Driftwood

by Harper Fox

  It was good, very smooth—his thinking had been that, if he spared no expense, he would go easy on it—but his throat was still raw with salt and unaccustomed shouting, and he choked faintly, pressing a hand to his mouth. What was in the damn box? He had an uneasy feeling in his gut about it. He was unsettled anyway. Having managed all day not to think about Flynn Summers, now that he was alone and unoccupied once more, he was finding he could think of little else. And people like Flynn did not belong in Thomas’s life. He was no longer fit to associate with the young and the reckless, with men who were—Thomas felt it, even on shortest acquaintance—absolutely, essentially sweet-natured. Not innocent perhaps but not spoiled, not tainted as Thomas was.

  No, Thomas’s world was populated by the likes of Victor Travers, or their ghosts. Vic had served with him in Afghanistan. They had grown up together in Sankerris. Then Thomas had gone off to university, medical school, and Vic had stayed at home, apprenticed to his father’s boat-building trade in the Porth Bay harbour. Thomas had next seen him at Bastion, a shell-shocked squaddie brought to him on a stretcher. Boredom had set in, Vic had explained to him, when he could talk. Boredom and lack of challenge. He had not needed to tell his old friend with what fervour he now wished himself back in the sweet, sleepy nowhere of the west. Thomas had patched him up and seen him sent back out.

  And again. And again. When, after a leave of absence, Victor’s sergeant called round to pick him up for the airbase and his third tour of duty, he found him in his dad’s boathouse, staring blankly into space, his kit packed and ready, his service pistol held to his brow.

  The sergeant had talked him out of that attempt, but there had been others, in the army psychiatric hospital and afterwards at home, where his distraught wife had tried to take care of him. Thomas, returning from his own third tour honourably discharged, had tried to help. He became Victor’s GP, once the poor sod had worked through his allotted portion of army assistance and been turned loose on the world. He helped him with his compensation claim, a battle still ongoing as the government and upper military echelons conspired to prove that Gulf War syndrome and PTSD were only a specialised form of malingering, best cured by another spell on the front line.

  Thomas supposed that if Vic had had his legs blown off in the service of his country, things might have been different. He helped him sign on for state incapacity benefit, persuading him that this was not an admission of weakness or failure. But what Victor needed from him most was his presence while he talked. Thomas had shared enough of his combat experiences to make him a good audience. Victor had lost all sense that his friend might reenact the dreadful scenes too, as he spoke, and not therapeutically. Once the kindest and most loving of men, Victor had come back from war clad in a brazen selfishness that made him blind to the pain of his wife, children, even a fellow soldier.

  Thomas poured himself another drink, a treble this time. He had spent two hours in the boathouse this morning. By the time he had emerged into the light, Victor shambling at his side, he could scarcely feel the sun’s warmth on his skin. He knew that it was there, but his capacity to feel it, to feel anything good, had been unplugged, was the closest term he could find. He felt unplugged, unhitched from his surroundings. On the rare but significant occasions when he drank, it was simply in order to make his body and brain match up. If he’d downed half a bottle of Stolichnaya Elit, he could expect to feel numb. It would be normal, and the next day he would have a normal hangover, recover and get back to work.

  He reached for his glass. Before he could lift it, Belle came and laid her great long head upon the table beside it.

  He hadn’t fed her. Sighing, Thomas pushed to his feet. He knew what she was up to, of course. By the time he had shovelled out enough dog food to satisfy her, he would be more in need of a shower than ever, and would probably go and do that, leaving the drink on the table. The shower would clear his head, and when he came down he would see the thick file of paperwork Florence Travers had pushed into his hands before he left—the latest stage of Vic’s appeal, to which Thomas was adducing medical evidence. It needed to be done tonight, and done sober.

  He would write his letters and statements, maybe notice after that that he was hungry, maybe go and cook. These days he would live on ready meals happily enough, did not some distant sense that he was a doctor and should practise what he preached still prompt him to buy fresh meat and veg and prepare them in some vaguely becoming fashion.

  Then he would wash up—everything, straightaway, the sight of dirty dishes and disorder making his stomach begin to twist in anxiety almost the second his meal was done. If he wanted to keep it down, he would do his chores. The rest of the house too. There wasn’t much to it—one big round room on the ground floor, to which the kitchen was a recent extension, and a spiral of stairs that ran around the tower wall to another circular space, slightly smaller to allow for the taper of the building. Removing such traces of dust and untidiness as the rooms had accumulated during their long, silent, uninhabited day should not have taken long, but to do it to Thomas’s standards—and he knew that he was sick, knew helplessly that this was not normal behaviour, and certainly not part of the man who had gone out to Afghanistan five years ago—required time, and huge amounts of energy. At some point during the process, he would become tired, as Belle knew. It would overwhelm him suddenly and utterly, and he would drop into sleep without any need of vodka to send him on his way.

  Thomas looked at his dog. Her head was still on the table, her expression serene and unaltered. It didn’t always work, God knew. Sometimes he just got wasted. But maybe not tonight.

  The package was, of course, still there when he came down from his shower. Deciding to deal with the unknown factor before getting on with his evening’s routine, Thomas sliced carefully through the parcel tape and plastic strips and lifted out from the first box a second one, neatly secured against impact by bubble wrap and polystyrene corners. This inner box was made of a thick, satiny cardboard, a kind of sea-green in colour, very beautiful. Its lid was impressed with a silver logo. Thomas suddenly recalled seeing boxes of this sort in the hands of visitors on the streets of Marazion, being reverently carried or cradled. What the hell? Gingerly he detached the lid.

  Inside was a sculpture which, had any piece of sea glass existed large enough, must surely have been made from it. Its surface was cool beneath his palms as he lifted it out of the box. Rough-smooth, patinaed with just the same silky feeling of time and constant impact he loved in the pieces he picked up from the beach, picked up and left behind, no matter how rich and appealing their colours. The artist had somehow reproduced this in a single sweep of glass, one rich curve in shades that ran from indigo to jade across its surface. Holding it, Thomas wondered what it was supposed to represent, or how it was meant to stand up. He couldn’t see any base to it. But when he set it on the table, it rocked a little, then seemed to take itself out of his grip and find its own centre of gravity, upon which it settled with perfect balance and weight. In doing so, it became what it was: a wave.

  A perfect surfer’s wave. Oh God. Flynn. Flynn, the chance encounter. The beautiful nutcase who should have left Thomas’s mind as completely as he had left Porth Bay that morning, not leaving behind him a lonely pang, certainly not reviving himself inside the lighthouse fortress in the form of this absurdly beautiful gift.

  Thomas sat down. The change of angle seemed to make the sculpture shift and murmur. It wasn’t static. Had the power to bear out its creator’s vision, not just once but every time it was observed. Unthinkingly he ran one finger over its crest, down into the beautifully evoked barrel. A lovely thing.

  The trouble—one of the troubles; he did not dare even think about Flynn Summers’ reasons for doing this, let alone how he was supposed to react—was that Thomas knew the artist. She ran a glassworks studio down in Marazion, overlooking St Michael’s Mount, and her latest exhibition had so increased her reputation that the few pieces she produced in any year now cost
a bloody fortune.

  Thomas couldn’t accept it, of course. It should have mortified him, that Flynn would even think the gesture necessary. It did. He was thoroughly embarrassed. He put his face into his hands and looked at the sculpture through his fingers. He felt the twitch of his own inexplicable smile against his palms.

  Towards midnight, he took Belle outside for a last breath of air. There was still a trace of light on the western horizon—soon it would be summer. The pile of round white quartz stones gleamed on the turf. Feeling in his pocket, Thomas realised that, for the first time, he had failed to bring another from the beach to add to it. Yesterday the omission would have triggered in him a spasm of guilt and grief. He could not work out why, tonight, he did not mind. On his way back in, he chucked the glass of vodka down the sink.

  That night Thomas dreamed. The dream of an ordinary man, for him so extraordinary that it woke him up smiling. No gunfire, no bloodstained dust. A pair of green eyes, full of wry laughter. Bronze-coloured hair, drying to gold in the sun. Thomas found that he was hard beneath his own caressing hand.

  His libido was so uncertain and suppressed—another self-diagnosed and unacknowledged symptom—that he had not dared risk the briefest sexual encounter. Even alone, his hungers seldom went beyond an ache in his gut—unsatisfiable, unreachable yearnings inside the caudal curve of his spine. A painless arousal like this was too rare, too good, to let go, and Thomas rode the wave. The night was warm. He threw aside the cotton sheet under which he’d been sleeping, and knew a ripple of shock at the sight of his own naked self in the moonlight falling through the seaward window, his own erect cock, swelling as he grasped it. “God,” he whispered, feeling his buttocks tighten, a slow heave of tension run through his whole body. He wanted to thrust into his hand, use himself freely and hard, and just…

  He came, crying out in astonishment. Too soon, too wild. Tiny thoughts like bats or moths flitted on the edge of his mind—the sheets, the uncontrolled mess of his semen pouring down the back of his hand. Shuddering, he forced them aside, rolled over onto his belly and thrust with all his strength into the orgasm, hips pumping, his own grasp hot and firm. He had a moment, afterward, of painful loneliness—of fear, at falling asleep like this, soaked and disarrayed—but the release had been too thorough, and he slipped away before the dark could find him.

  Next morning, the sculpture was still there, beautiful but out of place in Thomas Penrose’s home. He possessed no ornament. The clean bare lines of his rooms suited him. He wasn’t an ascetic, and could see how the deep bay of the living room’s east window, let all the way through the thickness of the tower’s walls, almost cried out for this lovely thing against its whitewashed stone, but he couldn’t keep it. Any such constant reminder of an event which had been beyond his control would make him uneasy—and besides, there was no way he could accept so expensive a gift from a stranger. Thomas didn’t know what they paid the RNAS rescue crews, but he was fairly sure their salaries didn’t run to impulse buys like this. An impulse buy—yes, he could see the bright, sun-washed man he had met yesterday acting on a reflex of the recently saved—occasionally Thomas had patients do the same thing—but he was sure to be regretting it now.

  It was Saturday morning, and Thomas found himself driving up towards the airbase, the sculpture packed away and safely stowed in the back. He didn’t want to be rude or unappreciative. He would find Flynn, give the gift back to him personally. Tell him he’d just been doing his job.

  RNAS Hawke Lake was vast, a sprawl of hangars and air towers that extended from the Helleskern cliffs to nearly four miles inland, encompassing on its western side the little town of Breagh, whose main purpose now was to serve the base. There were a few bleak rows of pebble-dashed houses on the town’s outskirts which Thomas knew belonged to the military, and it was here that he thought Flynn might live. When he stopped to make enquiries at the post office, however, he was told that because Lieutenant Summers was a single man and relatively new arrival, he still lived on the base itself, within its barbed-wire perimeter.

  The roads around Hawke were, of course, among the few really well-maintained rural highways in Cornwall, and Thomas drove back the way he had come, blinking in the brilliant April sun. He wasn’t so sure of what he was doing now. He felt odd this morning, better than he had in some time, but sleepy and a bit spaced out. The road’s slow curve around the base was hypnotic, free of the potholes that kept him awake and alert everywhere else, the Rover’s tyres whispering on its smooth surface. He knew military bases painfully well, and even as he pulled up outside the main entrance, with its barriers and flanking guard posts, was aware that he wasn’t going to get very far. The sensible thing to do would have been to go back home, stow the sculpture carefully under the stairs and wait until he ran into Flynn by chance somewhere.

  He couldn’t have it back in the house, even boxed and invisible. Thomas knew, his sleepy contentment burning off from him, that it had become a focal point. He hated himself for the reaction, feared, though, that next time his control slipped he would end up pitching the beautiful thing off the cliff. Sighing, he took the box from the back seat and approached the barriers, trying to look as unconcerned and as little like a terrorist as he could. Everyone everywhere was on permanent high alert, it seemed, even here.

  No, he could not have access to Lieutenant Summers. No, the guard would not phone the barracks—the lieutenant was on duty and could not be disturbed. Thomas, standing stiff-spined in the sunshine, felt the beginnings of rage—it was just this routine, knee-jerk hostility that had begun to disgust him with military life. It forced him to be on his dignity to meet it. Here, face-to-face with this stuffed-shirt sergeant, he was no longer the respected village doctor but an interloper, a supplicant.

  A couple of Navy ratings were leaning on the bonnet of a jeep, watching the encounter with amusement. One of them gave Thomas a grinning once-over. He turned to his companion and said, broad Belfast accent pitched to carry, “Looks like flyin’ Flynn’s been playin’ away. Doc had better watch out for Rob Tremaine, eh?”

  One useful side effect of Thomas’s condition was sudden and complete emotional cutoff under pressure. At another time, he might have cared or wondered who Rob Tremaine was. As things were, he shrugged. He took a couple of steps back from the guard and, moving slowly so as to make his intentions quite clear and avert any hair-trigger reactions, laid the box on the ground. “This is for Flynn Summers,” he said flatly. “It came to me by mistake. Check it for wires and detonate it if you have to. Otherwise, make sure he gets it.” He turned away. He wished he had Belle with him—she covered his rear, and gave good withering backward glances—but did not think he made a bad job of his exit.

  Chapter Three: Crosscurrents

  It was like pins and needles, like waking up with your arm folded under you. The numbness was bad, but things were briefly worse when it wore off.

  By the time he got back home, Thomas was mortified by his own lack of grace. His courtesy was deeper ingrained in him even than the scars of his combat experience, and returning Flynn’s gift like that was far from what he had intended. He flinched to think of the way in which Flynn might get his parcel back. Some bloke dropped this off for you. Said he didn’t want it. Followed up, probably, by Don’t have your bloody packages delivered through the gate, Lieutenant. We’re not the Royal Mail.

  He struggled to put the whole mess out of his mind. It was over, and a good lesson to him in not allowing random elements into his life. Probably he would never see Flynn again, and if he had offended him, what was the harm? But what if you’ve hurt him, the undamaged parts of Thomas whispered, making him shiver and become abstracted when conducting routine medical checks, taking temperatures, listening to nicotine-clogged chests. That was ridiculous, though. It had been a half-hour encounter, and Summers had probably since then faced death several times on the open seas, winching stranded fishermen to safety. He wasn’t going to care about some imagined slight from a man wh
ose name he had likely forgotten by now. In all probability he was simply relieved that he’d got away with it, not had his mad impulse taken to heart.

  Still, it nagged at Thomas. He seemed to notice the passage of the Sea King helicopters overhead, with their distinctive grey and red livery, far more intensely than he had ever done before. By the following Saturday, he liked himself even less than usual, and instead of spending his day in the stern isolation that went some way towards repairing the social exhaustion of his week, he packed up the Land Rover, wolfhound and all, and drove down to the Perran Beach air show.

  He’d never attended such an event before. Like any other kid he had watched the choppers plying the Cornish skies on their missions and imagined himself up there, but had felt no interest beyond that. He wasn’t really interested now. Any fascination with helicopter travel he might have been harbouring had been thoroughly knocked out of him by his first few Chinook flights over hostile terrain in Helmand Province.

  He stood, beached and a little disoriented, beside the Land Rover, parked in a field among the hundreds of other cars, mobile homes and Volksie buses glittering in the sun. Occasionally he would spot acquaintances in the crowd and exchange a smile with them, wryly noting their surprise at seeing him there.

  Glancing round at Belle, he saw that she was wearing her most haughty mask. Anyone who didn’t know her would think her unfriendly. For the first time, it occurred to Thomas to think about his own image—the effect he produced on others. He wasn’t unfriendly, either, but not one of the people who caught his eye and smiled at him came up to say hello. For the first time, he found himself minding.

  A thunderous reverberation on the edge of the world distracted him, and he leaned on the Rover and watched the display. Six Sea King helicopters and four military Lynxes, the full Hawke Lake and Plymouth complement, breached the horizon in tight formation. The sight was oddly moving, Thomas had to admit, as long as he kept in mind their lifesaving remit and forgot that they also bore down mercilessly, with fully armed crews, on the gun- and drug-runners who often made a dash along the Cornish coast. Perhaps what touched him was the brotherhood implicit in their close-quarters flight. What faith you must have, in yourself and your comrades, to spin those double sets of thin, flashing blades so close to those of the surrounding craft, to fly almost flank to flank.