by Graham Swift
When old Merrick contrived to bump into him, in that supposedly unplanned way, on his returns to Jebb, there’d be an extra gleam, Jack thought, in the old bugger’s eye. Or it was an extra nip, perhaps, of whatever it was he took. And the gleam seemed to be saying: Well, boy, your dad might be suffering, and so am I, and those cows might have been up against it too, but who’s got the shortest straw, boysyboy, of all?
They wouldn’t linger now when they met each other like that. Jimmy would just stop, stick his head through the window of the Land Rover, pucker up his face and say a few words, or just twinkle under the brambly eyebrows, and lurch off.
For some reason, if only because Jimmy was Ellie’s father, Jack couldn’t help liking the little pixy-faced bastard. And, once upon a time, those interludes when he’d trundle back after seeing Ellie—whether old Merrick appeared over the horizon or not—had simply been some of the better moments of his life.
He still thinks it now. Still sees himself rolling a cigarette, with just one finger crooked round the wheel of the jolting pick-up, as if it would know anyway how to steer him home. Sometimes, even if old Merrick didn’t appear, he’d stop, all the same, on the Luxton side of the boundary, just to take in the view. Something he never did otherwise. To breathe the air. He’d get out and stand with his back against the pick-up, one Wellington boot crossed over the other, one elbow cupped in one hand, ciggy on the go. The breeze riffling through the grass. And Luke, still alive then, lolloped by his feet, ears riffled too. And Tom just a nipper. Just a baby really.
A sense, for a moment, of simply commanding everything he saw, of not needing to be anywhere else.
‘I wouldn’t bother, Jack.’ She’d never actually said it. Though she’d sometimes said, at dullish moments, as if to make him feel he had rivals or he was just some stopgap (had been all those years?) that what she was doing was waiting for her ‘mystery man’ to turn up, her mystery man who’d also in some way be her real man, like the mystery man who’d been real enough once for her mum to be persuaded to run off with him. That wasn’t ‘Uncle Tony’, that was someone before. Even his name seemed a mystery.
Jack never knew if she was just joking or saying it to niggle him, or if what she really meant was that this mystery man ought actually to be him. If he would only do something. Whatever that might be. So how about it, Jacko? It was all right somehow when she said it when they were only seventeen, but when she said it again when they were past twenty, when she said it after those cattle had been bolt-gunned down on both their farms, it was different, it was troubling.
At some point he’d started having the thought that what Ellie was really waiting for was for her father to die. Not that she was actually hoping he would have one of the several forms of fatal accident open to farmers, but it might be her only ticket out. And it might be a long wait. Merrick was as tough as a thistle, all twinkle and wire. And it seemed that people couldn’t catch the cow disease, or not in a hurry anyway.
And then again, not having to live with him round the clock, Jack couldn’t actually hate Jimmy (but then, did Ellie?), as sometimes he could hate his own father. Jimmy, after all, had let them have all those afternoons. And God knows when Jimmy would have last had intimate female company of his own. But clearly that didn’t of itself cause a man to waste away and die. Or God help us all.
But, as it happened, Jimmy did start to waste away. And die. And not so long after Michael died.
7
‘WE’D BETTER cancel St Lucia.’
Ellie had looked at him and he’d known he shouldn’t have said it, or not then. He should have waited for the right moment. It was a secondary consideration—and it went, surely, without saying.
But he’d blurted it out straight away, like some clumsy gesture of reparation. And Ellie had looked at him and he’d known even then, with the letter back in his hands again after she’d read it, that this thing that had arrived out of the blue would drive a wedge—he could hear the blows of the hammer striking it—between them.
There was a separate mail box at the site and Jack would go down most mornings to check it, except during those mid-winter weeks when they’d be away and would arrange for their post to be held back (and suppose this letter had come then). Not much mail came directly to the cottage.
But that morning, a dank, grey early-November morning nine days ago, a red post-office van had swung up the narrow winding road he looks at now, to bring the private mail, including one very private letter, though the envelope bore the words ‘Ministry of Defence’. And it must have been redirected by someone with a long memory since it also bore the original, now lapsed address ‘Jebb Farm, Marleston’.
And Jack had known, before he’d opened it.
Once he had opened it and truly did know, there was no way he could prove that he’d known beforehand, and it didn’t matter. Yet he’d known, even as he held the unopened envelope. His mind was no longer the usual slow mechanism. It was quick as a switch, it had turned electric. His big, heavy body, on the other hand, seemed to be draining through the floor and leaving him powerless. The roof of his mouth went dry. In the same bright flash of knowing, he thought, absurdly, of his long-dead mother, raised in a post office.
Even before he’d opened the envelope he’d called out, ‘Ellie! Ell! Where are you? Come here.’
She’d been up here, in this bedroom, changing that duvet cover. By the time she was with him, he still hadn’t opened the letter.
And now that it lay opened between them and he’d said what he’d said and Ellie had given him that uncooperative look, he thought, seeing it all again, of the last time a letter, seeming to change everything, had lain between them. A letter to Ellie that time, and she’d been waiting—she’d certainly picked her moment—to show it to him. They’d both been stark naked at the time and he’d wondered where the hell she’d been hiding it.
He saw again Ellie’s tits sway as she handed him a letter. The July sky at the window. They were in the Big Bedroom.
Out of the blue? But this wasn’t out of the blue—setting aside that it was a gloomy grey morning. This had always been a cloud, a possible cloud, lurking over the horizon.
Yet he’d thought, all the same, of blue summer skies. Skies with smoke, perhaps, rising somewhere in them. He’d thought of barbecues. They were allowed down at the site (though every unit, of course, had its kitchenette), but only by permission and with approved equipment. Sometimes, of an August evening, the whole place smelt of charring burgers.
Blue, burning skies. They’d have to cancel St Lucia.
Though that wasn’t till after Christmas. This was still early November. Ellie, he could see from that look—his super-fast brain could see it—was already calculating that this thing (was there some proper word to give it?) would have blown over by then. In a month or so it would be behind them. The air would be clear and blue again, even bluer. That cloud, having arrived and shed its burden, would no longer be there. Ellie was actually thinking, even then, that if this thing had been going to happen, it had been well timed. All the more reason for taking a holiday. A problem behind them.
Whereas he’d thought, how could you take a holiday after this? How could you just fly off into the blue?
So he shouldn’t have said it. And perhaps, if he hadn’t, Ellie would have been with him, at his side, three days ago. She’d have been with him in the car as he drove all those long, solitary miles. And he wouldn’t be sitting at this window, a gun at his back. None of this would be happening.
Had he even had the thought, even then, the letter between them, that this thing that he’d always feared, which was the worst of worst possibilities, was really, perhaps, the thing Ellie might have wished? Her best possibility.
‘Well, thank God, Jack, at least this has come in the off season.’
She should never have said that. And even from a practical point of view—surely Ellie saw this, she being the one who always saw things so sharply—that gap of almost two months ahe
ad might not be so roomy after all. There was no date given in the letter. That is, the letter itself was dated and there was a date, very clearly, uncannily, given in it. Jack had tried to remember what he’d been doing on that date (it was a Saturday), whether at any point he’d felt anything turn over mysteriously inside him. But there was no future date. And there was thus a question, which he thought he’d quickly answered, of two flights. There was the flight about which the letter said he’d be kept closely informed. And there was the flight, which wasn’t going to happen, to St Lucia.
Though the letter hadn’t used the word flight. It had used a word which Jack had never encountered before but which would lie now in his head like some piece of mental territory: repatriation.
Once upon a time, and it would have been the same too for Tom, the notion of being anywhere other than England would have seemed totally crazy to Jack and quite beyond any circumstance that might include him. Though he knew that the world contained people who went, who flew, regularly, to other places. He knew that the world included other places. He’d done some geography at school. He’d once learnt, if he couldn’t remember them now, the capitals of Argentina and Peru. But, for all practical purposes, even England had meant only what the eye could see from Jebb Farmhouse—or what lay within a ten-mile journey in the Land Rover or pick-up.
There’d been a few day-trips to Exeter or Barnstaple. Two stays, once, in another county: Dorset. Even the Isle of Wight, once, would have seemed like going abroad.
If you’d have said to Jack that one day he’d find himself in St Lucia—and, before that, twice in Antigua and three times in Barbados—he’d have said you were barking. (And, anyway, where were those places?) It still seems to him, even now that he’s done it several times, like something impossible, a trick, even somehow wrong: that you could get into an aeroplane, then get out again a few hours later and there’d be—this completely different world.
It was Ellie who, a bit to his surprise, had been seriously up for it. Not just what she wanted, but, so she’d said, what they deserved, what they should definitely do. It was their world too. Everyone else did it.
‘So how about it, Jacko?’ She’d ruffled his hair. ‘Live a little.’
If he’d known, on those afternoons when he leant against the pick-up, rolling a cigarette, looking around him. If he’d only had an inkling.
And had Tom had any inkling? Or was it, in his case, even something that had pushed him? Up that track. The world. And he’d seen it, apparently. Lived a little. Basra. Palm trees there too.
Later, Jack would receive a thing called his Service Record.
*
On that grey morning Jack hadn’t just seen in his mind’s eye blue, hot, summer skies, he’d seen himself floating, flying in them.
It had been during their last time in St Lucia, in one of those periods of sweaty, anxious restlessness that could sometimes come over him. He’d wanted to shake off the mood. He’d wanted to say to himself, ‘Hey, lighten up, you’re on holiday.’ ‘Lighten up’ was a phrase of Ellie’s, often used by her in the days when they’d been about to move to the Isle of Wight, like a motto for their future—‘Lighten up, Jacko’—and now he’d use it, from time to time, like a reminder, on himself.
He’d wanted even to demonstrate to Ellie that he had indeed become a new, lighter, gladder, luckier man, and it was thanks not just to luck but to Ellie’s really rather amazing sticking by him. He’d anyway finally done something that Ellie had been urging him to do, daring him to do—as a joke, it seemed, because he was never really going to. On the other hand, she’d placed a bet on it, which she hadn’t withdrawn: a bottle of champagne at dinner, which in this place would cost a small fortune. And it was something that could be done at pretty well any time of the day. You spent a lot of time, in fact, watching other people do it.
He’d gone down to the beach and the little spindly jetty, where there were some grinning boys in caps and T-shirts, and a couple of motor boats in their charge—who’d strap you into this harness with a long rope running to the back of one of the boats and, attached to your shoulders, though it had yet to open, a big, curved, striped, oblong parachute. Like a giant version of one of Ellie’s plastic hairgrips. And they’d rev the motor and power off, and you couldn’t help but be lifted off and up, way up high, above the water.
He’d said, ‘Okay, Ell, moment’s come. Ready to stump up?’ And he’d just walked down there, in his shorts and shades. He’d had the sense not to wear his cap (and it was a Lookout cap too). He’d just walked down, trying to do it at the easiest saunter.
And then, moments later, to his surprise, he really was up there, just dangling—being pulled along, but somehow just floating too—with this great taut tugging thing above him, trying to drag him still higher, and the boat below and in front of him, with its white wake and the boys waving at him, like some little separate toy that had nothing, perhaps, to do with him. And all the people dotted on the beach and under the palms and sun umbrellas and round the blue-lagoon pools looking as if someone had just sprinkled them there. And Ellie somewhere among them, on her lounger, no doubt waving at him too, but it seemed silly, somehow, to try and spot her and wave back.
He hadn’t felt frightened and, strangely, he hadn’t even felt very excited—or triumphant, given that he’d won the bet now, he’d actually done it. When he walked up later from the beach, Ellie had said, ‘My hero.’ Had he felt like a hero? No. He’d just hung there, Jack Luxton, like some big baby being dandled, or rather—with that thing above—like some big baby being delivered by a stork. Thinking, if he was thinking anything: I’m Jack Luxton, but I can do this. Sixteen stone and six foot one, size-eleven feet, but light as a feather really, light as air.
As he’d been carried up he could see inland, beyond the resort’s perimeter. He could see that the resort, with its bright greens and blues, was like an island on the edge of an island. Somewhere in the distance there were slants of smoke. They were burning crop waste maybe.
And all the time he would have been floating up there and all the time he and Ellie would have been lying there in the hot sun at the Sapphire Bay, thinking of chilled champagne for heroes at dinner, Tom would have been in the hot sun, in Iraq.
She shouldn’t have said that thing about the off season. But suppose this had come in August. In full swing. What would they have done? Carried on? Carried on, but hung a flag at half-mast at the site? They didn’t have a flag. They didn’t have a flagpole. He was sometimes known as the commandant and the site office was sometimes known as the guardhouse, but they didn’t have a flagpole. Maybe they should have thought of it, as a feature, along with all the other stuff, a Lookout flag fluttering in the breeze, gold on black, like the baseball caps.
Carried on, but explained? Carried on and faced the questions, sympathy, puzzlement—when it became not just their private news but an item, with names and photos, in the papers? The papers available in the site shop. We never knew Jack had a brother, he never said. A brother in the army. Jesus.
Would it have clouded their holiday mood? Could they have fired up those barbecues in quite the same way?
But it had come in November, and by the spring it would all be history. And if the regular Lookouters, meanwhile, had noticed it at all, seen the name in the papers and made the link, then he and Ellie might have dealt with the questions, such as they might be, faced any music, without being still in the immediate shock.
Though, now, Jack thinks, they won’t have to face any music at all.
He looks down at the site. It was what they’d done, with a lot of help from ‘Uncle’ Tony, whom neither of them had met, since he was dead, but who’d lived here once, so it had emerged, with Ellie’s mum (her third husband and with this one, it seemed, she’d landed squarely on her feet), and run the Sands, as it was then.
People could help by dying, by dying at the right time. Had that always been Ellie’s position? Even with this?
And perhaps thos
e regular Lookouters, scattered now in their homes round the country, wouldn’t have noticed. Though they’ll notice now, Jack thinks, they’ll notice this story. That other story, it wasn’t such a big one, not even necessarily headlines these days, though Luxton wasn’t such a common name.
There was a war going on, that was the story. Though who would know, or want to know, down here at Sands End? A war on terror, that was the general story. Jack knew that terror was a thing you felt inside, so what could a war on terror be, in the end, but a war against yourself? Tom would have known terror, perhaps, quite a few times. He’d have known it, very probably, all too recently. It was saying nothing, perhaps, to say that he’d also have been trained to meet it.
Does Jack feel terror right now, with a loaded gun behind him? Oddly, no. Terror isn’t the word for what he feels. Has he ever known terror? Yes.
What they meant, of course, was a war on terrorism. But then it became a matter of who and where, of geography. Was it conceivable that terrorists—Islamic extremists—might want to operate out of a holiday facility on the Isle of Wight? Or, on the other hand, want to crash a plane into it? Target a caravan site? He didn’t think so.
Yet it was sometimes, nonetheless, a subject among the Lookouters. It was surprising how often, in fact, people who were here to have fun, to get away from it all, to have a holiday, could drift, of an August evening, with their sun-reddened faces, into conversations about the dire state of the world and how, one way or another, there was no hope for it. Jack would try, which wasn’t so difficult, not to get too involved. It was simply part of his obliging, humouring proprietor’s role, to go with the flow. So he’d nod and smile and now and then throw in some meaningless remark.
But once, down at the Ship—he couldn’t remember if it had been the war on terror then or some other global emergency—it had all got too much for him and he’d blurted out suddenly (the Lookouters present would remember it): ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry, any of you. In a few years’ time, if what they say is true, we’ll all have gone down anyway with mad-cow disease.’