Thames Gateway 01; Wide Open Page 6

  Naturally, also, she blamed herself. And her father. She should have saved it. The Head. If only she could have touched it. If only, if only. It had needed understanding but it had received none. While the mother pig lay dying, Lily had watched coldly as the babies all struggled to suckle. They were not pigs and they were not boars. They were little, hairy hybrids. Striped. Distinctive. Cute, certainly, but neither one thing nor the other. Lily despised them. The Head did not consider suckling. He was looking for understanding, not food. He was set apart. The world would have different standards for him. For him things were much more complex. For Lily, also.

  Nature was a hard taskmaster, Lily realized. That night she witnessed nature, nurture and then – the final blow – nothing.

  Lily alone grieved for The Head. She’d learned that nobody loved freaks. Not Dad, not Mum. No one loved freaks. Only she loved them. That was her role. And when The Head told her in a dream that she too was a freak, on the inside, and that the only reason Daddy didn’t kill her was because he hadn’t noticed what a freak she was yet, and that Mummy hadn’t caught on either, Lily saw no reason to disbelieve him.

  But what if they did see? What was to stop them from covering her with straw? From getting rid of her? And acting afterwards like none of it had ever happened? What was to stop them?

  Lily grew furtive. She grew stealthy.

  ♦

  She’d seen Jim. She’d noticed that he had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. He always wore a hat. Hiding something, she’d supposed. No hair. She imagined that he was ill, with leukaemia. He looked sick. Too pale. Always alone. Bent over like an old man, his body withered. She watched him. Nothing escaped her. She gathered information because it might come in handy, one day. You could never tell.

  ♦

  Sara was in the kitchen leaning against the Aga drinking hot Vimto when Lily arrived home, soaking wet. She demanded to know what was up. Her daughter should have been at college all afternoon, not dawdling on the beach. Lily couldn’t face a confrontation.

  “Here’s what happened,” she said, licking the salt from her fingers. “I met this man down by Shellness Hamlet. Totally naked. He’s renting one of the prefabs.”

  “You mean the bald one?”

  “No. The bald one doesn’t use the beach. He keeps to himself. This guy was fat and smelled of fish. Anyhow, I told him he shouldn’t be allowed to walk on a public highway totally stark-ers.”

  Sara frowned. “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He didn’t get my point. He was heading down to the sea for a dip. But then I noticed that he’d gone and left his prefab door wide open. I was cycling past, so I couldn’t help seeing that all over the floor were these pictures of naked ladies. And I don’t mean just naked, I mean weird. Things stuck up their arses and everything. Animals.”

  “My God.”

  “Exactly. So I confronted him about it and he said it was none of my business. I didn’t like the look of him. I mean, he was naked. I thought he might turn nasty so I jumped into the sea to avoid him.”

  Even Sara found this last bit difficult to comprehend.

  “You jumped into the sea? Why didn’t you just ride home?”

  “I dunno. I was angry, I suppose. He’s a sicko. This is a small place. There’s the nudist beach, which attracts the worst kind of people anyway. And now there’s this man. Attracted by the nudity. You know? Like this is a sewer. Our home.”

  Sara shook her head. “It’s not good, certainly.”

  “It’s terrible.”

  “I don’t want you going down there again.”

  “Oh no,” Lily smiled at this, her eyes icy, “no one stops me from going where I want to go and doing what I want to do. No bloody pervert, anyway.”

  Sara felt vexed by Lily’s moral certainty. “Go and get changed. You’ll catch your death.”

  Lily had dripped a puddle on to the kitchen flags. She held up her hands. Her knuckles were purple with cold.

  “I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the human body in its natural state,” she said piously. “I’m not suggesting that for a moment. But what I am saying, though, is that one thing leads to another.”

  She sounded just like her father.

  ♦

  “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the human body in its natural state,” Sara said staunchly, “but what I am saying is that enough’s enough. My daughter is seventeen. She has a right to travel on a public highway without encountering this kind of thing.” Luke was fully dressed. It was hard to believe that he would even consider walking a public highway stark naked.

  “Maybe you should step inside for a moment.”

  He pulled the prefab’s door wide. Sara saw the picture of the woman with the high breasts. The woman, she noted, was not particularly attractive, which was good, somehow. Even so, she stood her ground. “No. I can’t stay.”

  Lily was right. He did smell of fish.

  Luke scratched his head. What should he do? Trouble was the last thing he’d expected here. He’d come for the emptiness. He’d come for an end to people and their associated burdens and stresses.

  “Lily arrived home soaking wet,” Sara continued.

  Luke nodded. “She jumped into the sea. I was very surprised.”

  Sara shifted her weight from one leg to the other. Luke seemed harmless. But it was the harmless ones, she told herself, who were the real danger. Was that logical?

  “The thing is…” she cleared her throat, “most of the people who live around here were upset about the nudist beach. It was a concession to the Hamlet.” Sara pointed, uselessly, because it was pitch dark now. “I mean, the fenced-off chalets. And in general the rest of us don’t have that much to do with them. They tend to come and go. Summer weekends mainly. They aren’t what I’d call the community proper.”

  “And the prefabs?”

  “Pardon?”

  “This handful of prefabs. Are we the community proper?”

  Sara frowned. Luke was thinking how gorgeous she was. If Sara had suspected, a feather could have felled her.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly, “for some reason we tend to see them as separate.”

  She thought for a moment. “I suppose that’s illogical, really.”

  “It is illogical.”

  “There’s the boatmaker at the end of the line. Two along. He’s permanent. And then there’s the artists down to the left. But they winter in Ibiza.”

  Sara felt like she wanted to sneeze. Powerfully. But her nose was clear.

  “And next to me,” Luke added, “is Jim.”

  Jim.

  “You mean the sick one?”

  “He isn’t sick. It’s alopecia. It’s a condition. You lose all your body hair.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s a nice guy. He keeps my cigarettes for me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I gave up smoking, but I’ve entrusted him with a packet just in case. I’m actually purifying. That’s why I’m here. I’m downloading.”

  Purifying? Downloading?

  Sara stared at the picture again. Luke smiled. “My ex-wife.”

  “Really?”

  She blushed. Luke noticed. He found it rather touching.

  “The only thing I don’t understand,” Sara said, after a short pause, “is why her sandals are unfastened.”

  Luke gazed at Sara with a sense of real wonder. And then he said, so softly that she could hardly hear him, in a whisper, “Is it you?”

  Sara blinked rapidly. “Is who me?”

  He continued to gaze at her, like his face was illuminated from the inside by a high-watt bulb. The glow of it made her step backwards, although she felt in no way intimidated.

  “We’ve never met before,” she murmured. “I’m me. I’m Sara.”

  And then, as if to contradict everything, a wild laugh flew out of her, so quickly, so unexpectedly, that it had filled each and every corner of the room before her own slow hand could move to
mask her lips.

  ∨ Wide Open ∧

  Nine

  Jim found Ronny on the beach. Ronny was surrounded by several large piles of shells. It was six a.m.

  “What are you doing?”

  Ronny was engrossed. He spoke slowly. “You know, one minute I was just sitting here, watching the sea, and the next I was sorting out these shells.”

  “Sorting them? What for?”

  “Into families. Into colours.”

  Jim sat down. He took one shell from one of the piles and one from another. He held them next to each other. “I see no difference.”

  Ronny inspected Jim’s two shells. “Then you aren’t looking.”

  Jim put the shells back down. “So what will you do with them once they’re all sorted?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps you could create something.”

  “Like what?”

  “People cover wine bottles in them. Or they make shell frogs or shell dolls in shell dresses.”

  Jim watched as Ronny picked up the two shells he had just put down.

  Ronny displayed them to him. “You put these back on the wrong piles. Couldn’t you tell?”

  Jim focused on the shells again. Ronny held them in his left palm. Jim noted, once more, that Ronny’s fingers were strangely waxy at their tips, but also that his wrist had been lacerated. Scars as thick as pale maggots, long scars, nosed out from the dark shelter of his cardigan.

  “Maybe there is a difference,” he said, in a spirit of compromise, although if there was then it was so slight that he could hardly detect it. Ronny nodded, gratified.

  The squeal of seagulls alerted Jim to the arrival of a woman and a man on a distant section of the beach. They were disrobing. Jim observed them, unobtrusively, from the corner of his eye. Ronny continued to sort the shells, oblivious. The couple undressed completely and then ran into the sea. The cold made the woman yell and the man laugh. Ronny looked up.

  “Are they naked?”

  “That’s the nudist beach. There’s a sign over there to say exactly where the nudist zone begins and ends.”

  “Ah,” Ronny peered over. “I was wondering what that said.”

  “Why?” Jim picked up a random shell and placed it gently on to one of Ronny’s piles. “Can’t you read?”

  “I can read,” Ronny said, carefully removing the shell and placing it on to another pile. “It’s just that I prefer to read only certain types of lettering.”

  “Certain types?”

  “I met someone once who worked in printing and graphics. She told me how there were certain kinds of letters that made you feel happy.” He looked into Jim’s face. “You think that’s reasonable?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not an expert on lettering.”

  “Well, there’s a particular kind of lettering that’s apparently very friendly. And because of the shape of the letters – their roundness, their whole design – they can’t help but make you feel cheerful when you read them. They use them a lot in adverts to make people feel good about certain products.”

  “I never knew that.”

  Jim was fanning at the beach with his hand, shifting shells aside and revealing the sand below.

  “How about,” Ronny said, “you clear a space about as big as a table and then I lay out my shells on it.”

  “Like a picture?”

  “No,” Ronny spoke gently, but very seriously, “not like a picture, like a table.”

  Jim sensed something contract. His face. His mouth. His chest. He felt a dart of panic. Was it a sickness? Then he realized that he was not in pain. It was not uncomfortable. It was simply a smile. A smile. He was smiling. It was nothing to worry about.

  It was a real smile and it had started off from somewhere deep down inside him, somewhere numb next to his breastbone. He tentatively touched the spot where the smile came from with his index finger as he shifted forward, clumsily, to clear a patch on the beach. It was all very sudden and rather peculiar. He looked around him, squinting, like he was all at sea in familiar territory.

  ∨ Wide Open ∧

  Ten

  Nathan had received three letters and he hadn’t responded to any of them. The first came from the authorities, the second from a lawyer, and the third was from a young woman whose name he did not recognize. Connie. An old-fashioned name. It made him think of lavender and starch and thimbles. But her writing was bold, and her demands – which she clearly thought reasonable – struck Nathan as entirely unfeasible. So that was that.

  Each time Nathan received one of these letters, he took it to work and secreted it into a special file, a private file that nobody else ever accessed. He didn’t stop and think about why he had done this. Why did he take something so personal from his own private arena and carry it, so brazenly, into such a public one?

  Possibly he did it to avoid a confrontation with Margery. In some respects, where information was concerned, where the past was concerned, she was his enemy, she was his inquisitor, his conscience. He had allowed her to enter his home, his life, his bed. But he would not offer her a window into his past. His past was a graveyard that he did not visit. His past was a cemetery full of dirt. Nothing lived there.

  The letters found a home in Nathan’s Lost Property Kingdom. In his quiet folder they found an appropriate, a gentle and unobtrusive resting place. They snuggled comfortably up against pictures and scraps and other fragments. They had been opened, digested, closed again. They had offered up their information. They had made requests – unfulfilled – but that was not their responsibility. Like butterflies, they had spread their wings – all gaudy glory – and then they had softly closed them. That had to be enough.

  The letters referred to a lost friend, a lost soul. They concerned a stranger whom Nathan had once known. But they had no bearing, now, on anything. That part of his life was gone, was lost. It was so private that it was not even private any more. And that should have been an end to it. But like a child with a scab Nathan felt compelled to pick, to poke, to ponder. He nudged at the scab but he refused to contemplate the wound just under. He came back to the file; once, twice, many times. He couldn’t drop it.

  And then he did drop it. He was discovered, one night, after hours, paging through this private document. It had slipped, it had fallen. Its contents were exhumed. They looked curious in bright light. The letters, the photographs; polaroids, mainly.

  “Isn’t it funny,” Laura had said, squatting down to help Nathan gather up his past, scooping up his secrets, his life, “the things people leave behind?”

  Nathan had nodded. He’d muttered something. But he’d been flustered. He had given himself away. He sensed it. And he simply hadn’t felt right with Laura after that. In fact he felt wide open. A moth with its wings pinned, under the microscope. A girl with her legs spread, no knickers.

  And Margery would have said, “Has it ever occurred to you that you might actually have wanted to be discovered? Have you even considered that possibility, Nathan?”

  Margery would have said that. So he didn’t mention it to Margery. He didn’t mention the letters. And when the girl arrived, out of the blue, he didn’t mention her either. She called herself Connie.

  “You know what Connie’s short for?” she’d asked, following him upstairs, and then not waiting for his reply. “It’s short for Constance. But I’m not in the slightest bit constant by nature.”

  “Except in this matter, it seems,” Nathan said, prickling with resentment.

  “Yes,” she took a deep breath and then looked around her at Nathan’s living room, “but I didn’t really feel like I had much choice.”

  Nathan was relieved that Margery had gone after breakfast.

  Sometimes, on Saturdays, they spent the morning in bed together.

  “Have a seat.”

  He pointed at the sofa.

  “Thank you.”

  She sat down. He saw her eyes take in every detail. She looked like an angel, literally, with sh
ort, strawberry blonde, kinky hair and a child’s face. Skin like a macaroon. She was tiny. Barely five foot. Little hands, little feet. Breasts you could fit into an egg-cup.

  But Nathan had no interest in angels. And he mistrusted small people. Especially women. They were usually aggressive, like terriers, yapping for attention. Yet when Connie spoke she did not yap. She leaned forward and slipped her two hands between her knees. “So you got my letter after all?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t answer it.”

  “I had nothing to answer for.”

  Connie frowned at this. “Answer for? Why do you say that?”

  Nathan sat down, stiffly.

  “Look,” he said, after an edgy silence, “Ronny was my brother. But I haven’t spoken to him in a long while. Ten years or more. I just can’t help you.”

  Connie didn’t blink. In a flash she said, “Well, I suppose if you did know where he was then you’d be breaking the law. You’d be concealing a felon.”

  “Exactly.”

  Nathan paused. “And the only reason I knew he’d run away from prison was because the police contacted me. Just after. But it’s not even as if I could conceal him. He’s dead to me. It’s as though he’s dead,” Nathan smiled grimly, “and how could I conceal a dead person?”

  Connie’s head jilted. “People have managed it. In the past.”

  Nathan thought this comment throwaway – which it was – but also morbid and inappropriate. He grimaced. Connie digested his expression. She was feeding off him, he could tell. He hated that sensation. He resented it, sorely. Without thinking, he covered his mouth with his fingers so that she could not see it. Then he realized what he was doing and uncovered it again. He had nothing to hide.