The Darkest Secret

by Alex Marwood

  ‘Fat lot of good he’d be if you got into trouble,’ she snorts.

  Joaquin rolls his eyes and hits the door frame with his stick.

  ‘And put that bloody thing outside,’ she orders. ‘No sticks in the house. You know the rules.’

  The eyes roll again, but he hurls the stick out into the sunlight.

  ‘God preserve me from disobedient children,’ she says. ‘Your sister was nothing like this.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Simone’s perfect, I know. Well, if I can’t have any fun here, can I go to the beach?’

  ‘Please,’ she says. ‘And no. I don’t have time to take you. And Coco’s feeling under the weather. It’s too far for her.’

  ‘God almighty,’ says Joaquin, ‘it’s only the beach. What do you think I am? Five?’

  ‘Seven. And they went to the one on the other side. I’d probably get arrested if I let a seven-year-old loose by himself on the chain ferry. And don’t swear, Joaquin.’

  ‘That’s not swearing.’

  ‘It’s taking the Lord’s name in vain, which is the same thing.’

  ‘Ooh! Get you! Why aren’t you at church, Grandma?’

  Maria heaves a huge sigh. Ruby watches, fascinated, from her bar stool and pops mango chunks, one by one by one, between her lips. Mangoes are yum. She thinks they’re her favourite. She doesn’t understand big boys, though. Joaquin doesn’t exactly scare her, but she and Coco avoid being alone with him. They’re never quite sure what he might do.

  Joaquin releases an ngggh of frustration.

  ‘Tell you what,’ says Maria, ‘let Coco finish her breakfast and we’ll pop to the café and get an ice cream.’

  ‘Ooookay.’ He sounds mildly mollified. Then, ‘That one’s Coco? I thought that one was Ruby.’

  Ruby beams with delight. ‘I’m Coco, stupid!’ she cries, and waves her left wrist in the air.

  There are lots of cars on the road outside the gate, all sitting in a line, like when they arrived. She feels sorry for all the children in them. They look hot and bored and their parents won’t let them out into the lovely sunshine. Godmother Maria holds her hand as they follow the pavement and Joaquin runs ahead, whacking at bushes with his stick. Milly and India call him Whacking, which she thinks is very funny.

  ‘How are you feeling today?’ asks Maria. ‘You’re not feeling sick any more, are you?’

  ‘No. I think I sicked it all up last night.’

  ‘Good-oh. We wouldn’t want you to miss Neptune’s Kingdom this afternoon.’

  ‘What’s Neptune’s Kingdom?’

  ‘It’s a big water park.’

  ‘What’s a water park?’

  ‘You’ll love it. Slides and rides and great big pools where you can go paddling.’

  She feels herself glow with anticipation. Ruby loves water, far more than Coco does. She can almost swim already, throwing herself up and down the shallow end of the pool in her blow-up ring, flailing her arms, as Coco sits on the steps with her feet barely in the drink and flinches every time a drop from one of Ruby’s splashes comes her way. ‘Oooooh,’ she says.

  ‘Well, let’s see how you cope with your ice cream,’ she says. ‘What sort of ice cream would you like?’

  ‘Chocolate.’

  ‘Is that what Coco would have? Cause you’re Coco, remember.’

  She ponders the subject reluctantly. She adores chocolate. Chocolate and fries, though she doesn’t get to eat much of either.

  ‘I bet Coco’s having chocolate, if she’s being you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says sadly, ‘the pink one, then.’ She understands that if you’re going to tell a lie you have to follow it all the way through.

  Joaquin comes barrelling back up the pavement. ‘Instead of ice cream,’ he says, ‘can I have chips?’

  ‘Oh,’ says Ruby, sadly again. She’d had no idea that chips were on offer. This early in the day she’d rather have a punnet of hot, salty, crunchy goodness than a soppy strawberry ice. ‘I like chippies too,’ she ventures.

  ‘Tell you what,’ says Maria, ‘if you don’t tell anyone, I’ll let you share a portion of fries between you. How about that?’

  Ruby lets go of her hand and claps her own together with pleasure.

  ‘I spoil you,’ says Maria, ‘I really do.’

  She feels very grown-up, out at a café without her sister or either of her parents. She hasn’t even wondered where her mother is yet today, or her father. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ she asks over the top of a dish of ice cream so pink it almost matches the naked back of the fat man drinking beer at the next-door table.

  ‘Oh,’ says Maria smoothly, ‘she had to go back to London, sweetie. She realised she had something to do that she’d forgotten. But Daddy’s still here. He’ll take you both back up tomorrow.’

  Ruby nods. She’s a placid child, not prone to panic. If her mother has gone away, she will see her again. The thought of permanent loss has never crossed her mind.

  Joaquin has picked a vivid green mint choc chip ice and is squeezing ketchup on to the lid of an open polystyrene package of fries. ‘Now don’t eat all of those yourself,’ says Maria. ‘You’re sharing, remember?’

  The eye-roll again, then he reaches out with a fry between his fingers and dips it into Ruby’s ice cream.

  ‘Hey!’ she protests.

  ‘Oi!’ says Maria. ‘You should ask before you do that.’

  Joaquin puts the ice-creamy chip in his mouth. ‘Sorry, Ruby. Can I dip my chips in your ice cream, please?’

  ‘Yuk,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, grasshopper,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not a grasshopper.’

  He dips another chip. Puts it in his mouth with evident glee. Tries it with his own dessert and pulls a ‘meh’ face. ‘Definitely better with strawberry.’

  ‘Honestly, where do you learn these things?’ asks Maria.

  ‘Everybody knows about chips and ice cream.’

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Everybody who’s not a million years old.’

  Ruby giggles. She’s never heard a child cheeking its mother the way Joaquin cheeks his, but Maria doesn’t seem to be taking it badly at all. She’s still nervous of his big gangly body and his loud voice, but she admires him now. Joaquin is a risk-taker. He knows no fear. She takes a fry from the box and scoops up a lump of ice cream with it. Looks at it apprehensively – grown-ups are always telling her she will like foods, like spinach and peppers and broccoli, that turn out to be yuk – and screws up her courage to impress the big boy. Puts it in her mouth… and a whole world of culinary adventure explodes on her tongue. Up until now, everything she’s tasted has been carefully divided on her plate. She has never even known that these things, these tastes and textures, could be combined, let alone that soft can make crispy better, that sweet goes so well with salt, that hot and cold taken together can expand the universe. It’s horrid and beautiful, wrong and so, so right, all in one fleeting chew.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  ‘Right?’ says Joaquin.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t tell me you like it too,’ says Maria. ‘God, kids. Can I get you to eat simple buttered peas? Of course I can’t.’

  She sips her black coffee and watches with a pained look as the two children dive back into creating their hideous snack.

  ‘I had the weirdest dream last night,’ says Joaquin. ‘I dreamt all you grown-ups came into the room and you were making a great big hoo-ha. And someone was crying. And then when I woke up this morning I was in your room and I thought I’d been kidnapped for a minute.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ says Maria, ‘something went wrong with the plumbing in the annexe and the loo started overflowing. When Daddy came in to check on you there was an inch of water everywhere. We had to evacuate you or by the morning you would all have been floating to China.’

  Joaquin bursts out laughing. ‘No, we wouldn’t, silly. We’d have bumped into the
Isle of Wight first. Didn’t I wake up?’

  Maria lets out a hoot of laughter that sounds funny to Ruby. As if she’s not really laughing at all, but screaming. But then it’s just gone, again, and she’s laughing once more. ‘When have you ever woken up, Joaquin Gavila? I could let a bomb off next to you and you’d just turn over on to the other side. No, we carried you all, one by one, up to the house and Simone was up half the night mopping up, and you all slept right through the whole thing.’

  ‘Freaky!’

  ‘It was very late.’

  ‘So who was crying?’

  ‘Oh, that was Uncle Sean,’ she says. ‘Realising he wasn’t going to be able to put the house up for sale till he’d fixed it. He’s very emotional when it comes to money, is Uncle Sean.’

  ‘Cry baby,’ says Joaquin, and cackles disdainfully.

  ‘Come on, you two. Finish up that disgusting mess. Coco’s daddy will be wondering where you are,’ says Maria.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  It’s winter dawns like this that make him glad to be alive. When the tourists have slowed to a trickle and the estuary sands are empty, a million shades of red seeping through last night’s clouds and the Atlantic still roaring out there to his left. Everyone warned him over and over again that the seaside was different out of season, that he’d find it grim, but it’s the grimness that pulled him, always was. John was never a bucket-and-spade sort of person. Angry waters call to his Celtic soul in a way that sun-loungers and palm trees never did.

  Chip and Canasta run ahead across the sand, daring each other forward to celebrate the day. With their thick Collie coats and the shore full of flotsam, they love the winter too. No children falling over and blaming them, no family picnics or yappy lapdogs, the fishing boats all out until the tide comes in, or on chucks in the boatyard getting their annual overhaul, the rolling stretch of sand and all its tidal pools and secrets there for them alone. A gull swoops down on to a heap of something black – a great tree of weed ripped from its moorings and carried up the river mouth by the tide, some fishing net carelessly dropped from the back of a trawler – and the dogs step up their pace as one, barrel, barking, towards it until it flaps away with a resentful shriek. He doesn’t bother to call them. They know better than to go into the water at this time of year, and they have the beach to themselves.

  The wind is still high. He’s wrapped up tight in his oilskin coat, flat cap clamped over his thinning hair and two layers of gloves to keep his hands from falling off, but his ears are starting to hurt. They have never been the same since that infection twenty years ago: drops in temperature, the pressure of an aeroplane cabin, background music are all nuisances now, his pockets never free of decongestants, but the remains of his Christmas cold is making them hurt actively. He stops and unwinds his scarf from around his neck, wraps it over the top of his head, hat and all, and ties it tight around his chin. I must look like a baboushka out on the Steppes, he thinks. Isn’t it amazing how age and comfort will eventually erode away even the most deep-rooted of vanity?

  Eight years on, and he still finds it hard to believe how much his life has changed. I was feeling so old in Vauxhall, he thinks. Trying to look as if I was enjoying the scene as the people got younger and younger around me and my body could no longer take the stimulants required to keep up. And here I am now, no more gym body, no more walks of shame. My twentysomething self would have reeled at the thought that I’d end up alone in the middle of nowhere one day, Chip and Canasta the loves of my life, but this is the happiest I’ve ever been. Appledore’s a gossipy little place and getting through the visiting crowds is a pain in the season, but it’s great to come out of the flat door in the morning and have your neighbours greet you, and I enjoy the pleasure on people’s faces as they find just the perfect seaglass necklace, the most wonderful water-bleached wooden bail, the loveliest rusted coupler in the shop, and so what if they get it home to Basingstoke and wonder what on earth they were thinking?

  The howl of wind and the rattle of rain in the eaves at night are always an enticing sound to him, because it means that in the morning the tide will have thrown more of his means of living up the river and on to the sand. He started off selling gaudy glass, trinkets and wind chimes and glinting waterfall mobiles to hang in the window – still does – but the discovery that the estuary is a trove of shipwreck jetsam, that after each storm its shifting sands will reveal something that has lain buried for a hundred, two hundred years, was a moment of pure exhilaration. It’s actually better in here than it is out on the sands at Westward Ho!, perhaps because that beach is hardly ever deserted. People love a souvenir of someone else’s disaster. The Titanic trade seems to get more enthusiastic with every cap-badge those submarines bring up. They’ll slosh their holiday money about like drunken sailors if you can throw a few salty sea-dog tales into the mix when they start to finger a verdigris-coated capstan or a blunted whaling hook, and, if there’s one thing the wild Atlantic coast has to offer, it’s vivid yarns of mass drownings and miracle rescues by the hundred.

  The dogs are feeling the morning. Of all the many gifts they have brought to his life, the greatest is the forgetting of age. Out here on the sand the three of them can shed the creep of the years, ignore the aches and the sadness, the fact that there is less time ahead now than there is behind, and simply be. Gentle Chip and snappy Canasta, racing each other in some imaginary hunt, tumbling over themselves in the rush to be first. Just the three of them and a container ship tossing in the far distance on the open sea. John inhales deeply, enjoys the salt pleasure of the sea air.

  Head protected, he trudges on towards the edge of the river channel. He knows better than to stand still for any great length of time; though the sand is mostly firm, it has patches that suck liquidly, and a fair number of unwary people have had to be fished out by the coastguard as the waters rose above their chests. He finds a stick – just an ordinary stick, not skeletonised the way the tourists like them – and throws it overarm for Chip, who has trotted back to see what he’s doing. The dogs race off in pursuit. For a moment he feels a wobble of fear when he thinks he might have thrown too hard, that they’re going to plunge into the fast-flowing river, but it lands a few feet from the water’s edge. Canasta, more sprightly and more competitive than kindly Chip, dives past her brother and snaps at it with her hard white teeth. She misses. Dog and stick somersault towards the water in a blur of black and white and flying sand and John holds his breath as he waits for them to land.

  She hits, skids, enters the water with a mighty splash. ‘Canasta!’ he yells, pointlessly, above the wind. Should have done that before, he thinks. Not now. Not now she can’t hear you. Not that she would have listened anyway. Bloody dog. So wrapped up in herself she doesn’t listen to anything, and now I’m going to be one of those people you read about in the papers, drowned as they jumped in to save their dog from floodwater…

  The wave recedes and Canasta bobs up like a cork, grinning around the stick. She struggles against the suck, then he sees her paws scrabble into the shifting ground, gain traction, pull her forward on to the sand. She bounds a few steps towards land, then stops to shake herself off. That’s it, he thinks, that’s enough for today. My blood pressure can’t take any more of that.

  ‘Come on, you silly bitch!’ he calls. Always uses the appropriate noun when her recklessness gets too much. ‘Come out of there!’

  Chip has come back of his own accord and is sitting at his feet. He leans his chunky body against his leg and grins up at him with friendly, rolling eyes. John chucks him behind the ear, bends down and plants a kiss on his sweet white forehead. How two dogs can come from the same litter and be so different he will never know: Chip soft and gentle and loving, Canasta all bluster and barks.

  The girl arrives and he takes the stick from her mouth while she growls and threatens, as she always does. He slings it through the air again, back towards the shoreline, and she races off in pursuit, showers of salt water flying off her.
Chip trots sedately after. It lands by the pile of weeds he noticed earlier, and she snatches it up, then drops it and begins to bark. Look! she yells. Look what I’ve found! Come and see!

  Chip lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a sigh and a whimper, then falls into stride behind him, huffing, as John obeys orders. Sometimes the things Canasta barks about are indeed worth looking at. Chip, bored by his steady gait, races on ahead to his sister – and joins the barking.

  Oh, God, thinks John, and steps up his pace. He reaches the dogs and feels a prickle of cold around his ears despite the scarf. What looked like another piece of marine discardings isn’t that at all. It’s a man, yellowish skin bloated by immersion in water, long black leather coat that must have contributed hugely to the speed at which his feet have sunk into the sand. He’s buried up to the thighs, his eyes and mouth wide open in horror at the approach of the tide that has covered him. And, even in death, he clutches at the neck of a half-drunk bottle of vodka.

  Chapter Forty

  2004 | Sunday | Janusz Bieda

  ‘Watch out, boss! Here comes trouble.’

  Janusz looks in the direction of Tomasz’s pointing finger and sees the man from next door stop at the foot of the drive. ‘Fucking hell!’ he shouts over the roar of the crane’s engine, ‘What now?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Twelve-fifteen. If he wants to complain, he’s getting this right up his pipework.’ He waves the giant wrench with which he’s been coupling the flexible pipes attached to the pool liner’s outlets to the filtration system, and the men laugh out loud. The atmosphere is cheerful on the site today, despite the heat. After ten days in which most of the crew allowed themselves to feel miserable with homesickness as the prospect of relieving it drew nearer, the fact that they have reached the home stretch has acted like a shot in the arm for them all. Everyone’s joking as they throw themselves into scooping rubble into barrows to tip into the extra couple of feet they’ve dug out from the swimming pool hole, and the casuals he’s called in for the day are keen to make a good impression and get on the full-time roster for the next project. Until one minute ago it was looking as though they were going to make their delayed deadline easily. But they can’t afford any more delays, if that’s what this man’s bringing.