That Summer He Died (14 page)

‘You ever seen a dead man before?’ Alex said.

James mumbled, ‘No.’

‘Me neither.’ Alex launched a spinning smoke ring through the still air towards the branches above. ‘Never touched one either.’

‘I know why you did it,’ James said.

‘Did what?’

‘You know what. You did it to stop us freaking out, to prove we didn’t need to be scared.’

Alex removed the cigarette from his mouth, expelled smoke from his lungs in a heavy, exaggerated sigh. ‘That’s why, is it?’

‘Why else? There’s no other reason why you—’

‘You never wondered what you’re capable of? You never wondered where your guts ran out?’

James felt the trees closing in on him. ‘You make it sound like it gave you a kick. This isn’t a fucking game.’

Alex stood and crushed the cigarette butt under his boot.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if it was a game, it’s over now.’ He glanced at his watch and scanned the woods. ‘One of us should stay here. Might not be able to find our way back otherwise.’

‘I don’t think we should move Dan,’ James said.

Dan was still staring straight ahead, not blinking. An inch of ash collapsed from the cigarette Alex had wedged between his fingers. James took it before it burned his skin.

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll go,’ James said. ‘You wait here. ’

Alex nodded, got his tobacco tin, pulled out a Rizla and flattened it on his thigh.

‘I don’t understand,’ James said. ‘How can you just sit here like nothing’s happened?’

Alex shrugged. ‘We’ve all got our way of coping, eh? You know the way back to the cliff?’

James looked around and shook his head.

Alex pointed behind him. ‘That way. Keep going straight. When the ground runs out, you’ll know you’re there.’ He lowered his head and carried on skinning up. ‘See you in a while, crocodile,’ he said.

*

Some sort of delirium had swamped James’s mind by the time he stumbled down the last few steps to the bottom of the cliff. He felt drunk, didn’t know if it was some after-effect of the grass he’d smoked or plain exhaustion.

A kaleidoscope of images spun through his mind: the crazy patterns of the leaves in the forest; the glitter of the sea; the sun exploding across the sky. And Alex, Alex’s hand, always there, pushing through the leaves, rising from the waves, blocking out the sun and casting a shadow across the land.

James skidded across a mop of seaweed, fell, heard his knee crack on the rock, but couldn’t feel the pain. His limbs protested as he rose up and moved on, the lactic acid they’d produced over the last fifteen minutes turning sour, finally threatening to burn through his muscles and send him sprawling face-first on to the sand his feet had now reached.

But he couldn’t stop now. Wouldn’t ever start again. Close. Close enough to make it. One final effort.

His breathing howled through his throbbing ears as he set his sights on Surfers’ Turf. He tried to distract his mind by estimating how many paces it would take him to hit his target. He counted them off: one, two, three, four. . .

Someone must have spotted his erratic progress across the beach, watched him weaving to left and right, a shell-shocked soldier running towards the enemy over mine-strewn territory, as his legs buckled and prevented him from moving in a straight line, because by the time he reached Surfers’ Turf, Murphy and the other two policemen were standing on the plateau, staring at him through narrow, bemused eyes.

‘The others get too much for you?’ Murphy said as James stumbled up the last few steps on to the rock.

Crumpling to the ground, he ignored Murphy and the other policemen, distracted by movement in the doorway behind them: a woman, moving forward. . . Suzie?

He tried to focus his eyes, but the land lurched sideways. Just like it had when he’d been with his father. Just like when his father used to pick him up when he was a kid and spin him round, then set him back down on the ground. The woman slid from his view. He sank his knuckles into his eye sockets and twisted them violently.

‘James?’ a voice said. He felt a hand rest on his shoulder.

‘James? Are you all right?’

When he opened his eyes, his vision was still blurred. Disembodied facial features floated before him for a moment. . . rogue jigsaw pieces. . . before finally settling into a face. Suzie’s. He looked into her eyes.

‘Water,’ he mouthed, no sound coming from his mouth, and she stood and walked away.

‘Fancy yourself as a bit of a runner, do you?’ he heard Murphy asking. ‘Well, I reckon you overdid it this time, son.’ The policeman peered at James’s front, then reared back, covering his nose and mouth with his hand. ‘Look at the state of you,’ he said once he’d retreated to a safe distance. ‘Caked in vomit from bloody head to foot. You been on the piss?’

James’s words came out jumbled, an asthmatic rattle of wheezes, overriding their vowels and consonants. Murphy smiled. Actually smiled. Thought this was funny. One of the other policemen sniggered. Anger detonated inside James, exploded from his lungs and drove through his throat, over his tongue.

‘Dawes,’ he growled.

‘What’s that, son?’ Murphy lowered himself so that his head was level with James’s. ‘You say “Dawes”? Jack Dawes? That what you’re trying to say?’ He reached forward and shook James roughly. ‘Have you found something?’

Suzie reappeared, crouched beside James and draped an arm across his shoulders. She raised a glass to his lips. ‘Slowly,’ she whispered, gently tipping the glass towards him. ‘A little at a time.’

James sipped, then drank thirstily.

‘What?’ Murphy said. ‘What was it you found?’

‘Him,’ James wheezed. ‘We found him. Up in the woods. Jack Dawes. Dead. We found him dead.’

As James read the sign – WELCOME TO GRANCOMBE – it wasn’t so much butterflies flapping in his stomach as pterodactyls. Their clawed wings were shredding his guts.

He’d done his best to prepare for this inevitable freak-out during the drive down. He’d visualised all the changes that would have occurred over the past decade: new shops, new faces, new buildings and infrastructure.

And he’d prepared himself for how his eyes had changed, how it would probably seem smaller to him than it had done when he was eighteen. But maybe – he was approaching the high street now – he hadn’t prepared enough.

The journey had been quick, too quick. It was mid-week, winter. No caravans acting like blood clots on the road, clogging up the flow of traffic. Hardly any traffic at all, in fact, since he’d left the motorway and tunnelled into the country lanes. And especially the last fifty miles, as he’d closed in on the coast. Even the traffic lights in the series of prettified towns he’d passed through had been in his favour, the roads clear, starved of their summer glut of tourists.

Dread had done that creeping thing, starting as vague queasiness and mounting towards panic, the closer he’d got to his destination. He hadn’t experienced anything like this for years, not since those days his parents had driven him back to boarding school for the start of term. Those were the only other times he could remember journeys as being more desirable than arrivals.

He checked out the world the other side of the windscreen. There was no doubt about it: Grancombe had changed. His mind’s-eye view had been of blazing sun above, grey shadows below. The flick-flack of the windscreen wipers, as he hit the high street and strained to see out, repetitively pointed out how wrong he’d been.

Unfamiliar shops and pubs and parking zones. Grancombe seemed to have grown in his absence. He continued past the cinema, absurdly expecting the same films that had been showing last time he’d been here still to be on. They weren’t, of course. Just the stuff that had premiered in Leicester Square a month back.

He reached the bottom of the street and pulled into the car park off North Beach. Then he got out of the car, collected his jacket from the back seat and sealed himself against the fierce wind.

The sky was a thick vortex of swirling grey, like some backdrop from a Biblical epic. Still, at least the rain was easing off. He looked around and immediately his eyes were drawn to a building across the road. Some new club, windowless and black from gutter to foundation. Its name, Current, was strung across the door in unlit neon bulbs, beneath a vast sign with a picture of a lightning strike hitting the ocean.

A memory flashed into James’s mind. Dixie’s. That place used to be Dixie’s, Grancombe’s biggest club. He shook his head. Yeah, things definitely had changed. Time had wiped that old world away.

He looked across North Beach to where the cliffs reared up towards the sky. Not a person in sight. So different from the last time he’d been here. And the lack of human sound, too. It might as well have been half a century ago when they’d evacuated the town for a week following an invasion scare. He felt like a ghost.

He locked the car and activated the alarm, walked up the high street and stepped into the first estate agent’s he reached. The quicker he appointed someone to flog Alan’s place the better.

By the time he’d finished in there and agreed that they could come round and evaluate the house at the end of the week, once he’d had a chance to sort out Alan’s belongings and – though he didn’t mention this to the estate agent – make a start on cleaning up what he suspected would be a total pit, his stomach was loudly reminding him that it was lunchtime and he hadn’t eaten anything apart from a microwaved kebab, courtesy of a motorway service station, since he’d left Lucy snoozing in his bed early that morning.

He glanced up and down the street. The Moonraker was out. He wasn’t risking his old local just yet. He might be a ghost, but there’d be other ghosts here too, and he wanted to stay incognito for as long as possible.

Not that he thought he’d get away with it for his whole stay. Once – if – he started asking questions, people were sure to repay his curiosity with their own. He hadn’t changed enough in the intervening years. No scars or massive gain in weight, nothing to kid anyone who’d once known him that he was anyone but himself.

But keep hidden for now. Stick to the lonely places until he felt more at ease. If he ever did. . .

He grabbed a couple of pasties from a newsagent and stood under its striped awning, eating, and watching the people walk by. Then, gazing across the rooftops, he saw the grey-stone tower of St Donal’s Church and decided that there were some people he should visit after all. He walked back into the shop.

It was only when he reached the church, lifted the latch of the wooden gate and entered the graveyard, that he realised he had no idea where to look. The rain had stopped and he stood still and pushed one hand roughly across his head. He squeezed the rain from his hair, flinching when it trickled down his neck.

He remembered when he’d stood in this graveyard with Alan and Dan on the day of Jack Dawes’s funeral. Them and so many others. Would it have been that way with Alan as well? James doubted it. If even his own flesh and blood hadn’t bothered to turn up, who else would have?

Still, there’d be a gravestone. Alan’s will had made sure of that. Which in itself had struck James as odd, since his uncle had hardly been a fan of the Church, or God for that matter. But whether the church would have let him be buried here on holy ground after taking his own life with that shotgun, well, that was another matter altogether. James would just have to search and see.

Then there was Dan. His funeral would have been a very different affair. Much-loved son. Much-loved brother. Child of Grancombe. People would have come. And it would have been held here, James was sure of that. No cremation for Dan, stuck in a pot on a mantelpiece. He would have been buried here, with his grandfather before him. Dust to dust.

James scanned the gravestones as he walked, looking for fresh-cut stone among the crumbling slabs. Flowers, plastic and fresh, stood in jamjars and vases. Dates from the seventies, eighties, nineties and naughties. Will Not Be Forgotten. . . Mother of. . . Son of. . . Sister of. . . Testaments to existence. Comfort for those left behind that they too wouldn’t be forgotten, that their lives too wouldn’t have been lived in vain.

He found Alan’s first. Far from the church, near the gate. The old parish priest, Mark Gale, must have taken pity and turned a blind eye as to how Alan had ended it all, and had not consigned him to a plot beyond the churchyard wall.

The stone was polished granite, with Alan’s name chiselled across its middle. The date of his first breath and the date of his last. Beneath the name was an inscription, culled from the Bible, just as the lawyer had said Alan had specified in his will.

James read:

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave. It wasn’t the morbid nature of the choice that surprised James, more the source of it. Alan hadn’t been religious, or at least not while James had known him. More God-hater than God-fearer. God, the murderer of Monique. God, the black beast who’d stolen her from him. God, whose arms had turned into waves and dragged Monique to be at his side. The jealous God who’d taken her for himself.

James heard a sound like the flickering of a fire and looked down to see the wind flattening the plastic-sheathed flowers he held in one hand pressed against his chest.

He knelt down and placed one of the bunches on the ground before the grave. Colour burst against the grey stone, like flames in a hearth. He reached to his left and pulled a rock from the mud and weighed the flowers down with it to stop them being swept away by the wind. There were no vases here. There were no other flowers in this neglected corner. There were no other new stones.

James walked backwards on to the path, as if Alan’s grave were an altar from which he’d just received Communion. But there was no sense of communion here. Nothing had been shared. Alan’s and James’s lives had long since diverged. Everything between them had rotted away.

‘Why?’

The word came from his mouth in a wheeze, unbidden, on a breath of wind soon swallowed by the gale. James had no answer to give. He turned from the grave and, still clutching the second bunch of flowers to his chest, continued to walk among the dead, continued to search for an answer.