by Tim Connolly
“Come on, Ellis,” he groaned, “this is baby stuff.”
But there wasn’t time to think about it. All that mattered was meeting Shelley Neame and there was no way he could do that without washing. It was the lowest of all possible tides. He walked for twenty minutes across the mudflats to the sea, wearing Jed’s bathrobe and a towel around his waist. He carried a bar of soap, a bottle of shampoo and a tall wooden pole. When he reached the water, he planted the pole into the mud, hung the bathrobe and towel from it and hurried into the water until it was deep enough to bathe in and wash his hair. He arrived in the lounge bar of the Victoria pub in Victoria Street very clean, if a little salty, and very late. Twenty-five minutes late. Shelley Neame had been and gone.
He called her from the phone box on Harbour Street. She was prickly and offended at being stood up.
“Is it because I’m bisexual?” she asked.
“No. Not at all. I had no idea you were. I really want to see you. Do you mean you used to be a man?”
“No, dickhead! That’s not what it means.”
“Good. That’d be a bit freaky. What does it mean?”
“If you’re that wet behind the ears it’s probably best we’re not hooking up.”
She was gone and Ellis was pissed off. He really fancied her. She drank Guinness, and he found that indescribably attractive in a woman.
“Bollocks!”
He moped his way across Middle Wall and Island Wall to the pub on the beach, where he removed himself to the corner of the downstairs bar and drank. Really drank. For the first time in his life. He drank pint after pint and when he was drunk enough, he let the spiders know that he blamed them for his foul mood.
“I fancied her, as well you know!”
“You should be thanking us! We’ve saved you from an evening with a bisexual!”
They were taking the piss and he knew it. They just wanted him to admit he didn’t know what bisexual meant. He refused to discuss it with them any further and watched, with sullen detachment, the crowd of students, would-be artists, casual labourers and opt-outers that gathered here every night. He questioned whether, in their zeal not to conform, these people were merely embracing a different flavoured regime. How open-minded were they really, he wondered. If one of them had turned up this evening not wearing the clothes, body-language and politics agreed amongst them, would they have been welcome? They were in each other’s company constantly. When did they encounter something else? They talked about the same things every night. They slept with each other, gradually crossing off every permutation. They despised people with money and constantly bemoaned their lack of it. None of them seemed to go anywhere and yet they spoke of routine as if it were a disease they couldn’t catch.
Ellis’s evening became a blur of drink and unconvincing resolutions. He would look for farm work inland and discover a new heaven similar to Longspring. He would visit Tim Wickham. He would make it through a whole year before going back to his dad and would make something of himself before then. He would read some novels. He would write to his dad once he had a farm job. He would never get this drunk again.
He drank slowly and unremittingly until it was dark outside and he was more drunk than he could have imagined it possible to be. Unaware of the people he was falling into, he made his way out of the pub. The sea air seemed to free up his brain and the information he had been straining for earlier in the evening suddenly came to him. He hurried back and threw open the pub door to share his enlightenment.
“I’ve got it!” he shouted, silencing the downstairs bar. “A bisexual is a one who sleeps with men and women and women and men, right?”
Stumbling home along the sea wall, Ellis fell, and in a moment that was to make him, fleetingly, a local legend, he nose-dived through the driver’s window of a parked car and fell asleep with his face wedged against the handbrake and his legs sticking out of the window.
Longspring was pale and silent and perfect. The sea is never silent, Ellis told himself. He watched Tim emerge from the milking shed and walk down to Michael Finsey’s house. Chloe opened the door, stepped into the garden and took washing from the line. She waited for Tim to reach her and they walked inside together, without touching. Ellis watched this scene play out against the sound of crows in the treetops and shock in his heart. So, it had been Chloe he had seen stepping out of the herdsman’s house that evening. But it was no longer Michael Finsey’s house, it was Tim’s. It was Chloe’s and Tim’s. He was not, after all, to be met here today by the twelve-year-old Tim Wickham he had been missing.
“Why have you got two black eyes?”
“I fell into a car.”
“You look like shit.”
They walked up the track with their arms round each other. In the hay barn they handed each other a rollie.
“I’ve missed you,” Tim said lazily.
“Same here. Where’s Reardon?”
“Ireland. For a week.”
“What happened to Michael?” Ellis asked.
“Got Fincher’s herd at Rolvenden.”
“You’re young to have your own house,” Ellis said.
“Young to have my own herd,” Tim said, laughing under his breath. “It’s fucking excellent.”
Tim laid logs in the stove and they sat at the kitchen table. They opened a bottle of red wine at the end of the afternoon. Tim showed a brief interest in Ellis’s life on the coast before conversation settled on familiar details of the farm. Ellis stole glimpses of Chloe, who was subdued. She had grown heavier and filled out and was infinitely more attractive and feminine to Ellis than the pale, skinny fifteen year old he had once hoped might settle for him. She and Tim seemed to be playing at being adults. And they were not convincing, other than resembling a couple who had been together a long time.
“I haven’t learned how to cook, before you get your hopes up,” Chloe said.
“She’s not joking,” Tim said, pinching her waist and provoking a rare smile.
They got drunk over dinner, drunk enough for Ellis to tell Tim he’d help with the milking. Chloe went to the stove and, with her back turned, asked Ellis about his ‘love life’.
“There’s no one really …” Ellis said half-heartedly.
She opened the stove door and the three of them watched the flames.
“We’ll have to find you a good woman,” Chloe said, without meaning it.
She wrapped a coat around her shoulders and stepped outside. Through a doorway that seemed narrow and hunched, Ellis watched her sadness beam its distress signal silently into the night, before she wandered away to share her secrets with the horses.
It was the sound of a mug grazing the teak blanket chest beside his bed. Before he fully regained consciousness this sound breached the defences of his memory and unveiled ephemeral glimpses of mornings when his dad woke him before sunrise. Momentarily, he thought that they were heading to the Marsh. Love for his father and for those times seeped into his heart and he was sure that his dad’s fingers were stroking the hair off his forehead. He opened his eyes. Chloe was sitting on the bed. She smelled of sleep and her body emanated heat in a cold room.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” she whispered. “There’s a cup of tea for you.”
He felt the mattress rise as she left. It was pitch black outside.
Tim applauded Ellis as he sleepwalked into the kitchen. Ellis grunted and threw cold water over his face. He ran to join Tim on the track to the top field and together they brought in the herd.
The more tired Ellis became the more he felt that he was standing outside himself, watching the day pass. The times he had spent at Longspring seemed unclear and this saddened him. When they stopped for a break in the hay barn, he could have slept instantly.
“Your girlfriend is the only woman I’ve met in the last four months who doesn’t smell of joss sticks,” he said.
Tim smiled and handed the hip flask over. Then, after a silence that had almost stolen Ellis to sleep, Tim said, “My wife.”<
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Ellis sat up. “Come again.”
“Wife, not girlfriend.”
They were silent.
“I didn’t know how the fuck to find you, otherwise you’d have been my best man.”
“Fair enough,” Ellis muttered.
“There were nine guests. You’d have made it a good round number.”
“Who was your best man?”
“My dad, and Reardon gave Chloe away. Her parents wouldn’t show.”
They smiled warmly at each other, but Ellis felt shocked by the disappearance of the boy called Tim.
It was exactly the same. A faint, scraping ceramic sound. Followed again by the sensation of her weight on the side of the bed. Ellis woke beneath heavy, closed eyelids. He had slept deeply and his body tingled in the warm frailty of waking prematurely. He couldn’t feel where his back touched the mattress, so perfectly melted together were his body and the sheets. He opened his eyes. Her white nightdress was ghostly visible in the near dark. He could make out the contours of her face but not the expression. His left hand found her right hand and they held tight, pressing their fingertips into the other’s knuckles. He felt the weight on the mattress shift as she climbed across him. She pulled the blankets away and cold air brushed his legs. She unbuttoned the top of her nightdress and the hem settled across his chest. He touched her warm skin and the cotton brushed his knuckles as he stroked her ribs and allowed his thumbs to stray to her breasts. For the first time in his brief and woeful sex life so far, Ellis felt the body of a woman who was rounded and fleshy and whose movements of lovemaking were not clinical. She fumbled in removing his underwear, then drew the blankets up around them and lowered herself on to him. They kissed tenderly. She had seemed so tiny when they were growing up, and now she was upon him, the warmest, softest, most sensual woman he had touched, with breasts that made him want to kiss and suck and sleep. Her skin smelled of heat, as it had the previous morning. It brought him comfort and yearning in equal measure, as if they were feeding and stealing from each other. Only at the very end did their bodies become urgent and forceful and only then did her hands cease caressing his skin and instead grip it tight. Their kisses guarded each other’s mouth to ensure the near silence. For a few ecstatic moments afterwards, Ellis gazed at the faint details of her body in the tantalising half-darkness and felt enveloped by skin and the wetness of inside her. Then, on the brink of sleep, he felt her body lift away and a desperate longing came over him, like the desire for hope within grieving.
He slept briefly and woke to the half-light. He found Chloe in the kitchen cooking breakfast for her husband and her lover. He didn’t stop. He had put his boots on in the bedroom so that he didn’t have to. Although he was hungry, very hungry, he moved straight through the kitchen, pulled his jacket off the peg and left the house without saying a word. He knew that Tim would still be in the milking shed. He couldn’t think about it. He just had to drive away. And that’s what he did.
It was mid-afternoon when he saw the coast again. For the first time, the familiar sweep of houses on Borstal Hill and the tower in the harbour and the glistening sea failed to inspire him.
I am for ever the person who did that. No matter what happens in all the years, I can never undo today.
He sought the quickest route he could to numbness with what he had in his tin. In the dream that followed, he was sitting on a hillside overlooking a great desert. Far away, alone on the great plain of sand and rock, was a gigantic nuclear power station in meltdown. It looked like a chewed toffee. Snowy the dog appeared at Ellis’s side. They watched a tame sparrow on the ground. Ellis tried to pick the bird up, to stroke it, but couldn’t get a proper hold of it. He fumbled and the sparrow disintegrated in his hand.
He woke and it was already dark. He smoked a spliff and the savage self-loathing washed over him again, leaving in its wake a residue of disappointment. Disappointment at the discovery that he was who he was. He smoked more and curled up on his bed and drifted in and out of sleep. Later, a shiver of cold disturbed him and he pulled the blankets across his body. Then he slept deeply and a curtain appeared in front of him. The curtain was amber and made of millions of wasps. He stepped closer and peered through the droning curtain and saw himself and his mother lying together. It was very hot and the whole world was swamped by a deep orange hue. Ellis’s right forearm was swollen and hurting. The skin on his arm broke open and thousands of spiderlings emerged. They poured out of his arm and converged on his mother and ate her. He woke abruptly, his back prickling with sweat. He was thirsty beyond measure. There was a weight pressing down on his forehead. Opening his eyes, he saw a spider resting on his face. It was the size of an adult hand. The palps were sunk into the soft crease between his lips. The spider didn’t move and neither did Ellis. He breathed through his nose and kept his mouth shut tight. He remained motionless for hours. His vision was obscured by the spider’s abdomen but he began to sense light appearing in the window. The ceiling became washed with daylight. He heard the incoming tide reach the shallow rim of pebbles at the top of the beach. The waves dragged a little of the shingle away and then, in time, retreated to the silence of the mudflats. The day moved slowly from one period of intense thirst to another. In the peace of crystal clear crisis, Ellis felt calmer than he had for some months.
Late in the afternoon, he felt the spider move. He held his breath. The spider walked away. When he was sure it had gone, Ellis rolled on to his side and curled into a ball. He heard his own voice some way away. It was the faintest of whispers. A single word, dissipating into the air.
“Daddy …”
13
Late one night there was a car crash on Graveney Marshes in which three young men were killed. The local radio was full of it next morning and Ellis woke to find a man peering in through his bedroom window. The man was in his seventies, wore old-fashioned tweed and had the look of a Victorian gentleman. He was giraffe-like, tall and thin, with tight waves of grey hair. All of which made him noticeable, but what made him appear positively strange was the way his hands were cupped together in front of him.
“What are you doing?” Ellis called, through an inch of open window.
“Ah, excellent,” the man said.
“What’s excellent?”
“That you’re alive and well. All in one piece, thank God.”
At that moment, a frog leapt out of the man’s hands.
“Damm!” he said, and scrambled after it.
Ellis threw on some clothes and followed the man – who followed the frog – off the beach, across the railway bridge and on to Joy Lane. At the bottom of Medina Avenue the man stopped to straighten up a wonky road sign, whilst the frog continued up the avenue to the furthest house. The road sign was home-made but convincing. It was a triangular warning sign with a red border, inside which was a frog.
“What’s that sign for?” Ellis asked.
“Ah!” the man exclaimed. “Excellent! Excellent!”
“What’s so excellent now?”
“That you’re here.”
“You’ve got to be the tallest man I’ve ever seen,” Ellis said.
“Got to be,” the man replied.
“How tall are you?”
“Six seven.”
“And is this your sign?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it all about?”
“It’s all about the fact that I am a preserver of frogs. Rare frogs. They come to my pond and I protect them. They are wild. They are free to come and go. Those that want to come and go near the road need protection.” He gestured to the road sign, then smiled benevolently. “I am glad you followed me,” he added. “I like curiosity in youth.”
“Why were you peering through my window like a pervert?”
“Just checking you and your chum were unharmed. More neighbourly than perverted, I hope you’ll agree. Come on, I’ll show you the clan.”
“It’s OK.” Ellis retreated. “I don’t want to disturb you.”
Ellis followed the man to the furthest bungalow, keeping his distance. It was the one house that backed on to fields. Hedley led Ellis down the side of the house and straight into the garden and, as promised, Ellis’s eyes and ears fell immediately on a colony of frogs in a corner, where a pond nestled in the shadow of a scarlet willow.
A lady appeared. “Would you chaps like some tea?”
She seemed unsurprised to find Ellis there.
“Yes, please, old thing,” Hedley said. “Darling, this is Ellis.”
“Good-oh. Hello, Ellis.”
Framed by a chorus of frog-song, Ellis managed a bemused smile.
“Make yourself at home,” the lady said. “I’m glad everything’s all right.”
Amusing though it was to discover that there were people who actually said “Good-oh”, Ellis felt uneasy. He didn’t know why. He lit himself a cigarette. Hedley pulled two garden chairs out of the shade. Both men sat and looked across the layered bungalows at a view of the sea.
“Bit cold for tea on the lawn but I don’t expect you want to come inside,” Hedley said.
“This is fine,” Ellis said defensively, exhaling smoke.
“Can you spare me a cigarette?” Hedley asked, and proceeded to puff it in the manner of a man who has never smoked a cigarette in his life.
This does not add up, Ellis told himself.
“Well, I like your frogs,” he said, feeling uncomfortable with the silence.
“Thank you. I won the MBE for them.”
“I don’t believe in all that.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then why did you accept it?” Ellis asked.
“For the experience. Life’s too short to dodge them.”
“A bit hypocritical.”