The Evil Within

by S M Hardy

  The morning couldn’t have been more perfect. The usual ever-present mist had burnt away before we had even reached the cliff path, and the sun shone down from a deep-blue sky warming the back of my head. Even the air smelt good, warm and scented with fresh vegetation and grass with a hint of dry earth.

  If I’d been worried about whether we’d have anything to talk about I needn’t have bothered. We could have been old friends who just hadn’t seen each other for a while. We compared notes on London and the places we’d both been to. I obviously knew the city better than she did, but she had a pretty impressive knowledge and there were a few places we both knew fairly well.

  She didn’t mention her ex and I didn’t enquire, and similarly I didn’t say anything about Kat, for one thing I didn’t want Lucy’s sympathy. Anyway, during what I supposed was our first date was hardly the time, though I’m not sure there ever would be.

  There were places when we had to walk single file, but mostly when we reached the narrower stretches of path Lucy just snuggled closer to my side and held onto my arm tighter.

  ‘Where are we heading?’ I asked after a while.

  ‘I thought we could go down to Saint’s Bay and have a picnic. It’s a bit of a steep climb on the way back but it’s worth it.’

  ‘It can’t be as steep as the steps down to Fisherman’s Cove,’ I said, and for a moment in my head I was running up those steps once again in fear of my life.

  ‘So you have been this way before.’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘And last night you just let me prattle on like an idiot.’

  ‘I liked listening to you prattle on,’ I told her with a smile, and she began to laugh.

  ‘My grandma would say you have a silver tongue, Jim Hawkes.’

  ‘I did work in the city.’

  ‘Hmm, that would explain it. What were you?’ She stopped mid stride and let go of my arm, turning to look me up and down. ‘You don’t much look like a city slicker.’

  ‘I’m not any more.’

  She squinted at my face. ‘I bet with a haircut and an expensive suit you’d look the part, though.’

  ‘I guess I did once,’ I admitted.

  ‘Finance, I bet.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Investment banker?’

  I shook my head as she slipped her arm back through mine and we started back off along the path. ‘Banker is about right, though.’

  She turned her head so she could look at my face. ‘You said that as though you despised what you were.’

  I kept my eyes straight ahead. This I did not want to talk about. If I despised myself, what would she think of me?

  ‘Let’s just say it was making me into a person I suddenly realised I didn’t want to be.’

  She was quiet for a few moments, then said so softly I wouldn’t have heard her if we hadn’t been walking so close together, ‘I can relate to that.’

  I glanced her way and her expression was grim. This was not a good way to start a first date.

  A gull cried out above and a cricket chirruped from within the long swathes of grass stretching out to either side of us, and a smile returned to her lips. ‘I love it here,’ she said. ‘It makes me realise why I came back. If I never see London again, I’ll be happy.’

  ‘Really? Don’t you miss it?’

  ‘Do you?’ she asked, looking at me again.

  I frowned at her for a moment, then felt a smile tugging at my lips. ‘At this precise moment – no, not at all.’

  She began to laugh, and it was infectious. For the first time in over two years – maybe even longer − I was having pure, uncomplicated fun and I was happy, really happy.

  We carried on past the turning that led down the long flight of steps to Fisherman’s Cove towards the point where I’d first seen ‘the man’ on that fateful afternoon, and I had to suppress a shudder. I forced the apprehension that threatened to darken my mood away; I was buggered if he was going to ruin my day. Anyway, if he was a figment of my overwrought imagination, as the voice inside my head would have me believe, why should I let him?

  The path followed the cliff as it curved around and to the point that stuck out in a high jagged tip overlooking the sea. I couldn’t help it but as we began to get closer, I kept looking for the place she had been waiting for him; the place where she had tried to push him to his death. We must have passed it, I was sure it was somewhere just before the incline to the point, but if we did, I missed it.

  When we reached the tip of the point the path had been widened by hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of walkers’ feet as each one had pressed a little closer to the edge to get a better view. There was now a tubular, metal safety rail supported by similar posts driven into the rock to hold back the masses. It was largely unnecessary; if someone were to slip and fall the worst that would happen was they’d get entangled in the brambles and other vegetation covering the rock face before it dropped away into the sea. ‘The man’ hadn’t fallen from this place, of that I was sure, and for some reason it made me relax a little. I was not going to think of him any more − not today, at least.

  We stood there for a while, the wind blowing our hair about our faces and turning our cheeks pink, as we looked out across a sparkling sea that appeared as though it could go on and on for ever. Our shoulders were touching and if her arm hadn’t been through mine, I would have been tempted to drape mine around the back of her neck – nothing too heavy, just rest it there and gauge the reaction. It was probably just as well I couldn’t, maybe it was too soon, I didn’t want to make things awkward between us and potentially end our date before it’d even begun.

  ‘I love it here,’ Lucy said.

  ‘I can see why.’

  She smiled up at me. ‘Come on,’ she said, taking my hand and drawing me after her.

  When Lucy had said the climb down to Saint’s Bay was steep she hadn’t been joking, and for the most part there weren’t any steps to help us on our way, just a well-trod, zigzagging gully trodden into the rock between the vegetation. Here we did have to walk in single file. I let her lead the way and was glad I’d opted to wear trainers. Lucy almost skipped down the path like a mountain goat, whereas I took it slow and steady. For one thing I didn’t want to reach the bottom puffing and wheezing like an old man – this wouldn’t impress her at all. And I was finding I wanted to do that more and more with each passing moment.

  The path ended with a flight of steps carved into the cliff like at Fisherman’s Cove; even so, they were steep and weathered so smooth that in the wet they’d probably become lethal.

  It was worth the climb. The bay was small, sandy and secluded with a small island about twenty metres from the shore.

  ‘When the tide’s out we can wade to it,’ Lucy told me.

  Again, she took my hand and led me across the sand and over some rocks close to the cliff face, past some pretty impressive rock pools. Behind them and to one side was a small cave completely hidden from the beach.

  ‘I used to come here as a child,’ she told me. ‘It was my secret place.’

  She helped me off with the backpack and began to unload its contents. A bottle of white wine and two cans of beer went straight into a nearby rock pool to keep cold and the rest she stowed in the shaded entrance to the cave.

  ‘Want to explore?’

  I nodded my agreement and then we were off over the rocks like two excited kids, stopping at every pool to check it for marine life. It was a good place. Small blennies and shrimps hid in clumps of weed and hermit crabs scuttled across the sandy pool bottoms alarmed by our figures looming over them and blocking out the light.

  Sheltered from the wind it felt warm in the sun, warmer than one would expect on a late September day. We cooled down by taking off our trainers and padding along the shoreline with the sea lapping around our ankles and the wet sand scrunching between our toes. We laughed, we laughed a lot, actually, and for the first time since I’d arrived at Slyford St James it occurred to me that if mo
st days were like this one, then yes – yes, maybe I could make this isolated place my home.

  Lunch was good. Lucy had brought chicken, salad and a bottle of her delicious, home-made dressing to slop over it. She had laid a blanket out on the sand for us to sit on and while I had a beer, she sipped the white wine as she told me about her childhood in Devon and I told her about mine in the suburbs of London.

  ‘Do you think you might stay?’ she asked.

  ‘If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said no. Today,’ I shrugged and smiled at her, ‘today I’m not so sure.’

  ‘There’re worse places to live.’

  ‘You’d not go back to London?’

  She gave a small laugh and ran her finger around the rim of her glass her eyes on its contents. ‘I don’t think so. I never got used to the hustle and bustle. I never got used to the constant hum of the city. I don’t suppose you’d even notice it, but to me there was never quiet. Never silence.’

  I thought about it and I supposed she was right. At night, when I walked to the pub or back from Emma’s with Jed, apart from the sound of our own voices and our footsteps echoing along the street there was hardly a sound other than maybe the occasional call of an animal crying out across the countryside. During the day it wasn’t much different. Apart from the odd car passing through the village every sound was natural: birds singing, peacocks calling, insects buzzing. She was right, now I thought on it, in the city it was never silent – not really.

  After we’d finished eating Lucy flopped back on the blanket and I laid down resting on my elbow so I could watch her face as she was speaking.

  She closed her eyes. ‘Hmm, this is nice.’

  If she’d been wearing anything on her lips it was gone now, which was probably just as well, they already looked too kissable by far. Her nose twitched and she raised a hand to flick away an imaginary fly.

  I don’t know when I’d become such a coward. In London I’d snogged the face off many a girl I’d met only a few minutes earlier when on the dance floor of some club. I suppose the difference was I’d never intended or wanted to see them again; with Lucy it was different.

  Then I thought of Kat and it was like a cloud had drifted across the sun.

  You have to move on, Jim. Don’t make me an excuse for fucking up the rest of your life.

  ‘Why so serious?’ Lucy had opened one eye and was shading it with the back of her hand as she looked at me.

  I made myself relax. I was not going to fuck this up. ‘I was just wondering if it was worth risking a slapped face if I reached over and kissed you.’

  She closed her eye and rested her hands across her stomach. ‘You’ll never know unless you try,’ her expression inscrutable, ‘but be warned – I know t’ai chi.’

  I was in a quandary. I’d planted the idea in her head, but she hadn’t exactly given me the thumbs up.

  Her eye opened again. ‘What’s the matter, Jim? Scared I’m going to turn you into a pile of chopped liver?’ Then her lips began to quiver, and she started to laugh. ‘Come here, why don’t you?’ and she reached up, hooked a hand around the back of my neck and pulled me down to her.

  The kiss was soft and sweet, and I could feel all the sense I was born with deserting me. I wasn’t ready for a relationship. I wasn’t in the right place inside myself to start a new relationship. I didn’t even know if I’d still be in Slyford St James this time next week. All this went through my head and mattered for probably a nanosecond, then I was kissing her back and it was like our lips were meant for each other.

  Soft kisses became a little bit more as I wrapped my arms around her and we snuggled up close, but as much as I wanted her, and I wanted her a lot, somewhere at the back of my mind I had this strange little feeling like I was being … tested. There was nothing in her kiss or in the way she pressed against me to suggest this; it was just, I don’t know, maybe intuition.

  So, I stroked her hair, nuzzled her neck and resisted everything but non-threatening foreplay as if we were fifteen-year-old virgins. When eventually I lay flat on my back and she snuggled up against my chest I was pretty sure it’d been the right move. That didn’t stop me from being rock hard, but in a funny way even that was good, like a promise of good times to come.

  We lay there for a bit, me stroking her hair and Lucy resting her hand on my chest right above my heart as though checking I had one and it was hers for the taking.

  ‘Want another beer?’ she asked.

  I kissed the top of her head. ‘I’ll have a drop of wine if there’s still some going.’

  She gave me a hug, then pushed herself onto her knees and lifted the bottle so I could see it was over two-thirds full. ‘Plenty,’ she said and got another glass out of her rucksack.

  I sat up to join her and shuffled back so I was leaning against a rock. She passed me a glass and I took a sip. ‘Still cold,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm. Lovely.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  She grinned at me and moved closer, so she was sitting next to me, our shoulders brushing. ‘So are you, actually,’ she said, ‘for a Londoner, that is,’ and there was something wistful in her voice that made me turn my head to look at her, really look at her.

  ‘Something you want to share?’ I asked, knowing there damn well was something, but not sure what. Maybe the ex, maybe something or someone else, but my money was on the ex.

  She gave a little sigh. ‘Not really, not here, not now.’ When she looked at me her smile was overbright. ‘I don’t want to spoil our day.’

  ‘Hey, whatever you say, unless it’s “I never want to see you again”, won’t spoil it for me.’

  She turned onto her knees and, putting her glass down beside her, took my head in her hands and gently kissed my lips. ‘You’re a good man.’

  It was my turn for a smile to fade. ‘No – no, I’m not, but I’d like to be.’

  She stared into my eyes as though searching for my soul. ‘I think you’re probably better than you know. Anyway, I think I’d like to find out.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’d like that too.’

  We packed up our things pretty soon after that. We finished off the wine as it would be one less thing to carry, and despite her arguing, I carried the rucksack. With the food and wine gone it was pretty light with only our empties, cutlery and the blanket to carry away with us.

  We took the climb up from the bay slowly, not just because it was steep, but I think neither of us really wanted our day to end. When we reached the top, her hand slipped into mine and we started the slow walk home, and it was slow. After a while I slipped my arm around her shoulders and now and then we would stop to look out over the sea and have another kiss. It was weird, though. It was almost as though we both felt like it was the last time we’d be together before a long, enforced separation, and what made me think that I’ll never know.

  Maybe we were just scared it was too young and fragile to last, or maybe it was something to do with us both having our own demons rampaging around in our heads. I knew I had mine and now I’d a suspicion I wasn’t the only one.

  All too soon we were stepping off the path and into the lane leading us home. I really didn’t want this day to end and I didn’t want to say goodbye. The memory of the bitter-sweet feeling I’d felt earlier making me scared that when we parted it would be for good.

  When we reached the end of my lane we stopped. I wasn’t sure whether to invite her back or whether this would appear a bit forward, like I was after something and she’d have a pretty good idea what.

  ‘I’ll walk you back,’ I said.

  ‘You can – later. Do you mind if I use your loo?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘If I go back now, Dad will only have me washing glasses and stacking dishes,’ she said as we started off towards the cottage, and I must admit there was a spring to my step that hadn’t been there before. This was until I heard the mower going from what could only be my back garden.

  ‘I don’t be
lieve this,’ I muttered as we reached the gate, and Lucy started to laugh. I glanced her way. ‘Do you still want to come in?’

  ‘When a girl’s gotta go a girl’s gotta go, and anyway, Jed might be many things, but he’s not a gossip. My reputation will remain intact.’

  I didn’t want to disillusion her – to my way of thinking Jed gossiped as much as the next person.

  I opened the front door and directed Lucy upstairs, then walked through to the kitchen to unlock the back door and go out into the garden. Jed had his back to me and looked as though he was finishing up. He pushed the mower back and forth two or three more times then killed the engine and pulled a large white hanky from his back pocket and wiped it across his brow.

  ‘It’s not Thursday, is it?’ I asked, and he swung around, his face creasing into what looked to me like a relieved smile.

  ‘Friday, actually. I missed yesterday and was going to leave it until next week, but Emms was worried, you see, and when you weren’t here when I arrived, I thought I might as well …’ and he gestured around the garden.

  ‘Worried?’ I asked, latching onto what he had said about Emma.

  ‘She thought we’d have heard from you after the other night and when it was coming up to two days and not a word,’ he gave a shrug, ‘she started to think the worst.’

  ‘The worst?’

  ‘Like maybe you’d – I don’t know, gone back to London, drunk yourself into a stupor, had an accident,’ he lowered his voice, ‘been murdered.’

  I started to feel really bad. Of course they’d been worried. ‘I’m sorry I just—’

  Before I could say any more, Jed’s attention shifted to over my shoulder and his face lit up into a beaming smile. ‘Hello, Lucy, my love.’

  ‘Hi, Jed. Keeping busy, I see.’

  ‘No rest for the wicked.’

  ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ Lucy asked, touching my arm.

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied with a smile and had to force myself to drag my eyes away from her backside as she sauntered back into the cottage as though it was the most natural place in the world for her to be.