Brodmaw Bay

by F. G. Cottam

  They weren’t canoes. Strictly speaking they were kayaks. And the ones Jack and Livs were in were two-man kayaks because they had to have someone experienced accompanying them. Livs was sharing her kayak with Philip Teal who was now Mr Teal to them. Jack thought that fair enough. He would not have been comfortable calling his future headmaster ‘Phil’.

  Jack was in his kayak with Megan Penmarrick, which all things considered was not so much cool as totally epic. They were wearing wetsuits and life jackets and the flotilla of five kayaks was keeping a close formation because it was safer that way.

  The sea was calm. The tricky bit had been getting the kayaks over the surf at the edge of the beach and then getting in once they were on the calm beyond, but Mr Teal and an older boy called Ricky Sharp steadied the craft so there was no real danger they would capsize. Ricky’s dad was the chandler Martin Sharp and Ricky obviously knew boats backwards.

  Jack liked him immediately. He looked as strong as a bull but he had no attitude at all. He was totally expert on the water without being at all flash. And once they were off, because his balance and coordination were naturally good and because he had every incentive not to look a complete dickhead in front of Megan, Jack found that he paddled quite competently.

  It was fun. The tide was out now and there was no current to fight against. Mr Teal explained that they would return at about eight o’clock on the incoming tide, which would assist them. Before that, they would barbecue a supper on the island. They had sausages and homemade burgers and baps in watertight containers. Two of the kayaks trailed baited lines in the hope of catching fish to grill.

  They passed a shoal of basking sharks. Mr Teal had said they might and explained that these monsters of the deep were gentle and timid and lived on krill. Seeing their dorsal fins sticking abruptly out of the water was still quite shocking. They were huge. The sea was a strange and alien element and it was thrilling to be out on it and to think that this was part of their new routine.

  The only slightly dodgy bit had been their mum insisting on coming and seeing them into their kit and kayaks before waving them off from the beach. But mums were mums and the sea was awfully deep and it had been their first time. Besides, Megan thought their mum just about the most brilliant woman on the planet. So it hadn’t actually been too embarrassing.

  Jack glanced at his little sister and felt a sharp stab of pride at how well she was doing. She had got the rhythm of paddling straight away. He looked at the firm set of her pretty little face and loved her despite himself. Of course he loved her; she was the piece of the puzzle that made it whole. In his preferred way of putting it, they were locked on. At least, they would be when their dad got back from his business trip to America.

  The island was quite small when they got there, almost circular, rising to a rocky peak in the middle, with heather and gorse bushes and blackberry thorns and quite a lot of bird shit on the exposed bits and a small hut made of split logs painted over with something to weather-proof it.

  The hut was fantastic. Inside it there were bunks with blankets and tins of food and hurricane lamps. There was a paraffin heater. There was a really old-fashioned radio set. It was like base camp in a film about Scott of the Antarctic. Outside the weather was gentle and cloudless, with barely a breeze. Jack almost wished it was stormy so that they could light the stove and barricade the door and evenly divide their rations.

  He walked back outside. They had taken off their life jackets and wetsuits, were in their normal clothes again. He closed the door of the hut. Its hinges creaked on a harsh lack of lubrication. Something, some kind of carving in wood, had been mounted at its centre. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, out loud, shocked into speech by the sight of the effigy.

  ‘That’s the spookmeister,’ a voice from behind him said. He turned. It was Livs, of course. It was her word, wasn’t it? And it really was the spookmeister. The figure on the carving was evil-looking. It was like a gargoyle or an imp. You couldn’t even properly look at it, Jack didn’t think. It made you wince and raised goose bumps on your skin to do so. His sister looked very pale and completely unsurprised by the sight of the carving. She looked scared and resigned and he was reminded of her indignant claim that she never told lies.

  The others, the proper members of the Club, were a few metres away, surrounding the fire, the hut not a novelty to them as it obviously was to the Greer children. They had hooked five mackerel paddling to the island and everyone seemed to be concerned with fanning the flames and gutting the catch.

  Megan looked up and across to them, smiling. The smile disappeared when she saw the concerned, distasteful look on their faces. She was kneeling by the fire. She stood and approached them, wiping fish slime from her hands on the thighs of her jeans. Jack thought the expression on her face a hard one to read. It was not one he had seen her use before.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The spookmeister is the matter,’ Olivia said.

  Jack thought that his sister sounded very serious. There was a word, wasn’t there? The word for how Livs sounded was grave.

  Megan’s eyes switched from them to the carving mounted on the hut door. She put her finger to her lips to signal hush and her eyes grew large in her head before she lifted them in a gesture signalling that Jack and Olivia were to follow her. They did. She stopped out of sight of the cooking party, out of sight of the hut, out of the group’s earshot in a patch of clearing surrounded by dense foliage. She squatted on the ground and, taking her lead, they did the same.

  ‘What is that thing?’ Jack said.

  Megan hesitated. He had not seen her do that before, either. She was a confident and fluent speaker. She was clever, not the tongue-tied type of girl from a home without books and conversation that there had been a depressing number of at his old school. ‘We’re not supposed to say its name,’ she said. ‘It’s bad luck to do so.’

  Livs said, ‘Why is it on the door, if it’s bad luck?’

  ‘It’s on the door as a sign of protection. They’re sort of like guardians or soldiers or something; warriors from an old myth. They’re not unlucky, only naming them is. It’s just a superstition. You wouldn’t whistle on a ship, would you?’

  ‘I might,’ Jack said.

  Livs said, ‘I might too. If I could whistle, I mean.’

  Megan raised her eyes to the sky. ‘Incomers,’ she said.

  Jack said, ‘What do they guard?’

  ‘They guard the Singers under the Sea.’

  ‘And what do they do?’

  ‘They do magical things, Jack. They can grant your wishes.’

  The smell of grilling mackerel was drifting deliciously around them. It was time to go back to the others and their food.

  ‘Do you not have any wishes?’

  The wish that came to Jack closely involved the girl who had just put the question. He wanted to kiss her, confident that she wanted to be kissed. It would very likely not come true for a few years yet. ‘I wish for my dad to come back to us safely,’ he said.

  ‘Olivia?’

  ‘I’m keeping mine a secret,’ Livs said. ‘Otherwise it might not come true.’

  Lillian Greer did not know much about organised religion but she knew desecration when it stared her in the face. She had opened the church tabernacle because it had been left slightly ajar. Her instinct on ascending to the altar had been to close it. It was the instinct of someone habitually neat. But she had noticed the slightly nauseous whiff of the sea about the large, ornamented box at the centre of the altarpiece. She had opened it. She had almost screamed out loud at what doing so had revealed to her.

  The severed head of a conger eel, a huge specimen with rows of vicious teeth visible in its gaping mouth, had been placed inside. The hook used to catch the eel was still there, its barbs stained bloody. They had pierced the roof of its mouth in the struggle to land this monster and torn through the flesh of its upper jaw.

  The dead-eyed gaze of the eel returned her own. The head ha
d been severed raggedly, while the creature still lived and struggled for freedom or more likely tried to bite its captor, Lillian thought. The flesh was dull and half a dozen listless flies were buzzing around it but it did not yet stink. It had been put there fairly recently, a day or two ago at most.

  The previous day had been a Sunday, hadn’t it? That was the traditional Christian day of worship, when the most important service of the week, would be held in a church still consecrated and functioning. This one was not. It was derelict and abandoned. Someone had done this, though. Someone had been here.

  Something glistened in the gloom of the tabernacle interior, she noticed, in the dim light she had provided by opening its door, in the mouth of the eel beyond those rows of razor-edged teeth. It looked a bit, she thought, like caviar. Struggling with her own distaste, she leaned closer to take a proper look. She saw that it was the black beads of a rosary, deliberately placed there in a symbolic act of blasphemy.

  She took a step back. She closed the tabernacle door on the grotesque joke made at God’s expense inside it. She looked around the church interior, at the sagging roof, the smashed stained glass of the windows in their high arches, the burlap sacks slumped as though in mockery of worship on the old wooden pews. She walked back down the aisle, listening to the slightly gritty sound her boots made on the smooth stone of the floor. It was sand. Wet sand had clung to the tread of her boots as she had watched her children paddle off on their Enid Blyton adventure an hour earlier.

  She had not expected this. She had not anticipated the heavy dread that had started to subsume her the moment she stooped under the broken door and entered the building. There had been no Matlocks commemorated in granite or marble tribute on any of the gravestones in the churchyard. But her curiosity had not been satisfied. It had driven her into this blighted and damned interior.

  Who had done this? She wondered if one of the men who had welcomed her family so warmly in the pub the previous evening had been responsible. She could not imagine it. They seemed such relaxed and friendly people.

  It seemed even less likely that one of the women could have done it. She could not see frumpy Bella Worth or mousey Rachel Flood landing the beast whose head decorated the tabernacle. She could not see Elizabeth Penmarrick severing the head of the great, thrashing specimen it must have come from with a gutting knife. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, she thought giddily. And Lillian realised that she wasn’t alone in the church.

  ‘Hello, Angela.’

  ‘You should not be in here. It isn’t safe.’

  ‘Would that be structurally, or spiritually?’

  Angela Heart was standing at the foot of the aisle. She looked beyond Lillian to the altar and the tabernacle at its centre. ‘This is the west of England,’ she said. ‘Some of the pagan ways still persist. Nowhere is perfect, Lillian; picturesque maybe, but not perfect.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  Angela glanced around, up at the roof. She looked uneasy. Her usual air of urbane nonchalance was not in evidence at all. She said, ‘It’s just mischief, Lillian. It is crude and done with spiteful intent but the church is deconsecrated and it is a very long time since a believer in a Christian God came here to worship, or to pray for intercession.’

  ‘Whoever did what I’ve just seen is very sick and quite seriously deluded,’ Lillian said.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ Angela said.

  ‘What happened to this church? Why did it fall into dereliction? What happened to the priest?’

  ‘My home is a two-minute walk away from here,’ Angela said. ‘Where are your children?’

  ‘They’re in the charge of Philip Teal. They’re with the Club.’

  ‘If you’ve time, come back to my house and I’ll tell you exactly what happened here.’

  Angela’s cottage was quaint on the outside and had a pretty back garden visible through the sitting room’s French doors, while the interior struck Lillian as a reflection of the woman herself. It was handsome, but austerely so. The décor was stylish, minimalist and largely monochromatic. Where there was colour, it expressed itself in various shades of red. Most vibrant among these was a bunch of roses in a slate vase placed on a table topped with black marble.

  Angela made coffee for both of them and then they sat with the late sun slanting through the panes in yellow ingots on the ivory-white carpet. Lillian thought that you would not need the detection skills of Alec McCabe to know straight away that this was the home of a woman without children. And there was evidently no man, either.

  Angela Heart was either a widow or she was a spinster. If she was a widow, that was sad. If she was a spinster, it could only be through choice. She wasn’t just attractive. She had a very potent sexuality. It had deserted her in the church, along with her composure, but it was returning now. There was something feline about her as she pulled her legs up sideways on the sofa and tilted her head and her eyes caught the light like those of a bold and confident cat. Her hair was glossy and her fingernails wore the same crimson hue as her lips.

  She explained that the church had first fallen into dereliction in the first decade of the last century. It had been High Anglican and the Church of England priest incumbent in the parish had become involved in a sex scandal. His paramour had been a boy. He had been only fifteen years of age and skilfully groomed by someone he had been taught to respect and even to revere.

  When the priest was exposed, the bishop supervising the diocese had elected to deconsecrate the church. The parish of St Stephen’s was abandoned. Feeling had run very high over the paedophile crime committed by a trusted man of the cloth and the bishop did not see how the resentment could be overcome without a properly symbolic mea culpa. There were other villages with other churches those people from the bay wishing to continue to worship could attend.

  ‘The Church doesn’t usually abandon its flock,’ Lillian said. ‘It contradicts its missionary function. It goes against the direct teachings of Christ, doesn’t it?’

  The bishop was a pragmatic man, Angela told her. His rise through the hierarchy signified a politician as much as a priest. St Stephen’s had never had more than a very meagre congregation. Even in those more devout Edwardian days, the people of the bay preferred their folk superstitions to High Church orthodoxy. They did not like the priestly paraphernalia. They thought that they could differentiate between right and wrong, between good and bad, without having to endure incense and candles and plaster effigies.

  ‘What the fundamentalists call smells and bells,’ Lillian said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Angela said.

  No attempt to revive St Stephen’s was made until after the Great War. Then in 1921, a cleric belonging to an independent branch of the Protestant faith arrived and bought the freehold of the site from the diocese and had the building blessed and refurbished and began to try to convert followers.

  ‘He had been an army padre,’ Angela said. ‘He had known Adam Gleason. He had ministered to the men of Gleason’s battalion and they had forged a friendship on the Western Front. Like Gleason, the Reverend Baxter was a poet, though he was not anywhere near so gifted.’ She was silent for a moment. She said, ‘Can I give you the rest of this account in the garden? I would like a cigarette and I do not smoke in the house.’

  Lillian looked at her watch. It was ten past seven.

  ‘Do you have time?’

  ‘Yes. And I’m all ears.’

  They went outside. It was still warm and bright. It was bright, Lillian remembered, because they were on the coast and the sky was lightened by the sun reflected back off the sea. She thought about her children in their wetsuits and orange life jackets smiling as they paddled off in their kayaks. Then she thought of the obscenity, stinking and ferocious in death, in the church tabernacle.

  Something gave Baxter a sour demeanour, began Angela. It was as though he bore some grudge against the people of the bay. He would walk the lanes in a black cassock with his hands clasped beh
ind his back and a scowl worn permanently on his long, ascetic face. Some of the villagers began to suspect that Adam Gleason must be responsible for this. They could not think of any other explanation. He must have said something deeply disparaging about the place or its community. Had he accused them of some sin, of some corruption of the soul?

  Lillian remembered Richard Penmarrick’s remarks about the soldier-poet Gleason; the slight tone of sarcasm, discussing him in the Topper’s Reach kitchen, she had not really understood the reason for.

  One of Baxter’s parishioners most ardent in his Christian belief was a St Ives-born mariner called Thomas Cable. Cable back in those days owned half the bay’s fishing fleet. In the spring of 1923 he commissioned Jasper’s yard to build him a new boat. The Carol-Anne was launched, with much fanfare, in the September of that year. She was blessed on the slipway by the Reverend Baxter before the chocks were hammered from under her and she entered the water. Almost everyone in the bay had gathered to see the launch ceremony and they all witnessed this.

  It was a gentle day. The Carol-Anne’s newly recruited crew were young lads. But they had been familiar with boats since infancy and the skipper was an experienced man of twenty-eight. They set off on their maiden voyage with much cheering and waving of handkerchiefs and toy flags from the quayside. A fog quickly descended. In those days before sonar, there was a lightship in the bay to warn of the reefs at its southern extremity and its bell began to toll.

  ‘The Carol-Anne never returned,’ Angela said. ‘The fog swallowed her.’

  ‘The sea swallowed her,’ Lillian said. ‘She must have sunk.’

  ‘It was taken as an omen,’ Angela said. ‘The church was subsequently vandalised. The porch was burned down in an arson attack carried out at night. Baxter’s milk was tainted on his doorstep and the food spoiled in his pantry and people ostracised him. Not the bay’s finest hour, I don’t suppose, but Brodmaw people in those days were very superstitious. They took against the arrogant incomer in the dog collar and the disdainful frown and when he could take the hostility no more he packed up and left.’