The Messengers (6 page)

The next day, I found him standing on the path outside his beach hut with a bunch of postcards. A group of women swarmed around him. They all wore white jackets with
KELLY’S HEN
written on the back in pink. They wore denim skirts and cowboy boots, and most of them had cowboy hats on strings around their necks. The goose bumps stood out on their fake-tanned legs.

I took a long route round and hid behind Peter’s hut for a moment, watching. He was talking to Kelly, who was obviously the one getting married.

“You just here for the weekend?” Peter said.

“No, we’re doing a whole week,” Kelly said. “My last proper week with the girls. Thought we’d come to the seaside.”

“Great,” Peter said. “Oh, look. These are the more naughty postcards.”

He flicked through the pile of cards in his hands. I was close enough to see them. Kelly threw her head back and laughed. “Look at that one! Here, Treez, this guy looks like your Gav!”

She showed the postcard to another woman, who cackled and said, “Yeah, chance would be a fine thing.”

Peter and Kelly went through a few more postcards together. Most of them were photos of male strippers or breasts with faces painted on them. But one of them wasn’t. One of them was a painting of a street, with an ambulance and a woman lying on a stretcher.

“This one’s a bit weird,” Kelly said. “Have you got any of Prince Harry?”

Peter held the postcard in front of her for a moment before putting it to the bottom of the pile. I knew what it was. It was a message. I jumped from behind the hut and smashed the postcards out of his hand.

“Oi! Steady on, girl!” said Kelly. “What’s your problem?”

I ignored her and turned to Peter. He shook his head. “It’s too late,” he said in a low voice. “She’s seen it.”

I looked at all the cards scattering along the path. I couldn’t see which one was the message. It had blended into the mass, and before I had a chance to respond, a seagull swooped down and sent a big white dollop toward the crowd of women. It spattered on the ground. Kelly jumped back.

“It’s good luck when a seagull poos on you, Kel,” one of the women said.

Kelly looked herself over. “I think he missed,” she said. “Hey, let’s go for a paddle!”

They picked up a few of the postcards, returned them to Peter, and then clopped over to the steps leading down to the beach.

I turned to Peter, who was putting as many of his postcards as he could back into the rack. Some of them blew down the path. “When did you draw that one?”

“Early hours of this morning,” he said.

“Don’t you feel bad?” I said.

“I don’t know anymore,” he said. “It’s like when you swim in the sea in January. For a while, you don’t think you can bear it, but eventually you just go numb.”

I shook my head and thought of the cat screeching this morning, the sketch of the dead old man in my rucksack.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you a coffee.”

He walked off down the path, his shoulders hunched, his painting hand in his pocket. I followed.

“That woman,” I said. “When she saw the painting, she didn’t even flinch.”

He sighed. “I told you before. It seems that most people only see a surface image of random shapes. The sort of things that cubist artists used to paint. Tabby, my mentor, thought that the average person’s brain isn’t built in a way that can consciously register a death scene. They can’t decode it with their eyes. It’s too much for them.
You
can see the death scenes perfectly, though, can’t you? You don’t need any more proof that you’re a messenger.”

“I killed a cat,” I said sadly.

He shook his head. “You just delivered the message. Was it a cat you knew?”

“We weren’t close,” I said.

He smiled.

“There’s more, though. I drew a person.”

He nodded. “Let’s not talk about it here,” he said.

We joined the back of the queue for the Coffee Shack. The dark-haired bloke in front of us was in his early twenties and had a gray whippet. I’d seen him before. I stroked the whippet’s muzzle for a while. Since coming to Helmstown, I’d watched the man come out of his house on plenty of occasions, and it occurred to me that he lived two doors down from a really nice coffeehouse, yet he had come all the way down here for a plastic cup of Nescafé. It wasn’t long before I realized why.

The woman behind the counter was about the same age, and she had long red hair and a nice figure. Her name badge said
HELEN
. She smiled at the whippet as the guy went up to order. “Hello, boy,” she said.

“Hello,” the dark-haired man replied before he realized she was talking to his dog. I watched the back of his neck turn red.

I whispered to Peter, “I think the whippet guy fancies Helen.”

Peter shrugged. “It’d be nice if he could fancy her when I wasn’t behind him in the queue.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re not a romantic, then?” I said. “What about the mother of your son?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“But —”

“Trust me. When you’re a messenger, relationships don’t work out. The closer you get to someone, the harder it becomes.” Then something occurred to him. “You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m waiting for the right man.”

He sniffed at that.

“What?” I said.

“The right man,”
he said. “People always confuse love with destiny. When people fall in love, they say that everything in their life has been leading to that moment. But every moment in your life leads to death, not love. Death. Every twist, every turn. Every decision, good or bad.”

“God, that’s a lovely way of looking at it,” I said.

“I’m just telling you the facts. Death is waiting for all of us. Your death day is out there, just like your birthday. It’s unstoppable. The disease that kills you might be there already, the bad cells might be lurking in your organs.”

“Lurking in my organs?”
I said sarcastically.

He pointed at a woman on the sea path, who was shouting at a toddler. “Maybe that little boy will grow up to kill me. Maybe his abusive mother is right now doing the damage that will drive him to drink.”

“A boozing baby?”

“I’m talking about the future. Perhaps in twenty years, he’ll get drunk, get in his car, and run me over. And everything that happens to me and him between now and then — everything we do — is just a way of getting us to that place and time.”

The man with the whippet trundled off with his drink, and Peter stepped up to the counter. There was a confidence in his movements that the boys I knew back home didn’t have. Those boys were all so well groomed, almost girlish in their care over their appearance, and here was this man, his shoulders muscled up, who didn’t give a damn about the whitish dust all over his tracksuit top. I found that really hot. And yet he was telling me that even buying a cup of tea was just one more step along the road to the cemetery. It was depressing.

“So you’re saying death is more important than love?” I said as Helen busied herself with the Styrofoam cups.

“Of course it is.”

I sighed, deeply. “Christ, don’t you know any jokes?”

To be fair, he laughed at that. We both laughed. But then I saw the newspaper lying on an empty table.
LOCAL POLITICIAN DIES AT GALA DINNER
. A brief look at the photograph told me it was the man whose death scene I had held above the waves two days earlier.

“It’s unstoppable,” Peter said quietly.

We took the drinks back to his hut. Inside, out of the wind, Peter unzipped his top very slightly, and I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a T-shirt underneath. I could see the hollow at his throat, that one vulnerable point, and the sinews of his chest. I couldn’t look away. He caught me staring, and I panicked. “You’ll catch your death, dressed like that,” I blurted out, trying to cover myself.

“It’s July,” he said, and I blushed.

I studied the paintings on the wall, which — thankfully — contained no cubist art and no scenes of death. They were paintings of the sea. Sometimes there were boats; sometimes he’d painted cliffs or little coastal villages. They didn’t have the hyper-real feeling of his messages, but they were nice.

“You sometimes paint for pleasure, then?” I said.

“I used to. Used to sell a few, too. Not so much, these days. Don’t have the time.”

“What’s your day job?”

“I’m a part-time plasterer.” Which explained the dust.

“Not quite as artistic, is it?”

“I like it because it’s boring.”

“Not many part-time plasterers can afford a Helmstown beach hut,” I said.

“I inherited some money when my father died.”

In one of the paintings, the sea and sky were nearly the same metallic gray, and I almost didn’t notice the small white-sailed boat in the corner of the scene. “It’s ace, this one,” I said. “I like the way the boat is off to the side, like it’s not the point.”

“Thank you,” he said.

We both knew I had questions about what was happening to me, but we needed this moment of calm first. He sat on his chair, and I sat on the floor.

“You know, I don’t have all the answers,” he said eventually. “Nobody does.”

“You’ve got more answers than me,” I said.

He shrugged. “What do you want to know?”

“Nothing. Everything,” I said.

“I can only tell you what Tabby told me and what I’ve observed. I’m just a cog in the machine.” He looked at his boots, as if he was uncomfortable talking about these things, as if he thought it was unlucky to discuss them.

“What happens if I miss the deadline?” I said.

“From what we know . . . someone close to you dies instead. A life for a life.”

“That’s . . . I don’t understand.”

“Death must be satisfied, I guess. The scales have to be balanced.”

“
How
do you know it’s true?”

He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly.

“Jesus. Did you ever miss one?” I said.

“Look. Death is not the kind of thing you can be sure about. It’s a force of nature. People have been studying it for thousands of years, and they know nothing. It’s bigger than us. All I can do is trust the knowledge that’s out there and try to pass it on to you. I believed Tabby. I trusted her. The things she said made
sense
to me, and I’ve seen proof that she was right about lots of them. I’ve learned from experience, too. In my opinion, there is a simple set of rules, and you should learn them rather than asking any big questions. You make the message. You find the recipient. You show them the message. Or you face the consequences.”

I shook my head. “Where’s your family? Where’s your son?”

The ropes of muscle in his chest tightened. “Next question,” he said.

“How many messengers are there?”

“Who knows? Two? Two million? I’ve only met Tabby and you, but I’m pretty sure I’ve recognized others.”

“And you didn’t speak to them! Why not?”

“Once you know what a messenger does, why the hell would you want to meet one?”

“You wanted to meet me, didn’t you?”

He didn’t answer that. He rubbed his face and turned to his desk. I could see that he was becoming agitated, but I wasn’t going to give up. I needed information.

“How do you get round to all the people that have to die?” I said. “Thousands of people die every day. Are they all killed by messengers? Do some just die anyway?”

“I don’t hold the mysteries of the universe! You expect me to know things because I’m a messenger, but being a messenger brings home how little I know. How little you can
do
, as a human,” he said. “I hate these questions.”

“Don’t you think they’re important? I mean, don’t you want to know where you fit in? What your place in the world is?” I asked.

“Why?” He turned back to me.

“
Why?
Well, otherwise, you don’t know what you’re doing with your life.”

“Who does? Everyone thinks they’re the center of the universe, but really we’re just tiny insignificant specks. We’re part of something we’ll never understand, and maybe it’s better that way.”

Insignificant speck
, I thought.
Charming
.

“So who was this Tabby, then?” I said, trying to get back to specifics.

“Tabby Smith. She did abstract watercolors. Every messenger has their medium, I suppose. She was so intelligent. She had studied hard under her own mentor and learned everything she could. She taught me all I know about being a messenger.”

“How did you meet?”

“She lived in a tower block back home. I just found myself spending time there. I didn’t know why.”

Those words hung in the air between us. I suppose we were thinking of our own first meeting. He continued. “I guess I knew something was wrong with me, and I had this feeling she could help. She did. I would have done anything for her. She taught me how to control my gift.”

“But you
don’t
control it,” I said, thinking of Kelly the Hen having her last paddle in the sea.

“I live with it.”

“The people you paint don’t.”

He stood, but there was really nowhere to go in his beach hut. It was too small to pace up and down, so he just put his hands on his hips and sighed.