to Mulberry Cottage. The lists! The rules! The special requirements! I also observed the pointed way she used my surname. Of course we made the booking for the cottage under Lara’s maiden name: Ashe. I’m no fool. We’d never have got it for the full eight weeks otherwise.
‘They have sentimental value?’ I ask (somewhat facetiously, I confess).
‘Sorry?’
‘The walnuts?’
‘Mrs Barrow tells me there’s a problem with the dining table,’ she says, swiping her short, unkempt, sun-bleached blonde hair impatiently behind her ear. I can instantly tell that she cuts it herself. She’s that kind of a woman. No make-up bar a light smear of Vaseline on the lips and the angular bone of either cheek. Dressed in a pair of men’s baggy, canvas trousers (rolled over at the waist and belted with what looks like a length of old rope) and a drab, linen blouse in grey or brown – or both, or neither – un-ironed but worn and worn into a flat shine, buttoned right up to the neck. Scuffed plimsolls on her feet, no socks. She has broad shoulders and is tanned. She is built like a swimmer. I see the German in her, and I see the Soviet.
Around the nose – the chin. Poor thing.
‘It collapsed,’ I say, screwing the lid back on to the walnuts. ‘I’d placed the television on top of it to try and improve the reception. It caved under the weight. The middle flap seems to’ve been constructed out of plywood. That or the woodworm’s got the better of it. Either way, the table is irretrievably damaged, although – on a positive note – the picture on the TV’s been much clearer ever since.’
‘Your wife left,’ she says, her eyes – the colour of a mean bruise, edged in octopus ink – slitting, infinitesimally.
‘The second week.’ I nod, studiedly indifferent. ‘Mrs Barrow mentioned it? One of the other neighbours, perchance?’
Of course nothing ever happens in this ludicrous place without the neighbours mentioning it! A fool might imagine it to be the kind of wonderful location where a person might be rendered invisible – somewhere an artist or a criminal or a film star might flee in order to cultivate a precious, fragile sense of anonymity; a place where you might melt into the fringes, the margins, the nothingness; a place of privacy – insularity – isolation – retreat. But Toot Rock is not like that. Oh not at all! Not a whit of it.
‘She ran over a cat,’ Carla Hahn says, inspecting my tie with a small frown, her hand lifting, unconsciously, to her own very slightly frayed collar.
Her hands are the colour of boiled gammon! Extraordinary! Raw-looking. I quite pity her those awful hands.
‘Yes. The tail,’ I confirm, ‘in broad daylight. The cat was immensely fat. She was reversing at high speed, drunk as a skunk.’
‘The tail’ – she nods, slightly baleful, now – ‘was later amputated, and at some considerable cost to the owner, I’m told.’
‘You heard all about it, then?’ I smile, sarcastically.
‘He’s my father’s cat.’ She shrugs.
‘Oh. Mrs Barrow didn’t mention that,’ I murmur, somewhat perturbed by this sudden, quite unexpected, turning of the tables.
‘I think you’ll probably discover, on further acquaintance, that Mrs Barrow generally prides herself on leaving out the most important detail in any story. In fact you could almost say it’s her speciality.’ She smiles. Good, straight teeth. But the eyes … Tsk! Watch out for those eyes! Dead as a dodo’s! Deader still! A predator’s eyes (the dodo, to its eternal credit, was a humble vegetarian). These are a carnivore’s eyes. These are the eyes of a pterodactyl, a tyrannosaurus rex.
‘He was your father’s cat …’ I ruminate, trying to work out the wider implications of this unwelcome detail, somewhat on the hoof, I’ll admit. ‘And I suppose that horrendously fat dog I see you dragging up and down the beach every morning and evening is your father’s dog?’
‘Strictly speaking, he was my late mother’s cat,’ she explains (ignoring the dog comment). ‘He’s called Rolfie. He’s forty-one years of age.’
‘The average life expectancy of a cat is fifteen,’ I say, incredulous.
‘Yes. I know.’ She nods, solemnly. ‘Rolfie is an incredibly old cat.’
‘So Rolfie has lived almost three times longer than the average cat?’ I persist, then promptly calculate: ‘The equivalent age – in a person – would be two hundred and ten.’
‘Yes,’ she confirms, patently unshaken by the comparison.
I just can’t let this one go. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as a little … uh … improbable?’ I wonder.
‘Yes’ – she nods again – ‘highly improbable. It’s perfectly amazing. A miracle of nature. And then your wife drove straight into him. Drunk. In broad daylight. At high speed.’
‘Oh. Well, I apologize for that,’ I mutter.
‘My father was rather traumatized,’ she idly adds, gazing dreamily at the clouds scudding across the sky above my head.
‘In all my born days,’ I muse, ‘I’ve never heard of a cat living to forty-one years of age. He must be the oldest cat in the world. The oldest cat in the known universe.’
‘You have a ladybird on your fringe,’ she murmurs, squinting slightly. ‘In fact you have two. Yes. Two. They appear to be … to be copulating.’
‘You have very red hands,’ I respond, swiping at my fringe.
‘I’m allergic to disinfectant.’
‘Then why don’t you wear rubber gloves?’ I demand.
‘And latex,’ she adds.
In truth I’m not entirely certain if there are two ladybirds on my fringe. This worries me. I’ve had no previous intimations that Miss Hahn might turn out to be an unreliable witness. Quite the opposite. A little mouse. I was told. A lamb. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I was told. Damn. Damn. A propensity towards lying could prove catastrophic to my plans.
‘Anything else?’ I wonder.
‘Sorry?’
Her eyes are back with the clouds again. She seems to find great solace in the clouds, much as I do myself.
‘Allergies?’
‘Uh, nickel,’ she confirms, ‘and arrogance.’ She smiles. ‘You?’
‘Bullshitters.’
‘Oh, me too.’ She nods, most emphatically.
I can see now that this isn’t going to be all plain sailing. A short silence follows, punctuated by the cries of several gulls and the shrill whistle of a farmer in a nearby field, directing his sheepdog from the comfort of his tractor cab.
‘I’ll need to pop around to the cottage and have a look at that table,’ she eventually murmurs; ‘perhaps you might provide me with a convenient time to come over when you know for certain that you’ll be out?’
I’m still fiddling with my fringe.
‘The ladybirds have gone,’ she adds. ‘They flew away home.’
‘I may need to get back to you on timings,’ I say, with a measure of diffidence.
‘Fine.’ She shrugs. ‘Well you have my number, Mr Huff.’
‘Yes I do, Miss Hahn.’
She turns and picks up her bike. She suddenly seems very annoyed, but why exactly I am not entirely sure.
‘You seem rather annoyed,’ I say.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she exclaims, piqued. ‘Do enjoy the rest of your afternoon.’
And off she stalks, red hands and all.
What a curious woman she is! So brusque. A suggestion – a mere shadow – of the Germanic in her accent. Unkempt. Chaotic. Not unclean, just …
Unattractive. Well, not unattractive. But boyish. Uncouth. And untrustworthy, too – possibly. Yes. And tragically repressed! Poor little thing! A hysterical virgin. Ha! Obviously. Obviously. Could tell that from a mile off.
3
Miss Carla Hahn (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
Shimmy is outraged by Mr Huff’s behaviour – so irked, in fact, that I almost regret telling him about it. I am soaking his gnarled old feet in a plastic bowl (the iced water scented with sage and lavender oil), while heating up some minestrone soup for a late lunch.
‘Zis Mr Huff has insulted us all!’ he exclaims, in typically exaggerated fashion (all shrugs, waving arms and eye rolls). ‘First ze careless assault by his drunken wife on poor Rolfie, zen zat monstrous “letter of apology” – a veb of deceit from start to finish; the shiksa vas driving at high speed you say?’
I nod. ‘Yes, apparently.’
‘Mrs Barrow tells me she always stinks of raw spirit!’ he declaims.
‘In her defence,’ I interject, ‘Mrs Barrow often confuses the smell of perfume with—’
‘Ha! Mrs Barrow iz nobody’s fool, Carla!’
‘And on the one, brief occasion that I actually met Mrs Ashe – Mrs Huff as we now know her – I did notice that she applied her perfume rather liberally. She was a quiet woman, very polished, well-groomed, sophisticated …’
‘Und now he haz insulted us all, en masse!’ Shimmy throws up his hands with such violence that the water in the bowl containing his feet starts to slosh.
‘Mind your feet!’ I say.
‘He questions za age of Rolfie? Oi! If he questions za age of Rolfie zen he questions ze integrity of your Mame! If he questions ze integrity of your Mame, he questions my integrity, und yours too, meine Carla!’
‘He simply said that—’
‘He’s calling all of us liars! Feh! Fardrai zich deyn kop! Pass me his letter again, bubbellah!’
I pass Shimmy Mr Huff’s letter. It reads:
Mr Shimmy,
Mrs Barrow informs me that the cat which my wife Lara knocked into yesterday was yours. We are so very sorry. In Lara’s defence, the light was poor. She reversed from the driveway in Mulberry Cottage (where we are currently residing) and out on to the road with considerable care and was horrified when she realized that your cat had failed to get out of the way. It had been lying in deep shadow. It is a very heavy cat, and not, I imagine, especially nimble, although it did run off at some speed after the incident took place. The tail appeared kinked, but Mrs Barrow assures me that the tail has always looked like that.
I do hope the cat is all right. I am not a great fan of cats – of domestic pets in general – but I would never dream of hurting one in any way, shape or form.
Yours, in sympathy,
Franklin D. Huff
‘See zat?’ Shimmy points at the letter, accusingly. ‘Za shmendrick doesn’t even like cats.’
I take the letter back. Mr Huff has strange handwriting. Tiny. Very neat and joined up. Huge loops on the l’s and d’s. Even on the odd t. I immediately sense that this is the handwriting of an immensely inconsiderate man. A fussy but careless man, prone to self-aggrandizement. Of course I have no expertise in handwriting analysis. This is all just going on pure instinct.
‘He really is an awful man,’ I say.
‘Oi! A piste kayleh! A nishtikeit! Arrogant! Insincere! Cold-hearted! Hates animals! Hates Pett Level – our home! Our retreat! Hates life itself, bubbellah!’ Shimmy throws up his hands again.
‘An immensely vain man,’ I agree, ‘with the most horribly condescending manner. The very thought of him crashing around in beautiful Mulberry …’ I shudder.
‘You’re sure ve can’t evict him? I mean ze assault on poor Rolfie? You say he’s refusing to feed ze badgers? Genug iz genug!’
I nod.
‘Ve must seek recompense, Mizinke!’ Shimmy murmurs. ‘Vengeance!’
‘What do you suggest?’ I wonder, slightly uneasy.
Shimmy shrugs, pondering. ‘If ve didn’t own za property zen a small pebble through ze bathroom window. Dos iz alts! Maybe ve remove ze bulb in za porch. Hide his bin. Farshtaist?’
‘Let’s not stoop to his level,’ I counsel, ‘let’s just ignore him, Tatteh, and hope to God he’ll go away. Let’s just be dignified and aloof and ludicrously polite.’
‘If you vant to beat a dog you find a stick!’ Shimmy objects.
‘He’s lower than a dog,’ I grouch, ‘he’s beneath contempt. Who cares if he finds us “wispy” and “parochial”?! We’re a fair, decent, right-thinking, unpretentious people in Pett Level, Tatteh, and that’s what really counts.’
‘A nice, little potato in hiz exhaust, hah?!’ Shimmy volunteers.
Forty minutes later and I am walking Rogue on the beach (or – strictly speaking – dragging him along behind me like a giant and mutinous, heavily lactating sow) when who should I see striding towards me, at improbable speed (head down, hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets) but the man of the moment: Mr Franklin D. Huff! I observe that his footwear is completely unsuitable: black, patent-leather dress shoes clumsily kicking up giant arcs of sand and shingle! I pity him his unsuitable footwear! I do. No, no, really I do.
I stand and await his approach (while Rogue laboriously masticates a piece of sea kale), hoping that he has settled on a date for my maintenance trip. But instead of stopping when he draws abreast of me, he just storms straight on past! No acknowledgement of any kind! None! Not even so much as a cursory nod!
I turn, rather astonished, and call after him – ‘Have you worked out a time yet, Mr Huff? For the maintenance works?’ – and am shocked when he spins around on his name as if stung, stares at me, in complete amazement, then down at the dog, then back up at me again, his lean face contorting wildly, points an accusing finger at us both and virtually yells, ‘What on earth are you thinking, Miss Hahn? To feed a dog to that monstrous size? Whatever possessed you? It’s an act of the most extreme cruelty! An obscenity! A crime against nature! It’s a travesty, don’t you see? Call that care?! Call that love?! Shame on you, Miss Hahn! Shame on you for not knowing any better! Shame on you, Miss Hahn! And shame on your idiotic father!’
Then off he storms.
I can only … I can’t …
Deep breath. Deep breath. Count backwards, slowly, from twenty to one.
Deep breath. That’s better. Good. That’s …
AAAARRRRGHHH! It’s virtually impossible for me to describe the violent effect Mr Huff’s insulting words have on me! How dare he? How dare he?! The initial confusion followed by the shock, followed by the embarrassment, followed by the outrage … That this man, that this … this … that this awful, arrogant … URGH! I’m just … I am just … I am shaking from head to toe. I am slightly dizzy. I blink. Everything blurs. I blink again. I feel this … this heat in my belly, in my chest. I open my mouth and I simply … I pant! I pant like a wounded beast! And then I feel something burning on my cheeks. Tears! He has made me cry! Mr Huff has made me cry! And I am so angry that Mr Huff has made me cry that I pant even harder. And my stomach is hurting. It’s hurting. (I am hit! I am stung!)
I turn and head back in the direction from which I came. Everything is misty. I sense my feet pounding across the sand. Rogue is dragging along behind me. Several figures enter my peripheral vision but they are nothing, merely fleshy shadows. One of them speaks. It is Georgie Hulton who is digging up lugworms. I can’t answer. I just keep on walking. After about thirty or so paces I stop, with a gasp, drawn up short by the macabre sight of a small, dead sand shark, its belly split open, its guts writhing with tiny, pupating maggots. I stare at it for several minutes, and only the clarity of its predicament – the horror of its outline, the exquisite brightness of its intestines – restores me to anything remotely akin to a semblance of normality.
Damn him! Damn Mr Huff! I hate him! I hate Mr Huff! I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!
4
Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
Kimberly Couzens is dead. Kimberly – my Kimberly – dead! Lara just rang. There was a garbled message when I got back to the cottage. ‘I’m sorry, Franklin, but Kimberly is dead. She died. Something to do with a tooth. It was very quick. I just spoke with her mother. She died on Saturday. Four, five days ago. The funeral’s on Friday. I’m really sorry. I know you might find that hard to believe after … well. Yes. No need to go back over it all again, eh? I just want you to know that I’m very sorry, Franklin. Honestly. I’m … Okay. Bye.’
I listened to the message three times (‘Something to do with a tooth?!’) and then rapidly calculated back. I spoke to Kimberly five days ago and she was absolutely fine. Vital. Exuberant. Laughing. Mocking. Alive. So how on earth is this possible? How can she be dead? How? After everything she survived? And why do I feel so … so empty, so flat? Not angry. Not raging. Not tearful. Not …
It almost seems – disappointing. A let-down. Laughable.
Kimberly – snuffed out. Defunct. Dead. She hopped the twig. She popped her clogs. Stupid, hopeful, brave, indefatigable Kimberly. Dead. Dead.
Oh God, what the hell to do now? The funeral’s on Friday, but I’m broke! Can’t even afford the plane fare. The stupid travel agent – the bastard airline won’t … ‘What?! Not even on compassionate grounds?’ I yelled.
Oh God. She’s dead. Where to go? How to …? I’m only here because of Kimberly. I’m here for her. As a favour. Because of her dotty mother. We’d been agonizing about Trudy’s declining health for months – upwards of a year, in fact. She’d been growing increasingly confused, woolly, dithery – and Kim simply couldn’t cope. I mean Trudy was meant to be Kim’s buffer – her back-stop, her support (a rich irony!). Bottom line was, Trudy needed to go into sheltered accommodation.
But how the heck to afford it? After much heart-searching and arguing and sulking (in equal measure, on both our parts) Kimberly Fed-Exed me the only remaining thing of any value she possessed: the negatives of those infernal photos – the ‘picture diary’ of Bran Cleary, Kalinda Allaway and their daughter, Orla, ‘in hiding’, that infamous late summer of 1972.
I was given a brief to sell them to the highest bidder, and had agreed a good price for her – with a fair amount of wrangling – but then Kimberly underwent a sudden (not untypical) change of heart, damn her (Damn Kimberly! Damn her! Poor Kimberly. Dead Kimberly). She’d found out something unpalatable about the purchaser and had developed a whole host of last-minute ‘scruples’. We didn’t discuss the details. It was obviously a painful subject for us both. But we rose above – same as we always do. Same as we always did – Kim and me. Kim and I. We two. Us.
The Catholic Church was interested, obviously, but Kimberly wouldn’t countenance the idea, just on the off-chance … Well, I suppose she thought they might simply get swallowed up (her gorgeous images) – subsumed – in a maelstrom of clerical bureaucracy. It was illogical. But that’s Kim for you. Or that was Kim, before …
‘Something to do with a tooth?’
It was stupid. And time-consuming. And expensive. I complained about the cost (human, financial). ‘I have an import/export business to run in Monterrey,’ I grumbled, ‘and a tower of translation work to be done.’ The truth was that the photos had already disappeared – to all intents and purposes – by dint of being stuck in an old trunk at the end of Kim’s bed for the past twelve years. But that was okay, apparently. That was different. Kim wasn’t their jailer, she insisted, but a broody hen perched lightly atop. This handful of fragile spools was Kimberly’s creative and emotional legacy. She never said it, because it didn’t need saying. It was the unsayable. But I knew.
She was highly conflicted over the whole thing. We both were. In the end she persuaded me to go to a publisher with them, to flog them (for less money) in the guise of a book, but the publisher offering the best price (and it was a good price, a great price) still wanted text – context. Who might be expected to provide that? Kim herself? No. She couldn’t – wouldn’t – trust herself. ‘I was way too close to the whole thing,’ she insisted, ‘and I’m “the bad guy”, remember? The scapegoat?’
‘Well maybe you should try and see this as an opportunity,’ I valiantly suggested, ‘a chance to alter those popular misconceptions …’
‘But are they?’ she murmured. ‘Misconceptions, I mean?’
I couldn’t answer. I really wish now that I had – in retrospect – just with … I don’t know … the benefit of hindsight. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t bring myself to respond. Call it mean-spiritedness. Call it pride. Call it whatever you damn well like. You’re probably right.
‘I was blind-sided by it all,’ she sighed, ‘I was bowled over … seduced. And above and beyond that, I really don’t want the whole “tragic” angle to eclipse … well … “the work”.’
In a toss-up – a fair gamble – Kimberly would always – always – have opted for death over pity. Poor Kimberly. So defiant. So flawed. So proud. So …
Scared? Was it fear that kept them quiet?
Superstition?
Loyalty?
What was it? What was the indelible hold Bran Cleary had over them all: strange, little Orla, crazy Kalinda, the countless others? Witchcraft? Voodoo? Charm? Art?!
‘Okay, Kim,’ (yet another international call at completely the wrong time of day. Kim isn’t – wasn’t – ever happy unless a conversation was charged at peak rates. It was her last great extravagance. ‘Keeps you on your toes, Frankie-boy,’ she’d laugh, ‘keeps you sharp!’) ‘so who else, then? Eh?’ I demanded. ‘Who else can be trusted? Any suggestions, Oh Wise One?’
‘I do have somebody in mind,’ Kim confided, and then, with typical unreasonableness – balls-out, that was my Kim – suggested Franklin D. Huff. Yes. Me. Franklin D., no less: currently occupying the not-especially-coveted role of Jilted Lover. Betrayed Friend. Fall-Guy. Stooge.
There were weeks of heated negotiations. ‘You seriously feel you can trust me with this?’ I was astonished – touched – horrified! Trust me? I could barely trust myself! Wasn’t I the last person to be trusted? The most angry? The most cynical? The most dark? The most wounded? ‘That’s precisely why, Franklin,’ she’d chuckled (I always loved her laugh), ‘and because – when push comes to shove – you’re a born professional.’
This was not a commission I was eager to accept. Quite the opposite. This was the story I’d been running away from – at high speed – for twelve, long years. Several others (some reputable, others less so) had been pitilessly tossed against the jagged rocks of this sorry tale and left horribly becalmed. There were just way too many angles. The narrative was dangerously overloaded. How to gain access? There was the mysterious death of Bran Cleary while on remand, for starters, after a bomb (the second bomb he’d been ‘unwittingly’ connected with) planted – or being stored? Transported? – in the boot of his car went off. All the dodgy political stuff. There was the curious disappearance of crazy Kalinda, aka ‘Lonely’ Allaway, his wife (the fame-hungry vengeful Australian shepherdess). And Orla? Poor, sweet Orla Nor Cleary – their daughter? The tiny-armed girl visionary? Where even to start with that particular hornets’ nest?
‘Simply go back to Mulberry,’ Kim sighed (with typical clarity), making it sound like the simplest undertaking in the whole world, ‘and just inhale the atmosphere. You missed out the first time around. Aren’t you intrigued to have a little snoop about? Apparently they’ve kept the cottage exactly as it was – like a kind of shrine. They do short- and medium-term rentals. They’re very picky about tenants, though, so keep your head down. Be discreet. Why not invite Lara along for the ride? Build some bridges. Make it into a little holiday! I’ll cover all expenses from the advance. Try and reach out to the people who were there – on the periphery, in the background. Knit. Walk. Relax. Breathe. It doesn’t have to be the final word or anything, just a … I don’t know … a cut and paste job – a kind of collage, a human collage.’
‘But none of them will talk!’ I argued.
‘Several of them already have,’ she corrected me. And she was perfectly right. Several had.
Of course what I didn’t tell Kimberly was that we actually needed way more than that. To raise any kind of worthwhile sum on the photos I’d had to make a series of strategic promises to the publisher – moral compromises, of sorts – which Kimberly (as yet) had no inkling of. They wanted to smash the whole Bran Cleary cover-up wide open. They wanted a hatchet job on Kalinda. And Orla? That all-too-familiar ‘victim of circumstance’ schtick writ large: the ever-popular ‘vulnerable minor led astray by the wicked Catholic machinations of Father Hugh Tierney’ angle.
Why did they want these things, exactly? Oh … They wanted them because, well, I’d promised them. I’d offered them all up on a platter. Kim’d thank me for it in the long term, I was certain. Once I’d exonerated her – and, by extension, myself – once the royalties started rolling in. She said it herself: I was a consummate professional (a professional what, though?! Cuckold? Fool? Dupe?).
Let’s face it – this was the story dear, old Kimberly (dead Kimberly) was too close to tell: the awful truth. Although how to gain access to it, first-hand? Kim was right: several people had spoken out publicly, yes, but only the small players – the bit parts – and never candidly. Father Tierney had become a Benedictine monk and entered a monastery. He was virtually a non-starter. Father Paul Lynch (of Rye, now retired) had proven curiously gnomic and diffident. Seems they’d all contracted the disease Kim herself had fallen prey to.
Although Carla Hahn, Kim had confided, was definitely the one to watch out for. She’d been the family’s nanny and cleaner during their time in Pett Level and had later inherited the house. ‘She was very quiet, rarely spoke. I don’t know why, but I always thought of her as “the other camera”. She had this strangely unsettling watchful quality about her. Engaged but unengaged. Hardly uttered a word to me the whole week I was there. Smiled a lot. A strange girl, very tight – tender – with the child, training to be a nurse.’
Carla was the key, Kim maintained, the ‘inside-outsider’.
So I came. I waited. I made connections with the other witnesses. Lara left; there’d always been … well … fault-lines. I drank heavily for a few weeks. Just the atmosphere of this place – the house. This awful feeling of … the simplicity, the roaring quiet, the certainty. An unbearable itchiness. In my head. In my soul. As if the place, the sea, the furniture, the entire house were all slowly rejecting me. Developing a gradual intolerance. I know it sounds …
Or was that just …?
Then the phone call – the garbled message. Kimberly Couzens was dead. Dead! Something to do with a botched tooth extraction. Kimberly Couzens was dead.
I left the cottage in my suit and dress shoes. I was empty, flat (remember?) and I was paradoxically Day-Glo; blank and cynical, yet strobing with emotion. Urgh! I was neither. I was both. I was confused. I was walking away from my feelings and I was running straight into them. It wasn’t … I wasn’t … I … I dunno.
I staggered down on to the beach. I just put one foot in front of the other. I tried not to think. I tried desperately to process the news. I could, but I couldn’t.
Of course we had never been formally divorced, Kim and I. It was one of the many things Lara couldn’t forgive me for. Yes, I petitioned for divorce: 23rd December 1972. She was still in Ireland. In hospital. The date is singed into my brain with a cattle iron – the day of the Managua earthquake. Even my hurt, my outrage at Kim’s devastating betrayal couldn’t be allowed to take centre stage, couldn’t bask, bleeding, in the limelight. Nope. God went and killed 2,000 people, in one stroke, and I – by necessity – was left feeling petty and pitiful.
It was tough. I was wounded (I was wounded! What a joke!). But her burns were so bad that I couldn’t follow through with it. We were a team. Above and beyond everything else, Kim and I were a team. I was the ears, she was the eyes. Funny to think of it that way now. The ears stopped working a long time ago. They waxed up. They froze. They ceased functioning. Why? I have so many reasons, each one so tiny and humble and insignificant; each one merely an ant – or a black, darting termite – but collected together? An infestation. A great hill. An immovable mountain.
And the eyes? After the ‘accident’, they thought they could save at least one of them – on the right-hand side. It was her camera eye, her all-seeing eye. She had such high hopes for it. She was such a fighter. But full vision never returned. And she was melted, poor Kim, like a candle.
We moved her into a granny flat in Toronto. Her mother, Trudy (the actual granny), lived upstairs. And everything cost. From that moment onward, everything was calibrated – rage, hurt, resignation, paranoia, claustrophobia, frustration, resentment – through a shiny curtain of dollars and cents. I opened my import/export business in Monterrey, Mexico. We struggled along, me here, her there. How else to manage it?
Did I forgive her? No. Did I stop loving her? No. Could I let go? No. And Bran Cleary? My dear friend Bran (whose injuries had totalled a slightly sprained wrist, some bruising and a broken nose because – ever the gentleman – he had opened the car door for her – for my wife!). Did I forgive him? No. Did I stop loving him? No. Could I let go? Yes. Yes. Yes.
I let go. I moved on. I never wanted to feel that way again. People have often asked me my professional opinion (although what profession I belong to now I struggle to decipher – laughing stock? Entrepreneur? Crook? Social worker?). Did Bran deserve what happened to him? Was it all just bad luck? A conspiracy? Was it revenge? Murder? Something beyond that – the (God forbid!) ‘supernatural’?
No more questions! I just didn’t want to speculate. I didn’t want to engage. I didn’t want to let it all in again. And yet here I was, immersed in the whole mess right up to my chin, resenting every moment, hating every moment. Wishing I was dead. Why did she ask me? Why did I agree to it? And now Kim. Poor Kim. Brave Kim. Un-Kim.
Call that … call that fair?!
5
Miss Carla Hahn (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
The eternally fragrant, sweet-natured and well-meaning Alys Jane Drury is absolutely appalled by what I have done (how might I have imagined it could be otherwise?).
‘Whatever possessed you, Carla?’ she demands. ‘He’s such a nice man! So very interesting. Debonair. Handsome. All those lovely curls! And so incredibly polite. I just don’t understand how …’
She is silent for a moment. I hold my breath and press the receiver even tighter into my ear.
‘It’s so out of character!’ she finally declares. ‘Did Shimmy put you up to it?’
‘No,’ I insist (perhaps a split-second too quickly), ‘it was all my idea. I mean Shimmy wasn’t happy – after the incident with Rolfie, obviously …’
‘But you said Mr Huff had already apologized for that.’
‘Yes. He had. Well, in a manner of speaking. The letter was very arrogant. And a complete tissue of lies about the exact circumstances of—’
‘To protect everyone’s feelings, perhaps?’ she interrupts.
I ignore this. ‘He actually went so far – in the letter – as to admit to not even liking cats.’
‘I don’t like cats,’ Alys snorts. ‘Well, not especially,’ she qualifies.
‘But that’s because you love birds, Alys!’ I insist.
‘Franklin – Mr Huff – likes birds,’ she counters. ‘He made a huge fuss of the parrot when he visited. Teobaldo even allowed him to stroke his chest. And Teobaldo hates people. He won’t even let me do that. We spent ages talking about the birds of Me-hico. He collects feathers – exotic feathers. For the shrunken heads. But he never kills anything. He’s very strong on conservation. Very respectful of the environment which I thought was just lovely.’
‘Shrunken …?’ I echo weakly, half-remembering something along the same lines that Mrs Barrow had said.
‘Didn’t he tell you? He has a business which manufactures shrunken heads. The kind you get in Peru. He makes them in Me-hico and exports them. They’re incredibly beautiful. He showed me a sales pamphlet. I mean disgusting but beautiful. Hand-stitched. Extraordinary. Some sell for thousands of dollars. People collect them. He makes them with carved animal bones and skins. He has a small team of ex-gangsters and addicts in Monterrey working for him. The whole enterprise is run like a kind of social programme …’
I think it would be fair to say that Mrs Alys Jane Drury (widow) has been thoroughly won over by Mr Frankin D. Huff (con-artist). The woman is besotted.
‘Rather odd, don’t you think,’ I muse, ‘that Mr Huff should come here with the express intention of finding out things about you, and then should end up talking endlessly all about himself?’ I pause, meaningfully. ‘Did it ever dawn on you that maybe …?’
‘It might all be just a ruse?’ Alys promptly fills in for me, sharp as a tack. ‘A “technique”? To beguile me? Uh, yes. It did occur to me, as a matter of fact.’
‘Oh,’ I say, deflated, ‘well, good.’
‘It may interest you to know that several times in the course of our labyrinthine discussions he actually encouraged me to hold things back. He’d say, “Let’s not trespass any further into that, Alys. I can see how you’re struggling. Save it. Preserve it. Some things need to remain truly inviolate …”’
‘Are you serious?!’
After even only the briefest of acquaintances with Mr Huff, I find it difficult to imagine him readily employing the phrase ‘truly inviolate’.
‘Absolutely,’ Alys insists.
‘And then what?’ I ask.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well did you change the subject?’
‘Uh …’ Alys ponders this for a moment. ‘Sometimes. Yes.’
I roll my eyes and start to walk over towards the window, but am prevented from doing so by the tangled phone cord. I grimace and start the laborious task of unwinding it.
‘Well, for what it’s worth, he was still incredibly rude about Rogue’s weight,’ I mutter (smarting at the mere memory), ‘unforgivably rude.’
‘Rogue is horrendously overweight, Carla,’ Alys sighs, ‘Rolfie too, for that matter. Your father systematically overfeeds them. It’s awful – strange – cruel. You’re always moaning on about it yourself …’
She has me there, admittedly.
‘In Shimmy’s defence,’ she blithely continues, ‘it’s probably the expression of some profound, deep-seated emotional conflict or trauma, possibly relating to the persecution of the Jews.’
‘He is fat,’ I murmur, slightly shame-faced now, ‘but to be so … so forthright about it, and so mean, so horribly judgemental—’
‘Mr Huff has been resident in Pett Level for almost six weeks now,’ Alys interrupts, ‘and in that entire time has hardly breathed so much as a word to you, Carla. Perhaps you might be feeling a little … I don’t know … sidelined? Ignored? Piqued?’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ I exclaim, horrified. ‘I never had any intention of speaking to the man! I’ve been actively avoiding him. Why else did I hire Mrs Barrow to clean the cottage? To act as a go-between? I was actually glad he didn’t approach me – relieved.’
‘Sorry …’ Alys interjects, ‘there’s interference on the line.’
‘I said I was glad he didn’t approach me,’ I repeat, louder, briefly desisting from my frenzied untangling.
‘Right. Okay. So that’s why you approached him this afternoon …’ she wryly observes.
‘I didn’t!’ I squeak. ‘He’s staying in the cottage, my cottage, and by all accounts he’s gradually dismantling it, piece by piece. His wife ran over Mame’s cat, for heaven’s sake! What other option did I have? He lied about his true identity on the lease. They signed in under Ashe …’
‘Yes, yes. And of course you just naturally presumed …?’ I can hear the infuriating smile in Alys’s voice, and behind it (like the alternating layers of blue-grey wash in the lowering sky of a fine watercolour painting) a parrot muttering, ‘Baldo! Baldo! Baldo! Baldo!’ culminating with a deafening, ‘WAH!’
‘Presumed what?’ I demand, wincing (although I know exactly what she’s about to say).
‘That he wanted to talk to you. That he’s obsessed by you – stalking you. That you would naturally be the “crucial witness”. The main focus. The hidden key to it all! You’ve been actively looking forward to rejecting his advances, but he hasn’t actually made any. He’s been the perfect gentleman! Face it, Carla, you’re more obsessed than he is!’
‘I didn’t presume anything …’ I grumble, wounded. Once again – as a distraction – I start untangling the line. ‘Although it was perfectly reasonable to assume that after he’d approached pretty much everyone even remotely connected to the Cleary visit … I mean he tracked down the milkman, Alys! Old Billy Peck who was always deaf as a post. He tracked him down. And the woman who ran the mobile library – I don’t even remember her name!’
‘Meredith Brown. So perhaps he got what he needed from other sources?’ Alys suggests brightly.
‘Yes. Yes. Maybe he did.’ I sullenly play along.
‘I mean it’s not anything too in-depth that he’s after, just a series of captions for this little book of photographs. By Kimberly Couzens. That Canadian woman. The photographer. You know – the one who was with Mr Cleary when …’
‘Well hopefully he’s satisfied with what he’s got,’ I concur, moving a couple of feet closer to the window (as a consequence of my untangling), ‘and now he’ll clear off and leave us all in peace.’
‘Hopefully,’ she echoes (perhaps not entirely convinced).
‘Is it raining in Hove?’ I wonder.
‘It was earlier. Fairlight?’
‘Tipping it down.’
I gaze out at the rain.
‘Are you thinking of heading back?’ Alys wonders, after a brief silence.
‘Sorry?’
‘To the cottage. To sort it all out.’
‘No!’ I snort, then, ‘Yes. I am, actually. But he’ll probably be home again by now.’
‘You should go anyway, and if he is there, apologize. Make it heartfelt. It was an awful thing to do, Carla. He’ll think you’re completely unbalanced!’
I grimace.
‘And after I told him – at such unbearable length – about what a dear little lamb you are!’ she murmurs, softening.
I promptly baaaa (it’s automatic, semi-ironic, perfectly sincere). I have always – always – been Alys’s dear, little lamb.
‘Exactly!’ She chuckles. ‘But don’t just hang around in Fairlight pointlessly over-analysing everything like you normally do. Each second counts. Your honour is at stake here – and that of the entire community, by default,’ she adds.
Great. No pressure then. I solemnly inspect the rivulets of water trickling drably – incessantly, wetly – down the windowpane. Of course she is right. Alys invariably is. I will go. I was angry. I was wrong. I have behaved like a maniac. I am at a moral disadvantage. It simply won’t do.
I draw a deep breath and steel myself, preparing to say my goodbyes, but am momentarily distracted by an unexpected rumble – very low, like a long, metal snake of conjoined supermarket trolleys being pushed, some distance away, across a wide expanse of tarmac. Oh God, I recognize that sound! My skin instantly starts to prickle its automatic response (Quick! Run, Carla, run!). Seconds later (and I haven’t even shifted by so much as a centimetre) – pouf! – my garden shed evaporates.
6
Teobaldo (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
Baldo! Baldo! Baldo! Baldo! WAH!
WAH!
‘Sun’ near ‘cage’! Yay! ‘Sun’ near ‘cage’! Look at ‘sun’! Joy! Blink! Look at ‘sun’! Near ‘cage’. Happy. Happy ‘sun’. Rock, rock, rock. Happy!
Hup! Whassat? Eh? Ooogh! Ooogh! Oooooogh …! Urgh! Big poo! Aaah. Aaaah! Good.
Where’d it go?
Eh?
Twizzle head.
Eh?
Where’d poo go?
Ah!
Look! Look!
‘Seed bowl’!
Yay!
Baldo crap in ‘seed bowl’! Baldo crap in ‘seed bowl’!
Yay!
‘Sun’ near ‘cage’. Happy! Happy ‘sun’! Crap all done. Aaaah! Happy moment. Happy moment. Crap done. In bowl.
Now what?
Wanna fly! Wanna fly! Wanna fly!
Nest. Where’s nest? Why no nest? Wanna nest. Baldo find ‘twig’. Baldo find ‘straw’. Baldo find soft, soft, soft … Wanna fly! No. No. No fly. No nest. Sad. Sad moment. Sad Baldo.
Whassat?!
Itch! Urgh! Itch! Itch! ITCH!!! Gotta … gotta … Oooh! Yeah. Yeah …
Scratch, scratch, scratch. Feather, feather, feather! Look! Soft feather down like grey snow! Good! Good for nest. Oh. No. No nest.
Poor Baldo.
Hmmn.
‘Room’.
‘Cage’. ‘Chair’. ‘Lamp’. ‘Dresser’. ‘Ceiling’. No sky! ‘Ceiling’. No sky! Dead sky. Gone sky. Can’t … can’t …! No sky!
Wanna fly.
Sad moment.
Whassat? ‘Sun’! Baldo, look! See ‘sun’!
Getting closer!
Joy!
Baldo! Baldo! Baldo! Baldo!
Hmmn.
Egg.
Why no egg?
Why no nest?
Bounce! Bounce! Bounce! Bounce!
Baldo! Baldo! Baldo! Baldo! Wah! Wah! WAH!
Oh … Uh-oh … Here she comes, here she comes. Jailer! Bitch! Here she comes! Bow, deep bow. Respectful. Deep bow. Baldo, Baldo, Baldo, Baldo …
Away she goes again! Gone. Gone! Lonely Baldo. Ruffle feathers. Where’s the …?
‘Mirror’! Ring the ‘bell’! Look in ‘mirror’!
WAH!
Look! Look! Whosat? Whosat? Spirit parrot! Whosat? Eye! Evil! Beak! Sharp! Dead parrot! Ghost parrot! Whosat?
WAH!
Ruuuun!
Wanna fly! Wanna fly! Wanna fly!
Escape!
Huh?
Whassat?! Roar! Waterfall! Thunder! It’s the screaming monster! YAAARGH! She’s back! Bitch is back! She’s got the metal monster! Horrible! Horrible! Waterfall! Storm! Thunder! Death! Terrible roar! Angry monster! Hungry monster! Under ‘chair’! Under ‘little table’! Bitch is riding the metal monster! Under ‘cage’! … WAH!
Wanna fly! Wanna fly! Wanna fly!
Can’t! Can’t!
Rock, rock, rock, rock. Fear! Fear! Fear!
Where?
Where?!
Run down the ‘perch’! Jump into the ‘bowl’! Throw out the food. Sod off! Go! Scram! Take that! Take that! Hah! WAH!
Yay!
Sudden quiet! Brave Baldo! Clever Baldo! Dead monster!
Preen!
‘Teobaldo! **** **! *** Teobaldo! ******!’
[‘Teobaldo! Stop it! Bad Teobaldo! Enough!’]
Yes! That’s me! Teobaldo! That’s me! Happy! Happy! Dead monster! Hah! Here she comes.
Urgh. Finger. Urgh! Kill the finger! Eat the finger! Urgh! Come on! Head tip. Watch finger! Waggle finger!
Come on! Come on!
Bitch.
WAH!
‘Teobaldo! ***** ****** ** **** ****! ***** ***! *** ***! **** ******** ** **********!’
[‘Teobaldo! You’ve messed in your food! Silly boy! Bad boy! Stop throwing it everywhere!’]
Baldo a girl. La la! Baldo a girl. La la! Baldo a girl, you bitch jailer fool.
Where’s Baldo’s egg? Eh? Bitch?
Where’s Baldo’s mate? Eh?
Where’s Baldo’s nest?
Just. Let. Baldo. Go!
Wanna fly! Wanna fly! Wanna fly!
Rock, rock, rock, rock.
No fly.
‘Cage’.
‘Cage’.
What Baldo do so bad? Eh?
‘Ceiling’. ‘Cage’. Dead wings. Can’t … Can’t … Trapped. Panic in bones. Dead wings.
Itch! Itch! Ruffle feathers. Scratch!
Breuuugh!
That’s better!
Breuuugh!
That’s better!
Baldo! Baldo! Baldo! Baldo!
Uh-oh! Here she comes again!
‘**** **** Teobaldo! **** ********** ********! ***** ***** **** *** *****, eh?
‘Pretty boy! ***** ***** **** *** *****? Eh? ** ** *** ******? Eh? **** *** **** *** ******? **** ** ****** * **** ** *** *** ****** ** *** ******* ** ******** **** **** ** ** *** *****. Eh? Pretty boy!’
[‘Stop that, Teobaldo! Stop scratching yourself! What’s wrong with you today, eh?
‘Pretty boy! What’s wrong with you today? Eh? Is it the hoover? Eh? Don’t you like the hoover? Well I’m afraid I have to use the hoover if you persist in throwing your food on to the floor. Eh? Pretty boy!’]
Baldo! Baldo! Baldo! Baldo!
Pretty boy! Pretty boy! Pretty boy!
But Baldo a girl!
La!
Baldo a girl!
Ta-dah!
Pretty boy!
Preen!
Eh? Eh?! Where ‘sun’ go?
Huh?
Where ‘sun’?
Where’d it go?
WAH!
7
Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
I don’t know why I imagined I’d make it all the way around to Hastings before the tide came in. It was an ambitious scheme, at best – not so much even a scheme as a blithe notion, a vague ‘urge’, a complete spur-of-the-moment thing – and I was (quite frankly) unsuitably shod. It’s a challenging walk, much of it demanding – with the tide coming in, out of sheer necessity – a measure of energetic clambering and even leaping from large rock to large rock.
An ambitious scheme, as I’ve said. A foolish scheme. And then, when I finally made it back (forty-eight hours later! Barely still in possession of life and limb) … On my eventual return … The conquering hero (ha, ha, ha) …
Urgh! How else can I describe the vileness I encountered? Just … just … just plain … urgh!
Yes. Yes. So it was a rather silly plan, in retrospect. Irresponsible. I am currently in possession of the Tide Tables for Dungeness, Rye Bay and Hastings (courtesy of our Ms Hahn, no less; part of the cottage’s Welcome Pack). Pett Level doesn’t actually have its own Table (too small, insignificant) – it falls ‘in the approaches’ of Rye Bay and Hastings, but even so, it still doesn’t demand much basic common sense to puzzle the tides out. I didn’t tarry to make this calculation, though, just grabbed my keys and my wallet (no. Not the keys, just the wallet) and blithely set off. It was a silly scheme. It would be fair to say that I sincerely regret it, now. I do. I really do. I regret the leaving, but gracious me! The return! When I finally dragged my way back home (no bus fare! That endless trudge from Hastings over hard road and soggy field!) … On my eventual …
I see it clear as day in my mind’s eye: that lone dustbin perched – somewhat improbably – atop the Look Out (visible from quite some distance off). A warning shot across my bows. An omen. But I just gazed at it, quite innocently, idly pondering the logistics of it all. How on earth did that …? I mean it’s a difficult enough scramble up there without …
I was just way too frazzled to register that this was my bin, that this was my issue …
Perhaps I was actually heading for the New Beach Club (that previous afternoon but one) although the NBC is actually in the opposite direction to Hastings, so possibly not. Or, better still, to The Smuggler (which is en route), for a stiff drink or three. I don’t precisely recall. Although I was dangerously short of cash. Yes. Only had enough for a Schweppes bitter lemon or a Coke. Perhaps I was just …
What was I doing?
Letting off steam?
Getting some much-needed air?
Thinking things through on the hoof?
Walking it out?
All of the above?
I don’t really know why I left (it’s honestly just a blur now – a pointless irrelevance), but then to return to … I mean to come back to the cottage (my base, my home, my … my lair), stagger into the bedroom – exhausted, depleted – and find … Urgh!
The bin was definitely a warning. Then the porch light wouldn’t work. The bulb was missing. Then …
Urgh. Urgh. Urgh!
It now occurs to me that perhaps I hadn’t taken the news of Kimberly’s passing quite so well as I’d initially thought. How I loathe that word: ‘passing’! It smacks of the clairvoyant: the velvet curtain, the spotlight, the odour of a cheap cigar. It’s a verb that tiptoes gingerly around the ineffable absolutes of mortality: the stiffness, the coldness, the imminent putrescence. The ineluctable gone-ness.
‘Passing’. It’s an end without an end – an end without a beginning, even. A cowardly avoidance.
But how else to … to get through all those unbearable sentences – those endless, stewing thoughts – each one punctuated by the thudding, hammer-blow of ‘dead’? That savage, nail-in-the-coffin word. I used it – I had used it – countless times in the first short while after hearing the news (that garbled phone message), but its regular use – all that relentless thud-thud-thudding – had begun to bump and bruise my very core. The body was inside the coffin! Bang, bang, bang! The lid was sealed! Bang, bang, bang! But still the word kept on providing new nails, and of course they needed to be applied (demanded it), to be neatly and dispassionately embedded. But where? The wall? The door? My heart? My head? My soul? No! No, I had to get rid of that word. I had to eliminate it. It had suddenly become too real, too meaningful. How even to approach it now without … without feeling the urge to emit a terrible, wolf-like howl? Without jabbering? Without flailing around? Falling to my knees and tearing at my clothes? Without an all-out collapse, in other words? Surely it’s better to just … just use something else, something less definitive, something that evades … that compresses … that curtails the connected emotion. A band-aid word. Yes. A slightly vague, pointless, polite, peripheral word. To cleverly create a separate universe in language and then quietly retreat into it, to hide, like a cringing ninny, from … from …
From Kimberly’s passing?
Yes.
Kimberly has passed … Oh, look! There she goes! Hear the whistle? Kimberly! She’s a heavy-goods train thundering through the station of life (no timetabled stop) and then into the glorious bleakness – the billowing clouds of dry ice – beyond. Only the truly adventurous – the demented hobo, the illegal, the felon – would consider running after her and hitching a ride. Those trains are heavily guarded, I’ve heard. No. Better just wait a little longer on the welcoming, well-lit platform and flick through the local paper (great article about piles. Wonderful small ads. Nothing really amounting to ‘news’, as such) then head over to the kiosk for a hot cup of coffee (avoid the tea. The tea’s dreadful, like warm iron filings. It’s been stewing for days inside a giant rusty urn).
Just stand back (always respectful, mind) and let that old, heavy-goods train rumble on through …
Rumble.
Rrrrrrumble?
Gracious me! A sudden outbreak of goose-bumps on my forearm. How odd!
Uh …
No.
No. Let’s not talk of death, eh? Death sticks between the teeth like a pesky piece of sweetcorn husk. Sweetcorn’s way too ambitious a vegetable for a man in my state. I need mashed potato softened with milk. Or mushy peas. Or a lightly seasoned dollop of glowing swede, shining with butter. Or porridge. I need porridge! I need custard! A soft-boiled egg!
I’m too delicate!
Coddle me!
Uh …
No.
It wasn’t a great scheme, in other words. I wasn’t genned up on the Tide Times. I just headed out – flew out.
Perhaps I was more upset than I thought. Everything felt very sharp – the light, the sound of the gulls, the waves – the damn Channel so unapologetic, so vital, so unbearably bloody there; the texture of the pebbles on the beach, the individual grains of sand … Everything sharp. Everything cruel. And then … What happened?
I’m struggling to … uh …
Ten paces after I saw Miss Hahn and her ridiculous dog – that awful, fat dog; a barely perambulating canine offence, a cruel joke – I suddenly stopped short and thought, God. Did I actually just say that? Did I actually just speak those words from here … up here … from this mouth? The exchange – was there an exchange, though? – fell across the beach in front of me like a shadow in bright sun. I moved, it moved. Good heavens! Did I actually just …? No. Surely not! So I promptly strode on. Had to get through it. Simple as that. Fight or flight. Fight and flight. Pure instinct. Couldn’t think. Didn’t want to. Continued walking.
It’s possible the plan hadn’t even been fully hatched at that stage – the epic hike. It was barely in incubation. I was just … still can’t quite remember what I … I think it was just … just getting away from that word. The relentless hammer-blow of that word.
‘Good afternoon, Ms Hahn! The renovations? Uh … not now, dear. I’m … uh … My wife just died. We weren’t really married … well we were, but in title alone. We lived on separate continents. But I still reserve the right to be intensely pissed off – alternately numbed, bewildered, shattered, even – by the news. All right, Miss Hahn? Okay with that, are we? Is that acceptable to you, Miss Hahn? It is? It is? Good! Great! Toodle-oo!’
I just … I just … I wanted to blurt it out! Yes! I wanted to castigate, to blame – worse still, to share. I felt this sudden, overwhelming urge to unload! To unburden, to spill out my guts to that awful Miss Hahn with her … her frayed collar, her fat dog, her man’s trousers and her Soviet-style nose. But why her? Why then? Why there? Eh?!
Happenstance. Pure happenstance! A fluke. She could’ve been anyone! That’s why. And worse still, I’m sure I even found myself thinking: eyes on the prize, Franklin! This could actually prove useful – playing the sympathy card! I did! I swear! But then I suddenly realized (hammer-blow – bang!) that without Kimberly there was no meaning – no book (and no Advance! Bang, bang! Double whammy!). And I also realized that I couldn’t play the card if I didn’t accept the feeling. And I didn’t accept it. No! I just didn’t. So I stopped myself. I tried to find a suitable cover for my confusion. My mind was racing (but there was no race, no track, just miles and miles of empty air) and I found myself blurting out … Uh … What? Did I say that the dog was fat? Yes. Yes. I think I did, actually. But then the dog is fat. Big deal! I merely stated a known fact! No harm done there, then.
And so I calmly walked on. And a while later it started to rain. And I can remember the pebbles and the rocks all shiny in the wet. And my shoes – dress shoes – splattered with mud. And I remember how high the cliffs were. So high. So improbably high … Woo! Woo-hoo! (I’m spinning around, gazing upwards, woo-hooing, like a jackass) … Oh look – there … See that black bird, just circling above? Is it a raven? A chough? Do they even have choughs in this part of the British Isles? Or ravens for that matter? Uh … No. Possibly not. What’s that …? (Stops spinning, staggers slightly.) What’s that extraordinary … uh …?
And then … And then – Wham! Bam! Alakazam! – forty-eight hours had passed me by, in what felt like the merest of breaths, and I was waking up in the cells with the mother of all hangovers, a tin bucket by the bed, splayed across a creepy, squeaky, rubber-coated mattress, no bed-linen, no blanket, not so much as a pillow – a humble pillow – to rest my pounding head upon.
Oh. And there was a baby rabbit tucked away snugly inside my vest. My suit was still wet. The pockets were full of leaves. White ash? Eucalyptus? After approximately five minutes a young constable brought me some sweet tea and said that they were releasing me without charge but I needed to provide them with some details of my identity. I had no idea at this stage that I was missing an entire day. A day had been stolen! But by whom?! My wallet (a matter of secondary importance; it was empty, remember?) was also gone. Apparently I’d been apprehended by a passing member of the local foot patrol – in riotous mood (me, not the copper) – drinking on the beach the previous morning with a couple of reprobate old fisher-folk. I’d tried to break into a church: St Thomas of Canterbury and the English Martyrs (in St Leonards) which contains exquisite painted murals (stencils, but still lovely) by Nathaniel Westlake, no less. Amazing. Yes – yes! I had broken in (I have no memory of this) and I’d confessed a pile of hysterical mumbo-jumbo, in Spanish, to the priest, then knelt and prayed with him (we’d conversed freely – he was born and raised in Alicante), then jumped up and ran off. I’d tried to make a sled out of a bakery pallet and had careered down the Old London Road on it (I was relatively successful, in other words), ending up in a large bush of pampas grass (slightly cut lip – evidence of white fluff in hair). I had stolen and eaten half a loaf. I was wearing lipstick (yes!). Orange lipstick. In giant circles around my eyes. Three cigarettes had been stubbed out on the top of my hand. My right hand. And the rabbit? A dwarf breed. Quite rare. Of indeterminate age, it transpires. Nobody knew where it had come from, only that I’d been finding great solace in it. The officer had kindly fed it a carrot.
It was a white rabbit with pink eyes. I walked all the way home with it held in a makeshift sling fashioned out of my jacket. Even now I find it incredible to think that I would have walked all that way with it. I am no fan of small mammals. I have given it a temporary berth in the bath. In the bath the enamel turns its white fur a yellower hue. Strange how the act of comparison can suddenly transform one clearly defined object into something else altogether. Life has a nasty habit of doing that.
I noticed that there was a tiny hole in the bathroom window. Later on I found an even tinier stone in the toilet bowl.
But that was not all I found. Oh no. The bin, the missing bulb, the hole in the window (all serious, in their own way, admittedly) were as nothing by comparison (that rabbit in the bath phenomenon, remember?) with the thing I found in my bedroom. I say ‘thing’, but it was more than a mere ‘thing’, it was a performance, a staging, an extravaganza. It was a complete one-act drama. I hate to oversell it, but … come with me. Enter the room. Push open the door and then grimacingly recoil. There is a smell … Not even a smell, a stink, a vile, ungodly odour. Something so foul, so rank, that mere words – simple, uncomplicated language – cannot do justice to its offensiveness. A slap in the face. A physical reaction. A gut reaction. A violent recoil. An existential shudder. A withering of the soul. A shrinking. A boring at the nostril. A tearing at the throat.
But where? From whence doth this rancid odour hail, pray tell? (I’ve fallen into Olde English in a pathetic attempt to try and encompass how primordial this smell is, how primitive, how base, how … how medieval – and how fearful I am, how confused, how repulsed; but still pretending, nevertheless, to be bold, pretending to be jocular; call to mind, if you must, a cheery fifteenth-century soldier – a Man of Fortune – or, better still, a palsied whore or cocky jester.) I search the room, a shirt over my face. My forehead is instantly dripping with sweat. My hand is a claw. I am a zombie. My body is panicking. It’s instinctive. The smell is so … so engulfing.
Eventually I settle on my suitcase, my empty suitcase (old leather, a gift from my maternal grandfather when I went up to Cambridge). It lies under the bed. I drag it out by its handle. I am so full of dread. Hands shaking. Palms wet. I steady myself. My heart is pounding. One, two, three – Come on, Franklin! Grow some balls, man! – I throw open the lid.
NNNAAAAARRRRGGHHHH!
So much worse – so, so much worse – than I could possibly have anticipated! Several hundred huge, buzzing bluebottles swarm out of the case and into my face. It is as though the devil himself (I’m an atheist, but bear with me) has been compressed in that small space. And now he is free. And he is angry. The sound! The intensity of that roar! The violence of those wings! The sense of un … un … unexpurgated filth! And remaining? In the case? The putrefying corpse of a dead shark. A dead sand shark, no less.
Urgh!
Urgh!
I vomited – instantly, spontaneously – on to my own, damp lap.
The sheer indignity!
Words cannot do justice. No. No. Sometimes, even justice – even justice – cannot do justice.
8
Miss Carla Hahn (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
I am trapped (a pathetically bleating shrew dangling from a savage hawk’s bloodied talon) in the midst of a polite exchange with the indomitable Bridget ‘Biddy’ West, who is manning the Post Office counter in the Fairlight General Store (Biddy: ‘So how many metres of garden did you say you have left, now, Carla?’ Me: ‘Uh … Eight? Nine? I’m not very metric. Eleven or twelve good strides from the back door.’ Biddy: ‘The shed was quite some distance away from the property, then?’ Me: ‘There’s an old extension out back. A sun room that Tilda – the owner, Tilda Gower – closed in with a little pine-wood sauna. It’s … The bungalow is basically just a series of tiny extensions, one next to the … uh … to the … uh … other.’ Biddy: ‘So you’ve told Matilda about the landfall?’).
At this (let’s call it the second ‘uh …’ moment) I am horrified to espy the giant bulk of Clifford Bickerton (previously observed, minutes earlier, driving his van – at considerable speed – towards Hastings on the Fairlight Road) blocking all the light from the windows in the door.
Bugger, bugger, bugger! I was certain I’d got away with it this time! I’d been so careful, so stealthy (had even jumped behind a buddleia to be 100 per cent sure)! Has he been – is he – following me again? Why oh why didn’t I just answer his calls and have done with it? Why didn’t I just speak to him directly when he came to the bungalow the other afternoon, in person, to offer help? Oh bugger, bugger, bugger.
The bell cheerfully tinkles as the door is pushed open and Clifford squeezes himself inside like some huge, red otter gently violating a disused vole hole. Whenever Clifford Bickerton enters any environment constructed for standard human habitation an atmosphere far more appropriate to a Grimm’s fairy tale is promptly established. He is big, powerful, tall, auburn-haired and bushy-bearded with hands like pitchforks and feet like hams. He has been uniquely fashioned for the barn and for the field.
‘So you’ve told Matilda about the landfall?’ Biddy repeats, ignoring the placid and unassuming Clifford completely.
‘Uh …’ I am thrown into confusion, ‘Yes. No. That’s … that’s actually why I’m sending this letter.’
I point towards the letter which I am currently buying stamps for as Clifford smacks his head into the light fitment and quietly curses.
‘You couldn’t ring her?’
Biddy continues to ignore Clifford.
‘No. She’s still travelling.’
‘The Great Wall?’
I nod. ‘She has an itinerary. Her next official pit-stop is somewhere called Huanghua. But she’s been delayed by an infected mosquito bite on her heel. Every few months I receive a letter …’
Clifford is currently inspecting the rack of cellophane and Sellotape. He picks up a packet of Blu-Tack. He seems deeply engrossed in the writing on the back.
‘Is that her name in Chinese, then?’ Biddy wonders, indicating the top line of the address.
‘No. I think it says something like … uh … “to the crazy, European lady traveller who is walking the Great Wall. I humbly ask that you – the wall guard at Huanghua – please keep this letter for her until she arrives, when she will reward you generously for your kindness. A thousand blessings …” All very flowery and Chinese. I don’t know, exactly … something like that, anyway. She sends me her next contact address enclosed in each letter so I can just cut it out and glue it on to an envelope.’
‘Oh.’ Biddy nods.
‘It’s all fairly hit and miss,’ I continue (suddenly compelled – through guilt and embarrassment – to blather on, inanely). ‘The wall’s over five thousand miles long. Although Tilda seems to think it’s even longer than that. In her last postcard she said she’d recently met someone – a Chinese historian or a geographer – who told her that the wall originally spanned over fifteen thousand miles …’
‘I simply don’t understand why Matilda bothered buying that bungalow in the first place if she never had any plans to live in it,’ Biddy sighs, taking the letter from me and dropping it on to the scales.
‘No.’
Clifford has now moved on to the rack of birthday cards.
‘Although I suppose it gives you a roof over your poor head,’ she kindly concedes, ‘so you can rent out your little cottage in Pett and don’t need to be getting under the feet of your dear old dad.’
‘Yes.’ I nod (concerned that she might be confusing my reassuringly tough head or my utterly incorrigible father with someone else’s head – someone else’s dad – far more deserving than mine).
‘Have you ever actually lived in the cottage since you inherited it?’ she wonders.
‘Uh. No, no. I’ve always been committed to—’
‘Someone’s birthday?’ Biddy raises her voice to finally acknowledge Clifford.
Clifford is inspecting a card very closely. He is so engrossed that he doesn’t seem to hear her.
‘SOMEONE’S BIRTHDAY, RUSTY?’ Biddy bellows.
Clifford’s entire body jolts with surprise. He drops the card then bends down to pick it up, inadvertently bumping into a wicker basket containing bags of kindling.
‘Mine,’ he says, then, ‘Sorry,’ (to the basket).
‘Yours?’ Biddy scowls.
Clifford clumsily retrieves the card.
‘The day before yesterday.’ Clifford nods.
(Oh God! The day of the landslip! I have forgotten Clifford’s birthday again, dammit!) ‘It’s visible from space,’ he adds, as a somewhat lacklustre afterthought, ‘the Great Wall.’
‘Happy birthday for … for …’ I start to murmur, agonized.
‘Are you planning on getting yourself a card, Rusty?’ Biddy wonders, with a supercilious smirk.
‘Uh … no.’
Clifford puts the card back down on to the rack.
‘Thank you,’ he mutters.
‘Because you’re two days late!’ Biddy delivers her ringing punch-line with considerable pizzazz.
‘I was actually just after some … uh … matches.’ Clifford grabs a pile of kindling and then moves over towards the ‘shop’ section of the store. There he grabs a packet of Tuc biscuits and proceeds to the counter which is currently vacant because Biddy is in the P.O.
Biddy snorts, amused, then checks the weight of my letter on her scales and inspects her list of foreign postal prices.
‘I’d be scared stiff to go to bed at night,’ she murmurs, neatly tearing a small selection of stamps from their sheets, ‘I mean you can never be sure. A bit of heavy rain and the clay just … it just slips. And there goes your home! Off a cliff! A high cliff! Into the sea! Everything you own – everything you’ve worked for – all gone! Kaput!’
‘And an airmail sticker, please,’ I remind her.
‘Poor Dr and Mrs Bassett lost the best part of their front kitchen. She said they found the cat in a cupboard almost half-dead with fear.’
‘They were up most of the night calling for it.’ I nod.
‘For the life of me I don’t know why the council doesn’t do more to enforce the demolition order,’ she tuts.
‘Tilda’s place is still perfectly livable,’ I interrupt, ‘and the Bassetts haven’t actually occupied the front kitchen since the last big drop …’
‘You’re all nutty as fruitcakes!’ Biddy mutters, pushing over the stamps and the sticker. ‘That’s two pounds and seventy pence please, Carla.’
I pass her the money, then quickly affix the stamps.
‘Well I suppose we should all just be grateful that nobody was actually hurt on this occasion,’ she concedes, generously.
‘Yes. We should. We are. Thanks.’
‘Although it’s only a question of time if you ask me,’ Biddy persists. ‘There’s no point fighting against nature, Carla. I say that as someone who spent much of their childhood in India – Bangladesh as it now is. The Indians respect Mother Nature. Don’t have any other choice. They know, first-hand, what she’s capable of.’
She hands me my change.
‘I’m sure that’s very true,’ I concede, limply (and I am, too).
Without prior warning, Biddy’s disapproving radar suddenly shifts focus and is now centred on the hapless Clifford.
‘Enjoying that, are we, Rusty?’ she demands, scowling.
Clifford has idly picked up a copy of the local paper from the shop counter and is blankly perusing the front page. He quickly throws it down with a stuttered, ‘Nnn … n … no!’
(Biddy, who was once the headmistress of our local primary school, traumatized several generations of small children with her searching questions, her piercing looks and her perpetual air of slight disapproval until a stubborn hip injury put an end to her reign of terror in 1978 or thereabouts.)
I turn for the door, muttering my thanks, but Biddy stops me in my tracks.
‘Shall I put that in the post-bag?’ she asks, reaching out for the letter. I hand it over, somewhat regretfully (it never feels like you’ve actually sent a letter until it’s been shoved into the hungry mouth of a bright, red postbox. Oh well).
I thank Biddy again and start for the exit. I am actually through the door (jingle-jingle!) and halfway across the little car park before Clifford finally catches up with me, as he inevitably must.
‘I left my stuff on the counter,’ he pants. He is still holding the Tuc biscuits.
‘You’ve still got the Tuc biscuits,’ I observe.
‘Damn.’
Clifford inspects the Tuc biscuits, foiled.
‘You’d better go back in,’ I caution him, ‘or Biddy will eat you alive.’
‘Yes.’ He nods, not moving.
I am about to go on to apologize for not responding to his calls (and his visit etc.) when I can’t help but notice the new jumper he’s wearing, partially hidden under his scruffy, khaki work coat. It’s a pure horror: a fashionable Pringle; pale yellow in the main, the front a vile knitted patchwork of interconnected pink, white and mauve diamonds.
I instinctively wince. ‘Birthday present?’ I ask.
‘Alice.’ He nods. ‘She was so pleased with it – cost her almost a week’s wages. I just didn’t have the …’
‘Does it fit properly?’
I push back the frayed sleeve of his work coat and pull away, worriedly, at the cuff. There’s not so much as a millimetre of give.
‘It’s a bit snug,’ he concedes.
‘Isn’t that interfering with your circulation?’ I wonder.
‘I have no feeling in my hands,’ he confirms.
‘Can you actually get it off?’
‘Nope,’ he sighs. ‘It’ll tear when I do. So I’m just keeping it on for as long as I possibly can.’
‘I did that with a sticking plaster once after a polio injection at school,’ I fondly reminisce, ‘and I developed blood poisoning.’
‘I remember.’ He nods.
‘How high can you lift your arms?’
With considerable difficulty he lifts them to a 65-degree angle.
‘There are two tiny holes at the armpit and the elbow,’ he explains, ‘which have allowed a certain amount of flexibility.’
‘You need to get it off, quick,’ I warn him. ‘Isn’t it difficult to breathe?’
‘I feel entombed’ – he nods – ‘like an Egyptian mummy. Although it’s fine,’ he rallies, ‘so long as I don’t over-exert myself.’
‘But what if you get a call out for the lifeboat?’ I demand.
He shrugs.
‘There are little marks on the side of your neck,’ I observe, with increasing concern, ‘little welts. It’s like …’ I shudder. ‘It’s like an expensive, lambswool python has swallowed you up, whole.’
‘I tried to get it off this morning,’ he confesses, ‘but I couldn’t do it by myself. I knew if I asked Mum or Dad or Bill it’d get straight back to Alice in a flash. They all think it’s bloody hilarious.’
‘Gracious me!’ I stare at the welts on his neck, somewhat daunted (almost as if they aren’t friction burns at all, but tender little love bites). ‘You must really care for her,’ I reason, jolted, ‘to put yourself through all this discomfort just for the sake of not … for the sake of … for a jumper. And such a – I mean I hope you don’t mind my saying so – but such a … a …’
I don’t have the heart to say it out loud.
‘Yes.’ He looks suitably crestfallen at the notion. ‘We’ve been engaged for eight years now. I suppose I must probably feel something.’
(Clifford and Alice, a local milkmaid, were engaged after she proposed to him, in 1976, a leap year, and he was just too kind to say no. At least that was always his version of events. Alice plays the scene quite differently, by all accounts.) I nod. Now it’s my turn to look crestfallen. I decide to take it on the chin, though, and promptly rally. I draw a steadying breath and strengthen my resolve. I know that the worst thing I could possibly do under these particular circumstances would be to offer Clifford any form of assistance.
No. I shan’t. I shall not. I will not – must not, definitely not – offer Clifford Bickerton any kind of help. I must never help Clifford Bickerton, and I must never receive help from Clifford Bickerton.
Oh, but the urge to offer help is so … so natural, so instinctive, so spontaneous, so … so …
No. No! No help, Carla. No offers of help! None.
‘Go and pay for the biscuits,’ I promptly tell him, ‘then pop around to the bungalow. I can’t possibly leave you like this. I have a pair of shears … Uh …’ I pause, scowling. ‘At least I did have a pair of shears …’
‘In the shed?’ he asks, almost tender (I suppose men will feel emotional about outbuildings).
I nod. ‘I do have some kitchen scissors, though,’ I persist.
His face lights up. It lights up. Every pore and auburn whisker is suffused with joy.
No! No, Carla! Bad Carla! Mustn’t. Offer. Help.
Will. Not.
I. Must. Not.
No. Help.
None!
Ten minutes later and he is kneeling on the worn kitchen lino and I am brandishing the scissors in front of him.
‘Sure you’re all right with this?’
‘Yup. Do it.’ He braces himself.
I kneel down beside him and gently slide the bottom blade of the scissors under the right-hand side of the jumper’s collar.
‘Stay very still,’ I instruct him, leaning in closer. It is difficult to find the correct angle and draw the blades together without resting my lower arm and wrist against his leonine neck and cheek. Ah, and there’s that all too familiar ‘Clifford smell’ of candle wax, sleeping puppies and engine grease! A lovely smell. The smell of industry and loyalty and good intent.
‘Your Tikhomirov study of the birches is on the floor,’ Clifford quietly observes.
‘Uh … Sorry?’ I re-focus.
‘Your painting of the birch trees …’ he repeats.
‘Oh. Yes. Of course. It fell down. During the landslip. It was the only casualty inside the house. The bottom of the frame snapped.’
‘I remember the day you bought that.’ He smiles tenderly at the memory.
‘Yes.’
I adjust my arm, frowning, and start to cut. The jumper curls away beneath my hand on both sides like two obliging slithers of apple peel. The trusty old vest below has – to its eternal credit – somehow managed to stay intact.
‘I’ll fix it if you like,’ Clifford volunteers, ‘the frame.’
‘It’s fine,’ I insist, ‘I can do it myself. Some strong glue …’
‘Oh. Okay.’ He is slightly hurt yet resigned.
‘I still love it. I still love birch trees,’ I muse. ‘Berezka. Beautiful Berezka. I don’t know why, they just make me feel so … so …’
‘Russian,’ he murmurs.
I start.
‘I really like all your new propaganda posters …’ He inspects the busy walls, thoughtfully, his eyes pausing on an early ‘Liberated Women Build up Socialism!’ poster which features a wholesome Russian peasant girl brandishing a pistol. Next to it the ‘Think About Those Who Are Starving!’ poster in blue and black with a loaf, cup, bowl and ominous, pointing hand.
‘I’ve been using them as a cheap way of covering up all the stains on the old wallpaper,’ I explain, ‘although they’re way too good for a kitchen, really—’
‘I see your collection of Russian lacquered boxes has increased a fair bit since I last visited,’ he interrupts, flexing his chest as the scissors finally break through the jumper’s waistline. ‘And the Soviet china figurines …’ He tips his head towards the old dresser. ‘Is that a new Lomonosov Chow?’
‘Uh …Yes. I found it wrapped up in a big box of Uzbek fabrics. In an antique shop near Hythe … D’you think you might manage to pull it off manually from here?’
Clifford tries to yank the jumper from his shoulder but his arms are still stiff and he has no luck.
‘Shall I cut down the back?’
He nods and shuffles around, obligingly.
‘Has Shimmy been to visit you here lately?’ he wonders.
‘Shimmy?’ I pause, briefly, before answering. ‘Uh. No. Not of late. He’s still not especially mobile. That problem with his feet.’
Clifford turns his head to peer towards the blades as I insert them, pressing gently into the nape of his neck.
‘Why d’you ask?’ I wonder, slightly anxious. He doesn’t respond so I recommence cutting again.
‘I’ve been doing some work for a man in Bexhill who’s trying to get shot of a collection of Soviet army surplus stuff – a gas mask, a transistor radio, a canteen and a vodka flask, some military badges …’
‘Sounds interesting.’ I continue to cut.
‘He showed me a little, wooden sewing kit – a travelling kit – in the shape of a minaret. And a group of Kiddush cups – the sterling silver ones. Not a complete set. I think he had five in total. In fact …’
‘I can see how this might’ve been expensive,’ I muse, smoothly running the scissors – and my hand – down the back of the jumper, ‘it’s very soft.’
‘Soft but lethal,’ Clifford affirms.
‘And very bright. Luminous, almost.’
‘A statement piece.’ Clifford smiles, wanly.
‘Is that how Alice described it?’ I wonder, chuckling.
‘Uh …’ he frowns, obviously not wanting to appear disloyal.
The scissors cut the waistband and I pull back with a measure of satisfaction (like a smug Lady Mayor on cutting the ribbon at a local fete): ‘The Pringle is vanquished!’ I grin, throwing down the scissors and grabbing the jumper firmly at the top of his arm in order to yank it off. ‘Clifford Bickerton is finally liberated from the scourge of lambswool!’
I pull, but the jumper hardly gives. Instead I yank Clifford towards me and we both nearly topple sideways. He tips but steadies himself, his weight supported on his arm which is now planted, firmly, between my knees. I stop myself from falling by simply holding on. His bicep is like a giant squash. So hard. He doesn’t automatically straighten himself.
‘Don’t let go,’ he murmurs, into my hair. I am close to his ear. I long to press the cool outline of it against the skin of my forehead. It’s a random urge. Silly. But Clifford has such nice ears. Good ears. Familiar ears.
‘I’ve been reading that Ivan Yefremov novel you bought me for Christmas,’ I say, turning my head away, releasing my grip, delighting – thrilling, even – at my considerable powers of self-control, ‘the sci-fi thing. Andromeda. It’s very good.’
‘That was three Christmases ago,’ he answers, thickly.
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s from three Christmases ago.’
‘Oh. Well it’s very good,’ I repeat.
He suddenly straightens himself and clambers heavily to his feet. He walks to the window and peers out.
‘What did the surveyor say?’ he murmurs, coolly assessing the damage.
I stand up myself. ‘Tiered gardens are all the vogue, apparently.’ I try to make light of it.
‘That bad?’
‘No. No,’ I lie.
‘You’ve still got the sauna,’ he observes. ‘That sauna is indestructible.’
I grab the scissors from the floor and walk over. ‘Although I haven’t seen a single bird on the feeders since it happened.’
‘Strange. You wouldn’t think they’d be that bothered.’
‘They have wings.’ I nod.
I take a hold of his arm, lift it and gently insert the bottom blade under the cuff. As I start to cut something terrible occurs to me.
‘Hang on a second … the landslip – wasn’t that your birthday? You came around here on your birthday? Then you ended up searching for a lost cat half the night?’
(The Bassetts had informed me of these small details the morning after. It had been Clifford who’d bravely ventured into the front kitchen – just as dawn was breaking – at the pathetic sound of mewing.)
Clifford doesn’t volunteer anything further.
‘How’d you find out?’ I wonder.
‘The coastguard.’
‘Ah.’
‘They were thinking of sending out a boat, so I drove over to check things out.’
I nod. At last his first arm is free. He flexes it, gratefully. I commence work on the second.
‘Georgie Hulton said he saw you in tears on the beach the other day. You were out walking Rogue. He said you’d just been talking to your tenant – a Mr Huff.’
‘What a ridiculous name!’ I mutter, cheeks reddening. ‘Mr Huff! I’ll huff and I’ll puff …’
‘Was he bothering you?’ Clifford demands.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I snort, ‘it was windy. I got sand in my eyes, that’s all.’
‘Georgie said he called out to you but …’
‘I mustn’t have heard him.’ I shrug.
Clifford says nothing and the second arm is soon freed. I step back, grinning. Clifford stands there in his vest. All plain and uncomplicated in his vest. I am so pleased, so relieved, to see that awful jumper finally gone, to see him back to his giant, scruffy but utterly pristine self. Pure now and unadulterated. I bend down and start scooping up the abandoned segments of jumper and suddenly, for no reason I can think of, I feel like … like tearing at those expensive bits of luminous wool, throwing them down, cursing them, jumping on them. Instead I quickly carry them over to the bin (these dangerous and provocative pieces of knitwear) and am about to lift the lid and toss them in when Clifford appears behind me, pulling on his old khaki jacket and asks if he might possibly hold on to them, as a keepsake. ‘Of course,’ I say, ‘sorry. Of course you can. Of course you must.’ I pass them over. He is saying something about being late for a job. I nod. I say something about I don’t know what exactly. He almost bumps his head into a reproduction ceiling beam. I walk ahead of him to the door. I am saying inconsequential things, about the farm, about his mother. Then he is gone.
I stand in the tiny hallway for a moment, still holding the scissors, scowling. Then I walk through to the kitchen again. My thoughts keep returning to Shimmy, what he’d said about Shimmy. ‘Has Shimmy visited the bungalow lately?’
Strange. Why’d he say that? Why’d he ask that?
I cast my eyes around the room, frustratedly, irritably. It is then that I see an alien, little object on the edge of the counter-top. What …? I frown and draw closer. It is a tiny, wooden, Russian minaret, a humble thing, home-made, daubed in worn white and ochre and black. I pick it up, fascinated, and twist the small, stiff bulb which eventually comes loose to reveal – hidden within – a little selection of slightly rusty needles, pins and a small roll of faded threads.
Oh my goodness!
How utterly adorable!
Clifford Bickerton.
Clifford bloody Bickerton!
‘Never. Offer. Help. Carla. Hahn,’ I murmur.
9
Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
I don’t know why, but I have the distinct feeling that Mrs Barrow knows more than she’s letting on. When she arrived for work this morning (pristine gingham housecoat, Dr Scholl wooden sandals combined with thick tan tights, brown nylon A-line skirt, trusty emu-feather duster held incongruously aloft like the proud baton of a Marching Band leader) the whole cottage was still shrill with the hyperactive buzz of bluebottles.
I had found some brief respite, overnight, in the small, spare room (the ‘box’ room as I casually refer to it) which seemed like the only place in the whole cottage not utterly overtaken (doused, eclipsed) by the rank odour of rotten fish. The flies were everywhere – everywhere – yet this was also the only place in the entire cottage that they didn’t seem to feel especially drawn to. Not a single fly came in to pester me as I fitfully slumbered (or if they did, I had no inkling of it), although the door had – somewhat stupidly – been left ajar for the best part of the night after a lumbering visit to the bathroom.
I showed Mrs Barrow the damage (almost with a small measure of pride – a secret hankering for approval: Mrs Barrow! Observe my suffering – my confusion – my persecution!).
‘The bin has been dumped on top of the Look Out.’ I pointed.
‘The bulb on the front porch is gone … Presumed stolen.
‘A tiny pebble has been thrown through the bathroom window …’ (Of course I didn’t take her in there, the rabbit being hidden, temporarily, under an upturned washing-up bowl.)
And finally … the Pièce de Résistance! I led her out on to the little back porch (the postage-stamp-sized – and badly fenced – scrap of garden to the fore; a lovely mess of blue and mauve: wild asters, bugloss, scabious and sea holly; cusping a sheer, thirty-foot drop to ground level, but still hemmed in from the beach proper by yet more dampness: some swampy common ground, the thin end of the not-so-Grand Military Canal, the road beyond and, of course, the sea wall) where the big fish is currently in situ on the old bench (which I broke the back slat of two days ago while removing a boot). She pinches her nose.
‘It was hidden in my suitcase under the bed,’ I explain.
She thinks for a short while. ‘You’re sure as you didn’t put it in there yourself, Mr Huff,’ she wonders, ‘and then forget?’
I am – quite frankly – incensed by this question.
‘What earthly reason d’you imagine I might have had for doing that?’ I demand.
She shrugs.
‘This is a shark, Mrs Barrow! How exactly do you expect I might go about acquiring a shark in these Godforsaken environs?’
‘Oh I think you’ll find as they’re very common in these parts, Mr Huff,’ Mrs Barrow insists. ‘When Mr Barrow worked out on the fishing boats we would eat sand shark very regular. Once or twice a week. I’d have thought a cosmopolitan gentleman such as yourself, Mr Huff, might be quite partial to the odd plate of good quality shark meat.’
I stare at her, astonished.
‘A nice bowl of shark fin soup,’ she persists. ‘Surely them Mexicanos are all wild for shark fin soup.’
‘Shark’s fin soup is a Chinese delicacy, Mrs Barrow,’ I stiffly inform her.
‘Shark is very edible, Mr Huff,’ Mrs Barrow doggedly continues, wafting her hand gently in front of her face, ‘although the mistake you made here, Mr Huff, was to leave the internal organs in place. Always be sure and gut a shark on the beach. Mr Barrow is oft wont to say that.’ She smirks. ‘Then the gulls’ll kindly do the rest of the work for you.’
‘I think you misunderstand me, Mrs Barrow …’ I start off.
‘Or they makes a fine bait,’ she continues, ‘if you can only bear the stink, mind.’
She winces.
‘I have never eaten shark, Mrs Barrow, nor have I ever considered eating shark,’ I maintain.
‘Well if the urge ever takes you again, Mr Huff, might I suggest as you soak the gutted fish flesh in milk or bicarbonate,’ she volunteers. ‘The worst of that honk is the ammonia, see …?’
Again? If the urge ever takes me again?!
‘Like I say,’ I repeat, quite sharply, now, ‘I have never eaten shark and I have never—’
‘Well you can eats it in all manner of ways, Mr Huff!’ she promptly eulogizes. ‘Tastes just like mackerel, it does. You can have it fresh, frozen, dried. The liver is specially prized for its oil. A person can even make leather goods from the hide if they so feels the urge.’
‘My point is—’
‘I just deep fries it in a nice, light batter, Mr Huff. Better still, after soaking the steak in milk, dip it in beaten egg, then a thin layer of flour, then pop it in a hot, oiled pan …’
‘While this is all very educational, Mrs Barrow …’
‘Or make yourself a plain stew, Mr Huff, with chopped carrots, onions, leeks, parsnips, potato …’
‘… I fail to see how …’
‘… nice tin of plum tomatoes …’
‘… this has any relevance with regard to …’
‘Salt. Pepper. Basic stock. Bay leaf …’
‘… the rotting carcass of a shark suddenly appearing …’
‘Celery. Did I forget celery?’
‘… as if by magic …’
‘Be sure to only throw in the diced fish at the last minute. Big handful of chopped parsley to serve …’
‘… or … or voodoo …’
‘Then hey presto, there you have it: sand shark stew, Mr Huff!’
‘Gumbo,’ I interject (broken).
‘Pardon me, Mr Huff?’ Mrs Barrow looks a tad offended.
‘Gumbo,’ I repeat.
‘You can call it mumbo gumbo if you likes, Mr Huff’ – Mrs Barrow is still more offended – ‘but a regular-sized sand shark such as this one here will provide a good hearty family meal, and without breaking the bank, neither.’
‘No, no, gumbo, Mrs Barrow! Gumbo: an American fish and meat dish. A stew.’
‘Oh.’ Mrs Barrow doesn’t look convinced.
‘Although gumbo has plenty of garlic. And it’s generally accompanied by a handful of rice.’
Mrs Barrow’s eyes widen in horror. ‘I’m afraid as Mr Barrow won’t tolerate garlic, Mr Huff! Makes him belch something rotten, it does! Nor rice, neither, except in puddings of course, and even then he generally prefers some sago. He don’t have no stomach for all that foreign muck, Mr Huff. A plain English stew is perfectly all right by him, thank you very much.’
Mrs Barrow rocks back on her wooden soles, arms crossed.
‘Garlic is the mainstay of South American cuisine,’ I stolidly maintain, ‘and it actually has many impressive anti-bacterial qualities …’ I suddenly find myself listing them, almost as if the list itself will somehow validate the feelings of hurt and distress I’m currently experiencing as a direct result of my perceived ill-treatment by the vindictive, bin-stealing, fish-hiding, garlic-hating people of the Great British Isle: ‘It’s good for wounds, Mrs Barrow, ulcers, colds, bladder problems …’
Mrs Barrow starts at the mention of bladder problems. ‘I’ll as thank you to please refrain yourself from trespassing into areas of such a deeply intimate complexion, Mr Huff!’ she exclaims, turns on her heel and heads back inside, affronted. I remain on the balcony for a second, momentarily nonplussed, then turn and follow. She disappears into various rooms and can be heard banging the wide open windows shut.
‘D’you think it’s a good idea to be closing all the windows, Mrs Barrow?’ I call through. ‘Isn’t it better to give the flies every opportunity to disperse?’
Mrs Barrow stomps back into the kitchen-diner, shaking her duster around. She marches into the sitting room, still wafting, and slams the window shut in there, too.
‘Mrs Barrow?’ I follow her into the room.
‘Mrs Barrow? D’you not think it might be better if we …?’
As I irritably address her I am slightly bemused to observe a series of skittish, disparate bluebottles suddenly unify and cohere (like a swarm of wild bees, or pre-roost starlings) on to an expanse of the whitewashed chimney breast behind Mrs Barrow’s shoulder, then doubly bemused – nay, astonished – to see them forming into a coherent shape. A large … a large … what? Uh … An … an X? Yes … an … uh … Then they busily adjust, and the X … well, it tips … it tips on to its side and what were formerly the two ‘horizontal’ lines are fractionally reduced to produce … How fleeting is this moment? I blink. Nope. Nope. Still there … still there …
A kind of cross shape! An actual cross! Large as life! On the chimney breast! A big, black, buzzing cross!
The hairs on the back of my neck promptly stand on end.
Mrs Barrow is speaking.
‘There was none of ’em in the little room,’ she ruminates, ‘did you happen to see that, Mr Huff?’
She turns and double-checks that the window is properly shut. I merely gape. I am inarticulate. Does she even notice the deafening cross of flies – right there – immediately to her left? I lift my arm and start to point vaguely as the cross shifts again; a diagonal line forms between the top of the vertical line and the further reaches of the horizontal line to the left and a … yes … it’s now a four. A perfect four. A four!
Mrs Barrow finally satisfies herself that the window is properly closed, spins back around swishing her duster (like a hoity-toity priest on Palm Sunday condescending to scatter holy water on to the unwashed masses), disperses the flies, quite unthinkingly, then pushes past me and disappears once again into the back section of the cottage. Three seconds of silence, before:
‘Euceelyptus!’ she bellows, victorious.
‘Sorry?’
I start to follow her. She is standing on the threshold to the small, box room.
‘In the little girl’s room!’ She points with her duster. ‘Euceelyptus! That’s her smell. Well I never!’
Mrs Barrow seems delighted. I push past her and step inside the room, sniffing.
Eucalyptus! She’s right. I have no idea why I didn’t notice it before! It’s stringent. Clean. And very powerful.
‘Well Carla’s as told me on many an occasion how she can’t abide the smell. She’s allergic! Disinfectant, see? She always says as the whole place is full of the scent of it. The little girl’s smell! Orla’s smell. Although they was as thick as thieves when that poor child was still alive – if you could call it a life, as such,’ she cavils, ‘and it was no different then, neither. Not as I’d know, mind. I was off in Dymchurch that entire summer nursing my sister-in-law – God bless her soul – who was down with the dropsy. Terrible it was – for a while. We all thought as she’d miss the birth of her first grandchild. She was quite frantic about it as I recall. Then she suddenly got herself better. Died one year later of a heart attack. But it was very quick. Blessedly so, Mr Huff.’
Mrs Barrow crosses herself and heads back to the kitchen.
‘Euceelyptus!’ she chortles. ‘Flies can’t abide the smell of it! Wait till I tells Carla about this!’
I remain in the room – inhaling suspiciously – and am soon drawn to my suit jacket which is slung over the back of a small, rickety whitewashed chair by the bed. I check the pockets (pure instinct) and draw out several handfuls of leaves – eucalyptus leaves. Eucalyptus leaves! Remember? From my little Hastings misadventure?
‘Mrs Barrow?’ I yell through, but am interrupted by a scream. Mrs Barrow has finally discovered the little rabbit in the bath.
‘It’s a rabbit, Mrs Barrow!’ I yell. ‘Just a rabbit – a dwarf variety.’
Mrs Barrow comes storming back through. ‘We has a strict no-pets policy, Mr Huff!’ she chastises me, hands on hips. ‘It’s right there in the contract: large print! Miss Hahn could happily evict you for less!’
‘It’s not mine!’ I insist. ‘I found it!’
‘Whereabouts?’ she demands.
‘In … in … in …in my vest,’ I respond (but not all that convincingly).
‘It’s been doing all its jobbies and what-not in the bath, Mr Huff!’ Mrs Barrow is not remotely mollified. Then, ‘In your vest?!’ she echoes, a few seconds later.
‘Yes. In amongst my vests,’ I modify. ‘Inside the small chest of drawers. I’m planning to phone the local constabulary,’ I say, ‘to investigate.’
‘You think it’s a matter of sufficient import to be bothering the police with?’ she asks, taken aback.
‘Why not, Mrs Barrow?’ I demand. ‘This was breaking and entering! Trespass! It’s not just a small matter of a couple of kids having a little bit of harmless fun at my expense. The bin alone – yes, fair enough. But this? It’s far more … more focused, more personal than that. These are the actions of a man or a woman with a serious grudge; these are acts of pure spite – considered acts, Mrs Barrow, and I naturally feel duty-bound to treat them as such.’
‘Trespass?! But you left all them doors unlocked, Mr Huff!’ Mrs Barrow interjects.
‘How’d you know that?’ I demand.
‘Lucky guess.’ She shrugs. ‘You always as leaves ’em open, Mr Huff. Old habits dies hard. I imagine that’s as what comes of living loose among all them free-and-easy types in the slums.’
‘An act of … of vengeance,’ I persist, refusing to be waylaid.
‘To put a rabbit in your vests, Mr Huff?’ she scoffs.
‘No. No! Not that so much as …’ I start to correct her, then, on second thoughts, ‘Yes! Yes! The rabbit! To move the bin and steal the bulb and … and the fish and the rabbit. Yes. Exactly.’ I nod.
Mrs Barrow considers all this for a few moments, which prompts me, in turn (I mean what’s to be considered?) to raise the stakes a little. ‘I don’t want to say anything that might alarm you unnecessarily,’ I murmur, ‘but I think it only fair to warn you that during my time working as an investigative journalist in South America I had a measure of involvement with …’ – I lower my voice a fraction – ‘with operatives from the higher echelons of the CIA – the highest echelons, in fact. This was a long time ago – ’68 – and they were by no means my finest hours, Mrs Barrow; I was sacked, ignominiously; disgraced – I can’t stand here and pretend otherwise – but there are still … there are wounds, festering wounds …’
‘You think as the CIA went and put a rabbit in your vests, Mr Huff?’ Mrs Barrow is naturally sceptical at the prospect.
‘Not literally, Mrs Barrow, no.’ I shake my head. ‘All I’m saying is that I’m highly practised at reading signals – understanding gestures – I’m au fait with the subtle language of revenge – of tit-for-tat – at a very basic, very primitive level. In Mexican gang culture the concept of retribucion is at the very heart of how—’
‘Now you look here, Mr Huff,’ Mrs Barrow interrupts, plainly startled, ‘I has a great deal of sympathy with your predicament, don’t nobody ever dare tell me otherwise …’
I humbly nod, gratified.
‘I got two eyes in my head, Mr Huff, and I can plainly see as how upset you is, like as if you saw a ghost, almost, Mr Huff …’ – she inspects my grief-strewn visage with some attention – ‘but all’s I need you to understand is that poor Miss Hahn – Carla – don’t need the burden of your problems with the CIA weighing down on her shoulders right now. That girl is burdened enough already: what with the rental problems because of all the cranks what comes here and takes the right royal mickey out of her decent nature, her crazy dad with his bad feet and his fat dog, not to mention the awful landslip which swallowed up her shed – full of all her tools and such – not two days since up there in Fairlight …’
I start.
‘Sorry? A—’
‘I don’t know as if you realize, Mr Huff,’ she continues, ‘how precious this little cottage is to poor Carla. Mulberry might not look much to folks such as you and I, Mr Huff, but to poor Carla …’ She frowns. ‘It’d be no exaggeration to say as it was her life, her … her world, her … her very soul, Mr Huff.’
‘Well we can’t have rotten fish and … and broken windows and stolen bins and deeply distressed residents impinging on our poor, dear Miss Hahn’s fastidious soul, Mrs Barrow, can we?’ I blithely respond (yes, yes, there is an element of facetiousness). ‘Perish the thought!’
‘Rabbits, Mr Huff!’ Mrs Barrow maintains. ‘Don’t you forget them rabbits, neither!’
‘Just so, Mrs Barrow.’(I am finally now beginning to understand Miss Hahn’s former contention that Mrs Barrow is generally wont to find the least important detail in any course of events to be the most significant. In this instance the actual offence of these recent developments to myself – my dignity – as opposed to Miss Hahn’s perceived offence at second-hand.) ‘Which is exactly why I am determined to alert the relevant—’
‘Although now I comes to think about it, Mr Huff,’ Mrs Barrow reasons, ‘this is as likely to be an attack on poor Miss Hahn as it is on you! All the crackpots what comes to this place, you know, such as yourself. All those difficult cases, the religious maniacs and the Irish and the gypsies and the swindlers. And as if that’s not bad enough, there was always the problems with her mother when poor Carla was growing up; her being a German and what-not, a foreigner, very bossy, always sticking her oar in, working for the council and taking pleasure – active pleasure it seemed like – in tearing down people’s beach huts and little homes on the marshes over yonder, though she paid for it in the end, I suppose. Went totally doolally with dementia, poor soul. Not to mention her father being such a difficult, work-shy Jew. I mean piano-tuning isn’t a way to make a proper living, Mr Huff. It’s dreadful! Even carneys got more self-respect! Who cares if the piano is a little bit off key, anyways? You can still bang out a good old tune on it … Yes’ – she nods – ‘I do think as it’s our duty as to protect her from these curious developments, Mr Huff. In fact …’
She wanders off, wafting the duster. ‘I should telephone Rusty. He’ll know what to do. Rusty Bickerton always has Miss Hahn’s best interests at heart, Mr Huff. Forget the constabulary. They’re as good as idiots in these parts anyways. Rusty’ll set things straight and we won’t need to bother dear Carla with none of it. I think that’s the best course. I really does.’
‘But Mrs Barrow …’
‘Put yourself to good use, Mr Huff. Go out and build that rabbit of yourn a cage. And it’ll need a run, to boot: two by four at the very least I’d have thought.’
‘But Mrs Barrow … I really am determined to … Mrs Barrow!’
Silence.
‘Hello?’
More silence.
‘Mrs Barrow …?’
I stand and quietly scrutinize this unfolding scenario for a moment with my dispassionate, journalistic eye. Is Mrs Barrow actually on to something here? Is this not actually about me after all? Am I simply overreacting – lashing out – because I’m so upset … because I haven’t properly processed … because I won’t openly admit to the depth of my real feelings about …? Well? Am I?
Mrs Barrow is standing in the living room as I meekly approach her, gently wafting her duster as she speaks on the phone.
‘Hello there, Mrs Bickerton, this is Mrs Barrow up at Mulberry. Yes, hello. I was wondering if I might have a quick word with Rusty if it’s all the same to you? Oh. Well, when you sees him will you tell him as I needs him to come and see me up here, pronto? It’s a matter of some delicacy. Yes. Yes. Thank you.’
She places down the receiver then glances around the room, deeply gratified.
I fail to see any reason for such high levels of satisfaction. In fact I find myself at quite the opposite side of this emotional scale. I am disgruntled. Momentarily dead-ended. Stoppered.
‘D’you hear that, Mr Huff?’ She places her hand to her ear.
I frown. I listen. Eh?
‘Hear what, Mrs Barrow?’ I respond.
‘Nothing!’ She grins.
‘Nothing?’ I echo, exhausted.
‘They’s all gone! See?’ She chuckles royally at my mystified expression (is it just me, or has life suddenly become horribly … I don’t know … loud? Angular? Bald? Cracked? Convoluted?).
‘Buzz, buzz, buzz!’ She kindly offers me a clue.
What?! Oh. Yes. Yes! The pesky flies! I glance around me. She’s right. They’re gone. They’ve vamoosed! All of them. Every single one of the little blighters.
‘Never give ’em too many options, Mr Huff.’ She taps the side of her nose with her finger. ‘My old Mam taught me that. Don’t be opening all the windows. Don’t spoil ’em. Be sparing. Just open the one – or a door …’
She trots over to the back balcony door and gently pulls it shut.
‘Always put something beyond it as a lure, mind. Flies is like livestock, Mr Huff – and some folk an’ all, come to that! Skittish, they are, plain skittish! So just give ’em clear directions’ – she winks at me, broadly – ‘and then they’ll do as they’s told, right enough.’
10
Miss Carla Hahn (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
I am going to speak to Mr Huff.
I am going to speak to Mr Huff.
I am going to speak to Mr Huff.
I am. I am.
Apologize. Confess. Apologize. I am. I will. Yes. I will. It’s just that … that after all the drama with the landslip I simply haven’t had the … the … you know … the wherewithal … the nerve … the will … uh … no … the opportunity. Then I was scheduled on, last minute, for three, consecutive shifts at Mallydams: reception desk, cleaning out cages, hand feeding that snappy young vixen with the broken jaw etc. (they’re short-staffed – poor Amy Burrell contracted Rat-bite Fever from a weasel. It’s been all the talk in Guestling this week), and of course poor Dad’s foot medication ran out yesterday (he forgot to warn me in advance) so I was obliged to charge on over to the Ore Surgery just before closing (ditched the bike, got the bus). Then there was a queue twenty deep at the pharmacy …
But I am going to speak to Mr Huff. Yes. It’s an absolute priority.
I am going to speak to Mr Huff.
Confess. Confess all.
Yes.
Although … Although no word as yet from Mrs Barrow (and this is a scheduled cleaning day at the cottage, so … uh …), so perhaps it didn’t all pan out quite so badly as I … uh …
Hoped?
Anticipated?
Feared?
No. No. It must’ve … It must’ve been terrible. Awful. The bin hidden in plain view. The little stone through the window (but only a little stone, and it’s my window after all), the stolen bulb (although – again – it’s my bulb to steal). And … and the shark. The dead shark. There’s no … I mean there’s no excusing … no arguing my way out of … Under the bed! The dead shark! The shark with its guts full of vile, writhing, rapidly pupating …
Oh Lord!
I am going to speak to Mr Huff.
Although (in my defence – I know I don’t actually have a leg to stand on) he left all the doors wide open! Really! What else did he expect? Honestly!
And he insulted Rogue! Yes! Mortally! And Dad!
And he’s an awful, supercilious snoop! He ran over Mum’s cat, for heaven’s sake!
(That was actually his wife, though, wasn’t it? Before she left?)
And then, to compound the injury, he pretty much accused me of lying! To my face! About the poor old boy’s age! Followed by the letter! That awful, vain, self-aggrandizing … Urgh! Just thinking about it makes my … makes my blood … urgh … boil.
Such a rude man.
And the subtle way he’s gone about ingratiating himself with everyone. Oh lovely, charming, creative Mr Huff with his curly hair and his clever, hazel eyes and his cheekbones and his braces and his cosmopolitan life and his artistic hands and his winning ways and his extraordinary sensitivity (Please!) and his shrunken heads and his social conscience and … and his amazing gift – his deep empathy – with macaws!
Urgh.
When I so much as … as think about the way he’s lied and connived and conned and … and charmed people. How he’s ingratiated himself (did I say that before?). Ingratiated himself with everyone. Everyone. Even Mrs Barrow! Everyone. Everyone but … well, but me. Obviously.
The way he’s …
Urgh. Urgh.
I am going to speak to Mr Huff. I am. Confess. Apologize. Although before I can head on over there – here we are … Phew! Quick left turn. Avoid the puddle. Apply the brake. Clamber off. Throw down my bike. Remove my rucksack. Peek inside: tin of pilchards, check; pork pie, check; iron supplements, check; Deep Heat, check; aniseed balls, check – before I can head over there I’m obliged to pop in on Shimmy to drop off his Dopamine and some other stuff he’s asked for.
Of course (nothing’s ever as simple as it should be in this life) when I arrive it’s utterly impossible to gain access to the cottage. Rogue has fallen asleep – as is his perfectly maddening habit – directly behind the front door. The sheer weight of that animal, the heft, is equivalent (and this is absolutely no exaggeration) to a large chaise-longue or a small settee. I smack the door into him, repeatedly (Sorry, Rogue!). I have a full three inches leeway (Oh lucky me!). But he refuses, point-blank, to budge. I know – I just know – that he’s blocking my access on purpose – I’m certain of it – purely to avoid the distinct likelihood of his being dragged out for a spot of brisk exercise.
And I can’t get in through the back, either! Dammit! Dammit! Security-obsessed Shimmy has bolted the tall side gate. I knock (obviously – doors, windows), I sit on the bell, I yell, but all to no avail. Shimmy is listening – at quite extraordinary volume – to a home-taped recording (off the TV) of Fraggle Rock, his favourite programme. I can hear him singing along to the theme tune, bless him. Damn him.
Dance your cares away!
Worry’s for another day –
Let the music play,
Down at Fraggle Rock!
Again it plays, and again and again and again. Can he have made himself two separate recordings so he doesn’t have to wait to rewind? Has he even got two functional tape recorders? Does he possess the technological know-how for such pointless shenanigans?
I try the back gate for a second time. I return to the front door and smack it into Rogue. Thud.
We’re Gobo, Mokey, Wembley, Boober, Red!
I return to the gate. I’ve climbed over it before, but only under extreme duress. There’s very little purchase for hand or foot. After scrabbling around for a while I have the brilliant idea of fetching my bike, leaning it up against the gate and using it (the pedal, then the seat) as a kind of portable stepladder.
Everything is proceeding apace. The bike is carefully positioned – a brick wedged under the front wheel, the back wheel pushed against the wall of the house. I climb up. It’s a little unstable (a little ungainly, come to that) but everything’s going perfectly to plan, until …
It’s difficult to describe what happens next. I am almost half-straddling the gate – climbing over boldly, assuredly, very confident – when something catches at my waist, I fall forward, inadvertently – violently – kick out both my feet, and the bike tips sideways, crashing on to the gravel path. I am left hanging over the gate, bent at the hip, a fleshy, top-heavy U-bend, a human peg. To fall back would be difficult – even dangerous (the bike is just below. I’d hate to land on the spokes and potentially injure my foot, my ankle, my leg). I can only move forward. It’s just … uh … a question of … of using my hands to … to … And then I find that I’m … that I’m … that somehow I’ve become … no! I’m stuck! The piece of cord in my old jeans (they’re drawstring, tautened at the waist with a gentle bow) has somehow become hooked over an irregular piece of … a little wooden chip, a knot. And so I’m … I’m utterly, irrevocably, undisputedly stuck! I simply can’t …
I struggle. I struggle for what feels like an age to get my hand under my … to loosen the … but it’s too taut. In fact it’s … it’s almost cutting into me. And it’s hard to breathe with all this weight – my weight – on my gut. So I hang forward, to rest, to inhale, but then – once rested – I find it almost impossible to straighten back up. All the strength has leaked out of me.
I am stuck! Bottom in the air. Legs kicking. Wheezing. Groaning. I am stuck! I am stuck!
The vestiges of my womanly pride restrain me from calling out for help for a full five minutes. Who will come, anyway? It’s mid-afternoon on a quiet, unmade road. But after five – or ten – or seven (time loses all significance under such circumstances) minutes, I begin to yell.
At first an informal, undemanding, ‘Hello?’
Hello? Hello? Anyone? Hello? Hello?
Eventually a less formal, more desperate, ‘Help!’
Help! Help! Help me! Hello? Help! I’m stuck! Is there anyone there? Hello? Hello?
HELLO? HELLO? HELLO?
Oh my bladder, my poor bladder with the gate cutting into it! The chafing. The mortification! The redness of face. The nausea. Hands scrabbling. Feet kicking.
Aaaargh!
I am wailing. I can hear myself. A little, poignant wail. How long has it been now? The wail appears to be coming from the other side of the gate. Although my head is here. And my mouth. How odd! Could it be the cat mewing?
In my mind I am singing that silly song by Bananarama. The chorus goes ‘Robert De Niro’s waiting, talking Italian – talking Ital-i-an. Robert De Niro’s waiting, talk-king It-al-lian!’
I hang in silence for a while, bemused. Singing in my head. I yell for help only every minute or so to preserve my voice for the long haul.
Help!
Help!
Help!
I might be here all afternoon.
In fact I must’ve yelled this strange word (help – such a strange word! And the more I yell it, the stranger it seems; the hoarser, the darker, the more absurd and despairing) several hundred times when … now this is odd (because my head is hung forward – the blood pounding in my ears, I am almost faint – almost fainting) … I hear sudden footsteps on the gravel and something that seems like a human voice but all muffled and jumbled: like Aow-aow-aow-aow wah!
So curious!
Then comes a powerful smell of clementines (I’m not making this up!). An attempt to open the gate. A tentative yank on my foot, a hand on my bottom …
Oi!
And then, pow!
The bow on my trousers is untied (how’d he/she/it do that?) and before I know better (or am able to ready/steady/adjust myself) I’m tumbling forward over the gate and landing – Crump! (trouserless!) – on my hand/elbow/face/head/back ow! on the gravel ow! path ow! to the other side.
I lie for a few seconds, breathless and winded.
Aow-aow aow-aow? the strange voice asks, evidently concerned, trying the gate again.
I slowly sit up. Anything broken? Not sure. What I do know is that several pieces of gravel are embedded in my forehead. My legs feel okay … and … oooh … my spine … but my … ow! … my right thumb is hanging loose.
I’ve dislocated it! I’ve dislocated my thumb! Just look at that! How perfectly ghastly!
‘Oy vey, bubbellah! Ve Gates? Vat in God’s good name are you doing vith yourself down zere?’
Shimmy appears at the back door with his typical, slapstick timing.
‘I’ve dislocated my thumb, Tatteh!’ I wail, holding it out to him.
‘Zat’ll have to wait, Nebekh!’ Shimmy interrupts. ‘We got us bigger fish to fry here. Look at your poor dad! I’m plotzing! Zat damn dog has had hisself another heart attack! Za putz is blocking the front door! I called you a cab already. You gotta take him to the vet’s.’
As Shimmy is speaking I hear footsteps rapidly retreating in the gravel on the other side of the gate. I try to stand up, but it takes me slightly longer to find my feet than I’d anticipated.
‘Call the vet out, Tatteh!’ I’m grumbling. ‘How’re we meant to lift him into a cab? He’s huge. I’ve dislocated my thumb! Look! I’ve got bits of gravel stuck in my forehead!’
‘You crazy?!’ Shimmy exclaims. ‘You know how much zey charge to call zem out?! It’s a disgrace! Be serious, meine Carla! Get inside! Put your trousers on! We gotta do him a heart massage! Shlof gikher, men darf di ki kishn, girl! Stop your shmying about!’
I gaze at him, disbelieving.
‘Sleep faster, bubbellah,’ he repeats, sharply, as a concession (of sorts), but in English this time. ‘We need za pillows!’
Oh – thanks so much for the translation, Tatteh.
I click my thumb back into position (gritting my teeth), grab my trousers with my good hand and follow him inside, quietly marvelling at his apparently effortless recourse to poetic sarcasm.
11
Mr Clifford Bickerton (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
I really don’t understand why I’m becoming a part of this story. It’s not that I’m angry about it, as such, or resentful. But where’s the need? I ask this in all sincerity. Because it’s obvious (predictable! Even to a registered thicko like me!) how this thing is going to pan out. It’s all about them, isn’t it? All about Carla and Franklin D.; Hahn and Huff. They’re the perfect little double-act. She says, then he says. Like a relaxing game of lawn tennis. Phut! – boiiing! – phut! Polite outbreak of applause. Yawn (that’s me yawning. It’s a nervous yawn. A defeated yawn. The kind of yawn produced by a sheepdog when you tie it up to its kennel with a length of rope in the heart of winter just as it’s starting to sleet).
So what are the actual mechanics of this thing (Yup – mechanics. Trust me to get all hot under the collar about the technical stuff!)? I mean how exactly am I meant to … to fit into this set-up? Where did I ever fit come to that? I’m just way too … too big and awkward and … and hairy to seamlessly slot in. Too home-grown, too ‘rustic’. Ah, stupid, giant, callus-handed old Rusty – reliable, practical old Rusty – with his pathetic, unrequited crush, his over-long engagement, his over-tight sodding jumper … Soppy old Rusty. An all-round bad fit. A poor fit. The spanner in the works. The hole in the elbow. The tear in the seat. The pesky stone in the lace-up boot.
Perhaps I’ll be involved in an accident at work at an especially critical moment in the plot (electrocuted by a malfunctioning school heater – their regular man, the caretaker, is off on a one-day training course in modern gas-fired central heating systems!), or get tragically drowned on duty with the lifeboat while saving the crew of a sinking trawler. Yes. I quite fancy that idea. Rusty Bickerton: Mr Brave but Mr Dispensable. A tragic afterthought dreamed up by the mean cow of an Author to add that tiny bit of extra depth, a light gloss of polish – a nice, reliable pinch of snuff (where’s the tissue? Eh?! Use your sleeve! That’s what Rusty would’ve done, God bless the poor old bugger! RIP etc.) to the ‘main’, the important, the real, the actual-grown-up-three-dimensional relationship.
Great.
I mean is that honestly the best I can hope for? To be the harmless blameless idiot caught totally unawares in the background of a dramatic photograph of an awful car crash (quietly inspecting the times on a vandalized bus shelter)? Face slightly blurry. Right ear, arm, shoulder ruthlessly cut out. Or the nervous man adjusting his comb-over in a high wind just behind the pretty, buxom woman who is laughing and letting go of a large bunch of red balloons after winning £1,000 in a charity prize draw?
Am I just a little bit of local colour? Is that really the sum of it? Although now I come to think about it, you’ve already got Mrs Barrow (with her nineteenth-century ways, her housecoat and her – uh, sorry – totally unconvincing Sussex accent) to tick that particular box.
Perhaps I’m suddenly being shuffled into focus to offer a useful – but boring – ‘sense of perspective’? An ‘outsider view’? Perhaps I’m simply serving as a manly foil – a handy, helpful, humble, practical contrast – to the clever but mysterious and (let’s face it) slightly uptight and poncy Mr Franklin D. Huff? Fine. Fine. Whatever you like. However you want to play it. I might grumble (I likes a bit of a grumble, me), but I can’t really be bothered getting all fired up about it now. Just so long as I’m back home before milking. I’ll grit my teeth and I’ll get on with it. Same as I always do.
Although … Although (while I’ve got your attention – have I got it? Hello? Oh. Yes. Hello) what about that poor parrot? Baldie? Baldo? How’s he/she fit into this mess? What did that blessed parrot ever do to anybody? Doesn’t seem right – fair – to have his/her/our innermost thoughts – our private feelings and ideas (uninspiring as they most certainly are) – casually picked over (exploited, let’s make no bones about it) for the sake of a little light relief.
I remember in RE classes at school (bear with me for a minute) being taught the biblical parable of the ‘talents’ and thinking, If this parable expresses the moral, emotional and philosophical aspirations of the One, True Religion then there’s something badly wrong with it – something horribly … I don’t know … cynical (I was a precocious boy. Grew out of it soon enough, though). For those of you who don’t recall, the parable involves a series of servants being given ‘talents’ (some kind of coin, I suppose) by their cruel master before he goes away on a long voyage. The servant given the most talents (the most – ahem – ‘talented’ servant) invests them well and doubles his money (slave trade? Opium poppies? Tobacco industry? Who knows?). When the master returns he is naturally delighted by the servant’s achievements and the servant is justly rewarded (several rhino horns. A giant, ivory dildo. Something grand and extravagant along those lines). Then there is the servant who has been given two talents. Like the four talent servant he doubles his money (slaughtering dolphins, skinning minks) and the master is delighted with him (warm smile, slightly intimidating wink, soft pat on the buttock …).
Finally there’s the servant who is given only one talent. This servant is not as clever or as successful as the other servants (one talent, and we don’t even know what that talent is. I’m guessing juggling, or unicycling – reading tarot, badly), and he is rightly anxious about stuffing up (the ire of the cruel master might be too much to bear!) so he takes his one talent and he buries it in a large hole in the ground to ensure that it isn’t lost or stolen. When the master returns, he promptly digs it up again and hands it over to him (slightly muddy, but still intact).
Is the master happy to get the talent back? Is he heck! The master (fresh from those three, fine weeks in Magaluf) is absolutely bloody filthy that the most idiotic of his servants has done so little with his pathetic one talent (gurning. Or possibly the ability to place his leg behind his head. He’s oddly flexible).
‘Why didn’t you just give it to the bankers, you foolish man,’ he demands, ‘and earn me some paltry interest at the very least?’ Of course this is the moment at which that poor, long downtrodden (but basically ignorant) servant can finally take the opportunity to tell his master that all the local banks have been investing heavily in companies supporting child labour (chimney sweeps! That’s right! Send the little blighters up those chimneys! Let ’em earn their keep!) and so he (quite naturally, quite rightly) felt compelled to take a passionate stand against it. Yes. That would’ve been very brave, very principled of him (telling his master and the stand). But then could the master be expected to listen to his mumbled excuses? Nah! Of course he couldn’t! He’s just a servant – an untalented servant! Why would the master be remotely interested in issues of racial, social or gender equality? Forget it! He isn’t. So the servant is bawled at, publicly humiliated and unceremoniously cast out.
‘To him that has plenty more shall be given,’ the parable ends, ‘to him that has nothing, even that will be taken away from him.’ (Sarcastic, partial drum roll.)
So there you have it: my pathetic little life in two short sentences. And the worst part? I knew, I just sensed, even as a small, snotty, scab-knee-and-elbowed youth, that this would all turn out to be completely true; that I would – of course I would! – find myself at the thin end of this parabolical wedge.
Looking back (a great hobby of mine) I can clearly deduce that it was at this precise moment (the reading of the talent parable – pay attention) that I finally lost all sympathy with the Judeo-Christian tradition. There have been others since (other moments, other losses) still more painful. But then that’s … Well.
Good. Okay. So I’m not entirely sure why I bored you rigid with that anecdote. I suppose it was a toss-up between this brief Bible-study session or an in-depth breakdown of the journey from Chick Hill to Toot Rock undertaken in a twelve-year-old Ford Transit with no side door, dodgy transmission and a malfunctioning water pump.
Because these are the manifold riches of my life, ladies and gentlemen (the boring parable, the crappy van). No sudden landslips or obscure collections of Soviet memorabilia here, no ancient beefs with the CIA or complex issues of avian gender orientation. None of that. Just practical, gormless old Rusty. Mr Can-do. Mr Happy to Oblige. Mr That’s Absolutely Fine, Mrs Barrow, Just Point Me in the Right Direction and I’ll Get On With It, Shall I?
‘That’s fine. Just point me in the right direction and I’ll get on with it, Mrs Barrow,’ I tell her. Mrs Barrow has kindly provided me with a list. At the top is ‘porch bulb’ (in all honesty I think she could’ve handled most of these herself – what am I? Her drudge? Short answers on a postcard, please), then there’s ‘dispose of shark’, then there’s ‘rabbit?’ (her question mark), then ‘bin’, then, finally, ‘bathroom window. Putty?’ (putty underlined, twice).
Of course as soon as Mrs Barrow describes the general scenario (rotting sand shark under the bed?!) I am 100 per cent convinced that the salmon-pink paws of Miss Carla Hahn are all over this ‘mysterious and completely unprovoked attack’. In truth I think Mrs Barrow suspects as much herself, but worker/employer loyalty (and Mr Huff availing himself of the nearby bathroom) prevents her from confiding in me. All credit to her for that. Although there is a brief exchange of significant looks. Yes. And a slightly raised, under-plucked eyebrow. And she is very – very – keen to stop the ‘highly offended’ (‘hurt’, ‘violated!’: his words) Mr Franklin D. from getting the local police involved (but what else might you expect from the wife of the local poacher? Eh?).
I know all the signs, though. In fact I’m so certain of Carla’s involvement that I promptly head over to an old brass coal-scuttle stored just inside the entrance to the bomb shelter (there is a bomb shelter behind the house – a drab, claustrophobic concrete shed-like thing with a basement nobody ever goes into. Did anyone bother mentioning this before? Nah. Probably not) and I retrieve the porch bulb from this old favourite Carla hidey-hole.
I am smiling to myself (even allowing myself a gentle tut) and straightening up when – Oh bugger! – I see Mr Franklin D. Huff standing behind me, arms crossed, braces dangling (‘At ease, Suh!’), watching me from the back with a look full of what I can only call ‘deep misgivings’.
Sorry if there is something grammatically awry with that sentence. But I think you get what I mean. I respond with my broadest hayseed’s smile. This smile is doubly effective because of a missing canine (front top left).
‘Hello, Massa. I just be doin’ my work here, Massa. No need for the likes of you to be troubling yourself on my account, Massa.’
(Touch brim of pretend flat cap.)
I didn’t actually speak that out loud, I just compressed it into a slight bending of the knee and the broad smile, obviously. Especially the smile. Although there’s an extra (bonus!) atmosphere of ‘I might look like a moron – I am a moron – but if you mess about with my Carla – trifle with her – I’m going to … well …’
What might I do?
Bleat like a lamb?
Burst into tears?
Absolutely bloody nothing, same as always?
Oh God, I just had this … this horrible … this shadow-falling-across-my-grave feeling. An icy chill in my … A moment of …
She’s going to make me stand up to him, isn’t she? The cow Author. She’s going to make me act totally out of character – rise to the occasion, give the smug, ‘cosmopolitan’ arsehole what for – and then quickly kill me off. But it’ll be something mundane that does me in – a nosebleed or an infected toenail. Or something completely stupid and embarrassing like … like being squashed under a tractor after diving to save a duckling. Swerving to avoid a weasel and driving off a cliff.
I know that’s what she’s planning.
I suppose I should just be grateful that the over-tight jumper didn’t prove to be my undoing (Ch. 7? Ch. 8?). Although I’m not sure how that would’ve been managed, technically (I’m always interested in the technical side of things. This isn’t much of a virtue in your average romantic hero, I realize. ‘Sorry to interrupt you, Miss Eyre, but the axle on your carriage has noticeable signs of wear …’). To be perfectly frank, it doesn’t have all that much credibility as an idea (dispatched by an over-tight jumper?!). I mean this is only my second chapter! It’s early days yet. To kill me with a lethal piece of knitwear after – how many? – three pages? That’d be so … so clumsy, so amateur. The critics’d have a field day! Although she killed someone in another novel (forget the name of it, offhand) with a frozen, miniature butter pat and then she won a bloody prize. A prize! A big money prize!
What were they thinking?!
In fact there was this very sweet man in her last novel – kind and gentle, a bit of a wimp; rather like me, I suppose (sound the alarm bells!!) – who she hit with a sudden brain haemorrhage just when everything had finally started to work out for him. I don’t remember his name or all the circumstances exactly. But she’s probably planning something similar for me now. Right now.
What a nightmare. What an awful, bloody nightmare.
‘… store your bulbs.’
Franklin D. is speaking but I miss the gist of it worrying about all this other crap. There was one character who fed his fingers to an owl and then walked in front of a bus. Or a lorry. But he was the hero. And I don’t know if he died or not. I think she left it open so that if the book was successful she could write a follow-up. But the thing bombed.
Ha!
Although – damn! – none of this works, logically – logistically (Oh great, Mr Technical!). Because I’m thinking these thoughts in October 1984 and she only started writing seriously in 1987 on a student trip to Ireland while volunteering for the Council for the Status of Women. She wrote a wretched piece of teen fiction during that interlude called ‘The Perverse Yellow Flower’. It was inspired by three paintings of Christ she saw in a shop window in Windsor and a conversation she had while she was looking at them with a man called Marcus who wanted to make her join a weird cult called Sabud.
What?!
Hang on a second …
Where the heck did all that come from? How could I …? I … I just can’t be having these thoughts right now, about her other books and her sadistic urges and her … I dunno. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s … it’s unnatural, it’s supernatural.
‘… store your bulbs.’
Argh. Am I just sabotaging myself again? Same as I always do? Am I? Eh? Mr Bickerton, will you sign on the dotted line for your regular delivery of a truck-load of self-pity, please? Oh you’ve lost your pen. And your pencil. Boo-hoo-hoo.
There’s nothing positive or clever or rational about it, either, is there? I know that. I’m simply stewing in all this stuff – all these regrets. I really need to just try and … I dunno. Grow a set. Stop over-thinking. Stop making everything twice as complicated as it needs to be. Heroes don’t dither, do they? Do they? No. Heroes aren’t ditherers.
Uh. Sorry. Could you just feed me that line again, please?
‘Well that’s a very strange place to store your bulbs!’
Uh … Okay. Uh … I already did the smile, didn’t I? The hayseed’s goofy smile (my staple)? So how about I just repeat what he said back to him and then work the rest out from there?
‘A very strange place to store your bulbs. Yes. Very strange indeed. You must be Mr Huff. You were holed up in the bathroom when I first arrived. I’m Clifford. Clifford Bickerton. People call me Rusty.’
We shake hands.
‘Did you see the shark?’ Mr Huff asks, following me over to the front porch where I quickly re-fit the bulb. ‘Yup.’ I nod (Don’t give anything away, Clifford!).
‘Very convenient being so tall,’ Mr Huff observes.
‘Great for replacing bulbs,’ I affirm, ‘but not so great in other arenas. It’s hard to cram myself inside certain models of car.’
Mr Huff nods.
‘I sometimes break antique furniture.’
Mr Huff nods again.
‘And I play havoc with sofa and bed springs.’
Mr Huff considers this, scowling.
‘And everything’s dusty.’
Mr Huff looks quizzical.
‘I’ve noticed how women never dust above their own height. Up here I find everything’s dusty. It’s sad. I’ve often thought how there’s something deeply unloved about this altitude.’
Mr Huff’s eyes de-focus. I am boring him already.
‘I mean how are we going to dispose of it,’ he wonders, ‘with the bin stuck up on the Look Out?’
‘Follow me,’ I say, and walk around, through the little allotment (Ye Gods! He obviously hasn’t fed the badgers) to the front porch where the shark currently abides. I pick it up by the tail, take two steps forward and toss it over the cliff into the mess of rocky gorse below.
‘Bloody hell!’
Mr Huff is scandalized.
‘Something’s bound to eat it eventually.’ I shrug. ‘I’ll go and fetch you that bin now, eh?’
‘Will you climb up the little ladder?’ Mr Huff is intrigued. ‘It seemed a rather precarious arrangement when I went up there the other day.’
‘The ladder’s not a good option,’ I inform him. ‘The metal joists are corroded. It has a history of suddenly shearing off – falling out of the wall …’
Mr Huff blanches.
‘But there’s a series of thick planks hidden in some nearby bushes,’ I add, trying to keep the atmosphere positive, ‘and a quantity of corrugated iron. We generally construct a sloping walkway from the edge of the far end of the rock to the roof. It’s not especially stable …’
‘We?’ Mr Huff asks.
‘Local folk,’ I say, casually.
I stride out and Mr Huff follows. We retrieve the bin in no time. When we return we find a woman in the garden accompanied by two large red setters, tending the little girl’s shrine.
Mr Huff is not best pleased by her sudden arrival. One could almost go so far as to say that he is infuriated by it, and doubly so when one of the dogs menaces him as he opens the gate.
‘Do you know this person?’ he asks, stopping by the gate as I position the bin in its regular place, scowling.
‘Uh … no. But there’s a little gang of them,’ I say. ‘Good, decent Catholic women in the main. Locals for the most part. They aren’t too much of a problem. It’s the other group – the Romanies – you’ll need to keep an eye out for. They come up here in their vans and block off the roadway. Infuriates the people in the Coastguards’ Cottages, it does. Causes no end of trouble.’
‘But this is trespass, surely?’ Mr Huff persists.
‘If you try and stop them you’ll only make them more determined.’ I grin.
‘Faith is like bindweed,’ Mr Huff snarls, ‘an unremarkable enough plant, but give it any kind of leeway and you’ll find it pushing its fragile green shoots through thick inches of brickwork.’
‘They have Carla’s blessing.’ I shrug, moving past him.
‘Yes. Miss Hahn said as much in her Welcome Pack,’ Mr Huff grumbles, following. At the mention of Carla’s name he seems profoundly demoralized. I glance back at him as we circumnavigate the allotment to avoid the dogs. He looks ragged. I notice the pinkness of his irises, the bags under his eyes.
‘No point railing against it,’ I console him (emboldened by the Welcome Pack comment). ‘It’s going to be a major part of the plot at some point, I suppose.’
‘Sorry?’ Mr Huff looks confused.
‘The plot. The story,’ I repeat, ‘you know …’ I blithely indicate towards the little shrine. ‘Orla Nor Cleary. The truth behind what really happened back then. The subject of your book – the book. Everything else – the parrot, the landslip, this – it’s all just incidental detail, surely? Just filler. I mean I can’t speak for you, obviously, but I know I’m totally insignificant – just a minor character, a handy plot device. That’s it.’
Still nothing from Mr Huff, but it’s almost as if he starts to … to fade.
‘I’m very tired,’ he says, flickering. Or is it me that’s flickering? It’s hard to tell.
‘Mrs Barrow mentioned a rabbit?’ I quickly change the subject.
‘Rabbit?’ He instantly jumps back into sharp relief.
‘Mrs Barrow said you were building it a hutch.’
‘Yes,’ he sighs, ‘I suppose I am.’
‘It might be worth popping down to see Shimmy, Carla’s dad,’ I suggest. ‘His wife – Else, Carla’s mother – used to keep rabbits when Carla was a kid. She bred some kind of German lop. Huge beasts, they were. They ate them. After the war …’
Mr Huff is staring at me with a strange look on his face. You might almost call it a … a haunted look.
‘And they kept rescue dachshunds,’ I blather on. ‘She had about twelve of them, in kennels. It was a long time ago now, obviously. But he’s a great hoarder. He might still have something useful tucked away in one of his sheds.’
Mr Huff nods, but he doesn’t look especially taken by the idea.
‘I mean there’s no harm in asking,’ I persist.
‘It’s just that my … my wife ran over his cat …’ he starts off, then he frowns. ‘Although she’s not … she’s not … she’s not … not actually my …’
He shakes his head and his mouth suddenly contracts. He stops walking as we reach the back balcony, plops himself down on to the bench and covers his lean face with his skinny hands.
‘It’s all …’ he sniffs, trying to retain some vague hold on his dignity (failing dismally), ‘… all very confused … confusing.’
‘Can I …? Uh … Would you like me to …?’ I don’t even know what I’m suggesting I should do. Leave? Spontaneously combust? Gently evaporate? Quietly hang myself? (Oh she’d like that, wouldn’t she?! The cow Author? Well then I most definitely won’t be – hanging myself, I mean. No. I won’t be hanging myself. I’m far too tall to be hanging myself, for one thing. It’d be so difficult to arrange. Although there’s always the barn back on the farm, I suppose. Not that I’ve got any rope strong enough to … uh … aside from the blue nylon stuff Eddie’s been using to tether the …
What?!
No!
Why am I thinking like this?! I’ve never had these kinds of thoughts before – suicidal thoughts. And if I was going to kill myself it wouldn’t be by rope, it’d be sat quietly in the van with a grand view below me, up near the Country Park, maybe, engine running, blocked exhaust … Although with all that rust and the missing door there’s not much chance …
No!
I’m doing it again! She’s got me doing it again! I won’t be killing myself! I feel no urge to kill myself! None! I’m very much here – larger than life. I am substantially here. And I’m not going down without a fight, madam, you can be bloody sure of that! Bloody sure!
Good.)
I turn and take in the view. The sea view. This is the most beautiful view in all the world. Just scrubland and then sea. Well, the Channel, really. Just the bit of rough scrub, the ribbon of Sea Road following the sea wall, the pebble beach, the sea, the clouds, the sky.
‘Yes. No. My wife died,’ he blurts out (how much time has passed? Loads? None?). ‘Very suddenly. Three days ago. I’m just …’
‘Sorry?’ I turn, surprised (in truth I’d almost forgotten he was there).
‘My wife,’ he repeats, ‘died. Dead. She …’
I must look shocked – slightly disbelieving. Embarrassed. I mean this started out as a conversation about hutches – didn’t it? Didn’t it? About rabbits?
‘Not the cat woman,’ he commences, waving his hand about. ‘She wasn’t my wife. I was … it’s complicated. There’s a woman called … You might have heard of … she’s called Kimberly. Kimberly Couzens. She’s a photographer. We were married. She had the affair with … with him … you know. Bran. She was burned. In the explosion – the car – when he …’
‘Oh … Oh wow,’ I stutter, finally making the connection. ‘The Canadian? The photographer? She was your wife?’
‘Yes. Yes. I’m here for her.’ He nods, pathetically grateful to be understood. ‘I came for her. And I’m broke. Completely broke. I agreed to write the book as a sort of … a sort of favour. I’m not sure how it … I mean I’m not really sure … And then … then she just died. I mean she’s been disabled for years – with the burns being so severe … But this was something so sudden … so … so random, something to do with a tooth. A tooth! I’ve not eaten in four days. I’ve not … I’ve not told anyone … I’m just … The flight couldn’t be changed. I can’t go back for the funeral. Her mother has dementia. It’s been … then the shark … the flies. It’s been … I’ve been …’
Still the arm waving.
‘… really … really struggling,’ he finishes off, his voice cracking.
I don’t know what to say.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I say.
I’m furious. In fact, I’m steaming. I can’t believe the cow Author has sprung this on me. What a cow. What a cow.
I turn and inhale the view again. I refuse, no, no, I won’t be drawn into this bloody farrago! And I’m angry that I thought I had it all down pat … this … this situation … the set-up … the plot … but now to find out that my knowledge has been … well, just selective … compromised. He was married to the photographer! Why didn’t I know that?! I mean if I knew about the parrot. Why’d I know about the sodding parrot – all about it! – but nothing about this?
I breathe in deeply and force myself to enjoy the view. The view is still here. The view is still beautiful.
Behind me I hear him sobbing.
Oh God, why? Why?
‘Well, you still need a hutch,’ I maintain. Still looking at the view. Still feeding off the view. I really love this view. I could happily die looking at this view.
‘Yes,’ he sniffs.
No more thoughts about dying. I reach into my pocket.
‘Tangerine?’
I turn and offer it to him.
‘Thanks.’
He accepts the tangerine.
‘I don’t think I actually met her,’ I say. ‘Your wife. The photographer. But I did see her around and about the place. On the beach with her camera photographing everything …’
He glances up, sharply. ‘You were here back then?’
‘I’m always here.’ I nod. ‘That’s me. A part of the landscape – a blot on the landscape. In fact I was … uh … Carla and I were …’ I shrug.
‘Oh. Oh, really?’
Mr Huff looks slightly surprised. ‘So you were … Oh. So you were here – resident – when everything uh …?’ He scowls. ‘But why didn’t I already know that?’
I shrug (cow Author not doing her job, I suppose).
‘That’s never been mentioned,’ Mr Huff persists, ‘I mean there isn’t any physical evidence, any testimony … and documentary evidence in all of the … all of the …’
He starts feeling for his pockets (grief briefly forgotten) as if the information relating to my early life in Pett Level might be miraculously contained therein.
Oh, here it is – here’s the little bit of paper all about what an insignificant lump of crap you are (cheerfully holds out tiny till receipt with hardly anything printed on it).
‘It’s my size.’ I shrug. ‘I’m so huge that people kind of … they pass me over. It’s difficult to engage. They ignore me the way you’d ignore a giant bear.’
‘You’re the elephant in the room.’ Mr Huff grins, weakly.
‘Yes.’
‘But how odd,’ he repeats, shaking his head again, ‘that Kimberly never mentioned you, never photographed you. She worked as a war photographer for several years. Her photographs were amazingly … I don’t know … comprehensive, habitually copious, all-inclusive …’
As he speaks I quietly remember Kimberly and her camera. On the beach, in the garden, the house. Yes. I remember the camera always snapping. I remember – countless times, countless times – being briefly blinded by the flash.
‘I should go and take a quick peek at that bathroom window,’ I say. There are dark feelings in my heart. That’s the only way I can describe them – the feelings. Dark. I mean to be so easily … so … so routinely ignored.
Who’s behind this I wonder? Who’s at the back of this? Is it her? The Author? Has she gone back into the photographer’s portfolio, the photographer’s mind and just … just silently erased …?
Oh for heaven’s sake!
Just fix the window, Rusty! Just go and fix the window!
I walk through the cottage to the bathroom (ducking to avoid the door lintels, the light fitments). When I get there I realize that I have no tools with me. The ceiling is very low. I can’t straighten my neck. And there is a rabbit in the bath. A tiny rabbit. It has a very … a very deep, a quiet, an almost … a mystical quality about it.
Pink eyes. Pink nose.
I perch on the edge of the bath and I watch it. I look like I am communing with the rabbit (from the outside, in the uncut footage), and I am – but I am also hatching a plan. Yes. Me – I – Clifford Bickerton, Rusty Bickerton. I am hatching a plan. A secret plan. Which I won’t divulge here, because it’s a secret, obviously.
Every so often I think, Is this her? Is this her plan? Or is it me?
And then I expunge those thoughts (expunge? Is that a word I would use, naturally? Is it my word or is it … Oh God, is it her word?). I stare at the little rabbit.
Hello, rabbit! It’s me, Clifford, the Invisible Man!
The invisible man, eh? Ha! Well we’ll see about that, shall we, my little pink-eyed friend, hmmn?
12
Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
It’s because I’m so over-wound, so damn tired. I mean to be … to find myself intent on building a rabbit cage (a rabbit cage! A rabbit cage!) when I should actually be … I don’t know … arranging the flowers. She loved freesias, hyacinths, old-variety pinks (those foul, dirty-looking ones), anything aromatic, anything with a scent in other words.
Yes. I should be involved – on hand. Worrying about the details. I should be selecting the coffin, bearing the coffin. Choosing the music (something scruffy and pointless and suitably inconclusive by The Band). I should be planning the eulogy. Just being … being there. But instead I’m here. Here. In this hell-hole with its maddeningly attractive English view and its slightly broken-down, chaotic, self-satisfied, bohemian … And the only solid food I’ve consumed in the past three days (that I’m consciously aware of) is a tangerine. Or a satsuma. Or a clementine.
I’m broke. Broke! Kim had promised to send me a cheque just as soon as the advance came through …
Dammit!
And now she’s … she’ll be … for ever … indubitably … incontrovertibly …
Ka-ka-ka-put.
Ker-plunk.
Doiiiing!
So I go over to Mr Hahn’s cottage (it’s only a short walk) to enquire about the rabbit cage … A rabbit cage? This is ridiculous! Ridiculous! And I am approaching the front door when I hear a kind of … a little wail. A pathetic, little wail. A cat? An injured hedgehog? An amorous fox? So I jink left, to the side of the property, down a badly kept gravel path and I see … I see … How to put this politely? A bum in the air. High up. Halfway over a tall gate. Two slim legs kicking aimlessly.
Of course to free up my hands to help (of course – but of course!) I am obliged to fill my mouth with the rest of the tangerine – satsuma – clementine. But then I can’t … I can’t communicate! Ridiculous! So I … I kind of … I pat the bottom gently, to alert it to my presence, move the bike (yes, there’s a bike), try and grab the foot to …
I know. Yes. I do know that it’s Carla Hahn’s foot (who else could it possibly belong to but she?). It is, isn’t it? Yes. It is. It’s her foot. And (for the record), one of her deck shoes is falling off, revealing an old sock with a giant hole in the heel (so unfeminine! So unedifying!). She kicks out this foot, emitting another curious little yelp. And I see that her awful trousers with the roped-up waist, or another pair just like them – equally unflattering – have become hooked over a little jutting piece of wood. The belt has become hooked, I mean, the rope belt. So I say … I mean I’m speaking, although not especially well … what with the half tangerine (all this is happening very quickly, much more rapidly than I could hope to describe it – a mere matter of seconds) … I say, ‘Brace yourself. I’m going to unhook your jeans from a little … uh …’
And I unhook them. In fact I untie them. And then she falls like a bag of potatoes, out of the trousers. She disappears from view. The heel of her old white plimsoll almost smacks me in the face.
Oh balls!
‘Hello? Can you hear me? Are you all right?’
Short silence, followed by a door opening and someone speaking in a thick, German accent, followed by the gate-person, the fallen person (Miss Hahn) yowling plaintively, ‘I’ve dislocated my thumb!’
I’m not sure why, exactly, but I suddenly think that this might be a good time to make myself scarce. I’m not … I’m not running away, as such, no. I’m just not … not emotionally equipped to engage with all this right now. I didn’t … I didn’t ask for this to happen. I mean I should be planning a funeral, attending a funeral. And if not in fact, well, then at least in my fevered brain. The perfect funeral for Kimberly. A fantasy funeral for darling Kimberly, my recently deceased …
I just don’t need all this … all this … uh …
When I return to the cottage (a little out of breath, slightly furtive, perhaps) I find the big man, Clifford Pemberton (Is it Pemberton?) sitting out front on the bench. He is deep in thought. He has the rabbit in his hand. It fits, in its entirety, into his giant palm.
‘That was quick!’ he remarks.
‘Nobody home,’ I lie.
‘Oh. Well I had a thought while you were gone,’ he says, pointing towards a partially dismantled chest of drawers which is lying on its back close by on the lawn. ‘I found it in the shed,’ he says. ‘She was planning to chop it up for kindling – but in the meantime …’
I go over to inspect it.
‘We’ll need some kind of …’
‘Already thought of that …’
‘Oh yes. Genius.’
Inside the upturned chest is the cover of an old sewing machine.
‘It’s a perfect retreat,’ he says, ‘there’s a little hole in the front, the exact size he needs – custom made, almost! I filled the insides with straw. He’ll need food and water then he’s set up. Obviously you’ll want to bring him indoors at night or the badgers will suck his brains out.’
I wince. The badgers really are – they really are – the most awful blight.
‘It’s milking time,’ Pemberton continues, in a loud voice (stiffly, awkwardly, almost as if delivering the lines of a bad play). He stands up. ‘But before I head off …’
He gives me an intense, one could almost call it a meaningful look.
‘Is there a problem?’ I ask. What an extraordinary man he is! So messy. Like he’s been drawn with a broken brown crayon by a bored child with an excess of imagination.
‘You made Carla cry on the beach the other day,’ he tells me (very quickly, garbled, almost). As he speaks, I suddenly feel myself fading (or is it him? Is he fading?). Exhaustion. Lack of food, I suppose.
‘I don’t understand what happened there,’ he continues (he almost looks fierce – so big, so decent, all that dark hair, the red beard), ‘but I do know that in all likelihood it was Carla who left the shark under your bed. It’s just …’ He shrugs.
There follows a period of what I can only describe as ‘white noise’, ‘static’, and the most I can decipher is ‘Sword of Truth’ and ‘Web of Artifice’. He gives me a ten pound note and then passes me the rabbit.
‘The cow will probably kill me now,’ he says.
The cow? Sorry? The cow? Is he referring to Miss Hahn? Someone else? Mrs Barrow? His sister? His mother? Is this simply all about his being late for milking? For milking the cows? I wish I could … but the sweep of noise … like a giant … a giant wave crashing. A Lear jet flying at low altitude. A malfunctioning washing machine perpetually stuck on its spin cycle rocking its way across the kitchen tiles.
Uh …
What a strange man he is! Look at him! Look at his lips working! Like the mouthparts of a giant wasp – a bee – in astonishing close-up! So hairy – huge – confused …
Bumbling! Yes. Intense! Certainly. Deluded? Hmmn. But he seems decent enough (journalist’s first instinct. Gotta try and trust my initial gut …), uh …
Okay – okay, yes, the way he immediately knew where that missing bulb could be located. Highly suspicious. And the custom-made planks in the hedge by the Look Out? Strange. His desperate need to get shot of me for a while (Miss Hahn’s mother and the giant, German rabbits? I know for a fact – a fact! – that rabbit isn’t even kosher). Yup. He’s got an agenda a mile wide, I’d have thought.
Did Miss Hahn ever actually date him? It seems an improbable union. And what about the signal lack of any documentary evidence (photographic, earlier testimonial etc.) to this effect? And the parrot? Which parrot? Whose parrot?
What is he? Who is Clifford né Rusty Pemberton? What does he amount to, narratively? Is he a mere nothing? A nobody? Is he a missing link or a red herring? A loose cannon? A pointless distraction? A blind alley? A freak? A fanatic? A fantasist?
Because why would he be so determined to push Miss Hahn into the fray if he wasn’t (all of the above – none of them)? By outright accusing her? Why would a friend – a protector – feel the urge to behave in that way? So disloyal – so ungentlemanly. I mean I won’t pretend that I hadn’t suspected her myself – before. But now? No. Now, she’s the only person I don’t suspect! Our dear Mr Pemberton on the other hand … Oh-ho! With friends like these, Miss Hahn, who needs …?
Perhaps I’ve been slightly rash in confiding in him? Should’ve kept up my guard. Stiff upper etc. Although if he’s as strange and as skittish as he appears, then why would local people believe anything he says?
He prepares to leave.
Oh dear. Did I really make Miss Hahn cry the other day? On the beach?
We attempt to shake hands but this is rendered impossible by the ten pounds and the rabbit. So instead he kind of … he sort of curtseys.
Once he’s gone I sit down for a minute to try and gather my thoughts together. After about ten or so seconds the white noise diminishes. Well thank God for that! But then another sound neatly replaces it. Barking. Yes – barking! – followed by a series of profuse apologies. A woman’s voice. Then Mr Pemberton – Rusty – saying, ‘It’s fine. It’s absolutely fine. It isn’t deep. I actually … I … I sort of expected it, to be perfectly honest.’
13
Miss Carla Hahn (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
Poor old Rogue is no more. Which is terribly sad. But worse still is the knowledge that I – yes, me! – am going to be chiefly responsible for burying the body. Tatteh is too busy focusing on the onerous task of preparing a brief funeral oration and gathering together Rogue’s favourite toys to be buried alongside him (I note that several of these are items I have given to Tatteh myself – among them a Clarks’ sandal, a Johnson’s cashmere scarf and a little, plastic flamingo which I bought to commemorate the arrival of a lone bird of that species on Pett Pools in 1978, 1979 or some time thereabouts).
I have a fork and a spade, but the ground is pretty hard. And space is limited because numerous other dog corpses have been deposited here in years past. Upwards of thirty and counting, I’d have thought.
And Rogue was so huge! The sheer depth required to cover his bulk, and the terrible likelihood that if he isn’t buried deep enough the foxes will dig him up again haunt me as I work. I have bound up the thumb which aches horribly. In fact I am unwinding my makeshift bandage (consisting of a mesh washing-up cloth) and attempting to reapply it when Clifford Bickerton comes charging into the garden.
‘I saw your bike out front as I was driving past,’ he puffs. ‘Your dad says you dislocated your thumb.’
‘Rogue had a heart attack,’ I explain. ‘I was climbing over the side gate and my pesky belt got snagged on a piece of wood …’
Rusty takes off his work coat, folds it over his arm in order to put it down and grab the spade and commence digging, but as he does so a clementine (satsuma? Tangerine?) falls out of the pocket and rolls into my partly dug hole.
I stiffen.
‘Then after I’d been hanging there a while,’ I continue (more halting, now), ‘some big goose … some … some Smart Alec happens along and … and without warning … they untied my trousers. I fell head first on to the gravel below. Dislocated my thumb. Then they buggered off.’
‘Bloody hell!’
Rusty looks shocked, then ruminative (not quite the reaction I’d have expected). His eyes briefly de-focus.
I reach down and retrieve the satsuma, once again remembering – quite clearly – that very strong smell of tangerine. Or clementine. Or satsuma. From earlier. I proffer him the fruit.
‘Keep it,’ he suggests, ‘I’ve been eating the bloody things all morning. Mum bought a giant sack of them for the B&B-ers. I’ve actually got a little ulcer on my tongue.’
As he speaks, I notice a patch of dried blood on his forearm.
‘What happened to your arm?’ I ask.
‘Uh … I was bitten by a dog.’ He scowls. ‘Up at Mulberry. A setter. It belonged to some woman who was tending the girl’s shrine.’
‘What were you doing up at the cottage?’ I ask, scowling.
‘Uh …’
Again the uncertainty. ‘Uh … Mrs Barrow called me.’
He starts to dig, chin burrowing into his breastbone, almost ashamedly.
‘Why?’ I wonder.
‘Because …’
As he begins to respond (still digging) a hedge-cutter roars into life in a neighbouring garden.
‘Sorry?’ I place a hand to my ear.
‘Mr Huff’s wife died,’ he roars, just as the hedge-cutter is turned off again.
‘What?’ I take a small step back, blasted (in two senses) by this news.
He continues digging but offers no further information.
‘When did she die?’ I ask, shocked. Oh Please God Let It Be Today! Let It Be Yesterday!
‘About three or four days ago.’
I do the sums. My heart plummets. He continues to dig.
‘But then why would Mrs Barrow …?’ I persist, struggling to piece the thing together to my complete satisfaction.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, still digging. ‘I don’t think she wanted to bother you. After the landslip and everything. The underlying tensions with Mr Huff …’
‘But then why … why would she call you of all people?’ I finish off. I mean why wouldn’t she just call Mr Barrow? Is Clifford Bickerton now part of some new, UN-sponsored Pett Level Peace Initiative I know nothing about?
‘To help,’ he says (as if this is the most obvious thing in all the world).
‘With what?’ I ask.
‘A missing bulb.’ He shrugs. ‘A broken window. The rabbit hutch.’
‘Rabbit?’ I echo.
He nods. He digs. I watch, rotating my sore thumb, thinking about Mr Huff. Thinking about his dead wife. At the same time, I try and imagine Clifford Bickerton unfastening my trousers and letting me drop like that. Making those weird noises. Running off. No. No! I just can’t. I can’t imagine it.
Clifford pauses for a moment to catch his breath. ‘He was married to that photographer,’ he explains, ‘the one who … the one who got burned.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The photographer. His wife. Kimberly someone. He’s her husband. Although I don’t think …’
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