The Year of the Ladybird (26 page)

And then she cried. The wind gusted around us, blowing sand at us, gritty sand that blew in our faces and stung. I tried to comfort my mother as the wind gusted and dropped, gusted and dropped;
but I was numb, and all I could think of was that east coast advertising slogan: it’s so bracing.

Before leaving, Mum and Ken made Nikki promise that she’d come with me to visit them at home. We waved them away. When they’d gone I ventilated a huge sigh.

‘You all right?’ said Nikki.

We’d got duties to attend to. Nikki was in the Slowboat and I was due in the Games Room. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said.

Nikki scuttled ahead and as I walked back across the car park I was intercepted by Rosa, who called me from her caravan. ‘She’s ready to see you,’ she said. ‘Any time
this afternoon.’

I managed to steer the table-tennis and snooker through to their respective finals. I wrote down the names of the winners. I told them stage jokes.
With the right amount of training and
practice . . . you might just be able to hit that ball.
Eventually I made my way to the path between the offices and the bowling green. My appointment was with Dot, the grizzled ogre of the
steam-cave that was the laundry room.

I had to wait in line behind a couple of the cleaning staff who were sorting and folding white sheets. There was some kind of dispute. Clouds of steam settled on Dot’s shoulders as she
demanded to know why they needed extra sheets when they’d already been issued. The argument went on for some time. I shuffled my feet nervously.

Finally it was resolved. Without acknowledging my presence Dot moved a pile of sheets from the counter to the deeper recesses of her lair. From the back a strip light flickered on and off at
irregular intervals. At last, and with no gesture or word of recognition she said, ‘I don’t like doing it; but if it’s to be done let’s get on.’

‘You’re Rosa’s sister?’ I said.

‘Twin. Pull up that chair.’

It seemed astonishing to me. They hardly looked alike. Rosa was buxom with ample, swinging hips whereas Dot was rake-thin. I pulled up the chair and Dot was pulling up one for herself when
another cleaner poked her head round the door.

‘Shall I come back later?’ asked the cleaner. ‘I see you’ve got a
young man
in here with you, Dot.’

Dot got up, waddled to the door and closed it sharply, almost in the woman’s face. She dropped a latch. ‘I can’t be doing with foolishness,’ she said, motioning that I
should sit down. I took it as a warning.

She pulled her own chair up opposite mine and sat down. Our knees were almost touching. ‘What is it, then?’ she asked.

‘Well, Rosa said I should see you.’

‘We know that. What do you want?’

I must have looked vacant.

‘I don’t do mumbo-jumbo,’ Dot said sharply. ‘There’s no fortunes to be seen or told. You have to tell me what it is, and I see what I can do for you.’

I glanced round the gloomy laundry cavern. Clouds of steam were still thinning under the ceiling and the light in the back of the chamber was flickering. Dot had her eye fixed on me. Her thin
bleached grey hair seemed almost like a hood. I took a deep breath and told her everything my mother had told me at lunchtime.

‘I see. And what else?’

I said that was it.

‘You’re holding something back.’

I thought about it for a second, and then I told her about my dreams and hallucinations and the boy and the man in the blue suit.

‘Give me your hands,’ Dot said firmly.

I gave her my hands and she held them in each of hers. Her own hands were surprisingly warm and soft but her knuckles were big and chafed, and it was at her knuckle bones that she seemed to look
rather than at me. ‘Oh I see. There we are. Oh dear. Oh no. Oh dear. There we are. That’s the way. Poor duckie. That’s the way.

‘I feel very nervous. I feel it all the time. Like something bad is going to happen.’

I was about say something bland but she carried on speaking in a way as if I wasn’t even in the room there with her.

‘I feel very small,’ she said, ‘and very lonely and I think that all the trouble may be because of something that I have done, though I don’t know what it is. I’m
too small to know these things. I love him, but I feel something bad is going to happen.

‘There’s a moon,’ she said, ‘very very bright over the water. There’s a movement at the water’s edge. I see it. Two figures, where the waves are foaming.
They’re holding hands, these two, and looking out across the sea. What are they looking for? What do they want?

‘I’m going to the sea wall. I’m going to see what they want, these two. I’m walking the promenade for a short way and – here we are – the concrete steps down
on to the beach. I can smell salt and sea-gas. They’ve moved on, these two, but there they are, still silhouetted in the moonlight. Look at them holding hands. So tightly! So
tender!’

I was still holding Dot’s hands, or rather she was holding mine. Her eyes were half-closed as she said all this. The extraordinary thing was how clearly I could visualise everything she
said.

She went on. ‘It’s a boy and a man, isn’t it? A boy and a man. That’s strange: their eyes are like clear glass. I see moonlight – or is it the phosphorescence in
the water – reflecting where their eyes should be? It’s strange. I’m going to hurry a little. Catch up with them. Oh, but the sand, you see, the sand is sucking me down, slowing
me. I can’t catch up. They’re going towards the town. I’ve got to hurry to keep up with them.

‘Look. Look. We’ve come to the pier.’

‘We’ve come to the pier,’ I heard myself say.

I looked around and I was there, at the water’s edge. I seemed to have arrived there in mere moments. Dot’s voice had gone and I inhaled the brine and heard the lap of the water and
felt the soft sand under my feet.

I followed the man and the boy to the pier, and there was a boat drawn up at the water’s edge. The man looked around him nervously as if he didn’t want to be seen. He still wore his
blue suit and it too foamed with gentle phosphorescent light, like it was made of water. Eels of blue light swam and sparkled in the threads of its fabric. It was beautiful. He took the boy by the
hand, and together they walked into the water and climbed into the boat.

As the man pushed off with the oars I ran and caught up. I hurried into the water, splashing and soaking my shoes and my trousers and I climbed into the boat beside them. The boy smiled at me
briefly but the man didn’t so much as acknowledge me.

The man rowed steadily. The bright moon shone on his face and for the first time I was able to see him clearly. He no longer had eyes of clear glass. Now he wore spectacles. The boy too: now
instead of eyes of glass he had ordinary wide, trusting eyes of nut-brown. Though I had an aching dread inside me, I sat in the boat quietly as we moved deeper out to sea. We cast a moon-shadow on
the calm water behind us.

The little boy watched me carefully. He turned sharply to look at his father, then back to me. It was as if he was asking one of us for an explanation about the presence of the other. I tried to
speak, but some paralysis had me by the throat and I struggled for the faculty of words. Still the man showed no interest in me as he rowed steadily.

About two hundred yards out to sea the man stopped rowing and shipped oars. He looked back at the shore and decided to take off his shoes and socks. Then he stripped off his jacket and his shirt
and trousers. He wore swimming trunks underneath.

At last I overcame my paralysis and managed to speak. ‘Isn’t it cold for that?’ I said. The balmy nights had given way to chilly evenings and even though I was fully dressed I
was shivering and wet from the knees down.

The man looked at me and in a voice that I knew he said, ‘No-one will bother us here.’

I looked for the boy, but he had gone. The man reached for some ropes that were lying in the bottom of the boat. The ropes were secured to heavy iron weights, not unlike those weights that
braced the flats backstage of the theatre. He made certain that the weights were properly secured to the ropes and then he tied one of the ropes tightly around his leg just above the ankle.

He took another rope and a weight and he looped it around my ankle and knotted it tightly.

‘What’s that for, daddy?’ I said. My voice was tiny, child-like.

‘No-one will find us, even if they’re looking for us.’

A surge of panic and self-preservation shot through me. Moonlight reflected in the glass of the man’s spectacles, preventing me from seeing his eyes. I looked for the little boy again. I
was scared. I thought he must have fallen over the side of the boat.

‘Just you and me together and all the time in the world,’ said the man.

The man was my father. I didn’t know what he was doing but I trusted him.

He glanced back at the shore, as if expecting or perhaps hoping that someone would come after us. I looked over the side of the boat at the dark water. I didn’t like it at all. It looked
cold. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘No need to be frightened, David.’

I opened my mouth again to say Can We Go Back but something silvery and red flew into my mouth. It flew into my throat and I spluttered. Then the thing was on my tongue and I spat it out into my
hand. It was a ladybird. It righted itself and crawled into the centre of the palm of my hand, where it stayed. Here we were in the middle of the night and a ladybird, painted by moonlight, had
flown into my mouth.

I showed it to my father. I said very clearly, but in my deep adult voice, ‘I’ve come here from another time.’

He seemed thunderstruck, hunched forward in the boat staring at the tiny creature in my hand.

But it was as if I couldn’t remember what I’d just said to him. That is, I knew as myself, as the older David exactly what I’d just said. But as the little boy I couldn’t
remember.

I held the ladybird in the palm of my hand up to the light of the moon. The great strontium-white ball of the moon seemed to expand massively in the sky. I blew on my hand and the ladybird,
silhouetted, expanded its wings and flew in a dizzy pattern across the face of the moon before disappearing into the blackness.

‘Can we go back?’ I said. ‘I’m frightened.’

My father seemed crestfallen, beaten. His brow was creased. In a kind of daze he gathered the oars and he dipped them in the water. He turned the boat around and steadily but firmly rowed the
boat back to the shore. I sat opposite him and he didn’t take his eyes off me, not for a single stroke.

When we reached the shore he untied the rope from around my ankle, then from his. He put his trousers and his jacket back on and lifted me out of the boat to carry me onto the sand. After
setting me down he took my hand and we walked to the pier.

The light changed and it was instantly daytime; the sun was shining, gulls were calling and wheeling in the blue sky and the pier was busy with people and music and with gaiety. We walked
together to the end of the pier. ‘I’m leaving you here, David,’ he said. He took his wallet out of his pocket and he pressed it into my hand. ‘Someone will come for you.
Wait here.’

I watched him walk away, along the boardwalk of the pier. He didn’t look back at me. I could see him through the cross-hatch of railings as he got down onto the sand again, making his way
back to the boat. He pushed the boat back into the water, climbed in and heaved on the oars, rowing steadily out to sea all over again. The tiny boat became a dot out at sea and seemed to become
still. I watched it lift and fall on the swell for a long time.

Eventually I became distracted by some music playing on the pier. I moved between the people. I found a penny on the boardwalk and I tried to put it into a machine, but I couldn’t reach. A
young couple saw me and laughed. The young woman lifted me up so I could reach the coin slot, but then the young man said, ‘Oh, a penny won’t do it for Madame Zora.’

He found the right coin and Madam Zora began to whirr and click and go through her routine but I kicked away from the young couple and ran down the pier, following my father. I ran onto the sand
shouting his name. I think I knew he was never going to come back.

‘It’s my daddy!’ I shouted. ‘It’s my daddy!’

In an instant I was crying and screaming and there was no-one to hear me. I wanted someone to help me. The sun was high and hot in the sky as I ran over the sand. I slipped and I fell. The loose
sand scraped my face; it seemed not to want to let me get help for my daddy. I fell again and scrambled along the beach, screaming for him to come back.

But there was no-one there. I couldn’t even see the boat out on the distant swell of the water. Tears stung my ears. I couldn’t breathe. The beach had become a vast and hostile
wilderness. No-one came. ‘It’s my daddy!’ I screamed, and the sea just groaned and shifted its obstinate and infinite weight. ‘It’s my daddy.’

I sat down on the beach and I sobbed, gulping, trying to breathe.

Then I saw the young woman from the pier rushing towards me. She put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Who are you with?’ she asked me. ‘Tell me who you are with?’ Then she took
both of my hands.

‘Hush! Hush!’ she said. ‘Here you are! Here you are!’ And the person holding my hands was no longer a young woman on the pier, but Dot, in the laundry room. ‘Hush
now. Here you are.’

‘It’s my daddy,’ I cried to her.

I cried openly and unashamedly before this hardened old woman as she sat quietly and held my hands. Finally she got up and she found me a clean handkerchief and told me to blow my nose.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve seen a lot of tears,’ she said. ‘A lot of tears.’

When I’d recovered enough, Dot said, ‘Are you all right? I’ve got a lot of work to get on with, duckie.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s hard for a lot of people. You know that.’

‘Yes.’

‘Anyway, at least we know who they are, don’t we?’

I said, ‘But why are they haunting me?’

‘Oh no duckie,’ she said. ‘No no no. They’re not haunting you. You’re haunting them. They don’t want to be here.’