“There,” Tess says. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Sometimes it takes a while to find the right spot. It might be more to the left. Or down.” She tugs gently on his wrist, pushes her shoulders back a bit.
“No, I’ve got it.” He nods. “Definitely a heartbeat.” He nods again.
“Oh,” she says, a bit nonplussed, “good.”
The moment lengthens.
“Yes.” With the heel of his hand Joe can feel the curve of one breast. He has absolutely no idea whether this is deliberate. It’s lovely. He tries to be polite and not notice.
And suddenly the stone is back on the shelf and Tess is busily serving someone else.
Billy Friend puts his head in his hands.
The car is a grotty old banger, the best in a very small selection. Joe tentatively believes it is younger than he is, but would not put actual money on the assessment. On his left, Billy Friend holds Tess’s map. It is drawn in frustrated ballpoint, the road following the curve of the railway line, and there’s a grudging kiss at the bottom as if to point out what might have been.
“What you did to that girl ought to be illegal,” Billy Friend grumbles.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Of that we are all painfully aware. Lovely Tess is even now weeping in some kitchen corner, lamenting the waste of her heart. Not to mention her other salient attributes.”
“All right, I missed the point.”
“Yes, I would say you did.”
“We can’t all be you, Billy.”
“We can all be ourselves, though, Joseph, and who the hell can’t tell when a woman is putting his hand down her top that she’s doing more than discussing local folk tales? Are you in residence, Joseph, at all, inside your head?”
“Of course I am.”
“I should coco.”
“I just…”
“You try too hard to be a gent, Joe. It’s all going on inside you but it never gets out. You’re all buttoned up.”
“I am not!”
“All right, then: what action could young Tess have taken which you would have regarded as an unequivocal invitation?”
“Read the map.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Make an instruction out of the following three words: the, read, map.”
Billy does.
There’s no sign of witch-burning as they drive through the narrow lanes towards Hinde’s Reach. As they turn a corner, Billy Friend points out a large, rusted, black barrel which he asserts might be a cauldron used for missionaries, but the silent gloom of the sky swallows the joke. Neither of them mentions webbed feet. They’ve passed two men walking and a woman on a bicycle, and Joe found himself looking instinctively at their shoes to see whether they were larger than they should be.
They come over a hill, and there’s a small cluster of houses. It’s marked on Tess’s map as Old Town, but in truth it’s not even large enough to be a village, and made of concrete and corrugated iron. There’s a farmhouse and a single lonely petrol pump with a battered credit card box on top.
Joe slows the car and winds down the window so that he can speak to the woman sitting on a bench watching the road. She has messy hair, dyed a shocking red, but when he speaks and she turns to him, he realises she is very old. Her cheeks are purple with broken blood vessels.
“Hello,” he says, trying to be gentle and clear at the same time in case she’s deaf. “We’re looking for Hinde’s Reach House?”
She peers at him. “What was that?”
“Hinde’s Reach?”
“Ah.” She sighs. “Gone back to the grass, hasn’t it, and quite right, too.”
“We have a parcel for the house up there.”
“Do you, though?” She shrugs. “Well, I call that too late.”
A man emerges from the bungalow behind her, wearing socks and slippers. He has a mismatched face, as if one half has been shattered and reconstructed, long ago.
“Wossallthisabout, then?” He tries to smile, or perhaps he’s just twitching.
“Post office,” she tells him. “Parcel for Hinde’s Reach.”
“Parcel for the dead, then.” He spits. “Bastards, anyway.” He wanders back inside.
She sighs. “I should have said not to tell ’im. He’s still angry about all that as happened back then.”
“The town going into the sea?”
“No, no. That was natural. Awful, but natural. He’s cross about the other. His parents were taken off.”
“Killed?”
“Not exactly. Brain damage. Jerry thinks it was a plague. Thinks they were making germ bombs up there for to use against the Russians, and one of ’em went off. Maybe he’s right. Folks wrong in the head over one night, that’s not normal. And Jerry never entirely the same. Well, you see his face, don’t you? And no bugger gives a damn, either. These days everyone gets a handout. Stub a toe and you get one. But not for Jerry. Local trust says he’s faking it. Government won’t hear. The Church wanted him, ten years back. Wanted all the plague orphans and survivors and such. Said they could do wonderful things to help. But we’re chapel round here, so Jerry told them to stick it up their cassocks.” The woman sighs again. “Best you go over there, then. Close the gate after you, or the geese get out. Don’t take no nonsense from them! Have you got a stick?”
“No.”
“Kick ’em, then. Kick ’em hard, mind, you won’t harm ’em and they need to know you mean it. Otherwise they’ll have your arm.”
“If you’re sure,” Joe says.
“Not my geese,” she replies. “You want the second turning. Five minutes more.”
She goes back to staring at the road, and Joe guides the car through Old Town and along to the second turning. A huge, fanged thing made of iron looms over the road from one corner, and Billy Friend swears sharply before realising it’s a hay fork.
“I hate the fucking countryside, Joseph.”
Joe nods in acknowledgement of this truth. And then, without warning, the wind picks up and he can hear a deep, thrashing roar like a huge crowd, and they’re looking out over the sea, and Hinde’s Reach.
They go through the gate carefully, watching out for enemy geese, but the birds are clumped miserably in the far corner of the field, keeping one another warm. And there, sprawled against a grim, ugly sunset, is the place they have come to find; a shattered frame and some foundations, and a sign which reads: Hinde’s Reach House, Home Secretariat: S2.
The house is a pile of rubble perched on the edge of the cliff. A little further on there’s a rusted railway line ending in a stark iron buffer. Stiff, springy grass bends in the wind, and clumps of gorse bow and twitch. Below, the sea makes a noise so deep he can feel it in his gut.
It’s the emptiest place he has ever seen.
Joe Spork shoves his hands into his pockets and stares at the ruin, and out into the grim, blue-grey smear of sea and sky beyond the cliff edge. Spray spatters on his face. Reluctantly, he lets them extinguish this brief excitement in his life. Too late. Of course, much too late. The machine itself—the device which reads this magical book—is gone. This parcel, mysterious and beautiful and idiotic, is all that remains.
“Sod it, then,” Billy Friend says at last. He turns and huddles into his scarf, pulls his woolly hat lower on his head. “I’m sorry, Joe, it’s someone’s idea of a funny, I suppose. I was took. Or she’s mad, the old biddy. Doubtless wants to pay in fairy dust and cake as well. I got you all revved up over nothing. Still, maybe you can find young Tess and buy her a drink. No sense this being a total waste, is there?” and then again, with one last shake of the head, as he walks away: “Sod it.”
Joe looks after him, then turns back to the sea. There are white horses on the waves, hard shapes cresting blue-grey water. Back by the road, he hears Billy get into the car.