'Mothers' talk. Myths, legends. Maybe true. Maybe not. Foreign lands. Unknowable places.'
'Jake... I don't understand. Tell me straight, would you? Where were these letters from?'
He stopped eating and licked his lips. He tucked his chin in against his chest. His voice and his breathing changed. It was as if he were channelling someone else through him, and in this room, this madness that was flying around us, it would not have surprised me.
'These letters came in on the tide from the children that were taken from our village and those who continue to be taken they wash up on the shore in bottles and the letters sometimes come with other things fingers and blood still wet and teeth and other things I can't bring myself to think about and nobody can do anything about it because nobody knows where they went and every hundred years or so it comes again and the cycle continues and we should be grateful after all that it is but once every century or so now I must ask you to leave.'
His face had turned blacker within the ring of shadow he had created for himself. Now the breath I recognised in him returned, but it was shallower, weaker. He had tired himself out. Were there any healthy souls in this forsaken place?
I put down the letters - I had absolutely no wish to look at any of them again - and slowly stood up, listening to the stirrings in the joints of my back like a technician will listen to the valves in an old radio. I was convinced that I was dead. That I was an impossible memory of myself. The near-miss had been nothing of the sort. The Trip-7 had ploughed through the Jumbo and everyone had died, including me. This was what happened when death arrived. You took what had killed you, or it took you, and you were formed and led and possessed by it for the rest of eternity. My existence was about injury and child-snatchers and fire and a sea that threw up nasty little secrets every so often, like a wolf regurgitating something unholy and indigestible.
'I'm sorry,' I said to Jake, without knowing what I was really apologising for. It was second nature these days, it seemed.
'No hope,' he said, and he was strangled again, a Morse code voice. I didn't know if he was referring to me or the children or the village or himself. All of us, probably.
At the door I paused. Something he'd said.
'Jake. Every hundred years or so, you said. Every hundred years or so it comes again. What is this 'it'? Do you think there's some kind of, I don't know, a cabal that has a grudge against your people? Your village? A blood libel running down the years?'
He was shaking his head.
'It is. The Craw.'
He wouldn't say anything else, no matter how often I asked him to repeat himself or explain himself.
It is. The Craw.
I went out looking for children.
Chapter Ten
Quick and Dirty
She was lying in bed, blankets wrapped around her, reading a book bearing the title
Alive.
'Shouldn't you be reading magazines telling you how to breastfeed?' I asked.
'Crap,' she said. 'How many thousands of years did we get by without that?'
'How's the book?' I asked. 'Rugby-playing cannibals going down well with junior?'
'He's fine,' she said. 'But I've got indigestion.'
We both laughed. The air felt instantly clearer, freer of the unpleasant electricity that seemed to have been arcing between us of late. That and the awful, smothering feeling I'd had at the museum, and the fruitless search afterwards.
'Where have you been?' she asked, as if she could read my mind. But I knew how I looked. My fingers were grey with cold, my shoes wet. I could find no position in which to get comfortable. My back felt like a thin bag filled with rusting, useless ironmongery.
'Out walking,' I said. I didn't tell her that I'd covered the entire beach, nor that I had patrolled every street in the village, spying through kitchen windows, trying to spot a child frowning over a plate of greens, or playing on a video game, or reading
The Beano.
I gave up when I felt myself becoming so agitated I wanted to rap on the doors and ask the people where the children were. Why don't you have any children?
Where are the fucking children?
Here they were, or one of them, at least. I was with Ruth and I was calming down and it was a warm room and she was going to have a child, soon, and my God was I frightened for her. I was trying to find a way of bringing it up, this business of a childless beach - who had ever heard of such a thing? - and trying to understand the things I'd seen already that seemed to give a lie to my suspicions and fears. The naked toddler by the pier. An infant's romper suit washed up on the tide. But I couldn't be sure. Nothing was certain. Everything was riddled with meaning.
'Pour us a drink,' she said.
'Water?'
A brief shake of the head. 'There's a bottle of Talisker in the cupboard. Fetch us a scant millimetre.'
'What about the baby?' I asked.
'He'll have a double. Go on, panic-boy. A coating for the tongue is all I'm after. What do you think's going to happen? Junior's going to drop out trying to bum a fiver for a rock of crack? It's probably more dangerous for you, anyway.'
I got us both drinks. A dribble for her and a large one for me.
'Scant millimetre,' I said when I got back. 'Sounds like a French private detective.'
'In a science fiction novel.'
'Yeah. I feel as if I'm in a science fiction novel sometimes.'
She took the tiniest of sips, a mere dampening of her lips. They glistened in the caramel light. 'There's science fiction
in
you, for God's sake. You're the bionic man.'
'It's not just that,' I said. 'Don't you feel that this place is a bit... detached, sometimes? It's so far away from the main road. It's totally cut off. It's forgotten. It's like a different world. Like something out of Verne, or Haggard, or Doyle.'
I looked down at my glass. It was empty. I didn't remember drinking it, but the oily, hot taste was there at the back of my throat. I poured myself another.
'I suppose so,' she said. 'And there's also the sea. All of this will be gone one day. As happened to Dunwich.'
I'd read about Dunwich. Capital of East Anglia. A rival to London, centuries ago. Coastal erosion had meant that much of it had fallen into the waves over the past eight hundred years. Southwick had suffered a sea surge, or a
seich,
of equal proportions in the 1950s. Erosion, plus the sinking of East Anglia and global warming in general, meant this entire coastal region, the county itself, was at risk. In another eight hundred years the landlocked cities of today, such as Norwich and Ipswich, might well be coastal towns.
'You ever heard the bells?' At midnight, it was said that you could hear the bells of the eight lost churches ringing beneath the waves.
'Sometimes, although I can't help thinking that's just me, hungering after ghosts.'
A different sort of tension was unwinding between us. The heat of the room and the spirit in my belly were conspiring to make me feel drowsy, but in a pleasant way. The pills I'd taken that morning were enjoying one last hurrah, jazzed up by the Tallisker. My throat felt thick with something. Desire, maybe. It had been so long that I forgot what it felt like. She had put the book down. The blankets had shifted while she was sipping her whisky. She was wearing a chocolate brown blouse. It was drawn very cosily over the mound of her belly. She was tight as a tick. A slipped button allowed me to see the ice-white edge of her bra. I returned my attention to her face to find that she had been watching me watching her. I didn't look away. She didn't look away. She kept talking, as if there was nothing wrong; I hoped there wasn't. It took a moment or two to realise what it was she was talking about, and then I froze, barely breathing. I poured another drink. For her as well as me. The baby would survive. I just wanted to get tanked as quickly as possible now.
'It was a cold night. Much colder than this. Or maybe I'm twisting the memory. It was in the middle of summer, after all. I'd been drinking in The Fluke all afternoon, first day of my holidays. He said his name was Jimmy and he was looking for work. He was nice, in a kind of rough and ready way. Clean grime, if you know what I mean. Posh grunge... I don't know. Long hair and a bit of stubble going on. Biker jacket. Jeans. Old grey T-shirt. But he smelled good. Scrubbed.
'We talked for a long time. He showed me his motorbike. At one point he picked me up and sat me on it. I liked that. He was strong. There's something about being whisked off your feet that's pretty giddy. It doesn't happen when you're an adult. He did plenty of that later on.'
The hand that wasn't holding her glass snaked out of the blankets and wrapped itself around mine.
'He bought me drinks. Said he was travelling up from Dover. He'd been on the Continent, driving around Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France. Labouring on construction sites. Waiting tables.
Sucking in life,
he said.
Sucking hard, like a vampire without teeth.
He wanted to drain as much experience from everywhere he visited, whether it was Prague or Plymouth. He said he wanted to suck some life out of Southwick. And he did. He did that all right.
'But what I don't understand, Paul, is that we were getting on so well, we were flirting with each other like crazy. Too much cider. The excitement of meeting a new person you find attractive. That madness, summer madness in the air. I'd have, you know... oh God, no time for being prudish now. I'd have fucked him that night. No sweat. I'd have gone with him down to the beach and had him all ways if he wanted. But either he didn't get my signals, or he chose to ignore them. Maybe he could only take what he wanted. Didn't like submissive women. Christ, I think about how many of us there are, strung across the world, staring after his bike tracks with bites and bruises and dislocations. Babies growing inside.
'At closing time he walked me home. I asked if he wanted tea and he said no. He hung back, he said good night. When I said good night too, when I was closing the door, he kicked it in and knocked me off my feet. And then it all happened, so fast I couldn't keep up with it. He was punching me and kicking me and throwing me around. So fast I didn't have chance to take in breath let alone scream for help. He moved like he was used to it. He'd done this before. We ended up in the kitchen. He tore the trousers from me with such force that he almost skinned my thighs. He raped me while he had a kitchen knife pressed against the back of my neck. I daredn't try to lift myself up, he was too heavy anyway, in case it just slid right into me and killed me, or worse, severed my spinal cord and left me paralysed.
'He got off me, cleaned himself up, pulled his jeans on and left. I didn't see him again.'
Her fingernails were lightly scoring the tender flesh of my inner arm, becoming almost unbearably gentle when they encountered a fold or fissure of scar tissue.
'Come here,' she said. She was crying. I went to hold her and she held her hand against mine, a barrier. She reached for my neck and drew me down. She kissed me deeply and confidently. Whisky fumes. Vanilla shampoo.
I lost myself to it. Her mouth was soft and firm at the same time, maddening. Blades of black hair swung into my face, bobbing with the ebb and flow of the kiss. Again my hands went to her, touching her lightly on her back. She jerked up and slapped my hands away. A silver wire of spittle looped between our mouths.
'Don't touch me,' she said. 'Don't you fucking touch me.'
She raised herself, tears threatening, and leaned over on one hip. 'Sorry,' she said. She supported her head with her hand and leaned in to kiss me once more. Her other hand slid between the buttons on my shirt and scored a line between my nipples. I felt the skin on my scalp tighten so swiftly I thought it might just peel away from my skull. There was something both carnal and lazy about the way she kissed. She kept her eyes closed. Our mouths, yoked together, worked separate orbits. Sometimes they lost contact, but she didn't mind, she just kissed what was there and slowly worked her way back. When I went to touch her again, the third time, her eyes snapped open and her hand gripped my wrist. She didn't say anything. She drew me on to the bed. My back was screaming, but the kiss provided a salve. I wouldn't allow pain to ruin this. She pressed me down on to the mattress and swung one leg over both of mine. I felt her belly press and graze against my cock and I drew in breath. I felt dizzy with need. It had been so long. Tamara came into my thoughts and I forced her away, with bitter relish.
Ruth broke the kiss. I felt my face flush under her scrutiny. I had not seen her like this; I had not believed her capable of such behaviour. She wore a sleepy, sly expression. She kept her hand on the centre of my chest. She leaned over to her bedside cabinet and threw open the door. She withdrew two lengths of thin rope.
'Put your hands against the rails,' she said.
'Ruth, I -- '
'Do it, or go back to your room. You won't touch me. I won't be touched.'
'I won't touch you.'
'You will. You say that, but you will. You all do. Go on, put your hands against the rail. Now.'
'This is unnecessary, Ruth.'
'I'll decide that. This is a big fucking step for me. If I'm not in control, nobody is. It's me in the left-hand seat, Mr Pilot. Okay?'