He thought he was dreaming, and the thought that he was dreaming seemed very alert, and wide awake.
He curled up tighter, shivering, and the singing went away.
A little before dawn the screaming started again. A morning chorus, a rising prayer, the hidden people of the town turned their faces towards the mirrored sea and wailed. Not a song of rage, not for the rising of the sun. They called out the long sound of the whistle that marked the end of the factory day. They sang the closing of the metal gates across the forecourt. They shrieked the rubber on road of the last lorry driving away. They called to the sea, and at their sound Theo jerked awake, and bleary crawled to the bathroom and tried the tap, and there wasn’t any water, and so he walked to the front door and opened it a crack as the eastern sun bounced off the ocean at the bottom of the hill, and as he opened it, someone grabbed his hand from outside, pulled him forward and off his feet, and kicked him in the head.
The screamers, the ragers, the ones who got left behind, they feast on raw fish torn from the sea, they pick at the mussels that cling to the edge of the pier. There are no children born here, but they cling on, cling on, cling on like the sucker-flesh they feast on.
Hands pulled Theo through familiar streets.
To say he was beaten was probably unfair as that implied a plan, implied that there was some sort of…
Instead they hit because it was what they did.
And they smashed the windows.
And threw stones at the wall.
And tore at their hair and hit each other and scratched at their own skin as often as they bothered to kick him, when they remembered he was there, thrown in a corner of what had once been the back room of the pub where the ex-sailors went to drink away their landlubber days.
He stayed huddled, most of the time, and hoped no one noticed him, and for a while that seemed to work, as the four men and women turning through the room seemed equally as occupied with clawing at the last remnants of wooden panelling around the bar, cutting their arms lightly with glass and fighting over a bag of slightly mouldy bread stolen from the back of a shop down the way in Ramsgate, smuggled out through the fences and down the muddy causeway, as with beating him.
Sometimes someone saw him, and remembered that he was there, and kicked him or pulled his hair or trod on a vulnerable-looking joint for good measure, because why not, and then they’d lose interest and go back to trying to rip out the bathroom sink with their bare hands.
After a while even the ragers were calm, their morning rituals fulfilled, and they sat on the floor of the gutted pub, thin burgundy carpets peeled back to brown strings stretched like tripwires across the floor; the mirror gone from behind the bar, the bottles smashed and handles wrenched off the taps.
Still a slight smell of stale beer hung on the air, embedded in the fabric of the walls itself. As the sun climbed higher and swept across the floor, it was easy to imagine the place that had been before, and remember the time Theo’s dad came down here for a pint with…
A pint with…
It might even have been Jacob Pritchard, king of the coast, back in the days when boys were just boys.
Theo lay in a corner, and was for a while forgotten.
A man stood over him.
Thought about things for a while.
Then stamped on his abdomen, just to show willing.
Stood a while longer.
Said, not unreasonably, “You were Dani’s mate, yeah?”
Theo opened his less swollen eye, and looked at the man through the fold of his arms as the pain blurred vision and the light from the sea turned all things into grey shadows against its brightness.
“Hard-faced bitch she was, but we had some laughs. Wasn’t surprised she ended up on the patty line. Always gonna be the way.”
The figure before Theo drew a penknife, squatted on his haunches, toyed for a while with pushing the knife into the top half of Theo’s left arm, rocking the point back and forth against his sleeve, not applying pressure, not releasing the weight, just mulling a proposition, before getting bored again and instead digging the rusting point thoughtfully into his own leg, slow and long, then releasing it with a sigh as the blood began to flow.
“Shouldn’t laugh. Maybe the patty line was better, a smart move, she was always smart. You were the dumb one, right? Yeah—that’s right—Dani and her dumb friend. Wasn’t your dad some sort of nutter? Or am I thinking ’bout somebody else?”
The blood from the man’s leg seeped into familiar shapes carved by a dozen other indentations, a network of streams and rivers that had dried deep, muddy brown in the fabric of his once-blue jeans. Little crimson drops began to run down his exposed ankle into the hollowed-out rags of his shoes.
He didn’t seem to notice, or care.
“She got knocked up, didn’t she? Kept trying to tell me that the vermin was mine. No fucking way I said, not mine, not my fucking problem, you think she’s my problem then you’ve got another… what happened to that kid anyway? What happened to her?”
A thoughtful prod of Theo’s shoulder with the point of the knife when he didn’t answer, then another, a little more insistent.
“Dani’s dead,” whispered Theo through the bundled-up cocoon of his own pain.
“Is she? What was it—drugs?”
“Murdered.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No. The Company.”
“Seriously? Seriously, you’re not just—shit. Hey that’s something, to say that’s a real…”
From the back of the building a sudden howl of fury, met by another, the sound of gasping men, a fight breaking out, something cracked, something smashed, someone fell, screamed in agony, true agony now, a bone broken, something cut.
The sound subsided.
The man with the knife listened, waited for it to fade away, the distant whimpering of a broken body crawling towards the dust, then turned his attention back to Theo, smiling broadly.
“What’s your name?”
“Theo.”
“Theo, huh? Didn’t think… but what do I know? Never stuck my nose into the business of… come on then.”
He folded the knife away, hooked one arm under Theo’s, pulled him to his feet. Theo moaned, unable to keep down the sound, half-fell, was caught on the man’s shoulders, let himself be dragged, feet trailing, out of the pub into the blazing light of day.
The pub looked straight onto the shingle beach. A criss-cross of tattered grey British flag bunting still swagged the pavement in front of it, waiting for a brass band to play below, the souvenir shop to reopen and sell bags of shells imported from Thailand for only £2 a kilogram.
In the brilliant outdoors light Theo saw the face of the man who carried him, and thought he knew it. Somewhere, through the cuts and the scars, the intricate dot-to-dot patterns of scabs and half-healed wounds drawn through the ears and cheeks, nose and lips, there was a recollection, a name.
“You were Dani’s boyfriend,” he whimpered as the man carried him towards the sea. “Your name is Andy.”
The man called Andy gave him a hoick as he began to slip again, beamed brightly, exclaimed, “You ever been mad at something, Theo? You ever properly lost it?”
Theo grunted in reply. Andy carried him onto the shingle, laid him down at the top of the slope that tumbled towards the sea, thought for a moment, then with an easy kick pushed him, so Theo rolled like a sausage down to the edge of the water, landing in a curled-up groan of pain where the sea darkened the stone to deeper brown, the detritus of his fall forming small mounds of rattling pebbles against his side. Andy slipped down behind him, the shingle scuttling away beneath his weight, landed easily on his haunches. For a while he sat there, rocking a little, as the water came in and brushed against his toes, thick white foam hissing and popping as it rolled back out.