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‘If you won’t go into hospital then you must stick to a routine,’ Dr Smedley said, ‘Think of it as work. Get up at 7:30, have a good breakfast, take a tablet, read for half an hour, walk or swim for an hour. And the diary of course. Crucial! Crucially important! Bring it with you next week.’
Murphy banged me up at 8:00. ‘Hey Baldy man, you’ve got a letter here. Lend us two quid. And I need your boots man.’ I handed over my Swedish army boots and the money, thinking he won’t get much heroin for that. Anyway, he was pleased - he said, ‘Take it easy man!’
I took four tablets then read the letter:
Dear Archie,
I will read the will to the whole family on Sunday at 2 p.m.
Yours faithfully,
Mum
The whole family, that is, except for Aunt Fiona who was drunk at the funeral and is dying of multiple organ failure and my sister Anne, who managed to find a time-slot for the ceremony during a business trip from Toronto.
I managed a few pages of Crime and Punishment. You probably know it. I’ve started it many times but always given up.
Sorry, I didn’t get any exercise because the tablets knocked me out.
This morning I took two tablets, read more of the adventures of Raskolnikov then resolved to walk for an hour.
No need to check his pulse or breathing; Murphy sprawled on the stairs, as dead as dead can be – I’ve seen enough bodies to know that. I only thought for a moment about retrieving my boots – they gave me blisters anyway.
I walked at a scorching pace around this pretty town, eager to burn off the cloud of Charnwood House. I call it The Charnel House, being a place where the dead, or at least, as good as dead are deposited. Not that all the wretches are wracked with misery – Murphy was a wretch who revelled in wretchedness, or maybe, like Raskolnikov’s friend, he had more vigour in his bones than the rest of us. On returning, his corpse was gone but I felt my spirits re- awakening.
Took one tablet. Forced myself to read. But today, being the day of the will reading, our friend Raskolnikov could not hold my attention.
It occurred to me while walking to Mother’s house that something was seriously wrong with the old crow. A few weeks ago I called in with a girl I was knocking around with and her toddler son. It was a mistake. I was drunk. Mother offered the girl a drink, adding, “Archibald, of course, has had enough. A fine example to set his son!”
She addressed the boy, ‘I don’t suppose it’ll matter if you have your birthday present a couple of days early Tammie’. What the hell was she talking about? Of course, it won’t be long before she can’t tell night from day.
I was not looking forward to seeing my brother. I dreaded Rory’s endless talk of breweries and engine sheds. We hated each other as kids: he was a big romping boy and I was a runt. But it was all right when he turned out to be gay and nearly killed himself.
Rory was in a suit. He looked at my sunburnt legs. He said, ‘It's hot’.
Mother said nothing; she fussed with documents and skittered here and before calling us to my father's study. As children we were told that keys for its solid oak door were almost beyond value - should a key be lost or the lock require attention (through inattentiveness to the oiling regime perhaps) only one man could be called upon. This man, my father insisted, had been Queen Victoria's locksmith.
The room contains the odour that loiters outside a pub on Sunday morning. And a great deal of gloomy junk like antique golf clubs and clocks, a stuffed sea-trout, the family coat of arms draped with a generic tartan, paintings from Panama and pornographic prints.
Rory fidgeted and smoked furiously. Mother sat at a massive bureau – I wonder what’s in its secret cabinets - her posture and voice quivering with madness, reading a list stuff to be bestowed equally to Rory and Anne. "…and," she concluded, "They will each receive the sum of £3 million."
That left me. I got the beach hut.
Rory took me home in his new Jaguar. He drove fast, his face puckered in thought. The sunshine made me think of asking Rory to drive straight to my hut. He said, "Of course, I'll give you half."
"It doesn't matter," I said, "I'd get drunk every day, I'd buy a car and crash it and die."
It was true. But Rory wasn't satisfied. He said, in a falling tone as if he immediately regretted it, "Let me buy the beach hut off you then - I'll give you £100,000 for it."
"Don't worry about it," I said.
Rory snapped the Big Cat down to second and ripped past a wagon of turnips. I got him to drop me around the corner from the Charnel house. I let him force some money on me.
Last night, half asleep, I pictured the hut. It sits deep in dunes like snowdrifts. Dad is on the porch slumped in a deck chair. Close to hand are bottles of Crème de Menthe and Blue Curacao and a Thermos flask that the barman at the hotel has filled with ice. Soon, Dad falls asleep half on his side; his girth twists at his shorts to expose a dangling bollock.
I was about 12, Rory 14 and Anne 9 or 10 - I have never been back to Eyemouth. We got to the hut early. Mother set her easel on the porch to paint the familiar scene: the rolling dunes topped with marram grass, a sliver of sea beyond, Anne digging and playing.
Rory, father and me took buckets, spades and fishing gear from the hut and walked a long way, beyond the sands, towards the estuary. We waded barefoot into mud and dug for ragworm.
When we had a bucketful, we picked our way around a shoulder of rock and scrambled down the other side on to the jetty at Willsons boatyard.
Willson smelled of diesel. Father called him an old sea dog and I suspected he might have been the locksmith as well. There was a girl, Isobel, at Willson’s. She was strangely sallow and wore a baggy boiler suit – she could tuck her hair down the back and show her bra off. She smelled of marshmallows.
Old Willson rowed us out to The Cuckoo Dove, which was anchored in the estuary then returned alone playing the tide in an arc. Isobel liked to tinker with The Cuckoo Dove's engine, bait the hooks with the wriggling worms and smoke roll-ups. We caught pollock and close to the rocks, wrasse.
In the afternoon Willson drove us back to the beach-hut. He drank a lot of barley wine with Father and even Rory was allowed beer. Anne and me helped Isobel collect driftwood for a fire and Isobel cooked the pollock over the crackling flames - not for me though. Mother took Anne and me back to the hotel for high tea.
The next day at breakfast, Father and Rory were exchanging looks and even whispering. That’s why I hated them. And I had no ally because Mother was too stupid to even notice. Father nearly got away with it but I was watching him - he seemed, even for him, a little too interested in the waitress. She brought our bacon and eggs. Their eyes met for rather too long. Finally, she returned with the telegram on a silver salver. He said "Fuck!" too loudly. Then: "I'm afraid the party's over. I have to fly to Philadelphia tonight."
This morning I almost didn’t take a tablet. And then, after swallowing the bloody thing I considered not going to Eyemouth. Not a good start to the day.
Dostoevsky became impossible as the train clattered towards Kings Cross. I felt compelled to take a firm grip as though I was in a rollercoaster ratcheting up to the first drop. The train banged and swayed. It was about to de-rail. None of my fellow passengers seemed concerned in the slightest. They must be hardened veterans at this game; well aware the train was more likely to crash than reach its destination. My heart bounded - I could actually hear it thudding. A man opposite was reading a paper – I tried to focus on it but its words were dancing anagrams. Metal - that was the taste; I licked my finger expecting to see blood. A man got on at Finsbury Park. He was on the point of taking a meat cleaver from his bag and...
But I jumped off in time.
A staircase spiralled down to the Underground. The tunnels, the corridors, a beggar crouching in an alcove, the screeching echoes - I was back in hospital. On the platform, I became unpredictable. I couldn’t be sure where my legs would take me. It was like driving a car, thinking you might swerve into oncoming traffic.
My train stopped in a tunnel, for a long sap-draining time. I sweated so heavily that I put my jacket on to hide the stains on my shirt.
At Eyemouth, on the way to the beach, I bought a claw hammer. I reached the sea through a crowd of bodies. After a half-mile paddling the shoreline, there were no people at all on the sand - just oystercatchers that made piping noises. Eventually, I turned the lip of a shallow bay and came to an outcrop of sunbathers at Old Eyemouth beach.
A lifeguard was hauling an inflatable speedboat up the beach. He was a pumped up brute, hard and brown. His head was topped with a circle of blonde stubble, like a giant hazelnut.
A little way beyond, feeding into the dunes was a snake of beach huts. My hut, unless things had changed, was the last of the line but set apart and askew. In the evening, I remembered, it was shaded by conifer trees.
Black clouds suddenly crowded in on the beach. Wind whistled through the marram grass and whipped at the sand. People scurried from the beach. Heavy dollops of rain pockmarked the sand. The rain became heavier by the second. It turned the sand to mud and made it steam.
The hut had a well-kept look, not the ruin I was expecting. The paint, blue and white, was fresh enough to smell and a window had been recently re-glazed. Then – and this nearly made me vomit – I saw The Cuckoo Dove’s nameplate on the door.
I opened the door to a shocking hollowness. The hut was stripped bare and scrubbed and the rain drummed the roof with violence. I took enough floorboards up with the claw hammer to get a look underneath, then, seeing nothing, began to dig at the sand. The rain hammered down.
Someone said, “Hello mate.” I turned to face Hazelnut. He looked down on me, arms akimbo, as though calmly observing a rat before killing it. He said, “You must be Rory.”
“Who are you?” His stare said he wasn’t answering. I heard myself say, “Alright, yes.”
“You’re going to have to keep the payments up”
“Payments?”
“That’s right matey”
“Matey?”
I didn’t know the punch was a punch. It wasn’t a punch. Hazelnut’s right arm had turned into a 14lb sledgehammer. I was on the floor. All was black. I was blind. My last stinging sensation was that my head had been punched clean off.
Some time later, I came around. Hazelnut had gone. I gathered my things and staggered outside. My skin tingled in the freshened air. The finger of alpine trees hid the sun and cast a gloom over the scene but the sky dazzled brighter after the rain, making mirrors of the hut’s windows. I wiped my shirt on the hut to dampen it and smeared the blood from my face. An egg-sized lump topped with a deep gash grew above my left ear, but I looked unmarked. Old Eyemouth was not far away - I started walking.
Drinkers clustered in the evening sun at the Smugglers Inn. A dismal sight indeed. Oddly, an enormous plastic fish leaped from the pub’s sea-coloured roof tiles. I would have massacred the entire village for a drink but I pressed on; the road turned steeply seawards, funnelling down to Willson’s boatyard. I passed a few guesthouses - snuggly inglenook jobs - but they had no vacancies; nor did the last, a no-nonsense Victorian affair with a crazy name: Hotel Santa Catalina. Notices in the monster bay window advertised its charms:
NO VACANCIES, THIS IS A NON-SMOKING ESTABLISHMENT, STRICTLY NO DOG’S – EVEN FOR THE BLIND!!! NO FORREN MONEY – AND THAT MEANS THE EURO!!!
A woman opened the door. She looked all black and white; witch’s hair flowed to her waist and her face was as pale and waxy as lard. She flicked ash on an old Labrador that cowered at her side. It wasn’t until her shocked expression eased into a half smile like The Mona Lisa that we both realised. ‘Archie! Fuck! My God! What the fuck…where’s Rory? I was expecting Rory.‘
‘So I gathered.’ We were silent for a minute.
‘Anyway, come and see your room.’
She led me to a room that overlooked the estuary. ‘Boootiful voo,’ she said, bitterly exaggerating her accent. ‘Oh bliss, Oh joy, another day in paradise!’
‘Who lives here, I mean who runs this place?’ I said
‘It’s getting late – what do you want for breakfast?’ she snapped.
‘Scrambled egg and beans on toast will do.’
‘Ha! Another one for the fancy breakfast,’ and with that she swept out but paused at the door like a T.V. detective with a prepared afterthought, ‘we run it now. Me and you.’
Swilled a tablet down on waking before something inside told me not to.
‘One fancy breakfast.’ Isobel slapped the plate down so hard a gobbet of egg jumped into my lap. ‘And hurry up; we’re going to the hut.’ It was a noteworthy breakfast except for the cigarette ash on the beans.
Isobel’s Subaru pick-up got us through the sand all the way to the hut. She snatched a crow bar and shovel from a tangle of tools and mariner’s tackle. The dog parked itself on the porch. It looked quite at home. We went in and locked the door from the inside. ‘So, you started without me?’ she said.
‘It is my hut, you know.’
‘You’d better be very careful, m-’
‘Matey’ I finished her sentence.
‘What do you take me for? A slag?’ she spat. The words made her shiver. She lit a cigarette and looked out to sea. ‘What were you looking for?’ she asked.
‘What are you looking for?’
Isobel frowned. I had a look outside – light rain fell, there was nobody about. A grey heron flapped by. I said, ‘Something nasty in the woodshed.’
‘What?’
‘Remember the boy who went missing? – There was a big palaver about the police stopping the search too early or something. On the train down here, I had a sort of déjà vu feeling – just for a second, then it was gone - we were passing some farm sheds and stuff. I think it’s something about the boy’s name.
‘Stokeley. It’s not his name. That’s where they came from; it’s not far from here, you can see it from the train.’ She lit another cigarette, hiding it in the cup of her hand. ‘He wasn’t really a boy, he was eighteen. I was only fourteen when your Dad -’
‘I can guess. Was the boy here, in the hut?’
‘He’s still here. I think. He played … games. With Rory. They strangled each other or something. Rory was at University then. Your Dad was supposed to be on a business trip’
The crow bar made light work of the floorboards. I levered the entire floor up. Removing the very last board exposed a metal box.
‘It’s all about fucking money,’ Isobel said as she read Father’s note again. ‘I always knew he paid the police off.’ Hazelnut was sitting at the bar – he waved at me. I smirked back, raising my glass of ginger beer.
‘Where is Santa Catalina, Archie?’
‘Panama.’
‘How could he arrange all that?’
‘He owned a company there, went there quite a lot. Everything there is run by bribery. How the hell he sorted it here, I’ve got no idea.’
‘Think how I felt being told my baby’s dead and unfortunately it got tipped in the incinerator by mistake,’ she said almost laughing.
‘Especially when she was alive and well all the time.’
No tablet. No Raskolnikov. No Dr. Smedley.
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