by Ali Shaw
‘I give up!’ cried Gweneth, pushing the butts of her wrists against her eyes.
‘I thought I might be able to help,’ blurted Adrien again, as Clara shoved past him to comfort her mother. But immediately Gweneth lurched to her feet. She had turned as white as foam, and as her daughter grabbed her and forced her back into her chair she shouted, ‘Don’t show me any more!’ and then collapsed sobbing in the younger woman’s grip. Adrien grabbed Nora’s hand and fumbled with the latch on the camper-van door. As soon as he had it open he ushered the girl out, then sprang down to the beach after her. Nora was already running, and together they raced away across the shingle as fast as the little girl’s legs could cope with.
They did not stop until the van was long out of sight. Then they drew to a halt, facing each other and panting.
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Thomas,’ gasped Nora, tears forming in her eyes. ‘I’m so so sorry I took us in there.’
‘Don’t be,’ said Adrien, trying to sound as reassuring as he could. ‘No harm done. We’re both in one piece, aren’t we?’
‘I was scared. She was mad, wasn’t she?’
Adrien looked towards the forest’s edge, at all the green shadows and clawed branches extended for the sun. There was no comfort to be had in that direction, but when he reached on instinct for the memory of his armchair and a cold glass of beer, and for Stetsons and spurs and saloon-bar brawls, he felt even sicker than he had before. He did not want to return to those days, even if he didn’t know what he wanted in their place.
‘Yes, Nora,’ he gulped. ‘Gweneth was mad as a hatter, and you’ll be fine. You’ve no need to worry about a single word that she said.’
6
Captain
Hannah dreamed of the gunman.
The two of them lay on the beach, and he was asleep alongside her. She could tell he was alive because he was snoring, but there was a hole in his skull that kept filling up with red and then emptying, just as a hole dug in the sand loses water.
In the dream she sat up and was holding the gun again, and it felt as familiar as a household appliance. She pointed it at the gunman’s head, deciding whether or not to shoot. His lips made a bubbling noise like waves fizzling out against the shingle. A hint of a smile turned up the corners of his mouth.
When she fired, the gunshot was so loud that it woke her. She launched herself to her feet and out of her sleeping bag, then staggered out of the tent. Her eardrums were ringing as if the sound had really happened, and she crouched with her hands over her head until calm returned to her heart.
The morning hid beneath a cool sea mist, under whose cover the trees swayed like giant stalks on the ocean bottom. Wide awake now, Hannah walked along the seafront and listened to the waves crashing invisibly, then picked her way down to the shingle and followed the bay’s long curve. Every now and then the mist parted and enfolded her again, and in one such pocket of visibility she saw a starfish inching through a rock pool, and could not believe that such a sight would visit her now when she had never seen such a thing before in all her life. Other times she spotted opalescent shells, and held them up and regarded them for long minutes, wondering how oozing and shapeless sea creatures could grow such fanned or coiled structures from the slime of their backs. Inspecting one peculiarly wizened specimen, she jumped in alarm to see a sudden unfolding of needle legs from its opening, and a head moustached with pink mandibles that peered its black eyes into hers before vanishing back into its shelter. She placed it in the secrecy of another rock pool, but thought of its stalked blank gaze each time she closed her eyes.
The best shells she found Hannah kept, with a plan to string them together as a present for Nora. She hoped that Eoin had some sort of small drill among his shipwright’s tools, one she could use to fashion the shells into a necklace. It would be a nice gift for the girl, and a good excuse to talk to Eoin again. Hannah had been thinking, lately, that the silver lining of staying here until midsummer would be staying near the sailor. Staying, and learning more about the sea.
The morning mist was a million perfect prisms, each reflecting white with every colour of the light. Sometimes Hannah fancied she could make out those pinprick droplets marching off the sea and into the woods. This close to the water, the trees were bleached out entirely by the weather. They should not enjoy growing so close to salt water, but from their direction Hannah could hear their eager creaks and groans, as if they were straining to put forth roots even into the shingle. Something snagged her ankle and she had to crouch just to see it was a noose of seaweed. Then, as she unhooped it, she heard heavy, rhythmic splashes coming through the shallows.
She remained in a crouch, thinking at once of the gunman. She told herself not to be stupid, for why would he be splashing through the water, but some of the fright of her earlier dream still lingered. Splash . . . splash . . . came the noise in the shallows. A chill tingled across her flesh and her trigger finger began to twitch. She screwed shut her eyes and saw the gunman’s glasses turned vertical against his forehead, and a rim of bone visible where the bullet had entered.
The splashes drew closer, closer, and then stopped. Whatever had made them remained hidden behind sparkling white.
Crunch . . . crunch . . . Now it was making its way onto the beach.
The mists thickened, then formed up around the grey silhouette of a man. He stooped to lift something off the sand and, convinced it was a gun, Hannah cried out.
The man shouted back at her, but it was with shock and not malice. A moment later he was breaking through the mist towards her, and she realised that it wasn’t a gun he’d picked up but a towel, and that the man had been swimming naked and alone.
‘Hannah?’ he asked.
It was Eoin.
At once all of Hannah’s fear swooned into embarrassment. Terror dissolved in a hot blood rush. She collapsed onto her backside with a hard thump.
‘Hannah,’ Eoin said again, coming towards her with the towel wrapped around his waist. ‘You scared me half to death.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she spluttered, ‘I had no idea you were, you were . . .’
He looked confused. ‘Swimming?’
‘Yes!’
He laughed and shook his head, and tied a knot in the towel to secure it from slipping. ‘There’s no reason to apologise. This is the sea, not a private pool.’
Hannah prayed that the mist was powdering her blushes. She felt so stupid now. ‘Of course. Sorry. You just surprised me, that’s all.’
He drew closer. Water had darkened his hair to black, and tumbled in drips from his beard. His torso was thin brawn like deck rope, and there were droplets caught and shining in the hair of his chest.
‘Let me grab my clothes,’ he said, and turned back to where he’d left them. As he did so she saw, for the first time fully, the tattoo that filled up his back.
It was a capricorn, with great curling horns and hoofed forelegs, then finned lower quarters that spread into a fish’s tail. It covered Eoin’s back as a crest covers a heraldic shield, and the horns reached all the way to his shoulders. His wet skin made the tattoo look as blue as fresh ink, and Hannah was still staring at it when he looked back at her.
‘Er . . . uhh . . .’ she said, ‘aren’t you cold?’
He pulled his shirt over his head. ‘You learn to forget the cold when you’re a sailor.’ He put on his underwear beneath the towel. ‘On land you’ve always got a hope of shelter. But at sea you can never be sure of it.’ He grinned and tossed aside the towel, then stepped into his jeans. ‘It’s early. Are you having trouble sleeping, Hannah?’
‘Um, yes. Yes, I am.’
‘Me too. It’s the trees, I think. I’ll be so glad when the boat is finished. What about you? What’s keeping you awake?’
Hannah shrugged. ‘I’ve always woken up early.’
A wave clapped hard against a rock and threw spray into the air. There was something about the sound and the sudden flicker of liquid that made Hannah flinch, bu
t she quickly pulled herself back together and hoped Eoin had not noticed.
‘It’s the secret that you have,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’
She folded her arms. ‘I already told you there isn’t any secret.’
He nodded. ‘And I thought I made it clear that I didn’t believe you.’
‘Eoin . . . if you knew . . . you wouldn’t want to know me any more.’
‘Am I allowed to be the judge of that?’
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No, you’re not.’
‘I trust you, Hannah,’ he said.
‘You hardly even know me.’
‘But we have the sea in common. So I’m going to tell you the secret that I have, in the hope that some day soon you’ll tell me yours.’
The mist was lifting into thick cloud, its undersides pearly white. The sea stretched far beneath it, all the way to Ireland, all the way to all the coastlines of the world.
‘My boat is nearly finished,’ Eoin said.
Hannah didn’t know how to react. ‘No it isn’t,’ she said eventually. ‘I mean . . . you showed me what you’ve done so far, and it’s hardly even started . . .’
‘I showed you some of the gunwale and a rowing bench, but those parts are just a kind of decoy. I polish them and sand them down from time to time and I keep them covered with a tarpaulin, and people come and ask me how long till I set sail and I show them those parts and send them away disappointed. Then, at night sometimes when no one can see, I drag what I’ve done on the beach into the woods, and bring back some other half-made part to stash under the covers. My real work I’ve done in the forest. I’ve fished up a lot more from the harbour than I let people know, and I found more parts and tools in a lifeboat house down the coast. I have a hull, Hannah, and she’s keeled and made watertight. With a few pairs of helping hands – four pairs should be just about right – she’ll be seaworthy in a few weeks’ time. I’m sorry to have tricked you, Hannah, but I had to decide whether I could trust you.’
So it was that, come nightfall, Eoin led them all into the forest and showed them his boat. It was built upwards from the hull of an existing craft, which he had repaired and repanelled. He had stripped much of the old frame bare, but the replacement wood was finely worked and curved quite beautifully towards the hull. The vessel’s crown jewel was a small diesel motor, to which Adrien and Seb were able to contribute the bottles of fuel they’d taken from the petrol station.
‘On the night we set sail,’ Eoin explained, ‘we’ll carry her in parts down to the water. That’s when I’ll fix her together entirely, and as soon as that’s done we can leave. And we will, by the way, have to set sail at night. Otherwise we’ll have half the people on these beaches jumping aboard with us.’
During the days that followed, Adrien taught the children of the deckchair classroom while Hannah, Hiroko and Seb took it in turns to seek out food and sneak into the woods with Eoin to help him finish his boat. The sailor directed them as best he could, but much of the work needed a precision only he could provide. To Hannah’s surprise, Seb was the best of them at matching it. They moved their tent next to Eoin’s and sometimes, when they had finished for the day and were all exhausted, shipwright and boy would sit up late, discussing the technicalities and dimensions of the vessel’s design. Eventually, such conversations would always turn to stories of the sea, and of tropical oceans and typhoons from Eoin’s youth. If Hannah couldn’t sleep, she would curl up and listen, and try to imagine all that power of water.
Then, one morning when the boat was nearing completion, a seething rainstorm hit the shoreline and filled the air with salt. By the time noon arrived, the sky was so overcast it was like midnight. The first intonations of thunder sounded, and the wind screeched over the beach and into the woods, twanging their tents’ guy ropes. Hannah crouched beneath the canvas with the others and watched the wind fling sand into the forest. The waves gnashed like they meant to follow.
‘Come on,’ Hiroko whispered to Seb.
Then, to Hannah’s astonishment, the girl dashed out into the rain and stood straight-backed and staring upward at the clouds above the beach. Yasuo sped after her, to run orange circles around her ankles and yap at the weather. Then Seb rushed out too, and all three of them stamped about in the beating water hooting and howling. White fire scored the sky, as if scratching runes into its surface. When a thunderclap came, Hiroko flung her hands high and hollered back, and Seb’s delighted laughter carried on the rumbling wind, and Yasuo gave a shriek as piercing as an icicle. Hannah looked to Adrien, wondering if he would also turn wild and throw shapes in time with the lightning, but he was looking into the woods, not out to sea, and looked so preoccupied as to have hardly noticed the teenagers dancing.
Eventually the wind picked up into a gale and put stings in the raindrops, and only then did Hiroko and Seb crouch back into the tent, shivering and grinning. The spray painted white the flex and warp of the air, and great gusts boomed into the forest from the direction of the beach. Then, as the storm peaked, the wind gushed full circle, into the trees and back again, clattering out leaves and twigs which swept overhead like bats and were lost in the darkness far from shore.
When at last the water calmed, it was full of statues. At first Hannah thought that the storm had blown the cargo of some ship of mannequins onto the beach, but when they all trod down to the water to inspect them further, she saw that they were hunks of driftwood. Eoin and Nora appeared shortly after that, and the sailor led them in salvaging the wood. Only Adrien hung back on the shingle, neither joining in nor watching them. He just kept looking back at the forest, and stuffing his hands into his pockets and bunching his shoulders up towards his ears. Hannah was about to go and talk to him when Eoin announced a competition. Whoever could find the shapeliest piece of driftwood would see it bolted to the prow of their boat as a figurehead, and they all laughed and compared ideas of what each weathered lump most looked like. Nora wanted to know whether Hannah thought this one was a horse, or this one a tigress, and by the time Hannah had finished offering opinions on the matter, and headed back up the beach to speak with Adrien, he was gone. He must have scuffed away unnoticed, while they were busy with the driftwood.
7
Heart of the Forest
There were two winds blowing on the shore that afternoon, as Adrien wandered it lost in thought. The first was a salty shade of the earlier storm, hissing with the tide, ghosting off each landbound push of the waves. The second was its reply from the woods, coming sometimes like a horn blast and sometimes like a whisper. If the two met they spun the air into a bluster, flapping Adrien’s hair and chilling his bald spot. He took to covering it pre-emptively with his hand, as if it were a small mammal in need of protection.
‘I love you, you know,’ Michelle had once said, after she had ruffled what was left of his hair. ‘No matter if every last bit falls out. You should remember that. Besides, it happens to all men.’
But it didn’t. Not like this. He looked like some bloody ridiculous monk, these days. And other men his age had long locks of it or rock-star hair or were those bastards who shaved it even to the point of baldness, despite every follicle still functioning intact.
He wondered if Michelle remembered that moment, and whether she did so with any of the patience she had shown back then. She had lost faith in him so gradually that at first he’d hardly even noticed. He doubted she had any faith at all left now.
Adrien had used to walk home to Michelle, at the end of every day at the school, in a kind of stupor. She’d tried to make him see the funny side, before she changed tack and bought him his year to make sense of himself. ‘You take it all too seriously,’ she’d said on one of those earlier occasions. ‘It’s just a game the kids are playing. And remember that the rules of the game let you bollock them. You just need to make use of that authority.’
But it had not seemed like a game, at the end of each of those days, and Adrien hadn’t felt like an authority on anything. His pupil
s had been older than those of the deckchair classroom, and shared none of those children’s desire for the normality of school life. They had sniffed out Adrien’s low self-esteem like dogs sniffing out fear. They had pranked him and harried him, and he had been locked out of his classroom and locked into store cupboards. After teaching particular classes, he’d often trudged to the staff toilets, taken off his jacket and laid it neatly alongside the sink. It would be covered in what the schoolboys called lace, which meant long strings of saliva flicked from finger and thumb. Adrien had dabbed them away with a sponge kept in his jacket pocket for that very purpose and felt, quite eerily, just as he had done during his own school years. Bullied by just such boys.
It wasn’t the spit itself that had upset him. It was that there existed the same sorts of boys today as had existed in his own youth, and that on parents’ evenings there had come fathers who were man-shaped versions of the same. ‘Boys will be boys,’ Michelle had told him, ‘and let’s face it, it could be something worse,’ but Adrien had walked home and the world had looked grey and hard and masculine, even the sky and the clouds and the clipped verges. Even his house seemed all concrete, and the carpets all concrete and the furniture all concrete. Was this the world he was supposed to assume some authority over? He had felt utterly petrified by the idea.
On occasions such as those, it would always take Michelle an hour or two to make things right, softening the concrete world with the lightness of her touch, or the brush of her hair against his cheek when she hugged him, or her caress on the small of his back. ‘I love you for worrying so much,’ she’d said. ‘For wanting everything to be so impossibly perfect.’
Adrien sighed, and scuffed his feet along the sand. Back then he might have been unhappy twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, but those hours of relief when Michelle had rescued him were some of the finest hours he’d ever known.