by Tom Anderson
‘Nah. That could only happen on a cruise liner. They never pass here. On a cargo ship or a tanker they’d gut you instead of shooting you. Maybe this one happened on a pleasure boat. You know, like a little speedboat from some rich dude in Cardiff or Swansea? Maybe a posh sailing boat. You’ve seen them go by, haven’t you?’
‘On their way somewhere else, yeah. And you think they’re full of people murdering each other as they go to the loo?’ I said.
‘Ew! I bet there’s murder on those kinds of ships all the time,’ she grinned. ‘There was one in the papers a year back. Hands washed up on the beach, round here somewhere. No rings though, so they’re probably in the shoreline somewhere – with the diamonds still in ʼem!’
She kicked a load of litter and seaweed.
There were bails of rope and fishing lines strewn across the shoreline, and heaps of plastic bottles. In between it all, me and Gaby foraged about for anything else interesting.
She came up a minute later with a bar of old metal.
‘Look at this one,’ she said. ‘The bottom end is probably copper!’
It was about a foot long, and seemed to change colour exactly half way down. As she held it up, I saw that one half was really smooth and almost shiny. The other half, though, was so rusty it almost looked alive. Gaby was holding the smooth end, and waving the whole bar around like a mini sword or club.
‘Woah,’ she said, stopping it near her face and looking closer at the rusty end.
The bit she was holding had squared edges, still hard enough to make a little dent in her left palm when she moved it to her right. There were beautiful turquoise streaks of what looked like lime-scale running along the flat surfaces of the end she was using as a handle. But the other half had decayed underwater so badly it had swollen into lumps of spongy brown mushrooms, like coral heads of crazy sea-salt rust. That end looked like the stuff you saw in those deep-sea pictures of rotting metal ships. The way the top half of the pole was so different from the second half made it look like some stick of toxic candy floss.
Gaby wielded it gently through the air again.
‘Maybe it was a lightsaber,’ she suggested, swinging it around her head like the Star Wars Kid. ‘The copper would carry the charge. The rotten end must have been the handle. So I’m probably holding it back-to-front. Reckon it was a Dark Side one? Can’t imagine this thing shining a blue beam.’
I held my hand out. ‘Let’s have a look?’
She passed it to me, and I realised how heavy it was. Must have been in the sea for decades to get so rusted at that one end.
‘Seriously,’ I asked, ‘what was this thing?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ she said. ‘And we’ll never, ever find out either. I could give it to one of the plumbers who work for my dad but they’d just trade it in. They weigh-up used copper, see. Dunno what the other metal would have been. Can’t be aluminium.’
‘Maybe this was a weapon?’ I suggested.
‘Nah. I reckon something from a ship’s weather vane. Gonna be years old, mind. Good find, eh? Want to borrow it for your Art project?’
‘Can I?’
‘No!’ Gaby laughed and yanked the bar away again, before holding it out to me and saying, ‘Unless you ask real nice,’ she added a wink.
‘Whatever.’
‘Ah, don’t be like that, Lukee! You know I’ll help if you need it.’
‘While we’re in class?’
‘Don’t push that Lukee luck.’
She turned and trotted back along the shoreline, heading west again, away from town, and I followed just behind.
‘Low tide is much better, though, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed.
‘That’s when we’d have the best chance of finding stuff from the legendary shipwrecks.’
Gaby liked to go on about these, and I was never sure which ones were true.
‘Must have been such a different place back then,’ I said.
‘When?’
‘You know, like before when the Shores was full of people.’
‘It was a landing beach then,’ she said. ‘Just pirates, wreckers. And Vikings.’
‘Wouldn’t they all have been just a little bit apart in history?’ I pointed out. ‘Vikings and pirates?’
She play-hit me with the rusted bar, before stopping and opening her backpack to store it away. ‘Obviously. But they all came here once. There must have been Viking stuff and coins from galleons and all sorts on these beaches back before the army moved in. The smugglers probably kept going right up until they filled this place with tanks.’
Our history teachers always loved the fact that both Chapel Shores and Chapel Marshes had been used for war training. The Marshes were filled with irrigation canals that were once fake trenches for soldiers to practice in during World War One. The military town that had sprung up from those days was why this beach then got used to rehearse for D-Day. Teachers were just about the only ones who cared about that today, though. It only concerned me and Gaby because it meant the shoreline was always washing up little bits of metal from guns or tanks.
‘If people think it’s cool finding stuff from the forties,’ said Gaby, ‘they should remember that putting all those boats and armoured vehicles on the sand probably trashed all the stuff from the more exciting times.’
‘What about the unexploded bombs?’ I reminded her.
‘Myths.’
‘Just like the famous wrecks you go on about then.’
‘Not all of them,’ she said. ‘The one my great-granddad was on was real.’
‘Eh? Your great-granddad?’
‘Yeah! Haven’t I told you that before?’
‘No.’
‘He was a trader and sailor of some kind, too.’
‘You what? Here?’
‘Yeah. Where else? You don’t believe me, do you.’
‘Well, I haven’t got a reason not to,’ I said. ‘But you’ve never mentioned it before.’
‘You’ve never asked before.’
Why would I go around asking her if there was some remote chance she had an ancient relative on one of these old shipwrecks she used to go on about?
‘You normally act all tired and over it when I talk about shipwrecks,’ she said. ‘Why the difference now? It’s as if you’ve suddenly decided to be into it?’
Yeah, I thought, why is that? Was I going to fess up, here and now, to the fact I’d recently seen some out-of-this world stuff that had got me thinking about all this? Was I going to talk to Gaby, the girl who could make me almost flip out in school like only a few days before she might invite me to come here with her and then be all nice?
‘Er… I… well, no reason,’ I said. ‘Does it seem that way? As if I’m suddenly interested?’
‘Hmm, maybe not,’ she said. ‘Okay. Anyway, d’you wanna know?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I’m not making anything up. That’s exactly what he was. Gianni Carranero. My great, great, great-grandfather. He moved coal and other stuff back and forth to America like more than a hundred years ago, from here – when Chapel Shores was just a dock. My dad’s got some leather-bound family history thing that my grandpa had made and it’s got all about those days in there. No photos of him. Well, one, but it’s crap. So I’ve drawn it instead.’
‘But he was on a wreck?’
‘Yeah!’
‘As in a shipwreck?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And here? Out there?’ I pointed out to sea.
‘Yeah!’
There was one big question I needed to know right now. But was I showing too much interest, like she said?
‘His boat sunk within sight of Chapel Shores,’ said Gaby. ‘There are old logs about it.’
‘Was he okay?’ I asked.
‘No.’<
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‘Oh.’ I tried to hide the leap my heart and lungs had just made inside my ribs.
‘He died,’ said Gaby. ‘Lost at sea. Never found. My dad reckons he was involved in some dodgy smuggler business too, though, so he might have just pulled a fast one. Hey, maybe he’s out there now! He’d be like a hundred and twenty or something. Bet he’d have rings on his fingers.’
I laughed and bent down as if to look at the shoreline with my hand. ‘They’d have fallen off by now, when he rotted.’ I tried to recall the nineteen pairs of hands I’d seen traipsing up the eastern shores, and whether they had any rings or jewels on them.
‘Ew! Thanks for that, LLJ!’
‘But you’re not joking?’
‘No. I’m dead serious. Honest. Ha. Get it? Dead serious?’
‘Good one.’ I pushed to hear it again, for sure: ‘So you had a great-granddad who died in a boat tragedy out here? And I’m only hearing about it now?’
‘Like I said, why would you care?’
‘What was its name?’ I said, not worrying anymore about seeming too keen. ‘The ship.’
‘The Pictor,’ she said, straight away, no time needed to think.
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Just one of hundreds,’ she said.
‘What were they all wearing?’
She gave me a look as if I had three heads or something. ‘Wearing? What kind of a question is that?’
‘Er… Sorry. Dunno what…’
‘LLJ, you’re so weird you don’t even know you’re weird,’ she laughed. ‘I love it.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Nah, don’t be.’
‘I just thought… you know…’
She didn’t know.
Neither did I.
I wanted really badly to say something right now, anything, to tell her about what I’d seen the other night. But, each time I thought seriously about it, that hot feeling would hit the sides of my head and my chest would squeeze again, just like when Poundes tripped me.
Maybe I should have, though. I can’t even imagine where we’d be right now if I had. Anyway, no point thinking about that. It’s too late, isn’t it?
‘Hey, I’ll tell you what, Luca,’ said Gaby, moving us on and closing that tiny window once and for all. ‘Thing is, we don’t know much about Gigi Carranero and how it happened. It’s a fun story though, isn’t it! The one mystery in my family history. Everyone has to have a question hanging over them like that.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Anyway. What about your great-granddads? You probably had eight, just like everyone else.’
‘Four,’ I corrected her.
‘Same difference. Four. Howabout yours, anyway? They ever got up to anything dodgy?’
‘Er, on my dad’s side probably. They were all posh until he let the whole thing crumble,’ I said. Then, feeling bad for drawing attention to it, I apologised again: ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t mug him off to someone like you in that way.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, he does his best,’ I lied.
‘I like him,’ she said. ‘He’s on the edge. It would have taken guts to just blow off what your family expected from you. He did that, didn’t he?’
‘What, dropping out of college and running away to India with a load of freaks?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘My god, man! Don’t you realise how cool that is? Hippy parents must be so awesome. I’d love parents like that. Just give him a break!’
‘Whatever.’
We were slowly strolling back eastwards now, and it had been a little while since either of us looked at the shoreline. With the wind behind us, it wasn’t long before we reached the bunkers again. She stopped and climbed up onto the one we usually chose. Her handprint, scratched by the stone, was still on the top of it, just starting to fade in the salt air. She placed her palm down and looked up at me.
I watched her short, cropped hair trying to blow into her eyes but not quite having the length. I climbed up after her and she offered another gentle punch at my left arm. Wriggling her backpack off clumsily, she put it down firmly between us.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Luca… Wanna get closer?’
‘Sorry? What?’
‘You heard.’
‘Er, not sure. What d’you mean?’
‘Here. Maybe I will let you look in my sketchbook,’ she said, fluttering her eyelids. ‘Just once. If you want, of course?’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Come on,’ she said, shuffling over to me. ‘This is an offer you can’t refuse.’
‘I can look in Art,’ I said, trying to be funny but failing. ‘Mrs Rogoff keeps good work in a booklet to share with us re-treads for copying. Bet you’re in there plenty of times.’
‘She won’t have this though,’ Gaby said, leaning back away and putting her hands on her backpack.
She opened it up and pulled out a heavy book which she’d loosely covered in thick, red wallpaper. It was a different one from the Chapel Shores Comp drawing pad she used for GCSE, and I could see from how the sides of some of the pages were ragged and some really clean that is was almost exactly half-used.
‘This is my private sketchbook,’ she said, and began flicking through it. ‘You probably are gonna be in Gabe territory once you see this. I’ve shown it to no one. Ever.’
She settled on a page, which she looked at hard for a moment before making her mind up to go ahead.
‘Here you go,’ she said. ‘The only picture of Gianni Carranero doing what he did best. In his smuggling gear, about to set to sea. I’ve imagined it, so that’s how he has to look from now on.’
She flipped the book round to show me, and the air dropped out of my lungs.
Worse still, she picked up on it straight away.
‘I knew it!’ she said. ‘Something’s got you, hasn’t it!’
I tried to hold my cool, as three fast heartbeats seemed to pump air out of my mouth and ears.
‘That’s awe… some,’ I said, slowing my voice and trying to make it look like the actual artwork was what had spiked my interest, rather than her choice of what to draw. Don’t get me wrong, either – her style was pretty good. She’d sort of scraped against the page with some kind of pastel, knocking these straight, up-and-down strokes into the form of a person – a figure – before shading it with what looked like a grey water colour or acrylic. There were traces of her thumb print left where she’d smeared tone into his face. Or was it shadow?
It was how similar he looked, though, growing on me one second at a time, that was holding my next breath out there somewhere across the cold bunkers.
His hat was nearly exactly the same, except it was tipped towards the back of his head. He had a stupid musket of some kind in his hand. Or was it some other sort of weapon? The way Gaby had deliberately blurred it all – besides being super-clever – kind of left you to make up your own mind. I wondered for a second if the thing he was holding was the useless, half-iron, half-copper bar in her bag. There were so many similarities. Too many similarities. The shape of his stride. The length and shape of his hair. The heavy look as the pastel ran off him with the weight of nightime water.
‘You should show this to your folks,’ I said to Gaby, as I carried on staring.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Dunno. He’s kind of… real, when you look at this, in’t he…’
She didn’t say anything, but just watched me – as I watched the pastel Gianni, wondering what he’d look like wading up out of the deep under a half moonlit night.
He had the jacket too, and the light tunic- or shirt-type thing on underneath. She’d given him trousers that went all the way to his ankles and over his feet. That bit wasn’t right. But the way they were baggy, and the way the shaky charcoal made it look like he was moving… It was st
ill too similar. Too much of a coincidence. His face she’d pretty much left without any smears or blurs, and it had exactly the blank expression. And the eyes? They were the spookiest bit.
‘You’ve left them empty?’ I said, pointing without touching. ‘No pupils or irises?’
‘Yeah. Cool, innit. His photo – the only one my dad has – it makes his eyes look super white, like there’s nothing in them. D’you like it?’
I looked for words, but everything I thought of saying seemed like the wrong decision.
‘I know him,’ she said. ‘Well, I feel like I do anyway. This is him from now on. I mean it. Maybe I’ll find out more about the guy one day. Maybe I should write his book. Or maybe you can. I’ll be the illustrator. How d’you like that idea?’
‘Er, why not,’ I said. It was getting hard to match her enthusiasm while my head was reeling like this.
‘What’s up with you now?’ Gaby asked. ‘You seen a ghost or something?’
I laughed, softly and forced.
She fake thumped me on the arm again.
‘That’s it! I knew you were a creep,’ she laughed. ‘Ella reckons you’re gonna try it on with me one day, but I know your real secret. You were just waiting till I’d opened up to you, got my sketchbook out, like. And now you’ve seen my private doodles you’re gonna nick ʼem and leave me on the beach all mugged and half dead.’
‘Yeah. You’ve got me,’ I said, voice as flat as I could make it.
‘Well I’d smash you first, anyway.’
She went to turn the page of her book, and suddenly I wanted to do anything to prevent it.
‘Hey. Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. Look, it’s an awesome pic, but you don’t need to start showing me more. I mean it. Keep them to yourself.’
She looked at me hard, and squinted, like she didn’t quite trust what I was saying.
‘Okay. Fine. If you want,’ she said. ‘But it wouldn’t matter. I left the next page blank, anyway. That’s what I was gonna show you. It’s blank in case anything else needs to go there in an emergency.’
‘We should be getting back,’ I said. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘If you insist.’
‘Come on.’ I jumped off the bunker and onto the sand below.