by Tim Orchard
Simp identified the track leading past the Newman place, down to Fishtail Bay. It was back through the village and left and left and, if it wasn’t ridiculous, left and left again. As though it were his doing, Carter poked a finger on the spot Simp had indicated. “That’s it. Come on, let’s go and have a look.”
Just because Simp and Carter didn’t see anyone didn’t mean they weren’t seen, and whoever didn’t see them the first time around probably saw them the second. First off was Paloney. With nothing better to do, he was standing looking out the front window of the police house as they passed. Simp was driving so sedately it was easy for Paloney to take down their registration. Nobody on Stickle owned a BMW. Most, including himself, relied on pedal power. Paloney didn’t like what he was thinking.
Second was Postmistress P. Inside the deserted shop, she stood in the gloom looking out onto the village street. Beside her, Julian Crabbe, vicar of this parish. One of Postmistress P’s hands was fondling the vicar’s buttocks. Julian Crabbe was smiling. Mischievously, she said, “Ooh, look! People from another dimension.”
Then there was D.C. D.C. had a spot in the Newmans’ top field, about three-quarters of an acre. He tended it well and grew most of what he needed. He had chickens, enough for eggs most of the year and a few young ones for the pot. And a pig. Home was two trailers cobbled together in a T shape. D.C. was feeding the pig when he saw the BMW pass. A car like that on the island simply wasn’t normal. Add that to what was in the barn—it was two and two, and D.C. didn’t need telling.
Si saw them the second time around, as they followed the rutted dirt track by the Newmans’ farm toward Fishtail Bay. Strangers. He thought of the police and he thought of his dad. He thought about Petal and wondered if he could talk to her. He didn’t want things to go wonky.
Down on the beach, Carter and Simp walked up and down, but the tide was in and most of anything that had been there was gone now, all washed away. There were still a few tracks from the tractor and trailer. Carter pointed. “Look, it don’t take some kind of fucking mastermind to figure this shit out. Someone’s been down here and they’ve got it.”
Sitting down and taking his shoes off, Simp didn’t answer. Instead he smiled up at Carter, wriggled his toes in the sand, and stood up. He pointed at the sea and began to toddle off toward it. Before his feet got wet, he stopped and rolled up his jeans.
Carter mooched about. He could hear Simp squeal like a girl as the sea creamed between his toes. Carter persevered. He found some scraps of plastic and a bit of burlap and tracks in the sand. Against the odds he felt optimistic. He looked toward the sea. Simp was waving at him, trying to encourage him to have a little paddle. Although secretly Carter thought Simp was daft as a brush, he was the nearest thing Carter had to a friend and always had been, and sometimes you just had to indulge people. Or maybe it was the sea air or whatever, but on a whim, he waved back at Simp, and anyway, at that precise moment, everything looked likely. Maybe it wasn’t money lost after all, and in the end he’d have a laugh on those fucking gauchos. Fudavid granck them! To Carter it was all obvious. Where else would it be? If it had washed around the headland at Dungeness, this was the first bit of land it would come to. All he had to do now was to find out who had it. The island was tiny. How hard could it be?
Like a daft Russian doing that daft Russian dance, he managed to pull his shoes and socks off without actually sitting on the sand. Sit in the sand in a mohair suit? Do be brief. He pulled his trousers up above his calves and ran toward the little white tops as they tootled in toward the beach.
The sky was all tiny, pure, almost see-through clouds, spaced out in an infinite powder blue. It was all quiet and clean and clear, and Simp could have stayed forever with his feet in the cool wet sand and the little waves rushing around his ankles. He thought about when he was a kid, the year his mum began to get really ill, and a friend of hers, Pearl, came and collected him. Pearl lived on a farm down in Padockwood in Kent. Simp had stayed down there for the whole summer. It was magic. A different world. No one called him Simp, they called him by his name, Simon, and they let him ride on the tractor and everything. It was like being free. Since then, he’d always had a soft spot for Kent. It was pointless trying to explain to Carter that he kind of liked the island: the quiet, the air that made you want to breathe. And the fact was that when you worked for Carter, having nothing happening was a relief.
Strangely enough Carter too chilled with the waves. He took a nip from his flask. The whiskey warmth in his mouth and the cool all around his feet were lovely. Out on the horizon the blue of the sky and the green of the sea made a kind of haze, and some kind of ship passed slowly across it, like a cutout cartoon from the fifties. For the smallest moment, he forgot everything. But not for long.
Chop a little block out of time—two minutes or so, not longer—and stick it in among all that quiet and sun and sea, and that was about long enough for Carter. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he cleared his sinuses in a series of toots and squeaks and, taking a deep, clean breath, held it like a dope smoker and squeaked, “It’s here somewhere, I can smell it! All we’ve got to do now is find a hotel or something and tomorrow we can—” Then, all of a sudden, air came out of him in a blast and he coughed and hacked and backed back onto the dry sand. “Fuck it, that air’s too much!”
10
They drove around the island again, this time looking for a place to stay: a hotel, a bed and breakfast, somewhere, anywhere. A pub. Carter couldn’t believe there wasn’t a pub. There was one every hundred yards in Peckham. “What do they do when they just got to get the fuck away, out of the house or whatever?”
They stopped in the village and entered the post office. After the bright afternoon, the interior of the shop was quite dim, its outer limits indistinct. The two men set their shoulders as though some hidden threat may have been lurking in the shadows, but there was only Julian Crabbe’s nervous grin as he sidled sideways away from the post office counter, while Postmistress P, with a different kind of smile, slid in behind it.
For some reason, most people on the island thought of Postmistress P as old, but she wasn’t, not really, unless thirty-five is old. She dressed down, in shapeless jumpers and ankle-length skirts. Her auburn hair was braided into two plaits and pinned up on her head like some Flemish bint from another century. A large pair of horn-rimmed glasses sat as a barrier across her eyes. Her smile for Carter and Simp expressed tolerance, nothing more. She didn’t like the look of them.
Penelope was her given and it was one thing, among many, she’d never quite forgiven her mother for. For her whole young life, the name had plagued her. Through most of her youth her school friends had pronounced her name Pe-ne-lope (as in antelope), but it wasn’t even that. Her feelings about the name were not something rational or anything she could explain, but she never ever felt like a Penelope. They say “What’s in a name?” but sometimes it’s everything from the get-go.
Penelope got away. Disappeared. Built her own life from scratch. Moved, went and lived in a city with fifty thousand other runaway Penelopes, Deidres, Janes, and Ethels. There her name meant nothing. She could call herself what she liked and thought she could become anything she liked, and she could and life was good. She got a job, shared a flat. She made friends. People took her as they found her. Penelope discovered things about herself, things Stickle Island was too small for her to find, and Penelope enjoyed herself and learned what she liked and what she didn’t, and life was big and open and she did pretty much whatever she liked, until the day came when her mother had a stroke.
That was the day Penelope realized the bad thoughts she had about her mother didn’t amount to anything. Yes, her mother was a cantankerous, suspicious, and mean-spirited old bird, but what could Penelope do? She came home. Now, eight years on, the old girl was practically bedbound and Penelope had transformed into Postmistress P, and she stayed in the shop late most nights because she didn’t want to talk to her mother or to empty
the commode or to help her bathe or cook supper or do any of the things she had to do. Nonetheless she did them, day in and day out. Talking to her mother was the hard bit.
Eight years is a long time, and what with the advent of the blow-ins, most islanders didn’t know or had forgotten the modern girl with short bleached hair, big earrings, and patterned tights who’d come home. After she and Julian had got to know each other, she’d shown him a picture of her London self and he’d been a little taken aback. It was the swing over the bed more than the fact that she was on it. Her hair had been red then. Her breasts all white with dark pink nipples. The short skirt she was wearing was caught in time, lifting in the forward movement. Who had a swing above the bed? That was what had got him.
He’d said, “You, um, dress very differently these days.”
She’d shrugged. “I had to take over the business. No one takes you seriously in a miniskirt.”
It had taken Julian Crabbe several months to realize Postmistress P had feelings for him and several weeks more to understand those feelings were carnal.
Carter tried to come on nice, like butter wouldn’t melt, and Simp smiled out of his little-boy face, but Postmistress P knew there wasn’t a family on the island who’d happily put this pair of dodgy fucks up for the night, except… As though on cue, Julian Crabbe, over by the tinned goods, hopped forward, all teeth and trousers and always ready to improve on his shaky relationship with God and the public. “I don’t like to speak out of turn, gentlemen, but I have a spare room at the vicarage.”
The two turned on him like dogs who had finally found a home. They wagged their tails and made the appropriate noises, even when the vicar explained that they would have to share a bed. A bed was better than the car, any dog knows that. As if to mollify the two men for being forced into such intimacy, Julian spread his hands out, elbows clenched to his ribs, like a man willing to take on all the world’s problems—the sick, the poor, and the weak—and wrap them into his ever-loving arms. “It’s humble, but I can offer you supper as well.”
Carter and Simp thanked him profusely. Tosser.
11
The vicar placed the huge bowl of pasta slathered in a thick tomato sauce in the middle of the table. “Help yourselves, chaps.” He cast a beneficent smile on the two men. “It is so pleasant to have unexpected guests.”
Carter and Simp made the right noises, smiled, tried. Carter had the feeling that he was back in the 1950s, in one of those old black-and-white films, and pretty soon Alastair Sim would come through the door with those dodgy eyes of his.
After the food was finished, Simp helped Julian Crabbe with the washing up, and Carter, sitting in the living room, could hear the mumble of their conversation interspersed, every once in a while, with Simp’s guffaw and the vicar’s giggle. He didn’t get it, the way Simp could talk to people, just like that. Went around smiling at people all the time, even people he was going to batter. There was no malice in him at all, and anyway, what the fuck were they laughing at?
Simp came in carrying a tray with three small, shortstemmed glasses on it. Carter, to whom paranoia was as natural as breathing to most folks, snapped, “What’s so funny, eh?”
Simp had seen it all and moved out of the way only when objects were going to be thrown. With a shrug, he said, “Julian was telling knock-knock jokes.”
He began to tell a joke but Carter cut him short. “Don’t get too friendly. We ain’t here to make friends.”
Simp shook his head slowly. “He’s given us food. He’s putting us up for the night. I can’t blank him—for a vicar, he’s all right.”
With a sniff, Carter said, “Yeh, too fucking good to be true, if you ask me! Look, someone on this island has got our stuff and it could be him out there, he’s fucking weird enough.” As he spoke he nodded toward the kitchen door, just as Julian came through carrying several boxes of board games and a bottle of something he called amontillado. Carter smiled as the vicar poured the sticky golden liquid into the three little glasses.
Julian Crabbe came from a soft background. He had soft parents who cared, and it wasn’t until he went to his first parish of Toxteth, in Liverpool, he realized life was harsh in the soft country he thought he lived in. Julian Crabbe was a good man, a natural innocent, a man who, despite the odds, miraculously managed to believe in God. A decent man with a flaw. Julian liked to gamble.
When he was winning he saw God in the cards falling on a table, in the feel of warm dice in the palm of his hand, in the final jumps of the ball as the roulette wheel slowed, in the phony clicking stops and dancing lights of the slot machine when it loved him.
When confronted with the strange new world of Liverpool, he couldn’t really deal with it. The thick dirty smell of the houses, the pinched poverty heads of the children, the worn-out women and the hard physicality of the men. Julian tried but spent his waking hours on the edge of panic. Unable to cope, he turned, as most people do, to his source of distraction. His kick. Naive, gullible, Julian gambled and got himself into an amount of debt, and people who loaned money in Toxteth expected debts to be paid. So he’d been sent to Stickle for his sin, and now, with a tiny congregation consisting mostly of a few old dears and Postmistress P, who believed in nothing, he was actually quite happy. Out of trouble and out of the way.
The two Londoners drank the amontillado down the way you drink down cough syrup and smiled through the horrendous taste, like cheap morphine addicts anticipating a Collis Browne high. For Carter’s palate, the sweet flavors were all wrong, and usually Simp didn’t drink at all; shandy was his limit. Julian, on the other hand, sipped the sherry. He loved it. He didn’t understand why, but it was a drink that evoked feelings in him he couldn’t quite chart, like Christmas, like warm nights in front of a coal fire, like TV adverts that glow with middle-class comfort, like planted false memories of things that never really existed, but he still liked it.
When it came to seconds, Carter and Simp held up their hands in protest. No please! Julian wasn’t having any of it. Julian loved company. Company made an evening, brightened things up, and here on Stickle, random company was rare. It got lonely on Stickle, even with Postmistress P. Leaning forward, bottle in hand, Julian eyed them like a little daredevil and refilled their glasses, regardless.
The games came next. Carter started to gyp, and Simp, remembering the past, told Carter what he’d been told when he was a kid on the farm: “It’s the country, what else you going to do?” Okay. But for a start, Carter refused outright to play Monopoly. He wasn’t going to jail, even in a game. Buckaroo! was out because Simp’s fingers were too big. Then they tried The Archers game, but it was just way too boring. Taking sheep to market in Borchester didn’t light anyone’s fire. They ended up, at Julian’s suggestion, playing three-card brag.
Julian couldn’t help the way he was made. He still liked to gamble and he still liked to believe God liked him to win. In Toxteth, God just wasn’t on his side, but Toxteth had taught him something at least: stop if you are winning and stop if you are losing. So at about ten thirty, he stretched and yawned. He didn’t like to hurry his guests but, as he pointed out, it was the pensioners’ coffee morning tomorrow and they could be quite a lively bunch. Pocketing his near fifty quid in winnings, he was happy and already thinking of Postmistress P. Carter, who had lost the bulk of the money, was quietly spitting feathers.
The bed was a big bed, and for that small mercy they were grateful. Coy as only two guys can be, Carter and Simp turned modestly away from each other as they undressed. Both had been in various government institutions in their youth and were careful not to touch each other as they settled in the bed.
The two glasses of sherry had Simp soon asleep, but Carter sat up, back against the headboard, taking small sips from his flask. The whole evening had been a failure as far as he was concerned. Uselessly he’d spent most of the time trying to pump the vicar for information about people on the island—the blow-ins, the locals—and how he expected those hippi
e types were up to all sorts, drugs and whatnot. All he discovered was that the ferry was due to be cut the following April and that his congregation was very small and made up mostly of OAPs. A big fat nothing. Not only that but Julian Crabbe had gulled him for near fifty quid. He didn’t trust the vicar. The vicar was too nice and too good at cards. A well dodgy combination.
Now, as he sat in a strange bed, with a strange bed companion, the natural silence unnerved him and he wished he was back in London. One thing London’s noise had taught Carter was that most sounds don’t have a meaning, but here, in the quiet, it seemed every sound had a meaning, a purpose to be deciphered. His ears strained. His eyes searched the darkness of the room for the whisper of air creeping beneath the door, the unfathomable creaks of an old house settling for the night.
Julian Crabbe came out of the vicarage as silently as a ghost and, with the barest click, pulled the door closed behind him. Sensitized as he was, Carter heard, slipped from the bed, and pulled the curtain aside, just in time to see the vicar slither through the front gate. Carter spoke softly to himself: “Either something is going on or I’m getting paranoid to the point of paranoia.”
Back in bed, he nudged Simp violently in the ribs, and, bleary-eyed, Simp spluttered, “What—what, boss?”
Carter wanted to slap him, but they were in bed together and near naked, and he didn’t want to start something he couldn’t finish without it getting biblical, but then again, he wasn’t going to have any fucker sleeping on the job. He gave Simp another couple of digs. “Wake up!” Simp rubbed his eyes, nonplussed, and Carter snapped, “That vicar. Where’s a bloody vicar going this time of night, eh?”
Simp didn’t know what on earth Carter was ranting about and couldn’t really listen because he was still in a torpor, so he rolled over and took most of the coverings with him. Carter tried again to rouse him; he poked and prodded, but Simp slept on.