The Year of the Ladybird (13 page)

He held a rope coiled over his shoulder and he was coming for me. Another shiver of revulsion went through me. I felt cold, lonely and very small. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I had
never before known what it meant to quake. I felt my heart ice over.

The man gazed right at me with what can only be described as a menacing grin. I gripped the rails of the pier, leaning out to get a better look at him, willing the light to reveal that I was
mistaken. But just as easily as the boat had cruised in, it followed the clean line of its arc and the man, still gazing me and holding his rope, was taken away again. I watched the boat complete
its turn and go deep out to sea. A man in a dark blue suit, in a boat, in the sun, in the bay of Skegness.

There was a coin-operated binoculars mounted on a stand. I swung it round to follow the boat and though I fumbled in my pockets I didn’t have the right coin. By the time the boat had
diminished to a dot far out to sea Nikki had returned to find me. ‘Are you okay?’ she said.

‘I’ve been here before,’ I said.

‘What? Like déjà vu?’

‘Yes. No. I mean literally. I stood here. Exactly in this spot. I held his hand.’

‘Who?’

I couldn’t bring myself to say it. ‘I was here when I was a little boy. I stood here. Right here. I’d forgotten. But now I remember it.’

The pupils of her dark brown eyes dilated as she searched my features. There was a frown line on her forehead, like an omega. If I was pale or if my hands were still trembling she didn’t
see it.

‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘Someone just walked over my grave.’

Oddly that banal phrase made her feel reassured. Whatever it was that had just happened, those six words made it all right, made everything proportionate. Just to show her I was okay I linked
arms with her and nudged her towards the other side of the arcade. The cash machines and winking lights of the games arcade made everything normal again.

An elderly couple asked if we would take their picture, which we did. Then as we made our way back down the length of the pier Nikki drew up by another one of those absurd glass cases. Inside
this one was not a fortune-teller but a manikin of a jolly-jack-tar sailor, its face painted with an evil smile, like an early-period ventriloquist’s dummy.

‘Do you remember these from when you were a kid?’ she said. ‘These are great! Another coin please.’

This time I found the right coin and she dropped it into the machine. The mechanism rumbled. The manikin’s shoulders began to shake and its arms moved. Then a recording of muffled laughter
bubbled up from within the bowels of the machine. We stood and watched the manikin howl and laugh, as if we were both five-year-olds. But the laughter seemed to have a nasty edge that sawed against
the sea air. I don’t know how long the thing went on for.

‘I suppose we’d better get back to that fucking place,’ Nikki said, when the sun started to drop in the sky. The sun was a big golden-red balloon, like something you take home
from the funfair. She grabbed my wrist. ‘Can we get some sandwiches and a drink and just go to the dunes for an hour before we go back?’ She was like a child begging for an extra hour
of play.

I said, ‘Sure.’

We strolled along the beach and she suggested we find a place in the deep dunes. I started to feel uneasy about the dunes so I suggested we sit on the pebbles but she insisted we go deeper into
the spiky marram grass and the hills of sand. It was still hot. She said she wanted to get some sunbathing in. I gave in.

As soon as we settled down she wriggled out of her skirt and took her top off. ‘You don’t mind do you? I want to get some air to my body.’

I assured her that I didn’t mind. She lay on her back with her hands behind her head. I sat down near enough to her but with a couple of feet of distance between us. I felt too agitated to
lie back. I opened a can of cola and it frothed over. The spray went onto her midriff. She wiped her flat belly with a tanned and elegant finger and sucked her finger to clean it.

With the heat diminishing by the second, the day had distilled itself into a wonderful calm, even if inside I was fighting my own inexplicable anxieties. Were I not still troubled by the
apparition of the man in the boat I would have said it was a moment of paradise. We could hear the sea, gone far out now, rhythmically sucking at the sand. I had to force myself not to scan the
dune hills. I had this idea that I would see a boy and his father there. Finally, I forced myself to lay back with my tormented thoughts and I thought Nikki had gone to sleep.

I felt a finger trace my neck. I opened my eyes.

‘Ladybird,’ she said. ‘Look, they’re everywhere.’

She had one on her arm, too, so I flicked it off. I lay back again but Nikki flopped lazily on her side and reached out a hand towards me. At first she rested her hand on my thigh and then she
moved her hand to cup my genitals inside my jeans. I felt a jolt inside my jeans. I gasped.

Yes she was beautiful. Yes she was sexy. She was extraordinary. But I had to stop it. I wasn’t ready to stop thinking about Terri. It was ridiculous: it hadn’t gone anywhere with
Terri, but I was still obsessed.

I knew what I should do. I should speak to Terri and remind her that she was married and tell her straight up that I didn’t want the complication. It was the right and decent thing to do.
I could honestly say to Terri that nothing had happened with anyone else and that I’d made a moral decision about her situation, and after that the way would be clear with Nikki.

That was what I
should
do.

I lifted Nikki’s hands from my balls.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ Nikki said.

‘Look, Nikki, there’s someone else.’

‘Who?’

I shook my head.

‘Is it a man?’

‘God, no!’ I said.

Then Nikki screamed, right in my face. She pulled her T-shirt on, scrambled to her feet and stormed over the dunes and ran towards the beach. I waited for a while and then decided to go after
her.

She stood on the sand in her T-shirt and knickers with her back to me. Her arms were folded and she appeared to be gazing out to sea. The tide was out. With the sun dropping behind us her lonely
figure cast a long shadow across the sand. I didn’t say any thing, just stood abreast of her, gazing out to sea.

‘I could have any man back at that camp,’ she said. ‘Any man. I know it. That’s not being vain. I just know it. I would just have to point at one of them. So why is it I
pick the one man I can’t have? Why is it? I always do it. Always. Something in me sees that I can’t have this or that one, and that becomes the one I want. If I can have them I
don’t want them; if I can’t have them I want them. Who are you seeing?’

‘I can’t tell you . . . just yet. I want to get it sorted out.’

‘Oh? Well, I think I know anyway.’

‘Really? Who?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Go on.’

‘No.’

‘Please tell me,’ I said.

‘You don’t want to say; I don’t want to say; let nobody say.’

I looked hard at her. I couldn’t tell whether she was just playing games or if she had seen something that had suggested it was Terri.

She sighed. ‘Oh, come on. Let’s walk back to’t camp.’

She linked her arm in mine and we walked along the sand back to our workplace.

‘Anyway,’ she said when we got back to the gate. ‘I had a great day.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

We kissed briefly. Somehow in that moment I popped my tongue inside her mouth. She drew back and shook her head minutely, as if she didn’t understand me.

She wasn’t the only one.

Before turning in to the theatre the next morning I made my way over to the canteen for breakfast. It was hard going. The ladybirds that had been bothering us for a couple of
days had begun swarming in the hot air. They pinged at my face as I walked across the yard. One flew in my mouth and I had to spit it out. I could see campers batting them away with the flat of
their hands. What had been a nuisance was becoming a plague. It was a relief to get to the canteen and shut the door on them.

The ladybirds were the talk of the breakfast tables. No one had seen a swarm like this before. Someone said there was a plague of hover-flies one year. Another declared that it was happening
because the greenflies were plentiful that season and the ladybirds fed on greenflies. A third reported that it was caused by the drought and the ladybirds were coming to the coast looking for
water. I had no wisdom about ladybirds to contribute to this vigorous debate.

After finishing my breakfast I cleared away my plates, stashed my tray and headed over to the theatre. The ladybird blizzard had got even worse. If anyone was out and about, they were running.
On my way to the theatre I passed by the reception and one of the office secretaries opened a window and said to me that I had a call.

My first thought was that it was from home. I had an idea that my stepdad would call at some point and tell me that mum was sick or would find some other way to pressure me into coming home. I
picked up the receiver and pressed the earpiece to my ear.

‘All right, son?’

‘Oh! Hello, Colin.’ Of course, Colin would know my exact moves. He would know exactly what time I would pass by the offices on the way to the morning briefing. This was all
surveillance.

‘Anything I should know, son?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ One of the secretaries was eavesdropping, so I moved away as far as I could and turned my back.’

‘What does that mean? You
don’t think so
.’

‘It means nothing to report.’

‘Right. You all right for everything?’

With Colin it was like speaking in code. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Are you short for a few quid? I’ll get it to you if you’re short.’

‘No, no, I’m fine.’

‘Good lad.’

‘Where are you right now?’

‘I’m around. I ain’t allowed on the camp.’

‘Colin.’

‘What?’

‘If I see her out, am I to buy her a coffee or whatever?’

There was a long pause. ‘You can buy her a coffee. But not a drink.’

‘Okay. I’ve got to go to work now, Colin.’

‘Right.’

I put the receiver back on its cradle. The secretary looked at me and compressed her lips.

When I got to the theatre, Pinky and Tony were hastily revising the programme.

‘What’s it like out there?’ Pinky asked.

‘You couldn’t cut it with a knife,’ I told them.

We were scheduled to organise a Swimming Gala around the pool. ‘Can’t do it in this,’ Tony said with finality. ‘Right let’s get ’em all in the ballroom.
We’ll have another fuckin’ magic show.’

‘Right.’ Pinky said. ‘Another fuckin’ magic show.’

‘We need,’ Tony said, ‘someone to jog up to the pool to see if there’s anyone hanging about. Bring ’em all down to the ballroom.’

‘I’m not going out there!’ Nobby shouted. ‘Have you seen out there? It’s like a biblical fuckin’ epidemic out there is what it is. A fuckin’ biblical
fuckin’ plague I mean. Cecil B. DeMille, without the toads. Four horsemen of the fuckin’ ladybirds. That’s right. Apopolypse. No, what is it? Apocalypse. I open my mouth to speak
and ten ladybirds fly in.’

‘What a shame you have to shut your mouth,’ said Sammy the elder Greencoat, adjusting his wig.

‘Hey!’ went Nobby. ‘Hey! That’s not nice!’

While all this was going on, Tony leaned over to me. ‘Will you go, David? Someone has to.’

‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’

Pinky opened his office and reappeared with a battery-powered megaphone. ‘Use this, if you like. You’ll need to hang around up there for half an hour collecting the stragglers and
latecomers. Good lad.’

Off I went with my megaphone, into the ladybird storm.

I didn’t jog. I made my way pretty smartly up to the deserted swimming pool area and switched on the thing. The airborne insects were pinging into the metal funnel as I mouthed a few words
about everyone going down to the ballroom to have a great time. The trouble was there was no one there to hear me. Hardly anyone was actually outside in the ladybird storm. I let the megaphone fall
at my side. ‘There’s a magic show waiting for you,’ I said to no one, or maybe just to the flying bugs.

The ladybirds seemed attracted to my blazer. Maybe the green stripes had them confused into thinking they were settling on a lush leaf. Thankfully they didn’t seem attracted to my white
trousers in the same way, but I wiped about two or three dozen ladybirds off my blazer sleeve alone. Tony had told me to stick around for half an hour but what with the insects targeting me I
didn’t feel like standing still so I went about the chalet blocks, trying to be inventive with what I gabbled into my megaphone. Something unfunny about emergency anti-ladybird legislation.
Occasionally a door would open and a bemused family would peer at me trying to fathom what I was saying.

Ladybirds were crawling inside my collar and in my ear and I’d had enough. I walked past block D mouthing about an all-star magic show with
Abdul-Shazam!
and all the gang when one
of the chalet doors opened. It was Terri. She’d been cleaning one of the refurbished chalets. I went over to her.

‘Look at you,’ she gasped. ‘Come inside.’

She pulled me in and slammed the door on the cloud of insects.

‘Look at you!’ she said again, this time pointing at me.

I looked down. The ladybirds had swarmed over my blazer. There was barely a patch of cloth to be seen under them. They were live but motionless, anchored to the coloured threads. My blazer was a
live garment, like something from a dream.

I was shocked.

‘Let’s get it off you,’ she said. Very gently she reached a finger under each lapel and eased the blazer off my shoulders, like she was determined to lift the thing off me
without killing a single ladybird. I felt the thrill of her fingers stroke my collarbone. She stepped in closer to me and delicately slipped the blazer down the length of my sleeves. I could smell
the shampoo in her hair. I could smell something like sunshine on her skin. She was close enough for me to feel her breath on my neck. When she’d lowered the blazer sleeves free of my arms
she stepped to one side, holding the blazer in one hand, and then she gently hung it over the back of a chair before stepping back. I don’t think she lost a single ladybird in the
process.