On the other side of me is a fat man whose clothes are shredding away from his skin in sheaves of carbon. His skin is tight and shiny where the flames have scorched the detail from him, like sausages blistering in a pan. A tiny rupture in his flesh as he jerks in agony sends geysers of boiling fat sputtering against the plastic controls melting in the cabin ceiling.
'I was a lonely child,' he says, and I have to incline my head towards him, the smoke is smothering all sound. 'I was cripplingly shy. I never had what you'd call a healthy circle of friends. I had a stammer and I was so self-conscious of it I would sit in the corner of the playground every day and cover my mouth with my hands. And here I am. Middle-aged and nothing has changed. I'm flying home to my studio flat, regretting not saying this and not doing that every second of the day. I could have had a house full of laughing children and a wife by now. But I was too busy blushing and checking my teeth for spinach.'
His eyes burn with a violet flame.
A woman comes seething out of the smoke, hands outstretched. Her lungs have been seared dry. The dead-match remains of her feet drag sooty marks along the aisle. She's trying to say something to me but I can't tell what it is. Her vocal cords are so much incinerated tissue. She's imploring, beseeching. Her hands ask questions but also assume the aspect of somebody holding something fragile. All she is cradling is the restless curls and curves of the thing that is killing us all. The starboard fire flashes out for a second and one crisp figure, fused with the chemical syrup that is its seat back, rasps what was once the ball of its thumb over a beef jerky tongue and turns the page of a duty free catalogue long-turned to ash in its lap. People look up, querulously, as the PA softly chimes and the captain screams in agony.
An old, bearded man waves at me from seat 34A. His hand is a burning orange glove. He shouts over to me: 'Nothing you can do. Nothing we can do. Nothing we've done. None of it is any good. Nothing will work. Where is our sacrificial lamb? Where is our meat for the beast?'
The woman getting closer to me now. She's alternating between outstretching her hands and drawing them in close to her tummy, What does she want? Food? I look around for the flight attendant but she's busy trying to pat out with fiery hands the inferno twisting about her body.
The woman reaches out one of those black, famished claws for me. Burned tendons hang from her like loose horsehair on a violinist's bow. I turn away from her and ask the ruined marionette next to me if she's enjoying the in-flight film.
The hand on my shoulder, hell-hot, manic grip. She leans in close and though the smell of smoke is all around and inside us, I get a flavour of what's in her.
She exhales: 'Where's my fucking baby?'
Chapter Eight
The Wrecks
I woke up with a taste in my mouth that I couldn't identify but that I knew very well. It was maddening. I sat there playing around with it on my tongue, wondering where it had come from. I was uncomfortable and hot. Sense came to me. I was sitting in a cold car, my forehead against the window. I was covered with three or four thick blankets. The glass was all misted up. Rain hammered the other side of it. The car's engine had been silent a long time. I peered at the clock in the dashboard. Gone three in the morning.
I struggled out of the position I'd been sleeping in, swearing and gnashing at the pain. I hooked a claw around the door release and tumbled out into the frozen, teeming night. Blind moon, tonight. A ton of cloud. There was a childhood spike of fear and panic when I realised I did not know where I was. The road beneath my feet had some give in it; it felt like packed soil, hardened only by the fierce cold. I reached back inside the car and pulled a couple of the blankets out and around my shoulders.
'Ruth?'
Shapes materialising. Near black, on black. Water nearby: plaited dark iron. Fields stretching away like so much barren scree at the end of the world. I noticed the impossible knot was in my hand and I was fiddling with it, trying to find its edges. Something to distract me; a pacifier. Though I knew we'd been here a while, I put my hand on the car's bonnet. Dead cold. I checked the back seat in case Ruth was in there, asleep. The car was empty. I tried contacting her on the phone, but she wasn't answering. What the fuck was she playing at?
I turned through 360 degrees. Pale stain of orange light on the horizon. How far away was that? I turned back to the opposite skyline and there was utter dark. I blinked and squinted. Another shape emerging. Deepest grey. Like a pepper pot. Okay. Okay. That was the ruined mill in its lonely field. I knew that. I'd often used it as a marker when I was trudging around, trying to bring the muscles in my legs back to life. A bolt pinning the landscape and my mind into place. Sails long gone. The mill was still and cold and broken. I knew how it felt.
So the light behind me was Southwick. Which meant, by dint of amateur triangulation, I must be on the harbour path. It would make sense. I swore, casting a final glance around me just in case she might suddenly reappear and save me from this, then started moving in the direction of the mill.
I kept my eye on the mill, or where it ought to be under all that darkness and wet. There was nothing. I could hardly see the path and had to rely on the occasional forks of lightning to help confirm I was on the right course. I was loath to switch on my torch and give away my position in case there was danger up ahead. The mill stood away from the path, down an incline. I could see water glimmering around the necks of the reeds. I had to climb over a fence and pick a route through a jungle of dead electric wire that had once penned in animals long gone from this field. My feet grew sodden as I slipped into freezing cold, ankle-deep water. I could see it sluicing over the sides of the riverbank now. At the same moment, just before it was snatched away by the dervish wind, I smelled food. Soup, maybe. Or a beefy stew of some kind. I felt the storm fall away slightly as I came under the shade of the mill. Lightning showed me the skeletal remains of the sails. There was a tight, creaking sound as if the wind was trying to turn the seized gears of something that would never turn again. I heard a crack, and stopped, wondering if one of the sails was about to come free, but then I felt something in my mouth - a piece of tooth; I'd been clenching my jaw so hard I'd broken one of my molars. I spat it out and edged around the mill to the entrance. Any kind of door was long gone. There was one piece of timber, jammed obliquely into it as a token signal barring entry. It was hellish black in there. Now I switched on the torch and the pitted brickwork sprang into horrible relief. Kids had been here, but long ago. Graffiti spray-painted on to the walls was faded to the point of illegibility. There were Coke cans and foil takeaway cartons lying around, worn paper thin from time and corrosion. There was recent activity too, though. The reeds had all been mashed into the floor from the constant comings and goings of someone or something. There wasn't the stink of animal, but I couldn't trust my senses in this downpour. I got closer and the beam from the torch picked out candle stumps melted into pieces of shattered crockery. A paperback book was a puffball of mould.
There was a sleeping bag on the floor, but it was soaked through and filthy with mud. There was a plate encrusted with ancient food and a spoon glued into it on an upturned crate. The aroma of food I'd caught must have been flung to me on the wind from somewhere else, because this place was dead. But no. I could smell something oily and burned now. Like tallow. There was fresh rope, its cut end had recently been rewhipped, trimmed and dipped in wax. Someone had been working here. Some shelter. The wind came bullying in through the open windows and the holes in the brickwork. I couldn't stay here. I moved off in the direction of the sea.
What had Ruth brought me out here for? And why had she abandoned me? She knew the woman who ran the breakfasts at the café, but that wouldn't be open for another three hours or so. Charlie's fish hut was nearby, but he didn't sleep there. He'd be mad if he did in this weather. No, he lived in Breydon, the village between Southwick and the dual carriageway, about a ten-minute drive from here.
I felt my stomach lurch when I thought that Ruth might have committed suicide and actually edged along one of the slipways to look into the blank mirror of the water. But like mine, her 'incident' lay many months in the past. It had defined her, in the way that mine had not, or had yet to. She was managing to heal with time, and maybe the baby growing inside her was acting as some kind of marvellous balm, despite its origins. She was forcing through that separation, trying to detach the rape from its result, and becoming stronger for it. I suppose she had to, if she was going to forge any kind of successful relationship with the baby. Who knew if it would work? Scars were still present - how could they not be - in the way she could not bear any physical contact, but I was still wrestling with the time issue. In my mind, the impact had occurred only recently. In real time, half a year had drifted by.
I stared into the sea but I knew she had not done this. Her commitment to other people was too great, almost to the point where she failed to protect herself. I made a vow to try to give back some of the care she had afforded me, no matter how angry I was at her now for abandoning me. She deserved it and it would do me good as well to stop teasing open my bandages and mewling about how damaged I was all the time. I had to get a grip and accept that this was what my life involved now. There was no going back. Pain waited for everyone at some point or another. I was just unfortunate that it was climbing all over me at this moment. How you dealt with it when it was upon you was what mattered most.
I moved back on to the main harbour path and felt more confident in my location. The masts of sea boats were just discernible now: perspective showed me a corridor between them down which to travel. The curious, massive space above the ocean was different, I don't know how or why, to that above land. It seemed more reverent, cowed by the great mass of water; maybe this was how the world appeared when elements collided. I tugged the blankets more tidily around me and shuffled on, resigned to a drenching. At least my physiotherapy would be done early today, I thought to myself.
Twenty minutes later I reached the end of the path and bore left on to an area of dunes. I trod on the blackened remains of a beach fire and shuddered at the recent memory of my dream, unable to prevent myself from casting a suspicious eye to the heavens for a glimpse of nightmare, of something that would never be capable of rising from an airstrip.
I kept going. There was nobody about, not even a nightfisherman in a glowing orange tent to give me some beacon to aim towards. The cold found its way under the flapping hem of the blanket, through my sodden jeans and into my legs. I thought scar tissue might offer more resistance, but no; less, it seemed. There were more cracks to get through. I imagined the cold steeling in while I was having operations to mend my shattered limbs. It lay alongside the marrow, now, and would be with me always, even on the hottest summer afternoon.
I was sweating, though, by the time I reached the bookshop. There was no sign of Ruth here either. What was going on? I wondered if she was at Charlie's house, but that didn't square with her leaving me on my own at the harbour.
I felt as if I'd just woken up from another coma, with another puzzle to solve. And here was more shit: the keys to the bookshop weren't in my pocket. They must have fallen out while I was in the car, or perhaps Ruth had taken them while I was sleeping.
I was about to call a taxi to take me to Breydon - walking would wipe me out - and had opened my wallet to check how much cash I had, when I felt a key in the zip-up compartment. It was the key to Tam's Place.
What decided it was the rain, which was intensifying. Sheets of it were hurling themselves in from the sea. I hobbled as fast as I could along Surt Road to North Parade and fumbled the key into the lock of this dark building, in a street of dark buildings. It felt darker, somehow: the curse of a place that has not been lived in for some time. The breath of air that came at me once I'd forced the door in against the hill of circulars and free newspapers reminded me of the first time I'd been to see it, with Tamara. A much more different day to this you couldn't expect. Hard sunshine. The sea glittering, difficult to look at. I had a belly full of fish and chips and my hand was on her arse as we were led over the threshold by the obsequious estate agent who had an irritating way of talking that we couldn't stop giggling about. He kept referring to us in the third person, as if we weren't there.
'And there's plenty of private space should Mr Roan and Ms Dziuba think of having a Master... Roan? Roan-Dziuba? There's a mouthful, hahaha.'
'Your private space,' I'd kept asking Tamara on the way back to London. 'How much of it is there?'
'Enough to accommodate you,' she replied. 'Easily.'
Rain hissed against the glass panels in the door as I shut out the night. The smell of damp approaching like someone unsure of what was ahead. Dim shapes in the gloom. I rubbed my wet hair with the blanket and tried a light switch. No joy. I struggled to remember the layout of the building from the tour we'd been given. It was hard to believe that this place was mine now. I felt as though I was walking through a house I'd never visited before. I suppose my mind hadn't been on it at the time. Tamara's arse had felt good under that sheer wrapping of knitted merino. I was thinking, I remember, yes, we'll have this and make a go of it and it will be great and who cares that there's a lot of work it just feels right and yes and yes and yes.