Touch (24 page)

For a few seconds the sea gulps him. Then his head emerges, metres away, black as basalt in the blue-green water. The old man watches without being seen. The boy's body is fluid, like water itself, responding to whatever catches his interest as he sculls around. Then he dives back under. Soon he's lost amongst the heads of other swimmers. The old man walks home for lunch. By now half the town is frying sardines and the scent of hot fish comes down from open windows. As he passes the dog it pads out to sniff him, but he waves it away.

 
The next day is Sunday and the old man keeps away from the church. Instead, he takes his cigarette down to the quayside and chats to Ramon, his last remaining brother. They stand, gazing out to sea, to the ruined monastery on the mountain across the bay. The foothills opposite are covered in collapsing terraces that peter out as the hillsides steepen. All that land had been under vines or olives when they'd been boys. The war had put paid to that. The French had made their wine too cheap. It was hard to get decent local wine now. Hard to get decent anything – chorizo, cheese, game. It was all going to the bad.

‘It's this government fleecing the poor, those whores!'

Ramon smiles and sighs.

‘No matter, there's enough good wine to see us out!'

‘See us out? And they will, those bastards!'

Ramon had always been the same. Passive, easy-going, simple in all these matters. He'd never even asked his brother about his years in exile, but greeted him on his return as if he'd just returned from a night out in the next village. The old man says nothing more. What's the point? He gazes out to where the vines are growing wild on the hillsides, to where the boy is trailing a stick at the water's edge, electrifying a fringe of silver light, as if a shoal of sardines is leaping at his heels.

That night the old man sits in silence, watching some nonsense on the television, hardly answering his wife's questions as she sits fanning herself in the heat.

 
On Monday morning he's back in his usual position at the church. The boy is late, hurrying along, hardly finding time to pat the dog. He returns the old man's greeting politely, and seems to suppress a smile. Later in the morning he's there in the little bay, flipping from the diving board and breaking the surface of the sea which mirrors a blank, hot sky. The old man watches from the shade of the taverna with an iced lemonade in his hand. When he gets home for lunch he sits down to the anchovies his wife has prepared, eating without a word. She leans over him, trying to get a clue to his mood, but there's no smell of drink on him. Just the faint impression of sweat, sunlight, and tobacco, as always. She touches his neck where the white hairs grow, white and unruly. But he says nothing, staring from the dark centres of his eyes that have turned the colour of plums.

The day passes slowly, as all days do now. That night the old man dreams of the olive grove near Cadaques where he'd shot a man in the fighting. It had all happened so quickly. He'd hardly meant to do it. The enemy had appeared suddenly, a grey uniform between the trees. He raised the rifle then felt it kick at his shoulder. The man's blood left a damson stain on the soil when they dragged him away by the heels. And he hadn't died at once. He'd woken to call for his mother, begging them to hold his hand, then gurgling and drowning in his own blood. It'd taken a whole day. They sat him in the shade of a rock and he'd died at sunset. A boy just like they were. A dark-skinned kid from the south. Whispering things they couldn't make out. They'd waited until he died, then buried him: covering his face with stones, dust filming his eyes where they stared towards home.

The old man wakes up shuddering and goes to the window, pushing the shutters open a crack. The dawn is coming up behind the town, staining the hillside opposite with apricot light. The bay lies calmed, like a turquoise stone sawn in half. The air is restless, as if there might be a storm. Leaves rustle on the fig tree beside the house. To his own amazement the old man crosses himself. He hasn't done that since he was a child. Maybe the dream had brought that on. The war wasn't something you could talk about. How could you tell your wife such things? Perhaps Lisa had guessed, though she hadn't asked what her husband had done. Not a word when he'd come home and fallen into his long silence. It was the history of their land: blood and silence in each handful of earth.

 
That day the old man goes to the church early and smokes two cigarettes, pulling at his cap, watching gangs of swifts scream across the rooftops. The boy is also early and has time for the dog, which barks excitedly at his approach. The boy crouches with the new loaf under his arm, pats the dog's head, speaks a few words of affection, then rises to find his path blocked. The old man has made up his mind. He speaks first.

‘
Hola!
'

‘
Hola
.'

The boy scuffles his feet.

‘It's a fine day. Going to be hot!'

‘Yes.'

The old man speaks awkwardly, gruffer than he wants to be. There's a silence and the boy scuffs his heel.

‘Could I ask you a favour, boy?'

The boy considers carefully.

‘A favour?'

The old man sits down on the steps and the boy sits next to him as if invited.

‘See that out there?'

The boy shades his eyes and scans the sea, imagining something in particular will catch his eye.

‘What?'

‘The sea! You know, my father and brothers were all fishermen, my grandfather too and his father. The sea goes back in my family like blood goes back.'

He touched the boy's arm.

‘Like blood. You get it? They said we had salt blood!'

‘Yes...'

The boy is doubtful, clutching the loaf of bread, picking at the crust.

‘But like I told you, boy, I broke with the sea. I worked the land, dug out all this damned rock. To tell you the truth – and, God knows, why should I? – I was afraid of it.'

He pauses. The boy's sandals draw little circles in the dust.

‘And worse, I never learned to swim.'

‘You can't swim?'

The boy is incredulous. Surely everyone could swim? He'd been able to swim almost at the same time that he could walk.

‘Never learned to. Always had an excuse to get out of the damned water.'

He pauses for a second to laugh.

‘And never missed it until now. Not until I saw you jumping off that diving board.'

Again the hoarse laugh, like a motor trying to start.

‘I'm too old for diving, boy, but I have a favour to ask.

Just one.'

The boy listens and nods, then hurries off clutching the loaf with a new kind of step. He seems taller, or heavier. There is more gravity in his step, yet he is a small boy in a striped tee shirt taking a loaf home to his parents.

 
In the Mediterranean summer all things decay. The dead are buried quickly, though without haste. Refuse rots overnight. Here, on the Costa Brava, the town council has it collected each morning. The bins are emptied and even the imported sand on the beach is swept clean to please the tourists. The refuse workers wear white overalls, tipping the green bins into their wagon. Two slim young men in peaked caps and blue uniforms empty the smaller waste bins along the waterfront with a kind of elegant ease, one tipping the bin, the other holding a refuse sack beneath it. The old man smoking on the church steps is a familiar sight. The fact that he holds a plastic carrier bag excites no curiosity. An old dog stares after him with mournful eyes, absent-mindedly wandering to the length of its chain. The sea lurches in dull shades of grey. The mountains smoulder under cloud, the monastery appearing and disappearing in mist. Dark-skinned men in yellow waterproofs and red bandanas unload crates of fish from a trawler in the harbour. This is a new day, no different from yesterday or tomorrow. The sun is rising, strengthening to a glare, burnishing the sky to a blinding pane of light.

In a few weeks it will be autumn. The bars will shutter up and only the hardiest tourists – stray Frenchmen, German hikers, hippies from Barcelona – will brave the gusts that shriek off the sea to jostle the yachts in the new marina, rattling steel cables against their masts. A wind for each season and each wind had a name. Autumn brings the Tramuntana. A harsh, dry wind that hurls over the mountains and onto the bay, shaking the almond trees. Then winter, the season of storms. After that? Well, who knows? It didn't do to look too far ahead these days.

A boy comes along the street with his shoulder bag and stops in front of the old man. They exchange a few words, the boy trailing one foot in the dust. Then they set off together, walking down to the main street that runs parallel with the sea, following its curve to the small cove where a few early swimmers are gathered. The old man's walk is stiff and stately, the boy manages to restrain his eagerness and keep in step with him. The sun is still hazy and the sea is still grey, like the hull of a naval ship. A few yachts make their way out to sea, tilting white sails. The red hills beyond are splashed with dark green pine trees.

The old man and the boy reach the beach and then walk to its furthest point where shingle slopes easily into the water, where there are rocks to hold onto and the open sea seems far away. When they have changed into their shorts, the boy goes first, beckoning to the old man who has not entered the sea since he was a child. His muscles are slack; the flesh on his chest and upper arms is loose and covered in white hair. But there is still some wiriness in his body, there is still strength in the limbs that have carried a rifle and dug out the earth and smashed and lifted rock for most of his life. The boy's skin is smooth and brown, perfected by the sun.

They enter the water slowly, feeling warm air on their naked shoulders, the sea cool on their legs. The boy watches the old man, expecting him to be afraid. But the old man is remembering the darkness of a barn in the next valley, the scented heat, the way Lisa's body had shuddered under him, her hair stuck to his face with sweat. Now he enters the sea. He splashes water onto his face and it is salty like the taste of anchovies or a soldier's sweat. He feels the water begin to buoy him up, remembers the shocked eyes of a dying boy under the olive trees near Cadaqués. The way the soldier had appeared in his sights then stumbled as if he'd tripped over a stone. He'd looked down into that drained face and felt only relief. Relief that it was not his own life pouring away like dregs. Briefly, he thinks of the little girl he left in France. 
Françoise
. A woman now. But that secret pain is long dulled. He looks at the boy.

‘Now?'

‘Yes, now! Come on!'

The boy is already afloat, kicking like a little frog with his brown legs. The old man dips his face into the sea and takes his first stroke, kicking off from the shingle where the boy has led him. Mist is lifting from the hills. The white buildings of Llançà across the bay seem to be falling into and rising from the sea. He can see the hairpin bends of the road with their steel barriers. At home Lisa is fanning herself with a newspaper in the shuttered kitchen, the old dog is waiting, the fish van is threading its way through the streets, honking as the women gather. After this, he'll take the boy for lemonade, have a small cognac for himself, and they'll talk about how things are and about how things used to be.

The old man feels the boy's hand slip away from his. He takes a second stroke, embracing the sea and everything in it: the fish and the rocks and the sunken salt-encrusted hulks that lie where the light cannot reach. He spits out seawater and is not afraid. No, what he feels in his belly is not fear, not exactly. And if he becomes afraid as the water deepens, then it will pass, as everything passes here under the white stare of the sun.

All summer the boy from the big house next door was dying. We saw his bandaged head flitting through the rasp-berry canes, saw him drifting like a sleepwalker across lawns where his father and mother watched him. Something was growing inside him, shouldering aside his life. He played slowly, prematurely aged, as if learning to be a child when it was already too late. We didn't know that he was dying then, but we sensed that we were near a great event. It was like standing at the edge of the sea that time at Scarborough, waves bigger than we'd ever imagined, their chill pulling at our legs, the shingle dragging out its mantra of elsewhere.

All summer the village whispered. Undertones in the village stores, the post-office, amongst the crowd outside church on Sundays. That sudden pitying inflection tingeing voices avid with curiosity. That frisson of greed for news that runs through all villages in the world. Here was tragedy in our own midst. We felt the tremors of it underfoot as we marked out the flagstones for hopscotch or tied skipping ropes to the lamp post outside the Miner's Arms. We sensed it in the air as days turned into dusk, woke to it as light stole across the roofs of the village each dawn.

On warm days the boy would sometimes come to the garden fence to watch me play with my sister. He'd stand awkwardly, one leg tilted against the palings that separated us, his eyes expressionless. Once, when I was pulling rhubarb for my mother, carrying it in the hem of my dress, I looked up to find the boy watching me. He stared with pursed lips from under the swathe of his bandage. Then he turned away to limp down the garden into the shade of their veranda. I never once heard the boy speak.

‘Poor soul.'

Was all my mother said, taking the rhubarb, scolding me for the stained frock. My mother was Italian, one of a group of girls who had come over after the war and married local men.

‘I don' think he's long for here.'

As she said it her mouth went into a tight white line. She spoke English with an accent half Taranto, half Yorkshire.

‘You mean he's going to die?'

She sighed, rubbing fat into a bowl of flour to make pastry for a pie.

‘I don' know. He's pretty sick, I know that much.'

‘What with?'

She ignored me, staring into the pastry mix. I needed to know, felt apprehension tighten in my stomach.

‘What's making him ill?'

‘He's got a...
tumore
… a
tumour
. In his head. The doctors can' take it out.' She shrugged. ‘
È triste
.'

She hardly ever spoke Italian. The words were like the stray hairs that she pushed back behind her ear as she worked.

‘What's a tumour?'

‘It's a kind of a lump.'

‘Does it hurt him?'

‘Eh, I don' know. I expect it does. Poor little lad. Now, no more questions!'

She greased the dish with the lard wrapper. Would it hurt, that thing inside him? The lump pressing on his brain? What would it feel like to become the ghost of yourself, to be swallowed up by darkness and die? To be remembered in church on Sunday, like Mrs Delaney? She'd called every few weeks to collect the Christian Aid envelopes for Africa, labouring up the street on her horn-handled stick. Now she was just a name. The gold lettering was still bright on her headstone.

My mother rapped the bowl down, dusting flour from her hands onto her apron. I watched her roll the pastry, press it into place, ladle in the fruit, sprinkle sugar then slice pastry from the lip of the dish until everything was neatened for the oven.

 
That spring was the best for hawthorn blossom we'd ever had. It bloomed late in Yorkshire, appearing after the blackthorn then flowering well into June. When it came, it gushed against dandelions and cow parsley, already rife under the hedgerows. Lapwing returned to the meadows, curlews to the moor and oystercatchers to their ritual of picking over stones in the beck. A family of house martins came back from their African winter. They renovated their old nests in the corners of the upstairs windows of our cottage. Later in the summer we'd hear the young birds screaming with hunger, their parents flying in and out, frantic to feed them.

Then spring weather waned into the first overcast weeks of June. It rained so much that we hardly played out at all after school. Rain beat the blossom from the trees and we trod it underfoot. The lanes filled with the damp musk of elder-flower. On the fine days, tractors criss-crossed the village, leaving trails of slurry or silage from farm gates to fields that lay drenched in green.

The boy next door didn't go to school, though we learned not to envy him for that. Sometimes we saw the pale oval of his face pressed against the windows of the big house. Whether he was wistful or not we couldn't tell; his face showed no emotion. With his white bandage he reminded me of the picture of an Indian prince in the encyclopaedia at school. It was an unlikely setting for a prince, though. He should have been reclining in a jewelled sedan chair or swaying along on the back of an elephant under a fierce sun. Instead, rain trickled against the windows and ran down the roads, reflecting the grey light of a northern summer. And I knew that his turban was only there to hide the wound in his head. It gave him a mystical quality, a connection with another realm. As if he lived half in this world and half in the world of shadows that lay beyond; half in this life and half in the life everlasting.

The boy's house had a classical frontage and pillars like a Greek temple. It had once belonged to the local doctor who'd also owned the first motor car in our village. My grandfather had worked as his driver and we had a picture of him with his flat cap, moustache and leather puttees, standing with a hand on the bonnet of an Austin Seven. He'd learned to drive in the Royal Engineers during the Great War, fought the Turks in Mesopotamia, and died on a motorcycle when my father was still a boy. The rest was all forgotten, sunk into the past. Our house was a rented cottage, built next to the big house where the boy lived. Square set, with four windows and a door it was just like a child's drawing of a house. It had an outside toilet and no bathroom and the lime-washed walls were yellow with damp. When plaster fell from the walls we could see the horsehair beneath. The road went on past our front door. It ran over the fells to the next village and the next. It held the pull of distance, of everything beyond our valley, of the faraway country where my mother was born. Once, when a letter arrived from Italy, she cried in the kitchen and we squabbled over the stamps.

 
The wet weather set in for weeks. The road gleamed with water, slate roofs shone with reflections of the sky and the kitchen garden became completely overgrown. My father would stand at the kitchen window, shaking his head and pulling at his ear. After which, he'd pick up the newspaper and lose himself in the sports pages. He'd once been a keen cricketer. On Saturday afternoons he'd wander down to the local ground to watch our village team play, shaking his head at the softness of youth. Now he was a quarryman, drilling holes for charges and blasting out the limestone cliff that ate into the hillside at Horton. The hollow curve of rock resembled the inside of a skull picked clean. The stone was broken by hand and hauled onto conveyer belts for machines to crush.

It was a record year for slugs and snails. They fed unhurriedly on our vegetable patch, turning cabbages and lettuces into a fine lace of greenery and then into slime. My father caught hundreds of them in jam jars filled with beer that he cadged from the pub. He sank them level with the ground, then slugs and snails, avid for the stale beer, were drawn in. They drowned there and stank until he emptied them onto the compost heap. We hated the slugs, but pitied the snails with their beautifully turned shells. Their intelligent heads searched ahead of their armoured bodies, pilgrims of the vegetable world, carrying their houses wherever desire took them. Or until a thrush's beak thrashed them against the stones of the path. Or until they slid, unsuspecting, into the beer traps.

Wet days dried up, but the inclement weather dragged on into the strangest summer. Days were overcast, pregnant and menacing, threatening us with storms that hovered but never came. There was a heaviness in the afternoon air. Lapwings questioned the dusk with broken cries. Electricity seemed coiled in the atmosphere, which thickened as we drew on it with an almost tangible effort to breathe. Each evening my father came home late from the quarry, exhausted, his work clothes dark with sweat. We would already have eaten with our mother, so he'd collapse into a chair, bolting his tea from a plate balanced on his knees before falling asleep to the voices on the radio or the television news. His white hair drifted over his forehead, his overalls hung at the back door of the flagged kitchen, reeking of the dust that would choke his lungs and kill him in the end.

Now each day passed in charged suspense. Tension sparked between children, arced between husbands and wives. There were quarrels in the street, raised voices behind drawn curtains at night. The whole village sweltered in expectation. Still the boy's face came and went at the window of the big house, seeming to float under its swaddling bandage. Then one night a storm broke and my sister Maddy and I huddled together at the foot of our bed watching lightning ripen and flicker beyond the line of hills. We pretended to be terrified, hysterical in the sudden frisson of electricity. But it was pure release.

The sky flashed over with brilliant blue light and rain slammed the window sashes. We dozed off to sleep as the storm subsided and were woken by a huge thunder-crack that brought our mother to the bedroom door to soothe us. A tree was hit three fields from the house and in the morning we rose to its white-splintered wound. A blackbird was singing into a new day. Sun had already begun to warm the freshened air. Summer began all over again: days of warmth and light in which the gardens were gradually brought back under control. Grass was mown, weeds pulled, and what had survived of the vegetables lined up in neat rows. A robin came to our garden and fed on a glut of caterpillars, flicking its beak like a rapier, much to my father's approval. There was a sense of return. A sense that whatever had brought us close to the edge of ourselves had retreated.

 
That year we couldn't afford a holiday at Bridlington or Scarborough and so spent hours in the garden skipping with a length of washing line or gathering elder blossom to make our witches' brews. We went on expeditions as far as the ford and the clapper bridge beyond the village, taking picnics of jam sandwiches and pretend lemonade, which was really water with a spoonful of sugar dissolved in it. Sometimes we heard the hooter from the quarry, then the dull crumpling of rock under the explosion.

My grandmother – my father's mother who lived in Skipton – came to stay in July and for two weeks there was a smell of boiled sweets and the whisky she sipped from a flat brown bottle. My grandmother insisted on lighting the fire and sat in front of it knitting up balls of fusty wool that she'd rescued from other garments, shaking her head at the ways of her foreign daughter-in-law. She flattened her name –
Maria
–taking all the music out of it with her heavy vowels. She wanted waiting on night and day, calling from the parlour for someone to help her hank the wool or bring her a cup of tea. She'd gone bitter with age, my father said: adding mysteriously that it was one of two ways. Nan slept in our bed and Maddy and I shared an old iron put-up bed downstairs where we could hear my father coughing and grumbling at my mother in the room above.

Then Nan went home, pressing her cold face to ours as the train drew into Settle station. We were alone again. But the boy from the big house was gone, too. When I asked my mother where he was, she said that he'd been taken back into hospital to see if anything more could be done. I was almost twelve and my body had begun to surprise me. I'd grown two inches in a year. After the summer I'd be going up to the high school, but where would the boy be? The thought of those long shadows pulling at him made me shudder. And that other thing, growing inside him, taking him over, bullying him out of this life into whatever lay beyond.

When the boy was brought home in an ambulance the neighbours gathered in doorways, peered from behind net curtains, pretending not to watch. There was a shaking of heads that seemed half pitying, half vengeful. The boy's father was a solicitor in Bradford, travelling each day to work in his black Rover. The boy's mother had once been a singer, or so we were told, though I'd never heard her sing. She had a long, graceful throat just like a bird. Like the spotted flycatcher that came to our garden, flitting in intricate figures of eight from the electricity cables, elegant and alert to every insect that moved. It was the same alertness I'd seen in our cat when it heard the young martins crying from their nests and sat expectantly, trying to figure out a route that would take it from drainpipe to rooftop to window ledge. But the boy was home and the village held its breath.

 
One day, about a fortnight after the boy arrived back, my mother announced that we were to go to his birthday party. His mother had sent an embossed card to invite us, along with half a dozen other children from the village. We were buttoned into our best frocks; our hair braided into pigtails and tied up with little scraps of satin ribbon. I wore the blue leather shoes that we'd bought in Skipton the previous summer and that were getting too small for me now. My job was to carry the boy's present, wrapped in special paper with a pattern of blue-winged swallows.

‘What is it, Mum? What're we giving him?'

‘It's a book.'

She paused to remember the title.

‘It's called
Wind in the Willows
. Very nice, with pictures.'

My mother pressed my hair into place.

‘No use giving the poor lad toy, so I though a book would be best. Now,
velocemente
!'

A book would be best
. I liked the phrase. I was thinking about it when Maddy snatched it from my hands and held it up.