Winterton Blue (21 page)

Come on, he said, appealing to Lewis, You can't abandon us
now.
We
need
you.

For what? said Lewis, kicking at the bunch of keys instead.

Yeah, spazzman, for what? Bad enough having one spazzing spaz, said Carl, before breaking into his hyena laugh.

He looks older, said Wayne, as if it were obvious, He looks old
enough.

The two boys lying on the ground peered up at Lewis. Carl considered this.

You're right, he said, and turning to Lewis, Your brother needs you,
mate.
To help him with a favour he's got to do. Mate. A little debt he owes me.

Why should I? said Lewis, looking at Wayne.

Why? asked his brother, Why? And then, breaking into song,
Cos it's a nice day to . . . start again!

Carl let out his high, metallic laugh.

They're moving at the speed of light. Lewis in the back seat with his eyes shut and stinking of petrol, Wayne in front, pulling on a cigarette and handing it back to Carl, who angles it in the corner of his mouth, just like his father does, but who doesn't drive like him. Who drives like Ayrton Senna.

They robbed the car from a side-street off Moorland Road, cutting across the park and straight over the football pitch. The hair-coated blankets they'd found in the back of the hatch got ditched in the long grass on the edge of the children's playground, and the thermos was hurled over the fence and onto the bowling green. All the while they laughed, except Lewis, who was scouring for children, park attendants, anyone that Carl would think it might be amusing to run down.

At the garage at the bottom of Newport Road, Lewis—who looked old enough—got out and held the pump and fed it into the hole and pressed the trigger. He didn't know how to make it stop and his hands were shaking, and the petrol spilt all over the tarmac and down his trousers. Any second now and the bald guy they called Fester would be out of the booth and running. Lewis was meant to walk up to the door as if to pay, cut sideways down the alley, and meet them at the corner of the next street. Lewis planned to not get back in the car. But Carl had a plan too, hissing at Lewis to get in before he was done, and revving the engine, and making
Lewis panic so the hose snaked round his leg and he fell onto the back seat with his feet sticking out and the door hanging open like a broken wing. And now they're laughing their heads off up front, laughing because they'd got a full tank in the car and two bottles of Manny's home brew inside them and two more stashed in the footwell,
cooling.

The world's our fucking oyster! shouts Carl.

Whatever that means, says Wayne, glancing backwards at Lewis, trying to include him. But he's not forgiving either of them and he mutters, not quite under his breath: Means it stinks of fish.

He can hear Wayne singing above the over-revving engine, then whooping as Carl cuts the corner, then singing again. Lewis is no coward but he's just not looking. He's sick with the rear suspension and the petrol vapour coming off him. Every time he opens his eyes, he sees the fat green gonk hanging off the rear-view mirror, twirling round and grinning and making him feel a deep rumbling sickness. Wayne turns to his brother and thumps him on the knee.

I told you! he shouts, over the wail of gears, Goes like shit off a shovel!

The sky whips past, but Lewis still isn't looking.

Let me out, he says, through his fingers.

He leans forward between the front seats and grabs Carl by the shoulder. Carl turns his head, but like the pro he is, he's keeping his eyes on the road.

Not scared, are you, butt? he says, We haven't even started yet.

He takes his hands off the wheel and pulls his jacket off one shoulder, then the other, letting the car veer sideways as he wriggles his arms from his sleeves, waiting for the last second before jerking the car back on course. He tosses the jacket into the back, catching Lewis full in the face. Wayne swigs from the old lemonade bottle and offers it to Lewis.

Like Alka-Seltzer, he says, pointing the neck at him, Go on. It's alright, this.

The liquid is the colour of urine, with a cloudy froth on top. Lewis takes a sip, tasting sweet and bitter, and then another.

There is nothing fair in this world, and there is nothing safe in this world, and there is nothing sure in this world . . . look for something left in this world . . . START AGAIN!

His brother sings, rapping on the dash with his fingers. Lewis is pretty sure it's not fair and not safe, and he knows what's going to happen: it's way beyond his control. Carl will crash this car; they will run along the back streets, probably bleeding, maybe with something broken. They'll be cowering in some alleyway behind the bins and whether the police find them there or come for them later, they'll end up in Borstal. Lewis longs to rewind the day, go back to the bus stop and Wayne picking at the flaking paint with his fingernail. Sam would get there before Carl arrived, and the three of them would get on the bus, running up the stairs to get the best seat on the top deck, and in this other version they'd be in town, posing in the record shop. Lewis would buy the Sly and Robbie record he wanted, trying to be cool and restrained as he asked the assistant with the dyed black hair to play it for him. And Wayne would flirt with her, singing out of tune, being his usual nuisance self. But things could still turn out badly: Carl could still show up. No, he'd have to go further back, to when his mother left the house for work. He would wind it back to there, or further, yet further back, unspooling the hours until he found the right place to start time again. As the houses streak away on either side, Lewis knows where he would begin the re-run of this day: he would go after his mother with her cigarettes, and he'd give her a proper hug and she'd say, Get away with you! Go on, and make sure he takes his pills, mind.

Lewis hands the bottle of home brew back to his brother and looks into his eyes: they are too bright, and too shiny, and it's too late now for rewind.

They enter a long back street parallel to the river, lurching up over the pavement and down again, fast and reckless, so Lewis's nausea is turned to fright. Two children playing at the roadside jump off the kerb and into a hedge. Through the back window, Lewis sees their faces, round and wide-eyed with shock. Carl spins them sideways into a tree-lined lane.

Here it is: the long, leafy lane and the sunshine, and the trees flashing by, and the river running in a black spill to the right, and the bridge up ahead and the trees going dark and light and dark and light and dark, and in the front seat Wayne stops singing. Only the sound of the engine now as he jerks forward, arches back, throwing his right arm in the air like a stripper flinging off a glove. His body goes stiff as he jerks again, out of the seat this time, his head hitting the sun-roof with a crack. The bridge is speeding towards them. Lewis bends forward to hold him down, shouting at Carl to stop. Wayne's knuckles hit the dashboard and the windscreen, and the rear-view mirror, whipping the giant gonk from side to side. Carl takes his eyes off the road.

For a few seconds, they're airborne, sailing into the sky, until the same sky turns over and becomes the floor. Then it's night and Wayne's not singing, and there's no noise at all now, and no one else. As they sink upside down into the river, a picture comes unbidden to Lewis, of a giant who came to visit, with green eyes and wild hair. The giant must have picked up the car and slipped it in his pocket. That's all that's happened. But now the giant is on the move, his body rocking from side to side as his huge hobnailed boots negotiate the river path, and even though the pocket is green and made of wool, the car is rocking too, and it's slipping further down to the bottom, where there are bits of fluff and tangled threads and shreds of old tobacco. A shoal of coins zigzags past the window, swimming up and out of sight.

They're not coins, thinks Lewis, They're fish.

He thinks again.

They're not fish, they're bits of glass. We're in the water.

He can't see Wayne; as the car noses the river-bed, bounces, turns sideways, he is thinking of nothing, and hearing nothing but a raucous banging which comes from inside and which he doesn't know is his heart. Behind him, the hatch cracks open: Lewis is sucked from the back seat like pus from a boil. Up and down looks all the same but his body is drawn one way. He sees nothing, then at once a hand looms into his vision; only when he makes to grab it does he realize it's his own. The water is black and then dark blue and shapes appear above him; a cloud of grey tortoises with huge flippers, which become ducks, paddling madly away, and a stream of white foam which looks like sick, coating the top of his head and fizzing through his hair.

When he opens his eyes, he sees shoes and boots with legs sticking out above them, and the wheels of a pushchair with mud in the tracks, and the long bent neck of a swan. Its black eye stares at him. He's tasting iron and petrol and home brew, and he's crying out Wayne.

Here's the one thing that in all the forgetting he could not fail to remember: at the hospital, there was a dead brother and a living one. His mother would see one of them lying on top of the sheet and the other underneath. And when she came and walked round the curtain into his cubicle, she had thought to find Wayne. It was a simple mistake: the voices belonging to the shoes and boots above him had asked him questions, who was he, who should they fetch? Only Lewis had been calling for his twin. He had been crying out Wayne. It was such a simple, innocent mistake; no one could be blamed for it. And even though he could forget nothing from then on, it was a most particular cruelty that he would remember the look on his mother's face when she saw which son was spared.

Make the rain fall and the sun not shine, make that bend in a leafy lane a straight, clear road. You can't. You can't undo. Lewis was told it would get better in time. Time is a healer, people would say, for want of something more honest, meaning, perhaps, that time equals distance, and things look less significant when they're further away. But all that time did for Lewis was to amplify the moment. In his dreams, the giant—who lifted the car that day and put it in his pocket—would appear on the bridge, or at the top of the street, or outside the petrol station, or just at the moment when Wayne takes the stolen cigarettes from his back pocket. Lewis would hear the giant's footsteps on the stairs above them. He never saw his face, but over time, it assumed the thunderous countenance typical of his mother's boyfriends.

In waking life, everything sets him off. A knock on the door becomes the rap of knuckles on the windscreen; the sight of a swan gliding on the water makes his bones jar; the smell of petrol becomes the gag of suffocation. And at the end of the earth, in a ramshackle guest-house where he knows no one and owns nothing and wants nothing, and where he is less than nothing, an innocent painting of a river and a leafy lane becomes a scene of death.

Lewis pulls the painting off the hook and turns it over on his lap. He fights the urge to smash his fist through it. He takes a deep breath, tells himself it's a scene that was painted a century or more ago. It's not even the real thing; it's a
reproduction
of someone's idea of a river and a bridge. Maybe the place doesn't even exist. So he tells himself: it's a reproduction of a reproduction of an invention, it's entirely blameless, and it's not even real. Another deep breath, and he's counting again: one, Anna, two, Anna.

He must consider her: she is blameless too, in all of this, and his feelings for her
are
real. Lewis is ashamed at this crack that's appeared inside him, this fissure which feels wide enough to put his fist in and which feels like love. He won't gamble with Anna; he will leave her alone.

After Wayne's death, the families had kept Carl and Lewis apart: it was a requirement of the court that the boys would not be allowed to associate—as if Lewis had ever wanted to associate with Carl. And as soon as the inquest was over, Lewis, out on licence, was sent to live with an aunt in Monmouth. Out of trouble's way, his mother had said, meaning out of her sight.

It took twenty years before he felt ready to face her again, although at the time, he couldn't really say why he felt ready. He'd thought it was to help him confront his problem; now, after Anna, he understands: it's because she would never come looking for him. You can't make peace with Christmas cards, and more than anything, he wanted peace. Peace, and presence, and what was left of his family; he wanted his history back. All he'd found was another of her boyfriends. But he'd found Manny too, and finally, even though he wasn't consciously looking, he'd found Carl. A sharp taste fills his mouth. He knew it, as soon as he saw the wind-farm; pressing Anna close to him on the sand and seeing the faint pinpricks in the distance. Lewis closes his eyes and sees again the photograph of Sonia on the beach, her arms outstretched and her head thrown back, her dark hair in
jagged spikes. He only has to move his thumb away from the edge of the photo to find what was missing: a line of white turbines on the horizon.

Lewis feels Carl near, so near, he can almost smell him: it's not about things anymore, if it ever was. Carl can steal a van, he can steal a bracelet, but he can't steal Lewis's past. He replaces the picture of the river on its hook, and slowly puts on his clothes.

lagan
:
n.
goods or wreckage lying on the bed of the sea, sometimes marked with a buoy for later retrieval.

Anna and her mother had never been abroad together before, but they had been to the seaside. Anna's memory of it is vivid, how they made sandwiches in the kitchen in the early morning, whispering to each other so as not to wake her father, and how they had to take a train to get there. The station was crowded with families carrying heavy bags of food; the children swinging along with their buckets and spades; one little girl even had an inflatable dolphin. Inflatables were rare in those days. A whole gang of them was going from their street: the Cleys at number six, Ronnie and Tim from next door, and the entire Farrugia family, including their ancient grandmother, whom everyone called Nonna. The Farrugias had brought a suitcase packed with food, and when they weren't all taking turns to carry it, one of them would break away from the main group and run to hold Anna's hand. It was a month before her father died, but Anna wouldn't have known it then. She was very little: six—seven, nearly. She can't recall exactly, but she remembers it was before she had learned to swim. Her mother had given her a rubber ring with yellow stripes, but she still wouldn't let Anna go in the sea. She said it'd be no use in the current, or if a shark came in. Of course, a shark on Brighton Beach would have been her mother's idea of a joke.