The Far Side of the Sun (11 page)

She had spent the night at Mama Keel’s, curled up on a blanket on the floor. She had not believed she could sleep, but Mama had given her something to drink and she had drifted into a black empty space where there were no dreams. It was scarcely light but the front door stood wide open and Dodie could see the pack of grey clouds hunched low on the horizon, as if peering in, and Mama Keel shelling peas on the doorstep.

Dodie didn’t linger. She accepted Mama’s offer of an old cotton shift to wear instead of her waitress uniform and headed out into the early-morning wind. She couldn’t bring herself to travel along the beach this time but instead she chose the coastal road, snake-grey and deserted at this hour. She cut down through the trees and arrived at the beach from behind.

She had prepared herself. She had promised herself no tears. But she had not thought to prepare herself for the smell of it. That’s what reached her first, the stink of charred wood that drifted on the air, and then the sight of her vegetable patch scorched and shrivelled behind the remains of the house. The bean plants lay brown and lifeless as dead spiders, and a rat was rummaging among the remains. Just a few pumpkins had survived, still flagrantly orange amid the bleak debris.

Her house was gone. A wasteland of memories. No good to anyone. Only a few scraps of twisted metal reached up like rotten teeth out of the blackened heap. The wind whipped up ash from it and chased it down the beach, but Dodie could not bear to look any more. She turned away from the grim sight, and anger at whoever had done this tore through her, somehow getting all tangled up with the policeman standing right here on the same beach, pressing her with questions that frightened the life out of her. She moved away and as she did so, she glimpsed the outline of a lone man sitting under a palm tree, just where the bay curled round into its horseshoe. From this distance it was hard to see his face clearly, but she could make out that the young man was white, with a pale shirt and long rangy limbs.

He was watching her.

She didn’t want to be watched, didn’t want her grief to be spied upon by a stranger, so she turned her back on the figure and walked down to the ocean.

The sky was heavy with leaden clouds and the waves came charging towards her with fraying white caps, warning of the summer storm that was rolling down to the island from Florida. Trails of coarse kelp had been thrown up on the sand and tiny orange crabs were seeking shelter in its folds. Dodie hitched up the hem of her dress and waded into the water, her toes squeezing the sand into hard humps with each step, the only outward expression of the anger inside her. She prowled the shallows for a long time, back and forth along the cay, thinking about the men who had lain in wait for Morrell at the hospital and asking herself what it was he could have done to drive them to murder.

What kind of people were they? Was the burning of her house a warning from them? A sign to keep her mouth shut? What else would they do to her?

What the hell was going on?

She had come to this island to escape demons, not to find them. Her father had struggled from one dead-end job to another, from one whisky to the next, and Dodie had tried to help him. She had hidden rum bottles from him, bound up the cuts and grazes from all his drunken falls and splinted his arm when it broke. But it was like trying to pour sand uphill, and eventually she lost that particular trial of strength.

After his death, she could have retraced her steps back home and started afresh in England, but she didn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to leave the Bahamas. She had fallen too much in love with this beautiful exotic island. Its soft warm breezes, the vibrant colours of its flowers and birds and its saucer-size butterflies, the deep call of its ugly frogs and the distinctive whisper of its palm fronds in her ear – they had all bewitched her. And the vast blue ocean encircled her mind as completely as it encircled New Providence Island, so that she set about building a new life for herself. It had been tough at times. She learned to be wary of people. At first she was employed at the Stanley Sewing Factory, but when that went wrong and she became an outcast, Olive Quinn had given her the waitressing job at the Arcadia and she’d been there ever since.

But now they were trying to take the island away from her, these people who went round sticking knives in men’s guts. They wanted to frighten her. To drive her away. She lifted her head and stared fiercely up at the underbelly of the clouds that hung low over the waves. She was going nowhere.

A solitary Liberator aircraft was forging its way through the sky, buffeted by winds on its course to the new Windsor airfield, and the determined growl of its four engines found an echo inside Dodie’s own head. She swung round to head back to rake through the black debris of the shack before the rain came, but she halted. Up ahead the young man was still there in the shade. Still seated with his back moulded to the trunk of the tree as though he’d been there a long time. Still watching her.

Who was he? Why was he there? Come to deliver another warning to her?

No, not this time. She wasn’t going to sit and wait timidly for his warnings. This time she would get to him first and shake the truth out of him. Without hesitation she ran up the beach towards the stranger in the shadows before he could even think of leaving.

Flynn saw her coming up the beach towards him, her long chestnut hair snatched in all directions by the wind, her footprints chasing behind her in the white sand. But he didn’t move. All he did was stub out his cigarette and wish she weren’t so angry. He could see her anger in the quick purposeful strides she took and in the sharp set of her elbows as she raced up the slope.

He had been watching her for more than an hour, wondering what was going on in her head as she made her way through the water. She kept throwing up wide arcs of sparkling sea with her hands, stirring up the heavy roll of the waves as if trying to rearrange her world. She carved a course back and forth along the full length of the cay in her faded blue dress, absorbed in her own thoughts. He had always been quick to read a person’s mood – from the angle of their neck, from the swing of their hips, from the way they held their hands. It was a skill that had kept him alive more than once. He could see that, despite her obvious anger, this girl’s body was caving in on itself, as though someone had taken a hammer to her once too often.

She was not used to death. He could recognise that in her, and the thought of all the blood that had spilled on her floor disturbed him more than he cared to admit. It took courage to do what she did for Morrell. Yet she was a shy creature. It showed in the manner in which she looked around her at the world, not quite sure of her place in it. Ready to duck and move away fast. He admired that in her, her alertness.

I’ve told her nothing.

Flynn wanted Morrell’s words to be true.

Don’t let them hurt her, kid.

The question was – how much could she hurt them?

Dodie.

That’s what poor Johnnie Morrell had said that her name was.

‘Who are you?’ Dodie didn’t wait for an answer. ‘What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?’

She took a good look at the man. He was sitting with his head tipped back, looking up at her, and it struck her that here was someone who wore his city toughness like an overcoat. Under a dense mop of dark hair, his brown eyes were quick and capable.

‘Why are you watching me?’ An angry pulse jumped at the base of her throat.

‘It’s a free country, you know,’ he said quietly.

He uncoiled easily and rose to his feet. His nicotine-stained fingers brushed his hair from his eyes in a gesture she realised was intended to give her a moment to reflect. But all she wanted to reflect on was why he’d been there so long, spying on her.

‘My name is Flynn Hudson.’

His accent was American, from somewhere up in the cold northern states by the sound of it. His skin was pale, as if it didn’t get to see much sun in the normal run of things. Flynn Hudson was in his mid twenties, tall and lean, with a raw uneasy edge to him that was at odds with the calmness in his deep-set eyes and the patience he’d shown in his vigil under the tree.

‘Well, Mr Hudson?’

‘I apologise if I’ve upset you by being here. I didn’t mean to. I was just biding my time under the tree, waiting for you to come back up the beach.’

‘What is it you want with me?’

‘I thought you might need a hand, so…⁠’

‘There’s nothing I need from you, Mr Hudson.’ She regarded him warily. ‘If you are the one who started the fire or if you are here to give me another warning, I’m telling you – and your friends – to stay away from me. You don’t scare me. I’m going nowhere.’ Her voice sounded loud in the fresh morning air and her heart had slid into her throat, but she stared intently at the brown eyes, so that he would understand that she was not a cockroach to be stamped on. ‘I repeat what I said, Mr Hudson. There is nothing I need from you.’ She turned on her heel.

‘I think there is.’

It made her halt. She waited for more, and when it didn’t come she was obliged to look at him again. He was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, no tie, and he wore brown lace-up shoes that were coated in sand. Respectable enough, but the shirt looked cheap and the knees on his trousers were shiny. It appeared that he got by, but only just. He was standing with his hands sunk in his pockets, his gaze scrutinising her with a fixed attention that unsettled her.

‘What exactly do you mean?’

‘Nothing much.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wish it was more but I was too late – to help last night, I mean. The blaze was out of control but I did what I could. I’m real sorry.’

Dodie stared at him wordlessly.

‘About the fire,’ he added. ‘I tried to help.’

‘Look, Mr Hudson, I apologise if…⁠’

‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you something.’

He headed off in his unsuitable shoes across the sand to the far side of where the hut had been but she couldn’t bring herself to follow. He must have sensed it, because halfway there he cast a glance back over his shoulder and gave her a smile.

‘Don’t look so worried. Hell, I’m not going to kidnap you or sell you into white slavery or anything so exotic.’

He said it with a laugh that rolled easily out of him and animated his whole face. Dodie felt herself blush right up to her hairline but he seemed not to notice. He knelt down on the beach beside a small heap wrapped up in what was obviously his jacket, its material crumpled and coated in sand, black smears like tide marks across it.

‘Look.’

She came closer as he withdrew the jacket with the panache of a conjuror. Her mouth fell open and a sound came from her. It didn’t form into words.

‘I figured you might want it,’ he said.

It was her mother’s sewing machine. Dodie’s knees abruptly buckled and she dropped to the sand beside him, reaching out to touch the machine’s wheel. Its wooden base was badly charred and the black enamel paint on its metal body was blistered, but amazingly the workings looked to be still intact. Dodie felt a hollowness open up inside her that was the exact shape of the sewing machine.

‘Yes, I saw you last night.’ She remembered him. ‘With the long stick in your hand, raking out objects from the fire. I thought you were stealing. I didn’t know that you…⁠’ she waved a hand at the damaged machine, ‘that you…⁠’

‘Was it worth saving?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Good.’

She gathered the blackened machine into her arms. When she cradled it on her lap her isolation did not feel so complete. But when she finally thought to lift her head to thank Flynn Hudson, he had gone from her side and was striding away through the trees.

Dodie was on her hands and knees in her vegetable garden, her hair tied back to keep it from whipping into her eyes. She was finding it strange, adjusting to owning nothing. It should be easy and yet it felt hard.

She laid a hand on the edge of the hole she had opened up in the earth in front of her, big enough to hold a modest metal strongbox wrapped in sacking. But now she had enlarged it to take the battered sewing machine as well. Lovingly she had bathed the filth off this one thing she possessed that had been her mother’s and she bartered a clutch of potatoes for a towel and strip of oilcloth to wrap it in. Now that it was buried safely alongside the strongbox, she felt better.

She again checked the beach, but Flynn Hudson had not returned. She could see no one near. She listened. There was only the shiver of the wind through the pines and the boom of the waves reverberating up the beach. She could smell the coming storm. Quickly she opened the strongbox and from it extracted an envelope that held seven pound notes. She removed two. She wouldn’t starve, not yet anyway. This time she didn’t allow herself to spend a moment on the yellowing photograph of her parents that lay at the bottom of the strongbox or on the seductive gilt-edged pages of her father’s bible, but snatched out one of the two gold coins tucked in the corner and slammed the lid shut.

Ella sliced the top off her boiled egg and glanced up from her breakfast plate to find Reggie watching her.

It was always the same. After a night like last night. As if the strings that controlled his face had turned to elastic and stretched to let his features soften. His lips were parted in a loose smile as he gazed at her without feeling the need to make small talk about his round of golf. She liked him like this. With his guard down and that undisciplined look in his eyes which she knew meant he was thinking of her between the sheets.