He comes back and locks his door.
‘Helen?’
‘She’s getting her hair done. She’ll be gone a while.’
‘Good. I don’t want a pretty woman to see me fall on my arse.’
‘Don’t worry about it. She wouldn’t laugh. Much.’
‘Still,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
We’re outside Bob’s. Bob’s washing his car. He’s not wearing a coat either. He’s washing the tyres. He doesn’t look up.
‘Hi,’ I say, from a respectful distance. I stop.
He looks up, but doesn’t come over. He’s in his fifties. He’s got a wide head. Short cropped grey hair. A fat nose.
‘Bob,’ he says. He carries on washing his car. I could go over, shake his hand. But it’s his drive. I’ve got a stick. If he’s not going to come down the drive, I’m not going to go up.
‘Sam,’ I say.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Better crack on.’
Like I’m pestering him. It gets my goat, but I shrug and share a look with Frank.
‘Frank,’ says Bob.
‘Bob,’ says Frank.
We walk on, slowly. Frank doesn’t complain. I take his lead and soldier on.
‘I see what you mean,’ I say, when we’re a safe distance down the road.
‘Polishing his tyres,’ says Frank, like that explains everything.
I have to admit, it does seem a little odd.
‘Whatever,’ I say.
He nods. We make tracks.
It takes about half an hour, there. It would probably be a ten minute walk for someone with the full use of their legs.
I’ve got a backpack. I fill it with some light stuff. Chocolate for Helen, a can of coke for me, feeling guilty by association but OK with it because that’s the nearest I get to the real thing.
I get a pint of milk, too. I’m one of life’s pint buyers, now. I don’t want the usual four pints in my backpack. I’m liable to keel over.
Frank gets a pouch of tobacco and some papers.
I look at my watch. It’s the same watch as always, but it slips around now. I didn’t realise wrists got fat, but if they’re getting thinner then the opposite must be true, too.
Outside, I rest against a wall. There’s a pub there, right across the street.
‘Treat you to lunch?’ I say.
Frank puts the thin cigarette he’s been rolling between his lips and lights it.
‘I could do with a pint. Not here, though,’ he says. ‘Me and the landlord don’t see eye to eye. Down the Crown. If Dave’s on he’ll let me smoke in the back room. I can’t do the pub these days. I’m set in my ways, I suppose, but it doesn’t seem right, drinking a pint without a cigarette. I don’t mind round someone’s house, but it doesn’t seem right, in a pub.’
‘Just one of a long list of things you can’t do anymore. It used to drive me nuts. I don’t mind so much now. I’m trying for mellow. After a heart attack and a stroke, I let things slide, if I can.’
‘It creeps up on you,’ says Frank. ‘One thing, you wear it. One thing becomes two, then a hundred. We’re not so far off a police state. At least, that’s the way it seems to me.’
Frank sighs and pinches out his cigarette.
‘Don’t mind me, Sam. I’m just old.’
I think about what he said. Frank’s in his seventies. I figure if he wants to smoke in his local, I’m not going to stop him.
We go to the Crown.
It’s nice. He’s right. His beer looks good, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other. He wouldn’t look right without both.
I have a sandwich. I wish I had a beer and a cigarette. It looks cooler than egg mayonnaise.
I realise I’ve got some weird hero worship thing going with Frank. It makes me smile.
I also don’t know how to broach the subject I really want to talk about, but I guess this is the best time. We’re getting along.
‘Me and Helen, we’re going to do the tourist thing. Blakeney Point. Take a boat out, see the seals. We were wondering, do you want to come?’
‘Ah…’
‘Ah?’
‘Thanks. I’ll pass, though. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. It’s just…shit. I’ve never been on a boat.’
‘You used to build boats?’
‘Stupid, right? I love the water. But I’ve never been in. I never learned to swim. I’ve never been in a boat except on land.’
‘First time for everything.’
I can see Frank’s worried. Some people love the water, but they’re scared to go in. Maybe that’s it. I don’t want to push him, though.
‘Don’t worry about it. You know, I never saw the sea until I moved here.’
‘Is that so?’ says Frank.
‘I’d seen the Thames. It’s not the same.’
‘I did always love the water.’
‘You must know a good boat if you see one.’
‘I can tell.’ He nods. ‘I can tell. Can’t swim, though.’
‘That’s alright, then,’ I say. ‘We’re not going swimming. We’re going on a boat.’
Frank chuckles through his nose. Smoke comes out in two plumes.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Swimming optional,’ I say with a shrug. ‘You want to go swimming, up to you. But your choice. Just a thought.’
He takes a big gulp of his pint. ‘All right. You’ve talked me round.’
‘I wasn’t really trying to talk you round,’ I say. ‘Well, not trying that hard...’ I add. I grin a little. I’m not accustomed to grinning and my face doesn’t really like it. It’s still a little droopy. Spazzy, I think, but then Helen’s not around so I can think spazzy all I like. I’m in a pub. Man rules.
‘Just the same. I’ll go.’
‘Great,’ I say. I mean it. I want him to come.
When we get home, we part ways. The car’s in the drive. I call out for Helen from the front porch. Frank goes round the back of his house. I still go in the front door.
‘Well?’ she says.
‘I like it,’ I say. She preens. It makes me smile.
‘He said yes.’
‘Great. Did you have a nice time?’
‘I did.’
‘I’m glad you’re making friends.’
I want to argue. My natural inclination. But it’s true. Or it’s getting that way.
‘You must be tired,’ she says.
‘I am.’
‘You want to take a nap?’
‘You?’
She smiles, undoes the top button of her blouse.
‘Maybe.’
We don’t make the sea.
The sea’s like my talisman. Maybe that’s why the next day is so weird. I didn’t get a top-up. Maybe that’s why I didn’t listen to Frank.
*
16.
Me and Helen eat a late breakfast. I linger over tea, her over coffee. She takes two cups to my one. The coffee smells good, but the tea is fine. It’s got my milk in it and I walked for that damn milk.
Thirty minutes there, thirty minutes back. That’s the longest I’ve walked since getting ill. I wouldn’t have turned back. How can you turn back when you’re with a seventy-something guy with a fake hip and no stick?
I ache like a bastard, though. I ache in places I wouldn’t imagine it would hurt. My legs ache, my good one the worse, I guess because I favour it. My hand, from clutching the stick, but my neck, my shoulders, my back, too.
But it’s a good kind of tender. It’s better than the tender you get when you’ve spent the night throwing up after a bender, or the back ache you get from sitting at a desk for four hours straight.
I’m wearing my dressing gown, sitting at the table in the kitchen. I’m looking at Helen’s legs as she reads the Sunday papers, even though it’s Tuesday.
We don’t rush anymore.
I take the tennis ball from my pocket and squeeze it with my right hand. I can’t dent the ball, like I can now with my left hand, but I co
unt out a hundred, going at it as hard as I can.
Helen knows I’m doing it. She doesn’t say anything, but she’s happy. I can tell.
I can do things now that I couldn’t do before the stroke and the coronary. I can walk for an hour. I couldn’t do that before. I’ve got callus from my stick. I’ve never had calluses. I’m forty-two. I’ve never had calluses. Frank’s got calluses, and he hasn’t worked in ten years.
Calluses seem honest to me. More honest than all the nosebleeds I had from years of putting shit up my nose, or bleeding from my arse because I’d had to fight to get a big shit out that’d been stuck up there for a week, then tickle it round the U-bend. Drugs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
I squeeze out another thirty repetitions on the tennis ball, but by then I’m about to drop it, so I put it away for now.
Most days I go for two hundred. I decide right there, I can do more.
There’s no rush, but the days running down, too. I don’t want to die with soft hands.
‘We missed the sea yesterday,’ Helen says. She doesn’t look up from the paper. I’ve still got my eye on her legs. I’ve got a libido again. It’s making up for lost time.
‘I know. Want to go early today?’
‘Shall we walk?’ she says it lightly, but I know she’s feeling me out, testing where my limits are. She knows I’m aching, but she’s been taking it easy on me, driving me down to the sea.
I wonder how much of this is Seetha’s doing. I can imagine Seetha and Helen, working out the timing. Figuring out when I can be put back in harness.
She’s let me find my own way. She’s right, though. I’ve been babying myself. I walked further yesterday than I have for years, and even with my cane and gimpy leg, if it took thirty minutes to Skip’s, I could probably make the sea in twenty. Probably less.
‘OK. After lunch. I ache a bit. We’ll have to take it easy.’
‘Of course,’ she says, but the way she says it, I know she’s going to push me.
Fine, I think. I’m not going to be a pussy about it.
I tell her we’ll take the long way around. Through the estate. Down the hill, through the old town. To our bench.
I’m showing off. I’m sure she’s been talking to Seetha.
We’ll take the short way back, though.
If I don’t kill myself first.
*
17.
We set out after lunch. Spring is in, but the air still remembers winter. It’s that kind early spring when one week you’re in your shirtsleeves, the next you’re in your long johns.
I’ve got on a long coat, a jumper, and a woolly hat. I hate it when my ears get cold. It makes my jaw ache.
Helen’s hair’s long enough so it covers her ears. She’s got gloves on, though, and a scarf.
We walk down the alley, a thin dirt track between Bob’s and the next house along. The grass is bare in the middle of the track, worn down. Short elsewhere. The grass doesn’t need cutting yet. We haven’t had rain for a few days, so the ground is solid. The stick doesn’t sink too much.
I peek over the fence and Bob’s there, in his garden. He looks over and catches my eye. I nod. He stares at me. I look to see if Helen’s seen him. She’s too short to see over his fence though.
I think about saying hi, then I think about telling him to fuck off. I think about smashing the slats of treated wood on his fence and pushing my way through and driving a splinter of wood into his neck then rubbing his blood in my hair and laughing in his fucking face.
But that’s not me, and it’s gone as soon as it comes. It’s not me. It’s him, and his thoughts aren’t mine. It’s gone.
Yes. I think about telling him to fuck off or saying hi and forcing the issue but I don’t do either. I’ve met plenty of rude people before and half the time I’ve been one of them. I just look away and put it from my mind. I couldn’t give a toss if one of my neighbours is some kind of Norfolk troll. It’s nothing to me. Fuck him, and his ugly shed.
A little laugh pops out.
‘What?’ says Helen.
‘Nothing,’ I say. I don’t want to spoil her day telling her about our weird neighbour. ‘Just daydreaming.’
She gives me a little smile and I squeeze her hand with my weak right hand. I give her a little wink.
‘Take it easy,’ I say. ‘Might be a little something in it for you when we get home.’
She laughs properly and smacks me on the shoulder.
We come out onto Cedars, just like Frank said. It’s a nice area. Good, solid houses. A lot of new builds are pokey, but these look dependable, like they’ve got interior walls made out of actual brick. I could be wrong.
We’re in the middle of Cedars. I feel like an explorer. It’s a good feeling. Exploring, like when I was a kid, playing with friends over the dip, dumping our bikes carelessly and just running. Times way back before I remember the dip was a quarry. You couldn’t imagine it, when I was a kid. The trees seemed so tall, the dip so huge. You didn’t think about the age of trees and quarries and time moving on when you were ten.
Just like me and Helen didn’t really think about where we were going. Just a rough idea, a vague sense of direction, and an adult’s version of hide and seek. Instead of trees; anonymous houses. Pretty much the same, but for doors and windows and plants. The trees that had been planted were new. Still short, trunks still spindly.
‘It’s like the village out of the Stepford Wives.’
‘Frank won’t come here,’ I say.
She nods. That about sums it up. We were chatting before, excited by our adventure. Since we got onto Cedars, we’ve fallen quiet. There’s just the muted clack of my stick and the sound of our feet. Three normal steps, one slide, one clack.
‘It’s quiet.’
‘Too quiet,’ I say.
Not great, but it gets a smile. We’re old enough to have seen a western or two.
Up ahead, there’s the universal road sign for dead end, but before we get there, I spot a small break in the street, between two houses. A concrete path. Blink, and you miss it.
‘Do you think this is it?’ I say, pointing it out.
‘It must be,’ Helen says. She shrugs. ‘In for a penny.’
So we follow the path. It’s not that long a path. More of a back alley between Cedars and the street over.
We come out by a cluster of four houses with a shared driveway and too many cars. There’s another cut through that leads to a row of houses and a road name.
We’re on Townshend.
I can hear traffic, a way off. It’s the first sound I’ve heard since getting onto the estate. I don’t know why, but I’m relieved.
‘That’s weird,’ she says.
I know she means the ‘H’.
‘Just a funny spelling.’ I imagine the building company thought it added gravitas to what is just an estate, whichever way you look at it, strange name or not.
The road sign doesn’t tell us which way to go. All it says is Odds/Evens, with arrows pointing left and right. I don’t remember Frank telling us the way from here.
The road sign shows a little symbol that denotes a cul-de-sac, but give no hint of which way is out, which way is further in.
I don’t want to go further in.
‘Which way?’ says Helen.
I think. Listen for the traffic. But there must be a lull, because it’s silent again. Just my breathing, my heart, the wind.
‘Let’s try this way. We can always come back.’
We walk on.
There’s a guy, up on a ladder. He’s painting a window frame. I breath out, relieved. I’d been holding my breath. I didn’t like walking all that way, not seeing anyone. Probably just an adjustment. Walking in London, even from a tube station to a bus, you’d see a thousand people.
Helen nudges me, makes this face. Like, aren’t you going to ask him?
I shake my head. I feel better now. There’s no need. Things are fine.
True, the place is str
ange, but it’s still early, and up ahead I can see a patch of green – a field. The road curves. We follow it. The playing field is on our right, all of a sudden, then the traffic sounds come back in. But of course, they were there all along.
A hundred yards and we’re out on the main road.
Down the hill, the Stop Shop. Up the hill, the coast.
We’re in our own little dip here.
I laugh, but it’s nervous.
‘I see what Frank means,’ I say. ‘No people.’
‘The guy painting his windows.’
‘Yeah. Apart from him.’
‘You know,’ says Helen, ‘I was getting a bit freaked out myself. I was imagining the guy would turn toward us, have no face, or something.’
I get goose bumps. I remember the man in the sports shop. Faceless and on fire.
‘Don’t,’ I say.
Helen looks sideways at me.
‘You OK?’
‘Sure.’
‘You want to go back?’
‘No. I can make it.’ Besides, I’m not going back that way. That’s what I want to say. And that it feels wrong. That it makes me feel wrong. But I don’t say any of those things. Because I can’t explain it.
‘I was only kidding,’ she says. She looks worried.
‘I know, but…I don’t know. Come on, let’s go. I want to see the sunset.’
So we walk.
The estate falls behind us to the right. We pass a set of wide gates, shut, imposing. Behind them, a long driveway leads up to a grand old building. There’s a sign, hand painted, on one brick gatepost. Eventide Homes.
It sounds like it should be from the Liturgy of Hours, but it’s not. I’m not a good Catholic, but I’m from an Irish family. It’s in the blood.
I don’t know what it is.
The pavement disappears after a while, and we’re walking on the verge. It’s uphill, but I can smell the salt air. It draws me on.
After what seems a long time the hill tapers down to flat. A few cars pass us. It’s a quiet stretch of road, but I’m grateful for those cars.
By the time I can see the sea in the distance, I still have that sense of the unreal, but the sea is maybe five hundred metres away, and I push everything to one side and concentrate solely on putting one foot in front of the other.
RAIN/Damned to Cold Fire (Two Supernatural Horror Novels): A RED LINE Horror Double: Supernatural Page 27