All nightmare long, p.17
All Nightmare Long, page 17
But when Alf stood, holding his knees and groaning but actually looking fit and lithe, he frowned at Andy, shielding his eyes from the blazing sun. For a while he just stared at him, looking him over as if trying to match him with a mental photofit.
“Andy,” Alf said, nodding slowly. “Nice to see you.”
“You too, Alf. I’m here ’til late tomorrow, maybe we’ll chat again.”
“Maybe,” Alf said, and he crossed the road, mounted his bike and pedalled away without once looking back.
Left alone, Andy leaned back in his seat and looked around the village square, but it suddenly seemed like a strange place. He saw more of the new than the old, and he was sad at the changes rather than nostalgic for the places and features he knew. He finished his second coffee and stood, ready to walk across the village to the guest house on the outskirts. It was the old station house. Trains no longer stopped in Tall Stennington.
As he walked he started to sweat. The afternoon sun skimmed over the rooftops and probed beneath the trees overhanging the road. Houses became more occasional, and he waved at a couple of people working in their gardens. One waved back.
The skin of his face and balding scalp was tight, sore to the touch, and hot. He’d never learn. Should have used sun cream. He always seemed to burn more easily since that time in the pillbox.
Walking home through the woods, he’d been more afraid of being told off than he was worried about the damage to himself. Joe had held his arm and guided him along the paths, and Kai had kept his distance, staring at the boys wide-eyed. It’s the shock, Joe had said, trying to explain why the two of them weren’t screaming. And it’s not that bad. Like sunburn.
Close to the edge of the village, about to turn right into Station Road, he saw someone further along the road, a man seeming to intentionally match his pace. When Andy stopped, so did he.
A flush of recognition filled him, and he felt inexplicably nervous. “Joe,” he said.
“Joe?” Louder.
The man turned around. From this distance it was impossible to tell whether or not it was Joe, because age might have changed him so much. But the brash burn scar across the side of his face and head was obvious.
His image shimmered in heat haze, almost there, almost not.
Andy opened his mouth again but could not speak. The man stepped into a pathway between bushes and disappeared. “Joe,” Andy breathed, but he doubted it had been him at all. He blinked, feeling suddenly dizzied from the sun. Blood roared in his ears like flames. He would get to his guest house, take a drink, and indulge in a long cool shower.
Andy must have been sitting outside the coffee shop for longer than he’d remembered. The sunburn across his scalp and face was uneven, brighter on the right cheek and side of his nose, his right ear blazing red. He was angry at himself. After all this time he should know better.
Standing naked in front of the big bathroom mirror, his burned bits looked blood-red in the late afternoon light, the rest of his body so pale it was almost translucent. He looked after himself, and considering his age he’d held up well. Had a bit of a pot, and small love-handles, but he was wide across the shoulders and his chest was firm and muscled. Women should love him. He could hardly remember the last time he’d been with one.
He dressed in fresh tee-shirt and jeans and slipped on his walking boots. It was early evening now, and he had a meal booked at the Farmer’s Arms at eight o’clock. Still over an hour to kill, and he was bored of sitting in the room on his own.
Really, he knew where he was going even as his feet took him there. He walked back through the village, past the square and church and towards the new estate on the other side. The air was heavy and still with summer heat, and sound didn’t seem to carry far. A few cars and vans passed along the road, pedestrians plodded lethargically around the village, but Andy felt very much alone.
Memories leapt out like teasing friends trying to startle him.
Joe and him playing with magnets outside the small industrial estate, rolling up iron filings and making patterns with them across the metal-clad gates.
Throwing knives at the big oak at the edge of the cricket field, trying to get them to stick. Joe had cut his thumb open with one throw, but his knife had quivered in the trunk, and he’d talked about how his blood would always be in the middle of the tree.
Mrs Chambers leaning from her front window and shouting at them when they’d fired their water pistols at the cat bathing in her front garden. Andy had fired a daring shot across the garden at her, to Joe’s gasp of delight, but lucky for him it hadn’t found its target.
Falling off his bike on the tight bend outside the village shop, skinning his knees, going home crying and watching his mum picking out grit with tweezers.
Letting off a smoke bomb by the bridge over the small stream.
Mandy Bucknall smiling at him as she rode by on her pony. She had been his first crush, their two-year age gap an eternity.
By the time he reached the new estate he was awash in childhood memories, and he jogged through to the field and woodland beyond so that he did not lose them.
Approaching the woods, he saw movement ahead of him, beneath the trees and away from the new path that had been formed. A shadow shifted. He shielded his eyes against the sun burning low above the tree line, squinted, and saw the figure again. It was moving further away from the path and deeper into the woodland, and just as it passed out of sight it turned to look back at him.
“Joe!” Andy called. “Wait! It’s me, Andy!”
Joe or not, he did not wait. Moments later the movement ceased, and even though Andy ran the last hundred metres and stood at the new wooden fence between field and woods, there was no sign of anyone beyond.
“Damn it,” he muttered. It troubled him that Joe didn’t want to speak. Or maybe it wasn’t Joe at all. But the burns, he thought, remembering the pink burn scar he’d seen across that guy’s face earlier. It must have been Joe. Mustn’t it?
He entered the woods through the new gate and walked along the path, and soon he was keen to get off the beaten track. He didn’t recognise anything about the place now that it had been tamed, and he wanted to get in among the trees, where the bluebells were just fading away and his shoes would get covered in dust. Most of all, he didn’t want to meet anyone coming the other way. This was his time, his memory, and he wanted to live it mostly alone.
Mostly. Because he also wanted to look for Joe. His old friend must have seen him earlier, and again just now, and if that were the case then perhaps he was following him. Could someone walking ahead be following? Andy didn’t know, but the coincidence was too great.
He pushed through a bank of ferns and emerged into a shaded part of the woods that he remembered well. A dried pool was soft with a carpet of lush green moss, and he walked slowly in case there was still any water or deep mud there. It was only during the summer that this pool dried up completely, and it had been a hot one.
Really hot. Sweat dribbled down his sides and back. His sunburn hurt, even in the shade beneath the trees, and he wondered whether he should have used some moisturiser.
“Joe,” he said, pausing, surprising himself with the utterance. Even hearing the name spoken aloud provoked memories that brought tears to his eyes. He walked onwards, avoiding places where he could see new pathways cut through the woodland like pale scars on a rugged face. Some places were so familiar that he had to stop and stare. Time had worked on the woods in the three decades since he had last been here—many trees had fallen, and new ones grown in their place—but he still knew the place so well. The woods were timeless, and thirty years were barely the flutter of the last leaf to fall before winter.
Eventually he found the pillbox. It was buried even deeper beneath undergrowth. Someone must have planted rose bushes around it some time ago, and they had gone wild, twisting and merging with the forest’s natural plant life to form a thorny tangle. Though he circled it several times he saw no easy way through. He had mixed feelings about that. It was good because it meant that local kids didn’t use it anymore. But that also saddened him, because coming in here and having adventures, exploring places like this, was what kids should be doing. Now it was all computer games and TV.
He was also disappointed because he thought that perhaps he’d have liked to have gone inside.
Joe was watching him through the trees. Andy caught sight of him and held his breath. He was like a tree himself, motionless and expressionless, staring across at Andy as if he had no real thoughts in his mind, no words on the tip of his tongue.
“Joe!” Andy called. His old friend was a hundred metres away, visible between trunks because he wanted to make himself so. His image shimmered in the afternoon heat. “Wait there, I’ll come and . . .”Andy hurried away from the pillbox, but as he left he felt a vicious burning sensation across his arms and neck, his face, his scalp, like the memory of flame. It scorched. He gasped, and when he wiped his hands across his face and head, his skin was tight and hot.
He smeared sweat, surprised at how much he was perspiring.
Looking back he saw that he’d shoved past a bulge of nettles growing beside the pillbox. He smiled through the tingling, burning pain, remembering when Joe had fallen into the stingies that day. The last day they had been together.
Joe was gone. Where he’d been standing Andy now saw only the pale trunk of a silver birch. Maybe he’d never been there at all.
Wincing against the pain from the nettles and the pulsing ache of sunburn, he started to make his way back out of the woods. He was hungry. It would be dark soon. And suddenly, he no longer wanted to be there when shadows began to grow.
Just ahead of him, visible several times through the tree, the shape that might be Joe. Why his old friend was doing this, Andy couldn’t figure out. Didn’t he want to speak to him? Or perhaps he was as much a joker now as he had been back then, and he was just attempting to spook him.
The pain of the stings and sunburn continued to trouble him, and now and then it made him feel sick. He moaned against it, as if noise might drive it away. Blood pulsed in his ears, and then roared, blurring his vision with dancing shapes that twisted trees and bushes, catching the sun and concentrating it in flaming arcs that seemed to hang like giant spiderwebs all around. He reached out to lean against a tree but drew his arm back, afraid that he might set it on fire.
“Joe!” he shouted. “Joe, help me! It hurts!” He’d screamed the same all those years ago when the lighter fuel ignited, or thought he had.
Andy tripped and hoped he was falling into a stream. But it was the green flow of more brambles and nettles that caught him, piercing skin, speckling mild poison that added to the fire. He dragged himself upright. What was happening to him?
“What’s happening to me?” he screamed. Through his swimming, burning vision he saw that shape again, closer than it had ever been and gesturing him forward. He followed because he could think of nothing else to do. Why weren’t his clothes burning beneath such intense heat?
It’s just the sunburn and the stings, he thought, an allergic reaction. But he didn’t want to collapse out here, not alone, and not when he’d done his best to avoid the paths that people would undoubtedly stick to.
He staggered through the undergrowth and kicked against a wood-ants’ nest, backing away quickly even as he felt the first few acid stings on his lower legs. The shape—
“Joe? Joe? Joe?”
—waved its arm furiously and moved ahead of him. Andy followed, gasping against the fire that seemed to be deep within him now, singeing his organs, set deep in his bones where it might burn forever. And when he saw where the shape was taking him, the first glimmer of calm touched his skin.
The pillbox was no longer overgrown and inaccessible. Even with his senses reeling he was able to find that path beaten into the brambles, turned left and right to hide it from the casual observer. He wasn’t sure whether or not that shape had gone ahead of him, but just as the entrance came into view, he saw a shimmer of movement as something passed inside.
As Andy stepped over the threshold and entered the pillbox, the blinding pain of fire seemed to lift from his body and seed itself inside.
Small flames flickered over the floor, walls and ceiling, following the swirled lines where Joe had squirted lighter fluid. Andy could smell the tang of burning material and hear the gentle pop-pop of discarded litter shrivelling beneath the heat.
“Joe?” he said. But though there was a vague shape in the opposite corner, turned to face the junction of two walls as if ashamed at what it had done, Andy no longer wished to see its face.
As the heat inside him dissipated to nothing and the fires began to grow, he wondered whether he had ever left that pillbox, or if he had spent his life nightmaring about it.
If he kept the flames at bay, he would never have to find out.
FLOTSAM
Since her husband had died, Debbie always tried to sleep on the beach. The feel of sand slowly giving out the day’s heat mimicked his warm touch. The smell of drying seaweed and decaying crabs and fish reminded her that he was dead. The constant hush of waves onto the shore might have been him sighing in her ear. An unseen creature’s delicate legs trailing across her stomach were his fingers soothing her skin, and the stark sea breeze preceding dawn was his last gasp of air before he went under that final time. Everything was Marc. All that she had known, and all that she would ever know of him again.
She could never abandon that.
But three years is a long time. Plenty long enough to get over things, her friends had tried to tell her, before they ceased being her friends. And more than long enough for others to start seeing her in a different light. Mad old sea woman. The lonely mermaid. Beach bitch.
She’d heard it all, and cared for none of it. The sea entranced and intimidated her, and sometimes she went a whole day without even remembering Marc at all. Beaches became home. Sand became habit. Life wasn’t always about mourning and loss. Sometimes, life was driven by the tides.
By day she would sell homemade jewellery to tourists from the small home they’d once shared. It backed onto the beach and was becoming ever-more rundown, its wooden boarding scoured by the salt breeze. The sea eroded her home just as it had eroded her life.
She never told the tourists her story.
Some nights when Debbie slept on the beach, she spoke to him. But the times she spoke out loud were becoming less frequent. Memories were a form of communication, more personal and internalised. Sometimes it felt like they were impressing themselves upon her rather than forming from the shadowy depths of her own experience. On occasion, though, it simply felt good to talk.
“See the stars?” she would ask, lying back in her sleeping bag and tracing one hand across the clear sky. In moments she swept whole galaxies aside. Marc had loved looking at the stars. Sometimes she’d find him lying on the decking at the bottom of their garden, mildly drunk and grinning in delight as he stared, and stared. She’d join him for a while, but the cold always got to her, or the thought of unseen insects and other crawling things exploring her loose night clothing. A few times it had been his hands doing the exploring, and she had stayed with him a while longer. He had always insisted that she sat astride him, so that he could see her against the universe as they made love.
Other times she would say, “It’s so cold tonight,” wrapping herself tighter, curling up in the sleeping bag so that she looked like a giant shell among the dunes.
“Maybe I should go home.” She said that less frequently. It was a strange concept, when home was rarely more than a mile or two along the coast. But sleeping out here, beside the sea, beneath the stars, felt like a way of honouring her husband’s memory. Returning home to sleep would be moving on. She was not certain she was ready to move on so far.
So she bought thicker sleeping bags for the winter, and invested in heavy duty tents, and weathered the storms of water and wind and people’s scorn. And even after three years, on occasion she still spoke to Marc.
Debbie had never expected a reply.
The bottle was wedged between two rocks at the edge of a rock pool. It was almost buried in sand, and she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t slipped on a slick stone. She did not quite fall, but her foot splashed into the pool, water entering her boot. When she looked down she saw the opaque curve of glass. There was often glass on the beach, cruel edges smoothed by time spent washed back and forth across the sea bed. But this bottle was whole. Even more intriguing, it was sealed with a cork and wax sealant.
She tugged its neck. It came out of the sand with a slow pop, as if the beach did not wish to relinquish its grasp.
She held it up to the sunlight, trying to peer inside. The glass was cloudy, completely smooth, and speckled here and there with tough green algae. The seal appeared whole.
Tucking the bottle into her backpack, Debbie walked up the beach until she reached the first of the dunes. They were large here, frequented by dog walkers, runners, and lovers, and she sat atop one of the highest so that she could see all around. She loved the views over the water, the world at her back. Though familiar, they never grew boring.
Carefully, she worked at the wax seal around the bottle’s neck. When she could grasp the cork’s top she twisted, bottle one way, cork the other. It came out with a pop that reminded her of the beach giving up the bottle, though this was more musical. It sounded like a gasp of delight.
Inside the bottle, a single sheet of paper was rolled and tied with a grass-like twine. Excitement building, she tipped the bottle and caught the paper as it slipped out. The twine was old and crumbled beneath her fingernails. The paper was dry but brittle, and she unrolled it slowly to prevent damage.
