I am very grateful to the following for giving so generously of their time, thoughts and support; without them, this book may not have seen the light of day: Edward Way, Sacha Thorpe, John Fuller, David Steward, Zoe Swenson-Wright and Sigrid Rausing. Also to Duncan Minshull at the BBC for initial guidance, and to John Owen for an insider view of bookshops.
Thank you to Tom Williams, Clare Bullock, Victoria Murray-Browne for their critical suggestions at an early stage.
Many thanks to the Nyika family of Lunca de Jos in the Pagan Snow Cap Region of north-eastern Romania for their warm-hearted hospitality on the farm: especially to Istvan for translating and to Erica for recounting her experience of working in England.
With thanks to my editor Robin Robertson for his exacting judgement through later drafts, to Ana Fletcher at Cape, and to my agent Lucy Luck.
As ever Jo, you made it all possible and stuck by me. This is your book as much as mine.
FICTION
Ulverton
Still
Pieces of Light
Shifts
Nineteen Twenty-One
No Telling
The Rules of Perspective
Is This The Way You Said?
Between Each Breath
The Standing Pool
Hodd
Flight
POETRY
Mornings in the Baltic
Meeting Montaigne
From the Neanderthal
Nine Lessons from the Dark
Birds with a Broken Wing
Voluntary
TRANSLATION
Madame Bovary
Thérèse Raquin
NON-FICTION
On Silbury Hill
Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992, and he has published two books of stories and six poetry collections and nine further novels, most recently Flight (2012).
www.adamthorpe.net
A spirited, restless fourteen-year-old, Fay, goes missing from a Lincoln council estate. Is she a runaway, or a victim – another face on a poster gradually fading with time? The story of her last few days before she vanishes is interwoven with the varied lives of six locals – whether aware or unaware of her presence or absence, all touched in life-changing ways.
David is an eco-campaigner on a family holiday on the bleak Lincolnshire coast; Howard, a retired steel worker with some dodgy friends; Cosmina, a Romanian immigrant struggling as a care-home nurse; Sheena, middle-aged and single, running a kiddies’ clothes shop, is sexually entangled with the peculiar Gavin, while dreaming of Paul, up the lane; Mike, the misanthropic owner of the haunted second-hand bookshop, is secretly in love with Cosmina; and Chris, a TV producer become Trappist monk, can’t quite leave the ordinary world behind. All are involuntary witnesses to the lost girl; paths cross, threads touch, connections are made or lost. Is Fay alive or dead? Or somewhere in between?
Adam Thorpe has once again created a cast of brilliant eccentrics bound together by the accident of geography, in a novel of effortlessly elegant prose, forensic observation and resonant power.
15–16 August 2012
There might be bigger crabs when the tide’s right out, he suggests to the kids. Worms, anemones, brittlestars and the countless small crabs have not grabbed them. Stephie has just done a project on giant crabs at school, and is further up the beach, stooped over with a red bucket and a net. Noah is stabbing at bubbling air holes with a stick.
‘Don’t do that, Noah,’ says his father. ‘You might kill whatever’s breathing down there. Those holes are like their nostrils, OK? Little critters that thrive in salty environments. Pretty special.’
A brief pause, and then his son stabs at them with even more enthusiasm, now they are nostrils. Nostrils of concealed salt-loving monsters.
‘I said, Noah. Don’t do that. An intertidal mudflat is an amazingly rich habitat but it’s also … what? Noah. What is it? Remember? Begins with F.’
Noah mumbles a word that sounds very like fucking.
David is momentarily speechless. Surely not? Not at six years old? Noah glances up at him with a secret little smile. ‘Fracking,’ he repeats, loud enough to be heard over the sea’s restless wash.
The father chuckles in relief, to Noah’s delight. ‘OK, OK, I get it. The word is actually fragile. Remember? Fragile. A very important word, Noah.’
The boy is now pretending to be a burly hard-hatted fracking operative, from the look of it, adding drilling noises. His father turns away, defeated. He was woken at dawn, shivering in the tent, by a cacophony of rooks massing directly overhead, and he feels shit. The damp sand is silky-hard under his feet and surprisingly cool. He presses his toes into it, kneading the grains, not making much headway and releasing a sulphurous odour: the natural decay of organic matter, on which all life depends. His toes’ impressions are black. He is not an imaginative man, but he tries to picture himself as a hominid walking here a million years back, with a very simple life pattern, with straightforward thoughts and feelings and finely tuned sense receptors. Wetness, light, the healthy stench of mud, the cries of his blood progeny, the tribe’s future. It is difficult picturing this, what with a huge bright-blue shipping container in his sight line, dumped for no discernible purpose in front of the concrete seawall, its patched ugliness topped by a metal fence.
Noah has left off fracking and has picked up one half of a sword razor shell: creamy white, almost opalescent. David begins to relate the amazing story of bivalves, tapping the shell in Noah’s small palm. A helicopter, the bright-yellow rescue type, thumps into view some half a mile inland. The chopper’s slapping rotors are loud, considering its distance. Noah points the long shell at the heli and makes a surprisingly effective space-gun noise, followed by an explosion.
‘Noah! You’re really pissing me off! What is that heli doing?’
‘Blowing up.’
‘It is not blowing up, stupid. It is flying off to rescue someone, someone badly injured or drowning or critically ill!’
Lisa is meditating out of sight in the dunes, with a view down to their van parked in a lay-by on the very straight and very depressing coastal road. Luke is in the van, dreaming whatever toddlers dream. Lisa doesn’t like her husband to swear in front of the kids, breaking into one of his hissy fits, as she calls them. Maybe it’s his red hair, she says. True, he can’t help it. Not that it happens very often, these days. He has better self-control.
‘I’m not stupid,’ says Noah in a voice that mixes defiance with deep hurt.
Steph skips up to join them, to the father’s relief, the bottom of her bucket seething with whelks, hermit crabs and various wrigglings yet to be identified. ‘Wow, well done,’ says David. He’d forgotten to check on her. You never know with beaches. Noah crouches down and examines the bucket’s interior without touching, Steph standing over it with crossed arms.
At least there aren’t that many people on the beaches of Lincolnshire, if you stay clear of places like Skegness or Mablethorpe. The North Sea is off-puttingly cold, even in August. They’ve seen a few folks in the water, still only up to their waists about half a mile out, it looks like. The weather’s supposed to be getting a lot drier and hotter (or less cool) in a couple of days’ time. It is just unfortunate that most of the coastline has a rampart of static caravans and bungalows, which somehow they did not expect, while the coastal towns are basically run-down housing estates with amusements. Looking on the map, he just assumed that the miles and miles of broad sand would be lined by fields and trees beyond the dune grass, as they would be back home, where there are thousands of miles of wild beaches. There are nature reserves here, but they are pretty small and you can’t camp overnight. The one open stretch of grassy shoreline they drove past lifted his hopes until he saw the first bunker. He didn’t want his kids brained by golf balls travelling at 70 mph, especially as the few people on the fairways looked well into the doddery stage.
A retired couple from Birmingham with what looked like salt-blistered skin told them this morning, while they were rolling up their tents at the inland campsite, that it’s amazing north of Mablethorpe in the Saltfleetby-Theddlethorpe Dunes, but you can’t camp there, it is another nature reserve.
‘Could we camp sort of on the edge of it?’
‘Well,’ the man said, ‘there’s always Pleasure Island Family Theme Park at Cleethorpes. Or is it Fantasy Island? There’s that lovely site near Skeggy, lots to do for kids, plenty of toilets. Pool tables and whatnot. What’s its name?’ he added, turning to his wife.
‘Fantasy Island’s just down by Ingoldmells,’ said his wife sternly. ‘Ten-minute drive from here. You can’t have missed it. Britain’s first-ever theme park.’
The Milligan parents have so far managed to conceal the big resorts’ attractions from the kids, on the basis that unappeased desire is crueller than ignorance. They thanked the couple anyway, although the man persisted in going on about the campsite near Skegness. ‘Fifteen minutes’ walk and you’re on the esplanade with all the amusements,’ he said. ‘What the heck’s it called? We used it three years running, didn’t we, pet?’
His wife’s sagging jowls shook. ‘Haven’t a notion which one you mean.’
‘Superb pitch sizes,’ he continued as the Milligans bundled their gear into the van, agreeing to spend the day in the dune area with the unpronounceable name. ‘Superb!’
* * *
David is sitting back on his heels apologising to Noah for calling him stupid. They give each other a cuddle, which topples David backwards into the yielding sand, both of them laughing. Noah has the most extraordinary squeal of a laugh, reminiscent of a juvenile kea. David first heard keas on South Island in Kahurangi, and made their mating patterns the subject of his thesis. ‘They’re probably the most intelligent bird species in the world,’ he told Lisa at the time, when she questioned his choice. Really, it was so he could live in the mountains for a while, but he found it lonely: Lisa did not join him for long enough. The kea squeals got on his nerves, were sending him crazy, and now they’re haunting his son. Memory transference maybe. There’s a lot we don’t know.
The nature discovery exercise is turned into a game in which they get points for spotting something new on the soggy flats, from worms to waders to rusty cans which they can’t touch. The bigger crabs have made a collective decision to stay under, it seems. Size isn’t everything, he tells the kids, not in the natural world. Intelligence counts for a lot. Finding your niche and sticking to it. They don’t seem convinced. They have a little rucksack rattling with shells, including some pretty whelks, but there’s nothing here to equal the beautiful specimens back home, especially the huge patterned volutes. Yesterday he told them about his favourite, the famous blackfoot paua, iridescent with blue, green, purple and silver once you’d spent a long time scraping and scrubbing it, but that just made them more fed up. He took out a couple of slipper limpets and pretended they were his ears. Noah, despite David telling him that they are a product of the plastics industry and choke birds and fish and could even choke Luke because they look like sweets, has started a collection of blue nurdles.
When the rain starts in earnest, gusting into their faces, the three of them slope back to the van. Lisa is inside, her meditation already relocated to the van itself and disrupted by Luke filling his nappy and wailing. The cramped interior stinks. ‘This is supposed to be my holiday too,’ Lisa groans.
They find a spot in the simple campsite a mile away, a little close for comfort to a casino and a games arcade, but pleasant enough and only ten minutes’ stroll from the beach proper. There’s a café and a dilapidated mini-golf nearby. They sit in the site’s wooden clubhouse and play cards, before venturing out to Swan Foods, the local store, for supplies. The row of shops includes one selling mobility scooters, which Noah thinks are for kids and the best gadget he’s ever seen. There is a bright flyer for the Cleethorpes theme park pinned to the corkboard near the till. The kids are investigating the vast lolly display, thankfully.
David joins the queue, bored already. A small handwritten plea to find a home for Fluffy, an eponymous angora rabbit, red-eyed from the flash. A MISSING poster next to it. Did you see Fay? Thin, toothy, pale. Looking straight at him.
Lisa is nominally in charge of the confectionery department. The kids’ expressions are agonised, unable to choose within the strict parameters allowed by their parents. Sour Ears, Strawberry Clouds and Cobbers do not exist here, but the Brit substitutes are almost as foul and just as enticing, tempting you at every corner, every counter. It’s a kind of comestible porn.
David’s glance wanders back to the girl called Fay. Hair not as red as his and Stephie’s, not a proper auburn, but the poster looks faded. He doesn’t think the hair’s dyed, although henna red has become fashionable. Fourteen is a bit young to dye your hair, and she looks a very young fourteen. Old beams in the background, real old English cottage beams. Nice middle-class English girl. She’d still be called Ginger or Carrot Top. Copperknob in his case. Trousers pulled down by the Matthews gang when he was fifteen to check his pubes. Howls of laughter.
Her eyes of course do not look away in embarrassment but are still bolted to his, straight into the camera. They are a clear emerald green and her mouth has a child’s large teeth, her bone structure yet to mature around them. One front tooth is growing crookedly so it looks pointed. She will need a brace. She is amazingly alive, he thinks. Fay Sheenan. Irish roots, probably. He has nothing much else to read, so he scans the words over and over. Last seen in distinctive leopard-patterned trainers with pink laces, orange tights, a fur-lined hooded coat. And with a small mongrel dog. Some maniac with uncontrollable urges. Or maybe she has just run away. Home situation. With an ugly little bitser. Her only friend.
‘David?’
Lisa is gawking at him. Infuriatingly he blushes. The kids show him their lollies in their paper bags as if they are jewels. How can anyone harm anyone else, let alone a child of fourteen? Steph will be eleven in the autumn. What if his own red-haired daughter was to go missing, her pink laces carefully tied? Fragile, that’s the word. The lollies look sticky and alien to him. That’s how you know you’re abroad: by the unfamiliar confectionery. Among other things. His EcoForce colleagues, for instance, so passive-aggressive, so British. He loves his kids to bits, nurdles and pink laces and all.
The adjoining shop sells beach and pool toys, including a dolphin ride-on eerily like EcoForce’s logo, blown up and on display. A mere eight pounds. The kids want it. Even Luke points at the window and burbles in the same acquisitive manner as his siblings. David tries to explain that it’s made out of cheap plastic, no doubt in China, and will last about a week, if that, before creating yet more toxic waste for the planet. Also, the sea is really cold. ‘We can use it in the pool, Daddy,’ Steph points out. Lisa is further up the street, looking at a clothes shop. He walks towards her with Luke, who is in the pushchair; the other two cross their arms and stand firm. It is rare for them to show mutual solidarity. This will all lead with horrible inevitability to the need to find a swimming pool, to being squeezed by overweight campers with armpit and nasal issues: a living hell. Lisa points out that he’s left the other two behind.
David shrugs. ‘Oh, they just want to buy, buy, buy. Ignore it.’
‘Your problem to sort out,’ she says. ‘I’m on vacation.’
Steph runs up, Noah following her a few yards behind. She says in a mournful tone, ‘Daddy, we really love dolphins, just like you do.’
They wake up to a cold, clinging fog that soaks the outside of the tents. It is forecast to clear by mid-morning. It’s that time of year, the campsite manager tells them. ‘Yeah, we get these sea fogs in Wellington,’ David comments. Lisa grunts, ‘And how’s that supposed to help?’ They are tired after a bad night so decide to stop this upping-sticks lark and stay the morning in the immediate area, trying to be mindful instead of hopeful. Lisa’s been edgy ever since they hit Lincolnshire, for which she had great hopes. Or maybe it’s just PMT. Or the weather. Someone she respects at the toddlers’ group – a woman called Penny who has published a novel and lives in Muswell Hill – called Lincolnshire ‘authentically mysterious and eerily unknown. Tennyson!’ she added, which Lisa at first thought referred to sports facilities. England is so tiny, how could anything be mysterious and unknown? ‘The land that time forgot,’ Penny added with a giggle, her overactive son banging the bongo drums like a maniac. David had stayed in Lincoln in January, representing EcoForce at a conference on Engaging with the Televisual: New Ways of Visualising the Environment. A complete waste of time full of unpleasant media types, but he could confirm the (relatively) wild emptiness of the area, although he’d only glimpsed it from the conference bus on a wetlands tour. A quick meander through the Wolds on Google Street View sufficed. It was beautiful. And relatively inexpensive to camp in. And a lot nearer than the Outer Hebrides, which was his first choice.
David would have quite fancied a walk through the Saltfleetby-Theddlethorpe Dunes themselves, spotting birds, but the kids screamed in the negative; yesterday, when they first saw the trees and open meadows full of swirly rye grass from a winding lane, they pronounced the reserve ‘boring’ and Noah claimed car-sickness. They stopped the van and Lisa had to hold him from behind as he imitated violent retching, disturbing the peace of this miraculous parcel of unspoilt countryside. So the attractive walk plan has been delayed until further negotiations come the afternoon.
David has hardly used his binos. The birdlife is supposed to be fantastic, but so far all they’ve seen, apart from rooks, sparrows and so forth inland, is gulls and a couple of shelducks and the odd wader on toothpick legs in annoying silhouette against the dazzle-wet sands. Today is a no-no for anything outside, but then it clears in around ten minutes and the future looks bright.
The kids keep interrupting an adult argument about migratory patterns with demands for a go at the mini-golf. If they can’t have that dolphin ride-on, then …
Its puddled dilapidation attracts David, and probably explains why it’s free. You get the clubs and balls from the café next to it, an old-fashioned place called Nelly’s Teas where jellied eels are served up in a polystyrene cup. Lisa says she’ll sit with Luke at one of the outside tables and asks David to order her a cuppa. The others go inside and wait at the counter for the waitress, who is clearing tables very slowly, as if underwater. Another Did you see Fay? She’s becoming almost familiar, surveying them in their family bliss. Dimples, toothy smile, that long red hair. Mutant gene 40,000 years ago. How did the first coppernob survive? Regarded as a freak, a god, a curse, a blessing? Very pale skin, freckles scattered over her nose. Born to keep to the shade, skulk in the shadows. The lightless back of the cave, among the stalactites. Her coat was reddish-brown. He missed that last time. Why not red-brown? Or brownish-red? Maori. Apache.
The kids are desperate for him to have a taste of jellied eel, but he explains to them that eel numbers have fallen by 98 per cent in the last five years thanks to pollution and overfishing. What he doesn’t say is that he ate eel back in NZ years ago, and the slippery cold flesh made him feel sick. It was almost as bad as those grilled caterpillars in the Congo during his fairly disastrous post-doctorate research stint on African greys. He mentions the caterpillars to divert their attention, and it works.
She’s probably fine. Most runaways are. Alternatively she could be naked and strangled at the foot of some hedge or other, like a skinned rabbit.
The busty young waitress hands over the clubs and balls. She’s called Colette, according to her name tag.
The three of them survey the course. He tells the kids how, as a boy, visiting his grandparents in Manawatu, he would play mini-golf every day, clearing pine-needle clumps out of the holes just as he is doing right now.
The first hole is simple, just a chicane. Before they start David explains that it is not as easy as it looks, that they mustn’t shout or have a hissy fit if the ball doesn’t go in the hole like they want it to. Winning is not what’s important, he tells them.
‘We’re here to have a fun time together, OK? I played a lot of mini-golf when I was a kid, so don’t expect to be as good as me and go mental when you aren’t.’
Steph insists on going first. She has Lisa’s strong character. She hits the ball.
‘Remember, Steph,’ says David, ‘there’s a lot of luck involved. But well done. Wow. Oh, wow. Beaut, Steph. A hole in one. Look at that.’
Noah hits his sideways. He gets the ball into the hole after twelve hits, and is already in tears. David’s ball clips the chicane and leaps up out of the run like a comet and straight into the weeds and pine needles and probably dog mess.
‘You’re in the lead, Steph,’ says David, knowing this won’t last.
Steph’s ball has a magnetic attraction for the hole. Noah, four years younger than his sister, gets angrier as he gets worse, and vice versa. As for David, he finds that the club is not right for him, or maybe it is Noah’s anger: his ball keeps going haywire. He clocks up nine strokes trying to get over a double humpback bridge with a chipped sidewall and a brown puddle of rain in the middle. He was pretty good at mini-golf as a boy. His ten-year-old daughter, having never played it before, is beating him by five strokes.
To take the heat off, he tells them about the fun course he would play all those years back in Manawatu. The ball had to pass between these two big round cheeks, he says. It looked just like a bum. The kids screech with delight when he says this word. Bum. The upper half of the construction, which was a clown’s eyes and nose, had been smashed by vandals. It wasn’t supposed to be a bum, it was supposed to be the cheeks on the face of a huge clown. He clips the ball with smooth confidence.
‘Beaut,’ says Noah with an unpleasant grasp of the snarky.
‘Why can’t you play now, Dad?’
‘I am playing, Stephie.’
‘But you’re no good.’
‘I’m just giving you and Noah a chance,’ he fibs.
‘Oh yeah,’ jeers Noah. ‘Just because you’re losing, Dad.’
‘It’s not a question of winning or losing, Noah. I told you. Don’t take that attitude, please. It’s so competitive.’
There is a loop-the-loop now, with dribbly swirls of graffiti on the side. Noah throws the ball, and Steph shouts at him not to be a piker. Their mother is dimly visible through the chicken-wire fence, still seated with Luke at one of the café tables.
An electric shock passes through him. Shit, he never ordered her cuppa!
His dismay is distracted by some noise. Another group has come onto the course. Oh no. They are probably from that bigger campsite a mile or so up the road: a sprawling place with ‘entertainment’ and a heated swimming pool teeming with microbes. The Milligans studiously avoided it after a preliminary spec. The group has already caught up, and is waiting at a tactful distance for David to get his ball into the loop-the-loop. Steph’s ball has shot through far too fast but somehow bounces back off the low side wall to end up inside the hole, sitting like an egg in its cup. Now his daughter is leaning on her club like Tiger Woods, watching her dad. The campsite group is also watching.
David thinks he hears laughter and begins to feel sweaty and faint. They are bikies, from the look of it – huge with leathers and big boots. David is wearing minimal esparto sandals modelled on an archaeological find, according to the owner of the green shoe shop in Lincoln. It was surprisingly full of people. Crazy name. What was it? Itchy Feet. Served by this old hippy in a wheelchair, whose own feet were bare and brown as though carved out of kauri. Would they itch, in fact? Noah kept staring at him like he’d never seen a ponytail before, let alone a wheelchair. The sandals are uncomfortable and keep falling off; maybe that’s why he is losing. (Lisa bought a pair of reiki flip-flops, which are fantastic, she claims; she can feel the energy in her ankles.) Noah is sulking under the pines, face in his hands, partly because his sister has called him a piker. At last David’s ball makes it up into the loop-the-loop. There is a rattling noise and a pause and it trickles out again from his side, bashfully. David covers his face with his hands in half-meant despair and the bikies laugh in a weirdly raucous way, as if he is entertaining them deliberately.
This time the ball makes it to the other side. He taps it into the hole.
‘Eleven,’ says Noah. ‘They’re German. Yuk.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You took eleven for that one, Dad. I counted.’
‘OK, great,’ says David, his voice rising. ‘I’m sure you’re pretty pleased.’
He waves the bikies through. They are tall and bulky, grinning and nodding at him in their leather bib pants, their cut-offs festooned with sewn-on badges. Are they mocking him, or is there a cultural misreading here? Noah was right: on some of their backs is a big circular patch showing the German eagle popping its biceps with PROUD GERMAN BIKER around the edge, with the eagle echoed in tattoos on square-shaped bared shoulders. They are very good at mini-golf, despite not knowing shit from clay. He just wishes they would keep their voices down as they rasp, growl and gargle their way from hole to hole at blitzkrieg speed.
‘They’re typically German,’ says Steph, having looked impressed and a little scared. It was as if she was dutifully echoing someone adult.
‘That’s cultural stereotyping. They’re human beings.’
‘No, they’re not,’ Noah says. ‘They’re stupid coconuts.’
‘Noah,’ David shouts, making him jump. ‘Never ever use that word!’
‘Not even if I’m eating one?’
‘I mean in the context of an insult. And you know why, don’t you?’
Noah leans on his mini-club and nods slowly and theatrically. ‘But they’re not real coconuts,’ he points out. ‘They’re all white.’
‘It’s a racist term, and I don’t ever wish to hear it from your or Stephanie’s mouth.’
He really feels upset.
‘And from my bum?’ jokes Noah.
Steph explodes into snorts. ‘Coconut from your bum!’ she wails deliriously, a kea’s mating screech. ‘That’s so yuk!’
David leaves them to it. The long tunnel looms.
‘That’s not a bum.’ Stephie giggles. ‘It’s something else.’
Noah gives a snort, as low and guttural as a dirty old man’s.
‘Give it a break, thanks,’ says David, adjusting his bum bag around his waist as if by association. He doesn’t quite know how to respond to Stephie’s comment, but his body is responding with a hot-flannel feel on his forehead. It’s a kind of appalled panic. Maybe it’s the bag interfering with his swing, but if he puts it down he’ll forget it and they’d be sunk, stranded here for weeks or maybe for ever, like illegal immigrants. He can’t believe he forgot to order Lisa’s tea. He glances over through the chicken wire. Still with Luke at the table. He should nip back and correct this. Oh, she’ll realise eventually. She’s a grown woman. He’ll abase himself, drop to his knees and beg forgiveness. All will be well.
Steph wins by a number of strokes that only their author has kept track of. ‘Sweet as!’ she cries, punching her fist. Noah is permitted to place the ball in the hole manually. His juvenile maleness is undergoing a terrible trial. David’s ball has done nothing right. Maybe he was not actually very good at mini-golf in his youth down the far side of the planet. It is hard to say because he only ever played by himself.
‘All good,’ he declares as they head for the gate and the tables. Lisa is animatedly reading to Luke. Before he can open his mouth, she says, ‘Looks like you were having a lotta fun.’
‘Steph won by yards,’ he tells her. ‘Hey, look, I completely forgot to—’
‘Don’t sound so surprised. Girls can be excellent at sport too.’
‘She cheated,’ Noah declares without any conviction, already flinching in his sister’s proximity.
Steph snorts and shakes her head. ‘So sad.’
It is, David reflects. It really is. She is so dominant. She’ll end up an exec director for sure, breaking other people’s crayons. Jesus, how can he think this of his own daughter? ‘Really sorry about forgetting your tea, Lisa.’
‘I’m fine. Aren’t we, Lukey-Lukes? Hey, why did you lot keep slapping your own bottoms and shrieking? Kinda weird.’
He tells her about the broken clown face back in Manawatu.
‘I don’t think that’s very sensible,’ she says.
‘What’s not sensible?’
‘Lavatory humour.’
‘You cannot be serious.’
He married a scamp of an Aussie and her mischievous sense of fun. The scamp became a responsible mother and the fun has all but dried up, although she laughs on the phone or on Skype with her friends. The children want a second turn, and Noah slips off the bench and shows his bottom – pulling his shorts down, taking the undies with them. People at the other tables are looking.
‘Just stop that,’ snaps David, blushing furiously because he knows what the people are thinking. He would blush as a kid when a teacher asked who had stolen this or that, even though he’d done nothing wrong. It was uncontrollable, a freckled white to crimson, blushing under his red hair because he was blushing and so subsequently blushing an even deeper crimson. But now he was an adult! For Chrissake! ‘If you don’t want it whacked, Noah, pull them up. Right now!’
Lisa shakes her head. ‘Whacking a kid in public is illegal.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t ever get to whack a kid in private.’
‘Your threat was all bluster.’
‘Well, bluster works. Ask my colleagues.’
Their voices were technically quiet, as if they were talking through headphones, and they weren’t looking at each other. ‘What worked was your fairly aggressive tone of voice. Empty threats are not a great approach to firm parenting.’
‘OK, I’m a shit dad. Say it.’
‘You’re a good dad. But not a perfect one. You have to admit now and again to making mistakes. Telling that story about bums was probably a mistake, if you think about it. Bum is a trigger word, like arse or tit. Nobody’s going to beat you for it.’
His face is melting in the self-stoked fire. ‘I didn’t make any mistake, Lisa. I was just telling them a funny story from my childhood. They thought it was funny too. Please try to be less judgemental, it’s pretty tiring.’
‘You have a problem about being judged?’
‘You never used to be so judgemental.’
‘You’d rather I just shut up while you yack on? Play the obedient Sheila?’
‘Dolphins are our favourite animals because they’re threatened from stinction,’ Noah says with an infinite sadness in his eyes.
‘I hope I don’t yack, Lisa.’
‘You do talk quite a lot, actually. Ever since we started.’
He turns to look at her. ‘That’s maybe because I’m relaxing. I’m actually enjoying myself for once.’
‘Dolphins are even more intelligent than me,’ Steph announces with an arch look.
Lisa scoffs. ‘I mean started started. From the beginning. Ab ovo.’
They started at uni some fifteen – no, seventeen years ago. He has always thought of himself as quiet and considerate. Never in seventeen years has Lisa accused him of being an earbasher.
And his wife, in certain company, talks a great deal. She can stay on the phone or on Skype for hours. He hesitates before saying it. He could just retire from the scrap right now, like sensible animals do. But he is a non-sensible human.
‘And, of course, you never open your own mouth, Lisa.’
Lisa shrugs. ‘I think you just assume that the man has more right to talk than the woman, unless it’s about domestic issues.’
‘You’re nearly as telligent, though,’ Noah concedes as if after careful thought or out of solidarity.
Luke is slapping his mother gently on the face, then not so gently, as if testing her resilience. Already the male brute. David’s mouth is tense, a tense coil of rope. Out of this mouth might come words with which he could hang himself. The pasty, bored-looking and mostly fat folk seated outside the café are watching him, as Brits do. Not minding their own business. Stickybeaking into private matters. Neighbourhood fucking watchfulness. He glares back and they turn their heads away.
‘Let’s go sit in the dunes,’ he says. ‘With an ice block. What d’you reckon?’
They all go inside Nelly’s Teas to return the golf gear and buy their ice blocks. The young waitress called Colette takes the gear and says, ‘Dead good is mini-golf, but it’s not a thing any more. Like yo-yos.’ David smiles in fake agreement. Her thin white kitchen coat exaggerates her bust. One button is missing. No sign of Nelly herself, presumably long dead, but it’s a nice café apart from the filthy tables: very English and shabbily authentic down to the name. There are truffles for sale, made in a local monastery. A leaflet claims its gift shop sells stuff like pottery, fudge and honey, apart from books. Our Lady of Grace Abbey. They can visit it, David thinks. Despite believing that monotheistic religion is a historical and environmental disaster, he is attracted to monasteries. The contemplative life.
In the end they collectively succumb to ice creams in the form of Magnums, and Colette digs through the freezer with loud rustles as if their choices are annoyingly unusual. Monasteries and murderers, what a world of extremes. The small mongrel dog gives him hope it might not be murder, in fact. The girl went missing in late January. Almost six months ago. She was last seen at 16.22, Friday 27 January 2012. So precise! No doubt by a CCT V camera. Through a chill winter drizzle. Pink laces. Steph has a pair of pink laces, as far as he recalls. It’s not looking good. January cold, and now it’s summer, or what passes for summer in England. Maybe she’s begging somewhere on a busy pavement, with the dog next to her. Vulnerable. He’ll look out for her when he’s back at work. A daggy bundle in a furry parka by the mouth of a Tube station, mournful eyes the same as the dog’s. Take me to London.
‘Sorry, Steph?’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘No,’ he insists, ‘you just whispered something.’
‘Er, no. I did not. Daddy, are your ears going mad?’
Maybe it was Noah, who now asks, ‘What is that girl missing?’
‘Herself.’ He has unaccountably blushed to the roots of his equally red hair, a steaming hot flannel pressed against his skin. Except that he knows it’s all in the head; no one else can see it. ‘She’s gone missing.’
‘Whoa, go easy on the detail,’ Lisa murmurs.
Noah frowns, looking up at his father. ‘You mean she’s lost in a wood? Why have you gone really really red, Daddy? Like Postman Pat’s van?’
‘Crikey,’ his wife chuckles quietly, ‘so you have.’
‘It’s pretty hot in here.’
Steph snorts. ‘She’s chopped up in a basket, more likely.’
‘Yuk,’ says Noah, his little hand twitching inside David’s.
Lisa sighs. ‘Where on earth do you learn that kind of silly nonsense, Steph?’
‘I want to go find her,’ Noah pronounces. ‘I have to go find her,’ his son continues, crossing his arms and stamping his foot. ‘I have to. Not if she’s chopped up,’ he adds cautiously. The waitress returns from the freezer with the five Magnums, and Noah’s determination unravels into an outstretched hand and the huge eyes of a starvation victim. If his son and his wife have noticed, David thinks with alarm, then everyone must notice.
There’s an awed silence as the Magnums are distributed. ‘Guys, I’ve an idea. This great idea.’ David’s blush is retreating, it helps to speak, to be proactive. There again, it has no logic. ‘You go start on your ice creams outside. Leave this to me.’
Lisa ushers the gang out. As he sorts through his change, he asks the waitress if she’s got any more copies of the missing poster. The waitress stares at him under her mop of curly hair, then draws her little white coat closer over her breasts as if he’s been peeping into their deep gully. She can’t be eastern European, David thinks, as she’s not smiling.
‘I’m just standing in,’ she says, her voice hoarse and knowing nevertheless. ‘Seriously, like, I haven’t the foggiest about anything,’ she adds with a cheery cackle.
‘The point is, we live in London so I could put a few up there. Posters. Unless she’s been found?’
She turns round slowly and studies the poster as if she’s unfamiliar with it, pulling her coat over her buttocks. ‘I imagine not,’ she says. ‘The campsite up the road can do you a photocopy, like? They’ve got a colour one.’ She turns back to him, her full upper lip winking with gloss. ‘Are you from Australia or South Africa or summat?’
‘I’m a Kiwi.’
‘Don’t mind me asking, but why the heck have you come here then? It’s just a mudflat the whole way along. Water’s full of sewage. They don’t even bother replacing the light bulbs in them Las Vegas illuminations in Skeggy.’
‘We’re not staying long,’ David admits, startled by the sewage info. ‘Just passing through, really. My wife’s family came from here about a century ago.’
‘Changed a bit since then. To be honest. Do you really want it?’
He nods. She turns back to unpin the poster, struggling with her sharp bright-green nails, then hands it over a touch slyly.
He rolls it up. ‘I’ll bring it back today. What time do you shut?’
‘No urgency,’ she says, leaning her elbows on the sticky counter. ‘But I’ll probably get a right bollocking. Have you tried the seal sanctuary?’
‘Temporarily closed.’
‘That’s what people round here have got tattooed on their brains.’
Which earns a chuckle from him. She smiles back, looking straight into his eyes. Christ, it feels good.
The others are well through their ices outside by the time he joins them, somewhat perky. His own Magnum has started melting – he has a struggle to unwrap it cleanly, asking Lisa to hold the poster.
‘We’ll photocopy it and take a few to London.’
Lisa looks at him as if he’s doing something slightly perverse. The kids are too busy with their lollies to be interested.
‘Let’s shift back to the beach,’ he suggests.
‘Are you OK, David?’
‘Yeah, why?’
‘Dunno. You never stand like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘I dunno. Legs wide. Like my brothers. Like you’re used to straddling horses. Weird. It doesn’t really work. The jackaroo look,’ she adds with a kind of giggle that reminds him of the old days.
They sit on the sand between two big tufts of grey-green marram grass, safely hidden from stares, shivering a little, within sight of the wetter grey that is the sea. It’s attractive here if you don’t look to the right too far, where the concrete reappears a few hundred yards up. Why couldn’t the whole coastline have been preserved? Who is in charge of Lincolnshire? Gulls flock screamingly overhead and then find someone else to harass. He knows what he has to do, apart from being careful about the way he stands, for Chrissake. He’ll carry out a personal word survey, quantify his vocal output, establish indices of nattering density and then establish long-term, year-on-year monitoring of the spew coming out of his mouth. He’ll ring certain home-grown words and record their reappearance, like reckon or heaps or keen. Won’t he just?
‘What’s up now?’ Lisa asks, frowning at him.
He blinks innocently and mentions the monastery. Organic allotments, herb garden, beehives. This could be a good contact.
‘Your parents would be delighted,’ Lisa says in a tone made more caustic by her Aussie twang.
‘I think we should visit. They’re completely organic. Reach out, build the network.’
‘Try selling it to the kids. The monastic peace would be shattered. Forget work for a day, yeah?’
Lisa was a social worker back in Auckland, and is currently struggling with her doctoral thesis on the use of manaakitanga in mental health risk management – manaakitanga being the Maori concept of hospitality. It seemed a great idea at the time. She’s yet to find a suitable supervisor in the UK, but Skype comes in useful. David reckons she misses her job and is resentful of his. She’s already chomped her Magnum all but down to its stick. Despite her veganish ways, she has a sweet tooth.
Sex on a stick. You’d be so lucky.
If he catches her burying it in the sand, with the idea that it’s organic …
He looks out at the sea, narrowing his eyes like a sailor. There’s a silvery line of hope out there, right on the horizon. He hunkers into his silence.
Lisa is now teaching the kids a tongue-twister: She sells seashells on the seashore. She’s really relishing her latest minor victory, kicking him when he’s down, not letting him limp away to nurse his wounds. No, she’s a tough woman, brought up on a farm in the Outback with five huge and deeply unattractive brothers; she knows how to weld, for Chrissake. Steph’s inherited all that. Lisa once told him, in the early days, that she appreciated his feminine side. Her brothers reckoned ‘your Bluey’ was as camp as a row of tents, she said, simply because he was slight and couldn’t lift a tractor with one hand. They both laughed. He told her about the time he’d met a black tiger snake when out birdwatching on Bruny Island and stayed to watch it swallowing a lizard head first. ‘The fourth deadliest snake in the world,’ he added as if she didn’t know! ‘Yeah,’ she smiled, ‘but it had its mouth pretty full already.’ True too. Most of what she says is a reality check. Rows and rows of little boxes to tick. A blob of Magnum gunk hits his T-shirt like a seagull dropping. The chemicals will no doubt eat into the organic dye.
He gets up and goes over to the trash can behind the grass clumps and drops in the unfinished bulk of his ice cream. The two older children run up to ask him why he has done this. He explains to the kids that commercial ice creams are full of synthetic chemicals and that actually they have never seen a drop of cream or even fresh milk and that their reputation is the result of careful globalised marketing or, in other words, lying, and that many of them use palm oil, which is responsible for terrible deforestation. A great flock of words, he realises. Too many to count, screeching overhead, on and on.
‘Does this one use palm oil?’
‘No, Steph, as it happens, but most of them do.’ The kids are frowning, absorbed in sending all those colourings and flavourings and emulsifiers down into their innocent and miraculously constructed stomachs at massive profit to Unilever. The corporate cynicism lingers on his tongue, oily and synthetic. Serves him right. If they’d bought a chilly bin they could have stocked up on healthier snacks, but he didn’t want to look too equipped and disconnected from the natural world, humping it all about.
He eventually collects the sticks – Lisa’s is bitten raw – and they clatter in the trash can. He holds his youngest child’s hand and walks a little way on the long slatted path towards the beach proper, with Steph and Noah already there. Luke is bandy-legged but steady, a small precious weight pulling on his own enormous hand. Bits of shredded plastic and gunge-food wrappers blow past them in the sudden gusts as their toes hit the harder, cooler sand. A dog and its walker break away from what looks suspiciously like a canine crap in the middle of the beach. Wow, folk are selfish. He’s seen dog poop all over the place in Lincolnshire, actually. Wild animals do it discreetly, terrified of being tracked. Perhaps Lisa was right about him being an earbasher. And so what? It isn’t exactly the greatest of reprimands. He feels good, rationalising his rage into self-judgement and self-awareness like this. His father would’ve given Mum a black eye in the name of the Lord.
He looses the two older kids onto the beach like live balls, swinging them away to where they can hurtle about, trying not to think about sand-speckled sausages of dog poop. Soya sausages of poop. And a small mongrel dog. Owning a large dog is equivalent in sustainability terms to owning an SUV: he’s seen the figures. Luke toddles behind them now on his chubby little legs, freed of his nappy, naked except for his top. The sky has patches of blue and the sun shines way out in a definitely broadening strip of silver that David stares at again, appreciating the delicate beauty of the light and colours, its diminished northernness. The offshore wind farm is now far more visible, its elements rimming the horizon like tiny skeletal trees. It is the beginning of the future. Clean and sensible. He finds it both ugly and beautiful. A hopeless gesture, really, against the infinite kilowattage of nature herself, soon to come pounding in on gigantic breakers, sorting out all this trash. Not even revenge. Just physics. There are other people scattered on the beach; those sitting down are looking at their mobiles, not the sea. That’s what we’ll all be doing the moment the climate apocalypse happens. We won’t even lift our heads from those tiny screens.
Lincolnshire spreads out behind him, as flat and featureless as the Outback. He’d go insane if he had to live here. Bungalow roofs, patches of foliage and the usual in-your-face glint of antennae and pylons. That’s about it. The kids hate walking so the Wolds were hopeless. Nothing he has ever seen in the world outside New Zealand is anything like as spectacular as New Zealand, but this is ridiculous. The waitress asked a valid question. Why have they come? Why did he leave New Zealand in the first place? To be more connected, less out in the planetary wop-wops? Connected with what? The great liberal-capitalist highway lined with fuckin Macca’s and KFCs?
He wanted foreignness too, and this is a foreign coastline. Because this is a foreign country. Where when he says stuff like, ‘I’m just gonna have a kip,’ his UK colleagues say something like, ‘Make me a cup too, there’s a good chep.’ Because of crazy London property prices, they are condemned to living in a small semi-detached in Borehamwood.
A bloke with a camera behind the railing on the raised concrete strip, telephoto lens, half-naked Luke in his field of view. Against the law, probably. Repeat shutter clicks. To be reproduced on the web without permission. Should he go over? Or maybe it’s just zoom shots of the sea. The man is elderly, in a raincoat, with a check scarf and matching cheese-cutter cap on his big round head. Could be harmless, could be evil. Turning away and walking on now; got what he came for. The kids’ souls in his bag maybe.
How come so much of life is tainted?
Lisa stands nearby, packing a sad yet again – staring out to sea like she’s waiting for her lost man to return from his epic voyage. Her figure is running to stout, says a little voice. It is a political move. She once dressed to kill and now she dresses to evade any kind of sexual overtones. Her hair in a practical but unattractive bob.
She is unattractive to him now.
When he first met her she looked very young, like someone’s little sister, mid-teens. She was so thin her clavicles showed through her cotton tops. Her skin was amber; she was lithe and laughing, with freckles over her nose, and he fancied her like crazy. She had an Aussie frankness about her. She’d spent her childhood sunbaking (as she put it) on the farm that her father and her brothers ran with their leather whips and their massive horses. She was a wild girl, or that’s what he believed. She wasn’t, not really. She was in her first year of sociology, had wanted out of Australia. No one is truly wild. But that’s what he projected onto her, the suburban boy from Auckland. Now his terrible secret is that he no longer feels physically drawn to her. He doesn’t know what to do. The feeling is mutual, he reckons. She has only grown tired of his voice because she no longer desires him.
He goes over to her and puts an arm around her shoulders. Her back slopes. Her mouth has a pout to it that he knows well. He’s seen photos of her as a kid, with exactly the same pout. Then, she looked sultry and pretty as a flower, a skinny nut-brown scamp on the farm. Now, somewhere inside her beyond the tired eyes is that same amazing kid. He feels a great nostalgic love for her, welling up in him like springwater in a dry place.