Shellshock

by Anthony Masters

  A curious image filtered through David’s mind. His father’s eyes were rock hard. As alien as his sculpture.

  ‘There’s one other thing but I’ve never been able to find out much about it,’ continued Tod.

  ‘What’s that, Dad?’ David was fascinated, almost hypnotised by him – by contact with his glittering rock eyes.

  ‘Something about a garland – a necklace of some kind. Apparently it belonged to one of the children Mariolete walled up. It was found on the rocks of the island.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘No idea. But it keeps turning up.’

  ‘What does it do? Is it magic?’

  ‘That’s the bit I’ve never been able to find out.’

  David paused. ‘You said you came here because of the Rock People – those sculptures you were making in England.’

  They’re quite a well-known phenomenon.’ His father’s voice trembled slightly. ‘In the guide books, you know. I read about them back in England, ages ago, and went along to Rob Sebastian – you remember the gallery owner who exhibits me in Canterbury. I said I wanted to sculpt something out of the legend and he commissioned me. It wasn’t much. Then he stumped up another advance, enough to get me here and rent this place and give me a year on a hand-to-mouth existence.’ He poured out some more wine. ‘This is cheap,’ he said with a wink. The hardness in his eyes had gone.

  ‘Dad –’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me about the accident?’

  His father’s face went rigid. ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he said abruptly. ‘No, I didn’t mean that, I –’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to pry into it all. If you’d rather –’

  ‘No. You should know. I’ve been meaning to tell you about Pilar.’ He hesitated and then hurried on: ‘She was a terrible mistake. I’ve been such a damned fool. Your mother’s a very good person and I love her dearly, but I couldn’t stand the idea of living in Canterbury for ever, becoming less and less creative and ending up just running a boarding house. So I came here. And met Pilar.’

  It was curious – it was as if his father was telling him a story that he wanted David to believe, as if he was projecting an image, as if David was the stranger now, the outsider on whom charm had to be showered.

  ‘How long had you known her before – before she was –’

  ‘Killed? Not that long. I got to know her parents because we were neighbours. She’d come and go. Always had the boy with her, of course. The old people despaired of her. She’d gone through so many men and had such a rootless life and yet she and the boy always clung together. Then Pilar got ill – exhaustion really – and she stayed at the house all summer. We got together.’

  ‘Did you love her?’

  ‘Not like your mother. But Pilar was intelligent and well-read and we got on. She was about my age, we had mutual interests, we were both lonely. Perhaps we both wanted stability.’

  But didn’t his father really want someone to agree with him – someone new who would feed his vanity? Surely there was stability in abundance in Canterbury.

  ‘And Miguel?’

  ‘He’s like her. Hot-tempered and cunning. But what could you expect after the life they’d led? And I’m fond of him. I want to do my best by him.’

  ‘But why is he living here? Why can’t he go back up the mountain and live with his grandparents?’

  ‘Because I want to help him. That’s why.’ There was a sudden hard note in his father’s voice and David realised with a shock that he had hit a raw nerve.

  ‘Miguel thinks you’re fantastic, Dad,’ he said hastily. ‘He’s jealous of me –’

  ‘That will pass.’ His father sounded briskly confident and David felt cut out again. Quickly he changed the subject.

  ‘And what about her brother. The taxi driver?’

  ‘I hardly knew him. He worked up the coast. He fished too – had a little boat.’

  There was a short tense silence.

  ‘Do you want to go on, Dad? You don’t have to.’ But David wanted to know everything.

  ‘I want to finish. We’d been drinking and on the way to St Pere José took the corner too wide. I can’t remember anything really – except suddenly being in the sea and swimming.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get them out?’

  ‘I kept diving. The car was on a rocky shelf near the beach. I couldn’t get her out, however hard I tried; the brother was jammed up behind the wheel. I knew it was hopeless when I came up with my lungs bursting. I could feel all my strength going – thought I was going to black out.’ He broke off, his eyes full of tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ said David. ‘I shouldn’t have asked you.’

  He shook his head impatiently. ‘It’s all over. The inquest brought in a verdict of accidental death.’

  His father was speaking very fast now and David noticed there were little beads of sweat on his upper lip. ‘It’s still very painful. Of course, her parents won’t see me and I can understand why. They obviously feel I didn’t do enough. Just let them die. Maybe they even think I brought them bad luck – was the indirect cause of the accident.’

  ‘Do you want to come home?’

  ‘No, but I’m looking for somewhere cheap now. For me and Miguel and you. I know how hard it is for you with him.’

  ‘He hates me,’ said David, trying not to show his hurt and his jealousy. ‘Do you hang on to him because he reminds you of her?’

  ‘No. The old people can’t look after him. And there’s no one else.’

  ‘What about Henriques? Can’t he look after him?’ But David knew his father of old. He had taken over Miguel, made him dependent on him because he was the only part of his new life that was left.

  ‘He’s old too, in case you hadn’t noticed. He’s got his work cut out as it is. But he’s a good faithful servant to them, a relic of the days when they had a successful fishing business. Before the tourists came.’

  The thought struck David immediately. ‘Dad, were they something to do with Manolete?’

  ‘That would be a little too neat. No, but they knew him. Everyone knew him.’ He got slowly to his feet. ‘Do you want to see something I haven’t shown you? I was waiting for the right moment and you’ve initiated it.’

  David was pleased; his father seemed to have taken him back into his confidence. But in the back of his mind, David wondered if Miguel had been shown the sculptures. David followed him to a lean-to wooden shed at the back of the villa. It was quite large and had a padlock on the door. He had always assumed the ramshackle building was full of junk. His father’s studio was at the side, overlooking the mountain.

  ‘Miguel knows what I’ve been doing out here. But no one else does. Not even Henriques. I just want to keep it private.’

  David immediately felt another stab of jealousy. Why should his father be so fond of this boy he hardly knew? And why did he expect him, David, to understand and be tolerant? Here was another example of Miguel horning in, knowing something he didn’t. He thought of how Miguel had tried to kill him this afternoon and suddenly felt aggrieved that his father had taken it all so lightly. Perhaps now he had his new life he just didn’t really care about him any more.

  His father switched on the light and, instead of junk, there was a bare space in the centre of which stood a rock giant, and beside it another, smaller figure. He gasped.

  ‘One of the Rock People,’ said Dad with a funny little dry chuckle.

  Unlike the giants he had seen in the cave, the rocks were cemented into a more symmetrical form and were surmounted by a woman’s head, delicate and with a haunting, yearning expression. The figure was standing, staring at them.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked David.

  ‘Pilar.’

  Beside her stood the other sculpture. It was made entirely of shells, stuck to each other to resemble a man.

  ‘The Shell Man,’ said David.

  ‘I’m going to exhibit them in London.’

>   ‘Together?’ asked David.

  ‘Yes. I think they go together. Don’t you?’ He switched out the light. As he did so, David noticed that his hand was trembling.

  The inside of the house was in a state of decay. Everything seemed to have had too much sun, and the furnishings and curtains were almost bleached out. Miguel’s grandfather was almost blind and his grandmother was crippled with arthritis. Henriques looked after them devotedly, and had done so ever since Miguel could remember.

  As he was finishing his supper, Miguel looked at the aged couple sitting beside him and felt curiously moved. They were like helpless children, already old and infirm, trying to cope with the death of both their children. He knew they hadn’t really taken it all in. They were willing themselves not to think about what would happen. At first, just after the accident, things had been different. His grandmother had sat rocking herself to and fro in a chair for hours, sobbing relentlessly. His grandfather had stood behind her, sentinel – stiff, one hand resting on the back of the chair, the other stroking her hair. They would not see the Englishman, as they called him. They felt he had brought tragedy to the family.

  Henriques brought Miguel a potato omelette, and as he ate it he remembered the day he had met the Englishman on the track. He had been staggering up with a wheelbarrow full of cement and Miguel and his mother had been walking down, heading for the village. They had lived with a number of men over the years; one of them, somewhere, had been his father. They had drifted around the Costa Brava while his mother worked as a waitress in the tourist season and as a whore in the winter. Miguel had run wild. Then the Englishman had come and been kind to him and even maybe loved him a little. His personality was strong; his charm was great. Miguel had liked him more than any of his mother’s other men. Then the awful thing had occurred, the thing that he couldn’t let himself think about. But afterwards – after what had happened – Tod had been so good to him. Had become a father to him. Then David had arrived.

  Sometimes Miguel felt very angry; at other times he was just depressed, there were times when he could no longer see his mother’s face in his mind. It was all just a blur. They had been very close-friends as well as mother and son. Now she was gone. Unlike his grandparents, Miguel did not blame the Englishman. He simply wanted someone to love him. Anyone. Now that she had gone. But David was bound to oust him. He wished he had drowned him that afternoon. But at the last moment he had gone back for him. That had been a pity – a weakness.

  Henriques entered the dim cool room with brandy for the old people and the banana drink that Miguel liked so much. He put it on the table. The room was very still and quiet.

  ‘Will there be anything else?’ he asked.

  His grandmother shook her head.

  Henriques went away, leaving them to silence and contemplation and stagnating thought.

  Dear Gran,

  This is me again from Spain. Miguel is still a pain. He nearly drowned me today but I’m OK now. I saw some weird rock giants in an undersea cave and Dad told me a local legend about them. They’re meant to represent a family that was walled up in a cave as a punishment and the locals built these effigies of them. There’s a legend about a man of shells as well and something about a necklace. Dad’s making sculpture about the giants and the shell man. I’m missing Mum but I’ll be home this time next week.

  Dad’s all alone apart from Miguel and no one will speak to him because of the accident. Pilar’s parents seem to think that in some way it’s his fault, which it couldn’t be. But you know Dad as well as I do. He’s got that glitter in his eye – and that means he can’t see his way home.

  Hope you are keeping well.

  Lots of love,

  David.

  PART THREE

  The Garland

  Jan hadn’t told David she was coming to Spain. She hadn’t even written to him, just in case her father changed his mind. He was like that – negative and unpredictable. She never knew what he was going to do next, and although he loved her, he had an almost perverse tendency to make life as awkward as possible. She knew that they were near David after she’d looked up the names on the map, but as to how near she really had no idea. She was determined to find out.

  The luke-warm sea and the continuous search for shade made up a substantial part of the daily routine. They rose at eight and breakfasted in the smelly bar of the hotel. They arrived on the beach at nine, and there they remained until one when lunch was taken at a small and scruffy restaurant which specialised in dried-up pizzas. Jan had had more than her fill of them. The siesta was taken lying down in their hotel rooms, and then they were back on the beach again until the sun went down. A brief constitutional before a doubtful dinner and they would retire to their rooms or the hotel lounge to try and read amongst the racket of pop music and bottles smashing as the drunks got drunker in The Rover’s Return, the bar downstairs. Each day was relentless because it was the same, and Jan had begun to retreat into a fantasy world of her own. This was occasionally interrupted by her father asking:

  ‘Are you bored, love? Do say if you are. We could take a coach inland and do a bit of sightseeing.’ His pale tired eyes gazed into hers as if searching for the truth that she never meant him to know.

  ‘I’m fine with my book, Dad. Honest.’

  The more he rested, the more he tried to reassure himself that she was having ‘fun’. ‘I had hoped you might chum up with someone of your own age, but it looks as if everyone’s attached, doesn’t it?’

  It did. There was no one in the hotel of her age on their own. She substituted the print in front of her for images of making love on a strip of lonely sand under a huge yellow moon. Then, just as she was getting to the interesting bit, her father leant over from his chair and said:

  ‘Would you like an ice cream, love?’

  Jan sighed, for she knew that she would have to get up and go to the little café on the promenade. Her father disapproved of the swarthy Spaniard who sold them from an ice box on the beach. Perhaps it was the guttural way he called out or maybe he thought his hands were dirty.

  ‘No thanks, Dad.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ He looked at her anxiously.

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘Are you enjoying your book?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘Only you don’t seem to turn the pages. You can always get another English book if you like, love. They sell them on the hotel bookstand.’

  ‘I’m just reading slowly, Dad.’

  Jan closed her eyes and feigned sleep. Her father would have been surprised to know that she was making love to David, clasping his sweating body in her arms and rolling over on the hard firm sand. Then, hurriedly, she stood up.

  ‘Where’re you going now?’

  ‘I thought I’d take out a pedalo.’

  ‘Would you like me to come with you?’

  ‘No. It’s OK. I shan’t be long.’

  Her father looked at his watch. ‘It’ll be time for lunch soon so hurry.’

  Soon, she thought, it would be time for tea and dinner and bed and sleep and waking up and breakfast and lunch and – Jan plunged off, scattering sand over her father as she went.

  ‘Careful, love.’

  Jan was soon out of sight.

  I could kill him, thought Miguel. And if I killed him I would be alone with Tod and that would be very good. All his life he had depended on his mother to see him through. And she always had, even when they had been completely broke and those times when they had both been knocked around. But it hadn’t mattered. They had stayed together. Now she wasn’t there any longer.

  The taxi had sunk so deeply into the water, washed off the rocky ledge in a violent Mediterranean storm, that they hadn’t been able to recover the bodies. A memorial service had been held instead at the little church at St Pere. Tod had held his hand tightly throughout, but the grandparents had just stood apart, distanced by their grief.

  Miguel often went to sit in the little graveyard which o
verlooked the cove where the taxi was submerged. It was strange, he often thought; she might have been married here. But he still didn’t blame Tod. How could he when he was the only person he could depend on? It was David he hated. David the interloper. And since he had returned to the house last night and heard his snoring and saw how he was beginning to possess Tod again, Miguel had made up his mind to kill him. There had been deaths already. People were getting used to them. They wouldn’t be worried about a third.

  Miguel had tested out his skills yesterday afternoon when he had led David into the cave. It had been good to see him so afraid. But he knew he would be in big trouble if David died with him so obviously to blame. He had to make sure that Tod would stick by him afterwards, so it must look like a genuine accident. The problem preoccupied him. It was partly a dream, and Miguel was still not sure whether he would carry it out.

  This morning, after breakfast, he had taken the little sailing dinghy that one of his mother’s lovers had given him and had set off for the island. Over breakfast Tod had read them both a lecture about what had happened the previous afternoon. They had listened in silence. Miguel had apologised and promised to be far more careful, and had then managed to leave without asking David to join him.

  It was a breezy morning and his small boat scudded along with the wind filling the sails so that he could hardly hold them. The spray wafted on board, soaking his bare brown body. Miguel felt exultant, knowing that soon he and Tod would be together and there would be no third person around to get in the way. He had not liked it when his mother had taken up with men, but men were always good for guilty presents and David was really good for nothing. He would land on the island and plot how to kill him and that would give him considerable pleasure.