Loss of Separation (17 page)

'Why?' I asked.

'I look at myself sometimes, when I'm naked, and I don't recognise myself any more. I know I'm me - I know my eyes have not changed although much around them has, and, bar the new aches and pains, I feel the same, but... I feel like an impostor. I feel like someone came to me while I was in my hospital bed, comatose, and covered the real me with this... this full body mask.'

'Can I have some more whisky, please?'

While she refreshed our glasses I tried to think of something to say that might make her feel better. But I understood, and sympathised, with her for what she'd revealed about herself. We were strangers to ourselves. Our shapes had changed. Things were gone. Things were added. It would take a long time to become comfortable with our physicality again, if we ever would.

I moved, an involuntary shudder. I imagined my skeleton, white, basted in my juices, grinning. Trying out its new moves.

'I read somewhere that, roughly every seven years, our bodies replace their own skeletons. You know, the equivalent in new calcium. Bones and marrow and so on.'

'That doesn't exactly help with my identity crisis,' she said, but not without some degree of humour.

'Maybe it does,' I said. 'If you accept that we're changing all the time anyway. It's not like we're lizards, or anything, but we still shed our skins over time. You're not who you were ten years ago. Mentally, physically. All that remains the same is how you see the world and maybe not even that.'

'Eyes,' she said, and I had to look down into my glass because she'd said it hungrily, desperately, as if she were anxious for any buoy to hold on to, to keep her afloat.

'What is it you want me to do?' I asked. 'Why are you here, in Southwick? Is it the baby?'

She nodded. 'That, and other things. Kieran Love, from Ely. Seven months old. A weekend trip to the seaside with his parents. He was found broken over one of the wooden groynes on the beach. Stiff with cold and rigor. It was as if someone had tried to use him as a hammer to bash the groyne deeper into the sand.'

'Spare me the details,' I said and took another deep swallow of whisky. 'Jesus. Is it any wonder I never wanted children? How can you want children when there are people out there who will do this to them if they get even a moment's chance?'

She was watching me, waiting for me. I could almost hear her say it:
Go on, get it out of your system. And then we'll crack on. Then we'll get down to business. We have plenty of time.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

'It's okay. This is unpleasant stuff. I'm not looking for you to be Mr Ice.'

'What are you looking for? Why do you need my help anyway?'

'Because I've been watching you. I've seen you on the beach in the morning, burning those boxes. I've seen you in the bookshop, reading stuff.'

'You took that pamphlet.'

'I bought that pamphlet. What I'm interested in is tied up with Winter Bay and the battle that took place there on that one day.'

'That one day three hundred years ago.'

'This isn't like a stain on a rug. It doesn't wash out over time.'

I glanced around me as if I'd see the pamphlet among the pounds of loose paper lying on every available surface. There were maps and charts and grids drawn on tracing paper, broken-backed notebooks stuffed with co-ordinates and colour-coded diagrams and print-outs and clippings from newspapers yellowed with time. Two hefty external hard drives were plugged into the laptop and they blinked acid green colour across her desk, chuckling away softly in the background over the secrets that vibrated inside.

'You read it?' I asked.

'I read it, yes.'

'Someone had defaced it. Scribbled on the pages in pen. Something about children.'

'Would you like another drink?'

'I've had enough,' I said. I knew straight away that she hadn't seen what I'd seen. I hoped she'd simply taken no notice of it, or been so wrapped up in the prose that it hadn't even impinged on her consciousness, but it was unlikely. 'Can I show you?'

'I didn't see the words,' she said.

'Can I have -'

'Which doesn't mean that they aren't there,' she said.

We sat in silence for a short while. We both knew what she meant. She hadn't seen them because there were no words. But she believed that I'd seen them. Which meant that either I was crazy, or she was crazy. The likelihood was that we were both mad, our minds decayed after the long recovery from our respective accidents. Bits of us still lay on the roadside and on the car roof outside that hotel. Molecules shifted, torn away, re-positioned. The tiniest bits of the roadside were impacted into me. Minuscule flecks of cellulose from the car were under Amy's skin. We were composites. We were not merely of ourselves any more. We were less and more than what we once were.

God, I was pissed.

'Show me the pamphlet,' I said.

She pushed herself out of her chair and picked her way around various reference books on the floor to a box filed with the word CURRENT written on the spine. She extracted the pamphlet and, without checking for herself first, handed it over to me.

I flipped through the pages, hoping now that she was right, that there were no added words and that the pamphlet was just an ordinary, slightly dry account of a lethal coming together between Dutch and English ships in the North Sea. But there it was again. And my breath caught in my throat because it was written so hard into the paper that the point of the pen had gone through the page. How could she not see this?

I held it open and showed her, placed my fingernail beneath it.

'See?' I breathed. 'SUFFER CHILDREN... THEY WERE TAKEN! Can't you see?'

'It's not there,' she said, and paused, and smiled and said: 'For me, at least.'

'But I can see it.'

'You can see it. Have you seen anything else?'

I told her about the child I'd seen, alone, seemingly naked, at the end of the beach.

'The spot where you have your little fires?'

'You think that's significant?'

'Maybe,' she said. 'What else?'

I told her about the fishing trip I'd taken with Charlie, and the nasty little haul we'd landed.

'Where are the skulls now?' she asked.

'I don't know. Morgue? I don't know what the procedures are. They were old skulls. Hundreds of years old, they said. Maybe they're being carbon dated, or filed away in a museum cupboard.'

'I doubt it. I'd like to see those skulls.'

'I wouldn't know how to help you. We could go to the police, but I can't see them happily ushering you through to the room where they keep all the dead things, can you?'

'Take me to the place where you found them.'

'What, now?'

'It's light enough.'

'I don't have a boat.'

'Let's worry about that later.'

The rain had stopped when we went outside, the wind's threat receded. I was still mumbling and grumbling to put her off - it was warm and cosy in her flat, despite all the grim scribblings - but she seemed to be one of those people who lock on to an idea and refuse to let go, like the jaws of a pit bull. Light scored the sky; great streaks of ochre parting the night, widening, pulling it apart. The sea was flat. Massive oil tankers on the horizon looked like tiny cardboard cut-outs on a child's picture.

I was bone tired. The cold had not entirely been massaged out of my legs by the radiators in Amy's flat; now it raced back as if invited. There was movement down on the beach as we reached the stone steps above the promenade café and began to gingerly descend. An early-morning jogger perhaps, a brief flash of white, lumbering and stuttering over the uneven beach? A plastic bag blown by the wind? By the time we'd made it down to the sand, it was gone. A tree branch skinned of bark, polished and nude, was a limb pointing back to the marshes, as if it were trying to get me to return to the car, urge me back to sleep so that I might wake up to find everything was good again, how it should be.

'Who's Charlie?' she asked.

'He's a fisherman. He's lived here all his life. He sat with me a lot in hospital after I was found. Talked to me. I owe him my life.'

'Did you go out far?'

'Pretty far, yeah. Although you could still see the lighthouse. What about this boat? We're going to have to charter a trip. Not cheap.'

'We don't need a boat.'

We made our way along the sand until the light from the lighthouse was flaring periodically above our heads. She got me to stand with my back to the sea, looking up at the large, brilliant lens under the dome.

'Look at the lighthouse for a few seconds. Then I want you to close your eyes and think about what you saw out there, on the water. Let whatever it is that's in the dark make itself known to you.'

I didn't like the sound of that. She had her back to me, to the lighthouse, but the reflected shots of light from the sea, and the paling sky, turned her eyes into something inhuman. It was like watching something failed but dangerous trying to learn the skill of mimicry to better its chances at getting close to its prey.

To avoid this, I did as she asked and closed my eyes, even though it left me exposed to her.
She isn't the threat here,
I chided myself, although in answering that question, I'd posed myself another. I'd admitted to myself that there
was
a threat. I just didn't know what shape it had assumed.

I was back on the water but I wasn't aware of Charlie behind me - it was as if he was an actor awaiting his cue in the wings - or even the boat beneath my feet. I might have been little more than a disembodied eye, hovering above the waves, a camera filming a dramatic documentary.

I thought of the sea giving up its secrets. The bulging net. The little cluster of clean white skulls like a clutch of hideous eggs at the centre of all those scales and tentacles and slime. I heard again, impossibly, the distant thunder of horses' hooves. The same pattern as before: a strong, insistent canter and a ghost at its heels, much weaker, yet faster. I looked around but there was nothing but water. It must be thunder, then; weird, syncopated thunder. But there were no great stairs of cloud: only clear sky stretching to the horizon.

I heard the sound of those skulls skittering across the boards, saw the gleaming spheres and opened my eyes to see them represented in Amy's eyes, which were rolled back in their sockets. She was clutching the lapels of my coat. Her mouth was open and I saw the ring of her throat relax and contract as if she were about to gag. She was as exposed and as intimate as at the moment of an orgasm or a death rattle. I tried to shake her out of it but she was lost to whatever had unwrapped itself in her mind, or that I had passed on.

Then she returned, her eyes dropping back into the sockets of her face like ghastly slot machine windows.

'Are you all right?' I asked.

She turned and spat into the sand. Black blood.

'Christ,' I said. And then, again, with more urgency: 'Are you all right?'

She nodded, although such a movement in her seemed anything but positive. 'Give me a minute.'

I slowly coaxed her back to the stone revetment and sat her down on its cold, hard edge. She didn't seem to mind.

'What was all that about?'

'There were deaths here,' she said. 'Many, many deaths.'

Her face was threatening to collapse. There was deep woe underpinning her voice. Not the melodramatic stuff you see in attention-seekers bemoaning their crap marriages or crap jobs, but the kind of near panic that people can find themselves in when hit by bad news that they can do absolutely nothing about.

'We already know this,' I said. 'There was a huge naval battle out there. Heavy losses on both sides. Bodies were washing up on the beaches for days afterwards.'

She gripped my hand so forcibly I cried out.

'There were others,' she said. 'Others that suffered that day. All of the children were taken. Their parents watched them die.'

37

Paul... he is considerate lover. He takes time with me, because I find it hard to reach orgasm. Just like reaching. Stretching out arms. Tip-toe. Trying to get hand into cookie jar. I don't always get there, and he is upset by this, but I tell him not to be. I get as much pleasure out of seeing him climax as coming myself. I knew he would be gentle with me. He has good control of himself, unlike some lovers, selfish, racing to be finished. It's like he holds reins, can steady himself if it looks as though he is about to lose himself to the moment. His hands are soft, they were soft. He had beautiful hands, before. His nails always clean. I used to hate the boys in Odessa, home from the factory, and they were clean, they smelled of soap, but their fingernails were disgusting.

Paul. I wonder if he is still able to love me. He was so ruined. The doctors, they reassure me that everything is in full working order. Even if he ends up in wheelchair. We can still build family. Build family? Is that right? Like wall. Like house. And why not? Something secure and comforting. Somewhere to retreat to. Bosom of family. The heart, the hearth. Warm and safe. I remember in kitchen back home in Odessa, with my father, my dear
Tato
, just before he died. I don't remember face much, but I remember his arms around me as we sat by the logs burning in the stove. I remember the colour of his skin, and the hair poking out under the cuffs of his shirt. I remember his smell, and above all how comfortable he was. My tiny body was like last piece of the jigsaw puzzle that was him. I fit him. I press my ear against his chest and hear his heart trotting along, strong and healthy, like horses on the beach at Tenderovskiy Isla