And so a pattern is established, of emotional lives expressed in a language so reserved that sentiment is reduced to shadow: I am looking forward to getting your letter on Wednesday. What is hidden may as well not exist. Nicky sends letters that read as if he wrote them in prison, begging for news of the outside world: Please would you tell us (Timothy, Richard and I) who won the FA Cup?
It was Ipswich, Nicky. I can look that up for you. Ipswich won the FA Cup final in May 1978, beating Arsenal by a single goal scored by Roger Osborne. You won’t believe how football is going to change.
With hindsight, the postmarks on the surviving envelopes read like a countdown. 22 Oct 1977—he has nine months left. Please, before it’s too late, somebody in these letters should understand the fragility of life and search for words of love. Nicky makes the first move. He experiments with how he signs himself off. Love, Nicky or like Daddy calls me Nick Nack. He signs off love from Nickelpin. He tries out Nickpin and Nicholpin. He insists on versions of himself more individualized than the minimal Beard minimus, and this reaching for an identity is part of his developing character. From Nickypin he gets to Pinwin. His thoughts evolve, the possibilities shift.
The routines, however, remain the same.
Thank you for coming to see me on Saturday. I am looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday.
He sees his mum and dad on Wednesdays and Saturdays because his life is measured out by sports fixtures. Beard min soon put the Blues back into the lead and then went on to score his hat trick. If Nicky wanted a regular meeting with his parents a competitive nature was essential, because parents were welcome to visit the school if they had a match to watch. They could admire from the sidelines, then a brief chat before showers and tea.
Football, rugby, cricket: to get selected for the team was to reunite the family. Nicky made all the teams. As did I.
I came first in a class of twelve boys.
Yes, and doing well at lessons was important too. His letters home are full of competition and standard presentation—the core values of boarding school. The inner workings of his nine-year-old mind remain obscure, except for the discovery that he’s a reader. In his free time he reads Lord of the Flies. He knows that for boys unsupervised by adults, a punch in the face is only the beginning. He has read Treasure Island, in which an impetuous boy comes of age at the seaside.
I drive from The Mill back to the farmhouse at Tregardock. This time, after the twenty-minute walk through the gate, down the field, into the tunnel of gorse and toward the indented cliffs, I break out above the glory of Tregardock uncovered. The sand is vast and wide below me. The beach is suddenly exposed, unveiled, with none of the gradual reveal I’d have witnessed if I’d stayed the first time round.
I’m back. The day is cloudless, a summer breeze cooling me on the cliff and blowing flies off course from their scavenge of rabbit droppings. Now that the tide is out, surfers gather on the grass above the beach to peel themselves in and out of wet suits. I could cry, I feel like I could, but this time I’m not alone so I don’t. Near the life buoy I sit on a promontory above the big brown beach and eat a biscuit. I can’t say if this counts as emotional progress. I definitely don’t want to be crying all the time, but I’ll be disappointed if the beach breaks me up once and then never again.
I sit and I eat and I look. By my schoolboy reckoning, the beach is about 300 meters wide, a hard distance to gauge but somewhere between the longer Olympic sprint events. Out to the left are ten surfers surfing, like the early verse of a modernized song for Christmas. The surfers spend most of their time bobbing in the water and waiting, but today’s Tregardock waves allow a surfer to stand up—I count the best of them—for 6 elephant, 7 elephant, almost 8 seconds. At low tide, about now, the coves have given way to a broad expanse of brown sand, dotted with uncovered outcrops of ancient rock.
Port Isaac is a fishing port adapted for tourism, but also the fictional village from the TV show Doc Martin. The Mill contains the past, but also a fresh layer of experience lived by Jim and Bertie Watson. Tregardock Beach isn’t open to the same kind of change. It is what it naturally is, unaltered in a million years.
The tide turns back, and the waves hump in toward land. If I look closely enough—my mind flicking between then and now, between my inner knowledge and the visible scene—the rising sea will at some point exactly re-create the landscape from our disaster in 1978. The beach starts to diminish as the tide takes over; coves form and they isolate patches of sand between rocks farthest out toward the sea.
I climb down the cut-out steps beneath the life buoy. I’m on the beach, on the sand. To the right, not that far away, a cove forms. I go through a gap in the rocks and I’m on a smaller beach. I find the spot, and look at it. I think this is the spot. I know that memory can let me down in countless ways, but simple forgetting would be the biggest disappointment of all. I take photos to match against the past, snapshots of the bare black eternal rocks. In theory, at the right moment as the tide comes in, twice every twenty-four hours, I should be able to snap identical views and angles to those mapped in my memories.
I remember a narrow patch of sand a little farther to the right than the main beach, where the waves were bigger on the incoming tide. I’m looking for an area of sand free of rocks, where two small boys can run into the sea and jump rolling waves, then quickly lose track of their depth. Also, the sides of the cove need somehow to prevent a rescuer climbing along and leaping into the water to help a swimmer in trouble.
Geologically, meteorologically, the waves, rocks, sand, wind, and light can converge as they did on 18th August 1978. At any other time, when Tregardock is marginally different, the same event might not have happened, not in the same way. A drowning couldn’t happen right at this moment now, for example. At this stage of the tide at this time of day someone would notice a drowning boy. Surfers would come to the rescue, now that surfing in England exists.
A couple walk by, with their curious dog. They’d have saved a small drowning boy, these healthy young adults. I’d have treasured for the rest of my life the sunglasses of a braver, bolder type of bystander. Minutes earlier the undertow could have been weaker, and a few minutes later the beach would have disappeared, so we’d never have tried out the waves.
In this story so many factors are dependent on chance, or on fate. In September 1978 my dad wrote a letter of “observations” about Tregardock Beach, possibly with suggested changes for the benefit of future visitors. He needn’t have bothered: with every passing minute I’m standing on a different beach. With every meter of approaching tide the topography and the hazards change.
I’m looking for 1978, feeling for my bearings by triangulating the reality of each perceptible moment against the geography of my memory. The roll of the waves comes back to me. We jumped and floated with the swell, weightless in every next surge of water. In comes the tide, and now this small portion of beach feels enclosed like a cove: the rocks are big if you’re nine or eleven, and this is as close as I can get. The rocks, the sand, the liquid sea with shifting currents as fascinating as flames in fire, always changing, always the same. I am nearly in the right place. I sharpen my senses to the rawest memory prompts available—smells and sights and sounds. The emotion is somewhere here.
I touch rocks and a damp thatch of hyper-green seaweed. I plead with the crash of waves and a lone drifting seagull to remind me. Please, for my own good. But maybe a perfect picture of the past depends on perfectly replicated conditions. A stream of freshwater rills through the sand to the sea, and to merge with 1978, at the age we were, I need the language we had for our experience. I know the words, because they fill Nicky’s schoolbooks and letters, and we knew no other words but these. The sea was hungry. The air was dusty. The rocks flint. The sky was kidnap. These were the words we had.
To access a pure memory from the present I should wade into the water. I could wade right in, but can’t face it, neither the cold nor the risk nor the drama. I don’t want to e
nter the water. Instead, I find myself reenacting the running away. I hobble into a run, back toward the main beach, half on rocks and half on sand. From somewhere inside me rises a spontaneous mewling sound, a keening that squeezes through my chest, up into my tightened throat. I commune with the gulls, through my stiff unemotional jaw. The noise is because my leg hurts, that’s what I tell myself. My leg hurts, and as I run I limp. I limp and run, and the wounded noise keeps rising and has nothing to do with my leg. The noise is inarticulate pain, grief that doesn’t know how to express itself.
I run as far as the steps, climb up high above the beach, find a grassy spot where I lie down exhausted. I’ve finished the biscuits. I go to sleep, and when I wake not a trace of the beach remains, only gloss Atlantic Ocean from here to Nova Scotia.
2
18th August 1978
The Boy Will Die
The Boy Dies
The Boy Is Dead
The Boy Will Die
I’m the only eyewitness to the death itself, but not to the day, to the immediate before and after. There were others at Tregardock Beach on 18th August 1978. My brother Tim (13) was one.
He’s alive, which allows us to get on well, and I’ve been seeing a lot of him recently in the photographs I salvaged from the attic. Christmas 1969, and in a professional studio Tim and I as toddlers get the matching Norwegian sweaters. Outside in the snow, also late Sixties, we each wear a bobble hat and hooded anorak, with shorts. Tough as they come.
At the beginning, in photographs, Nicky is just a baby in baby clothes. Then he gets a lesser pattern on his jumper, and parents have to be so very careful—from his unmatching clothes it can look like Nicky is excluded from the short-trousered tough-guy gang. In a slide from an early beach, Nicky is partially hidden by his big and greedy brothers, who have claimed the bucket and spade. We close in on the camera, demanding attention.
“There was a divide between the big boys and the little boys,” Tim remembers.
As a grown man, fourteen months older than me, Tim has recently broken his leg—a stress fracture. We meet on a day of low, bumptious clouds, and he crutches himself to a bench where we sit beneath a tree to watch his Under-14 As play cricket. The pitch is sticky and slow, and the boys have trouble hitting the ball off the square.
“How did that divide show itself?”
“We got to stay up later. We could watch Starsky & Hutch, and Nicky couldn’t. In the jobs. We had more chores to do. We were sometimes quite nasty to him.”
“How exactly?”
“We made him fetch the ball when it went over the hedge,” Tim says, “sent him round into next door’s garden.”
Nicky never grew big enough to do his share of the work, or for that matter to tell us to bog off and fetch the ball ourselves. He never drew level, as one day he surely would have done. We’d have compared A-level results and discussed house prices. I’d have drunk too much at his wedding and forgotten the birthdays of his wife and children.
I want Tim’s version of 18th August 1978, and in my novels the older brother is invariably an impressive character who knows what’s what. That’s what older brothers are for, to show the way. Tim will have memories and opinions I respect, though I don’t want to lead him with explicit questions. I want his memories pure, uncorrupted, free of influence from my visits to the attic and to Cornwall.
“I’m trying to retrieve as much of the day as possible,” I say, “to help me gauge the impact of the event, not just on me, on all of us. The holiday setting seems important. We’re on our summer holiday and supposed to be having a fabulous time.”
Upstairs at The Mill, in the bedroom on the left, Tim wakes on 18th August 1978 in a bunk bed beside another bunk bed shared by me and Nicky. I’m on the bottom, which I must have chosen, because I’m older. Before anyone is up and about, Tim lies in his bed and attempts to clench his fists.
“It’s true,” he says. “It can’t be done.”
First thing in the morning, according to Tim, no one can make a hard, tight fist. He doesn’t know why he remembers this, in connection with that particular day, but he does. Pure, uncorrupted. Otherwise we’re on holiday, and it’s another lovely morning under a blue Cornish sky. After breakfast we climb into the car, drive up the track and onto the road and from there we dream of the beach. In those days we saw so much more from the car than kids do now. No headrests to obscure the green fields, the stone cottages, the 1970s cars, every make of which we could identify from a distance by the design of the lights.
“At the beach the sun is shining,” I say, forgetting that I didn’t want to prompt him, “the sea is blue. Then bam!—from nowhere, catastrophe. Is that how you think it works? We never again trust in simple happiness. Do you remember the holiday being perfect until that point?”
“I remember the beach, and being among those other people.”
What I know: the beach, the swelling waves, me and Nicky out of our depth, the saltwater panic, thrashing back in. The immediate family. There is so much I do not know.
“What other people?”
“Mum, who else was on this holiday, apart from us?”
“In the first week my parents came down.”
Okay, I think, I’ll fit them in later. “Where was Dad?”
“He had work. Mummy and Daddy left after the first week, and then your other grandparents joined us. They were with us when Nicky died. Your dad was there too. He arrived during the second week.”
I need to get these details straight, and confirmed by reliable sources. I show Mum photographs on my phone from my visit to The Mill.
“That isn’t the right place,” she says.
I scroll through the pictures: the façade of the house from every angle, the gate from the lane, the timeless glass panels in the kitchen door, and the original Belfast sink. I have a photo of light in the dining-room window and the split-ended stairs, and a photo of the unchanged bathtub.
“No, that’s not it. It wasn’t that nice.”
“Mum, please, I’m not making this up.”
Eventually she concedes that in 1978 the garden may have been overgrown, which is why she doesn’t recognize it, but I can tell she’s not convinced.
“The house wasn’t painted white,” she says, “nor the shutters green.”
“They could have been painted later.”
Mum thinks I’m making a mistake. Her maternal instinct is to protect me, because to her I’m always partly a child and therefore easily fooled. She worries about all of us this way, as if the universe is angled against us and only she knows how to save us from peril. Added to that, we have this new situation in which I’ve gone in search of the past. I have photos to prove the past exists, for real, but Mum is wary because she’s the guardian of Nicky’s flame, such as it is. Larger, smaller, any change in the heat or light will make her uncomfortable.
“We rented the house for four weeks,” she says, correcting me. “My parents were with us in the first week. They left at the weekend, then Gran and Grandpa arrived. Tim’s friend Guy Hake was there too. We had a full house.”
“Mum.”
Slow down, Mum. This is my life, yet I know so little. Mum is filling in the details, but I’ve already lost track. “Why did we book a holiday for four weeks? I thought we used to go for a fortnight?”
“That year was different. Your dad had cancer.”
Your dad, as if whatever other faults he had, he was always that—your dad. As far back as I can remember, Dad lived with the visible scars of a cancer, his neck scooped out at the back. Hospital consultants had carved away his neck to reveal shining tendons and nubs of white gristle, barely contained by a polished layer of thin healed skin. At first they gave him a curve of pink NHS plastic as a prosthesis, with some brown hair painted in at the top. He never wore it, but the plastic sat on his bedside table for months, possibly years.
“I spent the first week of the holiday on my own,” Mum says, “with the idea of trying to cope without him.
My parents came along to help with the house. That’s another reason your dad wouldn’t have wanted to be there.”
Dad’s cancer, in the form of his missing neck, became a distinguishing physical feature for the rest of his life. What I’ve forgotten is that the big surgical interventions must have happened around this time. It was another subject we never talked about.
The more patronizing condolence letters now start to make some sense. You have been through so much in recent years, and have been so brave. Life just doesn’t seem fair. The earlier operations, before the cancer attacked again in 1978, also appear with characteristic restraint in the letters to Nicky at school. From Dad: I am much better now, and from Mum: Daddy is very well, and will be home at the beginning of next week!!, with progress reports thereafter: Daddy is very well, and back at work!!
“But he was there at the beach when Nicky died?”
I pull Mum back into 18th August. We have a practiced talent, I realize, for slipping away from contact with the day itself, in fact from any emotional disturbance. We do it automatically, with such expertise that no one need feel unsettled.
“Yes, he’d arrived in Cornwall by then. So had his parents, and Guy Hake, who was Timmy’s friend.”
First Mum’s parents, then Dad’s parents and a friend of Tim’s from school. I know Guy Hake from the school magazines: Captain of the School and Captain of the Greys. That summer Hake had won the senior long jump, and on the cricket pitch his leg spin bowling seemed to defy the laws of physics. Here comes everyone on our annual family holiday, like a last-chance summer. My dad, with the cancer back in his neck again, was unlikely to make it to 1979. Mum was learning to distance herself, while the grandparents were seizing quality family time before the suffering truly started.
The Day That Went Missing Page 7