“Once we had some ragers come up from Shawford,” mused the woman as they swung past a white lighthouse, the light long since snuffed, barbed wire on top of the wall, HOME SWEET HOME painted above the door. “I thought we were going to die.”
“Die!” agreed the man.
“I thought, this is it, they’ve come to tear this place apart and I’m not paid enough, pardon me saying, I’m not paid enough to be fucking massacred for a bunch of rich wankers who don’t—”
“Don’t say wankers!”
“Affluent clients who don’t ever look out, don’t leave the walls because if you leave the walls…”
“Never leave the walls!”
“There are people if you leave the walls you see…”
“But thankfully the Company came, they sent a helicopter with tear gas and a machine gun…”
“I wouldn’t call it a machine gun.”
“A machine gun it was—”
“There were rubber bullets.”
“I saw the bodies, those bullets weren’t—”
“It’s what our clients pay for, you see.”
“They pay to be safe!”
“Protected.”
“So that’s why.”
“Are you sure you don’t want some fudge?”
In the end Theo accepted two apples, four teabags and some fudge. It seemed rude to say no.
Five miles further on…
The wind off the sea blows away all doubts, it blows away the past and the smallness of this world, it tears open the sky the fields ripple like water; it blows away the tiny cramped-up prison bars that you built across your soul the wind is…
Theo isn’t sure he has the words for what it is. It is a thing he cannot express. If he could express it, he might have to say what else the wind purges from his soul, and he can’t imagine saying these things out loud would make anyone happy.
Walking past an abandoned golf course.
A monument to pilots who died in a war, buddleia growing from between the cracks.
A trapdoor down to an unknown place beneath the cliffs, a single KEEP OUT sign nailed to the posts, rusted and ancient.
A village close enough to the water’s edge that sometimes the sea came up through their toilets, through the basements where once the smugglers had hidden their goods, chimney stacks crumbling and semi-detached retirement homes slanting a little to the side as the land gave way.
Great stems of pale brown and bright green grew from the peppered stones where they met the edge of the land, spiny, spindly, no flowers or leaves, just a forest of stems heading upwards. An empire of snails had taken up residence amongst these stalks, their shells spirals of blood red edged with black, imperial yellow dotted with white spots, flashes of blue. A single tree had managed to grow in that muddy area where stone met farmer’s field, and over the centuries its roots had spread beneath the land, sprouting in shrubs and spindly white-barked children. Someone had put a tyre swing inside the den it made of its own umbrella branches. Theo ducked beneath the canopy of leaves, a habit, a thing from his childhood, he had come here once and it had been…
That was in the time before he was Theo Miller, and these things should not affect him any more.
He walked through the village, and the curtains twitched, and grey eyes peered at him from behind the netting and through the cracks in the doors, and no one moved, and no one spoke, and no one walked along the edge of the water.
He saw the pier at Shawford before he saw the rest of the town, sticking out into the sea before the curve of the bay.
Several spans had cracked, fallen into the water. Now Dory’s Café lurked at the end, cut off from the world, lights out, and the fishing deck was swamped for most of the year, unusable as the waves crawled in.
A small rose-shaped stone fort marked the edge of town, built by Henry VIII a few months after he realised he’d pissed off the pope. Black iron cannon, the ends plugged with red bungs, pointed out towards the sea. No flags flew, and the gates were barred.
On the hill above the houses the Budgetfood Estate was silent, vines breaking through the loose corrugated-iron walls. No lorries came, no lorries left, and grass pushed up through the cracks in the pavement.
He walked into town, past the seafront apartments where the old folks had sat in long bay windows to watch the yacht club and the passing trawlers, along the shopping street of boarded windows and street lamps with no bulbs in them. Baskets still hung from some of the lamps, the soil long since washed away, the exposed roots rotted to wisps. On the walls of the local Indian takeaway someone had graffitied, WILL YOU MARRY ME? but if an answer had been given, it hadn’t endured.
The paddling pool was empty. There were poked holes where the crazy golf had been, a scar in the tarmac where the ice cream van had stood. Somewhere deep in town he heard the sound of raging, a man’s voice soon joined by a woman’s, soon joined by a few others, a call and response of unseen faces rising in fury.
Theo shuddered and was briefly afraid, and scurried on.
A man sat on a bench opposite the place where Budgetfood had once run “Microwave Meal Fridays,” discount days when it offloaded its inferior goods cheap for the town. The man had thin ginger hair, a round, smiling face stained red by the wind, a great belly and tiny legs. He smiled affably at Theo as Theo walked by, and didn’t move.
Silence on the high street.
Silence outside the church.
Silence where the arcade had once jittered and tittered its twinkly songs, its come-yea-golden salutations into the night.
Silence by the old railway line, the copper cables taken up and sold for scrap, the pylons rusted overhead.
Silence on the bridge that looked down to the dry-tiled swimming pool
Silence in the bingo hall, painted cobalt blue, a domed roof above a shuttered concourse.
Silence on the shore, except for the beating of the sea as it pulled a little more of the land back down into its depths.
The town was dead except for the man on the bench and the sound of rage from the inland streets.
Theo followed memory through a ghostly map, and went to the detached two-up, two-down on the edge of a caravan field where, as a child, Dani had lived, and knocked, and heard no answer and immediately felt stupid, and went round the back to the garden overgrown with brambles and stinging nettles, tried the back door, found it open.
Fading light from a settling day through the kitchen window.
Empty cupboards and empty shelves, an empty place where the fridge had been.
Tiles behind the sink, he’d painted them with Dani, a childish thing in bright pinks, purples, blues and yellows. It had been part of a community art project, a summer fête for the kids, they’d caught the perfect moment; both still young enough to be welcome at the kids’ fair, and old enough to have decided that mucking around with paints was cool again.
That had been a few years before the night on the beach, the sound of the sea and pebbles in Theo’s back.
He went upstairs.
Dani’s room.
Her parents’, though only one had ever slept in the bed. The mattress was gone, the frame remained, as did a mirror on the wall.
He went down to the front hall, was surprised to find some mail, curling up and crinkled. The gum had long since faded and the contents came out easily; he read with barely a glimmer of guilt.
An offer for a discount eye exam.
A letter from the GP commanding Dani to book and prepay for 10 per cent off her smear test.
A series of ever-more-threatening letters from the council, demanding unpaid taxes and charges.