by Graham Joyce
“What’s that?”
“Don’t ask.”
Once again, this was almost what I was paid weekly in addition to meals and lodgings. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Do with it? Do what you want with it, you dozy fuck. I’m flush. Ain’t anyone ever give you no money before now?”
“Well. No.”
He shook his head. “You’re a right one, ain’cha? Fuckin’ college boy. Listen: I have a kid somewhere. They wouldn’t let me see him. Be about the same age as you. I like to think he wouldn’t be cleaning or in no factory or fuckin’ coal mine. Maybe he’d be at college, smart-arse like you. Maybe someone somewhere will sling him twenty notes.”
“It’s too much. I can’t take it, Colin.”
“Take it.” He looked at me when he said it and I knew he meant that I had no choice. I picked up the money and put it in my pocket. “Anyway, it’s nice to know I’ve got someone on the inside looking after my interests.”
“I’ve got to go, Colin. I’ll be late for the yard-of-ale competition.”
“Want a lift back?”
“It’s two minutes.”
“Okay. I’ll be in touch.” He lit another cigarette and sat back.
I still can’t believe that just an hour after having sex with his wife I walked out of that pub with twenty of his pounds in my pocket.
LATER, IN THE cooler evening, the ladybugs began to subside. After I’d finished work I made my way up to the same dark place on the beach. After my encounter with Colin I didn’t want to go but I’d arranged to meet Terri there again before Colin had intercepted me. I assumed she knew Colin was back on the scene, and I was quite prepared for her not to turn up. But when I got there she was waiting with a blanket and a couple of beers. She did of course know that he was around, but she was very surprised that I’d seen him that day.
“What’s he want with you?”
“I’m supposed to keep an eye on you.”
She found that amusing. “Jeez!”
“Maybe we should leave it. Are you sure he’s not following you?”
“Not tonight. I know exactly where he is tonight. Cards club. Once a month to piss his money away. That’s why he’s back. He ain’t here to see me.”
I looked back up the beach. “I don’t know about this.”
“It’s all right. I’m sure. Look at you. You got the jitters now, haven’t you?”
I felt trapped. After what had happened between us I was afraid she might think I was drawing back from her. We walked on a little way and then she spread the blanket on the sand and popped open a beer. The luminous ripples of the waves did nothing to calm my nerves.
“Relax, will you?”
The sea was blue-black, calm with a light, foamy tide. What had seemed like a beach in paradise a few nights ago now seemed to have a smoky edge. The phosphorescence in the waves was still at large, but now it had a wormy quality. But it wasn’t the beach that had changed.
Terri would talk about other workers on the resort in quite brutal terms. Somehow she got onto the subject of Nikki. She called her a “half-wog.”
“Stop,” I said, “stop. You know what? Nikki is amazing.”
“You think,” she said drily.
“Yes, I do. She’s become a good friend. The only friend I do have here, not counting you.” That last phrase came out like an afterthought.
“How good a friend is she, then?”
I knew exactly what she hinted at, but I said, “How do you mean?”
“Never mind. What about Colin? Sounds like he’s your big buddy now.”
I ignored that. Whatever relationship I had with Terri, I wasn’t going to allow her to slag off Nikki. Already the evening wasn’t playing out in the expected way, so I tried to change the subject.
I took my wallet out of my pocket and showed her the photograph of my biological father. I’ve no idea why. It wasn’t something I went around discussing freely with anyone. In fact it was a kind of secret. Perhaps I’d made the basic error of thinking that emotional intimacy automatically follows sexually intimacy. I told her I had this idea that my biological father was always close. That he was somehow here for me.
It now sounds an impossibly naïve thing to say. It was a half-baked idea. I hadn’t worked it out, but if I’d hoped to develop the notion any further by talking about it with Terri, I was mistaken. I told her the little bit I knew. She examined the photo briefly and then slung it back at me. “You think you’ve had it rough?” she said.
“I’m not saying that at all.”
“You’ve been brought up in cotton wool.”
“That’s not what I meant. I was just telling you that—”
She wasn’t going to let me finish. “I could tell you things about my own life that would make your hair fall out. At least you know who your dad is—or you think you do. I’ve no idea, and yet you don’t see me crying about it.”
“I’m not crying about it.” Her hard-hearted posturing only made me smile.
“I don’t see why you’re smirking.”
Her irritation made me smile—or smirk, if that’s what I was doing—even more. Heaven knows, I thought she was faking being cross with me, but I misread her mood. “That’s it,” she said with a nasty wheedle in her voice, “you can fuck off. You’re not getting it tonight.”
“What?”
“You heard. I said you’re not getting it.”
“It” of course being sex. I was taken aback. First, I had never imagined sex as a bargaining token or a credit chip to be offered and withdrawn in this way. Second, I couldn’t imagine anyone who wasn’t in the mood being open to sex. Here I was facing the confiscation of privileges I hadn’t even asked for. The evening had turned sour and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I felt the second argument had something to do with the first. Quite apart from the fact that I was worried about Colin prowling the beach, the episode stirred deeper doubts about what I was doing. If I’d ever seen myself as Terri’s rescuer, I’d been a fool. It now occurred to me that in her mind she might have thought she was the one doing the rescuing.
She swallowed the last mouthful of beer and slung the bottle into the sea. I wanted to say something about children cutting their feet on broken glass, but I let it go. She was already up and folding the blanket. Without a word she set off ahead of me, moving toward the lights of the promenade.
I DIDN’T SEE Terri the next day, but the following morning we almost collided in front of the theater. She behaved as if our spat hadn’t happened. She’d been reassigned to clean in the theater again and that meant she’d been obliged to return her keys for the refurbished chalets. Our love nest was taken away from us and we had nowhere private to meet.
“What will we do?” she asked.
I said I didn’t know. The truth is it was almost a relief. Then she suggested we use my room.
“That’s not a good idea,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes at me. I was afraid that she suspected I was withdrawing emotionally. I couldn’t tell whether what I saw in her eyes was contempt or hurt. She could seem vulnerable one moment and then like cast iron the next. I weakened and we arranged to meet in my room at lunchtime.
We’d been in my room for maybe ten minutes when we were brought to our senses by the sound of a key hitting the lock from the other side of the door. Fortunately I’d secured the door with my own key and left it hanging in the lock.
There was a loud thumping. “Got someone in there, you maladjusted boy?” It was Nobby, making one of his rare visits back to our room. “Wickedness. Fire and brimstone shall come to thee, young man. Plus I’m going to ’ave to report you to the secret masters who run this august lodge since you are in clear violation of rule number seventy-seven which expressly prohibits the wayward practice of afternoon nuptials etcetera etcetera etcetera can’t you open this fuckin’ door?”
“Jesus!” Terri whispered.
I shouted through the door. “Nobby, can you come back later?”<
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“Later is tomorrow is no good is surplus to tomorrow’s requirements. Did I leave my dickey in there?”
“Your what?”
“Dickey! Dickey! Dickey bow! Formal neckpiece throat-butterfly fuckin’ bow tie is it in there my friend I need it for tonight. It’ll only take me two seconds to ascertain presence of said couture oh for fuck’s sake!”
“Where? Where is it? I’ll look.”
“I dunno, in the drawer, stuck in my drawers in the wardrobe under the bed fallen behind the fuckin walrus secreted in a shoe stuffed under the mattress, come on chief, I don’t know, let me fuckin’ well look an’ I’ll find it!”
“You can’t come in. I’ll have a good look for you and bring it to you later.”
I resisted all his protests until finally he went away. We heard him go out of the building, blathering incomprehensibly. I lifted back the curtain to see him trotting across the yard away from us, still prattling to himself.
“Is he on drugs?” Terri asked me.
“No, he’s from Manchester.”
She was already getting dressed. “I don’t want to stay here.”
I made a halfhearted effort to get her to stay. Before leaving she suggested we meet backstage in the theater.
“You’re joking!”
She took a deep breath. “Now that I’m working there again we both have a reason to be there. It makes sense. We should only meet in places we are supposed to be.” She cupped my face, kissed me, and gave me a precise time when I would find her backstage early that evening, while everyone else was eating.
THE LADYBUG STORMS were subsiding but the ground was littered with their carcasses. Workers were mobilized to sweep the bugs into neat pyramid piles so that they could be disposed of. One man was shoveling the things into a paper sack. I had never seen so many insects. It did indeed remind me of biblical stories about swarms of locusts.
But the spectacle of all those bug carcasses told me that the madness was over. I’d made a mistake and I knew it. I hated myself for having raised Terri’s expectations about me, but I hated myself more for having to pretend that I wanted to carry on. I decided that when I saw her in the theater that evening I would tell her that it all had to stop.
AT TEATIME I ate early and quickly, and I went hurrying over to the theater. I had to fight off the notion that I was transparent, that everyone knew where I was going and whom I was seeing. It seemed like I passed everyone who knew me. Nikki, Sammy, Gail. Even Luca Valletti, who wasn’t usually to be found outside his performance hours, was there in front of the offices having a smoke with Pinky. They all looked up and gave me a knowing smile. Or so I feared.
I went into the theater through the front entrance, through the hushed and shadowy auditorium, skipped up the steps onto the stage and behind the thick red curtains. There was no one around. I found a stool to sit on between the upright wing flats and waited in the dark.
A darkened backstage is a place full of ghosts. You expect silence, but things creak. You feel the tension of hanging wires and pendulum weights and flimsy flats. After a while a crack of light appeared briefly as the rear door was opened and closed again.
She came in. “This is crazy,” she said.
“Yes.”
But she flung herself at me and we kissed. All the time we were kissing I felt like a meteorite falling to the earth. I wanted to pull back but the taste of her mouth inflamed me all over again. Her kisses sparked memories of that phosphorescence on the dark beach as she invited me to go further. She put her hand inside my shirt and raked my back with her fingernails. I was weak. I had a sense of myself as a moral coward as I kissed her back.
Just then I felt a draft, and one of the flats wobbled slightly. Someone was backstage with us.
“Slutcha.”
The gravel voice was unmistakable, coming from out of the darkness, somewhere between the unsteady flats.
“No.” Terri gasped. “No.”
“And you, you cowson.”
I still couldn’t see where the voice was coming from but I could almost smell the toxic breath on which it traveled. Colin knew we were there but it was plain that he could only see us in shadow. Perhaps he thought that I was Luca Valletti. My instincts were conflicted. I wanted to run but with Terri in my arms I felt emboldened. “Slip out the back way,” I said to her. “I’ll face him.”
I felt her peel away from me as I turned. I took a step toward the voice. Colin moved from behind a black-painted flat, making it quiver. His face was in darkness. I could see his teeth bared in the shadows. He powered forward at me but in his momentum tripped over one of the iron weights holding down the stage braces and went sprawling, down onto his knees. One of the flats at the edge of the stage fell forward onto him.
Terri grabbed me. She put her face right up to mine. “Get out,” she hissed. “Get out or you’re dead.”
I saw him throw off the fallen flat and my fight instincts liquidized and turned to flight. I squeezed between the back flat and let myself out of the back door, slamming it behind me. I ran quickly up the alley behind the theater, sure of the route from when I’d played Captain Blood with the children. I took the steps three at a time and went out onto the theater roof.
Once on the roof it occurred to me that I’d trapped myself. I’d left no way out. There was a low wall on the east side of the roof and a space between a humming ventilator and the low wall. I squeezed in between and lay down. The ladybugs were still swarming. Though their numbers had diminished they seemed to target me as I lay behind the ducting.
I was breathing hard. I lay there listening, trying to filter the sounds. I hadn’t heard anyone come from behind me or up the steps to the roof. There was nothing to be heard from inside the theater. Above the hum of the ventilator I could hear snatches of conversations of the holidaymakers. There was the occasional laugh or cry of mirth, and I could hear the low-level buzz of some familiar voices from below me. It was Luca and Pinky, having a smoke. Though I identified their voices easily enough, I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Colin might have seen Luca chatting with Pinky, in which case he would have realized that Luca was not his man. If he hadn’t seen them I feared that he would attack the Italian tenor on leaving the theater. Colin was a violent man. Terri had told me of previous convictions for grievous bodily harm and a whole number of assaults for which he’d never been brought to book. I lay in my cowardly hiding place praying that at least he’d spotted Luca outside the theater before going inside.
I stayed there for a long time. Not daring to move. It occurred to me that he was waiting; that he had an almost supernatural instinct for knowing that I was still in the vicinity; that he could smell my fear. Eventually I started to hear more and more people draw up outside the theater doors below. I was already late for my next duty. My heart had stopped hammering and I came to a decision that I should go.
It was then that I heard tiny steps making their way up onto the roof. They were very slow steps, as if made by someone who was trying not to be heard. I had to strain my ears to hear them over the hum of the ventilator. But my hearing was so focused that the steps were unmistakable. I had to still myself all over again.
The steps reached the rooftop. And though they were still small steps, they were easier to distinguish now because of the gravel on the roof that crunched very lightly underfoot. I held my breath. The steps seemed to approach me and then moved away again, toward the edge from where I’d almost fallen. I tried calibrating the steps. Was it a tiny step, suggesting that Terri had come up onto the roof to look for me? Or did the step belong to Colin, rolling his foot like a hunter in the woods?
I lay there in agony as the steps moved across the dusty, graveled surface of the roof. I considered raising my head to see if I could look around or across or through the humming ventilator. But I was afraid any movement might alert the hunter. Then a ladybug flew directly into my mouth, into my throat. I reflex gagged and I managed to roll the bug out o
f my mouth on a tiny wave of saliva.
The footsteps had stopped. I felt certain that I had alerted the hunter to my presence. Surely enough, the footsteps started to approach me. I quickly decided that if discovered I would spring to attack. It seemed better than lying down to be beaten. I coiled myself in readiness.
The footsteps stopped close to the ventilator. I felt a scratching on the side of the humming metal. Then a slight tapping, like fingers drumming. Slowly a head appeared from around the side of the ventilator.
I sprang to my feet. But it wasn’t Colin at all. Neither was it Terri. It was a child, a small boy. I had startled him and he put his hands to his face to protect himself though he made no noise. For a moment I thought it was one of the holidaymakers’ children who had wandered up onto the roof.
When he took his hands from his face, I saw that his eyes were clear glass. I saw through the glass. When I say clear glass, I mean I could see through them to the cloudless blue sky behind him.
Inconceivable. But that’s what I saw.
Of the boy’s father this time there was no sign. Though his face was distorted with fear, the boy was no longer cast in gray shadow. I recognized him easily. I knew perfectly well who he was. And as soon as I recognized who he was, he rose slowly into the air, like a helium-filled balloon. He went higher and higher into the warm summer air, rising steadily into the blue. At last he waved at me, a tiny gesture, like the time he had waved at me on the beach during the sand-castle competition from which he was excluded. The pinkness of his sunburned face was the last thing I remember as he rose even higher in the early-evening sky, until at last he was the tiniest dot in the blue, and then he was gone.
I don’t know how long I stayed there. Ultimately I had to go and face whatever was down there waiting for me. I decided that if Colin attacked me I would do my best to defend myself and hope that there would be other people around to help me. I got up from my hiding place, dusted myself off, and cautiously made my way down the steps from the roof.