Diving Belles (25 page)

The moor was dotted with granite boulders and clumps of longer grass. It smelled damp. It smelled big and cold and lonely, like the moon might smell. The slopes were getting steeper. Her father told the other man he wanted to stay away from the mires further down.

‘Jesus Christ!’ the man said suddenly. He swatted at his face. ‘A fucking bat was this close, this close.’ He showed how close with his hands.

‘Bats don’t hurt you,’ she said.

‘That was too close for my liking,’ he said. He took another drink. ‘You know something I heard about bats? I think this is right anyway. They know the smell of the house or the barn they got born in, and they go back there and if they can’t get in because the chimney or the windows are boarded up, they bang against them and fly against them because they have to get back in.’

‘Why?’ her father asked.

‘I don’t know. That’s all I heard about it.’

‘Like moths looking for light,’ she said. She pictured those bats flinging themselves against a barn, trying to get back in.

‘Yeah, I guess like moths,’ the man said. Her father was quiet.

The ground was rockier. There were humped shapes all around. Her father tripped and fell on to his hands but he didn’t swear. He told her to be careful even though it was him who had fallen.

When he started cutting her hair, thin slivers would fall on to the floor around her feet, dark at first and then drying lighter and splitting into hundreds of scattered pieces, like salt or stars. He tried to be careful around her ears, because once she told him it hurt when he combed over them. He put an inch width of hair between two fingers and straightened it out to get the right length. She could only feel that he was touching her hair because she could feel the pull on her scalp. She wished that hair had feeling. Why didn’t hair have feeling? It would hurt too much when it got cut, she supposed. That was why. He always cut too short, so that her hair wouldn’t stay behind her ears and so that some of the girls at school said she looked like a boy. She had started smuggling a silver clip in her school bag. She had found it under a loose corner of carpet in the bathroom. She kept it with a cake tin she’d found at the back of a cupboard and an old tin of mandarins, which she knew her father would never have bought, and a packet of sweet-pea seeds, years past the use-by date. She put the silver clip in her hair just after she left the house in the morning and took it out before she got back.

Sometimes he hummed songs she didn’t recognise; mostly he was quiet.

She watched her hair falling. The scissors made a noise like crickets. ‘All right?’ he would ask from time to time.

‘All right,’ she would reply, listening to the noise like crickets.

She wished the other man would fall over and roll away into the dark. He was breathing loudly and couldn’t walk that fast so he was slowing them down. She had no idea where they were going. She was walking in front now, keeping her head down and listening to where her father was walking to make sure she was going the right way. She listened and heard him stop, so she stopped and waited. ‘Just checking this is right,’ he said to the other man. He looked around and then nodded. It all looked the same to her. What if they were lost and he was just pretending that he knew where he was? She was sure that no one could tell. There were slopes and rocks, and sometimes big rounded rocks like people hunched over. ‘We haven’t got long till it starts.’

There was another low howl from the distance. She saw her father and the other man exchange a look then the man shoved his hands in his pockets and started whistling again. She hated it – they were keeping it, that, whatever it was, everything, from her. They shouldn’t even be out here. ‘We could stay here,’ the man said. ‘It won’t make any difference.’

‘I wanted to get up to the point,’ her father said.

They walked uphill some more.

‘I would have had it off him if it had been cheaper,’ the man said.

‘You wouldn’t want it with a dent like that in it.’

‘He should pay someone to take it off his hands.’

‘What happened to the horse?’ she asked.

‘I thought he got the dent sorted, actually,’ the man said.

‘He did a bit. But you can see it in the paint. It’s right there in the paint.’

‘Was the horse OK?’ she asked.

After a while her father said, ‘I don’t know.’ He checked his watch. ‘Shit, we’ve only got a few minutes.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘Maybe we should just stop here.’

‘For what?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know if we’ll have time to get up there.’

‘It’ll be just the same from here,’ the man said. He had already sat down, and then after a moment he lay back with his hands behind his head.

‘I wanted to get right up this bit,’ her father said. ‘To the top.’ They looked around for a patch without too many rocks. Her father kept looking up and he didn’t sit down. The man closed his eyes and started to snore, quietly and with a faint whistle. There was only that noise now in the whole night. She didn’t want to be here next to it; it seemed a shame to be next to the only thing making a noise in the whole night.

Her father looked down at him and then he looked up the slope. He gestured for her to follow and he turned quickly and scrambled to the top. At the top, there was a pointed finger of granite and then a flatter piece. They lay side by side on that and stared at the stars which had been there the whole time. They were like faraway torches. ‘Any minute now,’ her father said. ‘This is good, eh?’

She nodded. She hoped her father wouldn’t go to sleep. He closed his eyes for a moment and she felt as if she had been left alone and the house and her bedroom and her father were all somewhere very far away. Then he opened his eyes again. It was funny how he had managed to find his way here when sometimes he banged around the house because he couldn’t find the scissors or the bin bags.

She was cold. She moved a bit closer to her father. His elbows stuck out behind his head.

‘At school,’ she said, ‘we did a project.’ After a moment she said, ‘The stars aren’t really there, are they?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Because they’re not really there. Because they’re in the past.’

‘Yeah. Light takes so long to get to us. So those stars we’re seeing are the stars from years ago.’

She nodded. ‘What are they like now?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe the same.’

He was thin. And his hair and his shoulders. They were silent for a while. ‘Orion,’ he said. ‘The dipper. Cassiopeia.’

She looked at him.

‘Constellations,’ he said. ‘The patterns. Leo. Canis Major. Draco.’

‘Leo, Canis Major, Draco,’ she said.

He pointed them out to her. The names of the stars seemed to come out of him like some old, half-forgotten language. She looked at him, and had the feeling that something was continuing on without her. They traced the shapes in the air. The stars and the shapes were scattered across the sky and she echoed the names as he said them.

‘There was one,’ he said. ‘I think I just saw one.’

She looked and then saw two stars fall out of the sky, trailing a brief silver thread behind them. Then there were more stars moving, dropping like spiders. They faded slowly into the black sky like ink being absorbed into paper. It was as if the whole sky was dropping stitches, unravelling itself ready to fall and drape over them like a blanket. And she lay there, looking up, and as each star fell closer towards them she thought: that was the best one so far, no, maybe that one,

no, that one

    that one

        that one.

Some Drolls Are Like That and Some Are Like This

Mid-September and the geese were back. The droll teller saw them as he wandered slowly down the street, following the same small route he took every morning. They flew in over the cliffs, calling to each other, their voices like harmonicas. The droll teller was hundreds of years old and he had seen the geese fly back hundreds of times, but every year he stopped and watched them, thinking about the distance they had travelled to get back to this same place, thinking about the Arctic tundra nestled in their feathers, the strange map they carried with them in their bones and feathers. Except this year he couldn’t remember the word for tundra, and he couldn’t connect the geese to the Arctic – he had no idea why, when he thought of one, he thought of the other. He also had the vague, unsettled feeling that they were arriving early, although he couldn’t remember when they usually arrived, and so after a while he just watched them and didn’t think much at all.

He saw Harry coming along the street towards him. Harry was up and around early, which meant he’d probably locked himself out and spent another night at the harbour looking at boats. If he was lucky someone would have given him a sandwich, thrown him a blanket.

‘Locked out again?’ the droll teller asked. He had never owned any keys. He’d found a buckled tent a few years ago and slept in that, which was better than sheds and benches, no one to rage at you as soon as you’d got settled.

‘The key’s gone,’ Harry said. He always stood too close, so that you could smell his sour clothes. The services had finally given him a flat to live in. It had a TV and a hotplate. He wasn’t allowed guests.

‘You’ll have to get Jack to pop the window. If you can find him.’

Harry glanced back down the way he’d come, then leaned right in. ‘Those people there,’ he said, pointing.

The droll teller looked. There was a man and a woman standing at the end of the street. They were in their fifties and he thought they were probably tourists. They were looking around as if they were waiting for someone. The droll teller always used to be able to recognise tourists, because he’d known everyone that lived in the area. Hundreds of years of people and they’d all greeted him by name. He had been the centre, although he wasn’t sure of what, exactly. His name, his name – no one had said it in a long time and he grasped at it, came up with nothing.

‘So what?’ he asked. Harry was getting more and more suspicious and probably thought those people had stolen his keys. He said there were hidden cameras spying on him in the flat. The droll teller had known Harry for years, could recall him as a boy, in fact, all bones, always hungry. They used to borrow Jack’s boat and go out night fishing. There were a few images that sometimes flashed up: a body tangled in a net; closing a man’s eyes softly; drying their clothes around a fire; a torch cutting through trees; rain on an old car roof; rifling through straw; doors closing hard; bolts drawn. But, come to think of it, he wasn’t sure that he’d done all of that with Harry. He’d known a lot more people than just Harry – people came and went; it was hard to tell one from the other. Faces became other faces. And they had all gone the same way: forgetting, becoming ill, weak, boring, giving up the struggle, while the droll teller had stayed more or less the same, watching it all, getting left behind. Except maybe now it was different, maybe now it was his turn to go through all that.

‘I heard Meg’s got hold of some good stuff,’ Harry said. ‘Crates. She needs to shift it quickly.’

‘Well?’ the droll teller asked. ‘What are you telling me about it for?’ He felt his temper flare up, but not much; it was mostly embers now. He wanted to go and see where there might be food. Hoban had said he could go round to his workshop and watch TV later, his favourite programme was on and Hoban often had slices of pizza, the kind with meat and pineapple. He was good for waiting around with, passing time.

‘Those people there,’ Harry said. ‘They’re waiting for that story tour.’

‘They’ll be waiting a long time.’

Harry nodded. ‘They’ll be waiting a long time, I should think.’

‘A long time.’ And then after Hoban’s, the droll teller thought, what would he do after that?

‘Season’s over. The tosspot that runs it has gone on holiday.’ Harry looked at the droll teller, his eyes almost closed with old sun-glare.

‘It’s crap,’ the droll teller said. He’d watched that man a few times, smiling with his sharp mouth, wearing a green top hat, checking his watch as he talked.

‘It’s a tenner each person,’ Harry told him. ‘Cash in hand.’

The droll teller looked up.

‘It’s all the old stories,’ Harry said. He started taking his shirt off. ‘Wear my shirt, it’s cleaner.’

The droll teller looked down at his top. Someone had given it to him. It smelled like last night’s chips and the sleeves were unravelling. Underneath, his skin had dried out and hardened so that it was almost like wood. There were grainy cracks and furrows etched all over it. The tendons in his arms and hands had tensed and thickened like branches; they had been like that for as long as he could remember. A tattoo on his forearm had worn down to pale smudges – it could have been a mermaid, or someone’s name. There were only a few faint marks left.

‘All the old stories?’ he said.

‘It’ll be piss easy,’ Harry told him. ‘We’ll go to Meg’s after.’ He held out his shirt and shivered, even though it wasn’t cold. He’d already forgotten how to be surrounded by weather. His skin was getting thin and pale – no more brambles and barbed wire.

Down the street, the man started to pace and check his watch.