by Tom Anderson
This was the kind of stuff my dad spent most of his time doing – and it was why we were skint. From time to time I got something nice out of his deals, like the iPhone which a poor kid like me should never have. The only trouble is that getting some little sweetener present off him is never straightforward… also like my iPhone, which was obviously nicked from somewhere because of all the weird messages it would get from people who must have still had the number of its old owner.
‘Can’t you stick a buy it now option on those shoes?’ asked my mum.
‘Yeah, but that would be even higher if I’m gonna get a decent return. And it makes people not bother bidding, too.’
‘Well, if you will buy up all the sizes no one wants.’
He looked at her with that gaze he uses to say, ‘You’re right but please don’t be right’. Then he went on:
‘Seriously, though. Two G and I could buy in then. This is a really good chance to make a lot for once. Two grand. I know how to get it. That’s all I’d be short if I could just go up with Jeff the next time he goes.’
I’d heard enough. He was on about the same thing again. He’d been trying to get his mate Jeff Rafferty to take him to some jewel market for at least a year but was always needing a little extra before he could buy anything there. Story of his life. Well, story of the pair – mum and dad.
You’re welcome to them, Gaby, I thought.
And so came bed. Without sleep, of course. Sometimes, when I get that brain flu, it’s enough to wipe me out and I get whacked by this full-on heavy sleep, right through until I get shaken out by my mum and have to run past Mr Kleener with the wrong Bunny tune in my ears.
This night was a proper restless one though. I kept wanting to Facetime Gaby and try to talk my way out of it. Wasn’t brave enough, of course. So the only place I could go was deeper into Luca Land.
And it was dark enough there, too. Like always.
Chapter 3
‘Think of it as a diary, Luca. You can trust a diary. It’s only yourself as an audience so you can tell a diary exactly how you’re feeling, or how you did feel at a time and place. You can teach yourself about your own thoughts.’
‘Except you’ll read it,’ I said, sitting up further back into the bed, as if I might be able to crawl away from him.
‘I won’t read anything you write, Luca. Not unless you’re comfortable with it, first.’
Dr Wentloog was sitting side on, so he could stare at me without looking like it. I was probably trying to crawl the wrong way. There wasn’t going to be any escape by clawing through the mattress. Seemed my days of being able to pass through stuff like I was made of gas were done. The window though… Nah, I’d never make that drop. Plus it was locked, and double glazed, and reinforced too, probably.
No option then. I’d have to listen.
‘We’ve got you this dark blue notebook,’ he went on, producing what was certainly, beyond doubt, something very like a notebook that had a dark blue cover. ‘Apparently you like having notebooks for Christmas and birthdays?’
‘Love it.’
‘Good. What do you put in them?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Yeah. Nothing.’
‘You mean that you don’t see the contents as being worth much to anyone else?’
‘No. I mean nothing. Blank pages. I don’t write in any of them.’
This was a little bit of a fib, but this guy doesn’t deserve the full truth.
‘I see,’ he said.
But he doesn’t see. I can promise you that.
* * *
What I’ve always loved, more than any other part of the human world, is the night. Mind you, it’s not really the human world, when you think about it, is it? That’s probably why I’m so into it.
You know the way most kids get scared of the dark when they’re very little? Didn’t happen to me. No way. I’ve gone into the night since as young as I can remember. First I used to just get up in secret and watch out my bedroom window for hours. I remember the orange street lights and waiting for ages to see tiny things happen, like a cat go past or the milk floats that used to come round in Chapel Shores. I remember the noises and how the dark would amplify them.
One time I waited for hours for a far off engine noise to grow closer. In the end it grew and grew so loud that by the time the winter gritting truck trawled its way down my street it was as if a jumbo jet was landing overhead. It gives me chicken skin to think of it now.
Those are the little things. If you’re a proper night-watchman, you’ll see bigger deal things sooner or later, as well.
In my case, sooner – but everything I saw as a little kid is old news now, right? What’s the odd talking animal, flash of light, UFO or gap in the clouds when you think about it, anyway? Even the ghosts I reckoned I’d seen as a little child. None of them ever really did anything to me anyway, so who cared?
That night, though. The night I’d been thumped away by Gaby like that. That night I didn’t even try to nod off before heading out. No point. There was and always would be one solution to feeling as hollowed out as that. One thing that would make it go into the background for a little while…
Heading into the night – well, I’d done that for years too. It’s as if it lets you figure out the world when it’s not looking. Like going onto a pitch, a court or a track after some huge race or tournament and seeing it silent and bare, all the fuss gone for good.
You can walk streets and the cold isn’t even cold. It’s too exciting for that. Roads are so empty you could lie in them, gardens and driveways are still and sleepy. You can stare at things, step on things, sit next to them. Nothing replies or tries to make you feel uncomfortable. Going out into the night, if you time it right – the darkest, darkest hours – makes you think the world was made for you. The same world that spends all the waking day trying to crush you and to hold you back. Seen in darkness with nothing but that frosty mist and the strange glow of street lamps, it’s yours to play in.
It was somewhere past two when I slipped out and made straight for the dunes and the bridle path to the sand and rock behind my house. My parents genuinely had no clue I did this, and so the front door key was always under the phone and easy to slip silently around in the lock.
The Council drop the streetlights sometime around then, too, so it was just a matter of feeling out the pavement underfoot, before the point when it turns to long grass and I’d hop that little broken fence. I could see the outline of the dunes and crops of longer, spiky grass before the thin stretch of pebbles leading to the beach. And then there I was: miles of freezing, moonlit ocean ahead of me.
It was high tide, and I tried humming something that kept rhythm with the little shore-pound that was rolling the pebbles every couple of seconds. The moon was at about three-quarters and right over the far-off horizon. Below it, a wobbling shape of lunar reflection shook gently on the silk surface. At the point where the water met the shore, that sheen of light would fold inside the little breaking waves and then jump around on the angry water getting flung up the beach.
Just above the tide mark, where the ground was cold but bone dry, I sat down and thought of nothing at all. There was so much space around me, I didn’t need to. Anything living that wanted to disagree was sound asleep – deep under, out for the count, off in dreamland, too far away to matter.
That rhythm I’d been looking for started to look for me instead. The cold ground felt good, and I wanted to lie back on it and look at the sky. That was when the first figure began to break the surface.
At first it didn’t stop the emptiness in my mind at all. I watched that little arrow of water rings disturb the sea as if it was just a nosy fish – or even a sea turtle, except they only like warm water. So when a dark lump began to rise out, I watched it and waited as if I had been expecting them.
It was when that lump kept pushing out of the water, kept rising steadily, twenty metres away, then nineteen, then eighteen, that I realised it was a human head, and that below it the head had shoulders.
Wow-wow-wow-wow-wow, went a voice in my head. Stand up, run away. But I didn’t need to do that at all. The figure was rising out of the water at such a steady pace it felt as if he wasn’t going to be any threat at all. It was all so slow that it looked like the sea had turned to oil or become some sort of black treacle. I could see the saltwater draining off his clothes, a dark and shiny gloop. They were a properly odd shape, too, his clothes. That’s how I knew he wasn’t from our time.
When the first man got his feet onto the sand the second figure was already rising behind him. Now I could see better what they were wearing. There were little bits of seaweed hanging out of the neck of the leader’s jacket, and under that was a slightly lighter shirt. It was old, though, and baggy. Maybe more of a tunic than a shirt. His trousers were sagging and tucked into knee-length socks. He had a beret hat on too, which the sea hadn’t knocked at all. It was perched neatly towards his forehead. The jacket had long tails, and the water was draining off them, faster and lighter now he was on dry land.
I scrambled softly across the floor, backwards, to the pebble line and wedged myself against a rock that shaded me from the moonlight. He had to have seen me. I watched his shadow quiver up the beach in front of him as he walked, same pace as always, up the sand.
The second figure was now out of the water to his waist, and he was dressed exactly the same.
And there was a third one – a third man, rising gently from that spot on the surface. Over and over again, that little circle of ripples would begin, then break into another dark, moving object, another head, another hat, another wide-shouldered jacket. The forth was exactly the same distance behind, too, and the fifth.
By now the leader of this procession was about to go right past me, and without moving my head I glanced up towards his face.
There was no expression at all. His eyes, white in the moonlight with tiny dark pupils, were focussed dead ahead. His square chin had a tracing of dark stubble across it, and his mouth was closed tight. Every step, on sand, pebbles, rocks or the grass, was the same distance – feet the same length apart, and at the same speed. All he did was move forward, as if pulled towards something behind my housing estate at the end of the dunes.
The second guy trudged along just like him, brilliant, bright eyes gazing straight ahead, no notice of me at all.
By now I had begun counting them. Besides the two to pass me, there were four more making their way across the dark sand, one more almost free from the water and still another pair of head and shoulders rising from the glassy surface behind.
And still, each had the same clothes, the same weight of water running off them, the same seaweed and grime around their clothes and hair. One had a small crab clinging to his trousers, and another a few barnacle shells on his back, but you could see the way they’d all put the clothes on. Their hats were at an angle, the undershirts baggy, the socks high and tight. A uniform, identical – like they were all meant to be part of the same body.
I had slipped back into that rhythm in my mind that the lapping waves had made when I first arrived. The figures kept passing, and I kept watching, staring – following them with my eyes as they all, one at a time and equal distance apart, slipped up over the dunes and back into the night, headed for the streets where I lived.
It was the most natural thing in the world. I felt like I knew them right away. I’d seen them, somewhere before, far, far away in the deepest bits of my own head. And now here they were, doing what seemed like just the right thing for them to do.
I leaned back against the damp rock, felt sea water starting to strain up through the sand, wetting the seat of my jeans. Still the cold hadn’t got to me. I watched the shining surface slow down again, as the patch of water they’d emerged from healed and smoothed over. The horizon was marked out by the end of that white strip of dancing moonlight. Uneven edges of moving foam slipped up the sand in gentle layers, thinning out as the tide dropped back. I knew exactly how long I’d been here, exactly when to go back. The image of each of the men strolled on and on into my memory as I looked at the footprints they had left. My house and the warmth of bed could wait a little longer.
I hadn’t lost the count at all, either.
There had been nineteen of them.
Chapter 4
It was nearly five in the morning when I got in, and a few yellow upstairs lights were just pinging on in my street. I was back in bed straight away, two and a half hours before my mum woke me for school. Or, as she puts it, checked I’d managed to wake up for myself.
‘Luca… That’s you up, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good.’
I’d been doing a better job of the whole waking thing anyway. I’d put my iPod into a speaker port in the evening and set it to fire up with Toots and the Maytals singing 45-56 That’s My Number? which is the only song that gets me out in the right way. It’s gentle. It drumrolls you in and then gets going gradual enough to make you just about happy to wear another day on the chin.
Maybe it was the two hours’ sleep. Maybe my mum giving me hassle about being politer to my dad as she drove me to the corner. Maybe just bad timing, but this next morning, like I knew he would, Mr Kleener got his wish.
‘Luca Lincoln-James. Registration started three minutes ago. Stay right where you are! Line up by the fence.’
It was brutal. He doesn’t get me that often, but when he does it makes you want to curl up and fall into a pit with no bottom. You can tell the guy loves it, too.
‘Your excuse?’
‘You know I have none, Sir.’
‘Excuse. Now.’ He doesn’t let you just be late.
‘Uh… Traffic?’
‘Leave earlier, then. You know that. You need your attendance figure. You’re missing out otherwise.’
‘I did.’
‘Did what?’
‘Leave early Sir.’
‘Think of all the money that goes into your education,’ he began. ‘All the work and all those people running it, all getting up, all making it here on time themselves. Kids to care for, milk to buy, car tanks to fill. But they still make it. And then this is how you thank them? It’s rude of you!’ He had the whole speech off by heart.
‘I know,’ I told the floor.
‘So… Let’s get on with it. Inside, Reception, sign in then wait for me.’
I love the way they punish you for ‘missing out’, by making you miss out more. Anyway, that day it was fine. I waited for him to catch a few more latecomers in his net, thinking how it was okay not to be in assembly at least. Plus it was a good chance to think, awake, in the daylight about those weird men from the beach.
What I’d seen the night before had done the job of pushing crap from the day into the back of my mind. Did it really matter at all if Joseph Poundes was in today, or if Gaby was, or if either of them had any interest in me? Technically, that’s what I should have been caring about. Gaby especially. But now I had something better to fill my head with.
No sleep does great things for a kid my age, by the way. It means I can’t think about anything that adults want me to, like Maths or English for example. It also makes everything seem kind of unreal. Mr Kleener was back at Reception with two more kids, arranging to have them call our parents about lateness and to get us on this attendance e-monitoring thing he loved.
For me though, it was all about what was in my head. There, if I squinted, or rolled my eyes into my head, were those figures I’d seen. It was like I was looking at them all over again. I tried working out how many hours ago they’d happened to me by now. And then came the job of wondering what they were.
‘Make sure all three of these leave for lesso
ns before nine,’ Mr Kleener was saying, to someone. ‘Get them booked in to spend lunch here, though. They owe us extra time. I’ll send them out to litter-pick, maybe.’
I wasn’t tuned in to that business, though. I had a bigger question to deal with. Who or what were these shapes – men or shadows of men – that I’d seen on the shoreline last night? Were they alive? Of course not. Or not in the way we consider being alive, anyway. And who walks out of the sea? Sailors? Ghosts? Ghosts of sailors? Maybe they were wreckers or smugglers from some of the folk tales people in this town tell kids. Visitors from a time when this was an exciting place to live. And where were they going?
The slip was in my hand, confirming my lunchtime appointment back here for Mr Kleener’s late club, and so I walked, distracted, towards lessons. I knew the one thing the figures in the dark couldn’t be, though. I knew it from the start. The one thing they definitely weren’t was a one-off. They knew what they were doing. You could see it in their eyes, in the perfect distance of their paces, in the straight line they cut across the dune. They would be there again another night, too. I was sure of it.
* * *
No surprise; Gaby wasn’t in. And Poundes? Of course he’d be around, but for now he didn’t seem too interested in holding onto yesterday. That had nothing to do with forgiving or forgetting, mind you. It was just that he had his interests elsewhere. When I saw him, he was hassling a couple of the best-looking girls in our year with this creepy smile and his loudest voice. Oh well, at least two people on site had the power to draw some sort of cave-man warmth out of him. Fine, I thought. Let them have his attention.
I wondered for a minute what it might be like to be someone like Joseph Poundes. His sort probably overlooked how intimidating it was to get singled out like he did to me yesterday. They move on like it’s nothing, but the heat of that moment is still left to affect the weaker one. Joseph Poundes probably hadn’t thought once about my existence since, a comforting thought, almost.