Driftwood

by Harper Fox

  He helped Summers up and let him take a few uncertain steps on his own before reaching to support him. It was only a hand to his elbow, but Summers flinched as if the contact burned him.

  “Are you all right?” Thomas enquired, loosening his grasp. “Does your arm hurt?”

  “No. Well—yes, it does, but not there.” He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m freaked out a bit. I don’t know why.”

  “Shock, probably.” Thomas kept his voice level. He was freaked out too, but he had no easy explanation for his own state, or why it was hard for him to make the ordinary doctorly gesture of helping this young man off the beach. “Here. Can you put your arm round my shoulders?”

  “Yeah. Thanks. Er… I’ll have to give you your jacket back first.” Summers slipped it off his shoulders and handed it to Thomas, making a rueful face at the patterns drying sea salt was making on the leather. “Shit. I’ll have that dry-cleaned for you.”

  “What? Oh, no. Belle does worse than that to it when she’s been in the mud.” Thomas shrugged into the jacket, unwillingly aware that it would be easier to have Summers’ arm around him, Summers’ warm flank pressed to his side, if there were a shielding layer in place between them, not just his own wet shirt. Why, for God’s sake? Why were Thomas’s nerves singing, prickles of gooseflesh trying to lift up the hairs on his nape? Handsome Lieutenant Summers probably had an equally presentable girlfriend waiting for him at home, if not a young wife and a couple of blossoming kids. And even if he were queer as fuck, what difference should that make to Thomas? All that was over for him, long dead and buried in the Afghan dust. Shaking himself, he reached out an arm to Summers, who was hanging back, looking at least as uneasy as Thomas felt. “Come here. It’s okay.”

  They set off together up the beach. Thomas soon realised that the jacket wasn’t providing much defence against sensation. Every step brought Summers into light, insistent contact against him. Too damn light—Summers, understandably wary, was stiff and awkward in his embrace. His arm round Thomas was an obedient gesture only, exerting no weight. And he needed the support. His breath was coming shallowly and too fast.

  Thomas took hold of the wrist draped over his shoulder, silently reproaching himself once more for his outburst. “Lean on me,” he said, and felt Summers relax a little.

  Better and worse. Conflicting desires tore at Thomas. He was helping Summers properly now, justifying their proximity with his strength and his medical purpose. They would cover the couple of hundred yards between here and the car park in no time. Thomas wouldn’t have to cope for long with this sweet, profoundly unsettling pressure at his side.

  And, perversely, he minded. The distance was suddenly too long and too damn short all at once. He needed and wanted and could hardly bear the thought of letting go. He frowned, bewildered at himself, struggling for control. Here at last were the beginnings of the long ramp that led up to the promenade. Summers winced as they negotiated the stones and bits of concrete half hidden in the sand, and Thomas concentrated fiercely on keeping him upright.

  He tugged open the Land Rover’s rear door and released Summers carefully to sit on her rusty step. The car park was still deserted, though the sun had boiled off the last of the sea fret and the first really fine day of the season was promising in the periwinkle sky over the cliffs. Reaching awkwardly past him, Thomas extracted a thermos of coffee from under the back seat. As well as a good deal of glass-enhanced warmth, the Rover’s interior was exuding pleasant if basic scents: leather, vinyl, clean dog. Summers leaned back into the heat, shivering, and Thomas quickly poured him a cup of coffee from the flask. “Here you are.”

  “Thanks.” Summers accepted it gratefully, lifting the cup to blue-tinged lips. “Oh, that’s nice.”

  Thomas smiled. Habitually he made himself up a batch of Kenyan from the cafetière. He hadn’t been expecting to share it. He was peripherally glad that it was decent—perhaps it offset the fact that the four-by-four looked ready to crumble to scrap where it stood. Thomas seldom noticed the state of his vehicle, but something in the action of helping Summers across the car park towards it had made him aware of its shortcomings. “Good. Drink it slowly. Do you feel sick or disoriented?”

  “Er… No. I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. Move over a bit.” Thomas leaned past him again, this time extracting a tartan car rug and his first-aid kit. He handed Summers the rug. “Here. Put that round you.” Setting the box down on the tarmac, he crouched beside it and flipped up the lid. “Not sleepy?”

  “No. Not irritable, either, and I reckon my pulse and BP are fine.”

  Thomas glanced up. Summers, of course, would know the signs of immersion hypothermia as well as he did. Better, probably. “Okay,” he said wryly. “Good.”

  “I know you, don’t I?” Summers asked. “You’re the village doctor up at Sankerris.”

  Thomas, busy tearing open an antiseptic pad, frowned in surprise. He didn’t get many flyboys through his surgery, the RNAS base having state-of-the-art facilities, though sometimes when they started families they preferred to bring their children to him. “That’s right. Thomas Penrose. Have we met?”

  “No. I drive through Sankerris on my way to the base sometimes, and I’ve noticed you, that’s all.”

  Thomas saw him start to blush, and looked away to let him off the hook. He was ridiculously disconcerted himself, at the idea of having been noticed—by another man, or this one, anyway, explicitly and unavoidably gorgeous in his Neoprene skin. Thomas made no efforts to be seen. He knew that he was still in decent shape, but he dressed quietly, kept his profile low. Other than that—well, the man who stared back at him from mirrors these days was almost a stranger. Brown eyes, once expressive, now guarded, always looking to a dangerous horizon. Thomas kept this stranger tidy, made sure its dark hair never grew out of its soldierly crop. He was not noticeable.

  “Oh, right,” he said vaguely, and reached up with the antiseptic pad. “Sorry. This is gonna sting a bit.”

  Summers sat patiently while Thomas cleaned sand out of the grazing on his face and neck. Thomas, who usually had no trouble with an impersonal touch—it was the other kind that fazed him these days—found that he was having to concentrate hard on his work. This man’s proximity troubled him. To push his wet hair back from his brow was disquieting, made Thomas want simultaneously to do it again and to flinch away. Biting his lip, he finished out his task, steeling himself to non-reaction when Summers tilted his head to one side to accommodate the clean-up, exposing delicate tendons in his throat.

  “Thanks,” Summers said, when it was done. “Now, give me that and hold still for a minute.”

  Thomas found himself obeying. Now that Summers’ face was clear of blood, his hair beginning to dry tawny blond in the sun, he looked younger, maybe only in his mid-twenties. But there was a compelling note in his voice, a shade of authority, and Thomas supposed you did not get to a lieutenant’s rank in the Navy without some powers of command.

  Oh God. To be tended was almost unbearable. This was not the dynamic of Thomas’s world—he was the healer. He saw to others. No one looked after him. On the rare occasions of his own illness or injury, he dealt with it himself. Summers’ fingers on his skin sent ripples of shock through him, although the other man was only gently easing back the collar of his shirt to examine the place where Belle’s teeth had grazed him. Clenching his hands on the Land Rover’s step, Thomas stared grimly at the tarmac while Summers sloshed antiseptic over the wound then pressed the pad to it tight.

  “There,” he said. “I don’t think it needs stitching, but look out for infection. You know, dog bites… To be fair to her, though, I think she was trying to help you.”

  “I know.” Thomas drew a deep breath and managed not to flinch out from under Summers’ hands as he pulled a wide strip of plaster from the kit and smoothed it into place on his shoulder. “She’s a good girl.”

  Raising his head, he was about to wonder where she was—then saw her, regall
y seated by Summers’ side. He hadn’t seen her jump in. He found he was mildly chagrined. Belle was almost as mistrustful of strangers as himself, another reason, along with her good manners, why he had chosen her. Now she was looking down her long grizzled nose at Summers, in evident approval. A little silence fell. It was not awkward, stitched through as were most Land’s End silences with seagull cries and wave song, but Thomas felt a strain on his nerves. It had been a long time since he had spoken properly to someone who was not a patient, and longer than he could remember since he had been touched.

  Flynn Summers was smiling at him. Distantly, reluctantly, Thomas noted his beauty, like a half-remembered echo from another world. “Well,” he said hoarsely. “If you’re really okay…”

  Summers got stiffly to his feet. “Yes.” He shook the sand out of the rug, folded it and handed it back. “I mustn’t take up more of your time. Thank you, Dr. Penrose.”

  Thomas considered letting him hold on to the formality. He felt, unreasonably, that he needed the distance. But that would leave him stuck with Lieutenant Summers, and he’d given and received enough military titles to last him a lifetime. He put out a hand, remembering with shame that he hadn’t been gracious enough to accept the other man’s gesture before. “It’s Thomas.”

  “Flynn. And I’ll bear in mind what you said, about risking other people’s lives.”

  “Oh.” Detaching his hand from the strong grip enclosing it, Thomas flickered him an uneasy smile. “I tore your head off, didn’t I? Sorry. I was going to say, if you’re all right, can I give you a lift back to your car? Where are you parked?”

  “No need. I’m just round the back of the café.” Summers looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled, and said suddenly, startling them both a little, “Penrose, eh? Proper Cornish.”

  Thomas smiled too, for the first time broadly. “Born and bred. You?”

  Before Flynn could answer, pattering footsteps on the seafront pavement beyond the car park made both of them look up. A plump, pink-faced woman in her late forties was jogging up the slope towards them, progress impeded by oversized carpet slippers. “Thomas!” she cried, waving frantically. “Oh, Tom. I thought I saw your car. Please will you come and talk to Victor? He’s been in that damn boathouse for three days. He won’t come out.” Halting a few yards away, she looked the doctor up and down, her broad, kind face folding up in concern. “Oh my God, Tom. Has there been an accident?”

  “Er… No. At least…we’re all right. I’ll come straight down.” He turned to Flynn. “Sorry. I have to go.”

  “Course. Is there anything I can do?”

  Thomas surveyed him. Flynn looked subtly different, for all he was still damp and bleeding. Thomas wondered if this was his professional mask, the one his rescued fishermen and capsized tourists saw. He was impressed with how thoroughly he had assumed it, erasing all trace of the slightly gauche young man who had just needed rescue himself. Ready for action. Just for an instant, Thomas let himself imagine how it would be to avail himself of the offer. Flynn looked solid, capable. What would it be like, not to have to go in and face poor Victor alone?

  But Victor was wreckage from Thomas’s own old war, not Flynn’s. And all of Thomas’s actions since his return had tended to his own isolation—he wanted, needed, had to be alone.

  “No,” he said, almost sharply. “I mean, no thank you. Just take care of yourself.”

  Briskly he turned and closed up the Land Rover, making sure a window was cracked down for Belle. He helped Flynn lift his board. It was a pro’s eight-footer, and not a lightweight. They were always much heavier than they looked on the water, being used for purposes of flight by talented, graceful, intriguing lunatics like… He was suddenly acutely aware that, when he turned his back to follow Victor’s wife down the street, that would be the last he would ever see of Flynn Summers. There was no reason to suppose otherwise. He felt a strange pang, almost like homesickness, a kind of resonant ache beneath his breastbone. And Flynn was watching him intently, as if he too had something more he wished to say.

  But he only nodded, and lifted a hand, and set off barefoot across the car park. Thomas looked back—once, helplessly, as Florence seized his hand, and then again a minute later while she was tapping anxiously on the boathouse doors. The second time he saw Flynn up near the top of the pitching Porth Bay high street, thumb out to flag down a ride. The first few vehicles went past him. He’d be lucky, Thomas thought, wondering why he’d lied about having his car with him, wondering how he’d got down here in the first place. He needed a ride big enough to take him and the surfboard too. Then air brakes hissed, and a truck with RNAS livery pulled up beside him, and he was gone.

  Chapter Two: Sea Glass

  By the time he finished work that night, Thomas could think only of the watchtower and the uninterrupted silences that awaited him there. He got into the battered Land Rover and drove, up into the hills to the north of Sankerris, higher and higher through the narrow single tracks. Like most West Countrymen born, he could drive as adroitly backwards as forwards, but this time met no oncoming tractors or tourists and was glad of it. It could be a matter of reversing a mile or more down the spiralling lanes, whose banks were beginning to heap up with wildflowers at this turn of the season. He just wanted to get home. He broached the horizon, where farmland flattened out to moor, and the north coast of the peninsula spread itself out for him, bare, wild and clean. Rolling the Rover’s window down, he drew a deep breath of the sweet air.

  There was the quoit. This was one of Thomas’s commuting runs and he saw it every day, often twice, but it never failed to seize him. Placed here by unknown hands five thousand years before, knocked down in a storm and badly reconstructed in the 1800s, it was a stupendous thing, as breathtaking today as it must have been when its Neolithic builders had somehow raised its ten-ton flying capstone onto its four granite supports—three, now, after its clumsy rebuild—and set it to dominate the Morvah moor. West Penwith natives were blasé about it, calling it the tourist’s quoit—set a bare hundred yards back from the road, it was easily visible for miles and, unlike most of the county’s megalithic attractions, did not require a hike through gorse-tangled moorland to get to. For Thomas, the accessibility never diminished its magic. He was not even sure, on his daily drives past it, that it always lifted into view at the same place on his horizon, an effect he would put down to his own weariness.

  Which, today, was extreme. Belle, who had lapsed into silence again, only changed the angle of her ears as they bypassed the quoit, but Thomas could read her disappointment. They often stopped here for a walk, and she’d had a long day of it, patiently waiting out his shift in the back room of the pharmacy. “Sorry, sweetheart. Not today.” He saw her resume her queenly position in the passenger seat, watching the road ahead.

  He drove until the Atlantic appeared, silver-glitter indigo, beyond the north coast’s pitching cliffs, then took an unmarked side track and bounced the Rover across half a mile of moorland, the track fading out to turf and scattered stones beneath her tyres. He opened a farm gate, drove through and shut it behind him, then let Belle out of the passenger side. Restrained and polite, she seldom indulged in undignified racing around, but she did love her run home, and Thomas liked the sight, her full-power streak across the last tract of moor to the solitary white-painted building near the edge of the cliff.

  He followed her in the Rover and pulled up outside the tower, ratcheting the handbrake up with a sigh of relief. By the time he had finished with poor Victor today, there’d been no time to come home for a change of clothes, and he’d had to start his surgery round as he was. Mrs. Vic had offered him a shirt, but none of her husband’s mighty garments would have been less conspicuous on Thomas than his own wet ones, which by that time had started to dry on his skin. In his office, he resorted to his seldom-used white coat to hide the damage and had got away with it. Now, though, the cotton and denim, stiff with salt, were scraping on his skin, and he thought wi
th longing of a shower. The bathroom was the only part of the watchtower he had bothered to have professionally refurbished—worth it, for a man who still hallucinated desert dust in the crevices of his body, whose dreams left his muscles so rigid with resistance he could often barely walk until he’d immersed himself in a bath.

  The tower had its original black-oak door, the wood rock solid and satiny with time. Belle, still wild, was describing high-speed circles round the building, always clockwise, as if she shared the many local witches’ aversion to a widdershins manoeuvre. Smiling, Thomas took the vast key from under its stone and began to let himself in.

  He noticed the package at the same time the dog did, and both of them froze, Belle skidding to a halt on the turf. She trotted across to the door and sniffed the box over as if it had been an unexploded bomb, and Thomas reflected with a touch of shame that they were, after all, a pair of suspicious bastards. Then she sat down and looked up at him with an expression he could only interpret as a smile.

  He carried the box into the house, wondering at its weight. He hadn’t ordered anything. Placing it on the plain deal table in the kitchen, he noted from its labels that it had been sent up by parcel post from Marazion just that afternoon, and presumably at some expense—it was about eighteen inches all round and heavy as a rock. Thomas pulled out a kitchen chair, turned it round so he could straddle it and folded his arms along the back.

  He wasn’t in the mood for surprises. After seeing to poor Victor, he hadn’t been in much of a mood for anything, except perhaps drinking himself to oblivion. That thought sparked another in his mind, one connected with the gleam of a rarely touched supply of vodka in a crate under the stairs. Breaking his own rules of seldom-on-weekdays and never-before-eight, Thomas dismounted from the chair and went to pour himself a generous double.