Harry stood up and spun round, lurching downstairs to go and meet the trespasser outside in the yard. As he forced his way past the piano, the dogs ran towards him, barking gruffly as though he were a trespasser . . . but they fell away when he brandished the gun at them, because they knew the crash and the stink and the death it made when the man exploded it from the landing window. And there was the beachcomber, who’d stopped in the field to wait for the man to come out, who was standing fifty yards from the house. The face looked very frightened, drained of blood to an opaque whiteness. The mouth hung open; even from that distance, Harry could see the lips trembling. The duck shook as though it were still alive, but it was the beachcomber who was shaking as the red-faced, bushy-haired man came stomping closer, waving the gun and roaring like a stag.
The beachcomber didn’t run away. Harry was greeted as the dogs had been greeted the last time the trespasser had come to the fields – with gifts: the mallard in one hand, and a parcel wrapped in greaseproof paper in the other. Harry stopped short, amazed that anyone should defy his bellowing. As the dogs had done before him, he leaned his face forward and sniffed.
‘Sausages,’ the beachcomber said. ‘I brought sausages for you. I nicked them from the kitchen. You told me to bring something, so I did . . .’ The voice trailed away. The parcel swayed in midair and the duck ruffled its feathers in the breeze.
Harry swung with his hook, snatching the bird with it. Horrified, the beachcomber staggered backwards and sat down in the mud.
‘My property!’ Harry snarled, shaking the duck like a rag. ‘On my land! What the hell do you think you’re doing on my fields, unless you want to get eaten by the dogs or blown to pieces?’
He brandished the gun at the beachcomber’s face. With his hook, he shook the duck even harder, so that droplets of blood flew from it and spattered the beachcomber’s cheeks.
‘Yes, blood!’ he shouted. ‘My bloody duck on my bloody land! How dare you come three times onto my property?’ Then, much more softly, he said, ‘And my sausages as well, thank you very much, since they’re now on my property.’
He leaned down and hooked the parcel from the beachcomber. He lifted it to his face and sniffed. It smelled very good.
‘Get up,’ he said gently. ‘I’m not going to shoot you. And it doesn’t look as though the dogs are going to eat you, does it? Bloody useless animals!’
So the beachcomber stood up, snivelling noisily, slapping at the mud on jacket and jeans, smearing at the blood on cheeks and chin. Harry whirled towards the house, with the gun in his left hand, with the duck and the precious sausages dangling from his hook.
‘The name’s Harry Clewe, by the way!’ he barked over his shoulder. ‘Mr Clewe, to you! You’ve got a name, I suppose?’ And he stomped away, hardly listening to the breathless reply.
Again he barked, without bothering to turn round. ‘Eh? What’s that? Christine, d’you say? Well, you’d better come into the house, and get your face cleaned up! Are you hungry? It’s weeks since I ate a sausage! Come on! You’ll have to excuse the mess inside! The water’s been getting in a little bit!’
Now, if Harry had waited another moment before stomping indoors, if he’d paused to look round at the beachcomber before heading for the house with the duck and the sausages, he would have seen that the muddy, bloodstained figure was opening and closing its mouth as though it wanted to say something very important . . . opening and closing its mouth without saying a word . . . wanting to call out, trying to call out, but still too afraid to do so as the bad-tempered man with the gun and the hook went squelching off through the mud . . . wanting to say that the man had misheard, had got the wrong impression, indeed that the man had had the wrong impression since the very first encounter on his fields. But Harry made for the house without turning round.
The beachcomber had said Christy, not Christine. He was a boy, a boy of fourteen with long, blonde hair and a pale face, dressed in jeans and boots and a khaki jacket. But, by the time he found his voice, the moment had passed: the man, Mr Clewe, was fifty yards away, at the entrance of the big, old house, forcing his way past what looked like a piano jammed in the doorway and disappearing inside.
The boy frowned, pursed his lips, rubbed at the blood on his cheeks and trotted after him.
Chapter Six
Indeed, it was a piano. Wondering why there should be a piano fixed sideways in the front door, the boy squeezed past it and found himself in the strangest house he’d ever seen.
First of all, it was the biggest: he’d never seen such a great, high room as the hallway he stood in, such great, high rooms as the ones he could see to left and right, such a fine, wide staircase as the one which rose before him to a landing with a great tall window. Furthermore, he’d never been in a house so deep with sea-water pools, strewn with shingle and sand and barnacled boulders, scattered with clumps of seaweed, where enormous grey and pink jellyfish lay about the floors.
Speechless, he gazed at the broken windows and splintered doors, turning to look again at the capsized piano . . . so aghast at the size and state of the rooms and the staircase that he’d forgotten he was going to call out to the man and tell him his name was Christy, not Christine, that he was a boy and not a girl, that the man had made a mistake. Instead, he simply stared, wide-eyed, open-mouthed. It was wonderful, a house with a beach inside it: a beach like the one he’d been exploring when he’d heard the shot and come running to pick up the wounded duck. He’d returned to the foreshore to bring the sausages, lured by an irresistible curiosity for the strange man and his enormous dogs: the best and most exciting kind of curiosity that a boy can have, flavoured with fear, laced with danger. And here, better than he could have hoped for, was the oddest house he’d ever been into.
Hearing the man gruffly calling, seeing that the dogs were wagging their tails on the landing, Christy crossed the hall and mounted the staircase. Near the top, he squealed loudly when a rat bolted downstairs towards him. He flattened himself against the banister as it sprang headlong past him, as the dogs thundered after it. One of the dogs caught the rat before it could reach the front door, crunched it in its jaws and flung it from side to side. The other dog snapped at the dangling body.
Harry had appeared at the top of the stairs. He bellowed with laughter at the efficiency with which his dogs despatched the rat, at the look of horror on his visitor’s face.
‘Good work, Gog! Good work, Magog!’ he roared. ‘That’s your supper taken care of!’ To his visitor, he shouted, ‘What’s the matter? Afraid of a little mouse? After the way you faced up to the dogs? Come on, the sausages are cooking!’
He disappeared from the landing. The boy climbed the last few stairs, glancing uneasily from side to side in case another rat might launch itself at him, and went into the room where the man had gone.
It was more like a normal room in a normal house, smaller than the downstairs rooms. There was a bed and an armchair, a rug, a big window with a view across the fields to the sea. A fire was burning in a handsome fireplace. The mantelpiece was stuck with the stubs of molten candles, spattered with wax. On the floor there were heaps of books and yellowing newspapers; there was a radio, a gas stove; clothes bundled here and there; tins of beans and sardines and peaches and prunes stacked in one corner; sacks of potatoes and carrots in another. The sausages were sizzling on a griddle across the flames, but the smell of their cooking didn’t disguise the smell of stale clothes, stale sheets, the smell of the man’s unwashed body and the smell of the dogs. Christy sat on the bed.
There wasn’t much talking, because Harry had lived so long in a house where the only sounds were his own: the sounds of his dogs and the gathering gulls; the sounds of the sea and the wind which were so much a constant part of the place that they seemed like a rushing inside his head, a sound he carried within him wherever he was. He had voices on the radio he could turn on when he wanted them, turn off when he was tired with them: that was all the talking he needed. So, wit
hout saying anything, Harry appraised his visitor, who sat on the bed and ate a sausage.
He looked at the fall of the soft blonde hair, the long lashes, the lick of a little tongue on wet lips and the movement of a slender, white throat. He couldn’t help staring. When the boy went into the bathroom to wipe the blood from his face, Harry followed and stood behind him so that their faces were framed in the bathroom mirror; as the boy rubbed at the blood on his cheeks and chin, Harry felt at his own face, where, a fortnight before, he’d smeared the blood which the beachcomber had flicked at him.
Christy smiled at Mr Clewe’s reflection. Back in the bedroom, he smiled again as he tested the heat of the sausage on his lips.
The boy was too frightened to say anything. Any confidence he’d felt as he dealt with the dogs outside had ebbed, now that he’d come into the strange house. The man glared fiercely, as though he regretted having invited the trespasser to share the sausages: and Christy, taking a deep breath to blurt out that he was a boy and not a girl, decided against it for the time being. It wasn’t the right moment to correct the man’s misapprehension. Mr Clewe, pacified temporarily by the gift of food, was reverting to his previous biliousness, looking angrier and angrier in direct proportion to the steady disappearance of the sausages. So Christy said nothing, afraid that the man would think he’d deliberately made a fool of him for being cantankerous, short-sighted and hard of hearing.
The minutes went by and the sausages were gone. Christy made to leave. Perversely, that was when Harry started to ask questions, while Christy shifted from foot to foot by the bedroom door.
‘Where do you live?’ he said. ‘You’ve walked from Caernarfon, I suppose?’
‘Yes, Mr Clewe, I’ve walked from Caernarfon,’ the boy replied softly and politely. ‘I’m on my way home to Bontnewydd, just a couple of miles inland. I often come along the shore, after school.’
‘Bontnewydd,’ Harry said, rubbing at his chin. ‘Well, you won’t get the floods there, will you? Things will have to get pretty bad before the tides reach Bontnewydd! This house would be completely submerged by then! The sea would be right over the roof! What about your father and mother? They’ll be wondering where you’ve got to, won’t they?’
‘I haven’t got a mother and a father,’ the boy said, looking at the threadbare carpet.
‘Oh,’ Harry said. ‘Divorced, are they? Adopted, are you? Taken into care? Well, speak up, girl. Speak up.’
‘They’re dead, Mr Clewe,’ the boy answered. He looked up from the floor, his eyes level and cool. ‘They died when I was three. I can’t remember them at all. They were drowned in a boating accident. I live in the orphanage in Bontnewydd. I go to school in Caernarfon, by bus in the mornings, and then I usually walk back along the shore, if the weather’s not too bad. I prefer it, being on my own, looking for things on the beach. As long as I’m in time for Mrs Bottomley’s roll call, it’s all right. She’s the matron.’
There was a long pause. The dogs fidgeted on the rug, glancing hopelessly at the scraps of sausage on the griddle. The fire fizzed when some of the fat fell into the flames.
‘Drowned,’ Harry whispered. ‘Drowned . . . and you go moping along the beach looking for things.’ He chuckled. ‘A bit morbid, isn’t it? What sort of things do you expect to find? Eh? What sort of things do you expect to find washed up on the seashore? You should be larking about on the bus with your schoolfriends on the way back to Bontnewydd in the afternoons, not moping about on your own on the seashore!’
The boy shrugged. ‘I suppose so, Mr Clewe. But I like it down here, on my own. That’s all.’
‘Well, so do I,’ Harry said very softly. ‘So do I.’
He turned in his chair and stared out of the window. It was dusk. The waves were driving across the foreshore and into the fields. The wind rattled the slates on the roof. A freezing rain, blown straight off the sea, spattered on the glass, as though the tide were already up and flinging a spray at the house.
‘Time for you to bugger off then,’ he murmured. ‘Bugger off for Mrs Wigglebottom’s roll call. If you don’t go now, you’ll have to swim. You saw the mess downstairs, didn’t you? The water’s five feet deep downstairs when the tide’s in. That’s why the rats have come upstairs. Get going while the going’s good.’
Harry heaved himself to his feet and together they went out of the room, onto the landing. As they looked down the stairs, they saw that the sea was just beginning to come into the house. Slowly, slick and sinuous like a long, brown, muscular snake, the water slithered past the piano. Nosing a scum of foam, rolling aside the weed it had left behind on a previous visit, it pooled in the hallway.
He remained at the top of the stairs with the dogs as the boy hurried down. The noise of the wind was so loud, whistling into the house through the open door and the broken windows, that when he shouted from the landing the boy could hardly make out a word he said. He could hardly see the man either, because the house was suddenly very dark. But Mr Clewe was shouting, raising a hand to lob something which landed with a splash at the foot of the stairs.
‘For the torch!’ he was bellowing, a looming black figure silhouetted at the landing window. ‘That’s a dead battery! Bring some new ones like that one if you’re coming back! Otherwise don’t bother coming! Now bugger off! Go on! You’ll have to run for it!’
The boy bent to the pool, which was already deepening around his boots, picked up the torch battery and slipped past the piano out of the house. Harry remained at his landing window. He watched the slight, slim figure go splashing across the fields and through the broken hedges, disappearing in the darkening dusk. Then he went back into his room, closing the door behind him.
He sat in the flamelight, while the house boomed and quivered, while the sea was in the downstairs rooms. Sometimes, throughout the evening and into the night, he got out of his chair and stared at the white-capped waves which foamed around him.
‘I expect she got back all right,’ he muttered to the dogs at the fireside. ‘Stupid bitch, coming out here! We’re better off on our own, the three of us, without other people poking around.’
Whenever he knelt to the fire to build it up, he would pick at the crumbs on the griddle to get a taste of the sausages he’d cooked there. He picked the griddle clean. Late into the night, he sat in the armchair, licking his lips, staring at the flames until they were dead.
Chapter Seven
A few days later, one of the windsurfers returned.
Crackling like a volley of pistol shots, the purple sail slackened as the board came close to the house. Then, with a sudden explosive snap of wind, the sail filled, bulging taut. The youth grinned, tossing his bright blond head, because he knew without looking up at the windows that the man was watching him. He flexed himself so that his black rubber suit glistened in the thin, cold light. He gripped tightly, leaning from the sail as the board raced away through the chop and spray of the tide.
Yes, Harry was watching. He seethed with an impotent rage as the sail crossed and recrossed his fields . . . or, rather, the sea where his fields had been. Time and again, it sped towards the house, so that the youth could turn the board as close to the windows as possible, so close that the snap and flap and the bulging of the sail were impossible to ignore. Sometimes the youth shouted, whooping with exhilaration or calling out to make sure his spectator was still there. At first, Harry had lunged from his fireside to the landing and thrown the window wide open, where he’d stood and shouted until he was too hoarse to shout any more. Gog and Magog had joined him, barking very loudly, and Harry, infuriated by the blatant way in which the windsurfer was trespassing on his property, had kicked them downstairs as though they might swim around the house and somehow chase the trespasser away. But the dogs only sniffed at the water, baulked, turned round and limped upstairs again, to flop in front of the fire in the bedroom.
The tide was as high as it had ever been; the water was six feet deep in the hallway. Ugly brown, churned with m
ud and sand, it looked like coffee gone cold and scummy. All kinds of driftwood and debris were slopping about, banging on the walls and the stairs. Outside it was worse: the flood was choppy with white waves as the wind blasted from the open sea.
No, Gog and Magog weren’t interested. They abandoned Harry on the landing, where, unable to shout any more, he gripped the windowsill and shuddered with anger as the sail raced towards him. For a mad split second, he groped in the corner where the shotgun was leaning, but then he left it where it was. Blinded by spray and tears, all he could see was a vivid purple shape zigzagging here and there on a background of brown and white water; as it came closer, he made out the gleam of a blond head and the flash of grinning teeth, the bending and leaning and stretching of a shining black body. Deafened by the wind, he heard the bang of the sail; he heard the youth call out some nonsense about potatoes and then a schoolboy obscenity. The windsurfer raced away. At last, exhausted by rage, Harry shut the window and joined the dogs in the bedroom.
Without thinking, he bent to the fire and picked up a knife from the mantelpiece. It was a very sharp knife, the one he’d used for the butchering of the sheep a few weeks before. He sat in his armchair, fitted the smooth wooden handle into his right palm and stroked the razor edge of the blade with his thumb. He tried to be calm. He relaxed the muscle in his shoulders. He stopped trembling and the tears in his eyes dried up. He steadied his breathing until he thought he’d controlled his anger . . . but, as he heard the shouting of the windsurfer close to the house, he pressed on the blade so hard that he cut his thumb quite deeply. There was blood all over his hand. Too tired to get up and go to the bathroom to wash himself, he tossed the knife onto the bed and flicked his fingers at the fire, where the blood fizzled in the flames.
The Blood of Angels Page 36