Cornish Short Stories

by Emma Timpany

  He turned towards the cliff and she followed behind him. The sand below the cliff was littered with giant rocks – huge, hostile fragments, split from the crumbling face by tide and time, a chaotic echo of ancient storms. Jake clambered over the rocks and she followed close behind him … tense, silent, privileged because he was showing something only to her. They were sharing something secret on the empty beach.

  He paused and pointed to a rounded shape wedged between two rocks. At first, it seemed to her like a large, grey rubber ball, squeezed out of shape and flattened by the rocks but, as she drew nearer, she could see the spreading tail and one limp flipper trailing on the sand. It didn’t move. She crept closer, feeling a whisper of excitement. This was the first time she had been this close to a seal. She leaned forward and reached out her hand to touch it, then drew back, suddenly afraid. Tentatively, she stretched out one leg and pressed her foot against its side. She expected a reaction, movement, the warm resistance of skin and flesh. Instead, the shape yielded unpleasantly under her foot, a rubbery grey membrane … a slimy, water-filled balloon. She jumped back.

  ‘It’s dead,’ she said, but Jake was already making his way back over the rocks. Of course it was dead. She should have known it was dead. Why else would it be here on the beach among the rocks at low tide? The sensation of the yielding, waterlogged flesh against her bare foot revolted her. The nauseating smell of dead flesh hung in the air and she was suddenly aware of the buzzing of flies. She turned away and followed Jake towards the sea.

  ‘You didn’t think it was alive, did you?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Of course not. It couldn’t be alive.’

  ‘Once there was a whale,’ he said. ‘It wedged up here above the high tide. It lay here for weeks before it was washed away. It stank like shit!’

  The dead seal haunted her as they padded down the slope to the sea but, in spite of that, she was elated. He had shared his secret with her. It was a sad, sour secret but she had shared it with Jake. They had seen it together. She watched him as he paddled out into the sea, the gentle waves lapping his bare feet and soaking his jeans. He picked up a tangle of leathery weed and spun it, lasso-like, over his head, then tossed it far out into the water. She liked to watch him. He was brown and compact, his movements graceful and fluid. He belonged to the sea, as the seal and the whale had done. It didn’t matter to her that he didn’t talk much. It only added to his beautiful strangeness. He didn’t need words. His body spoke for him.

  He turned and caught her watching him. For a moment, she was shy and embarrassed but she didn’t look away. He smiled. He didn’t often smile. He was a serious boy – troubled, tense – not like anyone else that she knew. Everything about him was strange. His life was different from her life. She knew that.

  He came from Polperro, but he lived now with a foster family in the village. His life had been extraordinary. She had heard things. His parents hadn’t looked after him the way parents usually did. He hadn’t been sent to school. He had roamed the beach from dawn till dusk, fishing for crabs and digging for lost change in the sand, while his father and mother worked on the boats and drank in the pubs. It didn’t sound so bad to her, but it ‘couldn’t be allowed to continue’ they said.

  He went to school now, of course, now he had been saved. She saw him every day at school – but he was different there. He didn’t belong there. It wasn’t his element. At school he was sullen and brooding, dark with silent anger. Here on the beach he was filled with light. His eyes, his sun-bleached hair and tanned skin. He shone with the glistening drops that clung to his face and his arms and legs as he splashed through the shallow water and she loved him. Absolutely and without question. She knew that she loved him.

  ‘Let’s walk right to the end of the beach,’ he said. ‘There’s a cave that goes on for miles.’

  ‘Okay.’ She knew the cave. She had been there before, many times … but not with Jake. With him it was an adventure, something dangerous and wild. With him, it was completely and terrifyingly new.

  It was a half-hour walk to the end of the beach. They walked in silence along the edge of the sea, trailing their feet in the warm salt water. Ahead of them, the gulls rose noisily and moved another hundred yards along the beach. She could see his feet padding the soft sand beside her own. The gentle autumn sun warmed their backs. She could hear the quiet thud of her heartbeat, echoing the rhythm of their steps. They walked a meandering path, sometimes close together, sometimes further apart. Once his swinging arm brushed against hers and she felt him tense and pull away. Now and again they paused to pick up objects from the tideline: a mermaid’s purse, a cuttlefish bone, a green glass float that they hid among rocks to collect on the way back. The small waves sucked the sand at their feet and the whole day pulsed in a slow pendulum of movement and sound. Feet … waves … heart. It was a dream day. It was the best day of her life. It was the right day for a kiss.

  The beach was a long, curving ribbon of sand ending in sheer cliff where the promontory thrust out into the sea. For a long time, as they walked, the promontory remained distant and small but finally it rose up, steep and sudden, as they neared the end of the beach. The cave was out of sight, hidden by rocks, but she knew exactly where it was. They both knew. Their pace slowed, as if by some unspoken agreement. She could feel his closeness as they dawdled towards the rocks. She stopped to pick up shells and he stood beside her, silently waiting. Overhead the kittiwakes screeched and reeled. The waves broke softly against the cliff. Everything else was stillness. She sat down on the sand and let the sounds and the silence fill her thoughts. He didn’t sit beside her as she hoped but remained standing, looking out at the sea and the sky beyond.

  This was a special place. She felt it and she knew that he did too. A meeting place of sea and land, of rock and air and water. The smell of tar and salt, familiar and strange, and behind them the waiting cave, damp and dark and hidden … a doorway into somewhere else, a crossing place between one element and the next. It had to be relished. It had to be taken a breath at a time – enjoyed, experienced. They didn’t need words. They only had to be there. Then … after all this … would be the kiss. She knew it now. She was sure it would happen. It was just as she wanted it to be. This was the day when everything would change, the day when she would have been kissed.

  ‘Do you want to go and look at the cave then?’ He was standing behind her, his gaze still fixed on the horizon.

  ‘Okay.’ Her voice was barely audible.

  He put out his hand to help her up. She took it and, when she had risen, their hands remained together, palm against palm, fingers intertwined, as they walked towards the cliff. When they reached the rocks, they separated and he clambered ahead of her. She watched his movements, animal and fast, leading her forward.

  The entrance to the cave was a narrow gash in the face of the rock. Its black walls bristled with mussels and jewel-red anemones. Inside, the sound of dripping water echoed. They entered slowly, peering into the dim tunnel that stretched ahead. For the first twenty feet there was light enough to see but after that a turning led them into darkness. They walked on, deeper into the dark. She couldn’t see at all now but the air was full of sounds: hot, wet, trickling sounds. She spread her hands out at her sides to guide her and the rocks were damp and strange with slimy, unseen textures. She hesitated. It was too dark. She hadn’t expected it to be this dark. Ahead of her she heard his feet splashing through water, and the sound of his breathing in the darkness, but she couldn’t see him at all. She listened for her own breathing and realised she was holding her breath. After a few moments, he stopped and there was only the sound of dripping water.

  ‘We should have brought a torch,’ he said. His voice was strange and hollow in this new, blind element. She glanced back towards the reassuring sliver of light that clung to the turning behind them. His feet splashed again, this time towards her, and she remained still, waiting, not knowing what to do. He came to a halt
as he reached her. She could just make out his shape in the darkness. She could feel the warmth of him in the air around her. She could smell the salt on his skin. He was very close. They had only to move their heads for their lips to touch. Her heartbeat pounded inside her head. The slimy, living, unseen walls pressed in around her and all she could think – all she was sure of – was that she didn’t want him to kiss her. Not now. Not yet. She didn’t want it to happen. She wasn’t ready for it to happen. She needed it to remain the thing she wished for and imagined. She wasn’t ready for it to be real.

  For a few moments, neither of them moved. The thick water dripped from the walls of the cave onto their faces and the noise of the sea thundered and echoed in the solid rock around them.

  ‘It’s freezing in here,’ he said, at last. ‘Let’s go back.’

  ‘Okay.’ She turned towards the light and they made their way back to the entrance of the cave and the sun-filled air beyond.

  The beach stretched back around the curve of the bay towards the village, wider now that the tide was at its lowest. Above their heads, the kittiwakes reeled and cried. The tide was turning and the sly waves crept up the slope of the sand towards the cliffs again.

  ‘We can try again another time,’ Jake said. ‘We could bring a torch next time.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s do that.’

  For a moment there was awkwardness between them. Then he smiled and pointed back along the beach towards the dunes.

  ‘Have you seen the plane?’ he said.

  ‘The plane?’

  ‘In the sand dunes. There’s a rusty old bit of a plane half-buried in the sand.’

  Of course she had seen the plane a hundred times before, but she shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Show me the plane.’ And together they set off along the slowly narrowing ribbon of beach.

  A BIRD SO RARE

  EMMA TIMPANY

  THE HOTEL’S interior decor – the wood panelling in the dining room, the columns in the atrium, the startlingly beautiful carved mantelpiece in the bar – seemed charming at first glance. But as they sat down to afternoon tea, they noticed holes in the panelling on either side of the door revealing not, as they would have expected, an authentic heart of old oak beneath a time-grimed surface, but hairy strands of yellow fibreglass.

  ‘Seeing that yellow is a little death,’ Frieda said. She was beginning to doubt if the two male angels guarding the fireplace, which despite their benign expressions had hands ready to draw swords from sheaths, were the real thing either. When she had first seen those angels, she had wanted to run her fingers over their dark bronze curls. Now she was glad that she hadn’t, that the illusion of finding some rare treasure had lingered a little longer than it would otherwise have done, that she hadn’t made a spectacle of herself and given an audience to her disappointment.

  ‘Does it matter, though?’ Michael said. ‘What difference does it make whether they’re real or not?’

  ‘It makes all the difference in the world. Better if the walls were painted white. The rooms left empty. Look at them. They’re beautiful rooms.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, they are.’

  The ceilings were at least twenty feet high. French doors set into bay windows opened onto a terrace that looked over the sea of trees to the coast. In the far corner of the sands, the chimneys of the china clay works gleamed silver. They were a couple of what the locals called blow-ins, people who’d drifted westwards from up-country and stayed put. They’d been married for longer than that though, almost twenty-five years. They had met when young and stayed together while all around them, one by one, their friends’ marriages and partnerships broke down. What’s your secret? people asked them, but in truth there was no secret. They simply abided. Recently they’d had a bad patch. No particular reason; many small grievances had accumulated, each one cobweb light, until they had found themselves either with nothing to say to each other or shouting and slamming doors. This holiday was their chosen salve, agreed upon because they both liked walking and swimming in the cold, green sea.

  On the way back to their room, they stopped by a board in the foyer displaying captioned photographs of rare types of plants and animals found, over the years, in the hotel woods and gardens: strange moths, rare butterflies, enormous unidentified grubs. The grounds of the house had an oddness to them, a forgotten air, as though time itself had somehow stalled halfway down this valley. Through the open doors, the voices of families echoed as they moved to the lodges scattered throughout the trees, and somewhere a group of sea shanty singers bellowed, their voices rising to the top floor and drifting in the open window to where Frieda lay afloat, footsore after their long walk, in a tepid bath.

  By the time they made their way back downstairs, the singers were gone, the early evening barbeque packed away. Dodman Point lay white in the evening light. The waters of the bay, violet with late sun, were empty of boats. Arm in arm they walked from the terrace down past an organic vegetable patch and a butterfly garden before stopping by an enclosure containing half a dozen giant rabbits, surrounded by a fence too low to be any serious attempt to contain them.

  ‘Look at them.’ Michael gestured to the huge bodies. ‘Natural born killers, each and every one.’

  She knew what he meant, but chose to pretend not to understand him. ‘You fear for your safety? Aren’t rabbits vegetarian? Anyway, they’re all asleep. Do you think we’re allowed to go in and pet them?’

  ‘Do you want to go in and pet them?’ Michael folded his arms.

  ‘No, actually. No, I don’t.’

  ‘The size of them. They’re bigger than your average cat. One bite could take your finger off.’

  He was right in a way. There was something disturbing about them, apart from their size. Was their lethargy a result of overbreeding? In her mind rabbits were small, quick, darting little things, masters of camouflage, barely glimpsed before they’d disappeared.

  ‘What’s wrong with this place? Why can’t they have normal rabbits?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Though Michael’s eyes remained fixed on the enclosure and didn’t roam to the trees, she became aware that his focus had moved on. About him was a certain intensity of concentration, a quality of stillness, his head tilted over to one side, his body poised on the edge of sudden action. He had tuned in to something calling, sweet and high, in the darkening leaves. If she spoke to him now he would not hear what she said, so she whispered, ‘Perhaps it’s time we gave this up.’

  When a few moments later he said, ‘What was that?’ she thought that perhaps she had been wrong, that he had indeed heard her, before realising that it was not she who was present in his thoughts. He was speaking of the bird which, unseen among the leaves, its call too brief to allow identification, had eluded him.

  How does it feel, she silently asked the rabbits, to live with someone whose mind is always partly elsewhere, on whatever winged thing is within sight or sound? This time, the familiar anger fixed itself into a resolution. If he does this to me one more time, I will leave him. She was tired of arguing about it. Her mind flashed back to the time when she had been relating a piece of particularly bad news and his first comment had been, Look, woodpecker. She had grown used to his exclaiming suddenly, breaking off in the middle of a conversation to run to the window, realising now that it was not a sign of danger or distress but that the alarm calls of the rooftop gulls had alerted him to the flight of some raptor over the back garden. She felt no more for birds than she did for any other living things she liked; otters, for example, or hedgehogs. If forced to choose a favourite bird, she would probably pick the owl, symbol of wisdom and death, the good it promised inseparable from the evil it bestowed, as double-edged as the old gods of Mexico.

  During dinner, the woman sitting at the table opposite them kept her pink iPhone raised to her face; a black eye shape on its back surrounded the camera lens. Even while she was eating, she moved the lens a
round the room as if she were filming everything. At another table a man, loud-voiced as the drunk or partially deaf, complained bitterly that though he’d been the second person to book a table for dinner, he hadn’t been given one of a pair of window seats, haranguing the couple seated there, telling them that they had taken his place. Outside it was dark, and the doors had been closed against the evening chill.

  ‘Busy tonight,’ Michael said, not seeming to notice that they had barely spoken to each other since they had left the rabbit enclosure.

  ‘These must be all the people we could hear earlier: the people in the trees. The room is completely full.’

  ‘Yes,’ Michael said, ‘they couldn’t squeeze anyone else in if they tried.’

  So it was strange, the next morning, when they came down for breakfast, to find the dining room, but for themselves, completely empty. Inside her was a kind of clarifying calmness, the sort that comes, for better or worse, after a decision, long postponed, has finally been made. Now, when the moment came, all that was left for her to do was to act.

  They chose a table beside the window. Morning light brightened the tops of the trees though the valley still lay in shade. The doors were open again and in drifted the smell of cut grass, green and soothing, mingling with the earth smell of the cooked mushrooms on her plate. As she raised her cup to her lips and sipped, the coffee’s bitter milkiness began to warm and wake her. The sea seemed closer than it had done last night, but the black shapes of birds visible on its surface were safely distant, rising and falling with the waves’ breath.

  Michael began to glance repeatedly out of the window and back again. He took his glasses off and cleaned them on the thick, white linen napkin. It had come sooner than she had expected. She eased her knife and fork together on her plate, her appetite lost.

  ‘What is it that you see?’

  ‘What does it look like to you?’ He pointed to the sparse top of a conifer, a naked-looking branch almost devoid of needles. The apex. It was the exact place on their Christmas tree where she always balanced the angel.