by Neil Cross
Patrick sat down and scratched his scalp. He picked up a Biro and tapped the table with it. He put it down.
‘Mate, you hit a punter.’
Patrick saw it in Charlie’s eyes; the weary desire just to hear it and be done.
He said, ‘My hands are tied. I’ve got to sack you.’
Charlie stared at Patrick. Patrick stared at the desk; the teetering reams and slip-sliding piles of unread paperwork.
‘Not that it’ll make you feel any better,’ he said. ‘But you’re a lot more popular round here than I am.’
8
FROM JANE’S NOTEBOOK
We ate before sunrise—croissants and coffee—then loaded up the Land Cruisers and headed off in convoy down the Western Axis, the main road out of here.
Already, people had gathered. We saw the red sun on the black volcanic rock, the blue tarpaulins, gritty dust collecting in its windless folds, the ragged people.
But soon the crowds thinned then eventually disappeared altogether; we were travelling along empty dirt tracks, sky all around. Then scattered villages, where people exchanged smiles and waves.
There’s a kind of hope there, in the way the crops are tended, the beauty of flowers round frail huts. The children playing. We were a few miles from Goma, a revision of hell, and here they were, children playing, and seeing them play I felt good and happy and relieved.
On the third day, we stopped to ask gathering locals about the Bili Ape. They were familiar with a large ape, they said: the lion killer. We passed round photos of gorillas, but they shook their heads. No, not gorillas.
We weren’t surprised. The Bili Forest is about 500 kilometres from the nearest recorded gorilla population.
The first night at the Belgian camp, we passed the special photograph among ourselves. It had been taken by a local hunter, a poacher. This is the photograph that brought us to Bili.
Claude was seeing it for the first time. I’d held it back, kept it in my luggage. We hadn’t even discussed it. It’s a kind of talisman. It has certain properties, which were accentuated by the firelight.
The photograph shows an ape, dead.
The face is gorilla-like: very flat, with a wide muzzle and a heavy, overhanging brow ridge.
The body is that of a chimp.
But the creature in the photograph is two metres tall. It is taller than the hunter who claims to have killed it.
Patrick’s morning meetings had become even more insufferable, punctuated by the keepers’ secret looks and furtive snorts: who could trust a man who’d sacked his own son—and for defending an animal?
Patrick thought of Uncle Joe in his final days; isolated and plotted against. And when Harriet told him about Charlie’s goodbye party, he groaned and said, ‘I sacked him, Harriet. What’s it going to look like if we have a frigging celebration?’
She folded her chubby arms and screwed up one eye. ‘There’ll be trouble if we don’t.’
So they did. Harriet booked the Olde Shippe’s upstairs room. And Charlie walked in, alone. He opened a door marked PRIVATE FUNCTION. It was quiet inside, and dark—until someone hit the lights.
Charlie saw the keepers, the grounds staff, the volunteers. They cheered and threw streamers and kicked balloons. Somebody had cued up the jukebox; it played ‘I Fought the Law’. No one knew the words, except the chorus, but everyone sang along.
And later, people began to peel off and stagger home, and those who remained became reflective and maudlin.
Charlie was sitting with Harriet, rolling her a cigarette.
She was florid and loud. For the first time, Charlie heard the Lancashire in her accent. She said, ‘Next time, break his nose. The little prick.’
He nodded, concentrating on the roll-up.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘well done, love. Sorry you’re not coming back.’
‘One day, maybe.’
‘But until then—what’s next for Charlie Chuckles?’
He looked up. Stopped rolling the cigarette.
‘It’s what the girlies call you.’
‘It is not.’
‘No, love. It’s not.’
He got back to the cigarette.
Harriet leaned over and pinched his cheek. She pinched hard, twisting, almost malicious; then let go.
‘They call you Cheeky Charlie.’
He finished the cigarette and passed it to her.
She said, ‘A mate of mine, Big Clive in Minehead—do you know Minehead?—he’s always looking for staff. I could put a word in, if you like.’
‘Big Clive?’
She slapped at him feebly, mock-offended. ‘Clive’s very tall, as it happens.’
‘Right.’
She slapped him again. ‘Well, do I put a word in, or what?’
‘What does he do?’
‘He runs a hotel—the Anchorage. Nice place. Do I give him a call?’
Charlie drained his drink.
‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Why not? Give him a call.’
Saturday evening, Patrick paid a visit to Sarah Lime.
He walked through the amber light, then along the harbour, past the new gastro-pub and the Post Office that sold beach toys and postcards and newspapers and camping gear. Tethered boats bobbed on the tide, collided, looked conspiratorial. Tourist flotsam stirred on the greasy water. He smelled rotting seaweed and saw the floating, glove-grey corpse of a seagull.
He stopped outside Quay Lime. It took up the converted ground floor of a narrow old harbour-front house.
He opened the door—a bell jangled—and stepped inside. It smelled of cooling dust and wood wax and oil paint and stretched canvas. The floorboards were bare and the walls were white and hung with paintings—landscapes, sweeps of light, reflections. Indices of fish, of gulls and other birds—local fauna—but as through a distorting lens.
He wandered round, hands in pockets. Now and again, he paused to nod, learnedly. He knew that Sarah Lime had crept in from the back but, admiring the paintings, he affected not to see her. Then he turned, as if mildly startled.
‘Oh. Hello, there.’
‘Hello.’ She wore the same paint-spattered jeans, a man’s shirt, defiantly open at the scarred neck.
He put his hands in his pockets.
‘Look. This is a bit embarrassing.’
He produced the ripped, shrivelled remains of a chequebook containing a single cheque and a few paying-in slips.
She took a rag and began to dry her hands.
‘When you came by,’ he said, ‘it didn’t even occur to me.’
Sarah tucked the rag into her pocket like a handkerchief. ‘No problem. I mean, your wife paid a deposit and everything. I assumed we’d settle when she got back.’
‘She didn’t tell me about the painting. She’s always thinking about three hundred things at once. And she’s more disorganized than I am, even. We’re not an organized couple.’
The tension left her shoulders. She put her weight on one foot. ‘Look. Really. It’s no problem. Whenever.’
‘Anyway.’
He wrote out the cheque on the counter and presented it with a flourish, to cover his discomfort. She slipped it unexamined into her pocket, to cover hers.
‘Fancy a glass of wine?’
‘Absolutely. Absolutely.’
He followed her behind the counter, through a short passage and up some narrow stairs, the wood blackened with age.
What he saw of the flat—the hallway, the kitchen—was pleasantly disordered. The kitchen was piled with books and newspapers and unwashed plates. The table was almost big enough for two. He sat down. Sarah dug out a bottle of wine and two cloudy, mismatched whisky glasses. She poured him a glass, urine-coloured in the storm light.
Patrick took a sip. Lifted the bottle to examine it; an organic brew from
some local vineyard.
‘Theresa and Steve,’ Sarah told him. ‘Steve’s a Kiwi. They’re good at wine, down there, but Theresa wouldn’t leave England. So they compromised on five and a half acres, down Lipton way.’
He turned the bottle by the neck, so the label was facing away. ‘Well, you seem very integrated into the local community.’
‘With the other immigrants, yeah.’
‘But not the locals?’
‘But not the locals.’
‘Ah. And I thought it was just me.’
‘You’ve got it easy, mate. At least you’re providing jobs.’
‘Yeah, well. They don’t make it feel easy.’
She made a noise in her throat, a grim affirmation. And she picked, at something on the table—a fleck of paint, or ketchup. She was thinking about it: the locals, the winter. Then she looked up.
‘And how’s Jane?’
‘Haven’t heard.’
Intermittent, fat rain exploded on the wonky windows. The storm was ripening overhead. He could feel the wine.
She held her glass in both hands. She was studying him, across the small square of table.
‘Do you worry?’
‘Worry? Jesus, no, I’m not worried.’ And then, regretting his tone, he added, ‘The place is eighty per cent rainforest. It’s got beasties you don’t want to think about. It’s—you know, politically it’s not great at the moment. But she walks into it like most people walk into a supermarket. If I worried, I’d never sleep.’
She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. ‘Amazing woman.’
‘Amazing.’
‘And Monkeyland? I hear good things.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Summer’s been all right. But summer ends, y’know? I just get the feeling—the place is going to die over Christmas.’
‘Winter’s always bad.’
‘For you, too?’
‘I teach a few classes, keep the wolf from the door.’
She shifted in her seat, and sat on the back of her hands, and brightened with a sudden idea that wasn’t really sudden at all. ‘What you should do, you should hold a winter market. Craft stalls, organic food. Art. Clothes. Wine. Whatever. Charge for the stalls. Then you’re still pulling money through the door. Not just day trippers—locals too. Christmas shopping and whatever.’
He listened to the rain.
He disliked English market-towns, with their snooty and herbivorous New Age travellers, anarchists, Wiccans and occultists. But he liked the idea of a market in Monkeyland. It might bring in some money. But, better than that, it might give him something to think about, for five minutes, that wasn’t fucking monkeys.
They talked about it, and more. They got a little drunk. And later, at the door, there was awkwardness. Should he kiss her cheek, his new friend, or shake her hand, his new acquaintance? They ducked and bumbled and, in the end, Patrick nodded and grunted something, and buried his hands in his jacket pockets and said, ‘Okey dokey,’ and left.
It was darker now. Strong winds whipping in, off the water.
The town was empty. He walked up the cobbled hill and into the pub. The sudden noise, like a cloudburst. He sat in the corner and took his time over a couple of pints. Nobody spoke to him, and when his last drink was drained he muttered, ‘Sod it’ and decided not to risk driving home.
It was still warm: the insulating, low clouds. Wind was channelled up the valley, through the hedges—and as he left Innsmouth on foot, it whistled like a jaunty spectre at his heels.
Halfway home, on die dark hill, he became aware of his solitude. And now, scared on this pitch-black trail, he felt foolish, half-pissed, an idiot.
He saw movement in the dark, slinky shadows, and heard a low growl beneath the wind. Shaking branches made an eager, voodoo rattle. He considered walking back to Innsmouth, calling Charlie—asking his son to come and pick him up in the orange VW. But it was nearly as far back to Innsmouth as it was to home.
He was persuaded by a volcanic rumble of thunder—and a sudden, violent flattening of the trees, like a cat’s ears. He hurried on.
It wasn’t a good idea to run, not with a belly full of booze and workboots on his feet. But he ran anyway, and got more scared the faster he ran, and although he ran, he did not beat the rain.
The Anchorage was an Edwardian hotel that stood on Minehead sea front, halfway between the high, wooded bluff called North Hill and Somerwest World, which was the new name for Butlins.
Charlie’s boss was a giant called Clive—six feet four with a blimp of gut and a pink hock of fist. In order to hold a conversation with him, Charlie had to crane his neck like someone watching an aeroplane; he was treated to a foreshortened panorama of chasmal nostrils, above which Clive’s skull seemed to terminate in a point, like railway lines meeting at the far horizon.
Clive had, he didn’t let Charlie forget, been in the business all his working life. He’d run working men’s clubs, mostly in Leeds and Bradford, before moving into the hotel trade. And he’d run some rough old places before moving down south. This, the Anchorage, it was a doddle. On-season, it was all pensioners and shaggers. Hardly any kids—who’d bring kids to an Edwardian hotel, with Butlins two minutes up the road? Nobody. So pensioners and shaggers it was.
Off-season, the pensioners stayed home.
Patrick couldn’t sleep. Just after dawn, he went for a walk.
Outside, it was beautiful and silent. The wet grass, heavy with daisies and dandelions, swirled at his ankles: dawn mist snagged in the trees. Moisture sparkled on the hedgerows. The silence was sweetened with birdsong.
Patrick swelled inside with it; it felt good.
He tramped to the stile at the far end of the garden and clambered over it. He went through the oak trees, the moss and rot scent of them, and joined the tangled, South-West Coastal Footpath.
Trekking through the woods, he could hear, feel, smell the ocean. In several places, the forest ran down to the highwater mark. Rags of seaweed, glistening green-black, snared in exposed roots; crabs scuttled there.
When the woods thinned, he sat near the edge of the cliff. Yellow gorse pricked his arse. He opened his backpack and took out his breakfast—a banana and a bottle of mineral water filled that morning from the tap; it tasted of the house’s old pipes.
After breakfast he wandered until he found a comfortable, sun-warming scoop in the rock. He sat and opened his book. The morning mist had burned off all but the deepest hollows, now—and even there it was loosening, stretching anemone tendrils at the sky.
It was still too early for anyone to be around, even the elderly hikers, the cheerful Tories who hiked this way in their red and blue kagouls, their daypacks. It was an in-between time; light, but not really morning—not unless you were a farmer, or an animal, or Patrick.
He read until the sun began to warm his neck. Soon it would burn. So he folded the page and put the book in his backpack and struck out for home. He was still feeling pretty good.
Accompanied by the sounds of the sea, he thought about England. He thought of his ancestors and saw the stamp of their lives on the fields and hills and coppices, these outbreaks of ancient forest. They would have breathed just like him, on any late-August morning. And perhaps, passing by this place, they had sensed his presence, a ghost of the future.
And then he was nearly home. He was moving through the dappled light under the trees, and he could see the stile, not far ahead—and on the other side of it, his land.
He wasn’t quite 200 metres away when a panther, slinky and black as ink, its heavy tail raised like a question mark, padded onto the path and stopped at the stile.
It looked at Patrick. Between them was a moment of perfect recognition.
The panther twitched its tail, once. Then it flowed, unhurried, over the stile—the tip of its black tail disappearing last.
Patrick stood, quite still, for a very, very long time. A ladybird crawled over the toe of his boot. A fly landed on his forearm and fed on something it found there. Sweat ran into his eyes.
He blinked. The sunlight made patterns on his eyelids: sweeping and merging like the Northern Lights.
He listened for the cat.
He thought of it, stalking him through archaic English woodland. There was no malevolence in it; just ferocious perfection. He imagined the cat dragging his body into the fork of a tree, leaving him there to season, eating him for weeks.
When that thought came—his corpse, still wearing hiking boots and a mini-rucksack, hanging in the branches of a tree, while local volunteers searched the fields and beaches below—Patrick became conscious of his paralysis. He surged with something like joy. He saw that his leg was trembling.
It had frozen in a difficult position, halfway through a step. So he moved, to ease it. And that broke his stasis.
There was a tidal surge of dirty panic, a geyser inside him. The cat had entered his garden.
In the garden was his house.
Inside the house was his daughter.
He took a tentative step. Another. And then he was running, the backpack slamming between his shoulders. Vaulting the stile, he sprinted through the dewy grass (where he and his wife had once made love, perhaps beneath the predator’s yellow gaze). He sometimes ran backwards a few steps, just to make sure no low, inky missile had launched through the remains of the morning mist.
And when the stone house had grown close, when he was nearly safe, the panic broke and he accelerated still further.
His hands were graceless and clumsy with it; he couldn’t open the kitchen door. And when he’d managed that, he threw himself inside and slammed the door behind him.
And then he stood at the kitchen window.
He drew off a glass of water and stood there, sipping it. Looking out.
In time, he became aware of the kitchen clock ticking behind him. He drained the water, drew off another glass, and sat at the cracked and warped old kitchen table. He began to shake.
He was still sitting there, shaking, when Jo came down. She was wearing a flannelette nightgown that almost reached her ankles and a pair of unlaced Converse.