Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  ‘Have you ever thought of using that space downstairs?’ asked Alison. Adam shrugged. It occurred to him that he had offered to cook for four tonight and he hated cooking.

  ‘Do you know much about cooking?’ he asked.

  She laughed. ‘I can cook, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I have had vague ideas about the basement, extending downstairs but then I started worrying about people stealing stuff or me locking up and leaving someone down there all night and coming in the next day to find they have eaten my books. Why are you asking?’

  ‘Why are you asking about cooking?’

  ‘Because I appear to have offered to cook for four people tonight and I don’t really know what I am doing.’

  ‘Do you have anything in?’

  ‘I have lots of broad beans in the freezer, I have potatoes, I can pick some sprouting broccoli and maybe a courgette or two, unless they’ve been eaten by slugs.

  ‘You grow stuff.’

  ‘I grow stuff.’

  ‘And are you just giving them vegetables?’ She was smiling.

  ‘I thought I’d fish, if I can make time.’ Both Alison and Adam looked at Grimy Nige and Jim.

  ‘We’ll hold the fort, Mr Sands’.

  ‘You sure, fellers?’

  ‘Oh yes, happy to,’ said Jim.

  ‘No more taking people into the basement though, please.’

  ‘It was a one-off,’ said Grimy Nige.

  ‘She made us,’ said Jim.

  ‘Oh I did not!’ Alison said loudly.

  ‘She did, Mr Sands,’ said Jim seriously. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to find she was from the council, checking for damp or, or…’

  ‘Bodies,’ said Grimy Nige.

  Alison turned to Adam. ‘Are there bodies?’

  ‘Feels like it,’ said Adam. ‘Feels like there are loads of them.’

  Alison stared at him and for the first time in a long while he felt self-conscious. When you are young, he thought, and an attractive woman looks at you, you hope she likes what she sees. When you are old you assume she is looking at all the signs of decay in front of her. He thought of the blood-red sun scars around his eyes and nose, his shaven head and grey stubble, and he imagined that she could see that his knees hurt. Whereas she, well, she looked lovely. Washed blonde hair, straight down to her shoulders, and she was wearing a floral print dress that shouldn’t have worked unless it was a curtain but she carried it off. And wedges, which probably didn’t help with the walk. Really, he thought she had no right to look good dressed like that.

  ‘I’ll make a deal with you,’ she said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’ll help you with the cooking if you show me how to fish and listen to my absurd idea about your basement without throwing me into the sea.’

  ‘You want to come on my boat?’

  ‘Unless we can fish from here?’

  ‘You’re not dressed for it.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ She looked awkward.

  ‘I didn’t say no, I said you aren’t dressed for it’.

  ‘I have some jeans and pumps at my brother’s house. I can be back here in twenty minutes’.

  ‘Why not just meet me at the harbour in twenty-five?’

  Grimy Nige and Jim were staring at Adam. This was not what normally happened in the bookshop. They looked a little worried. Adam shrugged, which seemed to reassure them and they both nodded in perfect time. Not that anyone saw.

  When Alison had gone Adam stood perfectly still in the middle of his shop. He felt surrounded by the events of the day. Anna, Tom, Laura and Grace. Tim’s cancer. He had never imagined that he was waiting for his past to visit. He had assumed his past was, if not dead, lying in a coma somewhere a long way from him. He knew that taking the boat out made sense. He had no idea how doing that with someone else was going to work.

  He sighed, thanked Grimy Nige and Jim again and went upstairs. He put on swimming shorts, a t-shirt with a fleece over the top and some baggy black trousers. He strolled down to the harbour and sat beside his boat. When Alison appeared she was quieter and he could feel her self-consciousness leaking over him. And it must have seeped in somehow because he felt uncomfortable and he never felt that this close to the water. He wished he was on his own and then he noticed that actually, he was relieved he wasn’t.

  ‘We’re going to fish for bass,’ he said. ‘Do you have a problem with worms?’ As he rowed round the harbour wall he could see her face change as she faced the open sea.

  She sat back slightly, lifting her face to the breeze. ‘We have an arrangement,’ she said. ‘I leave them alone and they leave me alone.’

  ‘Consider this a renegotiation,’ he said. ‘We need them for bait.’ She nodded. She looked behind her; the harbour was fading away already. The boat was rocking on the gentle waves. ‘Another five minutes or so and then we’ll stop. And fish. And swim.’

  ‘I didn’t bring anything to swim in,’ she said quickly. ‘And it’s too far out and it’s cold.’

  ‘Me. I meant I will swim. I’ve had… an unusual day. I need to stretch out in the water.’ He rowed on for a few more minutes. The harbour wall was visible in the distance but Alison couldn’t make anything out around it. The beach was just a strip of faded yellow. She couldn’t see the cars on the road behind it.

  ‘Do you notice the noise?’ Adam asked.

  ‘What noise?’

  ‘Well, it’s not silent, is it?’

  Alison listened to the water as it tapped on the side of the boat. She stared at it as it jumped up the side of the old brown varnished wood and she lifted her head and looked outward at the enormity of the sea. Adam stopped rowing and looked at her. ‘How does it make you feel?’

  ‘Not sure,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I find it helps me,’ Adam said quietly.

  Alison nodded. What she felt was like an intruder. Not into Adam’s world, she wasn’t thinking of him. She felt like an intruder in the water, like the boat was a tiny imposition on an otherwise complete sea. She imagined the waves being mildly irritated to find something in their way.

  Adam had put the anchor down and begun baiting two small fishing rods. He threw a few worms into the water. ‘Have you fished before?’

  ‘Yes, my father took my brother and me when we were little.’

  ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, my brother put a hook through his own lip to see how the fish felt.’

  ‘I meant do you remember how to fish?’

  ‘I hold the stick and pull back if something pulls.’

  ‘Pretty much.’ Adam cast the line, no more than twenty feet from the boat, and handed her the rod. Then he cast his own line, moved an old stained cushion that he had been sitting on while rowing so it would soften the wood on his back, adjusted his black cotton pork pie hat and settled back.

  ‘Are you cold?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have my thermals on.’

  Adam was looking out to sea. There was a tanker miles out on the horizon but nothing else in sight. ‘I wondered if it would be misty, it often is, but it’s quite clear.’ He sounded distracted and kept fidgeting to get comfortable.

  ‘Do you usually do this on your own?’

  ‘I always do this on my own,’ he smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said seriously. ‘For invading your space.’

  ‘It’s OK, I invited you,’ he said, still distractedly. He noticed that she was looking at him. ‘Do you say that because I look unsettled? It isn’t you being here that is doing that,’ he said. She didn’t look convinced. ‘I want to go swimming,’ he said.

  ‘Really? In this?’

  ‘Well… yes.’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘Of course it’s safe; we’re not that far from the beach
.’

  ‘Well, please don’t let me stop you.’ She was smiling, bemused.

  ‘OK,’ he said, taking off his fleece and T shirt at once. ‘You’re in charge of the boat.’ He took off his shoes, socks and trousers and moved on to his knees. He dug around in a small bag and removed a towel and some goggles. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said.

  ‘Er, what about your hat?’

  Adam was standing in the boat preparing to jump in. His floral tattoo spread right across his shoulders and down the other side of his back, turning into a black and grey swirling pattern of what Alison assumed was water. She didn’t like tattoos. She wondered why anyone would waste time colouring themselves in.

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ he said, tossing his hat into the centre of the boat. And he jumped into the water without making a splash.

  When he popped back up he shook his head like a dog. ‘Bloody ridiculous without a wet suit,’ he gasped. He pulled his goggles over his eyes, turned away from Alison and started to swim outward. It was cold. His face was stinging and his breathing uneven. It wasn’t usually this cold until November, he thought, and then he wondered if perhaps he just felt it more now: getting older, even thinner-skinned. He turned after about fifteen strokes and noticed his breathing. It wasn’t settled. Swimming was like walking for him, usually effortless and easy. He stopped for a moment and looked at the boat. He was breathing at the top of his lungs; he slowed down his breath and felt the water on his skin. He was acclimatizing. He took three breaths and turned his face back into the water and began to swim. His breathing was better. It was cold on his face but he swam faster, stretched his stroke, reaching his arms out until he felt his back and side muscles open. The sea was quite flat; occasionally a wave would lift his head, but not his body. He swam on, not looking back, rolling slightly to pull his stroke for longer, noticing how he was gliding as he did so. It was only when he noticed that he couldn’t feel his toes that he stopped and turned. He had swum a long way, longer than usual. He wondered if that was because there was someone in the boat, because he noticed that he wanted to go farther out.

  He stopped and floated for a moment, looking all around him. He shivered and he noticed that as he floated he was moving further from the boat and over toward the west. He swam five or six strokes back against the current and looked up. He didn’t seem to have moved; perhaps he had been pulled sideways a little. His fingers were cold. He shook his head and said ‘silly sod’ to himself quietly. He thought of Tim hanging from a tree and he felt his chest tighten and his shoulders… his shoulders shrink inwards. He found the edges of that feeling and realized that it had never really left him. He looked again at the boat in the distance and then out to sea. He put his face down into the water and began to swim.

  14. Alone Apart

  Anna did not date when Tom was young. She did not sleep with anyone or even flirt, which until she had become pregnant she had done without really noticing. She was mindful of being the single mum and chose not to notice the uneasiness that caused if there was ever a reason for pausing when she dropped him off at nursery. Later, in the playground she became more aware of not being one of the mothers who had had the time to attend the playgroups, the tea parties, the mini music sessions, as they gathered in small groups and she stood alone waiting for Tom to come out. Familiarity eventually overcame suspicion, however, and it was Tom’s ability to make friends—not many of them but enough to warrant play dates and parental organization—and later still his ability to play football that enabled her, if not to inhabit the community of mums, at least to sit politely on the periphery.

  It wasn’t until Tom was seven that she became more conscious, not so much of her singleness as her isolation. She had just turned thirty-three. The last person she had slept with had been Adam, which lent him a significance she had neither anticipated nor was willing to admit. It may have been that realisation that led her to lift her head slightly, to see and let herself be seen, because a nurse called Martin, whom she met while doing a course at the local university, asked her out on a date. He was divorced, a little older than her, with two children of eight and five, both boys. He suggested they take the boys to the park, get coffee while they exhausted themselves in the playground and then go for pizza. She quite liked that date. She found herself having to suppress her distaste for Martin’s older boy. He was brash and tubby and began every sentence with ‘I’. At one point she asked Tom, on their way back from the toilets, if the older boy was annoying him. ‘No,’ said Tom with surprise. ‘I like him’. It was just her then.

  At pizza Tom was over-excited and she became conscious of the fact that Martin’s younger child was behaving better than her son, who had just laughed so much that Coke had come out of his nose. Martin appeared not to judge and she had slept with people for less as a younger woman, but it didn’t occur to her to think about having sex with him. When it came time to part they kissed awkwardly on the cheek when the kids weren’t watching. He said that they should do it again sometime and she agreed, but they didn’t. She found herself relieved by that.

  Anna didn’t spend a night apart from Tom until he was eleven. She went to a three day conference called ‘Qualitative Research and the Evidence Agenda,’ in York. Tom stayed with Grace and Laura and had a fantastic time eating crisps and watching Men in Black on DVD. She was in bed by ten-thirty. On the second morning she met Martin, who was presenting a paper on ‘The Clinical Consequences of the Failure of Nursing Philosophy’. She went to it. She liked it in an easygoing way and they had sex that night. Twice. The next morning over breakfast she said: ‘It’s been a while.’ And ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  She never saw him again.

  She didn’t feel any different after having had sex and that made her feel a little sad. She told Grace about it. Her first response was a knowing: ‘Tell me about it.’ Grace, it seemed, had been having occasional sex with the nice-looking man from the delicatessen.

  ‘His mother thinks he’s gay,’ Grace told her. ‘I think he sleeps with me to prove to himself that she’s wrong.’

  ‘Is the sex any good?’ Anna asked and Grace shrugged.

  ‘I like to feel someone’s flesh on mine sometimes. Reminds me that I’m human.’

  When Tom was a teenager, Anna had two eighteen-month-long sexual relationships that mimicked being married, she thought, but without having to sleep over. They would meet, sometimes for a meal, sometimes to see a film and then have sex. The first relationship was with a younger man she had met at the university. The second was a married man whose wife felt sex without the potential for reproduction was undignified. She was not upset when both relationships fizzled out, although she was a little put out when the married man told her he was leaving his wife for a younger woman and he thought it best not to begin that relationship while having an affair. Not just because it ‘felt wrong,’ but because he wasn’t sure he was up to it physically.

  When Tom was eighteen he asked her why she didn’t go on dates. She was surprised and a little annoyed. She assumed she had been annoyed because it was none of his business but in truth it was because she didn’t like being seen, by her son, as having needs that were not met. It made her feel less than whole and, while she would always have a sense of herself as being that, she didn’t like her son seeing it. She was also annoyed because it heralded some sort of separation, him articulating clearly that he expected her to have an emotional life that didn’t involve him and in so doing reminding her that he would be having one himself. Indeed, was already having one.

  She dated a researcher after that. A man who was ten years older than her and who didn’t make jokes or take his socks off before his trousers. The sex was routine to the point where it felt less like an expression of intimacy or a pursuit of pleasure and more a physical reminder that she was in her forties and that this is what happens in bed at this age. He was good for her m
ind though, challenging her assumptions and analysing detail in a way that she had not experienced before. And, as a devoted saxophone player, he was good company for Tom, who by that age could play guitar and piano well and had just taken up the oboe because he loved the sound and nobody else played it.

  There were a couple more conference liaisons after the saxophonist had faded from the scene, but that aside there had been nothing even resembling romance. Anna had turned alone into normal. She was OK with that but it occurred to her, as she was walking back to the B and B that Tom and Laura were staying in, that alone felt different now.

  Bed and Breakfasts in the Margate area are rarely full in August, let alone September, and despite fussing slightly about having to ‘air the bed’ when Tom phoned from the café to ask if there were any vacancies, the landlady was happy to let the room next door to Tom and Laura’s to Anna. Anna would have preferred something down the hall, or in another postcode.

  ‘If you are going to go to CREAK, mum, I’d like to come with you.’

  ‘That’s sweet of you Tom, but people don’t tend to show up at work meetings with their kids.’ Which came out with less warmth than she had intended.

  ‘This isn’t just a work meeting though, is it?’

  If Tom had heard her coldness he had ignored it. Anna thought for a moment. He sounded more grown up than she remembered but she couldn’t tell if that was because Laura was listening to him or because she saw Laura beside him.

  ‘I think,’ she said tentatively, ‘that they are normalizing everything that has happened. I am not scared that I am going to walk in there and there will be a trap door or an assassin waiting for me. I am worried that I will go and they will have had some for-hire researchers who have sifted through the project and come up with some nonsense that, along with the story about Paul, will turn everything that has happened into… well, nothing.’

  ‘Mum, what if they tried to kill Meena? Or simply knew about it? That makes them capable of bad things.’

  ‘Yes, but what if the fire was an accident? What if I am over-reacting?’