Driftwood

by Harper Fox

  They rolled and tangled halfway to the bloody cliff’s edge before they had wrung the coming out of one another. Tom was glad, folding bonelessly down into his lover’s arms, that their nearest land-based observer would have to have been in New York.

  Chapter Six: Undertow

  They managed, somehow, a peaceful and prosaic breakfast. Tom sent Flynn up to shower the grass stains off while he made toast and tea. He had seen the idea of sharing the shower glitter in Flynn’s eyes, but it would have been a step too far, brought their one shared night tumbling into this day. It was Sunday, and Flynn due on a long shift at Hawke. Tom would run him up there, and that would be it.

  He had told Flynn to help himself from his wardrobe. Flynn’s T-shirt from last night was sweat-damped and crumpled beyond redemption, and had been beer-stained even before its ordeal. He looked nice in one of Tom’s many identical plain grey Ts. He looked nice, Tom thought, sitting opposite him at his breakfast table. He topped up Flynn’s mug from the pot, squaring his shoulders. “Do you… Do you think you’ll stay in Cornwall, then?”

  Flynn smiled. “Yes,” he said, taking his cue. This was their first official polite conversation, Tom’s effort, despite their wild night, to send them on their separate ways as friends. “It was just a posting, at first. Everywhere looked the same for a while, you know?” Tom nodded, cradling his mug between his palms—he did. “But I can’t imagine being anywhere else now. The surf, and the cliffs, and…at the risk of sounding like a complete hippie, the standing stones. When I saw my first one, I nearly crashed the car. Sat and stared at it for hours.”

  “They’re quite something. Do you remember which one it was?”

  “The quoit. The one any blundering tourist can find, right by the road. Lanyon, is it?”

  “Yes. Lanyon. That’s Belle’s favourite too—I take her there every other day for a run.”

  Flynn looked up from his toast. He absently sucked marmalade from one finger in a gesture which almost wiped Tom’s good intentions to oblivion. Their eyes met. Lanyon Quoit. Damaged, randomly put back together. None the less lovely for that. Not a promise. Not even a breath of suggestion. Just a place that they both knew.

  A faint, strange sound began to filter through their silence. Tom frowned. He knew most of his home’s noises by this time, and this was new to him. It sounded like a wasp caught in a jam jar. It seemed to be coming from near the front door where Belle was sitting, her back to the room. Tom got to his feet and went over to her. Unusually, she didn’t respond to his voice or his caress, and he saw, with a mix of alarm and amusement, that she had rucked up her normally placid and dignified face into a kind of gargoyle’s mask. As he crouched by her, it got worse. She kept her gaze fixed on the door, and slowly, as if having trouble remembering how, she wrinkled her long snout and drew back her lips to reveal both rows of white wolfhound teeth. Belatedly Tom realised that the tiny, high-pitched sound was coming from her. “My God, Belle,” he enquired, voice fracturing with laughter. “Is that your snarl?”

  She looked at him once, reprovingly, then fixed her attention front-centre once more. Thinking he should probably do the same, Tom went to the tower’s south window and looked out. He rested his hands on the broad white sill and let go a sigh. “Black Bull Mercedes pickup truck,” he said resignedly. “Huge, top of the range, silver trim.”

  Flynn dropped his face into his hands. “Oh fuck.”

  The truck had been at the far gate when Tom saw it, and God only knew how much farther away when Belle’s mysterious alarm system had been triggered. Now it was rolling slowly over the turf track, a growing black monster. Tom and Flynn stood in the watchtower’s open doorway, at painful standoff. “Tom, please,” Flynn said for the third time. “Just let me walk down and meet him. It’ll be fine.”

  Tom knew he had to say something. Just holding Flynn back by the waist of his jeans was not enough. It wasn’t easy. His throat felt full of grit, all his calm acceptance of the situation evaporated in the reality of having to let him go. “This is my home,” he managed at length. “It was incredibly hard for me to find one. I’m not ashamed of having had you here, and I’m not about to bloody hide.” He turned to him. “Flynn, do this for me. Go inside and take Belle with you. Just for a minute.”

  He stood out on the sun-blown turf, hands in his pockets. He was astonished and touched by Flynn’s compliance, which had been given with set-muscled, gritted-teeth reluctance, and an expression nearly as frightening as Belle’s. The thought of it distracted Tom as the vast Mercedes Bull lumbered over the last few yards between them.

  He had no idea what he was going to do or say to Rob Tremaine, and he wasn’t getting any advance cues. Typically, the truck’s windshields were one-way black, giving him only a view of his own insignificant stance against the backdrop of endless moors. Huge metal roll bars, as if the damn thing would ever tip up. Waist-high tractor tyres, a rack of searchlights, the whole thing wrapped up in glossy brand-new metal and shimmering chrome. Might as well have had a deer roped to the grille. Tom could not understand what anyone not towing horses every day could possibly want with such a vehicle. In the narrow Penwith single lanes, they took up a lane and a half.

  He stood up straighter, lifting his chin.

  An anomaly which had been tugging at his mind since dawn abruptly surfaced. Tom had a fair idea what those brutes cost. What good psychiatry cost too. Rob’s family was wealthy, Flynn had said—the branch that had left to make money in London, and apparently succeeded.

  Except that Tom was more or less certain they were not. He was pretty sure that Lizzie Tremaine and the string of random men who fathered her children were still living in borderline poverty on the Bay estate. It was the one bloody thing that Tom disliked about Cornwall, and fought with increasing futility to rectify—the gap between rich and poor, the pattern by which more and more homes were sold off for holiday cottages while the estates became ghettoes, hidden from visitors’ eyes. Well, it looked as if Rob had found his own solution. More power to him, Tom supposed, watching the truck door swing portentously open.

  Suddenly there was warmth at his shoulder, and he realised with a sinking gut that Flynn’s cooperation had worn off. At least he’d left the dog indoors.

  Rob Tremaine jumped down onto the turf. He looked smaller this morning—possibly only in contrast with his own vast vehicle, but he was holding his hands out in front of him too, angled, palms down. He was cleanly and quietly dressed, and had tamed his red hair back into a neat ponytail. “My God,” he said, approaching Tom and Flynn, looking from one to the other. “I do not even know where to begin apologising.”

  There was still some tea in the pot. Tom gave it to Tremaine graciously enough, while he sat on the sofa—in the exact spot, Tom thought with a shudder and a sense of disbelief, where he had stroked Flynn to orgasm barely twelve hours before—and explained, big disarming grin flashing, how he had had a rough few days and hit the cider. Not that that was any excuse for his behaviour, which although he didn’t remember most of it, had been described to him in lurid detail by his mates, and he gathered he deserved the shiner Tom had left him by way of souvenir. He had said some appalling things. He was grateful to Tom for looking after Flynn, and had come out to collect him to save Tom the trip. They were due on duty in an hour’s time.

  Flynn had remained silent, perched on the arm of the sofa. His hand was on Belle’s head, whether for companionship or to calm her Tom didn’t know. She had stopped her weird singing and was now only pulling ever more fantastic and anguished faces at the new arrival. “All right,” Flynn said now. “Thank you. Go on. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Tom tried to flash him a warning look. No point, Flynn. Just go. He saw Rob’s eyes darken, his smile become fixed. For a moment Tom thought, with a pang of revulsion, that he was going to have to tackle this mess in his own hard-won and thus far inviolate home, but then Robert got to his feet and left, Belle watching his every step.

  As soon as he was g
one, Flynn came over to him, knelt in front of the room’s one armchair, on the edge of which Tom had conducted this second-worst social occasion of his life, took hold of his face with tenderly passionate hands and kissed him. “I’m sorry. So sorry. I shouldn’t have let last night happen.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  Flynn’s eyes widened. “Christ, no.”

  “Then forget about it.” Tom regretfully traced the lines of his face with gentle fingertips. “What, do you think I’m going to make your life hard over this? Turn up threatening suicide outside your barrack door?” He paused, trying to think of something that would lessen the pain in his eyes. “Get into a deliberate crisis at sea? Would you do that to me?”

  Flynn smiled reluctantly. “I might turn up outside your barrack door.”

  “Don’t. Go home. Go and sort things out with Rob. If ever things are any different… Well, you know where my barrack is.”

  He was gone, and Tom was alone in his cliff-top solitude, surrounded by the cool light and the whispering silences he had come out here to find, by the four-foot-thick walls in which he had attained some semblance of healing. Which he told himself he needed, and still loved. Where he had plenty of rational ways of filling in a Sunday, none of which involved the crates beneath the stairs. He could sort out his bed linen, for one thing, and the breakfast dishes were untouched. Add in to that the subtle marks of another man’s presence all over his house—the soap left in the wrong place, maybe (not that he would look) a bronze-blond hair on a pillow—and, really, his OCD could run rampant in such a way as to leave his incipient alcoholism without a look-in. He might even begin to sort out his books, which were his last bastion against empty days.

  He’d start with the dishes. Leaning to pick up Rob’s teacup from beside the sofa, he saw on its arm a large, alien and expensive black wallet. He stood up and released a breath. “Oh for fuck’s sake.” Come to think about it, the fading sound of the pickup’s engine had stopped. And Belle was at the door again.

  He took the cup to the sink. Then he placed the wallet on the kitchen table, front and centre, in plain sight. He sat down quietly on a chair beside it. He said, “Belle, open the door.”

  It was normally one of her favourite tricks, but she plainly could not believe being asked to do it now. Nevertheless, after an incredulous look at her defaulting pack leader, she rose up on her haunches, lifted the latch with her nose and, when the wind pushed the door inward far enough, put a paw into the gap and drew it open. “That’s a good girl. Now come here.”

  Tremaine looked disconcerted to find the enemy lair wide open. As if he could not decide whether Tom, waiting at the kitchen table, or the vast dog at his side were least impressed with him. Nevertheless he came to stand in front of them, rage twisting his face. “I’m warning you, Penrose. Leave Flynn alone.”

  Tom said, “I think you left something. Take it and go.”

  Tremaine reached his hand out for the wallet. It had been an obvious trick, and he looked humiliated by it now. Tom could feel his own contempt crackling in the air between them like ozone. Suddenly Tremaine banged his fists down on the table’s surface. “You’re not listening!” he spat. “You think you know who I am, don’t you? I promise you, you’ve got no fucking idea. You go near him again, or I catch him with you, you’ll bloody find out.” He snatched up the wallet.

  Tom, who had barely managed to restrain Belle’s defensive lurch, watched in silence, holding her, as he stalked away.

  The one thing, Tom thought, which could have made the morning worse was half an inch more of Flynn’s discarded T-shirt protruding from behind the sofa cushion. As it was, he couldn’t quite work out how Tremaine had missed it. He pulled the garment out. He didn’t like dirty things or stale human smells. Normally it would have been a fingertip extraction and straight into the wash.

  He took it over to the south window and hitched himself up into its deep alcove. Once curled up there, he gently unfolded the T-shirt between his hands. Raised it to his face and inhaled deeply.

  Belle trotted over to the window and gazed up at him. She looked so sorrowful he almost laughed. “Don’t be stupid, dog. Just give me a minute. I’ll be fine.”

  All the following week, events seemed to conspire to help Tom to chase thoughts of Flynn from his mind. Staff shortages sent him down to the Penzance hospital twice instead of once for his casualty stint, and Victor Travers’ compensation case went to court, meaning Tom had to leave Belle with Mrs. Vic overnight while he accompanied his old comrade to London. It was a voluntary task—Victor had a good lawyer, and Tom had only been asked to provide written evidence—but Florence had begged him to provide an escort, certain that her troubled husband would not get there without one. The hearing was much shorter than Tom had expected, and strikingly more successful—someone up the line had had a change of heart, and suddenly Sergeant Travers, instead of being an embarrassing drain on army resources, was a war vet, an honoured soldier in possession of a decent income for wife and family, with enough left over to get the private medical treatment he required.

  The difference in Vic was extraordinary. Tom had sat with a pale, mute zombie on the train all the way from Penzance to Paddington, but on the way home it was as if he had suddenly met up with the man he had known. Victor had decided the verdict was entirely down to Tom’s good work, bought him Carling Black Label from the trolley as it passed, and drank it himself when Tom subtly pushed it aside, beaming at him broadly from across the plastic table.

  Florence and Belle were nervously pacing about the Penzance platform when they got home, and Tom stood back in wonder, arms folded over his chest, while poor Vic for the first time in years ran to embrace his wife. Later that week Florence scared him by informing him that Vic was now spending more time than ever in his boathouse, but that he was building something—actually working, the sounds of hammering and wood-turning making welcome music in the Porth Bay harbour again.

  Tom had to run a double surgery to make up for his one-day closure, every kid in a ten-mile radius apparently having come down with measles overnight, and by the time he crawled back to his refuge on Friday night, he barely had the strength to feed Belle and himself, in that order, and fall into bed.

  Where he dreamed of Flynn. His mind had seized on images and would not let them go. Good ones included the kindling light in Flynn’s eyes across the breakfast table—ordinary, a thing to be seen every day in a different light, bright enough to Tom to dim the morning sun. Flynn, struggling to his fraught, against-all-odds climax on the sofa. Then there were the bad ones, where, instead of rolling half-drowned and struggling to Tom’s feet at Porth Bay, Flynn had come unbreathing, a blue-lipped corpse to his hands. Where Tom was present, a mute ghost in the corner of room six, west barrack, while Flynn acquired his latest set of bruises. Those dreams woke him shuddering.

  He got up early on Saturday, restless, aware that a week ago he had been unwittingly on the brink of the strangest, sweetest adventure of his life. Belle had been much neglected over the last few days, and, not allowing himself any concise thoughts on destination or purpose, he bundled her into the Land Rover and set off.

  The quoit had sailed a long way adrift of its usual point of anchorage. As usual, Tom tried to persuade himself that it was a trick of the light, which was opalescent this morning, deceiving.

  Or perhaps the ancient stones were weary at the thought of the oncoming tourist season. There were only a couple of parking bays off the narrow, ochre-tarmac’d road that led past the quoit, and one of these was already occupied. A sleek little Mazda convertible, about ten years old, shining sea green in the sun. It looked as if it had seen some service, Tom thought, and these roads must be hard on it. Long nose, light chassis. Attractive, but not suitable at all. He registered these things distantly, pulling to a halt in the next bay. At least the quoit and its surrounding moorland were still deserted. Letting Belle half-haul him over the stile in the high-banked wall, rippling with campions and dancin
g umbellifers, he slipped off her leash and watched her tear away, a grey shadow on the wind.

  It was a lonely place. Tom had never felt this before. Shouldering his pack, in which he carried bags to clear up after Belle and, at least as often, human detritus, as well as a small first-aid kit, baby brother to the massive one in the Rover’s boot, which he did not seem able to leave behind even on the shortest walk—and water, and sun cream, and, God, how he wished he could sometimes just go—he made his way over to the megalith.

  He stood in the shadow of its mighty capstone. His ancestors, its builders, would have laughed at him. Would not have recognised, perhaps, this late fruit of their loins as human at all. The wind, which seldom ceased its scouring even on the calmest day up here, sang among the uprights. If he closed his eyes, he saw Flynn’s face, tilted up to his and becoming fixed in a kind of wonder as climax swept over him. He felt Flynn’s hands, caressing him while they lay in a stunned tangle on the turf. Would he see and feel these things always? His shock at David’s death had expunged from him all tactile memory of their one shared night. He had learned to be alone.

  Well, not quite. Belle, having finished her flying patrol, was circling back round towards him. He smiled. She wasn’t great for conversation, but nor was he, and her affections at least never altered. “Here, Belle, girl,” he called, leaning over and patting his knees to intercept her.

  She shot past him as if he didn’t exist, and headed like an arrow for the stile. Turning in astonishment to watch her, Tom was in time to see Flynn Summers jump lithely down onto the turf.

  They approached one another casually. It was all fine. Tom was sure the wild thumping of his heart did not carry over the wind. Flynn was smiling. His long stride ate up the ground unhurriedly. They could have been any two friends meeting up by chance in the May sunshine, and if the catch of the wind in his hair, the power of his movements, was drying Tom’s mouth with desire, that symptom could be concealed. Flynn didn’t need a rucksack full of kit to go for a walk, did he? Just the clothes he stood up in—dazzling white shirt, jeans if anything more beautifully worn and fitting than the ones he had skinned out of in the watchtower’s bedroom a week ago—and his own graceful self. Barely had this yearning thought flashed through Tom’s head when Flynn, mindful of anything but his footing, caught his ankle in a clump of tough long grass and fell over, flinging out both hands to stop himself from measuring his length on the turf.