by Oliver Tidy
As she pulled on the pump, she said, ‘They could be up at the Legion.’
I hadn’t thought of that. It must have shown. She set my glass down on a beer towel. I reached for my wallet.
‘First one’s on me. You want me to phone and ask?’
I thanked her and said that would be great. I took a long pull on the tepid brown liquid. English ale was one of those little pleasures I sorely missed in a country where the government controlled the beer consumption to the point of virtually monopolising it with one brand of gassy chemicals masquerading as lager.
As she dialled, she said, ‘How long you back for?’
‘A week.’
She cut me off with a raised palm. I listened as she found out they weren’t there and hadn’t been in. I thanked her again for the drink and took a table for one near the fire. I didn’t feel like burdening or involving her further in my situation.
I stared into the flames and made my way to the bottom of the glass. I took my empty back to the bar, thanked Pam again and told her I’d see her soon. I had a stupid idea I’d step out on to the street and look up and across to see lights blazing in the windows above the bookshop. Nothing had changed.
I stopped in at the Indian restaurant, ordered a curry to go, waited ten minutes for it, scanned the local paper, walked back and let myself in. Nothing had changed.
I found a tray, some cutlery, went through to the front room and put the telly on. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t want to be entertained. I finally admitted to myself I was worried.
I picked at the food, put it down, turned the telly off, stood up and moved around. I wanted to phone the police, but I didn’t know what I could tell them that wouldn’t sound panicky and stupid. There was no evidence of a crime having been committed.
I found myself back in the kitchen. I’d dumped a carrier bag of duty free cigarettes and whisky on the worktop. They were both for me; neither my aunt nor my uncle smoked or drank spirits.
I shrugged my jacket on, cracked the seal on the bottle, picked a glass off the draining board, poured a large one and went down the back stairs for an outside smoke and more worrying.
The wind was stronger and the air was colder. The night was darker and, round the back of the building, heavy with quiet. The duvet of cloud cover had closed over the moon, putting the Earth to bed – or at least the part I was standing in. I smoked and sipped.
By the time I was tipping up the glass for the dregs, I’d finished two cigarettes. I hadn’t moved forward with my thinking and I understood this was because my thinking had nowhere to go. I had no idea where they could be. I couldn’t even make a wild guess.
I picked up my butts and threw them over the fence into the builder’s yard, trudged back across the shallow beach and let myself in. I locked the door behind me and hoped that if and when they returned they had a key of their own. That gave me an idea.
I hurried back upstairs to search for their bunches of keys. I found one in the kitchen in my aunt’s handbag; the handbag I had already seen three times and not thought anything of; the handbag my aunt never left the house without, even if she was only going next door to the general store. I opened it: purse, tissues, paper, keys, hairbrush, saccharin, compact, lipstick. Shit.
So maybe they had left in a hurry, I reasoned. Maybe they had to dash on an errand of mercy – not far or the car would be gone. Local then. Very local. Maybe a friend in need had summoned them. An emergency. They would know I would be resourceful enough to get myself to Dymchurch, to let myself in, to make myself at home. I liked this more and more until I got to asking myself why neither had phoned me in that case and why both their mobile phones were still in the flat. And why was my aunt’s handbag still here? One step forward, two steps back.
I poured another small one. It was getting late. I was getting tired. Istanbul is two hours ahead of the UK and it was catching up with me. The day’s travel, the draining worry and the whisky weren’t helping. I thought about going to bed in my old room. Impossible.
I went back through to the lounge, closed the curtains, pulled the blanket off the back of the sofa, put the telly back on and lay down to wait.
***
3
I didn’t open my eyes again until gone eight the next morning. I felt bad for that. Alone on the lumpy couch, fully clothed under a thin throw, I’d had my best night’s sleep for months.
Traffic in the high street was heavier now. I lay collecting my thoughts listening to the constant background noise of passing tyres on the wet road the other side of the glass and one floor down. The people of the Marsh commuting off it to work and outsiders commuting in. A paradox that seemed to be lost on most I’d ever mentioned it to.
It was immediately obvious my relatives hadn’t returned, but I looked and called out anyway. I had to.
I was now suitably concerned for their welfare. I had been the previous evening, but then it had all seemed so unreal and confusing that I had expected them to return with a logical explanation that just hadn’t occurred to me. In the intemperate grey light of day, despite no evidence, I was starting to believe something bad might have happened to them.
I phoned Folkestone police station. The woman I was put through to said I should wait until they had been missing for twenty-four hours. That’s the way it was. I asked if she could tell me whether there had been any reports of any accidents involving a man and a woman of my relatives’ age the previous day. She said she didn’t have that kind of information. She advised me to ring the nearest hospitals – The William Harvey in Ashford and Victoria Hospital in Folkestone.
I could have kicked myself then. The idea of telephoning hospitals should have been one of my first. If one of them had had an accident it would explain why they might have left in a hurry and left everything personal behind. The woman also suggested I ask around our neighbours. If my relatives, or word of them, didn’t show up for twenty-four hours then I should call back and register them as missing.
I looked up the numbers of both hospitals and made my enquiries. It took a while to discover that no one fitting either description had been admitted within the last twenty-four hours.
I put the kettle on and stood staring out of the kitchen window. At the back of the flat the kitchen overlooked the builder’s yard – about a half-acre of land scattered with the rotting, rusting and redundant debris of a local building firm’s livelihood: old ship’s containers, cement mixers, scaffolding, piles of unused and reclaimed timber, pallets of bricks and roof tiles, aggregates of every description. And sprouting unchecked amongst it all patches of vegetation: brambles, nettles, intrusive weeds. It was a mess, an eyesore, but as far as my relatives were concerned it was preferable to residential development.
That’s what the owner had been trying to do for as long as I could remember. Planning application after planning application to try to capitalise on the potential of the brownfield land that was locked in on all sides by other people’s property. The only reason he was regularly turned down for anything and everything he proposed was access. Apparently, the track in wasn’t wide enough for whatever the council envisaged might need to use it.
The price and lack of available building land in the area made that parcel a precious plot if only someone could fashion a key to unlock its potential.
The kettle sang. I opened the fridge for milk. In the door were bottles of beer I liked. It told me someone had remembered I was due. I had an idea. I looked in my aunt’s purse and then her handbag. Then I looked in the bin. Then I dipped into the box my aunt stuffed all the plastic shopping bags into for rubbish sacks. I pulled out a couple of the local supermarket’s bags. In the second one I found what I was looking for: a receipt for the beer. It was dated the day before and indicated a morning transaction. It told me something, but it didn’t tell me anything.
I took my tea to the bathroom, cleaned up, changed and headed out the back. I went to each of the little premises that shared the right of way and the immediate h
igh street with my uncle and aunt. They were all nice, friendly and helpful, but no one had seen either of them since the morning before. The lady in the baker’s told me my uncle had dropped in for his usual loaf at his usual time. She also told me he had mentioned my visit. They all seemed surprised and concerned by my story.
I was properly hungry by the time I’d seen out that pointless twenty minutes. I walked the short distance to the Martello Cafe. I was going to eat out of necessity.
I wished I could have been in a better frame of mind. Living in a Muslim country made bacon an indulgence normally out of my price range. And in any case, the bacon available to buy in Turkey didn’t taste like English bacon. That’s not meant to be a compliment. An English breakfast was something I really looked forward to enjoying on my visits. I didn’t feel there was much chance of that now.
The day was another typical seasonal cocktail of compressed greyness and damp air. The wind had dropped and the temperature was up a little. The shop fronts looked drab and appeared to have suffered a harsh, wet, dirty winter war. The kind no one wins. Like all wars, just degrees of losing. No one seemed in a hurry to smarten the place up for the hordes of summer visitors that saw most businesses through the lean winter months. May wasn’t far away and I thought the shopkeepers would need to get their skates on.
In the cafe I got a table to myself, although it was busy. I tried to look like someone with problems; someone you wouldn’t want to share a table with in a village cafe. Given the circumstances, it wasn’t hard to do. And I didn’t want to be recognised and have to recount my story again. Every telling dragged me further down and every reaction was the same: sympathetic understanding but no help.
I ate hungrily, drank a couple of mugs of proper coffee and left unmolested. I decided to walk away from the flat and take a look at the sea. I crossed the road, went another hundred yards and there it was. It had done a full turn since the previous evening because it was back in – a heaving, uninviting, intolerant brown-grey mass. Forbidding. The antithesis of its summer self when it could sometimes manage hues of blue and green to make one wonder why people went abroad.
The sea wall renovations were finished. A plaque to the side of the slipway commemorated and celebrated this fact. The contractors had gone over time and over budget to the chagrin and cost of several local businesses hurt by the trade that had stayed away with the beach being off limits. I looked for the apology. There was none.
It was all concrete and conventional, millions of pounds and maybe millions of tonnes of the grey stuff: practical, ugly, intrusive and on the cheap. I hated it. To my eye, it was an abomination of functionality with all the charm of a wartime installation. An opportunity wasted. A perspective ruined. I wondered what Paul Nash, one of Dymchurch’s more famous temporary resident artists of times past and recorder of many sea wall impressions would have made of it. As a war artist, he might have understood it better.
I leaned on the high smooth concrete coping in the shadow of one of the few remaining Martello towers – a preserved relic of the unrealised fear of Napoleonic invasion. I didn’t dwell on the juxtaposition of old and new. For a while I just stared out in the direction of France, cleaning out my lungs with the salty tang of sea air – and then I spoiled it with a cigarette.
The only sound was the soothing constant motion of the water, bustling in to bully the wall, and then a distant wail of an emergency services siren broke the spell.
I was so deep in thought as I stared out at the horizon I missed the approach of a curious collie. He sniffed around my ankles and I bent to scratch behind his ear. Neither of us seemed to mind the attention. He moved on and his walker strode by: a good-looking tall woman in her thirties. From the look of her legs, she walked that dog a lot. We nodded good morning. She even smiled.
I decided to walk home via the sea wall and then cut down on to the main road by the pub, opposite the village’s little supermarket. I didn’t like the grey wall of concrete adding to the grey of my outlook and my mood, so I dropped down a level through a gap in the wall to the wide expanse of brushed-pebble slabs that served as the first, lower, section of the defence. Now it was just me and the English Channel. That was better.
Dymchurch is a tourist attraction because of its beach. The area is part of a wide bay that curves inland from Folkestone to the east to Dungeness towards the west. Dymchurch is roughly in the middle. Face the sea and look left or right and you can see the land arcing out to these two points like a pair of embracing arms. At low tide there are literally miles and miles of golden sand in either direction. Plenty of room for everyone.
I was walking west. At the furthest visible point along the coast, at the tip of the shingle peninsula where the land sticks its nose out the furthest into the English Channel before it turns back in towards East Sussex, stands Dungeness nuclear power station – a blot on the landscape if ever there was one. But it has it uses. It’s a big employer of local labour, for one. Heading back towards Dymchurch along the coastline there’s nothing much to grab the eye – unless an uninterrupted seafront of holiday bungalows excites you – until it falls upon the old water tower at Littlestone.
A mile up the shoreline, between the water tower and Dymchurch, is the smaller settlement of St Mary’s Bay. As my eyes strayed that way I saw the flashing blue lights of at least two emergency vehicles parked up on the sea wall there. My stomach turned a slow revolution, like the drum of an overloaded washing machine. Something unpleasant had happened; I was certain of that. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like where my imagination, like a freak salt-water wave toying with a discarded plastic bottle, had picked me up and deposited me.
Instead of turning off and cutting back towards the empty flat, somewhere I didn’t particularly want to be, I let my fears and anxieties lead me by the nose to see what all the fuss was about.
***
4
I hadn’t got halfway before a light drizzle started to fall. The sort that’s wetter than anything else the sky can throw at you. That put smoking off the list of things to calm my senses. By the time I could understand the focus of the activity ahead I could feel my damp clothes against my skin.
There was a margin of sand now: unmarked, ironed flat by the weight and motion of the water.
A police car and an ambulance and, by the time I arrived, a fire engine were cluttering up the promenade. I couldn’t imagine what they needed the latter for. There was nothing could stay alight in that weather.
A man dressed a lot like a policeman stopped me from getting any nearer with a raised palm and a polite sentence. I could see the attention of the professionals was focussed on something in the water by the outfall. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I could guess it wasn’t a missing inflatable beach toy.
‘Is it a body?’
He nodded.
‘Just one?’
He looked at me strangely then.
I told him about my missing relatives.
He thought about it and told me to wait where I was. He turned his back and spoke quietly into his radio.
A real policeman broke away from the group huddled on top of the outfall structure – another squat ugly concrete fixture for Nash to give his attention to – and walked to where we stood.
The policeman nodded at me and tried a tight smile. ‘What’s your name, please, sir?’
I told him.
‘And your aunt and uncle are missing?’
I agreed.
‘Since when?’
I explained what I thought would help him.
‘How old is your aunt?’
‘Late sixties.’
‘If you arrived in Dymchurch after they had gone missing, you wouldn’t know what she was wearing last would you?’
I could see that sounded pretty clever to him and I had to agree with his logic. I was feeling pretty clever too; I noticed he questioned me only about a female so I reasoned that whoever they had discovered it must be one. I told him so. He looked lik
e he might have thought that was pretty clever of me. He didn’t argue with my logic either. We were a pair of clever guys passing the time in the rain at the beach. All we needed were a couple of ice creams.
The emergency teams behind him seemed to have stopped wondering what to do and done something. Someone had gone into the waist high water. It looked like one of the fireman. It would be. Several of them bent to help heave a sodden lifeless form out of the sea and lay it on the wooden planking that topped the outfall. It was done quickly and efficiently but with little dignity for the dead person. Not that they’d be complaining.
From the distance I was being kept at, I couldn’t tell if my worst fears had been realised. My heart said yes and so did my gut, but I like to see things with my own eyes to believe them.
The ambulance team had stepped in and were wasting everyone’s time seeing if there was anything that could be done. They weren’t at it for long. The body was sealed in a zippered rubber bag, heaved by four of them on to a wheeled bed and pushed towards the open back doors of the waiting ambulance. There was no rush.
The policeman made a decision. He called to them to wait and asked me if I would look at the body. I heard myself saying I would. And then I realised I really didn’t want to. I’d never seen a dead body before. I didn’t particularly want to make my first one of my closest relatives. And then I thought if the body wasn’t a woman in her late sixties he wouldn’t have asked. And then I tried to remember the last time I’d heard of a body, any body, being washed up on Dymchurch beach. I couldn’t because in my living memory there hadn’t been one.
I didn’t like the odds on me knowing the deceased and neither did my recently consumed breakfast. I belched quietly behind my hand. I tasted half-digested meat, scrambled eggs and coffee. I felt hot on the inside, but my surface temperature must have been low. I was shaking. My mouth was dry and I thought I might cry. And they hadn’t even opened the bag.