Whitstable (10 page)

“He fastens onto vulnerable women. He can spot them. He homes in. He uses them. To get what he wants.”

He knew she’d already said too much and regretted it. Horribly so. Giving the table a last, cursory wipe, she turned on her heel and walked towards the kitchen with her shoulders back, eyes front. A teenage boy with his head haloed in the fur-trimmed hood of a parka sat at one of the other tables with his shoes, laces undone, planted on a chair. She flicked his shoulder with the back of her hand as she passed by, hardly looking at him.

“Feet. Off.”

The youth shot her a fierce look from under a heavy fringe. His mane of dark hair shook as he did so. His nose was long and square with a slight line above the tip from rubbing it too much. His eyebrows had begun to join in the middle. Thick lips, succulent yet dry enough to crack. Slightly crooked teeth. A constellation of pimples on his cheeks, some livid red, others turning yellow with pus. The affliction of the young. Another of God’s little cruelties.

“Mum…” he complained in a sing-songy way under his breath.

Cushing felt an intense chill and imagined someone had opened and closed the door, but they hadn’t.

He looked over at the boy in the parka as the latter played with the sugar dispenser, pouring a measured spoonful onto the table then scooping it, plough-like, with the flat of one hand then the other, prodding it into a perfect square, then making a dot in the centre of the square with the top of his index finger. Then destroying the whole artistic arrangement and starting again. He appeared both to be completely absorbed in the activity and completely bored by it. There was a lazy insouciance in the lad’s countenance, something about his very physicality which bordered on barely-contained rage.

What had Van Helsing said in
Brides
? That he was studying a sickness. A sickness
part physical, part spiritual…

As if aware of being spied on, the youth looked up. Their eyes met and he knew the old man was staring at him. His features froze, but not with any degree of guilt or foreboding. Without any fraction of self-consciousness or embarrassment. Quite the reverse. He stared back at Cushing with chilling assuredness. Aggression, in fact. A hard gaze, a vicious gaze which would take almost nothing to provoke to violence, and the old man wondered if he had provoked it already, and it scared him to the core to think of what a young man with such a cold gaze might be capable.

“I’ve said all I’m going to say to you.”

It was Sue Blezard’s voice again as she placed his cream tea on a tray in front of him.

“I understand.”

“No. You don’t,” she said.

But he feared he did. Very much so.

“Always the one to take the boy to bed…” She stood with her back to her son, blocking him out. “Read him a story. Their ‘special time’, he said…” It was as if she didn’t even realise she’d said the words. Her anger had said them, spilled them, from some disembodied place, before she’d had a chance to rein them back. Then her back stiffened. That was all. No more. The muscle in her cheek flexed. “Pay at the till when you’re ready.”

She walked away.

“Thank you,” Cushing said, knowing that she had revealed more than she could bear and no less than she was compelled. He respected that. In seeking to end pain, he had caused it, and hated himself for doing so. But it was necessary. So necessary.

The cup and saucer were Wedgwood. He thought it pathetic that he cared about such things.

Some of the pustules on the lad’s skin had broken and there were small streaks of blood where they had been picked at. After some minutes his mother brought the youth a hot chocolate and Cushing continued to watch him as he drank it. There were cuts and bruises on his hands as well as nicotine stains, and his fingernails were chewed to the quick. His knee jiggled with the spastic tremor of an old and hopeless alcoholic. It spoke of an inexorable slide into a life Cushing did not want to contemplate. Where was this boy? Not in school, clearly. Then, where?

He thought of hurt and anger… the road to dissolution, evil, decay.

Their special time…

The hurt that prowls.

The scar that infects.

The darkness that perpetuates itself.

He stirred his tea. When he drank it, it was cold.

***

Afterwards, for a stroll, he visited the Cathedral. It was only yards away and he had not set foot inside for years. He was surprised to find the interior so vast and daunting, more so than he ever remembered feeling before. A massive, overwhelming, empty space. A space in which you could fit several normal-sized cathedrals, certainly. He thought of it now, quite literally. Dozens and dozens of churches, stacked like Lego bricks. He wondered if there was any limit to how large the masons could build an edifice to proclaim their faith? How big does Faith have to be to fill a space the size of this? How much love does God need?

The last tourists of the day moved around the aisles, looking up in awe and wonder, but he was the only one who knelt in the pews and prayed.

With his eyes tightly closed, he heard a baby crying. The sound echoed distinctly in the Cathedral’s canyon of stone, but when he stood and looked all round, he could see nobody. No baby. No mother. Nothing. And all was absolutely quiet again. Except for the side door creaking gently as it closed to keep out the sun.

***

He did not know how long he had been sitting in the bath but the water was stone cold and the Imperial Leather had turned it milky and opaque. He felt pins and needles in his bony buttocks so he thought he’d been there a long while, but it worried him he didn’t know how long and now his shoulders were shivering and he was sure that under the scummy water his penis had shrunk to nothing. He wanted to pull the towel off the rail but it was slightly out of reach. Then the door of the bathroom opened and Christopher Lee came in, dressed exactly as he had been in the first Hammer
Dracula
in that formidable entrance descending the staircase. Immaculate hair. Virile. Vulpine. The top of his head almost touched the ceiling as he paced back and forth beside the claw-foot bath in his ankle-length black cloak. He looked terribly upset. “Where’s my wife?” he was saying. “Where is she?”

Cushing could do nothing. He felt frozen and invisible.

He woke feeling the millstone presence of death, its crushing inevitability, in a way that he hadn’t been so frightened by, or made helpless by, since he was seven years old.

Staring at the ceiling, he thought of the youth in the Pilgrim Tea Rooms, but instead of the pimply, hunched teenager in the parka, the boy sitting there was Carl Drinkwater, his hands wedged between his thighs, staring down at the plastic table-top which his mother was wiping with a wet cloth. Carl looked up and stared, just as the other boy had done. He had tiny smears of blood on his cheeks like the squashed bodies of dead insects.

***

Like massing vultures they gathered in the sky over the concourse of carrion, an echo of the prehistoric and primal. As the soles of his wellington boots pressed into the shingle with a hushing musicality of their own, their beckoning grew louder, a virulent and unforgiving choir. An announcement, spiteful heralds of his coming. Had he been blind, he thought, he could have purely followed the direction of the cries of the seagulls and found his way to the Harbour, where death was perpetually on the menu.

He carried a shopping basket. Not exactly becoming for a gentlemen, but he didn’t care. It was his late wife’s, and now it was his. He remembered the two
Harvesters
in the fifties, when he and Helen had first come here, often used as umpire boats during the regatta. The remains of the railway were still there, the lamp standards still in evidence though the tracks were gone. Two whelk boats still operated on East Quay, commercial ships came in carrying stone and timber, Danish stuff, he was told, and beyond West Quay he often saw grain boats unloading into lorries with a hopper.

Meanwhile fishing boats unloaded their silvery spoils and the gulls were there, hovering, fighting the wind, ready to clash and kill for the pickings they could get from what bloody morsels fell before the trucks loaded up and shipped it out. Old families tended to work the trawlers. Generations. Fathers, sons, grandfathers.

A sheen of blood and seawater striped the concrete. His wellingtons crossed the mirror of it in the direction of the ugly store shed on South Quay, corrugated asbestos on a breezeblock frame, both its barn doors open to the wide ‘U’ of the Harbour, the air punctuated by the tinkling of pulley metal and puttering slaps of wet ropes and lapping water.

It wasn’t hard to find out the time of the tides and discover when exactly the boats came in, and he wasn’t the only one who gravitated to the Harbour to get the pick of the ‘stalker’—as they called the odds and sods, small fry not sorted with the prime fish already boxed up and ready on its way to London. If they were regulars, they’d know when a certain boat would berth and they’d be there waiting for the bargains when it returned on the flood tide.

He watched as fishermen in sou’westers and oilskins hurried up and down the ladder on and off the vessel. They weren’t hanging around, even with a small crowd present. Business took precedence. A small truck waited, taking the stacked plastic boxes—the catch already sorted during the two-hour steam back from fishing off Margate in Queen’s Channel—straight to market.

Les Gledhill was one of them, strands of long wet hair hanging from his hood, cheekbones shiny and doll-like over his damp beard. The stalker was bagged up and marked at the quayside beyond the parked cars, some of it wrapped in newspaper. No airs and graces. “5 Dover sole’s £1.” The misappropriated apostrophe was almost obligatory. Others who’d arrived first were helping themselves, and Gledhill was taking their cash in a wet, outstretched palm, skin peeled pink from the scouring weather.

Seeing Cushing out of the corner of his eye, Gledhill at first attempted to ignore him. A transistor radio set on an empty oil drum was playing the recent Christmas hit, ‘Grandad’ by Clive Dunn. Unable to avoid doing so any longer, Gledhill stared at him as he rinsed his hands under a cold water tap on the quayside and wiped them in a towel. The DJ on the radio switched to the current single at the top of the charts, George Harrison singing ‘My Sweet Lord’.

“What do you have today?” Cushing presented himself as bright-eyed and bushy tailed.

“Depends what you’re after.”

“Oh, I think I’m open to suggestions.” Cushing smiled broadly.

“Well. Got a load of dabs,” Gledhill said, forcing a retaliatory smile to match. “Sprats. Herrings. Good winter fish. Dover sole. Skate. Nice skate backbone, if you know what to do with it.” His hands looked frozen and painful to the older man as he watched him turn to serve an elderly woman who had the right change. A great deal of nattering was going on between the other customers and the other fisherman—quite sprightly, good-natured banter—and to an onlooker, this conversation would seem no different.

Cushing adjusted his scarf, scratched the side of his chin and pointed at one of the packages lined up before him. “That one will do perfectly.”

“Pound.”

“Thank you.” Cushing happily delved into his purse.

Gledhill picked up the fish in newspaper and handed it to him, and as he did so Cushing saw the blue blur of an old tattoo on the back of his wrist, together with blue dots on his finger joints.

“You know, I was reading the other day…” He placed a pound note in the other man’s palm. “The fish, it’s the old symbol of Christianity. Older even than the cross.”

“Fascinating,” Gledhill said.

“Yes, it is, rather. Some people say religion has lost its way, but we are all God’s children, when all is said and done. Whether we choose to see that or not. Don’t you think?”

“You’ve got a bargain there, squire. I’d go home very happy if I were you.”

Turning his back, Gledhill went back to the tap of ice cold water and washed his red raw hands with the thoroughness of a surgeon. Cushing had researched surgeon’s methods for the Frankenstein films and it was the kind of thing he watched and made a mental note of, habitually. He found it interesting, vital, that there were telltale rituals and practices that made a profession look authentic, or inauthentic if wrong. It was essential to make the audience believe in the part one was playing, however ludicrous the part may be on paper. That was one’s job. That was why they called it ‘make believe’. Make. Believe.

Cushing waited.

Believe in yourself, Peter…

“Anything else you want, mate?” Gledhill turned his head and stared at the old man. “Apart from the Dover sole?”

Peter Cushing decided he would not be hurried. Why should he be?

“Let me see…”

He lingered. And the more he lingered the more he realised he was enjoying the discomfort his lingering engendered.

Les Gledhill did not do anything so obvious as a quick, shifty look towards his colleagues to reveal his unease. He would never have been that blatant. Nor did he become twitchy or self-conscious in any way. In fact his motions became slower and more considered. That, in itself, told a story—that the very presence of the old man in wellington boots made him uneasy. And he didn’t like it. A person who got a certain thrill from the control of others seldom enjoyed the feeling that someone else had control of him.

“Have you ever tasted oysters, Mr Cushing?” Gledhill picked up one of the shelled creatures from a plastic bucket in front of him.

“I thought the oysters round here had all succumbed to disease and pollution.”

“Not if you know where to look. I think of it as a hobby. Go out on a Sunday. Maybe get a hundred. You haven’t answered my question. Sir.” His intention was to intimidate, rather than
be
intimidated. That much was clear.

“My preference is towards plain food.”

“Then you don’t know what you’re missing. Marvellous stuff.” Gledhill took a knife from a leather satchel. It was a short, stubby one with a curve in the blade. “You break them open.” Metal scraped against the shell. He turned the object in his hand and opened it as if it were hinged. “Dab of vinegar if you prefer. Or just as it comes.” He ran the knife under the slimy-looking bivalve, cutting its sinewy attachment. It sat in its juices. “Then into the mouth they go.” He slid it off the half-shell onto his tongue, savouring it for a second or two, no longer, then swallowed. “One bite. Two at the most. Then down like silk. Nectar. Nothing like it.”