Becky’s voicemail picked up. Conscious of saying more than usual in a message to her, he also cringed at the note of desperation in his voice. ‘Hi, it’s me. The weather is just fantastic . . . and it’s been a while, so I wondered if you fancied a trip to the seaside . . . Anyway, I’d love to see you again, soon . . . There’s a great new seafood place just opened in Brixham—’
Seb cut off the hesitant stream of inducements because another now called for his attention. The figure in black stood at the pier’s railing between a noodle bar and a seafood concession. And he was closer.
Getting closer.
He couldn’t have been more than a hundred metres away now, which added an even greater intensity to Seb’s discomfort at being observed, and not only from the outside.
On his phone a recorded message played inside his ear, offering a menu of playback, re-record or deletion. And he wished that at least two options were available for far more than a recorded message. He suddenly wanted to undo the beginning of his adult life, because the man standing on the pier, and staring right at him, was becoming horribly familiar.
Can’t be . . .
Seb stood up, upsetting his rucksack and coffee cup.
Two cyclists, riding abreast of each other, whirred past, their heads elongated by helmets into the shape of alien skulls.
Seb trotted across the beach road and slipped between two parked cars to reach the promenade. He clutched at the railings.
His fear was joined by a compulsive curiosity about the stalker’s identity. But more importantly, how had he moved from Goodrington’s shoreline and around the headland to reach the pier? There had been no one behind Seb as he fled the cliff-side gardens. He’d looked back often enough. Of course, it could just be coincidence, two similarly dressed men in different places fixing him with their stare. But Seb was beyond even trying to convince himself of this.
As he tried to make sense of the man’s relocation to the pier, he could not suppress a competing suspicion that the figure had known where Seb was running to. To wait for you. And again, his reason was overrun by the notion that the man had arrived at the pier by other means, and by a method and design that Seb couldn’t even guess at.
But if this was to be a reunion, his memory began to reopen some of its darkest rooms in anticipation. Rooms with doors long closed and double-locked.
On the beach below Seb a frisbee was thrown badly. A mother, with broad tattoos on her lower legs, roared at her young. An elderly lady spoke to her spouse and said, ‘But I don’t want you to feel any pressure . . .’ Gulls cried above the rinsing action of the waves upon the sand. And all of these sounds retreated to a distance found only in daydreams, or in echoes from the past.
Bewilderment and the swoop of vertigo made Seb press his body against the railings to remain upright. An atmosphere of thinner air seemed to come into existence all around his body. He even feared that gravity was disappearing.
To the pier he looked beseechingly, his face pleading for a release and for that figure to make it all stop.
The man had vanished. He’d either sidestepped behind one of the little cabins at the side of the pier or had concealed himself within the crowd, or even . . .
Seb had no idea.
From an even shorter distance than before, he heard the sound of his name. Sebastian.
Again, the word might have appeared within the confines of his mind. It may also have issued from a range somewhere behind and slightly above his head. The only amelioration of his shock was provided by Seb’s recognition of the voice. The speaker’s face even appeared to him before quickly fading.
Could it be?
Seb turned about, and felt his vision drawn over the parked cars and to the man in black. He was now standing on the far side of the green within the shadow of the fir trees and behind a waist-high wall of breccia stone before the Hotel Connair.
He’d been on the pier mere seconds before. Impossible.
Seb could now make out the presence of lank hair and a baseball cap. A jaw covered by a black beard. The surrounding flesh issued an unhealthy pallor reminiscent of cream cheese, near-noisome at a glance.
The figure raised a long arm. The hand and wrist were as blanched as the face.
Seb moved hesitantly across the beach road. The world looked as it usually did, though his vision twitched from shock. But the world was not the same. Where had sound gone? He might have been sleepwalking.
A car braked hard and Seb saw suppressed fury in an elderly face behind the windscreen that he’d nearly rolled across. He waved an apology to the driver and stumbled back to the bench where he’d left his bag.
The temporary suspension of the world ended. A universe of raw sound rushed like the sea into a cave and filled his ears.
A mournful chorus from the gulls upon their lamp-post perches.
The gritty bounce of a rubber ball on tarmac.
A car door slammed.
The grunt of a motorbike on the Esplanade Road . . .
The end of the episode left him shaken and as cold as a bather emerging into a crosswind.
The watcher behind the wall had vanished.
3
A Sack with a Narrow Opening