infinities (15 page)

The Point was a long breakwater, jutting out into the mouth of the estuary. It had been built by the Victorians to alter the flow of the river and prevent the harbour from silting up. They had intended it to be over half a mile long but they had miscalculated and abandoned it a little over halfway. He ran out to the very end, past a couple of early morning fishermen. Children were always warned not to go out on Stone Point, but he had never heard of anyone being swept away by a freak wave. He stopped for a time, to watch the surging of the muddy waters. A cargo ship was heading out into the North Sea and for a moment he thought its bow wave might top the breakwater but it didn't and he turned away, perversely disappointed.

Ahead of him, as he ran back along Stone Point, was the sudden bulge of Beacon Hill, its silhouette hardened and broken up by the shells of long abandoned blockhouses and gun emplacements. The hill had been turned into a fortress during the war and, ever since, local children had known it not as Beacon Hill, but as the Dubbs, short for WD, the War Department.

The Dubbs had still been fenced off—however inadequately, where determined children were concerned—before, but now a public footpath had been opened up across the heart of Beacon Hill. Nick jogged slowly through, past signs that warned against exploring the ruins. Notices proclaimed plans to renovate the land, razing the old buildings to make way for a new marina and residential complex. It seemed that everywhere Nick went in Bathside the developers wanted to erase yet another of his childhood memories. Now, he wished he had skirted the Dubbs, as he had on the previous afternoon, sticking to the Prom.

By Cliff Gardens he had less energy to burn than on the previous morning and so he avoided the steep, zigzagging paths.

He let himself into the house, and as soon as he had showered and dressed, Jim McClennan was serving him with another greasy breakfast. "How's your wife?" Nick asked, hearing sounds from the kitchen. He still hadn't seen her.

His landlord just looked at him, and then left him to his meal.

~

Jerry caught up with him later, as he turned onto Coastguards' Parade for the second time that morning, undecided about his plan for the day. It was only later that he began to suspect that she had been watching the house, that she had engineered this 'chance' meeting.

He had paused at the corner to look out across the bay. It was clearer today, with a freshness that made him grateful for his old jacket. One or two yachts dotted the sea, and down towards the Naze Nick saw the black hulk of a Thames barge. On the horizon, a cargo ship merged with the haze. He wondered how much the town would be changed by the Channel Tunnel, luring away the passenger trade and the freight.

"Nicky, is that you?"

He turned and Jerry Gayle was approaching him, a quizzical look on her face. She'd let her hair grow, so that now it brushed her shoulders, but it was still the same streaked blonde. The way it hung around her face, combined with her distracted air, made her look vaguely like some starlet from the sixties. Her wide, cobalt eyes were edged with crows' feet, he saw, although she was only a month or two older than Nick.

She stopped, suddenly nervous, unsure.

"It
is
you, isn't it?"

He saw that her clothes were expensive: printed silk with a crumpled linen jacket and skirt. Her body, as slim as he remembered, if not more so. He had a sudden mental image of Jerry's naked torso, its angular form, the bones jutting, the small breasts rising and falling rapidly with her breathing.

"Jerry," he said, trying to blot out the image, cursing his mind for the tricks it played. "Hello." He half-turned, paused, and she joined him, walking slowly along the wide pavement of Coastguards' Parade.

"You're looking good," she said, with a sideways glance.

Good
, not merely
well
. He swallowed. He never knew how to handle these situations. A bar fight, yes: he could pick out the key figure—not the one who started it, but the one who looked most likely to keep it going—and eject him from the premises. He could deter a group of drunken students who had been barred from a nightclub. He could sort out any of these situations with hardly a thought. But this...

He swallowed, licked his lips. "I look after myself," he finally said. "You learn to." He risked a glance, knowing that he would store up every image, every gesture. The light, shining back off her lips, those eyes which were never still until suddenly they locked on your own.

He realised he had broken the rules. He should have returned her compliment with one of his own—
You look even more beautiful than I remember
—instead of defensively trying to explain himself.

"Have you come back to stay?"

"I don't think so," he said. At least he could try to answer a straight question. "I'm in a B and B for now. I just wanted to see the old place again. And some of the old faces."

She smiled at this. "You've never been back in the entire twelve years?"

She remembered exactly how long he'd been away. He shook his head. "Things get in the way," he said.

"Don't they always? Do you have time for a drink?" They had reached the junction with Station Road now, and there was a terrace with tables and brightly coloured parasols, part of the Bay Hotel.

He nodded. Of course he had time for a drink. The hotel formed the end of a four-storey Regency terrace. The rest of the row was the natural hue of the local brick, but the Bay Hotel had been stuccoed white, with ornate cast iron and baskets full of tumbling geraniums and lobelia dotted at regular intervals across its facade. They went inside to order—Earl Grey, slices of lemon—then returned to the terrace.

"What's happened to you in the last twelve years?" Nick asked. He remembered her inconsistent moods, how sometimes she would talk and talk, when at others the best she could offer was a semi-detached gaze and half a smile. "Have you been here all the time?"

Her eyes were wide, suddenly fixed on the Bay. Nick thought she was going to drift, but then she smiled, her eyes flicked towards him, then away again, and she said, "I've been away. I've come back. It's my home—it always pulls you back in the end, don't you think?"

He couldn't argue with that. A woman brought their tray of tea out, making little secret of the fact that she thought them insane to be sitting outside on a day like this.

Jerry picked up a slice of lemon and squeezed it into her tea, then took another slice and let it float on the surface. She licked the juice from her fingers with delicate dabs of her tongue, then glanced, again, at Nick. "My little treat," she said, and for a dizzy moment he wondered what she meant.

He put milk in his tea, then three sugars. "You're only the second familiar face I've seen since Sunday," he said.

"Oh?" A questioning tone, but she clearly wasn't interested.

He changed tack. "I went out to Riverside, this morning. Looked for our old house in Rebow Road. It's a building site now. I don't know what I expected."

They exchanged brief smiles. "Well
you're
the early bird," she said. "Catch any worms?"

They smiled again.

"I run," said Nick. "Or work out. Every morning, before the rest of the world starts up. It's the best time of the day. Everything's new, the air's better. The day hasn't had a chance to be spoilt by then."

"You make me want to join you." She giggled. "But look at me: I'm so out of shape. I couldn't run to catch a cold."

He looked and she sucked in a deep breath, patted her abdomen, giggled again. He looked away. "You look fine to me," he mumbled.

When finally he returned his gaze from the yachts, now multiplied across the Bay, her gaze locked on his own. "Where have you been Nick?" she asked. "All these years? Why did they take you away from me?"

~

He had left Bathside when he was fourteen, after the worst six months of his life. Jerry knew about his mother. She knew that she had been ill, that she had died, that Nick had been taken away.

It had been so sudden, even though it took half a year in the end. One minute, it seemed, his mother was organizing the AGM of the local history society and then he had come home from school to find her waiting for him, when she should still have been out at work.

The look on her face would be imprinted on his brain forever. It was a blend of the stubbornness, which he knew he had inherited, and some strange serenity he had never seen before and had never seen in anyone since.

Somehow—from that look, he supposed—he had known before she told him. "I'm going to die, Nick," she said, simply.

She always talked straight with him.

He had known about her stomach pains, and her frequent visits to the doctor, but he had never suspected that it was cancer, a cancer that had insinuated itself so rapidly that it was already inoperable.

She fought it, because that was the way she was, but it seemed that every day she was a little worse, a little weaker. He did what he could, but he was only fourteen. For a long time, before and after, all he had wanted to do was wreck the world that had done this awful thing.

"She made arrangements for me," he told Jerry, aware of her eyes on his face. "But it was confused. They didn't work out."

"What about your family?"

He nodded back along Coastguards' Parade to the Minesweepers' Memorial. "Uncle Jack's on there," he said. "The rest are under stones at St Nick's, or All Saints, or buried at sea." His family was a Bathside family of long standing—his mother had traced them back to the days they had worked in Sir Anthony Deane's yard, building ships for Charles II—but Nick was the last of the line.

"You had nobody?"

He'd never known his father, and his mother had never spoken of him. That was up to her, Nick had always thought. If the truth hurt her then he didn't want to know.

He shrugged. "The Council took me in. I went to a temporary place in Colchester, then down to Chelmsford for a couple of months. Then two places in Norwich until I was old enough to get out."

"You moved a lot, Nicky. That can't have been good for you."

He met her look now, and smiled. "I wasn't exactly cooperative," he said. "I kept getting into fights. Trouble has a way of finding me."

Jerry smiled at that. "Like I found you this morning, perhaps? What happened when you were old enough to get out of the system?"

"Like I say: trouble has a way of finding me." Suddenly he didn't want to talk about it any more.

His tea had gone cold in the cup. Her eyes were flitting about again. He marvelled at the way she could change from vacant gaze, to sudden focus, to this skittishness.

It would be easy to become infatuated again, with a creature such as this.

He waited until she was looking at him, then said, "Will I get a chance to see you again, while I'm in town? Or is this it?"

She smiled, then dabbed her mouth with a serviette. "Of course you'll see me again, Nicky. Didn't Ronnie invite you out to the Strand for the weekend?"

~

Who, exactly, was he trying to fool? It was never a question of whether he would become infatuated all over again. Seeing her had been enough: the infatuation had never died. For the rest of the day he had been unable to get her out of his head. Ghost images of her face, fragments of their conversation.
You're looking good
.

Over the course of the day, he came to believe that he had discovered the
real
reason for his return to Bathside. He had come back for a second chance.

She had always been his.

Next morning, he was up with the sky still dark. He hadn't been able to sleep. At first his head had been full of Jerry; later, it had been congested with doubts. Alone, in the dark, he could no longer believe what his senses had told him during the previous morning, as he had sat on the terrace outside the Bay Hotel, sharing a pot of Earl Grey with Jerry Gayle.

He ran along an alleyway, separating the back yards of two rows of terraced houses, to the Main Road, then out, past the hospital and the golf club and the end of the new bypass until he reached Westquay Station. There was a police box in the middle of the road here, only allowing through traffic for the station or the docks.

He turned back, passing through a huddle of terraced streets built for the first influx of dockers and railwaymen into Westquay, about a hundred years ago. He came to the end of a road, swung himself over a gate with one flowing movement and then he was running over a tract of wasteland which stretched all the way back to the old cement works at St Augustine's. This whole area was known locally as the Hangings, although Nick knew that the name strictly only applied to a short, abandoned stretch of railway cutting by Ray Island Cemetery.

He followed a track that ran by the railway, with the estuary just beyond. At one point he heard a wader crying—seven brief whistles—and he remembered that it was a whimbrel, the smaller cousin of the curlew. For the first time since yesterday, his head was clear. All he was aware of was the wild land all around him and the power of his own body. Early morning was always the best time.

Later, he went to call on Jerry's parents.

~

When he had known her the first time around, Jerry had lived in Caulders Road. The houses here were detached, modern, with gardens laid out like military kit for inspection. The road dropped away down one of the steeper hills in Bathside, from Bay Road at the top, to Coastguards' Parade at the foot. Because of the hill, the view across the bay was unimpeded, and to young Nick Redpath, living in his damp, prefabricated council house on Riverside, this house had been a sure sign of Jerry's class.

Now, he saw that the street was no more than comfortably middle class. Pilots and teachers would live here, he supposed, and moderately successful local businessmen.

He recognised the house, with its front garden all paving slabs and gravel and those awful miniature conifers. He crunched up the path and rang at the doorbell.

"Mr Gayle?" he said, to the man who answered the door. He wasn't sure, after such a long time. He had only ever seen Jerry's father once or twice. The door opened wider, to reveal a tall man with steely grey hair, slicked back behind fleshy, furred ears. His nose had been broken and then reset askew and then Nick noted those eyes: the deep cobalt blue, flitting from Nick's face to his clothes, to his shoes, to the street beyond, then back to his face.