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for Susanne Hillen and Bruno
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…
About the author
Narratives and Lives Jonathan Buckley talks to Louise Tucker
LIFE at a Glance
Ten Great Novels
Read on
Have You Read? Other Novels by Jonathan Buckley
If You Loved This, You Might Like…Chosen by Jonathan Buckley
About the Author
Praise
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
This happened ten years ago, more or less. It’s mid-morning on the second day of January, in the modest but immaculate little bungalow that is home to Benjamin and Christine Kemp. Having clambered over the stile of New Year’s Day, the Kemps are now setting out on their trek across the bleak moorland of yet another year of conjoined medium-level misery. Christine is in the kitchen. A row of brass ornaments is laid out on a tea towel on the breakfast table and she is polishing her way down the line. Her husband is there as well, reading the paper. They have recently retired, both of them. For more than forty years, from the year before he married Christine, Benjamin worked for the local council, in the rates department; Christine typed and filed medical records at the hospital for a couple of decades, after raising their daughter, Elisabeth, who at the age of nineteen married a French shopkeeper she’d met on holiday six months previously. Elisabeth then went to live in a village near Limoges, and might as well be living in a village in Tibet for all her parents see of her nowadays.
Benjamin is trying to recall who gave them that horrible brass horse with the spindly legs and massive head when Christine opens a cupboard and the door squeaks. She sighs into the cupboard, and it’s like the chill breeze that heralds the storm. ‘Are you ever going to fix this?’ she asks.
‘Yes, dear,’ replies Benjamin.
‘And when would that be?’
‘Soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘This afternoon.’
‘That would be nice. Please do it.’
‘Yes, dear.’
She closes the cupboard and opens another one. There’s a sharp hiccup of irritation and she turns round, showing him the small round handle that’s just come off in her hand. She presents it to him, Exhibit 3227 in the never-ending case of Kemp versus Kemp. ‘Why does it always take you so long to do the tiniest little job?’
‘And why is the tiniest little job always my job?’
‘You said you’d do it. It’s not as if you’re rushed off your feet, is it?’
‘No, dearest. It’s not as if I’m rushed off my feet. You’re quite right.’
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘When are you going to fix it?’
‘This afternoon, dear. After I’ve fixed the squeak that I alone can fix.’ And so on. They have each other now, all day long. Just each other, all day, every day. It’s too much; it’s not enough.
The niggling becomes a raised-voice row, and as usual it’s Benjamin who retreats. What can he say? That he hasn’t fixed the bloody cupboard door because he’s bored out of his head, today as every day, the same as she is? What would be the point? He puts down the paper and leaves the room. ‘That’s right,’ Christine calls after him, ‘you just walk away.’ She hears him picking the keys off the table in the hall. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Out.’
‘Out where?’ He doesn’t answer. ‘What about that blasted dog?’ she yells. So he takes the dog, a decision which is really going to knock a divot out of his day.
Milo, that’s the dog’s name. Milo is a sullen and overfed mongrel, part labrador, part something very much less handsome. They get into the car, Milo beside his driver, and they drive down to the seafront, where Benjamin – seeing that the tide is out – turns eastwards, towards the headland, and parks in the very last bay, where the road comes to an end against the cliffs. They walk on the beach all the way to Straight Point, and there Benjamin takes a rest. He sits on a rock, feeds a handful of biscuits to the dog, stares at the sea. The scene could not be more appropriate to his mood: the sky is a filthy old sponge, the air is thick and cold and damp, the sea is an infinite pavement of grey sludge. It’s not truly raining, but there’s so much water in the air that he’s getting soaked as he sits. He watches Milo moping around the pools, picking a path through the dull green slime that coats the rocks. When you’re feeling despondent, gazing into a mirror can make you feel worse, and this is the same: the longer he stays here, the gloomier Benjamin is becoming. He whistles for the dog, and they set off back towards town.
It was a rough night, the night before, and the sea has dumped piles of bladderwrack and rubbish in a thick continuous scum at the foot of the cliffs. Nose lowered, Milo is following the line of seaweed and flotsam, pausing now and again to root about in whatever’s been washed up. Short of breath, Benjamin stops again, and the dog disappears into a corral of stone blocks that fell off the rockface in the autumn. When Benjamin reaches the stones, Milo has moved on: his tail is visible, about fifty yards off, wagging above a hummock of sand, between two car-sized slabs. Benjamin whistles, but Milo doesn’t come to him. Having been ignored three or four times, he walks a few steps closer and sees that the dog is standing in a long wide groove that the tide has scoured in the sand, and has shoved his muzzle into a well-stuffed black bin liner. Benjamin waits. The dog’s pulling something out of the bag, a thick cable or a length of stout rope, and he’s having a good chew at it. There’s no hurry. Benjamin waits, eyes closed, dozing on his feet.
Milo is still busy with the oversized rope when Benjamin opens his eyes again. The dog’s head is snapping from one side to the other, as if playing tug-of-war, and he’s making a low snarling noise, of a sort Benjamin has never heard from him before. ‘Here, boy,’ calls Benjamin, but there is no response. He’s covered about half the distance to the bin liner when he notices there’s something peculiar about the rope, about the rigidness of it, and the sharp angle at which it’s bending. A moment later he stops – or is stopped, because he’s reacting before he knows exactly what it is he’s reacting to. Then he sees that the thing that Milo’s gnawing isn’t a rope or a cable: it’s an arm, and the bin liner is a body in a waterlogged coat, partly covered by sand. The legs, in sodden grey tracksuit bottoms, are twisted as if they’ve no bones in them, and there’s a gash in one shin, with a mush of dark green stuff coming out, where something, possibly Milo, has taken a few bites out of it. Eyeless, teeth agape, a purple-black face lies wrapped in a veil of wet hair. Beside it a naked arm emerges from the sand at a low angle, the rotted palm directed skywards, as if to make a catch. Scraps of skin dangle from the fingertips, like a shredded glove of black muslin. Worm-like things, white and slick as lard, are squirming in the earhole.
Benjamin is in shock, as who wouldn’t be? He’s a gentle old man who has reached the age of sixty-seven without ever seeing anything very nasty, and this is very nasty indeed. It’s so nasty it’s not real. Traumatised, he’s looking at the mouldering head and the empty eyes, and it’s like a display from a chamber of horrors, a dummy of a man who’s been ripped to bits. He stares and stares, as if the body might go back to being a bin liner if he stares long enough, but soon he is seeing the corpse for what it is, a dead man, a real person destroyed. And while Benjamin is being transfixed by the dead man, Milo is continuing his wrestle with the cadaver’s right arm, a struggle that ends with a gristly tearing sound and the dog flying backwards, bringing away a hand and a length of forearm, with ribbons of muscle trailing off it.
The dog goes cantering off down the beach, with the limb in his jaws. ‘Come here,’ calls Benjamin. ‘Here. Here,’ he yells. Several repetitions later, Milo at last obeys, bringing the half-arm with him. ‘Drop, boy,’ Benjamin orders. ‘Drop. Drop. Drop.’ Milo cocks his head, inviting Benjamin to wrestle the thing from him. ‘Drop. For Christ’s sake, drop.’ The beast is not trained in any way. This is another of Benjamin’s multitudinous domestic crimes: he brings this flatulent mutt into the house and can’t be bothered teaching it the basics of civilised canine behaviour. A stick is needed, something he can chuck to make the dog lay down his plaything. From the ridge of tidal debris he takes a length of wood and flings it over Milo’s head. Milo watches it fly and fall to earth. A second stick is similarly spurned. ‘Drop. Good boy. Drop. Drop.’ As a rule Benjamin doesn’t swear. Benjamin swears once or twice a year, when things with Christine get out of control, but he’s almost hysterical now. ‘Drop the bloody thing. Please, please, please drop. Put it down. Down. Put the bloody thing down. Now. Drop it. Drop.’ Milo deposits the limb on the ground, gives it a shove with his snout, and grabs it the instant Benjamin makes a move.
All Benjamin can think to do is walk towards the town and hope that Milo, losing interest, will relinquish his burden en route. As fast as he can, which isn’t fast, he strides across the sand, attended by his faithful hound. Every now and then Milo deposits his portion of corpse on the ground, turns it with his nose, and takes it up again. ‘Leave it, for Christ’s sake,’ shouts Benjamin, looking the other way. The road isn’t much further. ‘Stay. Stay there,’ yells Benjamin. ‘Sit. Stay. For God’s sake, stay.’ Milo sits, and the moment Benjamin turns his back, the dog gets up again to follow in his master’s wake. They are about a quarter of a mile from the beach-grave when, out of the corner of his eye, Benjamin glimpses Milo running alongside, his head held up, with nothing waggling out of it. The half-arm has gone. Disinclined to search for it, Benjamin scans the environs quickly, then hurries towards the car.
And that’s how we found the body, in two instalments: most of it lying close to its burial place, ravaged by seagulls and platoons of crawling wildlife, in addition to the routine self-destruction of the dead; and the right forearm and hand, a few hundred yards away, lying on a cushion of seaweed and chewed to buggery.
2
You couldn’t have called it a face: stripped of most of its edibles, it was a bonehead with a partial cladding of jellied flesh, plus the semi-attached remnants of a beard. Putting a name to the wreckage, however, was easy. Ian, for one, needed no time to make the identification: seeing the beard and the rotten trainers and the ripped-up coat, he said straight away: ‘This will be Henry.’ Under the coat there was a rag of a T-shirt and under the rag of a T-shirt there was another rag of a T-shirt, and another one under that, half a dozen of them, all of them torn and the colour of butcher’s aprons that haven’t been washed for a year. ‘One of them will have SeaShed printed on it, I’ll bet you,’ said Ian. ‘It’s Henry.’ And when they got him on the slab and started unpeeling the wrappings, the last layer before the skin had SeaShed on it.
Some seaside towns have a dolphin that swims with the fishing boats, some have an inquisitive seal that’s famous for a summer, or a monster seagull that snatches burgers from holidaymakers’ hands. This place had Henry, the hobo of the beach. A lot of people knew Henry, by sight if nothing else. If you went down to the beach at the start of the day and waited, sooner or later you’d see Henry, guaranteed. Any day, whatever the weather, you’d see him. Rip van Winkle, he was known as, or Captain Birdseye, or Robinson Crusoe, or Howard, as in Howard Hughes.
He was slightly taller than average, about six foot, and broad in the shoulders, but skinny. He looked like a once-hefty man who’d been whittled down by years of living in the open air. When he walked his T-shirts used to flap on his body like towels on the back of a chair, and the legs of his jeans were mostly empty air. In his first summer here that’s what Henry wore, every day: a pair of jeans that ended up the colour of salt and frayed halfway up to his knees, and a T-shirt advertising some long-gone medical conference in Acapulco. When the weather cooled, Henry added another T-shirt, and he kept on adding layers until, deep into his first winter on the beach, someone gave him a second-hand overcoat, the one the corpse was wearing.
He was already old-looking when he arrived, but nobody knew how many years Henry had clocked up. Look at the face and you’d think he wasn’t far short of seventy, but living rough can easily add a decade to the appearance, so all you could say was that he was somewhere between his late fifties and late sixties, probably. Watch him walking, though, and you’d be confused, because Henry used to move across the beach at the speed of a man in his prime, a fit man at that. Like a mechanical scarecrow in overdrive he’d appear by the cliffs, and within five minutes he’d have covered half a mile of sand, as though there were somewhere he had to be, an urgent appointment at the other end of the beach. Head down, as if striding into a gale, he’d follow a line close to the water’s edge, with not a glance to right or left, even when the beach was packed, and he’d keep on going, slaloming through the children, all the way to the harbour and all the way back to Straight Point. No heatwave could slow him down and no downpour could put him off: alone on the beach there was Henry, his T-shirt plastered to his ribs, the tramp in a hurry, battering his head through the deluge. You could watch him until he was out of sight, fleeing into the rain and spray, and if you waited long enough you’d see him return, most likely, charging out of the mist, his beard like a hank of sea-soaked cloth.
Ian first came across Henry only a week after starting at the station. It was late on a Sunday afternoon in August and Ian was on the beach with that month’s girlfriend. Some kids were playing volleyball and Henry – coming from the direction of the harbour – was heading right for them, full throttle, eyes fixed on the ground. He was going to plough right into the net, thought Ian, and then, ten yards short, Henry suddenly came to a stop, an absolute standstill, as if there were a glass wall running across the beach and he’d just crashed into it. The kids had noticed him now, and they were looking at him, wondering what was up, waiting for him to move, but Henry was in a world of his own. He was like a man-sized puppet dangling from invisible strings: his mouth was hanging open, his arms dangling by his sides, and his eyes were staring over to his right, towards the town. Of course, there would have been plenty to stare at on a day like this, lots of of nicely filled swimwear, but Henry didn’t seem to be seeing any of the girls. Ian and his girlfriend were quite near, near enough to notice that Henry was wearing an Adidas trainer on one foot and a Reebok on the other, and from where they were sitting it seemed that Henry wasn’t looking at anything in particular: the eyes were wide open and aimed towards the road, but they were blank, like puppet eyes. And then he did this shudder or jump, as though someone had just clapped their hands by his ears, and he was off again, swerving round the volleyball game. Off around the headland he went, oblivious of everyone.
A few weeks later Ian encountered him again, in town this time, gazing into a shop window. Ian was having a moment with a local nuisance out on the street, about a car that’d been separated from its rightful owner, and on the other side of the road there stood Henry, reading a small ad in the window. It was only a postcard with a photo of a dinghy stuck to it, but all the time Ian and this lad were talking – a good ten minutes – Henry was studying the card. When he was done, Ian crossed over and took up a position a couple of shopfronts away. Something about this dinghy was really troubling Henry. His nose was on the glass and he was frowning as if the advert simply did not make any sense. For a couple of minutes Ian kept an eye on him. Henry didn’t budge: his face was locked in this expression of bewilderment. Finally Ian went up to him. ‘Everything all right, sir?’ he asked.
Henry turned, smiled graciously, said nothing.
‘Are you OK, sir?’
‘Yes. Thank you,’ Henry responded, nodding slowly, drawling the words as if, after deep thought, he was deciding that he was indeed, on balance, OK. ‘And you?’ Henry enquired. ‘Is everything all right with you?’
‘Yes, thank you, sir.’
‘Yes,’ Henry mused, giving Ian a benign, mild, examining kind of look that made Ian feel somewhat uncomfortable. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’ It was a fresh day, a two-T-shirt day, and Henry was wearing a white buttoned-collar shirt over them, open like a jacket. Wavy lines of salt were all over his jeans, but the ensemble was remarkably clean, Ian observed. What’s more, Henry had whiter teeth than Ian, though his beard looked like something you’d find hanging off the walls of a cave and his hair was a mess, an inch-thick carpet of grey matting. You could lob a dart on to the top of his head and it wouldn’t reach the scalp. ‘Well,’ said Henry, pushing a shirt button through the wrong buttonhole, ‘I should be going. Thank you, officer.’
‘Just thought I’d check, sir.’
‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘Thank you,’ he added, with a sincerity that wasn’t altogether convincing.
‘Hope you didn’t mind me asking.’
‘No,’ replied Henry vaguely, examining askance the photo of the dinghy. ‘No. Not at all.’ His fingers fastened the buttons of his cuffs, then worked them free again. ‘Well, goodbye,’ he said, and he sauntered away, gazing at the sky, in imitation of a carefree stroll, or that’s how it seemed.
This was the first occasion on which Ian spoke to Henry. Not long after, in January, the acquaintance was renewed, after a call from Mrs Darrow. Dear Mrs Darrow was a serial complainant. If a party started up within a mile of her house, Mrs Darrow would be on the phone within the half-hour to protest about the noise. If a camper van were to be left in a nearby car park overnight, Mrs D would be on the blower, reporting an invasion of tinkers. Now Mrs Darrow had called in to say that there was a naked man wading in the water. She could see him clearly from her window, cavorting in the sea, making a display of himself. Would we please do something about it right away? Ian was sent down to the beach to have a word with Henry.
It was a couple of degrees above freezing and an aggressive wind was slicing in off the sea. The water was chopping up heavily, but Henry was out there, frisking around in the buff while Ian stood on the shore, beckoning this nutcase to come out. Henry noticed Ian. He waved back at him and dived under, as if he thought Ian might be waving for the fun of it. Ian took a couple of steps into the water; he started yelling. Eventually Henry got the point and staggered out, starkers and shrivelled and turning blue.
‘Good morning,’ Ian called.
‘Good morning,’ Henry replied.
‘We meet again,’ said Ian, and Henry smiled, having no idea what Ian was talking about. ‘We’ve had a complaint, sir,’ Ian went on.
Long pause. ‘I see.’
‘From a lady.’
Longer pause. ‘I see.’
‘About your attire. Lack of.’
Even longer pause. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to cover yourself up.’
Very long pause. ‘Someone has complained?’
‘Yes, sir. A lady.’
Henry looked around. There was no one in sight except Ian.
‘I take your point, sir,’ said Ian. ‘But the lady has seen you and has lodged a complaint.’
Once more Henry considered the vast frigid vacancy of the beach. ‘Got a telescope, has she?’
‘I think we must assume that she has.’
‘And I’m blocking the view?’
‘So it would appear.’
Henry’s skin had by now turned the colour of a dead mackerel and his private parts looked like three tiny acorns in a nest of singed grass. He was on the brink of hypothermia but he was talking to Ian as if they had just happened to bump into each other on a street corner. ‘Can’t she look the other way?’
‘It would appear not. Where are your clothes, sir?’ asked Ian, by now alarmed at Henry’s hue.
Henry pointed inland, but Ian could not make out what he was pointing at. Together they walked across the sand, Ian and this shaggy nude lunatic, chatting about the weather. On a low mound of sand there lay a small pile of clothes and a towel that would have done fine for lightly rubbing down a chihuahua after its bath. Ian handed him the tiny towel and Henry took it. He held it in one hand, by his side. They regarded Henry’s meagre wardrobe and the big red nylon bag lying nearby – a laundry sack, which Henry used to sleep in, until someone gave him a proper sleeping bag.
‘Do you have any swimming trunks, sir?’
‘No, I do not,’ Henry regretfully admitted.
The next day Ian bought him a pair of swimming trunks, but before long Mrs D was back on the line, offended again by the exposure of Henry’s genitals. Ian returned to the beach. The wind was Siberian and the waves were going twenty different directions at once. Henry was frolicking in groin-high water, slamming his head in the foam. Summoned, he trudged out of the sea. ‘Henry, you’re underdressed,’ Ian observed. ‘You’re not wearing them.’
At a loss, Henry frowned. ‘What?’
‘Your nice new trunks,’ Ian explained. ‘The trunks I got for you.’
‘Yes?’ Henry responded, still baffled.
‘The trunks I got you last week?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, the light dawning.
‘You’re not wearing them.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘She’s complained again.’
A blank pause. ‘Who has?’
‘The woman.’
‘The woman?’
‘The lady with the telescope. The one who complained last week. Before we acquired the trunks.’
Long pause. ‘I see.’
‘What’s the problem? Don’t you like them? I thought you liked them.’
‘Oh no. I like them.’
‘So where are they? Over there?’ asked Ian, pointing towards a dash of red on the rocks.
‘Yes,’ Henry confirmed.
‘Why not there?’ asked Ian, pointing to Henry’s nether regions.
‘They’re not dry.’
‘Come again?’
‘It’s a horrible feeling, putting on wet clothes.’
Ian sympathised, but insisted that Henry must make himself decent. This was not to be their last conversation about Henry’s swimwear.
For almost three years Henry was here, but he was in residence intermittently, which is why nobody was worried when he’d been missing for a while. He’d left the town before, for weeks at a time, months at a stretch, so no one thought anything of it. But it was odd that he’d gone missing in winter, because previously it was always in summer that he went away.