He nodded. ‘Look, let’s sit here a minute.’ He sat on a log that had been left for tourists to rest on to watch the sea.
She looked towards the pub, but there was no sign of life. She sat down beside him.
He struggled to find words, but eventually they came.
‘So, you know, he, your dad I mean, came back to the island a couple of weeks before it happened.’
‘Oh,’ Lia said. ‘We didn’t know when.’
‘Sorry. Well, he seemed fine as far as I could see. I used to see him going for walks, looking at the water and stuff, but I wouldn’t have been hanging out with them or anything.’
‘Harry and Dad?’
‘And my father and a few of the other older men. I suppose they were all friends years ago. A kind of gang. I think your dad was the only one who had left for good. And then he was back.’
She nodded. She didn’t want to interrupt the flow again.
‘Some people said there was an argument between the men in the past and that’s why he left, but it must have been long forgotten because for a while your dad was always with one of them, or a few of them, having a drink or whatever. Except I did still see him the odd time out around the island, on his own early in the morning, when I was taking pictures.’
He coughed and put his hand in his jacket pocket.
‘I took this one of him.’
Lia took the picture he offered her, holding it carefully by the edges. She wasn’t sure she wanted to look at it, but when she did she realised that she wouldn’t have recognised her father in it. He was at a distance from the camera, a silhouette against a brightening sky. If she had been pressed, she might have said that the figure was Harry, or even Ed himself. There was something in the set of the shoulders, some air of determination and tension.
She held the picture out to him, but he shook his head.
‘Keep it. Anyway, the day after that, he came out of the pub in the evening. It was still bright and the pub was busy. I guess he gave his friends the slip. He followed the cliff path. No one knows how long he was outside before it happened.’ He paused, staring at the grass between his feet. ‘Evan and Jim stepped outside for a fag and saw him. They called him but he didn’t seem to hear. And that’s when he ran at the cliff edge and jumped.’
‘Show me, Ed. Please.’
He stood up and offered her his hand.
She took it but let go quickly.
This was it. He led her along the grass until they stepped onto the worn path. They followed the path to the cliff edge. She could see that it was a place that had long been worn down, so that the grass no longer grew there.
‘It seems that your dad and Harry used to sit here when they were kids.’
‘I want to see,’ she said.
He grabbed her arm as she moved forward.
‘For God’s sake, Lia, lie down at least! Don’t step on the edge.’
Seeing his alarm pulled her slightly out of the reverie that made her feel both avid and exhausted at the same time. She lay down on her belly and looked over the cliff. Down below, as her heart had known, were the Devil’s Teeth. She watched the calm water swill around the visible peaks of rock.
‘It was their place, the brothers. And he knew that if he did it here …’
Ed stopped, but Lia finished the sentence for him.
‘He knew that if he did it here, onto the Devil’s Teeth, there would be no hope of surviving. That’s why Harry showed the Teeth to me from the boat. So that I would understand that.’
Lia buried her face in the bend of her arm and cried.
Six
There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Ghosts of
Goresthorpe Grange’, 1883
Ed didn’t know what to do, so he pulled off his backpack and lay down beside her, putting his arm around her. Her sobs were muffled by her arm and the soft moss, but her body hitched with the violence of her emotion. He started to get scared that she wasn’t going to stop but eventually she seemed to calm. At any rate her sobs reduced to hiccups and sniffs. He managed to get his free hand into the bag to pull out a few napkins. When he offered them, she sat up and faced away from him, wiping her face and blowing her nose.
Finally, she shifted back around towards him and sat with her legs folded under her. Her eyes were red but the pupils looked greener than usual, with flecks of gold and brown. Her cheek held the impression of the seam of her sleeve but otherwise her skin was clear and pale beneath her tan. She was beautiful and he felt almost afraid to talk to her.
She raised her chin in a show of pride.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s fine.’ He took her hand.
She entwined her fingers in his.
‘It’s better to know,’ she said. ‘Even just this much. I probably won’t ever find out why.’
She gazed at him, as though searching his eyes for answers he didn’t have.
She continued and he wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or to herself. He held her hand and listened anyway.
‘It might have been the separation, but he seemed OK. I’m not certain whose idea it even was. It might have been his. They never said.’
She plucked at the dark green grass. It didn’t yield but squeaked as her fingers slid off the blades.
‘Could it have been anything else?’ Ed asked quietly.
She tried to pluck again and this time some shiny blades of grass gave in. She gazed at them traversing her palm.
Ed could feel a pulse in the hand he held, as though someone had tied a tourniquet on her arm. He tried to loosen his grip slightly but she held on fast.
‘He liked his job. The city too, even though he often complained about it. He read a lot. Sometimes he liked to be on his own and sometimes he seemed to crave company. Jasmine, my mother, thought he was bipolar, always either up or down, but I think he just didn’t know how to be.’ She looked up at him. ‘Maybe that was it. Maybe he just got tired of trying to figure himself out.’
Ed said nothing. He had no way of knowing whether what she said was close to the truth or not. She fell silent too. All he could do was sit there and hold her hand. He thought maybe that sometimes that’s all anyone could do for anyone.
He looked at their hands together. He’d had a few adventures with summer girls, but they never involved handholding. When he thought about it, the last person to hold his hand had probably been his mother.
As though she sensed the change in his mood, she took her hand gently away and tied her hair in a knot, tucking the loose strands behind her ears.
‘I need to go home now,’ she said. ‘It’s been a tough day.’ Home? When had it become home? This place where her father had died?
He nodded and got to his feet, collecting the bag with the food they had somehow not eaten. He had hoped that it would be a nice day for her, but it was all too wrapped up in blood and tragedy.
‘Will you let me know if you hear any news about Becky and the baby?’ she said as they followed the path towards the pub.
He nodded.
She turned to go inside but paused.
‘Thank you for showing me. I had to do it and … it was nice to have someone with me.’
‘We did OK, I think,’ Ed said.
She reached up and gave him a quick kiss on the lips before turning and disappearing into the pub.
He stood still, feeling the impression of her lips, feeling like the air would suddenly fall back with a thunderclap into the place where she had been. He had known her for about two minutes, but the idea came to him that if she were not there anymore he would feel the loss terribly. Strangely, this made him feel happy as well as confused.
He walked home, absentmindedly noting the thin cry of the buzzards. Only when he was approaching the farm did he realise that the shadows had grown long. He picked up his pac
e and ran the last few steps to the door.
He went in and turned toward the kitchen. Then something struck him in the back, causing a shock of pain to his kidney. He sprawled forward, skidding a few inches on his belly on the lino of the kitchen floor.
He rolled, feeling his back ache, and tried to stand. His father shoved him back down with a dirty boot, laces trailing. He stood over him, almost smiling.
Ed had seen the look before.
Dan had an open can of beer in his hand. Ed had seen this before too. Punch with a fist, take a drink, punch again. Kidney pain or not, dirty boot to his chest or not, he knew he had to get off the floor to defend himself. He shoved the boot up and shoved himself backwards, and with the small distance scrambled to his feet.
Dan laughed. ‘Where are you going to go, boy? Standing up won’t help you.’ With that, he whipped his hand forward, releasing the can of beer. It flew the short distance and struck Ed in the eyebrow. A trickle of blood and beer ran towards his eye, but he swiped them away fast. Fear went with them. Anger boiled up inside him and he felt the muscles around his mouth tighten, showing his teeth the way a dog might. Before the old man could move, Ed lunged at him and was rewarded by a thick fist meeting his ear. Pain rang through him, a bell tolling in the distance. He staggered, suddenly dizzy. He had time to deal out one or two punches before Dan overwhelmed him with his stupid, drunken rage at his son’s tardiness and defiance. After a while, Ed didn’t feel the blows anymore. He just felt the soft press of Lia’s lips against his.
There was a long spell when Frank just wandered. He gradually became aware of the change in the light and frowned. There had been someone beside him but he had already forgotten who. Was there a baby? He couldn’t remember. He still felt fantastic though. He patted his belly. It seemed flatter than it had been. Happiness flooded through him and he marched on, feeling tall and young. He had the whole world ahead of him and everything was really grand.
He paused often, looking down the slopes to the lacy trim of beach and rocks that circled the bottom of the cliffs but the view didn’t satisfy him. He walked on, only to stop suddenly, gazing at nothing. Without knowing it, he had been looking for something. He felt hungry, in need of … what, he didn’t know.
He spent a few minutes looking at the sky and the water. He could hear the sound of waves. Even in calm weather, the sea was never silent. He remembered days and nights on the boat, with the water lapping at her sides, bearing him up and onward, providing him and his family with food, and a living.
Rose didn’t know what it meant to him, or to any one of the fishermen, to give up the boats. It was giving up being part of the sea and the sky. How could they know, the people who were anchored to the earth? They were the ones who were lost and they didn’t even know it.
She was always there, the sea, sometimes whispering, sometimes roaring. On the wild nights he had heard her call his name. He never told anyone, but he knew the truth of it. The sea always called to him, either in desire or rage. Either way, the sea was as hungry for him as he had always been for her.
And that hunger was filling him now. He longed for the rush of salty liquid on his face. He wanted to bathe in it and breathe it in. His belly was empty and his mouth was dry and lifeless as the trilobite fossils in the cliffs below.
He had never lost his bearings, even in a storm. Many voices returned to him in his memory of the years.
Frank will know. He always knows the way.
He turned in a slow circle, letting the thing inside him feel its way to true north, the way it always had. He didn’t realise that he had closed his eyes until he opened them and saw the Hall, solid and made of shadows all at once. His stomach grumbled and he set off, never taking his eyes off his destination.
It seemed to grow until it filled his vision. Before, it had been an ugly grey block. Now, he saw that it was full of beautiful life. Even at a distance, he could see lichen colouring the walls in patches of growth. The low winter sun was casting yellow light and shadow like a water colourist dabbing his brush, adding the final touches that made the scene come alive.
Stumbling over the broken wall, Frank stepped into the grounds of the Hall and started up the long driveway. The once perfect surface was riddled with dying weeds. He stopped where the driveway swept in two directions, in front of the house and behind to where the horses and carriages were once kept. He didn’t feel right about going to the front.
Instead, he took the back way, but veered off before it could lead him to the coach house. His feet unerringly found an old path down to the private beach. It had been cut out of the earth, made for ladies to descend safely to the sand, unlike the steep and rugged paths around the rest of the island.
The beach was the best on the island. The people who had built here had chosen the right location on many counts. It had an unbroken view of the open sea and sky and different aspects of the house benefited from both the rising and setting sun, as well as the long summer day of light, and the silver of the moon. The beach was made of pale soft sand and curved in a graceful bay where a swimmer would feel sheltered from deeper water.
Of course, no one came here anymore. There was no one left to enjoy the long days and half-light nights. He knew that there had been wild parties in the house that had often spilled onto the beach. He could almost see the long dresses making swirling shapes in the sand and hear the drifting music from the quartet brought in to perform for the night. He experienced a sudden rush of desire to have been here then, when the Hall was the centre of life on the island. Back then the greenhouses had produced food and flowers that wouldn’t otherwise grow here. The walled gardens and kitchens had kept many islanders in work. The very sea itself had been alive with a flotilla of boats, fishing.
He walked to the edge of the water and scanned the horizon. Of course, that was all in the summer. Winter here brought darkness and fear. The perfect position of the house in summer exposed it to the worst that the winter could offer. Most of the windows had to be boarded up and the glass taken out of the greenhouses. The side of the house turned towards the sea was cleaner than the rest, so constantly blasted was it by salty, sandy gales.
Whenever the family finally left the Hall, it must have been winter, because the windows were boarded up and the remains of the greenhouses were not sprinkled with shards of their own glass.
Many times, he and all of the islanders had heard the summer people exclaim over the beauty of the island, the wild flowers, the profusion of life in the meadows and cliff sides. Mostly they just smiled and nodded. The true answer they kept to themselves. It is lovely. For a few months of the year.
When the occasional person, an artist, a writer, people who worked from home, declared that they wanted to buy or build on the island, locals gently but firmly suggested that they visit during the winter first before committing to a purchase. There was usually a reason found to make them change their mind in any case. This was, outside of the summer, a private place, with its own ways and its own secrets.
Frank suddenly felt tired. So tired that he could no longer stand. He fell back one step, saving himself from falling in the water, but unable to stay upright for another second. He lay on the cold sand and looked at the sky. All the vitality he had felt all day was slipping away. He could feel it in his bones and joints, which began to ache. He hadn’t realised how much they ached, like beads of glass grinding against his nerves, until it had been gone and then returned to him. His mouth felt like cotton wool, his tongue thick and flaccid.
He lay there, unable to get up, feeling his muscles weaken, his blood slow. It was harder to catch his breath. His chest felt like someone had balanced a weight on it. He stared at the sky. Birds flew in and out of his window of sight but they were blurred now, his eyes clouding over. He closed them.
He must have slept, or blacked out, because when he opened his eyes again the sky held the last traces of bruised yellow and the dog star was visible. He was still weak but felt better. He managed t
o get to his knees and then stand, shakily. The cool twilight felt good on his face. I’m on the terminal line. The terminal line, the marker that moved across the face of the earth from east to west, pushing light ahead of it, dragging darkness in its wake. He was standing in a precious and brief moment of time, when light was still a blessing, but the dark was inexorably coming, heedless of anyone’s desire to hold it back. Frank heard the inner voice he had always heard since the time of the goat. It was distant now, but still within reach.
Anything can come with the dark. Watch for what comes from the sea. Make safe harbour before the storm.
These were the rules by which he had lived his life on the water. Where once he was the captain of his own vessel, master of his own destiny, rising unafraid to any challenge nature could throw at him, now he saw that his presence atop the waves had been a mere collection of bones and timbers, utterly vulnerable to the uncaring whims of the sea. He had survived until now, a tiny man in a vast and unknowable ocean. He had been lucky many times. Now, the voice and the compass inside him fell silent. There was no further thought of fighting or salvation. He had reached the edge of the world.
When he next heard a voice, he knew that it wasn’t his and it wasn’t offering him sanctuary from the storm.
It was the storm and there was no stopping it now.
Seven
Because if a woman’s heart was free
a man might have hope.
Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897
Jasmine sipped the wine. It was really very good. Ash always chose just right. This was their favourite restaurant. And somewhere she had never come with Will. The waiter arrived with their entrées.
‘You’re miles away, Jazz. Everything OK?’ Ash said, when the waiter had gone.
She nodded and smiled.
He put down his cutlery. ‘Is it Lia?’
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