by Kevin Brooks
When I woke my mouth was dry and my eyes were sticky with sleep. It was nine o’clock in the evening. I was still tired.
I didn’t know what to do.
For the moment, there was nothing more to think about. All I had to do was wait.
I went to the bathroom and peed. I washed my hands, washed my face. I cleaned my teeth, trying to get rid of that furry feeling in my mouth. I changed clothes, put on a clean T-shirt, clean underwear, clean jeans. I went downstairs and made a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. I watched television. An American cop show, I don’t know what it’s called. That man from Miami Vice was in it, the blond one, cracking jokes and chasing crooks down alleys with a dirty great gun in his hand. That was all right. When it finished I changed channels and watched some stand-up comedians swearing and telling rude jokes for half an hour. It wasn’t funny. At eleven o’clock I turned off the television and sat for a while in the dark listening to the sound of Friday night drunks going home – slurred shouts, cold laughter, cars revving, doors slamming. I sat there until the early hours of the morning when the silence was complete, and then I listened. I was listening for the hidden sounds that tell the story of this house. They must be there somewhere, in the walls, in the bricks, under the floor. Memories. But I didn’t hear anything.
Two o’clock. I went into the kitchen and washed up my plate and cup, turned off the light, locked the doors, and went upstairs. Peed again, washed again, cleaned my teeth again. Into the bedroom, undressed, got into bed and fell asleep.
Another day gone.
Saturday
The morning arrived cold, dull and heavy. I opened the bedroom curtains and gazed out at the colours of the day. Grey, brown. Brown, grey. Black. Dead green. The colour had returned to the weeds on the wall. Dead green spikes drooped with the weight of frost.
A door slammed and the young couple from next door slouched out dragging their snotty-nosed kids across the street. The father flicked a dead cigarette into the gutter, adjusted the bright red Santa hat perched ridiculously on top of his head, and aimed his remote-control key at his car. Sidelights flashed and the alarm sounded – weeweeweeweeweewee – then stopped.
Why? Why does everything have to make a noise?
One of the kids was whining about something, tugging at his dad’s belt. Dad didn’t want to know.
‘Get in the car and shut up,’ he grunted.
His wife coughed, stuck a cigarette in her mouth, got in the car and slammed the door. The car roared into life and they raced away up the street.
Happy Christmas.
Downstairs, the sudden pheep-pheep of the telephone gave me a start. I swore, flicked hot tea from my sleeve and picked up the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘Martyn?’
‘Alex. You made me jump.’
‘What?’
‘The phone ringing ... it doesn’t matter. What are you doing?’
‘I have to go shopping.’
‘When?’
‘Now. Mum’s going to Sainsbury’s. I have to help her with the shopping.’
‘Right.’
She lowered her voice. ‘I think it’s all right for later, you know ...’
‘The car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘Do you need anything?’
What kind of question is that? I thought to myself. Do I need anything? I need a million things. I need nothing.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Anything. Food, bread, milk, I don’t know.’
‘No, I’m all right, thanks.’
‘OK.’ I heard her mum’s voice in the background, telling her to hurry up. ‘Gotta go,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later.’
The phone went dead.
I needed to get out of the house, that’s what I needed. I needed to get some fresh air into my lungs, air that wasn’t stained with the must of stale death.
The question was – where to go?
There’s nowhere to go around here, nowhere that isn’t full of noise and ugliness.
Where? Town, the park, the river?
The town would be jam-packed with Christmas shoppers, the park stinks ... even the river’s no good. A greasy brown stew lined with tough-looking fishermen in their army surplus rags, fishing idly, drinking beer, warning you off with get-away looks.
Where? There’s got to be somewhere half-decent.
How about the beach?
The beach?
Why not? There’ll be no one there, it’ll be empty. Cold, big, wide open and deserted ...
Yes. The beach.
I started poking around the house looking for bus fare. A pound here, 50p there. Then I remembered the money in Dad’s room, the pound coins I’d placed on his eyes, and I fetched those too. The bedroom smelled really bad. Thick and gassy. Like sulphur. I covered my mouth and nose with a handkerchief and had a quick rummage through Dad’s trouser pockets, coming up with another couple of quid in change. More than enough. I pocketed it all, then got out of there before I was sick.
The beach is about twelve miles away, half an hour on the bus. It’s actually an island. Just a small one. A mile or so long and half a mile wide. You wouldn’t know it’s an island, but it is. A long straight road takes you across great stretches of muddy ooze. The ooze is the estuary, so the road is really a bridge, but, like I say, you wouldn’t know it. Except when there’s a high tide and the ooze fills up with a dull-grey sea that laps slowly across the surface of the road and nothing can pass until the tide goes out again. Then you know it’s an island.
Today, though, as the bus juddered along the bone-dry road, all I could see was miles and miles of sticky brown mud and waxy green grasses waving stiffly in the wind. I slid open the window and sniffed in the smell of the sea. Salty, fresh, clean.
The bus was almost empty. Just me and a funny-looking girl at the back reading a girl’s magazine. She had too many teeth to fit her mouth and kept adjusting her lips to cover up her sticky-out teeth, like a fish, sucking in water. Gloop-gloop. I watched her for a while then got fed up with that and looked out of the window. We were on the island now. The bus was rattling along narrow roads lined with high hedges and wind-whipped trees, their branches occasionally scraping against the windows as the bus squeezed in tight to the side of the road. Behind the hedges lay dead-looking fields dotted with birds – seagulls, lapwings, rooks – pecking at the icy ground. Farmlands passed by in a blur of emptiness. Ramshackle buildings, tangled angles of weather-faded boards and rusted roof iron. Cob walls, wiremesh, sheets of corrugated iron, a gutted tractor. Stables, too, half-acres of hard-packed ground laid out with strange patterns of coloured show-jumping bars. Horse manure for sale in blue plastic sacks. False barns selling fruit and veg and false fresh eggs. Faded signs: Pick-Your-Own, Pallets For Sale, misspelled Baby Rabitts, Boxer Pups, Cockatiels. Pubs: The Dog and Pheasant, The Rose, Live and Let Live. Small rows of tiny cottages, hidden turnings, meaningless signs, churches in the middle of nowhere ...
It felt strange being out of the house. Exciting, but a little scary, too. I wasn’t used to it. My world consisted of my house, the street, school, and the occasional trip to town. Anywhere beyond that was an adventure. Pathetic, really. The exciting part about it was that no one knew where I was. No one. Not a soul. Apart from the bus driver and the fish-mouthed girl, of course. They knew where I was, but they didn’t know who I was. I don’t know why I found that exciting, but I did.
As we rounded another tight corner something glinted in the distance, a silver streak. I squinted through the smeared window, but was unable to distinguish the sea from the sky. It was all just a blanket of aluminium grey.
The bus moved on into the heart of the island. Mud hollows, marshes full of wet brown reeds, more emptiness. Long-legged birds patrolled the mud banks, waders, sliding their long curved beaks into the brown slime, looking for worms and mud-grubs. Grub. That’s all they had to think about. Nothing else. Nothing to worry about but grub.
Lucky birds.
Now I could see the sea. Far away, a thin sliver of shine at the end of the mud. A long black container ship was slinking across the horizon, low in the water, silent. Where was it from? I wondered. Where was it going? What was it carrying? Sugar? Grain? Molasses? What are molasses? Mole asses. Mole arses. A boat full of moles’ arses.
The bus turned a corner and the sea view disappeared.
I sat back and closed my eyes. The first time I came here ... when was the first time I came here? Years ago. With a friend, I think, someone from school. What was his name? I forget. He wasn’t really a friend, just someone I hung around with for a while. I never liked him. He had a lazy eye, whatever that is. He wore glasses with a patch over one lens. Always had a bunged-up nose. He spent the whole day going on about how fandasdig the beaches were in Greece, or Majorca or somewhere. How hod it was, how clean it was, how priddy it was ...
Who cares?
After that I always came here on my own. And always in the winter, when it wasn’t hot and it wasn’t clean and it wasn’t pretty.
One thing’s for sure, I never came here with Dad. ‘Beach?’ he’d say. ‘What d’ya wanna beach for?’ Dad never went anywhere. We never went anywhere. Even before Mum left, we never went anywhere. Never had a car. Dad couldn’t drive. We never had a holiday, never went to Greece or Majorca, never went anywhere at weekends, never did anything ...
‘Hey!’
The bus had stopped and the bus driver was calling down the aisle.
‘You getting off, or what?’
To get to the sea you have to walk down through this sleepy little village, along the coast road for a while, then turn left down some steep steps that lead to the beach. There was hardly anyone around, just a couple of old ladies creeping around on walking sticks and a doddery old boatman with a half-dead dog. As I moved on down the coast road a lonely clinking sound drifted in from the rigging of small boats resting in the distant mud. Seagulls screeched and squabbled, circling aimlessly in the breeze.
The sky was dark and heavy.
As I stepped down onto the beach the shingle crunched beneath my feet. It felt momentous, as if I’d stepped into another world. Away from civilisation. Away from cars and houses and shops and buskers and Christmas carols and plywood reindeer ... away from everything.
I felt happy, I don’t know why. Perhaps it was the emptiness of the place. Cold, wild, unwelcoming. Raw and open. Hostile. Blameless.
The wind had died to almost nothing and the air was still. Icy cold bit into my bones. I buttoned my coat and pulled my woolly hat down over my ears and headed out along the beach. The sky seemed to lower itself to the ground as I followed the shoreline, walking slowly, head down, aiming for a distant point where the beach narrowed and disappeared into the sea. The further I went, the quieter it became. The sea was heavy and calm and the shingle had merged into a fine dry sand that silently soaked up my steps.
I thought no harboured thoughts, just walked the strand-line kicking up jewels. Polystyrene, plastic, municipal junk. Driftwood. Floats. Fish boxes. Sandals. Bones of fish heads. Razors, gapers and whelks. Countless tiny seashells, flesh-pink and paper-thin. A thick stink filled the air as I passed the dull black carcass of a dead porpoise. Pale grey meat showed where the rubbery skin had been hacked open by the propeller of a boat. Ripped apart. I imagined it thrashing helplessly in the sea, screaming unintelligible screams.
Dying.
I paused, weighed down with a sudden sadness.
Snow began to fall. Big, fat, lazy flakes, fluttering, seesawing, circling, taking their time, riding down slowly through the cold thickness of the air. Soft white crystals as big as coins. A surge of excitement raced through me as I looked up into the sky and saw nothing but white darkness. Millions of snowflakes dropping from the sky like invaders from another planet, silent and serene – menacing.
It was awesome. An alien world.
As I gazed up into the sky I wondered how I’d look to God if he was up there. I imagined myself as a tiny black dot, a blind particle crawling through the snow and sand. An insect. Going nowhere. Alone. Indeterminate, immeasurable and shapeless.
Nothing much at all.
I looked down and moved on. Forget it, I thought. Think of something else. Think of something solid. The sand, the snow ... what is it? What’s it made of? Come on, think. Sand. I don’t know, rocks, stones, shells, fish bones, all smashed up by the sea, pulverised over millions of years. Sand. Sandcastle. Sandpiper. Invisible sandpiper. Sandpaper. Sandwich. Cheese sandwich. Cheese on toast. What about the snow? What’s snow? What’s it made of? Frozen rain? No, that’s hailstones. Or is it? I don’t know. Snow’s made of crystals. Symmetrical patterns. Every snowflake is unique. Is it? How can you tell? Is there a record kept of every single snowflake that’s ever fallen? There might be two that are the same. Who knows? Snow. Snowball. Snowdrop. Drop of snow. Snowgoose. That’s no goose, that’s my wife. Snowshoe. Bless you. Snowman. Walking in the air. Abominable. Snow. Snow. Quick, quick, snow ...
I looked up. Flat nothingness stretched out in front of me. White, grey, black, white, grey, black. Sand, sea, sky. I was hardly moving. It was like walking on a treadmill, walking but not getting anywhere. Time seemed to have disappeared. Not stopped or slowed down, just disappeared.
Forget it, I thought. Just keep walking. Keep moving. Keep thinking. Sea. The sea. Salt water. Brine. Brian. Call me Brian. Destiny. Sea. Adriatic Sea. South China Sea. Irish Sea. Red Sea. The Dead Sea. The dead see. Atlantic Sea? No, it’s Atlantic Ocean. What’s the difference between a sea and an ocean? I don’t know, what is the difference between a sea and an ocean? I don’t know. Sea. Seashell. Michelle. Seashore. Seasick. Sea-slug. Seaweed. Sea-dog. Salty sea-dog, har har. Seaplane. Sea-Scout. See you later, alligator. Sea anemone. See an enemy. What else? The sky. Hell, I don’t know what the sky is. The sky’s just the sky. The sky’s the limit. Pie in the sky. Steak and kidney pie. Snake and pygmy pie. Sky diver. Skyscraper. Sky rocket. Sky lark. Sky sandpiper. Sky piper. Sea-piper. Invisible piper ...
I stopped. I was at the end of the beach. A finger of sand poked out into the muddy sea, and I was standing at the finger’s end. There was nowhere else to go. The colourless sea stretched out endlessly in front of me, a blurred emptiness of water and snow, dark and cold and formless. I sat down on the rise of a shingle bank and stared, hypnotised, at the snow-filled sky.
If I sit here long enough, I thought, I’ll die. I’ll freeze to death. And tomorrow morning someone walking their dog will come along and find me sitting cross-legged at the edge of the sea, like a statue, frozen stiff. White without and white within. A snowman. Snowboy.
Would that be so bad? I wondered. Would it hurt?
I imagined the coldness eating into me, numbing my fingers, my nose, my toes, my ears, before gradually moving on to my limbs, my skin, my bones, until eventually my whole body would be frozen into a state of senselessness and I wouldn’t feel anything at all.
Would that be so bad? I don’t know.
Is it too late already?
Could I stand up even if I wanted to?
My legs are dead, they don’t belong to me.
My thoughts are slowing.
What do you want to do?
What do you want to be?
What do you want?
I don’t know.
I’m tired.
My eyes are heavy.
The snow falls.
Never-ending.
Dark and light.
Black and white.
Good and bad.
Me and Dad.
Me and Alex.
There she is. I can see her. Gliding silently across the sea in a candle-white dress. I can see her. I can see her pale face and her shiny black hair, her dark eyes flecked with green. I can see her.
She’s beautiful.
What do you want to do?
I want to reach out to her, to touch her, but I can’t move. I want to call out to her, to call h
er name, but I have no voice. All I can do is watch her as she drifts across the sea and onto the sand, floating gently towards me, smiling her smile, coming closer, smiling at me, coming closer, and closer ... and then she stops. Still smiling, she throws back her head and opens her mouth to swallow the falling snow, and white petals tumble from her hair. She looks at me again, and my heart cries. A tremor plays upon her lips and her eyelids flicker like excited wings as she holds out her hand and moves towards me ...
And then she changes.
It’s not Alex. It never was. It’s Dad. Staggering up the beach dressed ridiculously in size eight boots and a ragged white dress. Like a ghoulish scarecrow, deathly pale and drunk. Dad. With a can of shaving foam clutched in his outstretched hand spraying out fountains of creamy-white snow. Dad. The snow-maker. Lifeless but alive, dead eyes sunk into his wounded head, lurching up the sand with a boozy leer on his face, laughing his laugh, coming closer, laughing at me, coming closer, and closer ...
My eyes sprang open and I jerked to my feet. With a violent shiver I slapped the snow from my limbs and stood there swaying on numbed and bloodless legs.
Look! Look out there! There’s nothing there, just a cold black sea in the snow. There’s nothing there, you idiot. Move. Now. Go on. Get out of here before you freeze to death.
What?
Move!
I turned and ran.
It was hard work. The wind was blowing again, gusting snow into my face, and I was hurting with cold. My legs were stiff and the wet sand dragged at my feet. It was like running through treacle – sandy, white treacle. But I kept going, pumping my arms, breathing hard, sucking cold air into my lungs, and as the fresh oxygen rushed through my head the images of Dad and Alex began to crumble and fade. The eyes, the white dress, that smile ...
Was that really Alex?
Was it a dream?
Was it real?
Forget it, the voice said. Just run.
Maybe it never happened at all? Maybe it was—
It was nothing. You were cold, that’s all. Cold, wet, and hungry. You haven’t eaten much the last few days. You’re tired. You dozed off. That’s all. You’re cold and tired. Your mind plays tricks. Forget it, just keep running.