See How They Run (5 page)

Beyond the horizon Ireland, and then nothing at all. Hotel Corvo loomed large and squat on the headland, dreamt about for years by an eccentric and then built as a castle, like so many seaside hotels from the beginning of the twentieth century. It would cost a fortune to build now, but in those days labour was
cheap. Lou remembered a fortress of a building,
servants in livery, maids in black dresses with white linen aprons and mop caps. There was a huge fireplace in the main hall, everything shone. Secluded alcoves, huge red sofas, newspapers and magazines from the
Country Life
sector. But there were bars down below for the locals too, and these had been very popular because they were far enough away from home: ideal for shenanigans, illicit meetings and male pursuits.

Old sea salts, tenor farmers stoked up on whisky,
posh retirees from the armed forces, young men
having a lark, they were all there. Mostly men in those days, though Saturday night dances flushed out some of the local girls.

So Big M said yes to Pryderi.
Let’s have some fun.
Posh little cocktail bar for the smart set and a lounge bar for the country set upstairs; a private bar for clubs and societies; a spit ‘n sawdust bar for the workers, a nightclub, a restaurant, and a nice little personal bar for Big M himself, hidden away in a cubby hole off the servants’ staircase...

So that’s what they did, off they went to Hotel
Corvo, and they celebrated their new pact. Big
dinner, posh nosh for family and friends. Pryderi sat next to his wife Ziggy, and Big M, in his best bib and tucker, sat next to Rhiannon, a nice mature lady but still pretty gorgeous. She and Big M hit it off immediately.
Phew!
said Pryderi,
this is going like a dream
.

Between courses, Rhiannon and Big M chatted, glanced at each other, joked a little. Both of them had some grieving to do. Sitting on clifftops in the sun, on pink slopes of thrift, letting time pass by.

She asked him what he planned.

He’d walk around on the shore, thinking. That was his plan. He would sit by the newly flowered gorse watching little green shield bugs drying out in the sunshine. Look at gannets plunging their yellow spears into the waves. Go swimming, watch the anemones going all shy when the tide turned. Feel the sand between his toes. Go crabbing, surfing, all the things he did as a kid. Let some time slip by, arrange headstones for his brother and sister, beautifully carved words on plain Welsh slate.

And her?

Something similar. Walk along the coastal path. Come to terms with the past. Watch the felucca clouds go by, since they were pilgrims too. Build up trade at the hotel, make enough money in summer to go travelling all winter. Have a nice easy life. No complications, she wanted no complications. None. And there would always be horses in her life; she rode every day if she could.

The meal went on for a long time, but that was OK. They felt relaxed together, and they got slowly drunk in each other’s company. Later, outside on the balcony, watching the moon on the sea, she leant on him, put her back against his chest and rested her chin on her wine glass. He felt good, firm but soft too. She liked his shoes, they looked expensive and well-made. Light tan leather, only four eyelets. Classy.

Spring was such a good time to be alive, said Big M, he loved it when the land was covered in that sensuous white mist, when the earth began to warm up. Special time of the year, buds and leaves popping out everywhere and birds dashing about. Nature busy. And later, a sleepy heat haze blanking out the sea. Lovely. People didn’t matter then, they disappeared. Just nature surfing the big wave of spring.

They didn’t bother kissing, neither felt the need. They slept together child-naked on fresh sheets that first night, their skins slightly flushed with a suggestion of early desire. All night they faced each other on their sides, hands linked together below their chins as if sharing a bedtime prayer, just looking at each other when they woke, like a couple of kids in
love. Didn’t need to talk much. Nice when that
happens. When you can’t remember going to sleep
and you wake up feeling entirely different. Refreshed
. Knowing that everything’s about to change.

Big M could hear their bodies talking to each other, biology’s soft bubble below the surface. Primal desire. The tingle of new skins meeting.

Can you hear it? he asked Rhiannon. A man of the sea, he described faraway whales calling to each other in the deeps, dolphin schools sending messages in hydro-morse.

And what could she hear?

A muffled confederacy of horses together below a canopy of trees, three fields away. Icterines and passerines on the wing above, coming in on the spring air. Swifts, swallows and martins. Old world warblers and flycatchers, the skylarks. She could hear them above.

These were the mysterious moments of lovers in
the night. Secret, cabbalistic. They were the last
generation, said Rhiannon, who listened to nature.
The last to describe the world without man’s
constant presence; to describe it as watchers, not as controllers. The last to know the song of the willow warbler and the chiff-chaff.

They could sense the long line of cliffs going away from them, along the coast; and stretching far behind them they could sense a small kingdom of rich green countryside. They were living in a natural paradise. They would go for car rides together to explore the
country, enjoy the sights. They would watch bees and butterflies combing the mayflower blossom;
they would see wood mice sunning themselves on country walls. They would see adders dancing and lambs prancing.

They would see it all.

III

Lou was in bed with Catrin, lying with his head parked lightly on her bubble. He was intrigued by the hidden scene inside her; their little bald actor, with his cummerbund placenta, alone in his dressing room, waiting patiently for the five-minute call. It was just amazing the way you could effect a rough docking, like a couple of play-doh spaceships hitting turbulence, and nine months later you’d have another version of the eternal drama, ready to appear in a slightly different provincial theatre. Lou was excited and intrigued by the activities within. Pregnancy had been good for them both. Catrin looked wonderful
and Lou
was going to be a good father
– he’d said it
and he meant it. Then his rampant hormones got the
better of him for a second time that morning;
fortunately, Catrin was just as horny herself. When they were at it, in medias res, he thought of the girl in the dragon hat on the ferry and momentarily lost his rhythm. What a shit he was. Later, after a breakfast of toast and marmalade – they’d run out of milk for cereal, thanks to Catrin’s urges – he went to the shops for some emergency supplies, then set off for West Wales and the reunion with himself at Hotel Corvo. A foreign-sounding female voice had laughed lightly at the other end of the line when he’d phoned to book.

Plenty of roomz zir, yez vi haff plenty ov roomz right now.

Perhaps he should have stayed in the village and snuck up to the hotel at night, as he’d done as a
teenager, but he couldn’t be bothered. When he
entered the coastal belt a thick white mist was rolling in off the sea and cars were driving on full headlights. He switched on his rear fog lamp and wondered why it gave him such childish pleasure to do so; it was something one did so rarely in life, and there was a
slight sense of virtuousness and righteousness, of
reacting nobly in a challenging situation. The road wasn’t quite as he remembered it and the journey took longer than he’d anticipated, so evening was
drawing on by the time he arrived. Hotel Corvo was smaller than he remembered, of course, and much the worse for wear. Despite this, he wasn’t
disappointed. He’d looked forward to coming back, though he knew the dangers of expectation, and as a precaution he’d deliberately dampened his hopes in advance. So it was nice to take his blue BMW through the curves of the driveway, and to enjoy the tilts and timbres of the narrow road leading up to the hilltop. The rooks or jackdaws were cawing their way towards bed as he closed the lid of the boot and made his way to reception. It didn’t take him long to establish that the hotel was an empty and decaying ghost ship ploughing her way through heavy seas; at the edge of the world now, ready to topple over the precipice.

He’d arranged for a member of staff to take him straight to the village and off they went as soon as he’d dumped his hold-all in his room. Down in the white-shrouded bay he skirted the rocks and went out to the tideline, so that he could savour the salty air again and let the scene stir his memory. The mist
enveloped him and he felt cool and distant and
isolated. He listened for foghorns, but his invisible world was completely silent as droplets of vapour began clinging to his pullover and hair. A bell clanged distantly, and a heron shrieked from the direction of the marshes.

He’d been sixteen when they came here, Lou and his freckly ma. While she worked as a barmaid at Hotel Corvo he’d spent the summer making friends, discovering sex and dope and cheap booze, surfing and spending all night in the woods with other kids, exploring each other around campfires, popping
some pills and getting dizzy. Then they’d left, as
suddenly as they came, when the season ended. His ma had been quiet, depressed, perplexed. She never was the same again – she put on a lot of weight and didn’t bother with her looks any more. Something happened to her that summer at Hotel Corvo.

Lou walked up through the village, which was much the same as it was in his youth. More holiday homes perhaps, they looked tidier and better cared for than the rest. The shop and post office had shut, as per normal, and one of the chapels had closed, new dormer windows giving it a fresh view of the holy kingdom.

Up he went, slowly, looking out for landmarks; the hollow tree where he’d hidden his swimming
gear and bottles (tree still there, but no bottles) and a slat in a slate fence onto which he’d carved a girl’s name; Ross Smedley, his second great passion that year (the name was still there, but the slender girl he
remembered had been swallowed by the void,
probably married with kids now, leaving a strange longing inside Lou). His first summer of love came back to him as steadily as the waves crashing in the mist below. Hard goosepimples on experimental young skin, fumbled flesh, electricity fizzing through his fingers as the AA bra or bikini top eventually
came undone. Week-long snogs. Volcanic brain move
­ments and a near-constant hard-on. Wonderful,
amazing days. And every evening, his skin still
tingling, his hair damp and his feet slopping about in a pair of pumps which he was meant to grow into, he’d stalk uphill towards Hotel Corvo, to mingle
among the men in the public bar, pretending to be one of their sons. After the initial gambit came off he became a regular, though the bar staff knew
well enough he wasn’t eighteen, turning a blind eye because they knew his ma worked upstairs. It was a time when pubs were at their most popular, operating at full capacity. They were still a way of life for
most people, places where they went to be social, to look for sex and to find work. They’d been the
country’s social centres since the chapels and churches emptied. The men played the old games, darts and dominoes, and there would always be one who’d start to sing in a wayward tenor voice towards the end of the night. Men still whistled then. Girls would sit tentatively with girly drinks, their cashmere pullovers draped over their shoulders and smudges of lipstick on their glasses. Drinks had nicknames like
snakebite
or
leg-opener
. Even in the daytime the place would be bustling with men in transit between jobs, or taking a break from home duties, or drinking their holidays away. There was always a healthy interaction between the generations, not like today’s scene with
a bored barmaid reading a magazine, a few oldies
ignored in the corner and a big open space, then some kids being moody with a cheap bottle of vodka hidden away in a bag. Lou called them the
Friends
generation because they just wanted to be in their own little TV sitcom modelled on the American product; it was what they aspired to – cool banter in a cool place, a bunch of schmucks livin’ the dream. The camera was always on them.

He approached the hotel with a frisson travelling
through him, and he dropped his shoulders like a
cat-burglar as the hulk of the building began to loom overhead. A row of lights, coming from the downstairs bar, lured him onwards. The place was much
quieter now; there was no hubbub coming from
inside, no cars coming and going. He peered into the long window which fronted the building and saw nothing at first, just a sea of empty tables and chairs; but when his eyes reached the long mahogany bar, over against the far wall, his eyes registered a series of silhouettes leaning against the woodwork. Amazingly, he recognised them all from the rear, by their shapes. Like seven old mythological beings or Easter Island
statues carved in stone, they were still there: each
outline stepping up or down against the yellow burr of the bar lights, a mountain range of dark blue hills set against the late evening light. He knew them all
by their stance and their body talk; a lifetime’s
mannerisms had been condensed into a slouch
here or a stoop there. They were the survivors;
everyone else in that bar had disappeared into the mist outside, or into the mists of time, but these last stragglers had defied statistics and probability; they’d survived the many winters which separated them all from Lou. The rest had gone. None of those hulks should have been there; they’d smoked and drank and caroused and misbehaved enough for a thousand men, but they’d got away with it. Strange, how it worked out, thought Lou. You never knew who’d last the years, but you always had a suspicion. The human
life force seemed to have an atomic quality to it,
discernible in passing bodies; a sort of quantum tweeting by the pheremones.