Looking Down (26 page)

She sat, reaching into the rainproof pocket for a cigarette. A crushed packet emerged. He shook his head at the offer and lit hers.

‘Haven’t done that in a while,’ she said.

She puffed. He watched. Cigarettes somehow belonged indoors.

‘I could see it. Just. You’re right, Doc. It would be bloody difficult to see from land, well guarded, but your man Edwin misses the point. He’s been guarding it on the land side, but you could always see it from the sea. And if it gets built over time, then someone would have seen. A boy, a fisherman, someone. The birds would be black against white: they’d be clear as daylight from the sea. I wonder if Edwin thought of that. No one could guard them from the sea.’

Then, as an afterthought, she added, ‘I think this was where they came in. Down there, you could get a boat in, down there.’

She ground out the cigarette, making him wince. No litter on cliffs, please.

Close by the other landmark, he had pointed out the small fishing boats, bobbing optimistically, minnows against the ferry and its wake, like a plume of feathers cutting a white swathe across the water, a flotilla of birds surrounding it. It was she who had observed how awful to be on a fishing boat, constantly bombarded by hungry seagulls, desperate for the catch. She saw what he had never noticed.

Then came the sound of the hovercraft, a droning, mysterious echo, cutting in and cutting out, invisible, mysterious, forlorn. It died away, leaving a strange, maddening vibration.

‘She wanted to go home,’ Sarah said. ‘Imagine it, being here, looking for a way home. Listening to that sound. Knowing your way home began
here.
You’ve nothing and no one, except some stranger you’ve found, or thought you’d found. A little help: not enough. And you hear that noise. Homecoming noise. Homegoing noise. You want to go home. You see someone you’ve seen before. Someone who brought you
in.
And can take you
out.
And with that noise in your ears, you run towards him.’

John could not follow what she was talking about, although he listened.

‘Did you see the ravens?’

She roused herself and shivered.

‘I saw the nest. But it’s no home. It’s empty. They’re dead or flown. And your man, Edwin, is down on the rocks. Doesn’t look dangerous to me. Go and look.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yes, you can. You must.’

He crawled towards the overhang; she held his feet. Go on, go on. Looked over further than he had before. Saw an empty nest, and down on the plateau where he had seen the ravens feed, Edwin, half naked, still with the scarf round his neck. Without the sound of the sea, his howls of despair could have reached the moon.

‘Come on,’ Sarah said. ‘We’d better go. There’s a man who needs company. He might not want it, but he needs it.’

Looking back, it seemed to have taken breath-filled hours to reach him.

John would never understood how Sarah found the way, as if she knew it all the time. As if she had an instinct for the path.

The tide was low, exposing dark grey rocks, constantly damp with water. Shapeless boulders, not yet worn smooth, the untidy detritus of the fallen cliff, the furthest away of them interspersed
with pools. Edwin sat among the grey, looking to John as if he might be waiting for the tide to come back and carry him off. Sarah was scrambling around the jagged clumps adroitly, while he foolishly tried to climb over, until he followed her example, marvelling how easy it was. The view from above was deceptive. Then, as they drew closer, John saw Edwin stand, and, in a gentle but powerful underhand throw, lob a black bundle far over the spreadeagled rocks, into the sea. The black bundle sailed serenely, with a brief spreading of wings, as if it was flying, then landed in the distant water, silently.

Edwin’s bare torso was streaked with brown mud, water and white clay. He wiped his arm across his face. The arm was raw with grazes and covered in bird faeces: John could imagine the smell of him. Then Edwin leant back against the rock, where his shirt hung, surprisingly tidily, as if to dry, while the rest of him was soaked. He scratched at the grazes on his arms, making them bleed. The sun gave pale warmth: John thought of hypothermia and shock. Sarah reached him first.

So much for wanting company. He seemed impervious to the presence of anyone else, unsurprised, careless, sobbing steadily. A dead raven chick with open beak and soaked feathers lay at his feet, enmeshed in a piece of net.

Sarah stood back, gazing at the scarf round Edwin’s neck, balancing her dancer’s feet on a rock, so she stood higher than they.

John was right, Edwin smelled like a sewer. He had slumped, raised his pale blue eyes to John’s face, registered his presence, stared vacantly and then looked away, wiping mucus from his nose. John waited for him to speak.

‘Fucking eejit,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Fucking, fucking eejit. Never thought they’d come in by the sea. Should’ve known, me more than anybody. You can land here. Robbers, with a fucking net. Climb like monkeys.’ His voice broke. ‘They’ve gone, Doc, they’ve gone. Two dead, they got caught in the net, and the
others will die. The chicks’ll
die
 . . . they needed a few more days, that’s all. Even a day. Was it you, Doc, was it you?’ John shook his head.

‘Course it wasn’t you. You never do nothing, you. Sad bastard you.’

‘I didn’t tell anyone, Edwin. When did it happen?’

‘Dunno. Last night, this morning. Came here at midday, brought food. Looked for hours, waded out. Found the net, and the parents. Choked in the net. Stupid. All dead and gone. They’ll never come back.’

He was shivering uncontrollably. Sarah’s voice came clear from behind them.

‘You
should
have known, shouldn’t you? That someone might come by sea. You lead them in, don’t you?’

He looked at her with complete indifference. She simply did not matter. A voice, not a presence, puzzling him with irrelevancies.

‘Yes I did, but it wasn’t them. Who cares about a boatload of fucking foreigners if they give you money? Easy to get in here, if you’re careful. But I signalled them to stop. What would they want with ravens?’

‘You’re getting cold, Edwin,’ John said as gently as he could. He was not feeling kind, felt cold and determined and revolted. He could have been in the prison cells, facing a man who had murdered and eaten the body, someone who stared at him with these livid pale eyes, full of self-inflicted damage, murderous sinner.
I think this is where they came in. What had she said?

Hypothermia. Edwin had been out in the rock pools, looking for the corpses he had found, no doubt. Stripped to the waist and soaked to the buttocks, for hours, covered in bruises. The water was freezing. Peed in his trousers. In a bad way, but John could not feel pity.

‘You had something for me, Edwin. Something you promised you’d give me. Remember?’

Edwin fished in the pocket of his trousers, wet against his thighs and tight to his shivering skin. His fingers seemed numb. Then both hands went uncertainly to the scarf round his neck. He fumbled to untie it. The twist of the thing was elaborate, but he managed, with his fumbling fingers. Got out a small chain with a small medallion from deep within the wet cloth, handed it across. John took it, and clasped it in his palm. It was warm and wet, felt like a talisman.

‘They took it off her,’ Edwin said. ‘The ravens took it. Dropped it down here. Found it. Must’ve wanted it for the nest.’

Then he began to sob again, racked with weeping, his thin, tensile body bent against it, his eyes on the dead chick, his callused fingers with their long nails scratching at his face.

John clutched warm, wet metal. He did not give a shit about Edwin. The smell in his nostrils was foul; he could see Edwin’s long fingers, playing with the scarf. Ligature, hiding place, ornament, rope. He hated Edwin with every ounce of his own bone marrow, wanted to leave him to be reached by the tide. Washed away, obliterated, cleaned of the ordure from the dead birds he had cradled, cleansed of the burden of identity he had worn round his neck. Something he had found, and kept, the bastard.

Sarah had climbed down off her rock. John clasped his talisman, watched her pick up Edwin’s shirt, take the phone out of the pocket, look at it, stick in her own back pocket and fold up the shirt, as if she was at home doing laundry. Her auburn hair had come free of the band that tied it back and frizzed round her head like an angry halo. Edwin’s sobbing went back to howling. His feet were immersed in cold, cold water. The tide was coming back. He looked immovable and deathly pale.

John loathed him at that moment. A violent hatred that made him want to strike, mixed with a terrible, physical repugnance that made him want to vomit.

You stinking bastard. You knew. You had her necklace, the one in
the picture, all the time. You had it, they had it. Stuff for the nest.

He opened his palm and looked at the medallion held on the cheap chain.
15 Cram Mans W1 0207
 .  .  .  On the back, the letter M was scratched. He felt a great gulp of disappointment. He had wanted a name. Like there had been on his dog when it went over the cliff. Wanted, wanted, something more, looked again. Salt spray hit his face: breeze was beginning, propelled by the tide. Conditions changed rapidly here. He read the inscription on the medallion again, feeling his own blood run cold. Richard’s address, pressed into his palm on a card; Sarah’s also, again delivered on a card. They had both given him cards, with that address.
15 Cram Mans W1.
Home.

An abbreviated address, but one he had learnt by heart. He stood completely still, swayed by a torrent of anger. The girl
lived
with them, was theirs. They would have known all along who she was: Richard, Sarah, too. That was why Richard had befriended him. That was why Sarah took him in. That was why she was here. To hide what they both knew.

He felt sick, turned towards Edwin. Sarah was beside him, ignoring the smell and the sobs and the slime of him. She was pressed against him, arms round his neck, his arms round her waist, hooked into the belt of her perfect, soaked, discoloured trousers, and she was embracing him, warming him, like a lover. C’mon, Edwin, she was crooning. Get warm. Come with me, and he was clutching to her, pulling her hair, almost dragging her down if she had not been, subtly, stronger. This way, Ed, this way, this way. They’ll come back. Big boy Edwin. Fuck the bastards, come with me. He clutched like a limpet and let her lead, back over the rocks, stumbling and crying. She managed him like a puppeteer, carrying his shirt, and the dead chick raven wrapped inside. She was as filthy as he was, by now.

John found himself stumbling after. Full of overpowering disgust. How could she? If Edwin had wanted to kiss her, she
would have let him. He slobbered; they were half carrying one another, lightweight, she was, until they were beyond the tide and facing the valley above. Stumbling on behind, John choked on disgust.

‘Help me,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s ill.’

He shook his head.

The sun had declined and the wind grew as they got to the top of the cliff. The sweet nothings of the sea resumed and nothing else could be heard, except her crooning voice. Edwin and she, joined at their slim hips, entwined, he trailing behind. Edwin needed warmth and she supplied it.

She had lost that fancy rainproof, but her feet stood firm. She found the car first. Stood, with him clasped like a limpet, holding on, locked into her body, like a corpse in rigor mortis. John caught up. The fresh breeze made his thick hair stand on end. He was so angry, speech seemed impossible. Angrier, because she was probably right. There might have been no other way to move him. She had done what he could not, in common humanity, but she had lied.

‘You bitch!’

The body locked into hers shivered less, the skin clammy, where he touched to feel for the pulse.

‘You knew all the time who she was. Did she belong to you? Or Richard? Did you come here to hide what he’d done? She was yours. She came from your house. Did you send her away? Was she Richard’s?’

She tried to shake her head, but Edwin’s fist was somehow locked in her hair. She did not seem to mind. It did not seem to limit her capacity for calm speech, and made him despise her even more.

‘You’ve got some of that wrong, Doc, you really have. Start the car, and get some heat. Otherwise he’ll die. He’s only a man and he’s sick. And we need him alive, Doc, we really do.’

Her eyes were colder than ice. He had never noticed the colour, remembered warmth. Ice chips.

He started the car and got a blanket from the back.

Watched them in the rear-view mirror as he drove back to town. She still held Edwin, calming him. Reacting only to grief.

He wondered at her. She would have done that for any man. Whoever he was; whatever he had done.

It was a strange sensation, to be holding a man, like a lover. Steven could not remember ever having done it before. The fierce huggings of boys on a playing field had never been for him. He was always the loner, the one with the funny hand who climbed instead, never one for touching. And now he was seeing himself in the mirror, embracing a man who might have been his father, with feeling. There was such a contrast between this and his last embrace, it made him blush.

First, embrace the naked wife, and then the fully clothed husband, but this was not an amorous embrace. Steven had been following her in to say goodbye, when he had seen Richard, clinging to the desk with his legs buckling beneath him, caught him beneath the armpits, lowered him to the ground and knelt behind him, pressing the man’s head between his knees. Lilian was kneeling, patting her husband’s hand and begging him to respond. Fritz stood above them, wringing his hands.

‘I think it might be stroke, Mr Steven. He had one before. Why did they hit him? Not hit hard.’

Richard stirred, making small protesting sounds.

‘I don’t know why anyone should hit him. Can you call an ambulance and the police?’

Richard was mumbling, trying to move, a strong man, fighting demons and unconsciousness.

‘Police?’ Fritz repeated.