After that the water moved fast. He’d stop and test plants, eat things snatched from the bank, make me eat leaves to give me energy, bundling wet plants and flotsam into the bottom of the boat, flashing big smiles at me when I looked round, enjoying freedom, speed and danger. After a couple of hours the trees stopped and we floated past open fields.
‘Can you smell it?’
The tang of oncoming sea, the cool new air, my hands blistered from the plank. I turned to look at him: shivering, pleased, free on the water, sliding us into wide forces.
‘One thing.’ Perhaps he should have mentioned it before. This sea we were coming to? It wasn’t sea proper. More like an estuary leading somewhere, Morecambe Bay? Had I heard of it?
Sure I’d heard of treacherous Morecambe Bay, dead cockle pickers caught in quick tides on sinking sands. I spun round.
‘Yes,’ he said: fast tides, quicksand, easy death. I wasn’t to worry: only dangerous if you didn’t know what you were up to or walked out when the tide was out. We’d be in our boat on water hugging the north coast, we’d wait for the right tide to sweep us out, we’d pay our respects, he knew all about it.
‘Trust me.’ We’d park somewhere, wait for the tide, he knew the signs. We were heading for Kraton and friends.
How could he know any of this: tides, where we were, how to get to Barrow via water from Lake Coniston, that Lake Coniston turned into a river, how to navigate Morecambe Bay? How could he picture the shoreline? We had no atlas, that I knew about: we had nothing except the stolen boat and clothes, nothing from before. Or at least I had nothing. And no chalk here: slate and mud, which carried no charge, he said.
‘That Welsh dragon?’ he said. The red one on the Welsh flag that meant mineral treasures to privileged eyes. ‘Can you picture it? Forked tongue out? Paw raised?’
I tried.
‘Not just a dragon,’ he said. ‘Also a map.’ If you flipped the dragon the other way round, he said, so it faced east instead of west, you’d find the dragon’s head and front body mapped pretty much exactly onto the shape of the Irish Sea, so the paw raised was Cardigan Bay, the back of the neck the east coast of Ireland. Yes, the Irish Sea was the shape of a dragon. ‘Check it out next time you can.’ A pretty goofy-looking dragon, a secret in plain view. The negative of the Chinese map. A useful way to come to know the coastline, what you got taught in desert schools. A vital coastline for sarnies now and in the past, metal empires. He’d had to study that dragon, commit its bends to memory, sing its inlet songs. We were currently moving towards the dragon’s snout. He said.
No way to check on the boat in the dark. I had to laugh. His whole style this crazed journey: when in doubt, hit me with something truly insane.
‘And where d’you think the dragon’s eye is?’ he said. ‘Come on, you know, out there in the Irish Sea, cloaked by mist. Come on. What do you know about the Isle of Man?’
Not much. Like Jersey or Guernsey: part of Britain, kind of, but with its own laws, no tax, lots of banks, a good place to hide money, famous motorbike race. A ball of fire on the Chinese map.
Full of rare metals, he said. From the top of its highest mountain on a clear day you can see England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Ancient watchmaking centre. The fifth most likely nation to send someone into space. Was and is Britain’s true capital, the eye from which all power radiates, the eye at the centre of ancient metal empires fringing the Irish Sea, once the most secret place on earth. The eye at the exact centre of the triangle which is Britain and Ireland when you look at them on a map, if you can trust the maps, the pyramid eye from US dollar bills from whence fires were lit to send and receive mainland signals, from when sarnies lurk and see and control the world even today.
‘Yeah chew on that. Here’s the real Mediterranean. The other’s a decoy. Those warlike tribes. And Barrow’s Man’s hub. The nearest mainland port.’ No wonder he didn’t want to go there. The Furness peninsula, Jenny 2, chief receiver for the Dons, for thousands of years. The big cut-off landing point, protected by sea, mountains and quicksand, where parcels wrapped in straw got traded, where apples got smelted into machines. Where we were heading, past the forts, castles, priories, hidden abbeys, monasteries, watchtowers, lighthouses, spyholes, black friars of its shoreline. Cos what did I think monks were really? Managents, manual CCTV, apple-counters, chief scientists, root-inspectors, purveyors of mind-tools to trance the dumdums whose land they tickled, chanters of bogus books with triple meanings, seekers of the past.
So that was why and how he knew how to get to Barrow, sarnie-central. He said.
‘What did Alan say about the fireball on the map?’
That it was like the sun, a place so hot no human could survive there. Not to go there, never to look at it directly.
‘Can’t remember,’ I said. ‘Can you?’
‘Look,’ he said.
We were sliding slowly past tethered boats into colder air and wind. There were lights to our right: something coming up. A big road bridge ahead over the river and beyond it something else: a wider blank, lights shimmering far away in true huge openness.
‘OK,’ he said. The tide was high, he could tell from the watermark on the bridge. Time to get out, find shelter, eat, wait for the tide to turn so we could ride it out to sea. A couple of hours by his estimate. He had to get out, take a closer look, to be more accurate.
We slipped under the bridge and saw beyond a much bigger bridge and something neon to our right. A service station, he said and shuddered, pulling his coat hood right down over his face, reaching over to do the same to me.
He moved the boat closer to the right-hand shore, made me get out and pull it with him through mud far up against the bank and hide it in reeds as best we could. Then we headed up in the dark into thick trees, found a bush for me to sit in while he headed out further to take a look at the water and tides, and to try to find food.
Leaving me there on my own. The first time since the burrow. Me alone in the new world.
‘If I’m not back by dawn then move on, wash the mud off your face and hands, pull your hood down, walk along the shore as long as you can till you end up in Barrow, you can’t miss the docks. But no service stations, steer well clear.’
Then I should go wherever we were heading in Barrow, the precise address I wouldn’t tell him, see if old Kraton wasn’t there.
‘Where is it? Tell me. Just in case. So we can meet up there. If it goes tits up.’
My last card. ‘Vengeance Street,’ I told him. I didn’t tell him the number.
‘Vengeance Street?’
Yup, weird, I knew. I nodded. No I didn’t know where it was, had never heard of or been there before, no Scritches.
‘We’ll find a map or something once we get to Barrow. Ask someone, we’ll sort it.’ He shook his head, shivered, then smiled again. ‘We’re already dead. Is the best way to think about it.’
Comforting words. He stroked my face and left.
I wrapped myself in the coat and scarf and leaves and sat there shivering in the bush, feeling woozy. He came back and woke me. It was still dark. I was ill. He forced me to eat mushrooms and shrivelled berries and what he said was yarrow to perk me up. He’d poked through people’s bins and brought back plastic bags, bits of old t-shirts. I wiped my runny shits with leaves and tied bits of t-shirts and plastic bags round my body and legs and numb feet, stuffed them back into the wellies like he told me.
The tide would soon turn, he said. We should head out now before it did. We’d have to go under the massive railway viaduct spanning the bay ahead and had to do it now, just before the change of tide, or the strength of surge could batter us up against the bridge columns. After that the turning tide would do the work for us, ride us out up the dragon’s snout to the forehead that was Barrow, chamber of the red dragon’s pineal eye.
We sat cross-legged by the tree and flooded ourselves with energy. You didn’t need to sleep if you knew which body buttons to press, he said.
I sat there wobbling next to him, smelling him and his shit. I sat there and filled myself up with the dark.
Back in the gloom with the boat, shivering under the coat and scarves and plastic bags, facing the hazy world. We pushed it down into the river, got in, me back in front, sailed on under the road bridge into the vast freezing black estuary, under the massive railway viaduct, squeaking through its narrow columns, forcing ourselves through.
Morecambe Bay proper now in the turning tide: big choppy water, flat wide black dotted with white lights from the shore and red lights out to sea he said were turbines. Moon, stars and satellites above.
‘Nothing fancy,’ he shouted. We’d stick to this course, hug the shore, follow the lights. We’d get there eventually, we’d be safe.
No talking after that, you couldn’t hear. Three or four hours of fast black sea, wind, freezing swells, bumpy water, spray, getting soaked, zonking out, clinging on, flowing down dragons, till the light started to change and the tide began to outrun us. We started getting stuck in raised mudbanks, having to push ourselves free with hands and sticks. Mud flats: the deeper water channels further out now, away from the shore, in real sea where we wouldn’t go.
We sat there, stuck.
‘Too dangerous now.’
We shouldn’t force it. We had limits. We’d been doing this a long time now: rowing, coasting. It would be dawn soon: new light and bird noises. We shouldn’t travel in the light. Soon the tide would be out completely and then it would change, come roaring back at us. We were pretty far along the snout. We’d done well.
We were tired and I was ill, we needed to rest, stop off somewhere at the shore, sleep, prepare. Get out now, before the fishermen came, leave the boat right here where it was, stuck in mud, too stuck and heavy to drag to the shore. It had done its work, got us here. Thank you, boat. We’d move on by other means. We’d wrap things round our hands and wellies to make mud shoes, increase our surface area so we could slide well and not sink. Quicksand took you when all your weight stood on one or two points. We’d crawl on the mud to the shore with our new hand and leg wadding, spreading out the weight, moving slowly but safely on our stomachs to the shore, find some place to crash during the day, wait for night to move on to Barrow.
A place to crash. What would that look like? If the turtle owned here and had salted it and turned all surfaces into snitchers?
We wrapped our hands and shins with junk to bulk out our surfaces, got out of the boat and just left it there. We got down on hands and knees and crawled through sticky icy salt mud in the half-light towards light on the land, pushing through seaweed and silver pools, scattering little white birds, trying to make out what was on the shore directly in front of us: regular lights, green solar panels, small white and beige boxes facing the sea.
‘Caravan park,’ he said.
I lay half-dead in the mud. An empty caravan park in late November: bingo, surely? Climb the fence, force some door.
‘No way. Cammed up to the gills. Places like this? On the coast here? Looking all remote?’
It was lighter. We pushed on, him yanking me on across freezing chocolate in search of shelter: fallen trees, sheep pens, things with half a roof.
Easier said than done. That coast was open and bare: sea walls, lone houses, open fields, no forests. We came to a red, yellow and brown brick obelisk sticking up out of the mud, a seagull peering at us from atop, Don’s agent no doubt. Beyond it were boats and boat parts stuck in brown like dinosaur bones, then a road, houses, land, jumble.
‘Here,’ he said and stumbled me onto the shore.
Two muddy fools holding each other up, swaddled with trash, ridiculous-looking. Him stooped up supporting me, me barely walking, a drunk, the most suspicious duo, forget about nanocams: injured tramps walking off a wet bender in the muddy dawn.
In front of us was a small settlement, a pub, a few houses, then a locked gate and beyond that a lone stretch jutting further out into the sea: a pier and a mess of boats and houses with something else lit up on the horizon beyond it still: the hazy ruins of a castle out to sea, on an island. He nodded at some small upturned boats a bit further along the shore, and a large beached rusty trawler half on its side, stuck in the mud. He slumped me against a broken row boat, pulled the muddy coat hood low over my face and went to check the orange trawler out.
He popped up on the trawler’s deck, thumbs up.
He came back down and hoisted me up and dragged me over and then up the trawler’s ladder to its deck and then down another ladder into the dim hold.
Cans and bottles, plastic bags, mouldy sleeping bags, scrunched-up paper, bad smells: we weren’t the first to think of finding shelter down there in our filthy clothes.
‘International spy station?’
He laughed. ‘You never know.’
So good to be inside. The low side of portholes faced out onto the sea and glistening mud. It was lighter now and we saw people out there doing things with boats: shrimp and cocklemen, he said. To the left, across the sea from us, was the glimmer of something huge across the big bay.
‘Heysham,’ he said. ‘What they call “power stations”. Don’s big rooms up and down this coast.’
Direct in front of us were big things out to sea: gas drillers, he said and wind farms out beyond—so-called gas drillers and wind farms. And to our right was what he said was Roa Island, which wasn’t an island at all but a bead at the end of the road. A bead split in two by the road: on the left side little houses, to the right the crammed-up boats, the weird castle out beyond in the water behind it. Everything was brown mud, sea, red lights, channels, mist, tiny brown and white birds.
In this foul tramps-nest we unwrapped our poor muddied knees and feet and tried to get warm using anything, pee-smelling sleeping bags with most of their stuffing gone. He cleared space, shook things, made a makeshift bed and pillows out of what rotten stuff he could, pulled them over sick sneezing filthy grey us, pulled his arm round me so tight so we warmed each other.
I slept.
22
Early afternoon. Leaves and seaweed, more runny shits in the corner. I was worse, lots of snot. He cleaned me with rags, wrapped grotty sleeping bags round me, told me it was good I was so ill and they hadn’t pounced cos maybe that meant they weren’t on to us after all. Since I was so important to them, they couldn’t have harm come to me, would’ve stepped in if they’d seen me this bad, cos of who I was, what I knew, so precious. Not that he’d got me ill to test.
We looked out of a porthole and watched light fade over shimmering brown mud, little brown birds dancing and pecking in channels, street lamps switching on to reflect the red sky in pools across the chocolate trap. The big dun cube across the bay that was the so-called power station lit up again, the sky was huge with wispy dark grey clouds stretched out like words I couldn’t read over the setting sun. He told me about the bay and Piel Castle on the island, an old Man receiver built by so-called monks on the ruins of much older spiral castles, Barrow tucked behind where we couldn’t yet see. The so-called drillers and turbines in the sea lit up red. Just before the light went the bluest kingfisher hovered for a moment right beneath us. We watched, he held me tight, told me these were our halcyon days.
He talked magic and plastic and machines and who’d agreed to any of it, and undersea wars and minerals and weaponised quakes. He talked the Isle of Man and its flag of three legs that meant something, about the dragon sea that was this Irish Sea in front of us and other seas memorised in desert schools: the horse-shaped North Sea, the stag-shaped Baltic and its islands, how the Baltic island of Saaremaa is the stag’s eye, its Man equivalent, how the island of Gotland is its dapple, how all seas have shapes and songs, how mainlands are always controlled by islands, how the dead are buried on islands, about Ibrasilia, the Celtic island of the dead in the west that was maybe Brazil, how islands are the tips of mountains: Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Hawaii, Java, Taiwan.
When I woke it was night. We had to wash, it wo
uld make me better, he said. It wasn’t too cold outside, we had to risk it, outdoor air would do me good. He lugged me over his shoulder up and down and into mud in the mild dark outside lit by orange street lamps. He propped me up by the trawler and ferried sea water to me in empty booze bottles and washed me tenderly bit by bit, doused my scabby head in cold stinging sea water, dabbed me dry with some washed tramp rag, washed himself, lifted me home.
On the trawler’s tipped deck he found a metal box and made a small fire from bits of bush and rubbish, sparked it with a found lighter, made me sit and warm myself. I watched the flames. He boiled sea water in tilted bottles, strained it through washed cloth to take the salt out, boiled it again, put seaweed in, made me drink some and stored the rest in bottles, called it champagne, toasted our grand dodge.
I had all the sleeping bags and felt better. ‘Your headaches,’ I said. He hadn’t had a headache for a while, since Flora, which I didn’t want to think about.
‘Yeah weird,’ he said. Perhaps he’d been allergic to something, in the white Nissan, or the tracker in his calf. Perhaps outdoor living suited him, doss wrecks. We laughed. He hugged me to keep me warm in the boat.
The next morning I woke late, feeling better.
He wasn’t there.
I went to the porthole. The tide was in, the dun box facing me across bronze water. He was outside, hood down, collecting things. Up on the deck he built another fire and fried us seaweed and crunchy tiny fish on a stone. We lay side by side in the dirty boat waiting for the sun to set.
It got dark. About 5pm, he said. We drank our champagne and put our coats on over plastic bags and rags. It was time. Only a couple of miles north to Barrow. Old muckers like us, we’d find the way, hug the shore. Blaze out. Could I walk?
Maybe.
We’d huddle together, hoods down, two old tramps hunting cockles for tea. We’d walk weird, to fox the gait-recognition tools they had, ID you by your slouch even with your face covered.
We looked out at our view for the last time, street lights shimmering in mud puddles, the lit-up power station, Roa Island’s two sides, the red lights. He put a sprig of dry seaweed into an empty bottle of Blue Nun at the porthole, jammed it in place with a curled wad of paper.
TWICE Page 15