“Hello,” he says, trying to be gentle and clear at the same time in case she’s deaf. “We’re looking for Hinde’s Reach House?”
She peers at him. “What was that?”
“Hinde’s Reach?”
“Ah.” She sighs. “Gone back to the grass, hasn’t it, and quite right, too.”
“We have a parcel for the house up there.”
“Do you, though?” She shrugs. “Well, I call that too late.”
A man emerges from the bungalow behind her, wearing socks and slippers. He has a mismatched face, as if one half has been shattered and reconstructed, long ago.
“Wossallthisabout, then?” He tries to smile, or perhaps he’s just twitching.
“Post office,” she tells him. “Parcel for Hinde’s Reach.”
“Parcel for the dead, then.” He spits. “Bastards, anyway.” He wanders back inside.
She sighs. “I should have said not to tell ’im. He’s still angry about all that as happened back then.”
“The town going into the sea?”
“No, no. That was natural. Awful, but natural. He’s cross about the other. His parents were taken off.”
“Killed?”
“Not exactly. Brain damage. Jerry thinks it was a plague. Thinks they were making germ bombs up there for to use against the Russians, and one of ’em went off. Maybe he’s right. Folks wrong in the head over one night, that’s not normal. And Jerry never entirely the same. Well, you see his face, don’t you? And no bugger gives a damn, either. These days everyone gets a handout. Stub a toe and you get one. But not for Jerry. Local trust says he’s faking it. Government won’t hear. The Church wanted him, ten years back. Wanted all the plague orphans and survivors and such. Said they could do wonderful things to help. But we’re chapel round here, so Jerry told them to stick it up their cassocks.” The woman sighs again. “Best you go over there, then. Close the gate after you, or the geese get out. Don’t take no nonsense from them! Have you got a stick?”
“No.”
“Kick ’em, then. Kick ’em hard, mind, you won’t harm ’em and they need to know you mean it. Otherwise they’ll have your arm.”
“If you’re sure,” Joe says.
“Not my geese,” she replies. “You want the second turning. Five minutes more.”
She goes back to staring at the road, and Joe guides the car through Old Town and along to the second turning. A huge, fanged thing made of iron looms over the road from one corner, and Billy Friend swears sharply before realising it’s a hay fork.
“I hate the fucking countryside, Joseph.”
Joe nods in acknowledgement of this truth. And then, without warning, the wind picks up and he can hear a deep, thrashing roar like a huge crowd, and they’re looking out over the sea, and Hinde’s Reach.
They go through the gate carefully, watching out for enemy geese, but the birds are clumped miserably in the far corner of the field, keeping one another warm. And there, sprawled against a grim, ugly sunset, is the place they have come to find; a shattered frame and some foundations, and a sign which reads: Hinde’s Reach House, Home Secretariat: S2.
The house is a pile of rubble perched on the edge of the cliff. A little further on there’s a rusted railway line ending in a stark iron buffer. Stiff, springy grass bends in the wind, and clumps of gorse bow and twitch. Below, the sea makes a noise so deep he can feel it in his gut.
It’s the emptiest place he has ever seen.
Joe Spork shoves his hands into his pockets and stares at the ruin, and out into the grim, blue-grey smear of sea and sky beyond the cliff edge. Spray spatters on his face. Reluctantly, he lets them extinguish this brief excitement in his life. Too late. Of course, much too late. The machine itself—the device which reads this magical book—is gone. This parcel, mysterious and beautiful and idiotic, is all that remains.
“Sod it, then,” Billy Friend says at last. He turns and huddles into his scarf, pulls his woolly hat lower on his head. “I’m sorry, Joe, it’s someone’s idea of a funny, I suppose. I was took. Or she’s mad, the old biddy. Doubtless wants to pay in fairy dust and cake as well. I got you all revved up over nothing. Still, maybe you can find young Tess and buy her a drink. No sense this being a total waste, is there?” and then again, with one last shake of the head, as he walks away: “Sod it.”
Joe looks after him, then turns back to the sea. There are white horses on the waves, hard shapes cresting blue-grey water. Back by the road, he hears Billy get into the car.
This day is the pattern of his life. He is the man who arrives too late. Too late for clockwork in its prime, too late to know his grandmother. Too late to be admitted to the secret places, too late to be a gentleman crook, too late really to enjoy his mother’s affection before it slid away into a God-ridden gloom. And too late for whatever odd revelation was waiting here. He had allowed himself to believe that there might, at last, be a wonder in the world which was intended just for him. Foolishness.
He considers himself, the wrong side of thirty-five and no closer to being who he wanted to be, if he ever knew who that was.
The stricture of Joe Spork is indecision, a departing girlfriend once told him. He fears she was wrong. There is no stricture to him, no core. No substance. Just a dozen conflicting drives which average out, producing nothing. Be a gangster. Be an honest man. Be Daniel, be Mathew, be Joe. Make something of yourself, but don’t stand out too much. Find a girl, but avoid the wrong girl. Mend the clocks, keep the old firm going. Sell up and run, leave London and head to a beach somewhere. Be someone. Be no one. Be yourself. Be happy—but how?
He has no idea.
He is a nowhere man, caught in between.
Down in the caves, beneath the cliffs, the water surges and ebbs. A curious circle of white foam and crested water sits in the midst of the bight, where the sea swirls around a pattern of rocks. Up above him, indifferent clouds are gathering, and the rain is starting to fall. It’s not yet four, but already it feels like the onset of night. He realises there’s water running from his eyes, and is not sure if the wind is causing it.
“Damn,” he says, a bit plaintively, and then with mounting anger, “Damn, damn, damn.” The sea wind takes the words away, so that his voice sounds hollow and small, even inside his own head.
Well. To be honest, it always does.
He turns, and finds himself staring full into a fierce, angry face, inches from his own. He yells and stumbles back.
“Who the hell’re you?” The man has white stubble and opium fiend’s eyes which glare out of a sou’wester’s grimy hood. “What’re you doing here? This is my land! Private land! It’s not some bloody tourist attraction! It’s private, for me, and them! It’s a grave!” The voice is northern underneath, but the pattern of words is coloured by decades spent down here, and the vowels have acquired a rounded burr.
“A grave?”
The man pushes him, sharply, on the shoulders; a stabbing of fingers to propel him back, but there’s very little weight behind it because Joe Spork is a big man and the other may be tall, but he is not heavy.
“Full fathom, aye, grave and serious, cut in the rock, dead like winter, dead like silence, and what do you think of that, ey? The soil is bones and the sky is skin, and everything is rotting and so am I and so are you. Now go away. It’s a shame, you coming here. You ought to be sorry, but you ain’t.”
“I am. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to trespass. I have a package for the people at the house. This is the address. I didn’t realise it was gone.”
“The old house went into the sea. Ground went an’ collapsed underneath it. Gawpers come in summer, looking for a little thrill. Time to kill. The dead went out to sea, down and down and down into the dark, and isn’t that just the way it is? Ghosts like starlings, pitter-patter on my greenhouse roof. Ghosts in the ivy and the gorse. Choking the greenhouse, choking the hope, little fingers around your neck. Ivy drags you down like water … Have you ever cut ivy?” This last in a cur
ious, conversational tone.
“No,” Joe says carefully, “I haven’t.”
“You see the hands then, little fingers clasping. Ivy’s a slow death, years in the making. Gorse is quicker, but it’s not so cruel. I burn the gorse sometimes, but you can’t burn ivy or you lose everything. Ivy’s a metaphor. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return, and down to dust your house will come with you, down with ivy. I knew a girl called Ivy once. God knows what happened to her, down in the dark beneath the sea. Choked, I shouldn’t wonder, leaves and hands and creeping through your window. Can’t say as I hold much with God any more, though. Bugger ’im. Rigged the game and left the place to rot, hasn’t he?”
“I never thought about it.”
“She came here.”
“God?”
“She came every day, for a while, and looked down into the sea. There’s a standing wave.” He points out at the ring of water.
“What is it? The rocks?”
“More complicated. It’s a wave that never ends. Never moves, never dies. Just changes. Water hits rock, washes back, meets water … always a wave, always in a ring. It rises and falls and changes, but it never goes away. Not just a wave. The soul of an ocean. The physics is quite interesting.”
Joe looks at him again. When he isn’t furious, he seems … teacherish. A heart of books with the skin of a tramp.
The man nods to himself once, sharply. “Who are you, then?”
“Joe Spork.” He smiles uncertainly, and sees or imagines a distant flicker in the hooded eyes.
“I’m Ted Sholt,” the man says.
“Hello, Mr. Sholt.”
“Oh, call me Ted. Or Keeper.” He nods. “Ted’s better. No one calls me the other any more.” As if reassuring himself.
“Hello, Ted.”
“Joe Spork. Joe Spork. Spork, Joe. You’re out of season for a hippy and too poor for a developer. Might be a scout, though. Smuggler? Lovelorn suicide? Poet? Police?” It is unclear which of these he holds in lowest regard.
“Clockworker.”
“Spork the Clock! Yes, of course you are! Spork the Clock and Frankie, in a tree. Gone now, of course. Spork the ticktock Clock … Wait for the day, she told me. Wait for the day. The machine changes everything. The Book is the secrets, all in a row. Death has the secrets, she said. Death bangs the drum, and his carriage never stops.”
Joe stares at him. “What did you say?”
“Ticktock?” Glazed eyes wander across Joe’s face, on their way to somewhere else he can’t see.
“No, after that. ‘Wait for the day’?”
“Breakers in a cauldron, the ocean in a box. Bees make angels. Book of changes.” Sholt smiles benignly. “You know all that, don’t you, Spork the Clock?”
“No,” Joe Spork says carefully, “I don’t.”
“Oh, yes. Time is ivy and death is gorse and the turning sets us free. You look younger than you did, Spork the Clock. You were older when we met.”
“Ted?”
“Yes?”
“What does it all look like?”
“Candle, book, and bell. For the exorcism of ghosts. No Heaven, no judgement. Just the Book, and pages like for a music box.”
Joe Spork stares at him. Yes. That’s the job. This old loony is the client. The endgame. Not too late, at all. Just lost upon the road.
God, I sound like him.
“Ted, I have a package for you.”
“I don’t get packages. I live in the greenhouse with the bees, and I cut the gorse and chop the ivy and that’s all. When they say ‘postal’ these days they mean ‘mad.’ It’s cruel, I think.”
“Yes, it is. But look, here’s the destination address, see? I wrote it down.”
Ted Sholt’s eyes fix very sharply, a moment of focus in the fog. “ ‘Destiny’ is the state of perfect mechanical causation in which everything is the consequence of everything else. If choice is an illusion, what’s life? Consciousness without volition. We’d all be passengers, no more real than model trains.” He shrugs, and the sudden acuity is gone. “The enemy was transcribed, not transmigrated. Left himself lying around like an unexploded bomb. Don’t let the Khan take you! Never!” He seems ready to flee, and then relaxes. “But he’s dead, long ago. Safe enough. Did you say you had a cake?”
“No. A book.”
Ted Sholt waves his hands. “I like cake. Chocolate, with butter cocoa icing. Golden syrup. It takes time to set, of course, but a man once told me time’s a figment.”
“Ted? I have the book. The book and everything.”
Sholt peers at him, scratches his stomach. Under the sou’wester, he seems to be wearing a skirt made of sackcloth.
“Well, that would be lovely.” And then the focus comes again, so quick and so strong as to be alarming. His hand shoots out, locks around Joe’s arm. “You have it? Here? Now? How long do we have? Come on, man, they won’t be far behind!”
“Who won’t?” But Joe Spork is already moving, old instinct demands it: when someone says “they’re coming” you go out the back first and get details later.
“All of them! Sheamus, for sure. Jasmine, maybe. Others, so many others, even if you haven’t seen them! And I’m mad and useless. Not to mention bloody old. God, how did it take this long? Come on, come on!” He grabs Joe by the hand. “Did you say Joe Spork? Spork like Daniel? Spork the Clock? Yes? Where is it? Please! We have to be quick!”
“You knew Daniel? He was my grandfather—”
“No time! Reminisce later. Family stories by the fire, yes, and cake. You’re buying! But not now, not now, now is the time, before it passes! This was supposed to happen decades ago … So late. Come on!” Wiry hands grasping and clutching, hauling Joe into motion. “No time!”
Ted Sholt does not, thankfully, smell the way he looks. He gives off an odour of wax, sap, and soil. He stops a yard from the car, pointing.
“Who’s that?”
“Billy. He found me the job.”
“Billy as in William. Don’t know any Williams.”
“He’s a friend.” Unintentional, and an old joke, that one. Sholt doesn’t know, hops into the back of the car. Billy starts from a doze and shouts “Jesus!” and Ted lunges forward and shouts back that “Jesus was the mother of Mary, and Mary met Gabriel at the crossroads, and the crossroads is where the ivy meets the gorse, where we fall down into the dark, where Frankie made angels in a tree,” which does not calm the situation down at all. Billy twists around in his seat to see his enemy better and Ted lurches away from him, trapping himself in the corner of the rear windscreen and shouting at the top of his voice, “Angelmaker, angelmaker!”
Joe, for the first time in several years, is forced to shout. “Billy! Billy! Billy, it’s okay, this is Ted, he’s a bit mad but he’s our client, or our client’s representative, all right?”
“Joseph, he is mad as a coot. And he’s wearing a dress.”
“It’s a robe,” Ted Sholt replies with wounded dignity. “I’m a man of the cloth.” Which is so surprising and so weirdly plausible that none of them says anything at all for a moment. Then Ted gestures. “Further down. It was back aways from the cliff, you see. So it didn’t fall in.” He raises his arm, and for a moment his face contorts in agony, so that Joe finds himself asking whether it’s physical pain, rather than ordinary madness, which makes him wander.
Ted Sholt’s home really is a greenhouse, but it’s a greenhouse in the Victorian style, a great sprawling thing with two floors and transparent walls. There’s a light on somewhere on the upper level, and Joe can see a makeshift bed and what might be a desk. The panes are cracked and taped, and yes, the whole place is wrapped in strands of invading ivy. As they get closer, Joe leans down to look at it, and yes, now that he sees it close to, it is somehow sinister, hungry tendrils slithering over a great wounded beast to reach the innards. He steps back rather quickly, and finds Ted next to him, bright eyes quick and head nodding.
Inside, it’s warm. The glass and the ivy bet
ween them make the place airtight, or near enough, and hot-water pipes run around and about in a gasworks bundle. Ted removes his sou’wester, but not his green boots. His feet make a soft flapping noise against the wood floor. Blittblattblittblatt. Joe stares at the boots. It must be his imagination, but they do seem awfully large. He wonders why Ted doesn’t take them off now that he’s inside. Perhaps he doesn’t have other shoes. It would be ludicrous to imagine he might have webbed feet.
“Do you ever swim?” he hears himself ask as he follows Ted up the stairs. “In the sea, I mean. In the summer. I hear people do. On Boxing Day, even.” Oh, bloody Hell, if the old place did actually go into the sea, could that have been a bit more tactless? He glances at Billy: Help me, I’m drowning. Billy stares back, mouth open: You did this one to yourself, mate.
Ted doesn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t hear or perhaps he has decided to ignore the question, as a privilege of being mad. Instead he grasps Joe by the arm. “Come! Come!”
Joe and Billy follow him to the back of the house.
The back room is improbably enormous. It gives onto a set of open ironwrought doors over the sea, and Joe finds himself wondering again how this entire place doesn’t simply shatter in the winter gales. It surely ought to. Even now he can see the glass panes bowing to the wind, hear the whole structure creak and moan. An alarming image fills his mind’s eye, of all these glass walls bursting inward at once, a windstorm of razors.
Obviously, it hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps the ivy protects the glass. Perhaps it’s the gorse bushes or the short, stumpy trees in along the ridge. Perhaps the glass is some sort of legacy of the Second World War, a laminate, a pilot’s cockpit glass. Perhaps he’s never been safer in his life.
“This way,” Sholt cries, “this way, this way, yes, we must go up! Up and over!” And up they go, out of the doors and onto a spiral stair which belongs inside a stone keep rather than outside a glass house on the edge of a cliff. The wind is treacherous, plucking and pushing. Joe finds himself regretting his big overcoat: it flaps and fills like a giant batwing.
Sholt draws him up the last of the steps, and they’re on a sort of sheltered roof terrace on top of the main building, scattered with the odd detritus of decades: a handmower, two tyres, rolls of wire and fence posts. Billy Friend scowls into the biting chill, then yips as he treads on what appears to be a pile of human limbs. He stares down, and heaves a sigh as closer examination shows it to be a stack of mannequin’s arms. “What’s all this?” he demands.
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