Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “He was climbing alone. I didn’t know he’d gone. I don’t know why he went.” The last was a lie, but he couldn’t bear to give his father any additional ammunition. “They thought at first it was an accident. But when they looked at his equipment, they saw it had been tampered with.”

  “By who?”

  “Well, they don’t know that, Dad. If they knew, they’d make an arrest and matters would be settled.”

  “Settled? That’s how you talk about the death of your son? Of your flesh and blood? Of the means of carrying on your name? Settled? Matters get settled and you just go on? That it, Benesek? You and whatsername just stroll into the future and put the past behind you? But then, you’re good at doing that, aren’t you? So is she. She’s bleeding brilliant at doing that, ’f I recall right. How’s she taking all this? Getting in the way of her lifestyle, is it?”

  Ben had forgotten the nasty emphases in his father’s speech, loaded words and pointed questions, all designed to carve away one’s fragile sense of self. No one was meant to be an individual in Eddie Kerne’s world. Family meant adherence to a single belief and a single way of life. Like father, like son, he thought abruptly. What a cock-up he’d made of the rough form of paternity he’d actually been granted.

  Ben said, “There’s no funeral planned yet. The police haven’t released the body. I’ve not seen him, even.”

  “Then how the hell d’you know it’s Santo?”

  “As his car was at the site, as his identification was in the car, as he hasn’t returned home yet, I think it’s safe to assume the body is Santo.”

  “You’re a piece of work, Benesek. Talking about your own son like that.”

  “What do you want me to say when nothing I say is going to be right? I phoned to tell you because you’re going to learn about it anyway from the police, and I thought—”

  “You don’t want that, do you? Me ’n’ cops in a converse. My jaw wagging and their ears perked up.”

  “If that’s what you believe,” Ben said. “What I was going to say is that I reckoned you’d appreciate hearing the news from me and not from the police. They’ll be talking to you and Mum. They’ll be talking to everyone associated with Santo. I thought you’d want to know what they were doing on your property when they finally show up.”

  “Oh, I’d reckon it’d have to do with you,” Eddie Kerne said.

  “Yes. I suppose you would.”

  Ben rang off then, no farewell given. He’d been standing, but now he sat at his desk. He felt a great pressure building within him, as if a tumour in his chest was growing to a size that would cut off his breath. The room seemed close. Soon the air would be used up.

  What he needed was escape. Like always, his father would have said. His father: a man who rewrote history to suit whatever purpose the moment demanded. But there was no history to this moment. There was only getting through the now.

  He rose. He went along the corridors to the equipment room, where he’d earlier gone himself and where he’d taken DI Hannaford. This time, though, he didn’t approach the row of long cupboards where the climbing equipment was stored. Rather, he went through the room to a smaller one, where a storage cupboard the size of a large wardrobe had a padlock hanging from a hasp. He possessed the only key to this lock, and he used it now. When he swung it open, the scent of old rubber was strong. It had been more than twenty years, he thought. Before Kerra’s birth, even. Likely the thing would fall apart.

  But it didn’t. He was in the wet suit before he had a clear thought as to why he was in it, shoulders to ankles in neoprene, pulling the zip up his back by its cord, one hard tug and the rest was easy. No corrosion because he’d always taken care of his kit.

  “Come on, come on, let’s bloody get home,” his mates would say to him. “Don’t be such a wanker, Kerne. We’re freezing our arses out here.”

  But there was a hosepipe available, and he’d used it to rinse the saltwater off. Then he did the same when he got his kit home. Surfing kits were expensive and he had no intention of needing to purchase another because saltwater had corroded and rotted the one he owned. So he washed the wet suit thoroughly—its boots, gloves, and hood as well—and he washed the board. His mates hooted and called him a poofter, but he would not be moved from his intentions.

  In that and in everything else, he thought now. He felt cursed by his own determination.

  The board was in the cupboard as well. He eased it out and examined it. Not a ding anywhere, the deck still waxed. A real antique by the standards of today, but perfectly suitable for what he intended. Whatever that was, because he didn’t quite know. He just wanted to be out of the hotel. He scooped up boots, gloves, and hood. He tucked the surfboard under his arm.

  The equipment room had a door that led to the terrace and from there to the still empty swimming pool. A concrete stairway at the far end of the pool area took one up to the promontory for which the old hotel had been named, and a path along the edge of this promontory followed the curve of St. Mevan Beach. A line of beach huts were tucked into the cliff here, not the standard huts which were generally freestanding, but rather a joined rank of them, looking like a long and low-slung stable with narrow blue doors.

  Ben followed this route, breathing in the cold salt air and listening to the crash of the waves. He paused above the beach huts to don his neoprene hood, but the boots and gloves he would pull on when he got to the edge of the water.

  He looked out at the sea. The tide was high, so the reefs were covered, and the reefs would keep the waves consistent. From this distance five feet seemed their size, with swells coming from the south. They were breaking right, with an offshore wind. Had it been daylight—even dawn or dusk—conditions would be considered good, even at this time of year when the water would be as cold as a witch’s heart.

  No one surfed at night. There were too many dangers, from sharks to reefs to rips. But this wasn’t so much about surfing as it was about remembering, and while Ben didn’t want to remember, talking to his father was forcing him to do so. It was either that or remaining within the Promontory King George Hotel, and that he could not do.

  He descended the steps to the beach. There were no lights here, but tall streetlamps that followed the path along the promontory above shed at least some illumination onto the rocks and sand. He picked his way through hunks of slate and sandstone boulders, clitter from the cliff top that now formed the base of the promontory, and he stepped at last onto the sand. This wasn’t the soft sand of a tropical isle, but rather the grit produced over eons as a frozen land of permafrost warmed till slow-moving landslides left coarse gravel in their wake, and water forever beating upon these stones reduced them to hard little grains that glittered in sunlight but shone dull otherwise, grey and dun coloured, unforgiving upon flesh and abrasive to the touch.

  To his right was the Sea Pit, high tide filling it with new water now, nearly submersing it in order to do so. To his left was the tributary of the River Cas and beyond it what remained of the Casvelyn Canal. In front of him was the sea, restless and demanding. It drew him forward.

  He set his board on the sand and donned his boots and gloves. He squatted for a moment—a huddled figure in black with his back to Casvelyn—and he watched the phosphorescence in the waves. He’d been to the beach at night as a youth, but those visits had not been for a surf. With their surfing done for the day, they’d make a fire ring. When embers were all that was left of the blaze, they’d pair off and if the tide was low, the great sea caves of Pengelly Cove beckoned. There they’d make love. On a blanket or not. Semiclothed or nude. Drunk, slightly tipsy, or sober.

  She’d been younger then. She’d been his. She was what he wanted, all that he wanted. She had known it as well, and the trouble had come from that knowing.

  He rose and approached the water with his board. He had no leash for it, but that didn’t matter. If it got away from him, it got away from him. Like so much else in his life, keeping the board close by should he
fall from it was a concern beyond his control just now.

  His feet and ankles felt the shock of the cold first and then his legs and thighs and upwards. It would take a few moments for his body temperature to warm the water within his wet suit, and in the meantime the bitter cold of it reminded him he was alive.

  Thigh deep, he eased onto the board and began to paddle out through the white water towards the right-hand reef break. The spray hit his face and the waves washed over him. He thought—briefly—he might paddle forever, straight into morning, paddle until he was so far from shore that Cornwall itself would be only a memory. But instead, bleakly governed by love and by duty, he stopped beyond the reef at the swells, and there he straddled his board. He sat first with his back to the shore, looking out at the vast and undulating sea. Then he turned the board round and saw the lights of Casvelyn: the line of tall lamps shining whitely along the promontory and then the amber glow behind the curtained windows of the houses in town, like the gaslights of the nineteenth century, or the open fires of an earlier time.

  The swells were seductive, offering him a hypnotic rhythm that was as comforting as it was false. It felt, he thought, like a return to the womb. One could stretch out on the board, bob in the sea, and sleep forever. But swells broke—the sheer volume of the water collapsing in on itself—as the landmass beneath it sloped up into the shore. There was danger here as well as seduction. One had to act or one submitted to the force of the waves.

  He wondered if, after all these years, he would recognise the moment: that confluence of shape, force, and curl telling the surfer it was time to drop in. But some things ultimately were second nature, and he found that taking a wave was one of them. Understanding and experience coalesced into skill, and the passage of time had not robbed him of that.

  The peak built, and he rose with it: paddling first, then up on one knee, and then erect. No deck grip at the tail of the board, holding the back foot in position, because on this board—on his board—such a device had never been placed. He skimmed for a second across the wave’s shoulder. He dropped into its face. He carved, getting high and fast, with his muscles acting on memory alone. Then he was in the barrel and it was clean. Green room, mate, they would have yelled. Sheeee-it! You’re in the green room, Kerne.

  He rode until there was only white water, and there he stepped off, thigh deep in the shallows once again, catching the board before it got away from him. He paused with the inside waves breaking against him. His breath came hard, and he stood there till the pounding of his heart grew slower.

  Then he walked towards the beach, the seawater pouring off him like a discarded cape. He trudged in the direction of the stairs.

  As he did so, a figure—midnight silhouette—came forward to meet him.

  KERRA HAD SEEN HIM leave the hotel. At first she hadn’t known it was her father. Indeed, for a mad moment her leaping heart had declared it to be Santo beneath her, striding across the terrace and up the steps towards the promontory and St. Mevan Beach to have a secret surf at night. She’d watched from above, and seeing only the black-garbed figure and knowing that figure had come out of the hotel…There was nothing else for her to think. It had all been a mistake, she’d thought nonsensically. A terrible, ghastly, horrible mistake. There was some other body discovered at the base of that cliff in Polcare Cove, but it was not her brother.

  So she’d hurried to the stairs and she’d clattered down them, as the antique lift would have been too slow. She dashed through the dining hall, which, like the equipment room, opened onto the terrace, and she set across this and flew up the stairs. By the time she reached the promontory, the black-garbed figure was down on the beach, squatting next to the surfboard. So she waited there and there she watched. Only as he approached her after riding a single wave did she realise it was her father.

  She was filled with questions and then with fury, with the eternal and unanswerable why’s of nearly everything that had defined her childhood. Why did you pretend…? Why did you argue with Santo about…? And beyond that, the who of it all. Who are you, Dad?

  But she asked none of these half-formed questions as her father reached her position at the base of the steps. Instead she tried in the semidarkness to read his face.

  He paused. His expression seemed to soften and he looked as if he intended to speak. But when he finally opened his mouth, it was only to say, “Kerra, love,” and then he passed her. He climbed the steps to the promontory path, and she followed him. Wordlessly, they approached the hotel, where they descended towards the empty swimming pool. At a hosepipe, her father paused and washed the seawater from his surfboard. Then he went on, into the hotel.

  In the equipment room, he stripped off his wet suit. He was wearing his undershorts beneath it, and his skin was pimpled with the cold. But this didn’t seem to bother him because he didn’t shiver. Instead, he carried the wet suit to a large, heavy plastic rubbish bin in the corner of the room, and he dumped it inside without ceremony. The dripping surfboard he carried into another room—an inner room, Kerra saw, a room she had not yet investigated in the hotel—and there he put it into a cupboard. This he locked with a padlock, which he then tested, as if to make sure the cupboard’s contents were safe from prying eyes. From family eyes, she realised. From her eyes and from Santo’s eyes because her mother must have known this secret all along.

  Santo, Kerra thought. The sheer hypocrisy of it all. She simply did not understand.

  Her father used his T-shirt to dry himself off. He tossed it to one side and donned his pullover. He motioned for her to turn her back, which she did and heard the sound of him removing his undershorts, plopping them onto the floor, and then zipping his trousers. Then he said, “All right.” She turned back to him, and they faced each other. He waited, clearly, for her questions.

  She determined to surprise him as he’d surprised her. So what she said was, “It’s because of her, isn’t it?”

  “Who?”

  “Mum. You couldn’t surf and watch her at the same time, so you stopped surfing. That’s why, isn’t it? I saw you, Dad. How long has it been? Twenty years? More?”

  “Yes. Since before you were born.”

  “So you put on your wet suit, you went out there, you took the first wave that came along, and that was it. No trouble. It was easy for you. It was child’s play for you. It was nothing. Like walking. Like breathing.”

  “Yes. All right. It was.”

  “Which means…How long had you surfed when you stopped?”

  Her father picked up his T-shirt and folded it neatly, despite its condition, which was damp through. He said, “Most of my life. It’s what we did in those days. There was nothing else. You’ve seen how your grandparents live. We had the beach in the summer and school the rest of the time. There was work at home, trying to keep that bloody house from falling apart, and when there was free time, we surfed. There was no money for holidays. No cheap flights to Spain. It wasn’t like today.”

  “But you stopped.”

  “I stopped. Things change, Kerra.”

  “Yes. She came along. That was the change. You got caught up in her, and by the time you saw what she’s really like, it was too late. You couldn’t get away. So you had to make a choice and you chose her.”

  “It’s not that simple.” He moved past her, out of the smaller room and into the larger equipment room. He waited for her to follow him and when she was with him, he shut and locked the smaller room’s door.

  “Did Santo know?”

  “About?”

  “This.” She gestured to the door he’d locked. “You were good, weren’t you? I saw enough to know that. So why…?” Suddenly, she was as close to weeping as she’d come in the last terrible thirty hours or so.

  He was watching her. She saw that he looked ineffably sad, and in that sadness she understood that while they were a family—the four of them then, the three of them now—they were a family in name only. Beyond a common surname, they were and had always bee
n merely a repository of secrets. She’d believed that all of these secrets had to do with her mother, with her mother’s troubles, her mother’s periods of bizarre alteration. And these were secrets to which she herself had long been a party because there was no way to avoid knowing them when the simple act of coming home from school might put her in the midst of what had always been referred to as “a bit of an embarrassing situation.” Don’t breathe a word to Dad, darling. But Dad knew anyway. All of them knew by the clothes she wore, the tilt of her head when she was speaking, the rhythm of her sentences, the tap of her fingers on the table during dinner, and the restlessness of her gaze. And the red. They knew from the red. For Kerra and Santo, what came on the heels of that colour was a prolonged visit to the elder Kernes and “What’s the cow up to now?” from her granddad. But “Say nothing to your grandparents about this, understand?” was the injunction that Kerra and Santo had lived by. Keep the faith, keep the secret, and eventually things would return to normal, whatever normal was.

  But now Kerra understood there were even more secrets than those which she’d kept about her mother: arcane bits of knowledge that went beyond Dellen’s convoluted psyche and touched upon Kerra’s father as well. Embracing this stinging piece of truth, Kerra realised there was no solid place to put down her foot if she wished to walk forward and pass into the future.

  “I was thirteen years old,” she said. “There was a bloke I liked, called Stuart. He was fourteen and he had terrible spots, and I liked him. The spots made him seem safe, you know? Only he wasn’t safe. It’s funny actually because all I’d done was go to the kitchen to fetch us some jam tarts and a drink—less than five minutes—and that’s all it took. Stuart didn’t understand what was going on. But I knew, didn’t I, because I’d grown up knowing. So had Santo. Only he was safe because—let’s face it—he was just like her.”

  “Not in all ways,” her father said. “No. Not that.”

  “That,” she said. “You know it. That. And in ways that affected me.”