by Adam Nevill
‘I want to see the gun emplacements at Longues-sur-Mer,’ he said.
‘What? Now?’
He nodded. ‘They’re the only remaining guns of the Nazis’ Atlantic wall.’
I didn’t want some drug-impaired activity at night to distract us from what we needed to discuss. ‘But it’s pitch-black out there.’
‘So?’ he said with such ironic force that it made me blink and swallow.
He looked at the end of the joint, reduced to a butt. ‘There’s a fortified observation point up there too. In blast-proof concrete. With those guns, they could hit targets twenty kilometres away.’
Why had this not been mentioned before? It was so typical of his selfishness; to have designs on visiting something that he would only share with me moments before he actually wanted to see it.
‘It’ll all be broken or locked up,’ I said. But that was a futile thing for me to suggest, as those very facts would make Toby want to see the gun emplacement even more.
He looked at me and frowned. ‘Was that not the entire point of the journey?’
My anger closed my throat down and made my blood hiss through my ears.
‘And the fact that it will be pitch-black,’ he said, ‘makes it all the more worthwhile. And I’m really fucked now, so I want to be up there before I straighten out.’ His teeth were brown and gleaming too, so he had taken yet another hit from the bottle that he kept inside his coat. So was I to experience it all straight? As he’d taken all of the drugs, it appeared that was to be the case.
He stood up. ‘Coming?’ He said this with such a weary uninterest, as if he really didn’t care if I went with him.
‘My, my, how things have changed.’
‘What? What did you say?’
I swallowed; it was hard to keep my thoughts straight because I was so angry and upset and feeling rejected. If I spoke, my voice would be full of tears.
He shrugged and made his way to the door, stepping over my open and discarded rucksack. It was on the floor at the foot of my bed, where he’d left it after rummaging for the drugs.
We drove to the cliffs in silence. He asked me to park near the old cliff walk. He wanted to climb up to the guns from the sea, in the dark, like the American Rangers had done at Pointe du Hoc in 1944.
‘No way,’ I said.
But from the car I docilely followed him down a cliff path to the shore, where he then began moving around to the area below the gun emplacements. I trailed him along the crunching shingle, and up and over a stone groin, and then up the side of some wet rocks to the foot of a steep, grassy cliff-face that would have to be scaled as a scrabble, on our hands and knees, in the dark. The sign on the fence at the foot of the grassy cliff forbade access and warned of avalanches. In parts, the sea-facing side of the hill formed a sheer rock cliff-face too, dropping into the angry waves that smashed into black rocks. But I was to follow him and his feeble torchlight upwards? It was too dangerous. ‘No way, Toby.’
Without a single word of advice or encouragement, he set off on his hands and knees. I dithered at the bottom, then followed his sounds ahead of me. I stopped after a few minutes and shouted at him to slow down and to direct the torchlight down to me. He turned the torch off and laughed. But I had climbed too far to go back down in the dark, and Toby knew this. He was forcing me to follow and I was already nearly in tears with fear.
I had nothing else to guide me; his red waterproof and his pale curly head were consumed by the lightless night. I could barely see my own hands where they clawed at the slippery grass on an almost vertical hill. At one point, I made again to go back down, but so steep was the gradient that I was sure, if I slipped, I would just plummet into the darkness below. Descending by the same route was impossible. In a breathless voice, I pleaded with Toby again to stop, but he didn’t reply. His sounds just accelerated ahead of me, as he went higher, alone. Swallowing a panic that wished to become hysteria, I too continued upwards, slowly.
A terrible universe of thin cold air reached out into the darkness behind my back and above my head; it seemed to suck at me. A cold breeze then slapped against me as I clung to the grassy rock-face like an insect. Below us, so far down, was the thunder of the sea, rushing in to smash itself against the land. It was as if I were climbing into the sky; as if I had gone through the very atmosphere and was entering the deep frozen gases of space. There were no lights at the top. A sliver of moon. No stars.
It took me over an hour to haul my trembling body up that incline. By the time I had reached the top, my mind was witless with vertigo and agoraphobia; fatigue had turned my muscles to warm water.
I stumbled through the shrubbery at the summit, and then climbed a wire fence to a mercifully level surface beneath long grass. In which I came across the derelict observation post. It was like a featureless mausoleum with a thin slot in the front for the dead to peer through. I called out to Toby and received no answer.
It took me another twenty minutes to find him up there in the darkness.
‘Would you be fucking quiet,’ he said at one point, from somewhere to my left.
Squinting into the inky absorbing nothingness of the clifftop, I followed the sound of his voice. By this time my breath was sobbing out of me, and my fear of how we would get back down was close to paralysing. And something terrible was up there with us. Not an individual or a shape this time, but something above us that had no form or end. I felt I could have just fallen upwards, into the sky, where the stars should have been. This was a night that would have once wrecked ships. There was no bottom to it, no horizon, no sides or ceiling. The night was a vast absence that did not end. It was not paranoia that had made my climb unbearable; it had been a justified caution at climbing over the edge of the world.
Where the fence was broken, Toby was standing on the cliff edge, staring up and outwards to sea. ‘Can you feel it?’ he said.
‘Too much,’ I cried out, and I fell to my face and grasped handfuls of long grass. A terrible sensation overcame me that my feet were then rising from the earth and moving upwards into the cold black infinity, and I screamed.
‘What is fucking wrong with you?’ he snapped at me. ‘You are ruining it.’
Whatever blackness was attempting to wipe my presence, my very existence, off the face of the earth, and whatever it was that we had climbed into, withdrew momentarily from around my unravelling mind. I felt as if a tight hat had been snatched off my aching head. And within the lightless air, I became red and I burned wild and hot with fury.
I stood up. I walked right at him. ‘Ruining’ was all I could release from behind my clamped-together teeth. And then Toby came into focus suddenly, as he turned around on the very edge of the cliff. He was actually angry with me.
I punched both hands into his chest. Hard. My elbows locked tight.
And Toby fell backwards, and was then yanked straight up and into the air.
There was a whisk of nylon sleeves as his arms windmilled in nothingness. In his raking torchlight, his mouth opened and his eyes went wide behind his silly little spectacles, and then the details of his shock and fear were gone. His body surged even higher and further out too, like a kite caught on some sudden upward draught of fast-moving air. His coat flapped.
And then I heard him drop like a stone into the darkness.
I stood still and listened to the silence for a time that began to feel preposterous. Until, so far below the clifftop, I heard a distant explosion as his body struck the rocks and surely came apart. After that, I heard no more from him.
Silence thickened all about me on the clifftop. Far away and below my feet was the rush and hissing retreat of the ocean waves. There was no other sound.
I looked at the sky in awe. There was nothing to see besides for ever. And the lightless canopy of the universe was not only closer than ever to the surface of the earth, it was touching the earth.
I dipped my head and clutched my face in my hands. And I shouted out into the lightlessness, cried o
ut the inscription upon the memorial for the Commonwealth soldiers: ‘We whom William once conquered have now set free the conqueror’s native land.’
After the incident on the clifftop, I walked inland and eventually found a road that led down to the car. I drove back into the town, whose name I will never speak again, nor will I countenance its name being spoken in my presence.
Inside our room, I ransacked Toby’s scruffy rucksack and found more than I had bargained for. His address book contained details of a vast life that I had no knowledge of. It was a thing filled with names and numbers and email addresses, and on every single page, and I will always treasure it. I now possessed his secret world. His mysteries were mine to explore whenever I wished to, if I wished to.
Inside his toiletry bag, I found his money and his drugs. He had an ounce of weed in a baggy, and some pills. The little waterproof wallet bulged with over five hundred euros. Pin money for Toby, but I could live on less for years. I pocketed the money and drugs, his iPod and his smart little camera. I wondered if there were pictures of his fiancée on there; if so, I intended to masturbate over them at a later date.
The rest of his things I stuffed inside his rucksack and then jammed his effects deep inside an overflowing skip at the corner of an abandoned building site on the outskirts of the town. I left the guest house before dawn, leaving ten euros on the front desk with the room keys on top of the money. I drove out of town and headed for Dunkirk to catch a return ferry at midnight. With the wet-wipe tissues he had in his toiletry bag, I even wiped everything of his that I had touched and then abandoned.
I called Toby’s parents three weeks later and inquired after him. His mother answered the phone. She was very posh. ‘He’s off’ – which she pronounced awf – ‘on one of his escapades. Who can I say called?’
Despite the fact that I had killed her son, I gave her my actual name. In the phone box, I nearly fainted with excitement.
She’d never heard of me.
He’d clearly never mentioned my name to his own mother in all of the twenty-three years that we had known each other. Again, Toby had managed to spoil a small moment of triumph. He was a natural.
But the strangest thing of all is that even now, when I ponder the fact that I have killed, I can feel no remorse at all. Toby’s sentence, I feel, fitted his crimes; and his crimes were those that no surviving vestige of any criminal justice system would ever recognise. And yet the damage of such crimes had blighted a life: my life. His death at my hands made me feel renewed, invigorated, awoken and awake, if that makes sense. I felt that some small act of fairness had finally been invested into an unfair world that had left billions dead. I even felt entitled. And the craziest thing is, had he paid for our packed lunch on that final trip, he would still be breathing now.
Florrie
F rank remembered his mother once saying, ‘Houses give off a feeling’, and that she could ‘sense things’ inside them. At the time, he’d been a boy and his family had been drifting around prospective homes with an estate agent. He only remembered the occasion because his mother was distressed by a house that they had viewed and had hurried away from to get back to the car. As an adult, all he could recall of that particular property was a print of a blue-faced Christ, within a gilt frame, hanging on the wall of a scruffy living room; the only picture on any of the walls. And the beds had been unmade, which had also shocked his mother. His father had never contradicted his mother on these occasional matters of a psychic nature, though his father had never encouraged her to hold forth on them either. ‘Something terrible happened there’ was his mother’s final remark once the car doors were shut, and the house was never mentioned again. But Frank had been perplexed by the incongruity of both the blue skin of the Christ and a house belonging to Christians that issued an unpleasant ‘feeling’ to his mother, when she should, surely, have detected the opposite effect.
Frank amused himself trying to second-guess what her intuition would be about the first home that he’d ever owned. He knew what his dad would say about the 120 per cent mortgage that he’d arranged to purchase the two-bedroomed terraced house. But once the house was fixed up, he’d have them down to ‘his place’: his own home after ten years of cohabitation and tenancy agreements.
The narrow frontage of the house’s grubby bricks faced a drab street, cramped with identical houses that leaned over a road so narrow that two cars driving from opposing ends struggled to pass each other. But a final jiggle of the Yale key moved him out of the weak rainy light and into an unlit hallway where the air was thick with trapped warmth. A cloud of stale upholstery, cauliflower thoroughly boiled, and a trace of floral perfume descended about him.
He assured himself that the house would soon exude the scents of his world: the single professional who could cook a bit of Thai, liked entertaining and used Hugo Boss toiletries. Once he’d ripped out the old carpets, stripped the walls and generally ‘torn the shit out of it’, as his best friend Marcus had remarked with a decisive relish, the house would quickly lose the malodour of the wrong decade, age group and gender.
Enshrouded by a thin illumination that wafted through ground-floor windows begrimed with silt and the silvery nets, he quickly realised that there had been a mistake and that the place had not been cleared of the former owner’s furniture. It was as if he’d mixed up the exchange dates and stepped into what remained of the vendor’s home. ‘Pure 70s, Nan,’ Marcus had remarked, with a grin on his face, during the evening when he’d visited to assist Frank’s purchasing decision between this two-up, two-down and an ex-council property in Weoley Castle that had needed an airstrike more than a first-time buyer.
Poking from a Bakelite fitting on the wall of the front room was a chunky light switch, the same colour as the skirting boards, kitchen cupboards and fittings: the plastic of artificial limbs used until the 1950s. But the switch was stiff and, when he’d forced it down, the ceiling fixture only emitted a smoky glow from inside its plastic shade, a shade patterned with all the colours of a tin of fruit cocktail.
He stared at the cluttered room and his distaste and irritation fashioned fantasies of destruction about everything inside it: the rosewood sideboard; the gas fire grille with its plastic coals and concealed light bulbs that would glow in the hearth; the ancient television in a wooden cabinet, the small screen concave like a poorly ground lens in a pair of NHS spectacles; the tufted sofa, exhausted and faded and reduced from an article once plush and dark but now sagging into the suggestion of a shabby velour glove dropped from a giant’s hand. All of it was an affront to his taste. The furniture and appliances also made him morose, though glad that he’d been born in the mid-70s so that he’d not had long to wait for styles to dramatically change and appear modern over the next decade.
Beneath his feet a red carpet swirled with green fronds and made him think of chameleons’ tongues licking fire. He looked down at the weave and his focus was drawn into the pattern. The carpet absorbed most of the dim electric light too, and drained the last of his optimism.
As if he’d just uttered an inappropriate remark in polite company, from the dusty gloom of the sitting room an odd chastening quality descended upon his spirits.
Frank reached out and touched a wall, without really understanding why he felt the need to. The paper was old and fuzzy against his fingertips, the vine pattern no longer lilac on cream but sepia on parchment. About him the warmth and powerful fragrance of the room intensified in tandem with his curious guilt.
Momentarily, his thoughts were weighted with remorse, as if he was being forced to observe the additional distress that his spiteful thoughts about the decor had inflicted upon someone already frightened and . . . bullied. He even felt an urge to apologise to the room out loud.
Only the sound of a delivery truck reversing and beeping outside stirred Frank from his inexplicable shame. The unpleasant feelings passed and he surveyed the room again.
Where to start? Before he could pull up a single carpet tack, t
he furniture would have to be removed. All of it.
He reached for his phone. This also meant that the terrible Formica dining table with extendable flaps would still be crowding the second downstairs room, along with the hideous quilted chairs. He checked and confirmed that all of the vendor’s furniture remained in place. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he whispered, and wondered why he’d kept his voice down.
Frank jogged up the narrow stairwell to expel a sense of fatigue, presumably caused by the stifling air or the anticipation of renovating the house.
The master bedroom was still choked by the immense veneered walnut wardrobe that he’d seen during his two viewings of the property. Beside it a teak dresser stood before him in defiance. A bed that had probably survived the Luftwaffe’s bombing of munitions factories on the nearby Grand Union Canal appeared implacable and vast enough to fill what remained of the floor-space.
One quick look around the door of the second bedroom revealed that it was also being used in absentia by the previous owner, as a depository for cardboard suitcases, dated Christmas decorations, candlewick bedspreads, candy-striped linen and knitting paraphernalia.
On the tiny landing, while standing beneath the white hardboard loft hatch, Frank wondered if the old woman had even moved out, or perhaps come back home. ‘She’s in a retirement home, I think. Couldn’t cope. Went a bit funny. Dementia or something,’ the wanker that was the estate agent, Justin, at Watkins, Perch and Manly, had said when Frank had asked about the former occupant’s history. So why hadn’t her relatives collected her things?
Maybe she had no one at the end.
Frank was overwhelmed by an unwelcome notion of age, its indignities, its steady erasure of who you had once been and the recycling of your tiny former position in the world. The same tragic end might befall him one day. Right here too.