by F. G. Cottam
Physically, Brodmaw Bay lay on the southern side of Cornwall, between Veryan and Mevagissey. It was about twelve miles from Truro and the same distance from Castle Dore. Leafing through the book containing Lillian’s illustrations, studying their detail, James thought that only the remoteness of the place could have kept it so unspoiled. The A303 was a venerable and often tortuous route to the south-western tip of England and there was no alternative road. That put Brodmaw Bay about four hours at best from London by car. Had the place been nearer, it would by now have gone the spoiled, affluent, weekend way of many of the more picturesque seaside settlements of Suffolk and Sussex and most of Devon.
He paused at the picture of the church. He switched on his desk lamp. It had grown overcast outside and gloomy within. He glanced up briefly and saw the fat raindrops of a summer shower hitting the panes. He looked at the illustration again, at the weirdly canted graves and the smashed windows of the church itself and its crooked spire and stove-in door and the pitch blackness beyond it.
The picture was suggestive of a furtive sort of violence. The church doorway seemed to pose an uneasy threat. It looked as though some dark and loathsome secret lurked within that was the opposite of what it should have been in such a building. Old churches in his experience were characterised by a kind of serenity; as though the spirituality of faith elevated them from the hurly-burly of a sometimes harmful world. They were redolent of peace and dignity. This one did not look like that. It looked like it sheltered something that squatted and snarled among its rotting, gloomy pews.
James heard a snicker of something like laughter then from beyond the window before him. He thought that the sound was impossible. The double-glazing would have prevented him from hearing so deliberately sly and secretive an utterance. But he looked up anyway, at the dark green of the bushes beyond the matt trunks of the silver birches in the grey light, dripping.
He could see a face. The eyes stared back at him through baleful yellow pupils set in skin as coarse and featureless as sacking. And he thought that the sound he had heard was doubly impossible. There was no nose and no mouth to the unblinking visage. There was nothing out of which sound could have escaped. There were just the eyes, surprised and surprising and watching him intently from a place of concealment in the hedge at the back of the garden.
James blinked, deliberately, looking away when he opened his eyes again, before looking back. The face was still there. But the expression had changed, somehow. The eyes had narrowed. They looked provoked and angry.
The face was only a couple of feet off the ground. Either it belonged to a child, or its owner was crouching down in an effort to hide. James did not know which of these possibilities was the more disturbing. He thought that the woven texture of the skin might be an effect caused by the rain on the glass. But he could not understand how the bleared pane could be depriving the sackcloth face so completely of its nose and its mouth. He had decided it was an optical illusion, a simple trick of light and shrubbery when, just as he had a moment before, the apparition blinked.
James stood and backed out of the room. He thought that he had to do something. He was not a confrontational man and he was not physically formidable. But his son had only recently been very badly hurt in an assault. He was not in the frame of mind to tolerate an intruder. He had not been entirely able to make sense of the face he had seen in the shrubs but it belonged to someone and they were not welcome; and his son was asleep and vulnerable under his duvet in his bedroom upstairs.
James stepped into the kitchen and took the carving knife from the block on the kitchen counter. Their kitchen knives were German, bone-handled, expensive and extremely sharp. He would take one further look through the study window. And then he would unbolt the back door and confront this strange and unwelcome visitor and he would do so lethally armed.
There was nobody there. He rubbed at the pane, at the slight film of condensation that had settled over it during his earlier examination of the book. The face had gone. He went outside anyway. The rain had stopped. The sky had cleared. The garden smelled sweet and pungent with damp grass and leaves drying already in the sunshine. There were no footprints, no sign of shrubs trampled or petals torn among the clusters of wild flowers blossoming. At the exact spot, he thought there was an odour, very faint under the strong garden scents. It was the snuffed candle harshness of burning wax, mingled with a sour hint of something he thought might be sulphur. Then a breeze soughed through the wet foliage and it was gone.
He went back inside. He bolted the door and replaced the knife in the block, thinking that anger at what had happened to Jack had influenced his behaviour, made him aggressive. The reasonable thing to have done was to have remained secure behind the locked back door and calmly dialled the police. That was what he would have done before the assault. The assault had made him angry and filled him with a desire for retribution. It had stirred the vigilante in him. It was quite surprising, because he had not suspected for a moment prior to this that there was any vigilante in him to stir.
He switched on the study radio, seeking the consolation of familiar sound, aware even as he did so that he was already humming a melody, aware that his doing so was both a nervous reflex and a way of deflecting his thoughts away from the disturbing ugliness of the apparition he had imagined he had seen squatting among the shrubs, observing him. He was shaken. He shivered as he pressed the button and song emerged from the radio’s speaker to deliver to the moment something mundane and recognisable.
Except that it was the same tune, wasn’t it? He had been absently humming a Sandy Denny song called ‘The Sea’ and when he switched on the radio she was there, on the station he was tuned to, unmistakable, singing it. Surely that was just his fraught imagination? Coincidence didn’t stretch that far. He had been humming something else. He must have been.
James loved folk music. Sandy Denny was one of his favourite singers and it was one of her best songs. But he could not listen to it, now. It sounded shrill and discordant, almost hysterically loud and intrusive in the confines of that small room. He switched the radio back off.
He was about to sit down again, before the open book and that image of the violated winter church, when he heard his son cry out from above.
Jack was lying on his stomach with his head in his pillow and his duvet shrugged down across his hips when James entered his room.
‘Sorry.’
James looked at his son’s broad back, at the fast-developing musculature of a young athlete, wondering, as he often did, how something born so small and precious had got so big and so very beautiful in so short a span of time. Blink and you miss it, the cliché about the growing up of your children ran. But then clichés were only derided as such because they were so true.
He went and sat on the bed. ‘You okay?’
‘Sorry, Dad, it was just a bad dream.’
James put his hand on the back of Jack’s head and ruffled his hair. ‘Want to share it?’
Jack groaned. ‘It was way beyond weird, Dad. I was at a church service. There was incense and there were candles. And the congregation was scarecrows.’
Jack swallowed. ‘Burlap sacks for faces?’
‘I don’t know what burlap is. They were scarecrows, though. And they weren’t the cheerful sort. Not the type to travel the yellow brick road with Dorothy, that’s for sure.’
James laughed. The laughter was forced, but it was the reassuring response his son would have expected and so he felt it tactful to provide it. Olivia had gone through a Wizard of Oz phase the previous autumn that had lasted for months. And so Jack had unwillingly endured the DVD to the point where he could probably have recited the entire film by heart.
‘Fancy a cup of tea?’
‘I’ll have a mug, Dad, if you’re making it.’
Jack was of the belief that only people of northern extraction could make tea properly. His father’s flat vowels might have embarrassed him on occasion, but the tea was adequate compensation.
James thought the scarecrows in the church were of the same vaguely telepathic nature as his son’s words when he was coming back to consciousness in the hospital. The brain was an infinitely complex organism. Jack’s had somehow tuned in to the same frequency as his father’s, now, twice. It was not something that would persist. The healing process would narrow and discipline what entered his son’s mind.
More worrying was the spectre in the garden that had triggered Jack’s nightmare. James could not really rationalise that and, a rational man, it bothered him that he could not.
‘Fancy a bite to eat in Borough Market?’
‘It’ll be way too crowded, Dad. We won’t be able to move for tourists and celebrity chefs.’
James nodded. This was true. Aldo Zilli and Jamie Oliver and their entourages were always trailing flamboyantly through the rows of stalls. And over the past decade, the market had steadily become a tourist attraction to rival Covent Garden. ‘We could do the Belfast.’
Jack groaned into his pillow. ‘We’ve been doing the Belfast since I was six. I practically feel I served aboard her. Like I was maybe press-ganged.’
‘Wrong era.’
‘I know. But you know what I mean.’
‘You used to like the engine room.’
‘I used to like Club Penguin. I used to collect Pokémon cards. Go back far enough and I probably liked Thomas the Tank Engine.’
‘You did. Whenever we caught a train, you used to ask me its name.’
‘I hope you told me they didn’t have names and not to be ridiculous.’
‘Nope. I used to make a name up.’
‘So fostering a pathetic illusion and deliberately stunting my mental development.’
‘Yep.’ I’d tell you the train was called Philip or Catherine and your little face would light up. And now you have Megan Fox in a bikini as the screen saver on your desktop and it’s all happened in the blink of an eye. ‘I’ll go and make you that mug of tea.’
They didn’t do anything, in the end. They just ambled along the river in the sunshine. Jack was healing with the speed of youth. The discolouration around his eye socket was fast fading and the swelling had all but gone down. He wore his sunglasses because he had an adolescent self-consciousness about disfigurement but by any objective measure he was a very handsome boy and his father was relieved to see, when he scrutinised the damage in the sunlight, that the surgeon had been telling the truth. The attack would leave no physical damage at all.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m wondering when I’ll be going back to school.’
‘Looking forward to it?’
Jack stopped. They had just emerged from the pedestrian tunnel under the south side of Blackfriars Bridge. Sunlight glazed the footpath under their feet and shimmered on the glass of the city buildings teeming unevenly on the other side of the river. Wakes glittered in the water cut by bright, cleaving boats. The vista was familiar and beautiful. James thought that a boy of Jack’s age would very likely miss all this and find somewhere remote and rural crushingly dull.
‘I’m dreading it to be honest, Dad.’
‘Why? You’re not telling me you’re bullied at school?’
‘Can we find somewhere to sit?’
They found a bench facing the water. They had seclusion, amid the indifferent foreign visitors and lunchtime runners along the embankment. ‘There’s a pecking order, Dad. There’s a sort of hierarchy.’
‘Are there gangs?’
‘Yes. There are gangs.’
‘Are you in a gang?’
‘Don’t be silly. The gangs are all black and Asian. I get left alone, though. I have status because of my football. My being so good at football gives me respect.’
‘For Christ’s sake.’
‘It’s just the way it is, Dad. You have to live with it.’
‘So the black gangs are at the top of things? They rule the roost?’
‘No. They don’t. The toughest kids in the school are Irish. They come from a travellers’ site. They’re wild, lethal. None of the gangs would take them on.’
‘So they’re a gang then, surely?’
‘They’re all related. They’re not a gang. They’re more a family.’
‘Why, specifically, do you dread going back?’
Jack was silent for a long moment. Then he said, ‘I’ve had time to think about it. School shouldn’t be somewhere where you live on your wits just to avoid physical harm. It shouldn’t be somewhere where the teachers are dissed just for wearing clothes bought from Marks and Spencer. It should be somewhere you can learn stuff that interests you without everyone calling you a suck-arse or a geek.’
‘Is that why you don’t try at your lessons? God knows you’re bright enough.’
‘Pretty much. It doesn’t pay to stand out from the crowd. There are subjects I like but if I was to show that I like them I’d live to regret it.’
‘In what way?’
‘It just isn’t clever to be clever in a place where it’s cool to be thick.’
‘What would happen if you did show some enthusiasm?’
‘I’d be a joke. I’d risk a slap.’
‘We’re thinking of getting out, Jack. Your mum and I have talked it through. We’re thinking of moving a long way away, to somewhere on the coast, starting over, starting afresh.’
Jack turned to look at his father. He took off his sunglasses. ‘Have you any idea how long you’ve been saying that for, Dad? You and Mum have been moving to the coast for as long as I can remember. You’ve been discussing it since the dawn of time. Except that we never actually go, barring a fortnight in the summer holidays.’
‘I’m going to look at a place called Brodmaw Bay next week. It’s in Cornwall. If it fits the bill, your mum and I would like to give it a try. How would that sit with you?’
‘I just hope you are serious. I’d go tomorrow, if I could. Blimey, if I could, I’d go today.’
They had lunch in a pizzeria at Gabriel’s Wharf. They walked on to the south side of Lambeth Bridge. There, at the café on the small pier tucked into the side of the bridge, James drank a cappuccino and bought an ice-cream sundae for Jack, reminded of what a complex age thirteen was. It was an age when you lusted after pretty actresses and still spent your pocket money on sweets. It was turbulent and contradictory.
Jack had made his school sound as brutal and hierarchical in some of its bleaker characteristics as a top-security prison, let alone a place of learning. Prisons were there to house criminals and his son was innocent of any crime. School was supposed not to punish but to educate. It was a complication he did not need in his young life. The stress of it was making him unhappy. Getting him out and away was the right thing to do.
‘Your football might suffer, if we move. The competition, the leagues, they won’t be so strong in the south-west.’
Jack just shrugged. He spooned ice cream into his mouth.
‘Don’t you care?’
‘In the squad, at South London Boys, we’re told that we have to want it more than anything, or we won’t make the grade. And then we’re told by the very same coaches that we shouldn’t let it rule our lives, because any of us could pick up an injury that could ruin our chances and because almost nobody makes it through to the top level anyway. If I’m good enough, I’m good enough, Dad. I can’t play at all till Christmas, the surgeon said so.’
‘You’ve had a change in attitude.’
‘Not really. I think I’ve got the ability. You know that police officer who came round?’
‘Detective Sergeant McCabe.’
‘We got talking when you were making the coffee. He was an amateur boxer. He represented England. He was undefeated as a middleweight. I asked him why he didn’t turn pro. He said he got the offers, but that he wanted to make a difference, so he became a policeman.’
‘I don’t see your point, Jack.’
‘I think I’m good enough to go all the way. I think that one day I’ll play in the
Premiership. But if I don’t, it won’t be the end of the world. I’ll do something else.’
‘You could be a police officer. Like DS McCabe.’
‘Don’t you think that’s cool? Wanting to make a difference?’
‘I think it’s very commendable,’ James said.
They discussed going to the Imperial War Museum a couple of blocks away, but Jack had been there recently with his school and was unenthusiastic. He had tired, too, his father thought. The walk in the sunshine had tired him. He was recovering from his beating but was nowhere near at full strength yet, despite the cosmetic evidence.
They went and looked at Captain Bligh’s grave in the churchyard of St Mary at Lambeth, just across the road, almost opposite the café. Bligh had been buried a hero after the feat of navigation that got him and his few loyal crewmen to safety during a prodigious voyage in an open boat. That was before the family of the mutineer Fletcher Christian began the propaganda campaign that successfully besmirched his reputation.
James explained all this to Jack, who walked around the handsome stone tomb and read the inscription carved there without comment.
‘Won’t you miss all this?’
‘What? Some old guy’s grave?’
‘Not just that, all this history on your doorstep.’
Jack shrugged. ‘I’m sure this place in Cornwall will have a history.’
James held his arms wide. ‘All this, I mean, the river, everything, the whole spectacle of London.’
‘You sound like a tour guide, Dad.’
‘Won’t you miss it?’
Jack smiled. ‘Why would I miss a river, when we’re going to live by the sea?’