by Adam Thorpe
Now he was making for a quiet cove on a Greek island with his family and it was nowhere near Uxbridge or South Ken. He wanted to walk the wide dirt track that ran up to a little white church or hermitage on the topmost point of the headland. This headland was one claw of the crab-like bay, and was completely uninhabited. He couldn’t work out why he’d ended up in Uxbridge rather than Hemel Hempstead, which was where he was brought up (although he pretended he was from Cornwall, where his mother and father had met and their family had gone for their holidays). He also wanted to snorkel, see some exotic fish. He hadn’t snorkelled for twenty years, but had a vague idea that fish were only to be found around rocks. The sea was calm despite the wind that had picked up, a wind that Andros was quite famous for. They liked the wind because it kept the heat down. Yesterday it had been so strong that the plastic chairs in front of the Pension Keti had ended up in the pool (the pool was small and looked as if it had been made single-handed by the round-bellied owner over many years). Eddie hoped, out loud, that the wind wouldn’t pick up too enthusiastically, as it had been fairly dormant over siesta time. Holly wondered, just as they left the last of the sand and joined the dirt track, whether it might not be better to stay on the beach. Ed certainly wanted to, he was pulling on her hand and saying, ‘Wanna stay on de beach, where we goin’?’
But his father was striding ahead, now, as fathers do. The dirt track was wonderful. It had been beckoning for days, they’d even tried it once before but Ed had been sick as they set out, from too much sun or olive oil. Eddie’d had enough of the beach and of taking Ed to see the donkeys and of taking Ed to see the shops and of generally not striding out to see what lay beyond the brow of the hill the dirt track disappeared over. He could see the track appearing fitfully among the headland’s rocky brown slopes of scrub and he could see the tiny white-and-blue spot that was the church or hermitage and wanted to get there because he assumed the track was there for the church. There was a snazzy, half-built villa down to the left, dominating this end of the beach, with glazed blue tiles all over the classical temple porch and nothing on the roof, but that was it. Beyond it was wild. He was striding out. He could hear a wail quite far behind him, Ed’s wail, then Holly’s cry. He felt a prickle of concern and turned round. He’d gone quite far ahead and was standing almost out of sight from them on the corner. He felt a delicious sense of solitude, for those few seconds. He could just walk on and forget them, but he wasn’t that sort of selfish prick. David Roach would no doubt have organised a whole fortnight to himself on Andros, hiking every day on his own while his Suzie struggled with the six small Roaches back in Islington, and then he’d have come back and told everyone how he’d communed with nature as well as read the whole of Pamela and Clarissa, or was it Clarissa and Pamela, because David Roach was immaculate and he had iced tea for blood and life for him was easy and extraordinary, he was a fucking star. But Eddie Thwing was not that sort of selfish public-school prick in whose mouth a warm Jaffa cake would not melt. One day Eddie Thwing would tell the world about Roach and his toyboy from Doncaster, but not yet. It would make him even more of a star, in the current climate.
Holly came up panting, apparently telling Ed about the extraordinary, amazing, beautiful fish that Daddy was going to show them. Ed looked absorbed in these fibs. His mother looked at her husband as if he was not quite honest in some way. She looked appealing under her straw sun-hat, her long blond hair bunched up and glowing. He anticipated tonight in bed, stirring under his boxer swimshorts. She shook stones out of her sandals.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure of what?’
‘That this is the way you said we’d’ve had to have gone, to get there?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘It’s the only track. Those other things are paths made by animals.’
‘Anmuls!’ shouted Ed. ‘Fucky fucky anmuls!’
‘Ed,’ said Holly, feebly. ‘The church looks too far,’ she added.
‘I can go to the church on my own,’ her husband said.
‘I think Ed might be anticipating something else,’ she pointed out.
‘I can go snorkelling and then nip up to the church.’
‘Nip up? It looks further than you think.’
Her superior age was showing through, this always annoyed Eddie. She’d shade into his mother, or his elder sister. At work he was king, at least on days when he didn’t come into contact with Jansen House’s top brass. Even then he felt king, although he had to act obsequious: the top brass were rubbish, they didn’t even read books. In fact, Harry Turner, the mad Australian Chief Exec, hated books. Actually hated them, like the Ryanair boss hated planes. At work Eddie was king but at home he felt more like Prince Philip.
They walked on. Eddie couldn’t stride, he had to go at the infuriating pace of an under-three. They passed some goats on the slope next to them. Ed stopped and stared, hand in his mouth. The goats were hobbled, a thin hairy rope went from each foreleg to each back leg so that they couldn’t jump or even walk properly.
‘Poor things,’ said Holly.
‘I dunno,’ said Eddie, ‘better that than falling off the cliff. Or being stuck in some factory farm. Apart from that they’re free, aren’t they? Free range.’
‘When were you ever worried about factory farming?’
‘I’m not. I’m just seeing it from the goats’ point of view.’
‘String,’ shouted Ed, pointing. ‘String on de legs!’
His shout was so sudden and piercing that the goats wheeled away, scrabbling up the slope as best they could, like old folk with arthritis.
Ed laughed his loudest, uncontrollable, under-three’s laugh. It sounded cruel and mocking. The goats surveyed them from the outcrop they’d somehow scrabbled onto, either curious or terrified: it was hard to tell.
‘Down there,’ said Eddie, a couple of hundred yards further. The church had dipped out of sight, now. He pointed down to where the sea was swelling and rolling gently against several slabs of rock, slicked wet by the spray that occasionally shot up behind them. It looked deep there: the sea went from the colour of a peeled broccoli stick (Eddie thought of this spontaneously) to indigo, to dusk, to an eventide blue around the slabs. The sun shone golden on the flat rock surfaces. The only blemish was a curious whirl of white plastic bags and general flotsam a little way out, forming a near-perfect circle in front of a sea cavern, on top of which the continuing headland beetled in the shape of an aircraft carrier’s prow. It was all rather nice, and was easy to get to: a little scramble down through scrub and some loose stones like scree.
‘Looks good,’ said Holly. ‘Things to sit on.’
‘It looks deep by the rocks. There’ll be lots of fish.’
‘Fish fishie fish!’ shrieked Ed.
‘Ed,’ said Holly, ‘do you always have to shout? You can say it quietly.’
‘Fucky fucky fucky!’ screamed Ed.
‘That’s enough!’ Holly snapped, pulling him up short by the arm.
Ed started to wail again. Eddie was watching all this like a distant god. Everything was so complicated and sticky. Holly’s arse was sticking out below her T-shirt, clad only in the Lycra swimsuit, which was a new one, very brief – too brief for Greece, they reckoned, so she wore the other one for the beach. It barely hid the cheeks. For that matter, it barely hid the cleft. She was bent over Ed, whispering into his ear. Eddie imagined, looking the other way, kneeling over her in bed and spurting onto the cheeks in their sliver of Lycra swimsuit. That would be very nice. Ed’s wail had subsided into a sort of fissile moaning. Holly was worried about him, in fact. His speech was behind the others in the Montessori school he attended on the days she was working, and the teachers wondered about his behaviour. They didn’t call it ‘behaviour’, as such, they just went on about his ‘interaction with the others’, which made it sound worse. He hit the girls and made them cry.
‘He’s too young to know what he’s doing,’ Holly had said. ‘They’re so big on this guilt trip. They look at me lik
e it’s all my fault.’
Eddie felt very detached from all this. Ed would pan out. The early draft that would end up wonderful, amazing, extraordinary. Unique.
‘I do want a bit of time to relax,’ said Holly, as they were making their way down to the flat rocks. Not a single sign of modern civilisation in sight. Apart from the swish of their canvas beach bags against their legs. Their sunglasses. Their sandals were OK, they could be Greek, though they let stones and tiny thorns in, between the toes. The sun was glittering on the water, on the gently rolling and heaving sea as it kissed the rocks.
‘You mean now? Or generally?’
He so wanted to get up to the church.
Jonathan wished their house was two floors higher, or that he could construct a wooden lookout tower, like a lighthouse, from the attic. On clear days you could see it from the loo (a thin sliver of silver or green or grey or blue, flashing or not between two buildings), if you stuck the little mirror out on the end of its pole. Knowing this helped, even though the pole and its mirror were gathering dust in the corner, these days. It was like hanging on to hope.
The seagulls were awful. They drove him mad. He’d loved the sound of them for about two days, until he realised you couldn’t switch them off and they didn’t take weekend breaks or even, apparently, emigrate to warmer climes.
He was in Dave’s shop, trying to forget tomorrow. Tomorrow he was meeting Eddie Thwing. Perhaps it was the name, but the whole thing didn’t sound real. He’d phoned up Luxor and expected a secretary, but apparently they didn’t have secretaries these days. Eddie Thwing himself had answered. Jonathan had anticipated a fulsome, hearty greeting, but instead he got something much more like the surprise response he was always using in his drama work. For instance, he’d give a secret instruction to one student to play the boss in the interview impro as low status, and tell the interviewee to play it high status but never ever higher status than the boss. The students had to cope with the unexpected, the surprise, they had to keep adjusting as if they were – well, playing a squash game. Light on your feet, you see? Then, when it came to actual reality, Jonathan Lewis was still in Drama Course for Beginners, Lesson One. It was shameful.
Eddie Thwing hadn’t been rude, just cold. In fact, when Jonathan gave his name, there was a little silence. That silence was like the floor giving way. Jonathan realised that the guy on the other end of the phone, who’d answered the phone so abruptly but who had confirmed he was Eddie Thwing (‘Speaking, yeah?’), had temporarily forgotten who Jonathan Lewis was. Jonathan Lewis, the author of New Demons! In his own little pre-performance scenario, Jonathan had imagined the line, ‘God, hi, yes, look – it’s an amazing book! What can I say? Fabulous! Let’s talk! Come and have lunch!’ He’d thought that was quite realistic. Instead, there was this silence. Then Eddie Thwing had said, uncannily, as if he’d forgotten the rest of his lines:
‘Come and have lunch.’
But it was said in a strange way, as if someone had given the secret instruction to Eddie Thwing to act as if he was on Death Row.
‘Thank you, thank you very much,’ said Jonathan, like a little boy. Over-grateful.
‘Wednesday?’
‘I teach on Wednesdays.’
Pratfall. Real writers don’t ever say, ‘I teach on Wednesdays.’
‘Do you?’
‘It’s OK. Wednesday’s fine. Sorry. I thought it was Thursday.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t worry. Wednesday’s fine. I’ll come up on Wednesday. To London. What time?’
‘Lunchtime. About one. You know where we are? Jansen House?’
‘Of course.’
‘You like Japanese, I presume.’
‘Well, yeah, I don’t meet many personally, in fact, but obviously I’m very influenced by their theatre, and the teachings behind it – Noh, Kabuki, y’know? In fact, I can see you’ve picked up on that in the book – all that stuff on the open flower, that energy being kept open just above the navel, that’s straight out of Noh, and I did keep my own flower open all the way though the actual—’
‘I meant food.’
‘Oh, oh yes. Anything! Fish and chips! Anything! Really! Except meat. I’m vegetarian.’
Silence.
You are such a wally. As if you’ve been told to play the lowest status possible, and then some more.
‘I’d forgotten you were in Brighton.’
‘That’s fine. I mean, it’s no trouble. Shall I bring a copy of the manuscript?’
Silence. Perhaps sighing.
‘No. See you lunchtime Wednesday. One o’clock. Just give my name at Reception. So fish is fine, then.’
‘Fish is great.’
‘I’m glad.’
Before Jonathan could reply, Eddie Thwing had rung off.
‘The thing is,’ he said to Dave, who was fiddling on the computer in the cubby-hole at the back of the shop, ‘he didn’t sound very welcoming.’
‘Of course not,’ said Dave. ‘He’s a hard man. A cool man.’
‘So?’
‘You can’t be hard and cool and slobber over somebody simultaneously, can you? They’re all hard men and cool, up there. We’re not cool. We’re soft. They’re high fashion, we’re not. They have the stage, we’re busking it on the street outside.’
‘Give me the street any day,’ said Jonathan.
‘Whatever,’ said Dave, ‘they are the Fat Controllers. You know what Gramsci said—’
‘Actually, Dave, I don’t want to know what Gramsci said, right at this moment.’
‘OK. How about Thomas de Quincey?’
‘No.’
Dave gazed into the computer screen, his beard (like a maritime captain’s, stained with pipe juice) catching its shifting glow on the silvery highlights. There was a character in New Demons, called Snarlsbitte, entirely based on Dave. Snarlsbitte was Lord of the Redemption Library, where you could borrow another life. If you went past the loan date, you died. Snarlsbitte was not evil, however. He was merely doing his job. Dave had once worked for Sussex County Library. Long, long ago.
And Snarlsbitte was important. The crux of the plot was when Gail Goodfellow, a distant descendant of Robin Goodfellow (prankster, but genial), found a book had been slipped into her bag that was due in that day. On the flyleaf was stamped, Property of the Redemption Library. And above the author’s name – it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream – was scrawled: To gorgeous Gail, with all my love, Glottis Glossarist.
As if somebody had slipped her a curse.
Somebody with a very strange name.
‘Eddie?’
‘Yeah?’
‘What do you know about Lewis?’
‘The island? It’s in the Hebrides. The Outer—’
‘No, daft punk, the author. Of this. God, you’ve got such a short memory.’
‘Not much. Nothing, in fact. Except that he took twenty years or something. Don’t make me think about work, my sweet.’
Eddie had only now got the mask to fit. It had a fantastically irritating strap that was rubber and refused to budge under the buckle because, when you pulled it, it just stretched. The snorkel was bought in a cheap-white-trash shop in the bijou village where their boat had come in, the other side of Andros, and was luminescent pink. It had been vaguely meant for Ed, but of course he was too young to use it. Eddie had tested it by lowering his face into the water over the edge of the big black slab where Holly had spread the towels and was already reading and then the water had lifted up unexpectedly as if somebody had tipped the seabed and he’d come out choking. In fact, it was psychologically hard to breathe through your mouth underwater, it went against instinct. The water was oddly cold. He guessed that was the wind, that the violent wind of the day before had cooled the surface or maybe brought some deep, cold currents towards the island. He didn’t know much about the sea. In fact, the sea frightened him. He’d imagined diving off the slab and impressing Ed, who was now sitting on a towel and watching him intently (fed by pro
paganda about the amazing fish Daddy was going to bring up), but looking down at the slippery, easy subsiding and lifting of the water surface, the huge weight of it and the cold and the way you couldn’t see far into the dark blueness when you were up close (though from further away, from the track for instance, it was quite translucent), put Eddie off the whole idea of going in. He was even afraid of the fish, of the possibility of meeting something big and nasty, of a big shadow looming out of the cloudy blue haze of underwater distance. He was, he knew it, pathetic. He was slightly overweight, too. His stomach folded like dough over the top of his swimshorts and his bosoms were a little exaggerated. On top of everything else, he was very white. A red tide-mark at his neck showed the phantom presence of his T-shirt, while a patch of discoloured skin on his midriff, like the beginnings of some hideous disease, indicated a lack of thoroughness in the suncream-application field.
That was the trouble with exotic, glamorous, beautiful places. They made you feel a berk.
‘Daddy goin’ in de water. Big fish.’
‘That’s reet, son,’ said Eddie, in a ham northern accent. ‘Down in t’pit.’
‘Don’t be long, will you? Ed’ll only start screaming.’
‘Oh, but look, I’ve got enough air for about three hours.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t put pressure on me. How can I relax? This is a kid’s snorkel. Do you really think I’m going to be long?’
A sudden spurt of foam followed a hollow, gulping noise the sea made in the underlip of the slab. The spume in the air reached Holly.
‘Oh God, it’s got the pages wet.’
‘Wheee!’ cried Ed, waving his arms in the air, spots of water on his face and his fair hair a little wet.
‘I think the wind’s getting up,’ said Eddie, shivering a little. ‘You’d better move back a bit further. I don’t normally bring manuscripts near the deep blue sea.’
Holly shifted back on her haunches, the text in her arms like a baby.
‘Keep an eye on Ed,’ said Eddie.
‘Come and sit next to Mummy,’ said Holly. ‘Daddy’s going in the water.’