Angelmaker (15 page)

The car is a grotty old banger, the best in a very small selection. Joe tentatively believes it is younger than he is, but would not put actual money on the assessment. On his left, Billy Friend holds Tess’s map. It is drawn in frustrated ballpoint, the road following the curve of the railway line, and there’s a grudging kiss at the bottom as if to point out what might have been.

“What you did to that girl ought to be illegal,” Billy Friend grumbles.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Of that we are all painfully aware. Lovely Tess is even now weeping in some kitchen corner, lamenting the waste of her heart. Not to mention her other salient attributes.”

“All right, I missed the point.”

“Yes, I would say you did.”

“We can’t all be you, Billy.”

“We can all be ourselves, though, Joseph, and who the hell can’t tell when a woman is putting his hand down her top that she’s doing more than discussing local folk tales? Are you in residence, Joseph, at all, inside your head?”

“Of course I am.”

“I should coco.”

“I just …”

“You try too hard to be a gent, Joe. It’s all going on inside you but it never gets out. You’re all buttoned up.”

“I am not!”

“All right, then: what action could young Tess have taken which you would have regarded as an unequivocal invitation?”

“Read the map.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Make an instruction out of the following three words: the, read, map.”

Billy does.

There’s no sign of witch-burning as they drive through the narrow lanes towards Hinde’s Reach. As they turn a corner, Billy Friend points out a large, rusted, black barrel which he asserts might be a cauldron used for missionaries, but the silent gloom of the sky swallows the joke. Neither of them mentions webbed feet. They’ve passed two men walking and a woman on a bicycle, and Joe found himself looking instinctively at their shoes to see whether they were larger than they should be.

They come over a hill, and there’s a small cluster of houses. It’s marked on Tess’s map as Old Town, but in truth it’s not even large enough to be a village, and made of concrete and corrugated iron. There’s a farmhouse and a single lonely petrol pump with a battered credit card box on top.

Joe slows the car and winds down the window so that he can speak to the woman sitting on a bench watching the road. She has messy hair, dyed a shocking red, but when he speaks and she turns to him, he realises she is very old. Her cheeks are purple with broken blood vessels.

“Hello,” he says, trying to be gentle and clear at the same time in case she’s deaf. “We’re looking for Hinde’s Reach House?”

She peers at him. “What was that?”

“Hinde’s Reach?”

“Ah.” She sighs. “Gone back to the grass, hasn’t it, and quite right, too.”

“We have a parcel for the house up there.”

“Do you, though?” She shrugs. “Well, I call that too late.”

A man emerges from the bungalow behind her, wearing socks and slippers. He has a mismatched face, as if one half has been shattered and reconstructed, long ago.

“Wossallthisabout, then?” He tries to smile, or perhaps he’s just twitching.

“Post office,” she tells him. “Parcel for Hinde’s Reach.”

“Parcel for the dead, then.” He spits. “Bastards, anyway.” He wanders back inside.

She sighs. “I should have said not to tell ’im. He’s still angry about all that as happened back then.”

“The town going into the sea?”

“No, no. That was natural. Awful, but natural. He’s cross about the other. His parents were taken off.”

“Killed?”

“Not exactly. Brain damage. Jerry thinks it was a plague. Thinks they were making germ bombs up there for to use against the Russians, and one of ’em went off. Maybe he’s right. Folks wrong in the head over one night, that’s not normal. And Jerry never entirely the same. Well, you see his face, don’t you? And no bugger gives a damn, either. These days everyone gets a handout. Stub a toe and you get one. But not for Jerry. Local trust says he’s faking it. Government won’t hear. The Church wanted him, ten years back. Wanted all the plague orphans and survivors and such. Said they could do wonderful things to help. But we’re chapel round here, so Jerry told them to stick it up their cassocks.” The woman sighs again. “Best you go over there, then. Close the gate after you, or the geese get out. Don’t take no nonsense from them! Have you got a stick?”

“No.”

“Kick ’em, then. Kick ’em hard, mind, you won’t harm ’em and they need to know you mean it. Otherwise they’ll have your arm.”

“If you’re sure,” Joe says.

“Not my geese,” she replies. “You want the second turning. Five minutes more.”

She goes back to staring at the road, and Joe guides the car through Old Town and along to the second turning. A huge, fanged thing made of iron looms over the road from one corner, and Billy Friend swears sharply before realising it’s a hay fork.

“I hate the fucking countryside, Joseph.”

Joe nods in acknowledgement of this truth. And then, without
warning, the wind picks up and he can hear a deep, thrashing roar like a huge crowd, and they’re looking out over the sea, and Hinde’s Reach.

They go through the gate carefully, watching out for enemy geese, but the birds are clumped miserably in the far corner of the field, keeping one another warm. And there, sprawled against a grim, ugly sunset, is the place they have come to find; a shattered frame and some foundations, and a sign which reads: Hinde’s Reach House, Home Secretariat: S2.

The house is a pile of rubble perched on the edge of the cliff. A little further on there’s a rusted railway line ending in a stark iron buffer. Stiff, springy grass bends in the wind, and clumps of gorse bow and twitch. Below, the sea makes a noise so deep he can feel it in his gut.

It’s the emptiest place he has ever seen.

Joe Spork shoves his hands into his pockets and stares at the ruin, and out into the grim, blue-grey smear of sea and sky beyond the cliff edge. Spray spatters on his face. Reluctantly, he lets them extinguish this brief excitement in his life. Too late. Of course, much too late. The machine itself—the device which reads this magical book—is gone. This parcel, mysterious and beautiful and idiotic, is all that remains.

“Sod it, then,” Billy Friend says at last. He turns and huddles into his scarf, pulls his woolly hat lower on his head. “I’m sorry, Joe, it’s someone’s idea of a funny, I suppose. I was took. Or she’s mad, the old biddy. Doubtless wants to pay in fairy dust and cake as well. I got you all revved up over nothing. Still, maybe you can find young Tess and buy her a drink. No sense this being a total waste, is there?” and then again, with one last shake of the head, as he walks away: “Sod it.”

Joe looks after him, then turns back to the sea. There are white horses on the waves, hard shapes cresting blue-grey water. Back by the road, he hears Billy get into the car.

This day is the pattern of his life. He is the man who arrives too late. Too late for clockwork in its prime, too late to know his grandmother. Too late to be admitted to the secret places, too late to be a gentleman crook, too late really to enjoy his mother’s affection before it slid away into a God-ridden gloom. And too late for whatever odd revelation was waiting here. He had allowed himself to believe that there might, at last, be a wonder in the world which was intended just for him. Foolishness.

He considers himself, the wrong side of thirty-five and no closer to being who he wanted to be, if he ever knew who that was.

The stricture of Joe Spork is indecision
, a departing girlfriend once told him. He fears she was wrong. There is no stricture to him, no core. No substance. Just a dozen conflicting drives which average out, producing nothing. Be a gangster. Be an honest man. Be Daniel, be Mathew, be Joe. Make something of yourself, but don’t stand out too much. Find a girl, but avoid the wrong girl. Mend the clocks, keep the old firm going. Sell up and run, leave London and head to a beach somewhere. Be someone. Be no one. Be yourself. Be happy—but how?

He has no idea.

He is a nowhere man, caught in between.

Down in the caves, beneath the cliffs, the water surges and ebbs. A curious circle of white foam and crested water sits in the midst of the bight, where the sea swirls around a pattern of rocks. Up above him, indifferent clouds are gathering, and the rain is starting to fall. It’s not yet four, but already it feels like the onset of night. He realises there’s water running from his eyes, and is not sure if the wind is causing it.

“Damn,” he says, a bit plaintively, and then with mounting anger, “Damn, damn, damn.” The sea wind takes the words away, so that his voice sounds hollow and small, even inside his own head.

Well. To be honest, it always does.

He turns, and finds himself staring full into a fierce, angry face, inches from his own. He yells and stumbles back.

“Who the hell’re you?” The man has white stubble and opium fiend’s eyes which glare out of a sou’wester’s grimy hood. “What’re you doing here? This is my land! Private land! It’s not some bloody tourist attraction! It’s private, for me, and them! It’s a grave!” The voice is northern underneath, but the pattern of words is coloured by decades spent down here, and the vowels have acquired a rounded burr.

“A grave?”

The man pushes him, sharply, on the shoulders; a stabbing of fingers to propel him back, but there’s very little weight behind it because Joe Spork is a big man and the other may be tall, but he is not heavy.

“Full fathom, aye, grave and serious, cut in the rock, dead like winter, dead like silence, and what do you think of that, ey? The soil is bones and the sky is skin, and everything is rotting and so am I and so are you. Now go away. It’s a shame, you coming here. You ought to be sorry, but you ain’t.”

“I am. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to trespass. I have a package for the people at the house. This is the address. I didn’t realise it was gone.”

“The old house went into the sea. Ground went an’ collapsed underneath it. Gawpers come in summer, looking for a little thrill. Time to kill. The dead went out to sea, down and down and down into the dark, and isn’t that just the way it is? Ghosts like starlings, pitter-patter on my greenhouse roof. Ghosts in the ivy and the gorse. Choking the greenhouse, choking the hope, little fingers around your neck. Ivy drags you down like water … Have you ever cut ivy?” This last in a curious, conversational tone.

“No,” Joe says carefully, “I haven’t.”

“You see the hands then, little fingers clasping. Ivy’s a slow death, years in the making. Gorse is quicker, but it’s not so cruel. I burn the gorse sometimes, but you can’t burn ivy or you lose everything. Ivy’s a metaphor. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return, and down to dust your house will come with you, down with ivy. I knew a girl called Ivy once. God knows what happened to her, down in the dark beneath the sea. Choked, I shouldn’t wonder, leaves and hands and creeping through your window. Can’t say as I hold much with God any more, though. Bugger ’im. Rigged the game and left the place to rot, hasn’t he?”

“I never thought about it.”

“She came here.”

“God?”

“She came every day, for a while, and looked down into the sea. There’s a standing wave.” He points out at the ring of water.

“What is it? The rocks?”

“More complicated. It’s a wave that never ends. Never moves, never dies. Just changes. Water hits rock, washes back, meets water … always a wave, always in a ring. It rises and falls and changes, but it never goes away. Not just a wave. The soul of an ocean. The physics is quite interesting.”

Joe looks at him again. When he isn’t furious, he seems … teacherish. A heart of books with the skin of a tramp.

The man nods to himself once, sharply. “Who are you, then?”

“Joe Spork.” He smiles uncertainly, and sees or imagines a distant flicker in the hooded eyes.

“I’m Ted Sholt,” the man says.

“Hello, Mr. Sholt.”

“Oh, call me Ted. Or Keeper.” He nods. “Ted’s better. No one calls me the other any more.” As if reassuring himself.

“Hello, Ted.”

“Joe Spork. Joe Spork. Spork, Joe. You’re out of season for a hippy and too poor for a developer. Might be a scout, though. Smuggler? Lovelorn suicide? Poet? Police?” It is unclear which of these he holds in lowest regard.

“Clockworker.”

“Spork the Clock! Yes, of course you are! Spork the Clock and Frankie, in a tree. Gone now, of course. Spork the ticktock Clock … Wait for the day, she told me. Wait for the day. The machine changes everything. The Book is the secrets, all in a row. Death has the secrets, she said. Death bangs the drum, and his carriage never stops.”

Joe stares at him. “What did you say?”

“Ticktock?” Glazed eyes wander across Joe’s face, on their way to somewhere else he can’t see.

“No, after that. ‘Wait for the day’?”

“Breakers in a cauldron, the ocean in a box. Bees make angels. Book of changes.” Sholt smiles benignly. “You know all that, don’t you, Spork the Clock?”

“No,” Joe Spork says carefully, “I don’t.”

“Oh, yes. Time is ivy and death is gorse and the turning sets us free. You look younger than you did, Spork the Clock. You were older when we met.”

“Ted?”

“Yes?”

“What does it all look like?”

“Candle, book, and bell. For the exorcism of ghosts. No Heaven, no judgement. Just the Book, and pages like for a music box.”

Joe Spork stares at him.
Yes. That’s the job. This old loony is the client. The endgame. Not too late, at all. Just lost upon the road
.

God, I sound like him
.

“Ted, I have a package for you.”

“I don’t get packages. I live in the greenhouse with the bees, and I cut the gorse and chop the ivy and that’s all. When they say ‘postal’ these days they mean ‘mad.’ It’s cruel, I think.”

“Yes, it is. But look, here’s the destination address, see? I wrote it down.”

Ted Sholt’s eyes fix very sharply, a moment of focus in the fog. “ ‘Destiny’ is the state of perfect mechanical causation in which everything is the consequence of everything else. If choice is an illusion, what’s life? Consciousness without volition. We’d all be passengers, no more real than model trains.” He shrugs, and the sudden acuity is gone. “The enemy was transcribed, not transmigrated. Left himself lying around like an unexploded bomb. Don’t let the Khan take you! Never!” He seems ready to flee, and then relaxes. “But he’s dead, long ago. Safe enough. Did you say you had a cake?”