‘Hi, how are you? Listen, can I call you back? It’s feeding time at the zoo here and as you can probably hear, things are getting out of hand.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve got some rather bad news.’
Kirsty turns her back on the kitchen and clutches the receiver with both hands. ‘What is it? Is it Mum? What’s happened?’
‘Your mother’s fine. She’s here with me. It’s Alice.’
‘Alice?’
‘She was hit by a car. She’s in a coma.’
‘What? But when?’
The kitchen has become deathly quiet. Annie is holding her spoon to her chest, staring open-mouthed at her mother. Neil comes across the room and stands behind Kirsty, listening. Jamie, sensing a change for the worse in the atmosphere, begins to snivel.
Ben listens to his daughter’s sobs down the telephone. Ann moves in and out of the room, putting things into suitcases.
‘It was last night. They called us early this morning. We thought we’d wait until now to call you. There seemed no reason to wake you all up.’
‘But, but ... I don’t understand. I only saw her yesterday.’
‘Yesterday?’
‘Yes. She came up to Edinburgh on the train. Completely out of the blue. Beth and I met her at the station. She seemed fine. For a bit anyhow. But then she went all peculiar and said she had to leave. And then she just got on a train and left.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, my God, oh, my God, this is so awful. I can’t believe it.’
‘I know, love, I know,’ Ben says. ‘Your mother and I are going down there today. I asked if she could be transferred to a hospital in Edinburgh, but they said there was no way they could move her.’ Ben’s voice catches for the first time. There is a pause in which he tries to collect himself. He doesn’t want to upset Kirsty even more by crying himself. ‘The other thing is that we have to contact Beth.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘Well, I rang the payphone at her halls of residence, but she doesn’t seem to be there. I don’t want to just leave a message saying . . . this.’
‘Of course, of course.’
‘It’s so difficult to get in touch with her sometimes.’
Neil takes the receiver off Kirsty. ‘Don’t worry about that, Ben. You and Ann just get yourselves down there. I’ll sort Beth out.’
‘That’s very good of you, Neil. We’re going to catch a train now. I’ll call you again tonight.’
part | two
The sun is burning off the mist, revealing the snaggled rocks that rear up at intervals along the sand. On the beach is an odd, broken assortment of my family — my older sister is away at college with the man she will eventually marry, my grandmother is off visiting friends in Glasgow, and Mario is with us.
I left without telling him and offered my parents no explanation as to why 1 had arrived home a week before term ended. Mario turned up on the doorstep the next day, having charmed the address from the housing officer. My family have accepted his arrival with unexpected and unprecedented equanimity and here we all are, playing happy families on Gullane beach.
My mother has nested herself down beside a rock with the Scotsman on Sunday keeping the water that the sand holds from seeping into her skirt. Arranged around her are a black snakeskin handbag, her shoes, laces tucked in under the tongue, my father’s book on seashore birds and a number of white plastic boxes protecting the picnic Beth and I made earlier. Beside her, in a deck-chair, my father sleeps with his mouth open.
Beth is twisting her hair into silky, flaxen coils and snipping off her split ends with nail scissors from my mother’s handbag.
The scissors flash with light and she gives Mario long, sideways glances as he resolutely chews his way through sandwiches he picks from the boxes by my mother. He eats with a concentrated seriousness, his jaws slapping open and snapping closed. He is not speaking. His eyes scan the slowly appearing horizon. In about two hours’ time I will tell him that I don’t ever want to see him again and he will return to America. But we don’t know this yet. For the moment, there is only the beach and the gulls going schree-schree over our heads.
The bruises on my thighs and hips have faded to yellow and I have only just stopped bleeding. Above my left breast is a round, red bite mark, pitted deep into my skin. Every night, blanching, I dab it with acrid-smelling witch hazel, but its bright colour refuses to dwindle. I am thinking about this when my mother catches my eye. I look away.
My father wakes and starts asking my mother what time it is. She ignores him and he reaches for the paper instead, crushing its pages into a methodical square before reading it.
‘Have you had enough to eat, Mario?’ my mother asks, in a way so barbed it makes me look up. His name puzzles her. She can’t say it without frowning. He nods with a mouthful of food and gives her a thumbs-up. Beth titters. I stand up. ‘Shall we go for a swim?’ I ask Beth.
She jumps to her feet and helps me unzip the back of my dress. We begin struggling out of our clothes and flinging them into an untidy heap - we have our bathing costumes on underneath. Mine is black and hers is white with blue stripes. I readjust the straps, pinging the elastic into place against my skin. I see my mother looking at the bruises on my legs, her face collapsed in confusion. I turn round. ‘Race you to the sea.’
We run together towards the sea, leaving Mario with my parents. The hard ridges of the sand push up painfully into the soft parts of my feet. Behind me, Beth shouts at me to slow down.
I stop short at the sea edge, stunned, panting: it is full of jellyfish, their viscous bodies palpitating like breathing hearts, their fringed tendrils ready to hook and sting. There is not a square foot of the water that does not contain a shivering mass of clammy glue, and it seems malevolent, as if these creatures have spontaneously generated from its elements.
‘I’m not going in with them in there,’ Beth says, and pokes at one with a stick. It convulses in shock, draws in its threads and shoots itself away with surprising speed. I clutch her and pretend to push her in. She screams and wriggles, laughing, and I am momentarily blinded by her hair, which streams into my face in the wind.
We lie on our stomachs in a shallow pool, our feet cutting swathes in the sand. I rest my chin on my knuckles. Final swirls of fog roll slowly up the beach. Beth twirls her hair and whistles.
I am conscious of something pressing on me that I want to say to her, but when I open my mouth to speak I realise that I don’t know what it is. A dog passes, red-rag tongue lolling from his mouth. He eyeballs us briefly, but lollops on, too busy to stop.
‘ Y ooooo-hooooooo. ’
Our mother’s voice reaches us through the cries of the birds. I turn my neck and look under the crook of my arm to see her running in the way only women of her age can — awkwardly modest, with her knees together, as if she’d rather be walking. She is brandishing a camera. Beth and I smile dutifully into the sun as the shutter clicks. I will keep that photo on my wall at college until my final year, when I have a party where it disappears, either trodden underfoot with cigarette butts or stolen by someone who likes the look of us.
My father joins us hastily, not wishing to be left alone with
Mario. Mario trails behind. He has taken off his shirt. His chest is tanned. He flexes his arm muscles. If I keep him out of the edges of my vision, I could almost pretend he isn’t here. At the top of the beach my mother’s newspaper wheels across the sand.
‘Are you going swimming or not?’ He looks at me hard.
I stand up. My costume is damp, cold and crusted with sand.
‘There are too many jellyfish,’ Beth tells him.
Mario closes his hand around my wrist and runs towards the sea, dragging me behind him, my wrist bones cracking and bending under the pressure. Spumes of water spray up under my flailing legs, the jellyfish are swirled about in the agitated water and I hear a screaming that isn’t the seagulls. He stops dead, the icy water lapping at my ribcage and placing his
hands on my shoulders, he forces me down. My knees buckle and water closes over my head. I twist and thrash under his grasp, lashing out at him, swallowing great gulps of bitter water. My skin is prickling, alert with the panic of sensing the stinging brush of jellyfish trails. Through his fingers I can feel the shudder of his laughter. Suddenly I am released. My head soars and breaks the surface and sunlight rushes in on me. The sound of the beach roars in my ears and I gasp for air, gagging and coughing. I wipe the water from my eyes with shaking hands and we stare at each other for a split second before I am pushed down again into the silence of the sea. This time I keep my mouth closed. The water is swinging with light. His fingers are pressing small circular bruises into my shoulders. The jellyfish hang in clusters just below the surface like parachutes. Beyond them, I can make out the figures of my parents, distant and blurred, standing at the shore.
I know where I am. I know more than they think. Earlier today someone with an officious voice said, close to my ear, ‘It is touch and go as to whether she will ever regain consciousness.’ Touch and go. Makes it sound like a children’s game.
Today I am bothered about the story of King Canute. (I say ‘today’ from habit — I have no idea if it is night or day or even how long I have been here. The strangest thing is that I sometimes have difficulty in remembering the names of things. Yesterday, or whenever it was, I couldn’t remember the word for the wooden structure for sitting with four legs. I trawled through my memory and found I could recall de Saussure’s semiotics theory, large chunks of King Lear and the recipe for Baked Alaska, but had no recollection of the word whatsoever.) But I was talking about King Canute. The story is, of course, that he was so arrogant and despotic a leader that he believed he could control everything — even the tide. We see him on the beach, surrounded by subjects, sceptre in hand, ordering back the heedless waves; a laughing stock, in short. But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if, in fact, he was so good and great a king that his people began to elevate him to the status of a god, and began to believe that he was capable of anything? In order to prove to them that he was a mere mortal, he took them down to the beach and ordered back the waves, which of course kept on rolling up the beach. How awful it would be if we had got it so wrong, if we had misunderstood his actions for so long.
Maybe it would be a good thing if I don’t come back. But if I don’t, I’ll never get to find out anything, ask anyone any questions. But, then, do I really want to know?
‘Would you mind holding the line a moment, please?’ Susannah pushed the hold button on the phone. ‘Alice, it’s some bloody journalist. Can you talk to him? I’ve got a thousand things to do today and it’s the last thing I need.’
Alice, on top of an aluminium step-ladder with an armful of books, shoved the books haphazardly on to a shelf. The Literature Trust was having a big crisis: not only were they in the process of moving from a cold, outsized, crumbling Georgian house in Pimlico to a compact terraced building in Covent Garden, but they heard yesterday that their main funding body was cutting their grant and sacking their director. A new director had already been appointed and would start tomorrow. Alice and Susannah, while still trying to absorb the news, were unpacking all the boxes from Pimlico.
‘Oh, no,’ Alice groaned, ‘the vultures are circling already. What does he want? Did he say?’ She wiped the palms of her hands on the overall she was wearing, leaving thick stripes of dust snaking up her legs.
‘No. He asked for the press office.’
‘The press office?’ Alice repeated. ‘Who does he think we are? Can you find out what it’s about? Maybe I could call him back.’
Susannah returned to the line. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting. Our press office is a bit tied up at the moment . . . She’s up a ladder . . . Yes . . . Can I ask what it’s regarding?’ Susannah grimaced at Alice as the voice on the other end rattled on tinnily, like a trapped bee. ‘OK. Fine. Hold on, please.’ She put the phone on hold again. ‘Alice, it’s John somebody or other, the arts correspondent for . . .’ Susannah named a national broadsheet. ‘He says he wants to do a profile on us — the new-look Literature Trust. Why we’ve moved, what our plans are now, blah, blah, blah.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Alice, as she climbed backwards down the rickety steps of the step-ladder, ‘I’ll bet you my body weight in chocolate he’s just digging dirt.’
I’d been working at the Literature Trust for two months and
I loved it. Which was lucky because nothing much else was going right. I was living in the top flat of a converted Victorian terraced house in Finsbury Park. The area was pretty rough and the rent cheap — literature charities do not pay high salaries. The house would have been beautiful once and its existence was testament to the fact that the area had been prosperous at one time or another. But somehow the street had declined and all the other houses, save this one terrace of nine or ten houses, had been replaced with sprawling seventies estates. The terrace looked abandoned and forlorn, an island of gentility among shabbiness and depression.
I had just left Jason, a music teacher I had been living with for a year or so, and I moved there because 1 had nowhere else to go. It was the first flat I’d seen, after days of poring over the tightly spaced columns of Loot. The landlord was a mean-spirited bastard, never answering my calls when the cistern flooded the tiny bathroom or when I demanded some furniture for my so-called furnished flat. For months I had no curtains and no chairs in the kitchen. I got used to eating standing up with my back leaning against the humming fridge.
There were three flights of stairs up to my door. I was on the top floor in what would have once been the servants’ quarters, but were now renovated, partitioned and divided beyond recognition. In the whole time that I lived there, I never once saw any of the other people who lived in the building. Because I hated being in the flat, I arranged to be out every night. I led a frenetic social life where I would be out with my friends in Soho or Covent Garden or organising literature events and would return and fall into bed, exhausted, after midnight, only to rise and leave the flat at eight in the morning. I knew other people were living there only by the bass-lines of their music and the rhythm and frequency of their orgasms. The whole building was, in truth, a death-trap. The front door was always bolted and double-locked to prevent burglary, which was all too common in the street; there were no fire-exits and I was a hundred feet off the ground. If there had been a fire, I would have died, unable to escape. I used to lie in bed at night after my evenings out and wonder about the people living in the floors below me. Were they the sort of people who smoked in bed, or who lit candles and forgot about them, or who left their gas rings on by mistake? They kept me awake, these faceless people and their imagined pyromaniacal exploits; I had inadvertently trusted them with my life.
‘Hello, this is Alice Raikes.’ Alice fiddles with a paperclip as she speaks. From across the room, Susannah pulls a face. Alice ignores her.
‘Hello, Alice Raikes.’ He sounds amused, cocky. Alice dislikes him instantly. ‘This is John Friedmann.’
‘Can I help at all? You’re doing a profile on us, I believe.’ ‘Yes, I am. Are you speaking to me from up a ladder or have you come back down to earth now?’
‘Er,’ she experiences a stab of irritation, ‘we have just moved, you know.’
‘So I hear. How do you like your new offices, Alice?’ ‘They’re just fine, thanks,’ she says impatiently. ‘I didn’t know yours was such a caring, sharing newspaper. If I’d known, I’d have asked you to come and help lift a few boxes for us.’ He laughs. ‘Right. OK.’ She hears him scuffling about in his papers. ‘I don’t know if your colleague mentioned anything but I’d like to do a piece about the Literature Trust - your move, your new aims, and so on.’
‘Fine. What would you like to know?’
‘Well, I was wondering if we could go over your plans for the next year . . .’
‘OK.’
‘. . . and also . . .’
‘Yes?�
��
‘. . . whether you could confirm for me that your grant’s been stopped and your director’s been booted out.’
Alice sighs. ‘I was wondering when you’d come round to that,’ she says.
‘Can you confirm it for me? Has your director been given the sack? Why was he sacked? Do you—’
‘People like you really piss me off,’ she interrupts him. ‘Pardon?’
‘The Literature Trust has been doing public arts projects for almost fifty years now. Did you know that? Were you at all aware of that before you phoned me up?’
‘Yes, 1 was.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Alice retorts. ‘You’re an arts correspondent, aren’t you?’
‘Ye-es,’ he says.
‘Then name me one project that we’ve done in the last year. Go on. Just one.’
There is a silence from the other end of the phone. ‘Look,’ he says eventually, ‘this is hardly the point, is it? I just want to know—’
‘I know what you want to know and I’m not going to tell you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re a national arts organisation and you’re a national arts correspondent and you can’t tell me one thing we’ve done. When we do important and effective things like creating workshops in prisons and schools, or bringing Commonwealth writers to tour Britain, or creating a national competition for new writing you lot don’t give a damn. You’re only interested when something goes wrong.’
‘Listen, I understand that you feel passionately about—’
‘I don’t think you do understand. I don’t think you understand at all. If you really do want to do a profile on our aims and objectives - like you said at first - then, fine, I’ll help you. But if you’re just calling me to dig dirt then I won’t. I hate to say it, but you journalists are all the same.’ ‘Is that right? In what way?’
‘You just rehash scandal - all of you, tabloid, broadsheet, it’s all the same. It would be so good if someone came up with a new approach. Or if someone actually thought about what the Literature Trust does or even what literature does before calling me with predictable questions about things that don’t really matter in the long run.’ She stops. She’s out of breath. ‘I see,’ he says. ‘A new approach. Like what?’
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