Careless In Red (37 page)

Cadan didn’t think he was meant to answer, but he did so anyway. “Parrots c’n live to be eighty.” The answer seemed to be sufficient unto itself: A pet who could live eighty years wasn’t likely to be going anywhere, and it didn’t take a degree in psychology to sort that one out.

“Yes,” Dellen said. “Eighty. I do understand.” She cast him a look and her smile was tremulous. “I hope he makes it. But they don’t always, do they.”

He dropped his gaze. “I’m sorry about Santo.”

“Thank you.” She paused. “I can’t talk about him yet. I keep thinking that if I just move forward a bit, even try to distract myself, I won’t have to face the fact that he’s dead. I know that’s not true, but I’m not…How can one ever be ready to look squarely at the death of one’s child?” She reached hastily for the knob of the radio and raised the volume. She began to move with the music. She said, “Let’s dance, Cadan.”

It was a vaguely South American rhythm. A tango, a rumba. Something like that. It called for bodies moving together sinuously, and no way did Cadan want to be one of them. But she moved across the kitchen towards him, each step a swaying of the hips, a rolling of one shoulder then the other, hands extended.

Cadan saw she was crying in the way that actresses cried in films: no redness of face, no screwing up of features, just tears marking a forking path downward from her remarkable eyes. She danced and she wept simultaneously. His heart went out to her. Mother of a son who’d been murdered…Who was to say how the woman was meant to act? If she wanted to talk, if she wanted to dance, what did it matter? She was coping as best she could.

She said, “Dance with me, Cadan. Please dance with me.”

He took her into his arms.

She pressed against him at once, each movement its own form of caress. He didn’t know the dance, but that didn’t appear to matter. She raised both arms to his neck and held him close, one hand on the back of his head. When she lifted her face to his, the rest was natural.

His mouth lowered to hers, his hands moved from his waist to her bum, and he drew her tightly against him.

She did not protest.

THE IDENTIFICATION OF SANTO’S BODY WAS MERELY PART OF police routine. While Ben Kerne knew this, he still experienced a moment of ludicrous hope that a terrible mistake had somehow occurred, that despite the car later found by the police and the identification within the car, the dead boy at the bottom of the cliff in Polcare Cove was someone other than Alexander Kerne. All fancy of this died, however, when he gazed at Santo’s face.

Ben had gone to Truro alone. He’d taken the decision that there was no point to exposing Dellen to Santo’s autopsied body, especially when he himself had no idea what condition the corpse would be in. That Santo was dead was terrible enough. That Dellen might have to see anything that had reduced him to death was unthinkable.

When he looked upon Santo, though, Ben also saw that his protection of Dellen had been largely unnecessary. Santo’s face had been seen to with makeup. The rest of him, which undoubtedly had been most thoroughly dissected and explored, remained beneath an institutional bedsheet. Ben could have asked to see more, to see it all, to know every inch of Santo as he had not known him since early childhood, but he had not. It seemed an invasion, somehow.

Ben had given a nod in answer to the formal question, “Is this Alexander Kerne?” and then he’d signed the documents placed before him and listened to what various individuals had to say about police, inquests, funeral homes, burials, and the like. He was numb to everything during these proceedings, especially to expressions of sympathy. For they were sympathetic, all the people he had to deal with at the Royal Cornwall Hospital’s mortuary. They’d gone this route a thousand times before—more than that, probably—but the fact had not robbed them of their ability to express fellow feeling for someone’s grief.

When he got outside, Ben began to feel in earnest. Perhaps it was the light rain falling that melted away his meagre protection, because as he walked to his Austin in the car park, he was struck by sorrow at the thought of the immensity of their loss and he was ravaged by guilt at his part in having brought it about. And then there was the knowledge that he would live with forever: that his last words to Santo had been spoken in a disgust born of his own inability to accept the boy for who he was. And that inability came from suspicion, one that he would never voice.

Why can’t you see how others feel about what you do? Ben would say to him, the constant refrain of a song of relationship they’d sung with each other for years. For Christ’s sake, Santo, people are real.

You act like I’m a user or something. You act like I force my will on everyone, and that’s not how it is. Besides, you never say a word when—

Do not bloody try that with me, all right?

Look, Dad, if I could—

Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? I, I, and me, me. Well, let’s get something straight. Life is not all about you. What we’re doing here, for example, is not about you. What you think and want does not concern me. What you do does. Here and elsewhere. Are we clear on that?

So much had gone unspoken. Especially unsaid were Ben’s fears. Yet how could those fears be brought into the open, when everything that related to them was swept under the carpet?

Not today, though. Today the present moment demanded an acknowledgement of the past that had brought him here. Thus, when Ben climbed into his car and began the drive out of Truro, meaning to head north, in the direction of Casvelyn, he braked at the signpost indicating the route to St. Ives and while he waited for the shimmering in his vision to clear, he made his decision, and he turned for the west.

Ultimately, he coursed south on the A30, the north coast’s main artery. He had no clear intention in his mind, but as the signposts grew more and more familiar to him, he made the proper turns by rote, working his way over to the sea through an uneven landscape made externally inhospitable by granite intrusions but internally rich with mineral ore. In this part of the countryside, ruined engine houses stood in mute testimony to generations of Cornishmen working beneath the ground, digging tin and copper till the lodes gave out and the mines were abandoned to weather and time.

These mines had long been served by remote stone villages, which were forced to redefine themselves or die altogether when mining failed. The land was bad for farming, too stony and barren and so constantly windswept that only thickets of gorse and the hardiest, low-growing weeds and wildflowers managed to gain a foothold. So people turned to cattle and sheep if they could afford a herd, and they turned to smuggling when times were tough.

Cornwall’s myriad coves were the provenance of smuggling. Those who were successful in this line of work were those who knew the ways of the sea and the tide. But over time this, too, gave way to other means of support. Transportation to the southwest improved, and transportation brought tourists. Among them were summer people who sunned themselves on the beaches and crisscrossed the countryside on walking paths. Among them, ultimately, came the surfers.

In Pengelly Cove, Ben saw them from above, where the main part of the village stood, unpainted granite that was roofed in slate, looking bleak and deserted in the wet spring weather. Three streets only defined the place: two that were lined with shops, houses, two pubs, and an inn called the Curlew and a third marking a steep and twisting route down to a small car park, a lifeboat station, the cove, and the sea.

Out among the waves, lifelong surfers braved the weather. For the swells were from the northwest, coming in even sets, and the grey faces of the waves were building to the barrels for which Pengelly Cove was known. Into these, the surfers dropped, carving across the face of a wave, rising to its shoulder, fading over the top to paddle out to the swell line and wait for another. No one wasted the energy riding a wave to shore, not in this weather and not with the waves breaking in mirror images of one another, over the reefs some one hundred yards out. The shore break was for rank beginners, a low wall of white water that gave the neophyte a semblance of success but no respectability.

Ben descended to the cove. He did so on foot rather than by car, leaving his vehicle in front of the Curlew Inn and walking back along the street to the junction. He wasn’t bothered by the weather. He was dressed for it, and he wanted to experience the cove as he’d experienced it in his youth: hiking down what had been only a path then, with no car park below and nothing else save the water, the sand, and the deep sea caves to greet him when he reached the bottom, his surfboard tucked under his arm.

He’d hoped to go to the sea caves now, but the tide was too high and he knew better than to risk it. So instead he considered all the ways that the place had altered in the years since he’d been here.

Money had come to the area. He could see that in the summer houses and the getaway cottages that overlooked the cove. Long ago there had been only one of them—far out on the end of the cliff, an impressive granite structure whose proud white paint and gleaming black gutters and trim spoke of more money than any local family had—but now there were at least a dozen, although Cliff House still stood, as proudly as ever. He’d been inside only once, at an adolescent party orchestrated by a family called Parsons who’d taken up residence for five summers in a row. A celebration before our Jamie heads off to university, they’d called the gathering.

None of the locals had liked Jamie Parsons, who’d spent his gap year traveling the globe and who hadn’t possessed the common sense to keep quiet about it. But all of them had been willing to pretend the kid was everything from best mate to the Second Coming for a night of carousing inside his home.

They’d had to look cool, though. Ben remembered that. They had to look like kids who experienced this sort of revelry all the time: end of summer, an invitation that had arrived for God’s sake by post, a rock band come down from Newquay to play, tables of food, a strobe above the dance area, and nighttime bolt holes all over the house where mischief of every imaginable kind could be got up to with no one the wiser. At least two of the Parsons kids were there—had there been four of them in all? perhaps five?—but no parents. Beer of every imaginable kind, as well as the contraband: whiskey, vodka, rum mixed with cola, tabs of something no one would identify, and cannabis. Cannabis by the crateful, it seemed. Cocaine as well? Ben couldn’t remember.

What he did remember was the talk, and he remembered that because of surfing that summer and what had come of surfing that summer.

The great divide: It existed any place invaded seasonally by people not born and bred to a spot. There were always the townies…and the interlopers. In Cornwall especially, there were those who toiled and scrabbled to make a modest living, and there was everyone who arrived to spend their holiday time and money enjoying the pleasures of the southwest. The main pleasure was the coast with its brilliant weather, crystalline sea, pristine coves, and soaring cliffs. The lure, however, was the water.

Longtime residents knew the rules. Anyone who surfed regularly knew the rules, for they were easy and basic. Take your turn, do not snake, do not drop in when someone else calls a wave, give way to the more experienced, respect the hierarchy. The shore break belongs to beginners with wide boards, to kids playing in the water, and sometimes to knee boarders and body boarders wanting a quick return for their efforts. Anyone surfing beyond the shore break rode in at the end of a session but otherwise remained outside, dropping off the board or cutting over the shoulder of the wave and down the backside of it to paddle out again long before reaching the area where the beginners were. It was simple. It was also unwritten, but ignorance was never an acceptable excuse.

No one knew whether Jamie Parsons operated in ignorance or indifference. What everyone did know was that Jamie Parsons somehow felt that he had certain rights, which he saw as rights and not as what they actually were: inexcusable blunders.

“This stuff ’s total shit compared to the North Shore, you know” might have been bearable, but declared after a shout of “Give way, mate” had acted as the harbinger of snaking one of the locals, it was not something destined to impress anyone. The lineup meant nothing to Jamie Parsons. “Hey. Cope with it” was his answer to being informed that he was out of order among the surfers. Those things didn’t matter to him because he wasn’t one of them. He was better than they because of money, life, circumstances, education, possibility, or whatever you wanted to call it. He knew this, and they knew this. He just lacked the common sense to keep the fact to himself.

So a party at the Parsons home…? Of course they would go. They would dance to his music, eat up his food, drink down his drink, and smoke up his weed. They were owed because they’d put up with the sod. They’d had him round for five summers in a row, but this last one had been the worst.

Jamie Parsons, Ben thought now. He hadn’t considered the bloke in years. He’d been too consumed with Dellen Nankervis even though, as things turned out, it was Jamie Parsons and not Dellen Nankervis who had actually determined the course of his life.

It came to Ben as he stood at the edge of the car park and looked out at the surfers that everything he’d become was the result of decisions he’d made right here in Pengelly Cove. Not in Pengelly Cove the village, but in Pengelly Cove the geographical location: at high tide a horseshoe of water beating against slate and granite boulders; at low tide a vast sandy beach far beyond the cove itself, a beach that stretched in two directions, intruded upon by reefs and lava dykes and backed by sea caves that twisted into cliffs in which rich mineral veins could still be seen. Maws in the rock created by eons of geologic cataclysms and oceanic erosion, the sea caves had served as Ben Kerne’s destiny from the moment he’d seen them as a very young child. The dangers they presented made them utterly compelling. The privacy they offered made them utterly necessary.

His history was inextricably tied to Pengelly Cove’s two largest sea caves. They represented all the firsts he’d experienced: his first cigarette, his first spliff, his first drunk, his first kiss, his first sex. They also charted the storms that patterned the trajectory of his relationship with Dellen. For if his first kiss and first sex had been shared with Dellen Nankervis in one of the cove’s two great brooding sea caves, so also had those two caves borne witness to every betrayal they’d committed against each other.