*
2 nd January Wind NE, light airs, cold.
Jack’s here. The change is shocking. Limping badly, using a stick. He’s driving a little automatic with plenty of miles on the clock that he’s bought with a ‘resettlement grant’. Can’t use a clutch pedal, he said, then bent down and rolled up his trouser leg. The poor kid. I had to sit down. I couldn’t speak so I just hugged him. First time I’d cried in nearly forty years.
He hasn’t told Harry and Mary. They’ve got a right to know, I told him, but he wants to find his own way and his own time. I didn’t really understand why, until he told me what Harry had said when Jack was selected for officer training. So bloody proud, Jack was, until Harry crushed him. As good as told him he couldn’t hack it.
Then Jack said he made a bad call on his last trip. Men died. ‘I failed,’ he said. ‘I feel bad enough without Dad saying I told you so.’
So I’m sworn to secrecy. It shouldn’t be too hard. It’s not as if I see Harry much, and he already made his token appearance at Christmas.
Jack threw the dragon on the grass to make room for us both in the boat seat. Maybe I should tell him about the dragon. He ought to respect it a bit more.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him my news. He could tell I was sick but I brushed his questions aside. Tomorrow.
*
Jack smiled to himself at the sound of Grandpa’s rumbling, smoker’s cough in the garden, that way he had of clearing his chest with lungfuls of salt air. Jack even started to put the diary away, guiltily, until he saw the ugly cube of ashes on the shelf and had another ‘can’t be’ jolt. He walked out into the garden, feeling a fool but half expecting to see Eddie. It was still twilight, the impossibly late light of the longest days, and as he stared at inevitable emptiness he reassured himself with the thought that it must have been an evening walker on the coastal path.
No matter. Even if it wasn’t a trick of the mind, having Grandpa around the cottage didn’t frighten him.
He preferred Grandpa’s company to Dusty Miller’s. He didn’t feel so bad about Grandpa.
*
3 rd January. Light airs, variable, cold.
Hard to believe Jack’s leaving the Royal Marines. They were his life. I remember when he first passed his Commando course he carried his green beret everywhere with him, even when he was in civvies. He’d take it out and brush it, smooth it down a bit, as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d passed the course. Royal Marines Commando. The elite.
We lit the stove by the boat seat, opened a bottle of wine, and stared at the flames, and it seemed the right moment to tell Jack I had cancer. The smokes had done for me at last. I told him I’d rather go this way than as a senile wreck in an old people’s home. At least I’ll die while I’m still alive. Sometimes I believe that. It’s a great idea until a doctor looks you in the eye and says you won’t see another Christmas.
It was his turn to hug me, and that let out a lot of stuff that I’d bottled up inside me since the diagnosis. Twice in two days. After that we opened more wine, chucked another log on the fire, and got drunk together.
Afterwards, I put the dragon back, respectfully. I know all its dark secrets, now. We’ve spent a lot of time together these last few weeks, out in the boat seat, and I can guess what it’s thinking. It wants open water. It wants a storm, and salt in its teeth. Well, it won’t get that from me any more.
One last journey, perhaps, but not yet.
I haven’t told Jack about the shadow in the trees. He might not believe me. Might think I’m mad.
I think he’s a warrior. And if the dragon knows him he’s a Viking.
What does he want?
*
The old man had been a lot more delusional, a lot earlier, than Jack realised. He remembered that stay. Quite emotional. Understandably emotional.
But also rational. No hint of spooks in the trees. Jack dropped the diary on the desk, reluctant to read evidence of his grandpa’s mental decline. It would be intrusive. Disrespectful.
He stared at a pile of his stuff that Charlotte had brought from their apartment (‘if you’re moving in here’) and dumped in the middle of the room: a suitcase of clothes, his officer’s ceremonial sword in its hard, leather scabbard and a framed photograph of his troop in Afghanistan. Thirty dusty men cradled weapons with the easy familiarity of veterans, as if they were extensions of their bodies. Raw recruits hold their rifles self-consciously, and untried soldiers proudly, as symbols of their warrior status. Only when they’ve been in a few firefights do they hold them with that casual, tools-of-the-trade manner. On the back of the frame Jack had written the troop’s names: White, Donovan, Wolfe, Miller… All good men. A brotherhood. Dusty Miller stood grinning at the camera behind his shoulder. Wolfe was killed by an RPG on an Afghan hillside swept by bullets, exposed because Jack had stretched the perimeter too thinly. Dusty died on the last trip, died because Jack had taught him that he could run through fire and survive. Why couldn’t he remember more about Chalky White? He was just a face in a photograph and the lingering smell of burning.
Charlotte didn’t return to the cottage that night. Perhaps she had driven back to their apartment in the light. Perhaps she had stayed with George.
Strange how gently, how harmoniously, two lives can slip apart.
III: JACK
That night Jack dreamed about Dusty Miller. Again.
Dusty wears an issue khaki vest, camouflage trousers and desert boots, the kit they’d wear off duty in the base. Chalky White sits on the ground behind him because Chalky doesn’t have any legs, but his trousers are folded neatly over his stumps as if he’s going on parade. Chalky wears gloves and Jack knows that’s to save his hands as he swings himself along the ground, but for now he is still. They both are, and they both stare at him with dark, sunken eyes within faces that are pale as paper. Their lips are dark too, neither black nor brown but an unnatural, dull, blood-and-earth colour.
‘How are you?’ Jack asks, and it seems the most reasonable of questions.
Dusty Miller makes a slight movement that might be a shrug. ‘We’re all right.’ His lips may or may not have moved with the words. He shows neither pleasure nor anger at Jack’s presence. Chalky White just watches.
‘What’s it like?’ Being dead, he means.
Another shrug. ‘It’s OK.’ No enthusiasm, but no horror either.
There are things Jack wants to say, but his tongue will only ask platitudes. He thinks he is whole again, and he could walk towards them, but his two legs are locked to the ground and a cloud drifts between them. He stares at them as they fade, hoping they understand, but the cloud smells of smoke and he knows that soon it will stink of burning plastic and rubber and charcoaled meat. He leans into it and bellows the way a charging marine will bellow away his fear as he runs into dust clouds through the smack of passing bullets, bellow as if the sound alone will keep the flames away until he is woken by his own screaming and lies panting in the darkness in a room filled with the tang of smoke.
The wardrobe mirror reflected a faint, flickering line of light above the curtains, the red light of fire.
Jack could dress quickly. He kept his prosthetic foot within reach of the bed, often still wearing its sock and trainer, and with his jeans crumpled around its ankle. It was almost as easy to strap on his leg as it was to hop to the window, and he didn’t want to ruin his night sight by putting on the light.
It took a while for his mind to adjust. Down through the trees, possibly on the beach, was a fire. He could see the light reflected off the branches, even though the flames themselves were masked. His breathing began to slow. The wind was in the east, and the smoke smelled of damp wood, not burning meat. There was enough moonlight to show it drifting in thinning trails between the trunks of the Scots pines, coming up the hill towards the cottage. Enough light to read his watch and see that it was barely midnight. Miller and White faded into the shadows as his heart rate dropped from thumping panic to just-run-
a-mile speed. The nightmare was real but unreal, the product of his own mind.
But there shouldn’t be a fire on the beach. Jack laced on his other trainer and let himself out into the garden, moving silently across the grass to the back gate, where he’d be able to see downhill between the trunks of the pines. He could see movement down there, indistinct shapes between the trees, and hear distant laughter. Kids, probably, getting away from parents with illicit booze and a few bags of crisps, and they were trying to burn enough driftwood to choke the hillside. There’d be a pile of bikes on the path somewhere.
Then he froze, pulse pumping in the same skin-prickling fear as the nightmare. If he hadn’t had his hand on the gatepost he might have fallen. A slight change in the wind sent the smoke in a different direction, across the hill rather than towards the cottage, and it was enough for the starlight to silhouette a figure against the smoke, a figure that had been invisible among the trunks of the trees but which stood motionless about fifteen yards away. The faint greyness rolling beyond showed first the outline of a helmet. Some part of Jack’s brain was still thinking logically, and told him that the eggshell shine about the helmet’s dome was wrong; helmets mustn’t reflect light. They’re matt Kevlar, not polished steel.
The smoke shifted a little more, enough to reveal broad shoulders and a torso whose minimal waist suggested body armour. Jack tried to swallow but had to suck his tongue to force moisture into the desert of his mouth. He could not speak. Now he could make out an arm that trailed a weapon with casual familiarity. This too was wrong. It wasn’t the stubby barrel of a SA80 assault rifle. A curved wedge of shadow might be the magazine of an AK-47, but the ‘magazine’ was more like the head of an axe. Jack swallowed again.
‘Dusty?’ His voice sounded tight and high with fear.
The figure moved, a subtle shift of angle towards Jack as if its focus had been beyond him, towards the boat seat, and for a moment Jack thought he was staring at a skull. The smooth, bone-like dome dropped to dark hollows where eyes should have been, but the still-functioning logic told Jack that skulls don’t have noses, and this figure’s face bore a hard, vertical line that divided the eye sockets. Nor do they have a plume of long hair, like a horse’s tail, growing from high on the crown and lifting gently in the breeze.
‘Dusty?’ Stronger, that time. Somewhere nearby, glass clinked against rock and smashed in a cackle of juvenile laughter.
The smoke rolled, shifting, and hung pearlescent beneath the trees, an empty screen as the figure faded from reality the way Miller and White had faded from his nightmare.
Jack wasn’t sure how long he stayed there. Long enough for his bare torso to chill and for his shivering to be constant.
Back in the cottage he poured himself a whisky. A large one. His hands were shaking so that the bottle rattled against the glass, but perhaps that was just the cold.
Jack went down to the beach at sunrise, carrying a Thermos of coffee. Normally, it would be a good time to be out, those midsummer hours between sunrise and the first stirrings of the human world. The seagulls have finished their dawn screaming and flown to their feeding grounds, so the sounds are foreshore sounds of lapping water. That morning the place seemed fresh and chill, the water a steely grey that became white and then golds and blues while he sat on a rock, sipped coffee, blinked at the numbness in his head and stared at the charred remains of a bonfire. A light debris of beer bottles, cans and the white-plastic circles of empty six-packs littered the beach. Kids. Real.
Jack didn’t often go to the beach below the cottage. It was a shingle-and-seaweed, slime-and-bladderwrack place, and it was edgy in the way that bleached driftwood, contorted like old bones, can be edgy and slightly threatening. He’d always felt that, always preferred the peace of Witt Point and its mossy stones. Grandpa had liked it though. This was where he’d found the carving. He’d tried to throw it back before he went into the hospice. Jack had come to look after him one night, and searched the empty cottage and garden before he found him down here, covered in mud, carrying the dragon, shouting incomprehensibly. Something about how it wouldn’t sink, or wouldn’t leave him. Jack still felt sadness at the thought of the raving old man his grandfather had become.
Jack captured an empty plastic bag rolling over the shingle and filled it with the night’s rubbish, his mind grating at what the figure under the pines might mean. Dusty Miller was a feature, asleep and awake, a product of nightmare or waking flashback. Jack couldn’t control his dreams but he could control the flashbacks, force them away with hard work or exercise or whisky. Especially whisky. And it was usually Miller; Chalky White didn’t come very often, but then Jack hadn’t had to watch White die.
But Miller in the woods, when he was awake, was a Miller he couldn’t control. This was madness, the thing Jack feared most of all; the loss of self, of self-respect and the respect of others.
Jack trudged up the hill, his mind sifting information the way he might shuffle a pack of cards.
Like Grandpa saying he saw a Viking in the pines, words Jack had dismissed at the time as the delusions of a dying man.
The diary entry about the dragon having a friend in the trees.
Him thinking he saw Miller.
Maybe they shared the same delusions. Either they were both mad, or neither was mad.
There were only a few tracks down to the beach from the coastal path, weaving through a tangled undergrowth of bracken and bramble. Damp, early-morning air had dewed the foliage and put enough of a crust on the sand of the paths to show prints: a badger’s tracks and the faint, powder-puff marks of a grazing rabbit.
And a foot, pressed into the sand at the edge of the trees, next to the sign of his own trainers tramping downwards. A man of about Jack’s size, barefoot and facing uphill with the toes pointing towards the cottage. Jack knelt to examine the fragile imprint, his unease growing at the way the toes and heel showed clearly, but not the pad behind the toes, nor the sweep of the arch. There were only the beginnings of lines from the toes back towards the heel, as if the foot had been more bone than flesh.
As Jack watched, the drying crust began to crumble, sending miniature landslides from its edges to fill the skeletal valleys beneath.
IV: Diary of Edvard Ahlquist, Volume 39
10 th January. Flat calm. Heavy frost.
The cancer’s spreading. Secondaries, the doctor called them, in my head now, and my liver. No point in operating. He asked if there’s anyone to look after me, since I’ll need care all the time soon. Cheerful sod. Live-in care or a hospice. I can have as much liquid morphine as I want.
I don’t want to go into a hospice. There I’d be just waiting to die. At least here I have a life of sorts.
There was a herd of deer on Witt Point this morning, grazing down near the waterline. If I’m dying, how come I’m seeing everything so clearly? They were the same brown as the salt marsh, but I could see so sharp it was like I had binoculars in my brain. Then when they turned and ran up the slope their white backsides were bouncing away like tufts of cotton wool. Beautiful. It’s worth a bit of pain to have moments like that, but then it gets too bad and I swig the Oramorph and next thing I know I’ve lost a couple of hours. Hours are too precious to lose.
Hard to think that all this will still go on without me. Those deer will still be there in the early mornings. Where will I be?
I called Harry. He ought to know. He said he’d come over. It doesn’t feel good having to ask him, and he sounded like it didn’t feel good to be asked.
The warrior comes closer when I’m not in the garden. Edge of the lawn, last night. I watched him from the bedroom. No moon, but enough starlight to see some kind of helmet with a horsehair plume that blew away from him even though there was no wind. The panic had me gasping for breath until I could suck oxygen.
* * *
Awning. ↵
Chapter Five: Fǣgþ
(Pron. ‘f-ay-th’. Anglo-Saxon: vengeance through generations; a blood feud waged
against the kin of a murderer)
From the Saga of King Guthrum
Now in Fyrsig there were two halls where folk worshipped the crucified god, one for men and one for women, and Jarl Harald slew not the women.
There was among them one of great beauty called Witta, that is to say the white. Harald Guthrumsson took her hand, and straightway it was as though fire passed through his body, and at once he would lie with her. The woman Witta fought against him and he saw that it would not be except by force, yet Witta fought so valiantly that Harald honoured her for her courage, and she alone was spared. Harald claimed Witta for his own, keeping her by him and saying he would win her willingly.
Jarl Harald dallied in Fyrsig, for the ships of his fleet had been scattered. He harried in the lands about, doing great scathe[1] and taking much plunder. King Guthrum came by land with the rest of his army and was wroth with Harald, for they had not brought Alfred to battle. Guthrum swore that Harald loved the woman so witlessly that he neglected all that was seeming for his honour.
I: HARRY
Harry found a way of helping Jack with the boat. Three evenings that week, after work. Being with Jack was much easier when The Slut wasn’t around.
It started by accident. Helping, that is. Harry called Jack, just to see how he was getting on, and could hear lots of bashing in the background, like someone was struggling with something metal. ‘Do you know anything about engines?’ Jack asked. Of course he knew about engines. Royal Engineer, wasn’t he, for twenty-two years?
Not that Harry wasn’t challenged by that museum piece in Draca. Scotty, Jack called it, like it was a person, and Scotty had probably been a great little engine in 1935. Designed to start on petrol and then run on paraffin once it was going. It needed a thorough overhaul, and the chance of getting spare parts would be zilch. At least it was air-cooled rather than water-cooled, so they could run it even with the boat out of the water.
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