“‘Truth, Billy,’ my dad goes on, ‘I suppose we’re better off this way. But from now on, you see Vaughn Parry, you step to the other side of the street. You don’t have him in the house, you don’t have no truck with him at all. He’s got the Screaming, and he’ll show it soon enough.’”
Billy Friend grinds his cigarette against the sole of his shoe. It’s a leather sole, grubby and stained with water, and the ball of the foot is thin and black with old burns. He tosses the butt out of the window.
“Well, he did, didn’t he?”
The Wistithiel station is made of grey stone and old, black iron. Billy Friend wonders aloud whether Wistithiel sprang up around a prison, the way towns sprout to serve whatever industry is nearby. “Or a lunatic asylum, Joseph, that would do nicely. Friends of Brother Vaughn all around. Cousins and aunts, red of tooth and long of nail, sitting in a hundred rocking chairs and making jumpers out of hair!”
In fact, the Parry family came from a town miles away up the coast, just across the county line into Devon, but Billy, unsettled, is prone to flights of trenchant fantasy.
On a hardwood bench with green paint flaking leprously from it, a sullen, beery man growls in his throat. It might be words. It could just be phlegm. Billy flinches.
“I says ‘No, it bloody wasn’t,’” the drinker bites out. “It was baskets and fishing, and now there’s no bloody fish because of the bloody Spanish and the Russians and their bloody giant factory ships, and who wants bloody straw baskets when you can have nylon or polyester or that rubbish? Eh? So it’s tourism and piss all else, and London buggers like you come in, buy the place up, don’t like the mist and fog and show up two weeks in the year. And then they act like they’re doing us a favour. So the council puts bloody plastic slides and plastic cows and plastic bloody everything to bring ’em more and they come less, and who can blame ’em? So laugh all you bloody like.”
“Good evening,” Joe says, politely.
“Is it? Where?”
“Here, I hope.”
“Well, you hope in vain, don’t you? We bloody all do.”
“I was hoping you could tell us where to find Wistithiel Rental.”
The man nods once in the direction of the car park, and when Joe thanks him, he shrugs into life.
“I’ll walk you. You’re all right. Your chum’s got a clever mouth.”
“Yes. He has.”
“I like that in a pretty girl.” Joe doesn’t know quite how to respond to that, and behind him, Billy Friend is frantically miming a banjo and rolling his eyes. “Going on far, are you?”
“Hinde’s Reach House. But we’re staying in the Gryffin overnight.”
“Gryffin’s a decent place. The House… well. I wouldn’t go up there.”
“Why not?”
“Bloody long way.”
“Oh.”
“And they were always funny round that way. Webbed feet and that.”
“Webbed feet?”
“Aye. What farmers always say about them on the coast, and city folk say about countrymen. They eat missionaries, too.” There’s a glimmer of laughter in the man’s eyes. “But the Gryffin’s all right. Decent enough. And the barmaids wear those little T-shirts.”
Billy Friend perks up, and they pass into the chilly, grey day outside.
“When I get my hands on the old trout gave me this job,” Billy Friend murmurs in the saloon of the Gryffin, “there will be an accounting, not to say that harsh words will be spoken by me into her pious little ear. ‘Lady,’ I shall say, ‘you are a troublesome old baggage, and you owe me extra,’ and she, being a clean-living old bird and of a nervous disposition, will yield up the cash and introduce me to her lissom granddaughter by way of additional compensation. Bloody hell.”
“You said I needed an adventure,” Joe reminds him.
“You do. You need to relax and be yourself, not whoever it is you’re trying to be in your mad little head. I bloody don’t, though. I’m me and I’m good at it, and I hate the country. It’s full of bumpkins and pies and godawful bloody warm beer.” Tess the barmaid snorts, and Billy recollects himself. “Though it does have some compensations, I will say.” She turns her back on him and walks away with great emphasis, but the effect is muted by the handkerchief top and low jeans she is wearing, which together afford Billy a revitalising view of her spine and sacrum. He makes an approving, canine sort of noise, and she scowls.
“I think she likes you,” Joe says. Billy eyes him over his pint.
“Yes, you actually do, don’t you?”
“She sort of wriggles when she comes over here, and so on.”
“Indeed, she does, Joseph. She sashays, is the technical term. And do you know what all that proves?”
“She likes you.”
“No, Joseph, alas. It proves that you are a prat.”
Tess reappears a moment later with the food, smiles at Joe, and pauses on her heels as she turns back to the bar. “Got everything you need?” Billy nearly swallows his tongue.
“Yes, thank you,” Joe replies. “And I don’t suppose you’ve got a map, have you? We need to get out to Hinde’s Reach House.”
She gives him a funny look, as if he has made the kind of proposition Billy frequently does make and she weren’t the kind of girl who usually hears that sort of thing.
“I’m superstitious,” she says. “So I don’t go up there.”
“Don’t want to get webbed feet, I ’spect,” Billy suggests.
She scowls. “You’ve been talking to Lenny,” she says, indicating the man from the station, now sitting at a table by the fire. “He thinks he’s a laugh. Did he tell you they burn travellers as witches, too?”
“Something like, yeah.”
“He thinks he’s funny,” Tess repeats.
“We’ve got a parcel for the house.”
“There’s no one there. And it’s not safe.”
“Not safe how?”
She shrugs. “Crumbling cliffs and holes in the ground. Tin mine back when we had tin, then a government place in the war. And if you believe in ghosts, it’s haunted, too.” She smiles, embarrassed.
“Whose ghost?”
“Hundreds of them. It used to be where Wistithiel was, but it went into the sea in nineteen fifty-nine. Most of the village. Or burned down. Or there was an epidemic. To hear my grandmother tell it, you’d think it was all three. Or Galveston. They wanted to make it a tourist attraction, but there’s still people alive who remember and lost friends, husbands and so on. So we said, bollocks to that.”
“The ghost of a whole town, then.”
“Yes. Actually, if you put your hand on your chest and your foot on the right stones, you can feel the heartbeat of the dead. Hang on—” She peers around, then reaches over to a window ledge and hefts a small, solid piece of grey granite. “This is from the bay underneath. A lad from Bristol brought it back from the fields out there, then got scared in the night and left it in his bedroom when he went home. Silly bugger.” She puts the stone on the ground. “Here. Put your foot on it.”
Feeling silly, Joe puts his foot on the stone.
“Now, you put your hand… here.” She puts his hand dead centre of his chest. Billy Friend watches, bemused. “Can you feel anything?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s been here in the Gryffin a long time, and you’re not local. Here.” She replaces his foot with her own. “That’s better. Now, give me your hand a moment.”
Joe gives her his hand, and she places his hand, palm down, on her chest and leans firmly towards him. Her skin is warm, with just a trace of perspiration.