Cornish Short Stories

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Cornish Short Stories Page 3

by Emma Timpany


  ‘Go careful now. Very careful. Watch it.’

  They did have to be careful; it was a real rabbit path, hard on the knees. Fuller couldn’t be sure that this sluggish figure was truly his son; maybe he’d dart ahead the way he always had. He put out a warning arm. Sheer drop. Careful.

  The surfboard was a nuisance. Glancing at the sand below, he saw people down there already. Damn. Not to worry, live and let live, hey.

  ‘I’ll let the board drop,’ he called. Please let it not break, he said to himself as it slithered from his hand, pivoted on one edge and shot out of sight. Fuller turned around to take the last slope of rock backwards.

  ‘Turn around,’ he called up.

  The boy would figure it out. Let him find out for himself, let him learn from something a bit tough.

  All the nooks and crannies and shady spots were taken. Fuller walked the whole beach and back to where the boy had stopped, his bag dumped on the sand. Every cleft and shadow already occupied. A middle-aged couple were sauntering from one of these nooks, and something about them had the boy transfixed. Fuller looked. Not a stitch. Starkers. Perfect mahogany tans all over, their buttocks going concave as they walked, the brown flesh in shallow folds. The man had a hat on.

  ‘Well, what is the world coming to?’

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Here’s as good as anywhere, I guess.’

  Fuller began to unpack the stuff. He was sure he’d brought everything: shorts, food, sun lotion, you name it, he’d got it. He flipped a ball in the boy’s direction, and it rolled a way off.

  ‘Bring your water bottle?’

  Daniel looked at him.

  ‘You didn’t, did you? You forgot, didn’t you? Didn’t I say: bring your water bottle?’

  ‘Well I didn’t, did I?’

  ‘We’ll be short. Good job I brought mine, but we’ll be short.’

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Getting the towels out.’

  ‘That’s my bag.’

  ‘I’m getting the towels out of your bag, okay? Please Daniel, may I get the towels out?’

  No reply. The boy sat down, yanked his cap further over his eyes, and looked at the sea. Fuller pulled his own shirt off and wrapped a towel tight around his waist. Still warm and happy; that sea was calling.

  ‘Coming?’

  He and his son, racing down the sand.

  ‘Coming?’

  ‘Maybe later.’

  It would take time. One thing they had plenty of was time. He had sole custody now and the boy’s mother could only have him one weekend in four, instead of the other way around; after wrangling over it for years, she’d suddenly let go of her end of the argument, like a piece of elastic. All because she was having another baby, with that jerk.

  He felt curiously exposed on the sand in his shorts, out in the air. Diminished, between the two great arms of the cliff. He broke into an easy trot – yes, he was fit all right, he was the most fit parent for his son, given his secure financial status and the fact that he hadn’t mucked about, like she had. She could end up living in a caravan. You’ll be downsizing, he’d said to her. What do you know about anything? she mocked back. Men, always thinking size matters.

  The air blew over him, made his body tight. It was good – exposed and good. Nobody was looking at him. No stopping now. Here it was, here were shallow waves like churned ice on his legs, no good stopping, get in there, throw yourself right in, aaaaaagh.

  ‘Fantastic,’ he said, towelling his head hard. ‘Absolutely fantastic.’ Everything glowed, shone, right into his heart. ‘I’m a new man. I recommend it.’

  The boy still sat, his feet buried.

  ‘Not even going to change?’ Fuller knew he should leave off, but honestly. ‘The waves are pretty good. Got quite a pull. Take the board, hey—’

  ‘I’m not using that thing. It’s too small. It’s for a kid.’

  Fuller looked at the purple polystyrene board. It had been the best thing in the world last year; they had had just one day at the coast and Daniel had been bounced around by waves too big for him. Now he himself was too big.

  ‘Why didn’t you say? You could’ve said. I wouldn’t have carried it all the way, would I?’

  What was the point.

  Daniel said, ‘Can we eat?’

  Of course, he was just hungry. It made you go quiet at that age when blood sugar was low. When you grow up you can go all day. A good breakfast, you can go all day.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Have a sandwich.’

  The boy opened the sandwich and peeled out the meat. He didn’t eat meat any more. Since when? Shrug. Since now.

  Patience. Leave off.

  ‘I’ll eat it,’ said Fuller. ‘Waste not, want not. Go easy on the water, hey. It’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘I need a proper board. A long board.’

  ‘Now, how are we going to get a long board down here?’

  ‘They did.’

  Sure enough, among the ribbon of people threading down the path, two were managing a long board between them. Fuller let out a breath through his teeth.

  ‘Biscuit?’

  The boy took the packet. ‘It’s too hot,’ he said. ‘I’m too hot down here.’

  ‘Go in the sea. Boy, that’s cold enough.’

  ‘There’s no point without a proper board.’

  Fuller didn’t speak. The shining glow in his chest was wearing off. ‘Well, get down by the water anyway,’ he said finally. ‘There’s a breeze there, get you cool. Don’t eat all those; there’ll be none for later.’

  The boy sat, coiled up. Then he dropped the biscuits, rose to his feet and made off with a slow, dragging lope, turning his cap around so the peak covered his neck.

  Fuller watched him. There he goes, my son, waiting to become a man. Funny to think of that. He thought about calling him back for sun lotion, but didn’t. He watched him go, then set his rucksack behind his head and lay back.

  Should’ve brought a paper.

  Now who was this, right in front of him, hardly ten feet away. Getting a bit crowded. Well, it was a blazing day, all right. This lot were foreign, it was obvious, which would explain it. Different sense of personal space. Two men and three women, all plonked down as if they owned the beach.

  Fuller studied them as they shed their clothes. Not down to the buff; the men wore tiny white things that looked like underwear but had small belts, so couldn’t be. The women were slower to undress. They wore costumes in two pieces like old-fashioned bikinis. One was dark but otherwise they were pale in a way that northern people are rarely pale, and they all had black hair.

  Fuller guessed Italian, but he wasn’t sure.

  He tried to hear what they were saying – not that he knew Italian, but he might recognise the sound of it. Maybe it was Romanian or Bulgarian or something; he only had a vague idea of such places. Maybe they were staff from a nearby hotel.

  God, it was hot. He turned over onto his stomach and shoved his face into the towel. Then he rolled back again.

  The men were small nippy types; some women go for that. Two of the women lay near the men, close, so he could tell they were couples, and that left one, on her own. She was kneeling, her arms lifted to fix up her hair, showing dark tufts in her armpits. They seemed to be teasing her. ‘Son-yar!’ they said. She laughed back. She wasn’t especially pretty. She finished her hair and stood up, hands on hips, her belly flat and smooth. In his ex-wife’s belly a new child grew, right now, at that moment.

  The woman called Sonya set off towards the sea, which was now a long way off. Fuller closed his eyes.

  When he opened them she was coming straight up the beach towards him, hair plastered back slick and wet off her face. Just then, the small figure of the boy crossed his line of vision, still quite far off, heading his way. Had he been gone an awful long time? It seemed so. Fuller sat up slowly, sun dizzy; he’d dozed off for a moment. He watched the boy come closer, watched him trail between the pe
ople with the sea blazing behind him.

  ‘Hi there,’ said Fuller.

  ‘Any water left?’

  He reached into the rucksack and handed over the bottle. The boy drained it and tossed it back.

  ‘Want to swim now?’ Fuller asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ said the boy. ‘Might do.’

  SONNY

  ROB MAGNUSON SMITH

  IT WAS their third summer in Cornwall when the seagull fell from the sky. Barry had been up on the ladder in the back garden, painting the window frames a more blinding white. Simon was at the cooker making his Hangover Lentils. The pair had been working with their kitchen window open to facilitate a sense of togetherness when apart.

  It was hot – the garden was awash with sunlight. Down the long stretch of grass there was just the one tree, a birch in full leaf after some determined rains of spring. Barry had almost finished the second frame when there seemed a palpable break in the atmosphere, a rupture. He heard a squawk, followed by a thud. He searched the ground and there it was, a male seagull past its youth, lying in the grass.

  Simon stuck his head out of the kitchen window. ‘What was that?’

  Barry had already climbed down. The bird opened its beak as if to greet him, but otherwise lay motionless. Up in the birch there was nothing – no companions, no explanation, just gaps in the branches where bright sunlight filtered down. High above their garden, shifting prisms in the sky had created strange portals. In their village of St Buryan, some distance from the coast, seagulls rarely appeared. There was no doubt in Barry’s mind, though he favoured explanations bordering on the supernatural, that this bird had reached them after great effort, possibly breaking through from a parallel universe. By the time Simon had reached his side, he’d picked up the seagull and cradled it in his arms.

  Barry had just turned fifty. He was younger than Simon by an undetermined number of years. Because he was Irish, good-looking in a bluff yet sensitive way, and he brushed his hair straight up from his forehead, everyone called him Morrissey. His chin was just the right shape for taking between thumb and forefinger – men, women and children often did so without asking. He was also a head nurse equipped with deep reservoirs of compassion. He was so naturally self-effacing, he denied that he was more appealing than anyone else. This ridiculous claim undoubtedly stemmed from his inherited Catholic guilt – a point Simon, a vocal critic of religion, made pains to repeat.

  In contrast – and everybody contrasted badly with Barry – Simon was practically an old crone. Paunchy, nearly bald, cranky to his best friends and murderous to his enemies, he was the agreed brain of the pair. He spotted faults in the sublime and never hesitated to identify them. An architect originally from Hampshire, nobody knew his exact age. Wikipedia had recently put him at sixty-one, but this entry had since been removed. Yet Simon had seen pain in his past. It was the legacy of his own mistakes, his incessant sniping. Despite his critical gaze – or perhaps in reaction to it – his eyes often welled and brimmed over, forcing him to turn away. This odd emotionality, which he explained away with venom, made Barry love him all the more. When they’d met, twelve years ago, Barry told his friends that providential forces had been at work. Meanwhile Simon – he’d seen his Morrissey and taken possession. Both believed themselves lucky, and as a consequence their relationship never foundered. They moved to Cornwall because they simply wanted to live there. It represented happiness.

  It was the first seagull to visit their garden. As Barry’s dropped paintbrush lay in the whitened grass, Simon stood at a distance, pale and badly hung-over, still in his dressing gown and wincing with an expression of curdled milk. Whenever Barry found a creature to care about, it threatened what he cared about – food, drink, affection.

  ‘What are you doing? Those things carry cancer.’ Barry didn’t respond. He had his head lowered over the bird, and he was whispering to it. Simon released a long and exaggerated sigh. His tone softened. ‘It’s not dead, is it?’

  ‘He might be in shock.’ Barry turned the bird over gently and stroked the feathers on its head. The bird didn’t seem to mind. It had swooned in Barry’s company, like everyone else. ‘No obvious injuries. Sometimes they have small heart attacks, like humans.’ He met Simon’s eyes with an expression of urgency. ‘We’ve got to take it to the bird sanctuary.’

  ‘What?’ Simon tightened the belt on his dressing gown. ‘Now?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But I haven’t finished my lentils.’

  Barry glanced up at the trees. The prisms shifted again. New portals had opened. ‘I can go by myself.’

  This time Simon’s sigh was genuine. He went inside to put some clothes on. Barry had dragged him to the Mousehole Bird Hospital a few times, mostly to visit a black guillemot that had made the papers. The bird had washed up on the beach coated with oil after a tanker wrecked off Penzance. He opened his wardrobe and reached for his trousers. Who knew how long this would take, following stacks of tourists on a Sunday afternoon, hunting for parking, waiting for some pious volunteer to relieve them of their burden. His lentils, his recuperative glass of cold Riesling – not to mention the evening’s intimacies – all had been pushed back.

  Meanwhile Barry had carried the seagull into the house. He sat on the sofa with the bird in his lap and submitted to the enthralment of holding a wild animal. Seagulls bred on every continent. They lived in noisy colonies, wary of direct human contact – yet this one rested quietly in his arms. He ran his fingers down its wings, all the way to the tips. Soon its eyes squeezed tight and its chest rose and fell less rapidly. He’d been told that, besides mammals, only birds had REM sleep. Barry tried to sense the bird’s dreams. There would be an ascent into the light, up to the winds his wings could catch, before banking with a fierce screech.

  Still in the bedroom, Simon found a shoebox from his second pair of dress shoes. Proud of this proof of compassion, he delivered it to Barry on the sofa.

  ‘Alright? Stick the damn thing in here and let’s go.’

  ‘I don’t know …’ Barry was smoothing the bird’s webbed feet. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t move him just yet. He’s calming down. I’ll run him to the bird hospital in the morning.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Most people can’t tell, but they’ve got slightly brighter plumage than females. I think we’ll call him Sonny.’

  They ate lentils with Sonny on the table between them. Barry never took his eyes from the bird. He’d lined the shoebox with grass cuttings and stuffing from an old pillow. Simon’s headache had finally lessened. It was the Riesling that had done it. They kept their voices low to avoid waking the bird.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Ten, maybe twelve.’

  ‘And how long do they live?’

  ‘Fifteen, twenty years, on average.’

  ‘Then he’s having a midlife crisis.’

  Barry put down his spoon. He reached over and dared a light stroke of the bird’s head. ‘Do you know – I think he came here on purpose.’

  ‘Man is allowed his delusions.’

  ‘Why don’t you try to hold him? Later, when he wakes up?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Simon poured himself another glass of wine. Barry, because of his long commute the next day, would stop at one. Remarkably, he’d kept his job in Ireland. He had the longest commute of anyone they knew – a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute drive to Exeter, a one-hour flight to Dublin, followed by a thirty-minute taxi to the emergency room. He worked twelve-hour shifts for four days, slept in a bedsit, then returned to the paradise he’d earned for the rest of the week. Simon had it easy – he worked from home.

  ‘I’ll watch him the first shift. You sleep for four hours, then I’ll wake you at midnight.’

  Simon just stared. ‘Um … how about no?’

  ‘We have to. When Sonny wakes up, he’ll be frightened. He might not remember where he is. He could try to fly.’

  ‘And? How the hell am I going to stop him?’

  ‘
Stroking his feathers, calming him down.’

  ‘I need to calm down. This is ridiculous.’ Simon glared into the shoebox, his feelings for the animal at a new low. ‘The last thing I’m going to do, mate, is stay up all night watching a bird.’

  ‘I’ll do it, then.’ There wasn’t any blame in Barry’s voice. It was resolve.

  ‘But you’re off to Dublin tomorrow! You can’t go without sleep!’

  ‘Shh …’ The seagull had stirred. He stretched his neck to a full and surprising length, then nestled back into his feathers. Barry rebuilt the grass and pillow stuffing around him. ‘That’s all right, Sonny.’

  Simon’s third sigh that day held genuine pain. He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Why don’t we just put his box outside? He wakes up, he flies away.’

  ‘It’s too cold out there at night. Think of the fox. The neighbour’s cat …’

  Simon didn’t want to say what he thought of that. He cleared the dishes and washed up. It would have been better if they’d gone straight to Mousehole. The reasons for Barry’s behaviour were clear enough. Years ago some of their friends, gay couples with money, had found surrogate mothers. These kids were getting older now, filling the social calendar with birthdays. Simon once fancied the idea of a child. He’d had a girlfriend long ago, mostly for the sake of raising a family. But Barry had always been against offspring, especially when so many others needed care. Now that he’d reached fifty, he’d sacrificed this window of opportunity, and the seagull was generating regret.

  Simon took the rest of the bottle to bed. He had plenty of regrets of his own – but at least his were known to him. He didn’t suffer from delusions. He tried to read himself to sleep, but he kept thinking of the advancing minutes before his watch. Once, he got up and crept into the sitting room. The television was on. Barry was still on the sofa, staring into the shoebox, whispering words only the seagull could hear.

  At midnight, Simon was shaken awake. His eyes felt swollen and he could barely see. Barry stood over the bed with the gall to smile. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘Come on. Don’t make me …’

  ‘You don’t have to. If you’d rather sleep.’

 

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