Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
I SPENT THAT NIGHT WITH MABEL AND MY FATHER AMONG THE BATTERED remains of the living room. None of us wanted to spend the night alone. I sat on our now legless armchair, my legs stretched out on the floor in front of me, while my father slept on the tilting settee and Mabel paced back and forth across the littered floor. When she wasn’t smoking, she gripped the diamond engagement ring on her finger, twisting it nervously round and round.
“Oh, God, Jesse, I can’t believe this is happening. It’s like one of them bleeming disaster films, is this. But I tell you, I can take canceling the wedding. I can even take our Evelyn acting like a one-woman demolition crew. But I’m worried to death about Frank and Ted being out in this.” She swept an arm toward the window and the cacophony of the still raging storm. “They could be off in a ditch somewhere. They could be injured. Oh, God, they could be …” She sobbed, then added softly, “I just wish we could phone the police.”
We had discovered that the telephone was dead when my father tried to ring my mother’s doctor, though what advice the doctor might have offered in the wake of her fit of destruction I did not know. When he hadn’t been able to reach the doctor, my father had searched out a bottle of her pills, given her a couple with a glass of water, and made her swallow them down. Then he and Mabel had taken her upstairs to her bedroom, where she’d rapidly fallen asleep. After walking through the house with a torch to survey the full extent of the damage my mother had carried out, my father had collapsed in a defeated bundle onto the settee. When he finally fell asleep, he slept fitfully, letting out little murmurs and grumbles as his limbs jerked and his features twitched.
“I’m sure Frank and Uncle Ted are fine, Auntie Mabel,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “Maybe they stopped off somewhere to get out of the weather.”
“I hope you’re right, Jesse,” Mabel said. “I really do. But I’ve got this awful feeling. I just know something terrible has happened.” She pressed a fist into her stomach. “I can feel it, right here, in my guts.”
I WAS JERKED OUT of sleep by the sound of loud banging, and for a moment I thought my mother must have found her sledgehammer again. But then, as I opened my eyes, I realized that it wasn’t the noise of a hammer that had woken me; there was someone banging on the front door. I pushed myself out of the broken armchair.
It was no longer dark. Light seeped through the curtains, so that the room was cast in a silvery pall. My father still lay sleeping on the settee, his mouth open, his breath coming out in snuffled gasps. Mabel was flopped into the other armchair, her head thrown back, her arms draped limp over the chair’s sides. As the pounding on the door continued, she groaned, her eyelids flickered, and then she suddenly opened her eyes wide. The next moment, she was on her feet.
“It must be Frank and Ted,” she said. “Oh, thank God! They must have forgotten to take a key.” She marched across the room, pausing for a moment to check her reflection in the mirror above the mantel, now hanging at an angle, a massive crack across its middle. She cupped her cheeks in her hands, groaned again, then patted her hair. “Crikey,” she said. “I look like I’ve been through a bleeming war.” Then she added, mumbling, “Feel like I’ve been through one as well.”
I followed her out into the hallway, hanging back as she raced to the door.
“Where the heck have you—” she began as she opened the door. Apparently shocked at what she saw there, she took a step back. The door swung wide, and I saw two policemen standing on our front step. One was tall, with a jutting chin and an enormous swell of a belly that pressed against the shiny buttons of his midnight-blue uniform. The other was thin and much younger, his conical helmet too big, so that it hid a good part of his smooth-skinned face and made me think of a bucket turned upside down onto his head.
“Are you … Mrs. Bennett?” the tall policeman asked, pausing as he consulted the notebook he held. He had a deep, authoritative voice, the sort that seemed appropriate for a representative of the local constabulary.
“No … she’s … she’s in bed. I’m Mabel Pearson,” Mabel said, her voice shaky as she pressed her hand against the wall.
The tall policeman looked grave. The younger one shuffled about, his expression invisible as he made a study of his feet. “Well, Mrs. Pearson—”
“It’s Miss … Miss Pearson,” Mabel said.
I moved along the hallway to stand next to her.
“Well, I’m afraid, Miss Pearson, that we’ve got a bit of bad news.”
“Oh, God,” Mabel gasped. “I knew it. I just knew it. What is it? What happened? Has there been an accident? Are they both … are they dead?”
The two policemen exchanged looks.
“Erm … If you’re referring to”—the tall man looked at his notebook again—“Mr. Edward Pearson and Mr. Frank Shipton, no, Miss Pearson, they’re not dead. They’re fine. But I’m sorry to say that they’ve been arrested.”
“Arrested?” Mabel’s voice rose close to a shriek. “For what?”
He looked down at his notebook. “Stealing. And I’m afraid there may be a charge of conspiracy to defraud.”
“Oh, God,” she said, grappling with her cigarette packet. “I’ll kill our bloody Ted, I will. Dragging poor Frank into trouble.” She pulled out a cigarette, waving it about, unlit, as she spoke. “So, what’s he been stealing? What’s he been defrauding?”
“It’s both of them that’s being charged, Miss Pearson,” the policeman said solemnly. “They’ve been stealing Tuggles sausages.”
AS SOON AS THE police were gone, I left Mabel smoking and pacing the hallway, ran upstairs to my bedroom, gathered up a few things, and put them into a duffel bag that I slung across my shoulder. Then I galloped down the stairs again, launched myself past Mabel, and out the front door.
It was a different world now. The storm had transformed everything. The hedgerows were battered and the fields beaten. The wheat, silvered with rain, lay flat like the fur of a damp animal. The road was pocked with wide, shimmering puddles and strewn with debris—ragged leaves, broken branches. Huge shape-shifting clouds, dense and gray at their bottoms, rolled across the sky. Next to where our driveway opened out into the road, a tree had fallen, blocking one lane of the narrow little thoroughfare. It was one of the dead elms, stark and bare, a felled corpse sent sprawling. As I made my way around it, I noticed, in the fine fingers of its upper branches, a pink serviette splayed on the ground, tattered, streaked with dirt, and darkly wet.
I walked purposefully, breathing in the cool, stark air. The wind, far less powerful than during the night, but still strong, was coming off the coast. As I moved against it, I felt myself pushing into a force that was so much larger than me, urging it to welcome me into its arms. And while my body moved forward, I let my thoughts skim over the bedraggled landscape. After such destruction, it seemed a miracle that the world remained intact, resilient. I only wished that I could say the same of myself. Instead, I felt undone.
I had tried so hard. Tried to make a new life for myself, tried to fit in. Tried to take care of my mother, to rein in her maniacal energy, to keep her afloat. I had tried, too, to love someone. And, finally, when pushed to it, I had even tried to stop brutality and bullying, to stand up, to speak out. I’d failed in all of it. Instead of making myself loved and popular and normal, I’d become the worst thing there was. At school, I was a “lezzie,” a “homo,” a “pervert,” but at home I was something even more dreadful. I had said the cruelest thing I could think of to my mother. I had told her that I wished that she were dead. And I’d told her knowing full well the state she’d worked herself into over Mabel’s wedding. I might as well have lifted that sledgehammer and smashed the walls and doors and furniture myself.
IT WAS STILL EARLY when I reached Reatton-on-Sea. The little high street was empty, the shops still closed, the only movement the squeaky flapping of a dislodged metal sign above the amusement arcade. I saw no one on the road that led to the cliff edge. The only sounds were the wind and the roar of the waves. The sea was a strip of slate gray, widening as I came closer, and flecked with white ruffles, like shreds of lace. I didn’t see the dramatic change in the shape of the cliffs until I was almost at the end of the road. It was only then that I noticed that the jutting little peninsula at the edge of the caravan park was no longer there. Where that tongue of cliff had stuck out, there was nothing more than air. Malcolm’s battered caravan was gone.
My duffel bag bounced hard against my back and its stringy strap bit into my shoulder as I ran past the entrance of Holiday Haven. I sped across the sodden grass, splashing through puddles, sliding over greasy mud, until I stopped as close as I dared get to the cliff edge, to the place where that peninsula had been. Then I craned my head to peer over the rim, to see where the sea had ripped the land away. The clay, dark and moist, seemed poured downward, like suddenly frozen liquid. At the bottom, it was held in the tumultuous caress of the waves.
The sight finally made me certain, tipped me, too, over the edge. As I gazed down at the place where Malcolm and his family must have plunged to in the middle of the night, I knew what I had to do. I had come looking for him, I now realized, hoping that there might be at least one person who could understand me, who could keep me attached to this place. But he was gone now. Sucked down, sucked under by the insatiable waves.
As the high tide swirled below and gnawed eagerly at the base of the cliff, I thought about Mr. Cuthbertson’s stories in my geography lessons, of whole towns and villages pulled under, of ports and people washed away. There were ancient graveyards in the silt and mud off the East Yorkshire coast. A sea full of bodies. I was sad that Malcolm had to drown there, but it seemed a fitting place to end.
I stepped back from the cliff and pulled the duffel bag from my shoulder. Then I tugged back the string fastening its mouth and tipped its contents onto the wet ground—a pillowcase holding a hundred little pills and a whiskey bottle containing a couple of inches of bright, coppery liquid.
It didn’t take long to push it all into me. A handful of pills, a stinging mouthful of the whiskey, another handful of the pills. I did it so fast that by the time I was done I didn’t feel the effects of any of it, just the raw and glorious burn of the whiskey all the way from my lips down my throat and into my stomach.
I began walking. Back along the cliff, gazing at the turbulent water, until I reached the path that led to the beach. As I made my way down, my limbs began to feel stretched out, loose. The noise of the waves became deafening, a percussion orchestra in my ears. And then a bright stretch of sky opened up on the horizon. It glistened across the silvered water, dazzling. I kept blinking. My eyes, now heavy and aching, couldn’t bear all that light. But I kept plodding downward until I reached the bottom, and a little patch of sand not quite covered by the tide. For a moment—or perhaps for a long, long time—I stood there, watching the waves sweep onto the sand, over and across one another, like crescendos of music, or rising and falling floods of hope. Then, as I felt dizziness start to overtake me, I kicked off my shoes, and in my stocking feet I stumbled over the wet sand and into the water, its cold fingers welcoming me, pulling me into a startling embrace.
I waded deeper, into history, into memories, toward swallowed land and drowned villages, inundated lives. I waded into stories about myself. The chubby-cheeked three-year-old my mother had talked about, thrilled to run away from her into the churning waters of the North Sea. It occurred to me then that I’d always been determined to run toward a dazzling, distant horizon. As the water clasped me to it, I decided that this was the one thing I loved about myself.
A wave came in, fast and tumbling, and I was underwater, limbs flailing, clothes flapping, sagging, dragging me downward. I gasped for air and took in choked-down mouthfuls of salt water. I felt my lungs burn, I felt my stomach lurch, I felt a shuddering convulsion. Then, buoyed up and pushed above the surface, I took in a breath.
Then I opened my eyes and saw Malcolm’s ghost swim over to greet me. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him. And, even though I fought him, I was happy to see him. It was nice, I realized, to finally find a friend.