A Half Forgotten Song (9 page)

School was a kind of slow torture. It was a forty-minute walk to the drafty buildings in the next village, and there she sat at the back and tried to pay attention when all the while she was glanced at and whispered about, and notes were flung at her with crude drawings and insults scrawled on them. Even the poorest children, even the ones whose fathers were always drunk or beat their mothers or had lost their jobs and slept all day under the hedgerows, like Danny Shaw’s did, even they looked down on Dimity Hatcher. When the teacher caught them at it, she told them off, and ostensibly encouraged Dimity during lessons, but Dimity always saw the look on her face, pinched and faintly disgusted, as if teaching Dimity was above and beyond the call of duty and almost more than she could bear.

When it was time to go home Dimity was always torn between wanting to get away quickly and not wanting to walk with the others behind her, back along the lane to Blacknowle. Mocking her all the way, throwing names, throwing things, laughing. Sometimes she hid until they had all set off, then walked alone at the back, careful to keep one curve in the road between them. She wasn’t scared of them, exactly, more tired. Every bit as unwilling to interact with them as they were with her.
Don’t touch that! Dimity’s touched it! It’s got her fleas now!
Every insult, every name they hurled was like a dart that would strike, and stay stuck in her skin, hard to brush off. She would try not to feel as she walked behind them, careful never to let them see her cry. They were like a pack of hounds in that way, driven wild by any sign of weakness. She heard their chatter, drifting back to her on the breeze, heard their games and their jokes and wondered what it might be like to be a part of it all, just for one day, just for a short while. Just to see how different it would feel.

Sometimes Wilf walked with her. Wilf Coulson, a skinny runt of a lad, born late to the grinning Marty Coulson and his beleaguered wife, Lana, who, at forty-four years of age and the mother of eight, had thought her travails were over when Wilf was conceived. He had a permanently runny nose and a crusted left nostril. Dimity offered him rosemary oil on a handkerchief to clear it, but he always shook his head, said his mother told him not to take things from her.

“Why not? Your dad comes to see us, sometimes. So your ma can’t mind us so much,” she said one time. Wilf shrugged his skinny shoulders.

“She don’t like it, though. Ma says we’re not to talk about you, even.”

“That’s stupid. And it’s perfectly safe. I made it myself, from our bushes in the backyard.”

“Don’t go calling my ma stupid. It’s got something to do with you not having a dad, I think,” said Wilf. It was November, the fields all sludgy and plowed. They slipped and skidded along a track that cut between great loops in the lane, the pale gray mud caking their shoes, making them walk wide-legged, inelegantly. The sky was the same color as the mud, that day.

“I have got a dad, only he’s lost at sea,” said Dimity. This was what Valentina had told her, when she’d asked enough times to be wary of the woman lashing out. She’d been sitting on the front step, gazing out at the horizon. Smoking, squinting.
Will you give it a bloody rest? He’s gone, that’s all you need to know! Lost at sea, for all I care
.

“Was he a sailor then?” said Wilf.

“I don’t know. I suppose so. Or a fisherman maybe. So he’s only lost; he’ll come back one day and then he’ll pick up Maggie and Mary Crane by their collars and shake them like a pair of rats!” For the rest of the day she sang “Bobby Shaftoe” in her head, humming it softly.
Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea . . .
It was some years before she realized that lost at sea meant dead, meant not coming back.

One stormy day, while the wind tore the water into high, angry waves, she stood and watched them hammer ashore, picturing all the drowned sailors and fishermen, from the beginning of time, swirling down into the depths like autumn leaves in an eddying breeze. Their bones ground up, turned into sand. The coast where she lived was a treacherous one, and wrecks abounded. The year before, she’d gone on the bus with Wilf and his brothers to see the carcass of the
Madeleine Tristan,
a three-masted schooner that had blown into Chesil Cove. It sat lopsidedly on the beach, surrounded by tourists and locals alike. Dimity and Wilf, along with all the other children, climbed the loose rigging to peer onto the deck and play at pirates. It was the best playground they’d ever had, and they went back again and again until rats took it over, infesting it with their bustling bodies and whiplike tails. Just along the beach from the
Madeleine Tristan
sat the massive, flaking iron boilers of another ship, the
Preveza
. Wrecks upon wrecks; layers of lost ships, lost lives.

Realizing that her father would never knock at the door of The Watch, take her side, or shake the Crane twins like rats made Dimity sad for a long time. And when Ma Coulson found out that her boys had taken Dimity Hatcher along with them to the wreck of the
Madeleine Tristan,
she stood by with her arms folded while Marty took his belt to each one of their backsides. From her hiding place in the blackcurrant bushes, Dimity heard the crack of leather on skin and heard the lads whimper and yelp. She chewed on her lip until it bled, but didn’t leave until the last beating had been given.

When Dimity was twelve, Valentina said she wasn’t going to go to school anymore; that it was a waste of time and she was needed at home. Dimity was surprised to find that she missed it. She even missed the other children, whom she mostly hated. Missed seeing their new pencils and clothes, missed hearing their stories. Missed walking back with Wilf. She didn’t feel she was missing any learning, though. What use was maths and knowing where Africa was? What use was being shown how to bake a pie by a horse-faced woman whose bosoms rested on the waistband of her skirt when she’d been baking them since she was old enough to stand on a stool and reach the countertop? The things Valentina taught her were more important. All the other children were staying on till they were fourteen at the least. That was the law, but nobody said anything when Dimity left. Dimity thought the headmaster might come knocking at The Watch and demand she go back; but he didn’t. She looked out for him for a few days, but not very many.

It was Dimity who first found the way down from the bluff by The Watch to the narrow beach below. In fact, she cleared the path. One day, with her heart thumping, making her knees shaky; one day when she’d been sent out of the house and told to keep herself busy. That meant for hours. She inched carefully over the edge, fingers knotted into the wiry grass, feeling with her toes for a rock she thought would take her weight and not slip or tilt. If it came loose and she lost her footing, nothing would stop her until she hit the jumbled shore below. The soles of her shoes slid a little on a layer of grit, but then they gripped. The rock didn’t move. From there she could see a long, narrow zigzagging way, going first to her right, then left to the bottom. Some of the gaps between safe-looking stones were huge, and she had to stretch her leg right out, or jump, which was terrifying. To voluntarily leave off all handholds, abandon all safety. But she did it, she found a way down, and then spent hours building better steps with rocks small enough for her to move; swiveling them until they stopped rocking, until she could trust them. The sun was bright and the breeze gentle, a gorgeous May day. Halfway up the cliff was a kittiwake nest, the parents out at sea, hunting, and in the nest one fat, fluffy chick. It eyed her with dumb acceptance, bobbing its ungainly head. She knew not to touch it, even though she wanted to. But she wriggled down close to the rocks a short way away and lay still, so still, watching the parent birds come and go with their ink-dipped wings and their throats full of fishy mush for their baby. The other way round than it was for her, she noticed. It was usually her who brought food to Valentina.

She stayed by the nest for a long time, until the mother bird came to roost and the sun was setting. Drowsing in swaths of golden light, tucked out of the breeze. Her skin had that sticky, prickling feeling of being covered in salt; she was heavy with fatigue but enjoying the company of the birds as they whistled and muttered to each other. She liked the way their wet beaks and feet glistened when they came in from the water, and how they never stayed away long before coming back to check on the chick; preening it, nudging it towards a better place in the cramped nest.

She wondered how long it would be before Valentina checked on her. Surely not much longer. It had been about two o’clock, after lunch, when her mother had glanced up at the kitchen clock and told her to make herself scarce. It must have been nearly eight by now, with the sun so low and buttery. Valentina must have been wondering where her daughter was. None of their visitors ever stayed so long—a couple of hours at most. She decided to wait and see, while the kittiwake’s eyelids sank lower and lower; but once the sun had gone she was chilly, and the rocks began to dig into her, and she didn’t dare try to navigate the top half of her new path in the dark. So she got up as quietly as she could, which still made the mother gull squawk, and made her way up with the help of hands and feet.
I’m home!
she called, rushing in through the door. Happy even to be scolded, just to know she’d been missed. But The Watch was in darkness and Valentina fast asleep in an armchair, her robe gaping open around one flaccid leg. Lipstick smeared around her mouth, an empty bottle beside her.

Later, when she had fed herself a supper of stale bread and bacon and her mother was still snoring in her chair, Dimity crept out of The Watch and went to the Coulsons’ house. Shrouded by the darkness, she lingered in the blackcurrant bushes for a while, breathing in their cat’s-piss smell, peeping in at the windows from a safe distance. When she saw Wilf, she waved, and gestured for him to come out, but he didn’t seem to see her. One by one, all of the lights in Wilf’s house went out, and the night clung close to Dimity, cold and lonely as a winter sky.

CHAPTER THREE

I
n the dark and quiet of the spout lantern, Zach sat alone in the bar, lit only by the ghostly glow of his laptop. Pete Murray had kindly given him the password to his wireless broadband, and the bar was the best place to pick up a signal. It was one o’clock in the morning, and Ali was supposed to have called by now so that he could tell Elise a bedtime story. As the minutes ticked by, he got more and more nervous, that same odd stage fright as when they’d first brought her home from the hospital, and he’d felt as though all eyes were on him, waiting for him to mess up. Without a book to help, his mind suddenly emptied of stories. He’d read all her favorites enough times, over the years; he’d thought that they would be ingrained in his memory. But perhaps he’d been reading them in a haze of boredom, the words going from eyes to mouth without passing through brain. Back when he thought things would always be that way, when it never occurred to him that everything could change, overnight, and he would be powerless to stop it. Seven minutes passed. He took a short, angry breath and held it, suddenly bone-weary. Head in hands, he thought about Dimity Hatcher. About the improbability of him being the first Aubrey fan to find her; and he’d done it without even trying. It had to be the new angle his book had been waiting for.

The ringtone, when it came, seemed impossibly loud in the deep quiet. Zach fumbled to accept the call, and in a heartbeat Ali appeared, her hair held back in a neat ponytail, wearing tight jeans and a fitted white shirt. Looking elegant, looking lovely. There was still sunshine over there, coming in through a nearby window and covering her in gold. It looked like a different world. In a small corner of the screen Zach could see himself—a pale wraith lit by computer light, with bags under his eyes and holes at the neck of his T-shirt. He might have laughed, if he hadn’t felt so wretched.

“Zach, how are you? You look . . . where the hell are you?” Ali said, accepting a cup of something that steamed from a hand that came briefly into shot. So Lowell was right there in the room with her, waiting on her. Listening. No privacy with his wife anymore, not even on a phone call.
Ex-wife.

“I’m in Dorset, in a pub. It’s one in the morning, and it’s been a long day. How are you? How’s it going over there?”

“Oh, great. We’re really starting to settle in. Elise . . . she loves it here. Why are you in Dorset? In a pub? In the dark?”

“I’m in the dark because . . . I couldn’t find the light switch. Don’t laugh. And everyone else has gone to bed. I’m in a pub because I needed somewhere to stay, and I’m in Dorset because I’ve come down here to finish my book.”

“What book?” She frowned, only half paying attention, blowing the steam from her drink and sipping it carefully. He shouldn’t expect her to care anymore, and yet it always hurt to be reminded that she didn’t.

“Never mind. It’s not important.”

“The Aubrey book, you mean? You’re finally going to finish it? That’s great, Zach. And about time!” She smiled. He nodded, and tried to look resolute. The task still reared up in front of him like a vertical cliff face, Dimity Hatcher or no Dimity Hatcher. “So you’re in Blacknowle? You’re going to do some digging about your granddad as well?”

“I don’t know . . . maybe. Probably not.” Zach shook his head. What he wanted to find, what he needed to find, was too amorphous, too fragile, to explain. “So, where’s Elise? Is she ready for her story?”

“Zach—I’m really sorry. We were out all day today and she was just shattered. She went to bed an hour ago. I only just remembered to call now and let you know. I’m sorry.”

Zach felt all his nerves dissolve into a wash of disappointment.

“And so it begins,” he said, a tightness in his chest making his voice sound strained.

“Hey—it’s not like that. She was wiped out—what was I supposed to do?”

“Text me and tell me to get online an hour earlier?”