Signals of Distress

by Jim Crace

  ‘If she must go,’ he said at last, ‘then, I hope, you will allow me to … to make your new lives less uncertain. I can provide a little money for you both …’

  Miggy came down off the bed, and stood beside her mother.

  ‘… Before I leave, or Miggy leaves, I will arrange a … small payment.’ He was embarrassed by their stillness and their silence. ‘I must leave now …’ He stood up hastily. He was so clumsy in their house, both in his body and his speech. ‘I mean, I must go back.’ He shook both women’s hands and fled into the cottage yard. He almost ran away. Whip barked and followed him. The two roped mongrels growled as he passed. The sea air slapped his blushing, sweating face. Betrayed, betrayed, betrayed. He didn’t stop until he reached the path above the Cradle Rock.

  There wasn’t any sign of Otto’s food or the napkin on the seat. They’d disappeared. One of the stones Aymer had used to weigh the napkin down had rolled, almost, onto the heart scratched in the wood, obscuring Ralph’s and Miggy’s initials. A heart of stone, Aymer thought. He looked beneath the seat. He pushed the grass aside with his boot. No crusts or fishbones there. No snubs of cheese. There were seagulls about, one-legged on rocks, their necks tucked in. Had they the strength to pull the napkin free of stones? He called out Otto’s name again. Then Miggy’s name. Then Katie’s name. Then all the swear words he knew. He was uncontrolled, despairing, angry, faint, ashamed. He’d missed Otto by a half hour at the most. He kicked the seat. He threw the napkin’s stone onto the ground. He banged his forehead with his fist. He cursed himself, out loud. Whip and seagulls echoed him.

  If he hadn’t been shouting, perhaps he would have heard more clearly what he took to be a distant voice, coming off the land. He called again, ‘Otto! Otto!’ and yes, there was the faintest voice. It was the echo of his own, rebounding off the rocks. He climbed up off the path onto the headland until he had a decent view inland. The coastal granite bluffs; the bracken and the gorse; a narrow wind-break of stooping skew and thorns; the first low wall; the salty grazing land; the miles of distant fields; the moors. He ranged from left to right, searching for some sign of human life, some moving shadow. He only spotted birds and something that might have been a bending man but turned sideways to prove itself a tethered goat.

  At first he thought there was a single, cussed wedge of snow, surviving in the shadows of a thorn which grew behind the nearest drystone wall, a hundred yards away. But when he saw it for the second time, it appeared to lift and change its shape, then drop and hang like washing on a line. Was that the missing napkin from Otto’s meal? It seemed to be. Its weight looked right for cloth in that low wind, and it was white and square. Its corners showed against the darker branches of the tree. Surely, Aymer thought, it didn’t walk there on its own. And it couldn’t be carried by the flimsy wind that had been blowing all that day. He wet his index finger in his mouth and held it up. What little wind there was was heading east. The napkin had gone north. ‘We have him, Whip,’ he said. ‘He’s there.’

  The going wasn’t hard at first. The land was wild and wet, but Aymer made stepping-stones of granite, and even though he slipped from time to time, and had to slither once on his haunches down a mossy outcrop, he found a route towards the cloth, that white and flapping signal of distress. When he reached the dip beyond the headland though and the sea was out of sight, the soil was deeper. There were no granite stepping-stones. The ground refused to take his weight. His boots sank in. The earth expired its brackish coffin smells. His ankle turned. He fell again onto his outstretched hand. He sank up to his cuff. Aymer headed for the bracken to his right, and found firmer footing there, though the gorse that grew beyond was thicker than it looked. He had to force his way through. His trousers and his legs were spiked. The gorse snapped. The air about him smelled of coconut. Whip wasn’t happy on this walk. She barked that they should go back to the path. She ran away. She waited. Barked again. But finally she followed Aymer through the bracken and the gorse to the dry, slight rise beyond, to the thorn tree and the wall.

  Aymer wedged his foot into the wall, pushed himself up on a low branch, and pulled the white cloth free. His hopes were dashed. It was too big and flimsy for a napkin. He recognized it, though. It was the sling he’d had for his bad arm. He’d flung it to the ground when he had needed both his hands to help Ralph move the Cradle Rock. He remembered how the heavy wind that Sunday had picked up the sling, turned it once or twice, then took it on a seagull flight inland.

  He called for Whip. But Whip had gone. She’d scaled the wall and run across the pasture in its lee. When Aymer called she barked for him to follow her. He climbed up on the wall, and clapped his hands. Whip had her chin pressed to the grass. Her tail was wagging heavily. She rolled on her back. What had she found? Rabbit droppings, probably. A rotting crow. Manure. Something irresistible and smelly to mark her coat with. Aymer followed her. At least the pastureland was firm. He held Whip by her collar. She had rolled in something dead. The smell was unbearable. He flipped her over by her legs and wiped her back on the grass. And then he wiped his own hands on the grass. They were as smelly as the dog.

  They walked up to a second, higher wall, climbed over it and then headed eastwards towards Wherrytown. To the north there was a lonely curl of smoke, a second lonely curl of hope that Otto might be found. There was a rough gate in the corner of the pasture. It led into a rutted wagon way, the quicker, more direct back path from Dry Manston which the Bowes had used the day before. Their footprints could be followed in the mud. Aymer would be happy to get back. He’d had a disappointing, empty day. Nothing he had done would change the world. The hunting party would go out the next day, and Otto would be carried back, at best half dead. Aymer Smith of Hector Smith & Sons, the meddler, the emancipationist, would be to blame. They’d shared the moment when the bolt was pulled, and he was pointing at the open door and telling Otto, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ Now they’d share the moment when the bolt was shut again.

  The light was fading on that Tuesday afternoon, but Aymer was not concerned. The wagon way would lead to Wherrytown if there was any logic in the world. He only had to stumble on and run the history of the last five days through his mind; the storm, the inn, the salmon flesh, the country wife, the Cradle Rock, the African, the bruising innocence of people far from home, the transience of life and snow, the permanence of all the damage done, and finally the distant curl of smoke which beckoned to him from the north. He didn’t know what made him leave the wagon way as soon as he heard the chapel foghorn sound for Tuesday evensong. Except this was his final chance. Go now, while everybody was at prayer. Or be too late.

  He concentrated on the curl of smoke, a dozen fields away. There was what looked to be a small stone hut nearby. The smoke belonged to it, it seemed. He’d walk that far, and then give up. Otto, surely, would have sought some shelter, away from the town. He would have lit a fire – and Africans were good at lighting fires from stones and bark. They hadn’t lost their ancient skills. Aymer had read the travel journals of men like Bruce and Soules, how Africans could navigate by stars, make light with bones, catch fish by hand, skin cattle with a sharpened stick, survive for weeks without a drink, speak with the birds, protect themselves from wounds and fevers with potions made from leaves. There was a narrow track which led off from the wagon way and skirted three small oblong fields before it disappeared in mud. Aymer checked the mud for footprints. There were none. Or none so far as he could see, because there was a sudden dusk and nothing could be certain in that light. Get to the smoke, he told himself. If he is anywhere, he will be at the smoke.

  He climbed on to the wall. It was wide and flat enough on top to be a path. Someone had walked that way before, and many times. The undergrowth was flattened. Roots were snapped. The loosest rocks had been knocked on to the earth below the wall-top path. Aymer followed it, leaping over branches, glad to be out of the mud, and benefiting from the last of the daylight and the low light of the moon. The whole length of his body was relief
ed against the sky. He looked as if he was ten feet tall, a comic, skinny stilts-man at a fair, with performing dog. A stringy hedgerow ghost. A diabolic scarecrow on the move. He found a route around the patchwork of the fields towards the smoke and hut, and came at last into the corner of a field that had been tilled and turned for winter. It looked at first like a landscape of ten thousand lakes; the mountains were the ridges in the earth; the valleys, furrows; the narrow pools, each shaped like icy mouths, reflecting all the silver in the sky. Again, it looked as if some fairy silversmith had dropped a cargo of brooches, or tried to plant the soil with polished, metal leaves. Was Aymer looking down on shards of ice? He walked along the wall a little further, so that the shards, the lakes, the leaves, the brooches, could be seen more clearly. He focused on the smell, before he focused on the ground. He knew it well. The field was full of fish. The sea was taking everyone away, and putting fish on land. There were no leaves or lakes or brooches, just one star-gazy pie with a four-acre crust of earth and a shoal of pilchards staring at the moon, their eyes as dead as flint, their scales like beaten tin, their fraying fins and tails like frost, their flesh composting for the next year’s crop. The field was absolutely still. The fastest movements were the snails and slugs which were enamelling the fleshy silverwork with their saliva trails.

  Whip and Aymer jumped into the field. Whip nosed about, then started eating. Aymer squatted on his heels, and backed against the wall. The fish had frightened him. Where was the order in the universe? How long before the sky was tumbling with frogs and rats? How long before the ears of corn had fins? He’d never known such superstitious, concentrated fear, nor ever felt so far from home. He thrust his hands into his coat. He shut his eyes. He hung his head towards his knees. This expedition had been mad.

  A scuffle thirty yards away made him look up once again. At first he thought it was the dog. But Whip was standing in the middle of the field, her nose pointing, her chin greasy with pilchards, her neck hairs hackling. She’d heard the scuffle too. There was some movement on the far side of the field, ten yards below the little hut and its twist of smoke. Some shadows shifting. Some interruptions to the glinting silver of the fish. Aymer could convince himself he saw someone, crouching in the furrowed soil, pushing pilchards in his mouth. Aymer could convince himself by now that there were wolves or hobgoblins or sharks. But Whip wasn’t afraid. She sped across the moonlit pilchard pie and gave chase to a feeding nest of rats.

  Aymer found himself a broken length of branch and followed Whip. The smell of rotting fish was soon displaced by that of wood smoke, drier and more bitter. What fire there was hadn’t been fed for quite a while. Its fuel was mostly root and bark and tough billets of thorn. Its grate – hidden up against the north side of the hut – was made from slates and stones that had been dislodged from the roof and walls. There was a flat slate in the ashes, with fish bones. Someone had cooked a meal. It was instinctive: Aymer crouched again; he blew into the fire to try and raise a flame. He got the embers to glow, but there was nothing for their heat to curl and burst around. He searched his pockets, took out the book, and fed some of the Truismes by dell’Ova to the fire. The pages lifted, stiffened, blackened, smoked. He tore more pages into tiny shreds, like kindling. He blew again until the hot eye of the fire lifted up its lid and winked a tiny flame. The fire grew strong on aphorisms, epigrams and teasing ambiguities, in French. Aymer’s face and hands were glowing now. His pulse had slowed. His blood was warm. He added more wood to the fire. The smoke was damp.

  He rolled the last remaining pages of his book into a torch. The ink burned blue. He held the torch up to the broken wall of the hut. It might have been the refuge from the rain a dozen years before for cattle boys. It might have been a winter sty for pigs. Or some hidden place that smugglers used. There was a tiny room inside, not five feet high, not six feet long, not fully roofed, no proper floor, but snug. Half of the ground was covered in dry bracken. There was a cup, a metal box, a demijohn, some more fish bones. Aymer stooped and went inside. He opened the metal box: some candle ends, an apple core, some cheese, some hardbake, a button, a teaspoon, an empty pot of Dr Sweetzer’s Panacea for Salving Wounds and Burns. No pistol. Aymer lit one of the candle ends, and stamped his torch out on the earth. He put the candle on the metal box, and searched the bracken bed. No pistol there. No body warmth. No blood. No anything. The blanket hanging from the wall was invisible, until Aymer almost fell and had to steady himself. Then he felt the cheap perpetuanna of the woollen cloth, and took it down off its twig peg. It was a horse blanket – and like the ones used in the stable and the tackle room at the inn.

  Aymer went outside, stood straight, and slowly turned a full circle, looking for the outlines of a man. He dared not call. The landscape of his circle ducked and ridged and plunged as walls gave way to trees, and trees arched weatherways towards the moors, and moors descended into fields and back again to walls and down onto the galaxy of fish. The only light was moon. The only life was Whip’s.

  Aymer waited for an hour, the horse blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his head, until his fire was almost dead. He tried to find a place for Otto in his life, to make amends inside his head at least, to revive the harmony he’d squandered. Whip snoozed, one-eyed, her fur just inches from the embers. It seemed much later, but it wasn’t yet eight o’clock and he might still be back in time for supper at the inn. He woke the dog, found his broken branch, returned the blanket to its peg, put all his change into the metal box – three shillings and a farthing – and climbed again onto the highway of the wall. The moon provided enough light, if he was careful. The branch was helpful as a walking stick. He wasn’t certain of the way. There were too many crossroads in the walls. Too many junctions. And, this time, no wisp of smoke to mark his destination. He tried to listen for the sea, but it wasn’t as noisy as the wind. At last he found a policy. The wind would come up off the sea at night. The warm attracts the cold. If he could follow routes that led into the wind then he must come finally to the wagon way. Then turn left for Wherrytown.

  He found a wall that ran into the wind. He hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps when he saw a light ahead. Was it a building on the edge of town? A marker on the chapel? He waited and watched, holding his breath, holding his cudgel-branch. The light was moving parallel to him and in a straight line. And then it took a sudden right-angled turn and was coming, more or less, towards Aymer. It moved from side to side, like a porch light swinging on its hook. Aymer made himself as small as possible. He pushed Whip down onto the wall and held her muzzle and her back. Again the light went right, and then resumed another path towards Aymer and the dog. Someone else was walking along the network of the walls, with a lantern. It wasn’t bravery, but cold and cowardice that made Aymer stand up and call out, ‘Who goes there?’ Such a foolish and dramatic phrase! He even blushed. There was no reply. Perhaps the wind had shredded his words and scattered them inland. This time he called out, ‘Hello. It’s Aymer Smith,’ and then, ‘I’m only lost.’ He could now make out the silhouette of a small man, walking on the wall with the certainty of a goat. The lantern was fifty yards away when Aymer recognized the busy and ironic walk of George the parlourman.

  ‘Ah, George.’ Ah, George, sweet George was carrying a half loaf, some apples and a ripped kerseymere jacket.

  ‘Ah, Mr Smith. Moon-hunting or rabbiting tonight?’ George sounded uneasy – and embarrassed – for once.

  ‘Neither, George. I’m fishing in the fields.’ He was delighted with his joke, and happier than he could say to have the parlourman and the lantern as companions home, and to have his conscience liberated by the happy certainty that Otto had an unexpected friend.

  11. Gone to Ground

  THAT NIGHT a chicken disappeared. Amy Farrow found some feathers from the missing bird and the shells of two eggs, eaten raw, next to the coop. There were more feathers outside, in the lane. Had Otto taken the chicken? Was he the beak hunter? Or was this the work of foxes? The older Wherryt
owners who had time to gather in the inn’s courtyard for sailor Rankin’s funeral were in no doubt. If there had been a fox prowling through Wherrytown at night then there would have been a din of squawking, and barking dogs. But no one had been woken. The Farrows’ bedroom – an open stage of boards across the roof beams – was above their yard and Amy Farrow said she slept ‘with one ear cocked, and never heard a thing, excepting Mr Farrow, wheezing like a steaming pie’.

  ‘It had to be some mighty clever fox,’ her husband said, ‘to climb our wall and smash the coop door open. And then he puts a spell on both the chickens and the dog and sends ’em dumb. If we had foxes sharp as that we wouldn’t have no need of folk. Not womenfolk, at least.’

  ‘I never knowed a fox before shell eggs. They eat the lot,’ a neighbour added. ‘It’s only men and monkeys can shell eggs. And I suppose we know it in’t a monkey, unless it was the Devil’s monkey. My wager is it was the Devil’s man.’

  They all agreed it was the Devil’s work. The sooner that they brought the blackie in, the safer they would be in their beds at night and Mrs Farrow wouldn’t have to sleep with one ear cocked.

  George and Mrs Yapp brought beer and mugwort tea into the yard to warm the mourners while Nathaniel Rankin, still stitched in his piece of sail, was boxed in Walter Howells’s birchwood coffin and carried out from the tackle room. Mr Phipps placed a wooden cross on top of the coffin, smiled bleakly at his parishioners and raised his eyebrows for a moment too long when the Norrises and Aymer Smith came down the outer staircase from their room. He would, he thought, require the man (if he were bent on coming to the burial) to stand outside the chapel grounds with his Unholy Scepticism for a companion. He sent George down to the quay where the captain, his crew and the local artisans were working on the Belle, and making better progress than they’d dared to hope. They’d have to spare an hour for their shipmate’s funeral. Mr Phipps was hoping for another large congregation, and had prepared a careful sermon and found the perfect hymn. He was pleased to see the Dollys from Dry Manston arrive – the parents, three sons, two daughters, Skimmer. They weren’t usually a chapel-going family. They didn’t even, he suspected, observe the Sabbath if it suited them. He shook the hands of the two older men and nodded impatiently while they explained – in unnecessary detail, he judged – how it was the Dolly nets that had brought the sailor in, and how it was their duty now to see their ‘catch’ put to rest.