Darkmans (44 page)

‘I need you to count to one hundred, but
very
slowly. Okay?’

The boy didn’t respond.

‘And when you’ve counted to one hundred – but
very
slowly, yes? – we’ll all wave at Michelle, then we’ll climb down the stairs again, then we’ll go straight into a newsagent’s and buy
fifty
boxes of matches.’

‘
Really?
’ Fleet’s eyes lit up. He was profoundly impressed by the generous nature of this exchange. ‘
Fifty
boxes, Mama? Are you
sure
?’ She nodded, sagely. ‘
Fifty
boxes, Fleet. But only – let me stress this very clearly so you don’t misunderstand me –
only
if you count, very,
very
slowly. Like this:

one..................two..................three..................’

‘When should I start?’ he asked eagerly.

‘Only once you close your eyes,
then
you can start, but very,
very
slowly, remember? If you count too fast you won’t get all the boxes.

The slower you count, the more boxes you’ll get.’

She began to withdraw.

‘Will I stand up while I count, Mama?’ Fleet wondered, determined to get every aspect of the transaction correct in order to maximise his prize.

‘Yes,’ she paused, ‘you must stand very straight and tall. No messing around, no running about. Just close your eyes and concentrate
very hard
on what you need to do.’

The boy nodded. He closed his eyes. He drew a deep breath…

‘One..................two..................’

The bird had found him. It was perched on the rail, shaking the rain from its greasy, black wings and chattering hysterically.

‘Fly!’ she hissed, taking a swipe at it. It fell off the rail with a euphoric squawk and somersaulted through the air.

‘Dory?’ she spoke, tentatively –

No response

‘Dory?’

She reached out and softly touched his shoulder. He opened his eyes and peered at her, suspiciously, from under the crook of his arm.

‘Elen?’

‘Are you all right down there?’

He blinked.

‘Yes,’ he said (almost peevishly), ‘I’m just upset about the
view.
’

‘The view?’

He nodded. She glanced around her, dazedly, at the crazy, icy, grey and gold panorama spread out below.

‘Is something
wrong
with the view?’

‘Don’t be
silly…
’ he scolded her, ‘of
course
there is.’

‘Okay,’ she drew a deep breath, ‘so what’s wrong with it, exactly?’

‘The port,
obviously
,’ he scoffed.

‘The port?’

‘Yes. The port. The old harbour. I can’t see the old harbour. They’ve gone and put this…this
horrible…
’ he waved his hand, with a shudder, towards the power station, ‘this
thing.
This box. This
idea.
’

‘The power station?’

‘Is
that
what you like to call it?’

She nodded.

‘I see.’

He sniffed, fastidiously.

‘So they’ve put the power station in front of your…?’

‘Yes. The blah-bleugh station. The
bleugh…
’ he interrupted, cruelly, almost vomiting the phrase back at her.

She gazed over towards the power station. ‘Which port do you mean?’ she wondered. ‘Rye?’

‘Rye?’ he scoffed. ‘
Rye?!
’

‘
Not
Rye?’

‘Old
Winchelsea
!‘ he exclaimed.

‘Winchelsea?’ she frowned. ‘But isn’t Winchelsea a town? Isn’t it perched inland? On a hill?’

‘Not the New Town, the
Old…
’

He slowly began to uncurl.

‘I’m all
wet
,’ he said, irritably, patting at his clothes, ‘what happened to my mac?’

‘We forgot your mac at home.’

‘Although…’ he paused, thoughtfully, ‘I
like
the wet, don’t I?’

He peered up at her with a slow smile.

‘
He
likes the wet,’ she corrected him, sharply, ‘not you.’

‘The wet,’ he repeated, ‘the…’ he sneezed, ‘
weit…
the
weit
, the
våat…
no…’ he shook his head, confused, ‘
vaad…vaad?
No…
no
,
votur…
yes?…
vater?…
water?’

‘Perhaps we should go inside,’ she suggested.

‘Inside?’ he frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Because Fleet’s in there, and I don’t want to leave him alone for too long.’

‘Fleet?’ he rolled the name around on his tongue. ‘
Fleet…
’

‘Fleet. Your son. Don’t you remember?’

He frowned, then he paused, then he smiled. ‘Oh God, yes…Fleet. Your boy.’

‘
Our
boy.’

He gave her a strange look.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked.

He glanced down at himself, evasively. ‘Did I fall?’ he wondered.

‘Perhaps,’ she responded. ‘Would you like to get up?’

‘Yes.’

She offered him her hand. Dory slowly clambered to his feet.

‘I’m bigger,’ he said, ‘than I remember.’

He gazed down at his fingers. ‘And my hands…’

‘Hold on to the rail and I’ll help you back,’ she said.

‘What a terrible storm,’ he sighed, accepting her help, shuffling his feet along, very slowly. ‘Where’s Fleet?’

‘He’s inside.’

‘Pardon?’

His eyes flew wide.

‘He’s inside, Dory. He’s fine. He’s counting.’

‘You left him
inside
? In the
tower
? All
alone
?’

‘He’s fine,’ she emphasised. ‘We’ll be with him very soon…’

‘Oh…Okay…’ He readily accepted her explanation. ‘Good.’

His gaze returned, idly, to the power station.

‘Why does it sing?’ he asked.

‘
Uh…
’ she frowned.

‘We’ll need to move it,’ he continued, matter-of-factly, ‘to try and see what’s left behind.’

‘Here’s the hatch…’ she encouraged him towards it, ‘and that’s Fleet inside, counting…’

Fleet had reached the grand total of twenty-three. He was counting
very
slowly.

Dory allowed himself to be manoeuvred through the hatch.

‘I am very big, now,’ he informed the child, cheerfully, crawling through on his hands and knees. ‘In fact I’m
huge…
Look!’

Fleet opened his eyes and appraised his father. ‘Hello, John,’ he said, softly, ‘will you be visiting us for very long?’

They were heading for the port. Elen was driving. Fleet was in the back (fifty boxes of matches piled up all around him). Dory – drier now, and warmer, ensconced in a replacement jumper – was holding court in the front passenger seat (Michelle balled up snugly on his lap), regaling Fleet with blood-thirsty vignettes from savage Old Winchelsea’s long and highly chequered history.

There were brutal yarns aplenty: tales of smuggling, of piracy (a problem endemic to the port: ‘Those unprincipled scum’d plunder a
robin
if its chest was bright…’), of filth, contagion and vicious armed attack.

The ‘bastard French’ (Elen winced at his language) had virtually razed the place in 1360 with an invading force of 3,000 men. They’d slaughtered so many townsfolk that the graveyard couldn’t hold them and their bodies were unceremoniously piled – like human ballast (Dory described the scene, with an almost palpable relish) – five or more deep, into local embankments.

He also detailed (helpfully mapping out the local geography, in the air, with his finger) how a concerted (but ultimately disastrous) policy of land reclamation in the Romney Marsh region – principally instituted by the greedy Church – had unleashed untold environmental (and economic) damage further down the coast by encouraging many of their fine, natural water courses to silt up.

‘There was a terrible storm,’ he remembered (Fleet listening, all agog), ‘a
legendary
storm. It raged so fierce that the tide didn’t ebb. It flowed twice – like a final, cruel judgement from a vengeful God. The flooding and loss of life in the old town was catastrophic. And when the tide finally withdrew, all that remained of that once great port were its shattered foundations, hidden, acres deep, in slime and mud…

‘But canny King Edward,’ he continued, ‘remained unbowed. He knew the value of the place, strategically. So he quickly devised a plan to transport Winchelsea – lock, stock and barrel – up on to a nearby
hill, to rebuild her afresh – and that’s exactly what he did, and that’s exactly where she stands today; daintily pulling up her skirts from the thirsty River Brede as it licks and laps about her pretty ankles…’

Suddenly (and completely without warning), just as they entered the tiny, nondescript villiage of Jury’s Gap (a raggle-taggle line of cottages fringing the road, which dutifully adhered – in turn – to the tall sea wall), Dory broke off from his story-telling and lunged wildly for the steering wheel: ‘
Stop
, Elen!
Quick!
’ he yelled.

Elen panicked. She swerved. She applied the brake. They skidded. A car behind them honked its horn.

‘Dory,
no
!’ she exclaimed, guiding the car off the road. ‘You
can’t
just…’

She stopped the vehicle, with a slight jerk, applied the handbrake, then turned, in shock (her eyes wide, her hands shaking).

‘
Look
,’ Dory exclaimed, completely ignoring her agitation and pointing, with an exultant grin, towards a nearby cottage.

‘Look
where
, Papa?’ Fleet asked, gathering his matchboxes up off the floor.

‘For
Sale
!’ Dory whooped, clapping his hands together.

‘What?!’
Elen scowled, incredulous.

‘For
Sale
,’ Dory reiterated, cuffing her, flirtatiously, on the shoulder.

‘Don’t you
remember
?’

Before she could answer he’d bundled the dog up under his arm, had sprung from the car, and was heading towards a small, ill-maintained, plasterboard bungalow. It was up for sale. There was a sign out the front.

‘What’s Papa doing, Mama?’ Fleet asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Elen murmured. ‘He seems to be going to look at that house.’

Dory strolled through the gate (it was off its hinges) and down the path. A moment later and he was knocking boldly on the front door.

‘He’s knocking on the door, Mama,’ Fleet said, now perched up on his knees, his arms curled around her headrest.

‘Yes, Fleet. I can
see
that…’

After a short pause the door was opened by a young girl (perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age); a slightly plump, eccentric-looking creature sporting a voluminous, grey mohair jumper (full of holes, pulled down almost to her knees), a pair of over-long, baggy jeans (which were extravagantly split and frayed at her heels) and scruffy,
blonde dreadlocks, yanked back from her face into a shapeless, olivegreen crocheted hat (with the charming addition of a clutch of small, plastic daisies poking intermittently through the knit). Dory spoke to her.

‘What’s Papa saying?’ Fleet wondered.

‘I don’t know.’

The girl – initially suspicious – was soon smiling and nodding. She reached out her hand and patted Michelle’s head.

‘She’s patting Michelle,’ the boy said.

Dory turned and pointed towards the car. The girl glanced over. She nodded again. Dory waved his arm at them. He beckoned them to join him.

‘Oh
God
, no,’ Elen groaned, covering her mouth with her hand.

‘He wants us to go, Mama,’ Fleet said. ‘Shall we go? Shall we go now?’

Dory gesticulated again, this time more keenly.

‘Okay,’ Elen said, turning around, ‘we should go. But I need you to be a good boy for me, Fleet. I need you to be very calm and grown up. Do you understand?’

She gave him a meaningful look.

‘Of course, Mama,’ Fleet said.

They climbed out of the car. She took him by the hand. They made their way, swiftly, over towards the property. By the time they’d reached the front step Dory was already half-way down the hallway. ‘I don’t know,’ he was saying, ‘it’s the same but
different
, if you see what I mean…’

He turned. ‘Elen, Fleet…this is Gaynor. She’s very kindly agreed to give us a quick tour around Aunt Mary’s old home.’ Gaynor nodded her welcome to them both. ‘I only wish my Dad was in,’ she said, ‘he’s the real expert on the area. Works behind the bar on The Ranges. He’s lived here all his life – grew up on Broomhill Farm…’

Dory’s face broke into a delighted grin. ‘We always bought our eggs there,’ he said.

‘Really?
God.
My dad never stops banging on about how it was always his job to clean out the chicken shed. The smell was just terrible, he says. He
hated
those birds…’

‘Perhaps we knew each other?’ Dory speculated. ‘What’s his name? Is he my age? A little older?’

‘His proper name’s David Thomas, but everyone calls him Chubby – Chubby Thomas. He was born in 1954. I’m the youngest of eight,’ she smiled, ‘what my mum likes to call “an afterthought”.’

‘Chubby…’ Dory considered the name as they followed her through to the kitchen. ‘It rings a vague bell, actually. But he was possibly a little old to’ve been a regular playmate…’

He glanced around him. ‘Gracious me,’ he exclaimed, ‘the old
range…
’

He walked over to a large, black Aga and ran a fond hand along the rail.

She nodded. ‘It’s always been there. We’ve never actually managed to get it working but it was too heavy to shift. Dad’s ripped out pretty much everything else over the years…’

‘I can
see
that…’ Dory shrugged, benignly. ‘But it still has the same…’

‘Atmosphere?’ she filled in. He nodded.

‘Is the cottage very old?’ Elen interrupted.

‘Not ancient, no. But a good age for around here…’

‘And there’s still direct river access out the back?’ Dory enquired.

‘The Gut? Sure…’

She opened the back door. A gust of cold, sea air blasted inside.

‘My aunt used to call it a “drowning river”…’ Dory stepped forward and poked his head out. ‘She’d never let me swim in it. I remember I built a raft one year but she wouldn’t let me float it out there…’

‘It’s very reeded up,’ the girl conceded, pulling the door shut.

‘So you’re selling?’ Elen asked, brightly.

‘Yes. My parents have split and my mum needs her half to set herself up. Dad’s really pissed off about it, though. He loves the old place and property’s so expensive round here…’

‘Will he be able to afford to stay in the area?’

She nodded. ‘He’s moving to a tiny shack on the other side of the Gut which he inherited from my grandad. You can see it from the back window if you crane your neck…’

Elen walked over to the window to take a look but the reeds were too high to see anything beyond.

‘I mean it’s just a
shed
, really. Nothing to write home about. But he’s hoping to get planning permission and to do a bit of work on it…’

‘What about you?’ Elen asked, turning.

‘Me?’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I’ll move into Camber, probably.’

‘At the end of the day,’ Dory observed, portentously, ‘we’re all just custodians,
eh
?’

The girl smiled at him, vaguely. ‘So was your aunt German, too?’ she wondered.

‘No. Not German. My father was Irish. She was his oldest brother’s wife. Widowed in the war. Her name was Mary Erwitt. A lovely woman. Big-boned. Red-haired. Wonderful cook. Kept herself to herself, really, so far as I can remember. God-fearing. A devout Catholic…’

‘That’s
amazing…
,’ Gaynor interrupted, excitedly, ‘because when we first moved here the place hadn’t been decorated for what seemed like
years
; the wallpaper was really ancient, and all of the paintwork…And in almost every room – even the toilet – there was a small nail banged into the plaster with the bleached-out shape of a crucifix around it. So we knew someone really religious had lived here once. Mum’s Catholic too, but lapsed. Those funny, little crosses used to completely freak her out. She was always on at Dad to repaint the place, but he took ages to get around to it. We had all kinds of weird junk hung up on the nails to try and cover the marks – just for her peace of mind, really – old calendars, bits of material, teddies,
sombreros…
’

‘Is your daddy
very
fat?’ Fleet suddenly butted in.

‘Fleet!’
Elen chastised him.

The girl burst out laughing. ‘No. Not when he was a boy, but he’s certainly fairly hefty now…’ she winked. ‘Enjoys the odd swift pint if you know what I mean…’

She described a huge, imaginary belly, with her arms. Fleet stared at her, anxiously.

‘They called him Chubby because of his
cheeks
,’ she explained. ‘He had chubby, red cheeks as a child. They used to pinch them to make them redder. Like this…’

She leaned forward and pinched Fleet’s cheeks. Elen smiled. Fleet stood stock still, visibly enraged.

‘Would you like to take a quick look at the living-room?’ she asked Dory, straightening up.

‘Ouch,’
Fleet murmured, under his breath, as they followed her through, ‘that
hurt.
’

They entered the tiny living-room. There was barely enough space in there for the four of them, the tv and the sofa.

‘This must’ve been quite a squeeze for the ten of you,’ Elen said, looking around her, aghast.

‘Crazy,’ the girl grinned, ‘but crazy-
good
.’

Almost one entire wall was mounted with fishing trophies.

‘Your father likes to fish, I see…’ Dory murmured, leaning in closer.

‘Most of those are mine, actually,’ she confessed.

‘You’re a
fisherwoman
?’ he marvelled, gazing at her, somewhat incredulously. ‘Who’d ‘ve thought it?’

‘Dory!’
Elen quickly upbraided him, but Gaynor didn’t appear to take offence.

‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled, ‘everyone’s always surprised when they first find out.’

‘You must be very good at it,’ Elen murmured, shooting Dory a dark look.

‘So did you live here long?’ Gaynor wondered as Dory walked over to the old fireplace and ran his hand – in a familiar manner – down the side of the thick, stone-clad chimney.

‘Long?
Here?
No. I’d say about a year. But I visited often in the summer. My parents moved around a lot. She was my favourite aunt…’

‘It’s a cosy house,’ the girl shrugged, ‘I’ve always liked it…’

She paused. ‘But there’s loads of work still needs doing – some dry rot in the attic…problems with the roof. Whoever ends up buying it’ll probably just knock it down and build something new. That’s generally how things tend to go around here…’

‘Ah-
ha
!’ Dory finally found what he’d been hunting for.

‘What?’

She moved forward, intrigued.

‘A letter, a tiny initial I once carved into the stone…’

He pointed. She drew in close. There, carved into the stone, a scruffy letter ‘D’.

‘How strange…’ she murmured, frowning, ‘I always thought…’

‘Good heavens,’ Elen exclaimed, glancing down at her watch. ‘It’s almost two, Dory. We must go. We’re late already…’

‘You always thought what?’ Dory asked.

‘I have a brother, Dylan. I always thought
he…
’

Pause

‘In fact I’m
sure…
’ the girl persisted.

‘No. Not
that
one,’ Dory corrected her, completely unfazed, ‘further back…see?’

She leaned in still closer. There she saw a second letter; smaller, older, beautifully etched.

‘My full name,’ he smiled, ‘is Isidore.’

‘Wow,’ she seemed visibly shaken, ‘I can honestly say that I’ve
never
laid eyes on that before…‘

‘But it’s not an
i
, Papa,’ Fleet said, pulling in close himself and peering up, ‘it’s a j.’

The girl inspected the letter again, frowning. As she did so, Dory turned to Elen and raised one strong, blond brow, very slowly and deliberately. Elen didn’t react. Dory returned his attention to the boy.

‘That’s just the Germanic style, Fleet,’ he calmly assured him.

‘
Dory…
’ Elen persisted, grabbing Fleet’s hand and guiding him away, ‘the
time…
remember?’

‘Of course you’re right,’ he sighed, ‘we should go. But it’s been lovely reacquainting myself with the old place, Gaynor. And showing the
boy
around, obviously…’

He tousled Fleet’s hair as they all trooped down the hall to the front door. Here, they said their quick farewells and Dory mooched off, dreamily, down the pathway, placing his spare hand, wistfully, on to the broken mechanism of the rusty gate as he passed through. But Elen didn’t follow him – not straight away.