As they drove in the police car, Blowers chattered on about the nightmares of the last week as if he and Arthur were old friends. He talked as if he was an old hand at policing although he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
‘My poor aunt lost a littlun,’ he said, ‘tiny mite of a thing he was, she couldn’t hold onto him and he was taken from her arms. Terrible thing,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Wave came and swept him away. We found him, though, that’s something.’
Arthur muttered a platitude. He thought of Muriel running to her family, the mass of them in those slum-like cottages, exposed, so close to the sea. They drove back through the town to Beach Road.
‘Aren’t we going on the coast road?’ he asked.
‘I doubt he’s gone far,’ replied Blowers, cranking the gears.
‘But what about what you said?’
Blowers continued to talk as he parked the black Wolseley next to the harbourmaster’s house, right on the quay.
‘Truth is, I read a lot of crime novels. Got a bit carried away. They don’t float away usually, bodies, they sink.’
Arthur imagined Jack’s body at the bottom of the sea, clouded with mud and silt, entangled in seaweed. And then he remembered Mrs Frost’s body, like a dead mermaid on the sand. Her body had come back. But it was a fleeting thought because the shop was across the street and he couldn’t help but turn in the direction of the dark eyes of the windows. He glanced up and thought that he could make out a shadow behind the net in the parlour window upstairs. They were now walking along Beach Road and he felt as if his mother must be watching them as they walked. He swallowed and regained his voice.
‘But if they sink then why are we coming out here on our own? Wouldn’t we need to dredge or something?’ PC Blowers had some kind of rope with him but nothing mechanical.
‘Oh, I reckon he’ll have floated up by now. But he’ll not have gone far. They usually come in where they drown.’
‘How do you know where he drowned?’
‘I don’t,’ said Blowers, glancing at him, ‘just a hunch.’
Arthur didn’t respond. His heart was hurting, it was beating so fast. The workers mending the breach were having a tea break, brought out to them by the Red Cross, and had mittened hands clamped tightly round steaming mugs, facing away from the North Sea to protect themselves from the cutting north wind. They nodded at the two young men as they passed, noting the PC’s helmet and keeping a respectful distance. Blowers waved at them as if he was out on a day trip to the beach. Arthur kept his head down. Ahead of them there seemed only ruin and destruction. They came to the end of the road, the old Pinewoods caravan site down on their left, but where the Jubilee Café had stood there was nothing there.
Blowers handed him a pair of long boots, like anglers’ waders, and they spent a few fruitless minutes picking their way through the debris of broken chairs and tables that must have come from the café, or the caravans.
‘Thank God the caravan site was closed,’ said Blowers. Arthur murmured agreement. He had his eyes trained on the water, imagining at any moment he would see… But he wasn’t sure what he would see. If they found Jack, what would he look like? He could hear his own breathing very loudly in his ears and felt as if his body had dislocated itself from his brain because it was moving automatically forward, as if the pull of the water was irresistible and someone was leading him step by step through the churning brown liquid.
‘It was near here where your boat sank, weren’t it, Mr Silver?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said faintly. ‘It might have been near here. It was dark. I got lost.’
He followed the policeman as he waded along the edge of the pine trees. They were exposed, out here, the ruined fields and marsh in front of them. This place of sanctuary, dripping with memories, had been desecrated forever. They moved further away from Pinewoods and Beach Road, past the bottom fields of Howe Farm, whose dark presence he felt rather than saw, as only the tops of the chimneys were visible. He imagined Verity watching him from the house, though there were no windows in sight. They were almost at the end of the pine trees where the trees stopped and there was only open saltmarsh and winding creeks to the sea. He had an uncomfortable feeling of being watched, but there was no one there in this bleak wilderness. They had been looking for a long time now. The meagre light was fading and he thought they would have to turn back. Surely they hadn’t come this far in the boat? He began to feel a dangerous hope that they wouldn’t find Jack’s body, that the policeman was wrong. The body had drifted after all.
‘Oh, blimey.’ Blowers was somehow ahead of him, close to the trees. For a second Arthur didn’t move. He kept staring at the swirl of muddy water below him, eddying around his boots. He heard the tone in Blowers’ voice and knew what it was. He thought that if only he could stay staring at the water and not ever look up, he could keep the sight out of his head. But that was impossible and he lifted his gaze to where Blowers was looking. At first, he saw nothing but the constable’s black cape and preposterous helmet.
‘Stay back, if you don’t mind, sir,’ said Blowers in a newly officious voice.
Again, he considered how he could turn and flee and never see what Blowers had seen. And again, he moved towards the policeman and then he saw.
It was a strange sight at first: not a branch but an arm dangling down from the tree. In the shadows of the wood, with only a sickly light from the pregnant snow clouds, he could only see the outline of an arm and a hand attached, white against the black of the tree. An arm. A tree. Perhaps it was not Jack after all. Perhaps it was another man. But then he saw the body too, the head drooping down behind the arm, the legs hanging above. The hair was copper red. And on the ghastly, greenish, bloated face a dark, purple mark blooming on the forehead. He had moved past Blowers who tried to stop him and he shook him off – ‘Sir!’ His legs had taken him towards the body, drawn to it. The policeman shone his torch on the body and something glinted bright.
A twisting in his gut and he bent over, clutching his stomach. The remains of his breakfast splashed onto the puddles in a gush of bile.
‘Best get back, sir,’ Blowers was saying. But as Arthur uncurled to stand up, he saw what it was that had shone – the metal chains Jack wore were hanging from round his neck – two ID tags, some kind of phial and a key on a chain hanging down behind the appalling, deformed body. In a swift, automatic movement, Arthur reached up and slid the key and chain over the lolling head and put it in his pocket.
Behind him, Blowers was saying something but Arthur couldn’t hear him. Then something wrenched the air. A haunting cry like an animal in distress. He looked up to see Verity, running with her long legs towards them over the marsh. He had no idea why she would be there or where she was running from. She had appeared from nowhere. The skin on her face was so pale it was almost translucent and the shiny dark of her hair and the black of her eyes made her look ghostly. He grabbed hold of her to stop her from seeing the body and she fought like a wild creature against him but he was stronger than she was and he spoke in her ear. ‘Don’t look.’
In his head a refrain played. Jack is gone. Jack is gone. Jack is gone.
5.
It was Saturday afternoon, three weeks after the flood, and Arthur sat in a booth in Askey’s milk bar on Staithe Street. The low light made stripes across the black and white checks on the floor and illuminated the kids sipping shakes and coffees at the bar. In front of him was a library copy of Brighton Rock. He was not really reading. Rather than the lines of the book he saw the grotesque fish eyes in Jack’s swollen body.
He reached into the pocket of his jacket and his fingers touched sharp metal. The key was still there.
Peter told him the US Air Force had taken over the investigation into Jack’s death, but so far, no one had come to ask him about the night of the flood. Neither the local police nor the RAF, nor the US Air Force. He didn’t know what to make of it. Peter said the local police had tried to keep hold of the
case but the Americans had insisted they must have jurisdiction – and given no explanation. It confirmed to Arthur that they were hiding something. If Jack had military secrets, they wouldn’t want anyone getting hold of that, would they? And he had to keep reminding himself: no one knew he’d been with Jack in the boat. That spotty youth of a copper had been funny with him but he didn’t know. No one could know what had really happened. But the very fact of Jack’s body being found made him nervous. He wondered if anyone knew about the key. What was it for? He was certain Jack had been involved in something secret. If he could find out what it was, perhaps Verity would come back to him. She had screamed when she’d seen the body. But it was him she had been with the morning of the flood. Him, not Jack. And Jack was gone now. He was gone and he’d been a traitor. Arthur had seen him in Norwich, passing something to that man. Could it be negatives of bomb sites, targets in the Eastern Bloc? If she could only see what he’d seen. But he needed proof. It went round and round in his head with no answers, no resolution.
He hated being at the flat on the quay – the wrecked shop and his mother with her frenzy of restoration and cleaning. It wore her out and sent her, sighing, to her bed. He asked her if she’d seen the doctor again and she said she didn’t want to bother him, not at a time like this. But her face was drawn in pain and she lay fully dressed on her bed, clutching her stomach. He knew nothing about cancer and what he should be doing.
In Askey’s, he was half eavesdropping on the young kids in the milk bar and their talk of American music. He saw in them the same desire to get away, to hear and feel the world, but they were talking about pubs and jive nights in Norwich – it wouldn’t occur to them to see beyond Norfolk – and they possessed a contentment he had never had. He envied them their easy, untainted consciences and their talk of be-bop and jive, as if these were the only things that mattered.
A hand touched his shoulder. Muriel stood in front of him, wearing a tight-fitting dark green coat and hat, holding a teacup and saucer. The coat emphasised her nipped-in waist. Her complexion was even paler than usual despite the rouge on her cheeks, her eyes red-rimmed and, behind her lipsticked smile, the shadow of loss. The memory of her black-smeared face in the rain came back to him.
He half stood. ‘Muriel, I – how are you? I haven’t seen you. I heard about…’
She gave a flick of her hair and sat down opposite him. ‘It ent just us.’ She opened up her handbag and took out her cigarettes. ‘I hear your mother’s got the shop open again,’ she said.
‘I should be there now.’
‘Why aren’t you then?’
‘I can’t face it any more. Since the flood, it’s all… I don’t know, everything seems ruined.’ He drifted off, then remembered again. Little Freddie Gittings. The policeman, Blowers, had told him that the boy had been pulled out of his mother’s arms. ‘It’s not important. How – how is your family?’ He should have said that first.
She took a drag of her cigarette and blew a plume of smoke out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Mother’s not herself. She’s raving. Says all sorts. Keeps saying his name over and over again and there’s nothing any of us can do.’ Another drag. ‘She’s on some pills what the doctor brought her. They make her all funny and drowsy and she looks at us, all blank and empty, like a sort of animal that’s been stunned. Whole families’ve been coming round and bringing us scraps of food an that but she hardly notices them.’
Arthur heard the voice of Blowers saying about his aunt. Blowers was Muriel’s cousin. Of course. He’d known that. He had a sudden lurching thought that the policeman might have told Muriel about him finding Jack’s body.
She noticed him watching her and flashed him her teeth, then paused, biting her bottom lip. Without meaning to, he’d put his hand on hers. He withdrew it and, to do something, lit up one of his own fags. There was a white triangle of skin beneath her yellow scarf and above the top button of her coat. He imagined putting his lips to the soft, cold flesh, pressing his fingers down into the depths below. The image spread, filling his head, and he allowed it to, strange though it was, because it made his skin tingle and his blood pulse. Nothing had done that to him since the flood.
‘I saw you through the window and I thought – I need to say thank you for what you did,’ Muriel said.
He shook himself away from his reverie. ‘No you don’t, I didn’t do anything. I wish I had, maybe we could have avoided…’
‘Don’t talk like that, Arthur, it ent going to change anything. Anyway, I came in to say thank you, so there you are.’
She raised her eyebrows at him and put her little finger into her mouth to bite her nail and there was a kind of challenge in it that made his stomach twist.
‘What are we going to do now that’s done? No use feeling sorry for ourselves, is there? There’s worse off than us.’ She had finished her tea and was stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray, looking at him so directly he could see himself reflected in the pools of her stare. He blinked and tried to take a sip from his now empty cup, then put it down again. He closed his eyes and saw himself kissing her red mouth. He swallowed, amazed at the thought of it. With Blowers and her being cousins, he ought to keep clear. But then everyone was related in this tight-knit, suffocating place. And he’d had enough of being alone in his head and here she was, an offering.
‘You want to go somewhere?’ Her voice came from a long way away.
He looked up and realised what she was saying. ‘I – I—’
She was a blur of green. He could hardly think. He saw Verity’s ghost-like face when she’d seen Jack’s body and he wanted to get it out of his head.
‘Where?’ he said, as if that was important.
She laughed and shrugged. ‘You’ll work it out.’
‘Fine,’ he said, and if it sounded as flippant as he thought, she didn’t seem to mind. She smiled with conspiracy and he noticed the way her lipstick bled at the corners of her mouth.
How they got to the shop he couldn’t say; it was as if he was propelled there by something other than his own legs. She put her hand into his and it was small and burning hot. What if someone saw them? His body was a foreign thing, a jumble of nerve-endings only. He felt her pulse throbbing against his too-big hands and imagined tracing a line up her arm to the breasts beneath her coat.
At the door he couldn’t look at her. He held his finger to his lips. Upstairs there was silence. Through the grey shadows of the ruins of the shop he led her through to the storeroom and, with the key he kept in his pocket, locked the door.
Dark and cocooned in the windowless room, he could barely see her, just a dim glow from her hair and, close up, the whites of her eyes. There, alone, with her facing him, he realised how tiny she was – she only came up to his chin – and he felt as if he could scoop her up and into himself. There was a moment when he saw himself standing in his stockroom with Muriel. A fisherman’s daughter! He wished he was half-cut, but then her soft little fingers felt along his jaw and he emitted a small groan. His own rough skin found the triangle of smoothness and he felt, as gently as he could, along her collarbone. Her body juddered and shivered and reached up to him.
Muriel’s mouth was warm and alive; her tongue flicked his as he drew the tip of it along the edges of her teeth and he bit, gently, her lips and her neck.
She helped him take off his shirt and he pulled at her blouse. Her coat and hat were already in a heap on the floor. Their fingers were a flurry of buttons and braces and clasps, of cold metal on skin, and then sudden warmth when all at once there was nothing else left; they were stuck together. He wished for a second he could see her clearly but then it didn’t matter because he could feel her and that was enough, too much.
Her body was soft and hard at the same time and he couldn’t believe he was touching this perfection, the curve of her back, the smoothness of her shoulder. He didn’t trust himself to touch her chest, he felt them, her improbable breasts, pushed against him and he fell into her, still holding he
r body tight to his. And then he was almost bent over double, she precarious, as he tried to lower her down to the floor. She started to laugh. ‘Stop,’ he said but he was laughing too. She nibbled the finger he had put to her mouth and her hand reached down and there was no way he could stop himself. His knees buckled and they collapsed onto the floor and he pushed her down with an urgent need to capture and possess the salty, smoky, living flesh of this girl who was giving herself to him. He no longer knew who or what he cared about and it didn’t matter that he was on top of Muriel on the dusty, cold floor of the storeroom. The only thing that mattered was the violent need to push and push until he could be released. He gave himself up. He was here and yet not here, somewhere else entirely where neither Verity nor Jack nor his dying mother existed.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh fucking God.’
*
He murmured into her hair, his hand stroked the line of her hip and across to her rounded little stomach. His legs were sticky and his upper body exposed and cold. He wished he had a blanket to cover the two of them, but with her lithe, warm body still against his, for the moment, he couldn’t move, didn’t want to.
The Night of the Flood Page 23