Just in Case (16 page)

‘You’re mad.’

Peter grinned, punch-drunk on sea air.

Justin followed the path down to a shelf of shale. The wind felt quieter here, and he stopped at a rock pool, squatting to get a closer look. It was illuminated by slanting rods of sunlight and appeared still except for a slight ripple on the surface where the wind hit it. He felt the water; it was warm.

Justin lay flat and lowered his face to within an inch of the pool, imagining himself floating through the weeds. He breathed out gently, ruffling the surface, then held his breath, waiting for the water to clear. Through half-closed eyes, he projected himself down, down, down, until he was gliding, swimming through unexpectedly warm winter eddies, safe in his tiny, enclosed world.

There were dark-red anemones at the bottom, opening and closing slowly like mouths. They looked gentle and welcoming; he swam around and looked deep into one of them, stroking the velvet red flesh of its throat. At the base of a reed, a periwinkle glided, leaving a faint trail in the sand. Now he could see a small population of crabs tiptoeing back and forth with the soft rocking of the pool; now a handful of tiny minnows surrounded him, curious, bumping him with their weightless bodies.

A cloud covered the sun and Justin felt suddenly cold. He stood up and left the little ecosystem, following Peter’s footprints along the beach. He could see his friend walking along by the water again. Agnes was nowhere to be seen. Even the mile of curving bay showed no trace of her. Perhaps an invisible shining pit of pebbles had swallowed her up.

Justin stopped to watch a group of cormorants fish from a half-submerged boulder in the sea, and when he resumed his walk, Peter too had disappeared. It seemed ages before he and Boy found him again, unexpectedly, huddled in a sheltered dip between two dunes.

Boy flopped down in the sand, head diagonally across his front paws, and watched drowsily as Peter flipped the pages of a small, well-worn book on coastal geology.

‘Hi,’ said Peter, moving over to make a space for Justin. ‘I’m just reading about Baltic amber. Apparently this whole coast is littered with it. The book says people have been collecting it here for centuries, but I’ve been searching all day and can’t find any. It’s a strange little text, listen to this,’ he said, searching for a page. ‘It says: “Baltic amber, fifty million years old and full of fire; warm, and enduring like love”. Wonderfully romantic, don’t you think? Only I don’t know how to differentiate the stuff from plain old yellow stones.’

He poured a handful of yellow pebbles into Justin’s palm. ‘Hold them up to the light. If it’s amber, you can see through it.’

Justin held one after another up to the light. They were nothing but stones. ‘I wish we’d saved some of that picnic. I’m starving.’

‘Me too. I’m going to keep looking for amber. We don’t have to turn back just yet.’

He pushed himself to his feet and set off again, leaving Justin and Boy huddled together in the dip. The sun sat low in the sky, but the little sheltered spot was perfectly situated to trap what was left of the weak rays. Justin lay back against the bank of warm sand, dreaming of amber. The temperature would begin to drop soon; Boy was already wedged up against him for body heat.

A few minutes later he saw Agnes and Peter returning, walking close together. Agnes stopped occasionally to examine a shell or snap a picture of Peter, and Justin felt a wave of jealousy.

So that’s what this little outing was all about, he thought. Yet one more opportunity to remind me that anyone will do.

He flipped over, pressed his face downwards and blinked, feeling his eyelashes brush across the sand. Turning slightly, he could see Peter and Agnes squatting at the water’s edge, laughing. They didn’t look in his direction, and after a minute they passed out of sight. He could have kept them in his line of vision, but rejected the impulse.

Boy shivered and looked at Justin enquiringly.

‘OK,’ he sighed, unwilling to move from the safety of his secluded spot. ‘Let’s head back.’

He walked slowly, picking up every yellow stone he saw. Most remained stubbornly opaque in the sunlight; a few were translucent but heavy and cold. One by one he tossed them into the sea. He liked the hollow
bloop
they made as they broke the surface of the water.

It must be one of those tales, he thought, like mermaids singing.

As they neared the end of the beach, Justin drifted closer to the sea, where the pebbles glittered in the last low rays of the sun. And then without any signal or obvious sign of transformation, the beach was suddenly alight with fiery stones. Where seconds ago he had seen nothing, they now glowed against the opaque shingle like little beacons.

Hands trembling, Justin picked one up and held it to the light. The complex centre revealed itself at once. He closed his fist round the ancient drop of sap, smoothed by the sea and set alight by the sun. It was light and warm in his hand. In a burst of excitement, he picked up one after another until he held twelve glowing drops of flame. Each revealed a different internal landscape, from palest yellow to a reddish marbled gold.

And then the sun moved and they were gone.

He searched the shoreline, frantic, in vain. The sun had dropped below the horizon and the entire beach was thrown into shadow. Justin stood motionless, watching the glow fade from the sky, taking with it the last faint flickers of warmth.

Boy appeared at his side and he held the stones out to
the greyhound, who sniffed at them delicately, then turned away, unimpressed.

Justin stood cradling his handful of warm stones. Then he headed back towards Agnes through the fading light.

43

On the way home they stopped for dinner at a pub with dark varnished beams and flashing fruit machines. They found an empty table and ordered sausage and mash from the bar. The gas fire in the little saloon bar managed to throw out enough heat to make them drowsy. None of them felt inclined to speak, so they ate in silence.

‘Did you find your amber?’ Justin posed the question, through a mouthful of Agnes’s treacle pudding.

Peter reached into his pocket. ‘I guess I’ll have to come back. I found something that looks right, but I think it’s yellow quartz.’

Justin took the small yellowish stone from Peter. It looked as if you might see through it, but it was heavy and cold. Lifeless. He shrugged and gave it back.

They drove home in silence. Justin might have fallen asleep with Boy’s head in his lap, had it not been for the roaring of the motorway and the icy sliver of wind blowing down his neck through the loose window. Instead, he stared out into the blackness at the double pinpoints of
light travelling in the opposite direction and thought about amber.

Warmth, he thought. And brilliance. Transparency. Timing too. Peter telling him what to look for.

Fifty-million-year-old sap.

Five minutes of illumination.

The sun at just the right height.

Chance.

A series of events, combined to make a coincidence.

Leading to a revelation.

He could have walked on that beach forever without noticing its treasures. Perhaps his past and future were also hidden somewhere on it, carved on to a single pebble, a Rosetta Stone with the key to the whole of his existence. Perhaps all the answers lay dormant somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

Justin thought of all the events of his life, collecting and dispersing like a handful of dust. Things happened and didn’t happen a billion times a second.

How many events add up to a coincidence?

How many coincidences add up to a conspiracy?

‘Justin?’ Agnes called softly, searching for eye contact in the rear mirror. ‘We’re nearly home. Peter’s fast asleep. Why are you so scrunched up in the corner?’

He didn’t talk to Agnes about Boy and so he didn’t answer, just frowned in the darkness. He stretched his cramped muscles as best he could without disturbing his dog.

‘I’m so glad you came,’ she said, her voice intimate, despite the rattling car. ‘I knew you’d like it there.’

He nodded again, but inside he felt hard and cold as quartz.

Of course you knew I’d like it. You know so much about me, so much more than I do. You know what’s real and what’s not. What’s useful and what’s not. What endures and what’s just for one night. So many things you know about me.

Agnes stopped the car in front of Peter’s house and he woke up immediately, the sudden absence of racket deafening. They all squeezed out of the car and stood, dazed and a little awkward, by the front gate.

‘Good night,’ said Agnes, kissing Peter on the cheek. But Justin backed away, afraid of the smell of her hair and the feel of her skin. The two boys began walking stiffly up the path.

‘Justin!’ called Agnes after him, and he turned back. ‘Justin, please don’t be angry with me.’ She caught up and took his arm, pulling him close. He didn’t move away and they remained at an impasse a few seconds too long, unable to move forward or back until finally Justin pulled free, dug a piece of amber out of his pocket and placed it in her hand, closing her fingers around it.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Amber.’ Warm and enduring like love, he thought, his heart contracting.

Before she could say anything, he had disappeared into the house. Agnes sat in the front seat of her little car with
the amber in her hand for some time before starting the engine again.

Justin and Peter undressed at opposite ends of the room and turned off the lights without speaking. It was still early, but the long walk and salt air had left them feeling windswept and tired.

Peter fell asleep immediately and dreamt of a beach littered with fiery stones.

Justin returned to the warmth and safety of his rock pool and floated there weightless in the winter sunlight until dawn.

44

On the evening Agnes’s show was due to open, Ivan took the train up from London with a group of like-minded fashion types. He told them not to expect much: a small collection of photographs in Luton, ha ha. It was hardly going to set the world alight. But Agnes was his friend. There was, after all, such a thing as loyalty.

The Londoners arrived at Luton station like a flock of geese, squawking and huddling together in a noisy gaggle, pecking nervously at the disorientating suburban vision around them.

‘Dear, dear,’ Ivan said, eyebrow raised. ‘So this is what Kansas looks like.’

One of the stylists gripped his arm and wobbled slightly on her stiletto heels. ‘It’s called the suburbs, darling.’

‘Isn’t there some sort of government rescue initiative?’

‘Of course not. They like it like this.’

‘Impossible.’

The woman shrugged. And then with a great deal of vowing that they would never again leave the safety of the
big city, they piled into a small fleet of taxis and made their way to the gallery.

Agnes was there to greet them, wearing a short, sky-blue woollen pinafore shot full of tiny holes. Each hole was beautifully backed with red felt and stitched and finished in black surgical silk. On her head she wore a felt hat hung with tiny glass and metal charms. As she moved, she tinkled gently like a wind chime. A narrow unravelling scarf with a little glove at each end trailed down her back and on to the floor.

Ivan’s crowd sniffed grudgingly at her outfit and began to peer around.

Agnes had chosen her best photographs of Justin and blown them up to two-metre by one-metre panels. There were four sets of three panels, twelve portraits of Justin in total. Six pictures ran down each side of the gallery, the gigantic figures looming over the empty white space. On the far wall were three panels forming a triptych, like an altarpiece. The three panels in the triptych were photographs taken during the airport crash: melting windows and tangled limbs, burning metal, tormented faces, severed body parts, and Justin, always Justin. Justin smiling weirdly at the scene of the disaster. Justin confused, Justin angry, Justin lost. The vertical format meant that each photograph encompassed floor, windows and ceiling of the airport terminal. They gave her compositions a sense of spatial grandeur that brought to mind early Renaissance paintings.

Around the room, soft, featureless mannequins wore the clothes Agnes had made. They were fashioned like rag dolls out of white muslin and wore felt gloves in innocent bright colours, each with a ragged edge where it looked as if fingers had been severed. There were linen shirts with the arms torn off, pale bags lined in red silk that Agnes had pulled in long fraying streams through small slits in the surface. Sweaters and T-shirts were perforated, the holes stitched carefully along the edges with surgical silk and backed with red fabric.

It was beautiful. And deeply unsettling.

Justin arrived by way of the mall, where he had stopped to shop for his brother. He’d been on the verge of giving up the search, but today had girded his loins, braved the mall, and found exactly what he wanted. When he asked the shop to wrap it, he was directed to the queue at the Christmas wrapping station, where he waited half an hour with a dozen other disgruntled shoppers.

When finally he reached the front of the queue, the official wrapper took one look at his gift and demanded double payment. ‘It’s not regulation size,’ she said with distaste, ‘and it’s the wrong shape. And it won’t go in a bag, either.’

Next year, thought Justin, handing over his £4, I’ll get the kid a pile of bricks if it’ll make your job easier.

It was only after he left the mall that Justin realized he was stuck with the package for the evening. At more than a metre long, covered in reindeer paper and tied with a
huge green and silver bow, it would not contribute to the air of casual insouciance he had hoped to convey.

He met Peter and Dorothea outside the gallery. Peter had placed himself carefully in front of the title lettered on the front window, and a smiling Agnes Bee pushed through the crowd to greet them. She kissed Peter, but Justin took a step backwards, and Dorothea managed to make herself look unkissable. The atmosphere in the little group was tense; none of them quite dared look beyond Agnes to the walls, which left them nowhere to look but at each other.