Susie started to cry. ‘Who will feed my rabbits?’
I picked the scab on my knee.
Auntie Jean comes every day after school with Susie and Honey and we have tea together. Then Auntie Jean clears the table, tells me to learn my spellings and tables and takes my shirt and pants and socks away for washing.
Grampy’s house is warm.
‘Let’s get a good fug up,’ he’ll say, and turns up the little metal heater he calls his Aladdin’s lamp. He has this as well as the coal fire, because of the snow. ‘What’s next on our schedule, my Treasure?’
Grampy has two armchairs that used to face the fire but now they face a bit sideways towards the television Father bought him for Christmas. We watch Thunderbirds and Crackerjack and even Juke Box Jury. Grampy says he’ll watch anything, but he must draw the line at The Flower Pot Men.
Sometimes we get out the sewing twine and cord and sail needles. Grampy teaches me some Two-Strand Lanyard Knots.
A rope maker, he tells me, knows that yarns are spun, strands are formed, ropes are laid and cables are closed. These are the correct terms, but some people mix them up by mistake.
To see if a hemp rope is damaged, he tells me, force open the strands and examine the heart here and there all the way along the rope’s length. The heart should be a little lighter in colour than corn or vanilla fudge. If it is rust coloured, or greyish, it is utterly worthless.
Utterly worthless.
Just before bedtime Grampy lights his pipe and has a smoke. Some evenings he goes out into the garden and makes a path to the front gate through the snow. His daily constitutional, he calls it.
Then we make Hot Chocolate and I can take mine up to bed, while he stays downstairs and watches a bit more telly. His favourites are Sunday Night at the London Palladium and Coronation Street because it’s about up north and he says it reminds him of home.
‘Helps me to get out,’ he says, laughing through his false teeth because that’s what Auntie Jean is always telling him. ‘You ought to get out more, Dad.’
Chapter 4
I’m sweating, my throat squeezed. Gale force winds and the sea’s restless prowl. Four o’clock in the morning and my body is on red alert, heart ricocheting. Pointless, as well as undesirable, to try to sleep. I take toast and coffee into the sun room to rework the Hangman’s Knots: thirteen turns to each noose, I’ve decided, not nine. Changed my mind. Not a random choice. I wonder if anyone will ever even notice. Or ask why.
The sky lightens.
I think of going out for a walk, but the sea is a grey scribble in the distance. Not a good idea.
Instead, in an attempt to get my head somewhere else, I fish about in the bottom of the old trunk. There’s a dog-eared pad of drawing paper, some embroidery thread, poster paints, plaster of Paris, a pencil stub. With my penknife I slice the blunt tip of the pencil into edges and planes.
With the sharpened pencil I doodle experimentally on the cover of the pad, adding my squiggles to faded paint smudges. The edges of the pad are wavy with damp, but the paper is thick and good quality. On the first page I draw a lasso, then another.
I wore my cowboy outfit when they took me to the clinic: waistcoat, chaps, bandanna, holster. The Lone Ranger galloped and hollered through my head. Yee Ha! And hooves beat, thundering beneath the wooden chair legs. The smooth seat was a glossy conker brown. I hauled the chair around, sat astride it and laid my silver gun on the table. The doctor wanted me to take off my Stetson. I didn’t.
The doctor called it the squiggle game, doodles with a pencil on paper. He started them off: lines that lay like string on the paper.
I added my own:
The doctor set a lot of store by them, removing his round, horn-rimmed glasses to peer closely.
They were arguing, as usual, in the car on the way home. The hospital blanket prickled my face. To shut them out, I’d pulled it over my head.
I run pencil over paper, one page after another falling to the floor. One more – I brush the page with the side of the hand holding the pencil. A Reef Knot; left over right and under, right over left. The dimensions do not translate accurately to the page. I sketch lightly, trying to correct the pencil lines as I go, but the flat page defeats me. The act of tying a knot, as Grandfather once told me, is an adventure in unlimited space. I was nine. The first Russian astronaut had just orbited the earth.
I rip out the page, screw it up and let it drop. I select several of the jewel-coloured twists of embroidery thread, a pair of scissors and begin to cut and tie, cut and tie, using Reef Knots to join the different coloured lengths. The knots are very small and flat, the sheen of the thread enhanced by interlocking dips and curves. Most people think, because they know how to tie a Reef Knot, they know when to use one. Not true. According to Ashley, when employed as a bend the Reef Knot is responsible for more deaths and injuries than have been caused by the failure of all other knots combined.
After a while I stoop to the scattered pages and shuffle them. The pencil lines are different widths, thin where the pencil was sharp, thick and smudged where it was blunt – the suggestion of time passing. It gives me an idea. I select half a dozen scribbles and order them, according to thickness of pencil lines, sharp to blunt.
By the time Sarah knocks on the window of the sun room, making eating gestures through the glass, I’m surprised to see the clouds are red-bellied: sunset. The pencil scribbles are pinned on to the blistered tongue-and-groove boarding of the sun-room wall and I’ve almost finished making copies of them, using brown string and cotton rope in various lengths and widths. The cotton rope is coated with a mixture of paper pulp and powder paint, to add colour and bulk. For the final drawing in the series, a dense scribble I drew with my eyes closed, I’ve used the coloured embroidery thread, choosing turquoise and purple and royal blue from the assortment in the trunk, knotting lengths together with Reef Knots, to make one unbroken line.
I tug the door open to let Sarah in, aware of an ache in my fingers and arms now that I’ve stopped. And, in my T-shirt, I’m cold. I pull on my jumper and collapse on the old kitchen chair, running my fingers through my hair. I’m weak with hunger and too much caffeine – my perpetual state.
‘Wow!’ says Sarah, stepping in for a closer look. She studies the drawings and rope work, her back to me, hands in the pockets of her overalls. The way she stands now, motionless but quivering with energy, reminds me of the Diving Woman. Sarah’s body has the same mesmerising pause of muscle and movement. Under her baggy white dungarees, she’s wearing a low-backed vest top and from her lower neck down to between her shoulder blades, the knobs of her vertebrae are visible. Fine hairs lie on her skin. The tip of her long plait grazes at the swell of her buttocks.
‘I love the way this one stands out from the others.’ She peers at the silky embroidery threads, then steps back to study the piles of snippings on the floor. ‘Is it finished?’
I nod, light-headed. ‘More or less.’
Sarah clutches her stomach when it rumbles. ‘Got any food?’
I cut mould from a block of cheddar in the fridge, while Sarah rummages through the box of supplies Susie left. ‘It’s like a Christmas hamper,’ she exclaims holding up jars of Marmite and olives. ‘Look! Even cocktail sticks!’
The remnants of the sliced bread are stale, so we toast it with cheese and Marmite and take our plates into the sun room, where she sits apart from me, cross-legged on the floor, shaking her head at the offer of wine. She wolfs down three slices of toast, licks the grease from her fingers and unplaits her hair, fluffing it over her shoulders. Today her hair smells of apples. She slips a tobacco tin and Rizlas from the pocket of her overalls and sprinkles a pinch of tobacco on to the paper. She runs her tongue along to seal the edge, and glances up at me, lifting an eyebrow, but she smokes in silence, gazing out at the darkening sky. I can’t work out what’s going on in her head. Haven’t enough energy to try too much. I move closer, lifting a spiral curl and wrapping it around my forefinge
r. The slip and cling of her hair arouses me, my cock shifting, but she leans away to spear an olive with a cocktail stick and the strand of hair slides from my grasp.
I brush the dust from my jeans and walk to the window. Outside, the sea is back, breaking waves gleaming white in the darkness. It’s early evening. The fluorescent tube sparks overhead. I could suggest some tango, but I’ve no music. Her face looks empty, turned in on herself.
‘How’s it going then?’ I say, finally, picking up our plates from the floor.
She seems to come to, get her bearings. She takes a long final drag on her roll-up. Her latest commission, I already know, is from a friend of the couple who bought the Diving Woman. They, too, want a water feature, something similar.
‘My production line, you mean?’ She stubs her cigarette on the plate I’m holding. ‘It’s crap.’ Her face is sharp and white. One slip and she’s biting.
‘Crap?’
‘Yes. The nursery at Bosham House phoned me today.’
‘About?’
‘The same old thing: water features. They want some – big, bloody expensive ones, of course.’
‘Isn’t that good?’
‘Oh, yeah, I’m behind with the rent.’
‘Then ...?’
‘Then why am I in such a foul mood?’ She pops the olive into her mouth.
‘Well, you’re a bit quiet, but ...’
‘You don’t have these dilemmas.’ She neatly retrieves the stone between thumb and forefinger and drops it on to the plate. ‘And you don’t know how lucky you are. It’s another world out here. You live in your sister’s house, no worries about a roof over your head. She even brings you food supplies.’
This is about money, then. ‘Well, it’s not ... I don’t—’
‘No, you don’t.’ She’s pacing up and down, waving her Rizla packet about. ‘You have an idea and you get on with it. No one tells you what to do and how to do it. Or, worse, gets you to make copies.’
‘But the point is it’s not my work, is it, the rope stuff? It’s just a – a hobby. It has nothing to do with other people.’
‘My God! The ultimate self-centredness of the True Artist.’ She gestures inverted commas around ‘True Artist’ and grimaces, before scooping up her hair in both hands and rapidly plaiting it again.
‘Not at all.’ She must intend to provoke. ‘I’m not an artist.’
‘And I am? I might as well be making concrete gnomes, except that my water features are for rich people who imagine they have taste!’
I should have told her – I realise five minutes after she’s left and I’m alone adding our plates to the pile already balanced on the draining board – tourists constantly boss me around when I’m waiting tables in tavernas. But it doesn’t matter. It makes life easy. That’s the difference. Waiting at tables doesn’t interfere with my head. I don’t have to converse with anyone about anything at all except the food and drink. And, when I don’t feel like talking to the tourists, I simply pretend to have no German, no English. I smile winningly at the most attractive female in the group, the one I might want to get into bed at a later stage, and shrug. Usually, they quite quickly stop trying to talk to me. Vasilis vanishes into the kitchen and opens the lid of the chest freezer to hide his laughter. I’m meek, subservient, head tilted, attentive, but elsewhere. In Crete, it’s easy to be alone when I need to be. There are the lonely mountain tracks and narrow dirt paths worn by goats. The simple white mountain-top churches.
And it’s not Susie’s house. Surely I have told Sarah this already.
Too unsettled to stay in and get on, I decide to walk to the phone box at the far edge of the village to make the promised call to Susie. The phone box smells of curry today; there’s a takeaway carton upside down in the corner. Wind whistles through a cracked pane. Behind with the rent. Perhaps that’s her problem. I’d assumed she had a private income of some sort. I turn up the collar of the sheepskin jacket.
‘Oh, I’m so glad it’s you! I was worrying about how to get hold of you.’ The chink of crockery and Susie’s voice is breathy, coming and going. I picture her in the chaotic kitchen, phone tucked between shoulder and ear, unloading the dishwasher. ‘I thought I’d have to drive down to tell you. Hang on.’
The clinking stops.
‘Tell me?’ I can’t hear her voice any more, only a sound like wind blowing across the telephone receiver at her end. ‘Susie?’
Her voice is back, hushed and urgent. ‘—been in touch – asking me what I want her to do.’
It must be leaves in the trees I can hear. She must have stepped outside the back door. ‘Who?’
‘Hoggie ... over the years ... says she must tell her about Dad ... but ... my address ... should I ... told Richard yet.’ Her voice comes and goes.
‘What? Slow down.’
‘She’s written to me. Hoggie – Harriet, I mean. I knew, the moment it landed on the doormat. I had to sit down. Mum’s in Spain.’
I rest my forehead on the smeary glass and poke at the yellow-stained takeaway carton with my toe. Her voice is fading, tinny.
‘They’ve visited each other quite recently, Hoggie and Mum. She will definitely want to see us, Hoggie says. But it’s up to us. Can you believe it? I thought I should ask you. I’ve started to write back but there’s so much – Andy, I can’t believe it, can you? I don’t know what to think.’
Outside, a Jack Russell sniffs at the door of the phone box, cocks its leg, urinates, then scampers up the road after a hooded figure in a cagoule.
‘I’m so excited I can hardly keep still. Andy? That’s why I was thinking – Christmas—’
Her words pound, crashing through my head. I’m drowning. Substance and breath knocked from me. My throat constricts. I slip downwards, fumbling with the receiver, trying to bury it, with Susie’s voice, beneath the sheepskin jacket, clamping the receiver against my ribcage, shoving it, until I’m hunched on the concrete floor of the telephone box with the hard lump of plastic rammed high into my armpit. Still Susie’s voice squawks and fuzzes. My head tumbles with her incomplete phrases. Words in smithereens.
My mother stood on the sand at the edge of the pebbles, her mouth open in a wide O.
I withdraw the receiver from my armpit and hold it out in front of me. Let it go. Plummeting, black, shiny: the receiver twists and spins as the wire takes the weight, curls elongating and shrinking again. Finally, it dangles. Chirpings escape from little circles in the earpiece. Neat woodworm holes pressed against my fingertips in the blackness. My hands cover my ears. Silence roars in, my head awash with underwater turmoil. I tuck head and elbows down between my knees, hold on to my breath.
My eyes open. I’m gasping, my lungs tight and airless. Don’t know where the hell I am. Concrete, curry: the telephone box. It’s dark. I stagger to my feet, cramp in both legs, my whole body seized up. Was it dark before? God knows. I’m stiff with cold so I’ve been in here a while.
Outside: rain on my face; a juddery breath of salty air. I stamp my feet to get sensation back. Moonlight on the wet track. Time’s jumped; it’s night time. I must have passed out.
The impulse to run is strong. But my rucksack; Ashley’s; Grandfather’s sailor’s palm: I have to go back for them.
At The Siding, I stop at the gate. Susie’s Volvo is there, engine running, headlights on. This doesn’t add up. Her voice on the phone ... must have been out of my head for hours for her to already be here, now. The front door’s open, banging back against the wall. I go nearer. Susie’s in the car, slumped over the wheel.
As I heave open the car door, she lifts her head. She’s crying. She moves robotically, holding open her arms and then, mind still reeling as if I’m pissed, my head’s on the softness of her breasts.
‘Thought I was too late, Andy, too late.’ She keeps saying it over and over, her breath hiccupping. ‘I thought you’d gone again.’
Eventually we sort ourselves out and get into the house. I’m parched, downing glass after glass of w
ater, splashing my face, my head under the tap, trying to decide whether I need alcohol or just a long sleep.
‘Andy?’ Her voice is thick. She blinks across the kitchen at me, looking dazed. A phlegmy cough has her shoulders heaving. ‘Andy, there’s something ... where?’ and then something happens to her face, a momentary spasm, like terror, and her eyes roll back in her head. I glimpse the whites just before she falls off the chair and is thrashing on the floor.
A snatched thought, Is this labour? but the twitching and kicking of her legs and arms is so violent, her mouth foaming, that it’s obvious she’s having some sort of fit. Fuck.
Useless objects illuminate themselves with a startling clarity: the different shades of a lifting patch of brown linoleum; the mottled blue-grey metal of the leg of the old stove; her bunch of keys fanned on the Formica table top. My thought processes move excruciatingly slowly while my body races to the door and I shout out into the empty evening for help. Nobody. I glance at the Volvo. Could I drive it? Not a clue. Quicker, safer, is Sarah’s phone. On the wall in her kitchen.
Of course, she’s not there.
Pick lock.
Dial 999.
I rant.
A calm voice tells me to move all furniture out of my sister’s way in case she hits herself, to check her airways once the fit has passed.
‘She’s pregnant,’ I remember, just as I’m about to slam the phone down and run back to Susie.
‘Pregnant, did you say?’ The voice is sharper. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Huge.’
Susie lies on her back, shuddering. Her face is waxy. There’s vomit in her hair and the skin on her forehead is broken and bleeding a little. She must have hit herself on the chair leg. I touch her cheek and tell her I’m there. She goes limp and lies still. I don’t want to touch her any more.
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