A light spit came on, or it could have been sea spray, lifted over the cliffs by the wind. Dog described a circle around the spot Lloyd worked on, smelling and nosing the things that were unearthed. I walked down towards them, not sure what I would say when I reached them. Lloyd squatted and pulled something from the hole which caught Dog’s attention. He trotted over and smelled it for Lloyd, who touched Dog’s head in acknowledgement. Dog returned to his business, and Lloyd weighed whatever it was in his hands like a fillet of beef and then threw it to the side. His shoulders tensed. I stopped and followed his gaze up into the white sky, where a merlin hovered. They eyeballed each other. Lloyd started to sing at the bird, but all that reached me on the breeze was a murmur. He dropped his shovel and flung both arms out, the wind blew his hair so that it stood straight up at the back, wild and grey. He did a little dance and the bird dropped down lower to watch. He sang louder, he howled, ‘I wish that every kiss was never-ending!’ and a bellow of wind came up behind me and blew my hair over my face. A second later it hit Lloyd and he wobbled in his dance, patted his hair back onto his head and turned towards me. The human eye senses movement before all else. Lloyd raised his hand at me and I raised mine at him. He looked up for his bird, which had let itself be blown away by the wind. He scanned the empty sky a moment longer, then sat down with his back to me, next to the hole he’d dug. Dog stood and barked once, and I made my way down to them.
‘Digging a hole?’ I asked.
‘Is it okay?’ said Lloyd.
‘What are you burying?’
‘I’m just digging.’ He kept staring up at the spot where the bird had been. There was silence, and I sat down next to him.
Dog tried to lick my face but I pushed him away.
‘Seeds,’ he said.
‘What are?’
‘I was going to plant some apple seeds.’ There was silence again.
‘Okay.’
To prove himself, Lloyd took an apple out of his pocket and turned it in his hand in front of me. ‘Ha!’ he said, then flung the apple as far as he could into the blackthorns. There was more silence and then he said, ‘When I was a kid I was into reincarnation.’
I caught the smell of whisky. ‘Seems like a comforting thing to think,’ I said, for something to say.
‘I’m not sure I believe in it now. But I like to pretend I do.’
He was really going to get in the way once the lambs started coming.
‘Do you believe in an after-life?’ he asked with another gust of his whisky breath.
‘No I don’t.’
‘Then what are you so frightened of?’
I stared at him. His eyes were glassy.
‘So the seeds?’ I said. ‘Tell me about the seeds.’
He leant back and breathed in harshly through his nose and closed his eyes. ‘In remembrance.’
‘Of what?’
‘The Jews do it. The tree of life; they call it something, the holiday. The Queen does it too — she plants a tree.’
Dog whined. I fidgeted. Lloyd closed his eyes. The wind dropped and the whole place slowed down.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not making the best sense.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘It was nothing special,’ he said, his eyes popping open. ‘He was alive in the morning and then by the afternoon he was suddenly dead.’
‘Who?’
He pointed to the empty space where the bird had hovered.
I twisted a blade of grass until it produced juice. Lloyd took from his carrier bag a quarter-empty bottle of whisky. He took a swallow that was longer than would have been comfortable in the throat. He wiped the top off with the underside of his wrist and offered it to me. I nearly said no, but I didn’t.
‘Look — I’ve got the last of his ashes in an envelope.’ He took from his breast pocket a small packet that looked badly weathered. ‘But they got wet. He’s more mud now than ash.’ Lloyd looked inside the packet and then refolded it and sighed. He sat himself up straight, and spoke with a new authority. ‘The idea was I’d go to the furthest points of Britain. This was my last stop. I do a little ceremony at each place — the first three were okay. I went to Suffolk and I had a little toy wooden sailboat, and I set it on fire with a little bit of him on board. It was dark and the sea was flat and nobody was there, and it went so well.’ He smiled and closed his eyes again. ‘I watched until he was out of sight and I thought, when this is done, I will feel better.’
A large moth wobbled between us. I watched it settle for a moment in Lloyd’s beard and then take off again in the direction of the sun.
‘John O’Groats!’ Lloyd barked, opened his eyes and gave me a look like I was arguing with him. I picked up the bottle from where it sat next to him and drank a little more. It was smokier than I liked.
‘At John O’Groats I made a circle out of stones and sprinkled him all over them. Like decorating a cake. That was nice. I sat down next to him and drank champagne. And then I threw him off a cliff edge in Cornwall. It was all good. But here — I can’t get this last one right.’ He looked at me, crestfallen. ‘I’m bored of it, sick of it.’ He looked at the envelope in his hands. ‘I could just pass by a bin outside a chip shop and drop him in.’
‘Who was he?’ My throat was burning.
‘He was mine,’ Lloyd said, and smiled widely. ‘He was mine and he was hit by a truck on his way to work. BAM!’ he shouted, and giggled and then was quiet.
‘Your son?’
‘No — not my son.’
My insides listed and turned like a shoal of fish.
‘Sorry,’ I said. I stood and brushed my trousers down. Lloyd conducted the air around him with his hands.
‘Shall we go now?’ I asked. I didn’t want to go back to the house without him.
20
Working at the Hedland is different from Darwin. In Darwin someone told me it was safer at the Hedland where there were fewer tourists who came and went, and that the sex was more average because they were the people who lived and worked there. At the Hedland, they weren’t off their tits on excitement because they were on holiday. It made sense, and I did some reading up on the place, which is a mining town, and so I expected it to look like a Western film, but when I got off the Greyhound it looked just like a shitty little town. And as it goes, the sex is just the same for bored men as it is for over-excited men. I guess they’ve had the chance to really think about the things they’d like to do to a person. But not all of them are like that. Some are kind, but even kind people use other people for sex. You come to see that.
I share a room and a bed above a rotisserie chicken shop with Karen. She’s been in Port Hedland two years by the time I get there, but she doesn’t tell me why, and I don’t tell her why I’m there either. We just rub along together, and she makes me laugh. She’s the beautiful type, straight out of a magazine, with long hair and a small waist, and I try not to think too hard about how she, looking like she does, could have come to be in the same place as me.
We try and make the place look decent, even if it smells bad from all the cooked chickens, and Karen refers to a thing she calls ‘ombionce’ which is brought about by scented candles and a red and orange rag rug over the only window. She also talks about ‘fung shuay’ and throws a fit when I move things around while she’s out, so that the foot of the bed faces the door. ‘That’s how you get carried out when you die!’ she wails, yanking the bed across the room to where it had been before, so it gets in the way every time you walk by it, and you smash your shin on it.