'You overdid it a bit today.'
'I'll be the judge of that.' I didn't mean to sound so short, but some sentences, no matter how you butter them up, still come out sharp and nasty.
'Well, actually,' she said, her tongs in the air, her back still to me, 'your physiotherapist will be the judge of that. And when you turn up with a prolapsed disc he'll be really impressed that you tried to go cross-country running three weeks after waking up.'
I snorted. 'It wasn't exactly a cross-country run.'
'No, but it wasn't exactly a stroll in the sand either. Charlie said if he hadn't pulled on your reins you'd have ended up in the middle of Cold Acre Marsh with a long walk back whichever direction you looked at it.'
'I wouldn't do it if I felt I couldn't manage it.'
Now she turned around. I could see she was upset, but there was also some matronly steel in her. She didn't like being argued with. It was funny seeing that in a young woman. An attractive woman. Maybe that was what turned you mean, after a passage of years.
'Paul, the weather's unpredictable. You only need to find yourself a couple of miles from home, a storm, or the cold coming in, and you're in trouble. The weather here, it changes fast. It gets ugly quick.'
'Point taken,' I said, irked, and unsure whether my dented features were able to hide it from her. She didn't seem to mind that; she must have come up against surlier tossers than me in her line of work.
She transferred the chicken to the pot and added the vegetables and stock. The slam of the oven door was some kind of end to things. When she turned to me again, she was smiling.
'I might be pregnant, but nursey reckons one glass of wine won't stunt growth.' She uncorked a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and poured a hefty glug.
'Has Charlie ever talked to you about Gordon?'
'Of course he has. He's not one to hide his grief, Charlie. He's seen plenty in his time, quite a bit of it unpleasant. He knows how to deal with tragedy.'
'It helped. He talked to me about it today. About the car crash. It helped me.'
'It was before seatbelts, of course. Everyone did the same. Everybody had a child who bopped about on the back seat, or leaned forward to chat in between Mum and Dad. When you think of the appalling injuries, windscreens and the like, well, it's beyond me how the law didn't change years before it did.'
Charlie and his then wife, who had left him after the accident, had been driving home to Peterhead, where Charlie was first mate on a prawn trawler. Their six-year-old son Gordon was in the back. Charlie was a good driver. He never drank. He always observed the speed limit. But the tread on their tyres was worn and the road was wet. The brake discs had not been checked for a while - they had skipped the last service because they couldn't afford it. It was a newish car; they weren't too worried about doing it just that once.
Music in the car. One of Carol's old tapes. The Ink Spots. They had all sung along to
If I Didn't Care
and
Do I Worry?
Later, Charlie would sit with the album sleeve alone at home, staring at the track listing, the last three songs of which were
Life is Just a Gamble, Forever Now
and
You Always Hurt the One You Love.
It might have been funny, beyond belief, if it hadn't happened to him. Charlie had noticed the spongey brakes a moment before they failed completely. Their car, an Austin Princess, slid through a T-junction and into the side of an articulated lorry, he and Carol had suffered whiplash injuries, and Carol had sustained a broken leg when the dashboard collapsed into her thighs.
Gordon had been catapulted past them. Charlie heard a popping sound, two in quick succession, even as the wreckage of the car drew in around him. He saw his son impact against the windscreen, his face spread into it, moments before it shattered outward. He realised that the popping sound must have been something in Gordon's legs giving way - his knees or his pelvis - to allow them to fly free of the footwell in the back. The popping noise disturbed him more than anything else; more than the visit to the morgue to identify the body. Carol turned to dust inside. She stopped speaking. She withdrew so far that she seemed for ever on the verge of turning around.
We both drank our wine a little too quickly, talking about this awful accident. I motioned to Ruth's glass, and though she looked reluctant, she nodded her head.
I reached for the bottle of wine and felt my spine crack. Grey mist drizzled across my vision. The bolus of mashed breadsticks in my mouth caked the back of my throat; I couldn't swallow it. Through the grain I saw the beak of the broken gull, bloodied and shuddering. I heard bubbles of air being sucked through wounds. The gull bent the spar of its wings and lifted from the sand; black, blood-wet clumps hung or fell from the chicane of its body.
And then Ruth was doing something to my back and the pressure relented and I was able to swallow and colour came back to my world.
'It's all right,' she said. 'It's okay. Just a spasm. A muscle spasm.'
'Christ,' I said.
'Not that I'm going to say "told you so", or anything like that.'
I shook my head. 'That was more painful than being hit by the car.'
'Just take it easy. There's plenty of time for you to up the ante. There's no rush.'
She reached across me for her glass. Her face glided past my own, inches away. I smelled her, fresh and good and pregnant, and wondered where Tamara was, what she was doing. Was she thinking of me? Was she dissolving in her own acid guilt? I wondered if she would recognise me, should she turn up, racked with remorse. I couldn't bear to be rejected twice. It was better that she was lost to me.
I went out again after dinner. I felt full and, somehow, braced against further injury, as if the swell of food in my belly was acting as a buffer against my spine. Ruth had gone to bed with a cup of raspberry leaf tea and one of her non-fiction books about the indomitable human spirit of survival. She was obsessed by the human capacity to endure. If we were reading together in the same room, she'd break into my concentration with some excerpt about life in extremis: seriously injured mountaineers who crawl thousands of feet to safety; the story of the Japanese man lost on a winter hill who broke his pelvis and went into hibernation.
I made sure I shut the door quietly, not wanting another lecture on the fragility of my body and mind. I was coming back, I was healing, but so much of that was only going to happen if I regained control of myself. I felt, sometimes, like some piece of meat being tossed about by Ruth's tongs.
The air was splinter cold. I thought I could smell woodsmoke on it, but I was always smelling smoke these days. I couldn't tell if it was real or some olfactory breakdown courtesy of the accident. I stood and looked at the cleaned-out sky, massive above the village. Stars everywhere. The longer you stared, the more made themselves known. They were there on cloud-packed days of storm. They were there when you fell in love with a woman you no longer knew. They were there for her now, wherever she was.
I had never walked the beach at dead of night. It would be fun to do so, to see the colour and glow in those fishermen's tents, watch the loose particles on the surface snake across the packed sand like spindrift. But I was dog-tired. My back was seizing up; my legs felt as though they'd been dipped in quick-drying concrete. I thought of the beach further south, how it was collapsing into the sea, as it had done since the continents were formed. No amount of bulldozers and boulders were going to stop it. This entire bulge of East Anglia was sinking. In ten thousand years or so, the map of the UK would look as though a shark had bitten off its backside.
Ruth in bed, warm with her books and her tea. She was my riprap. She was my water barrier. I wondered what was stalling the tide for her. Not me. I was too weak. But I might, in time. I wanted to. But I needed to find out what had happened to Tamara, first. I needed to hear her version of events. I felt itchy, cuckolded, left out of some crucial loop. I felt like what I was: someone who had lost six months of his life.
Far off, above the lights of the oil tankers fastened to the horizon, the glitter and flash of aviation lights: a jet at cruising altitude chalking the night. If I stopped breathing, I could just hear its call.
I went back inside, fast as I could. It was if the heat from the engines, no matter how many miles away, and counting, had scoured out the back of my throat. My bowels were suddenly loose as soup. Tragedy accreted. Layers of it pressing down, a geology of misery. If I'd thought the near miss would be subsumed by the hit-and-run, I was wrong. They held hands together and laughed; siblings reunited after too long apart.
I had gripped the control stick so tightly, I left fingermarks in it.
Chapter Three
The Pain Nurse
Ruth was dressed for work by the time I had struggled out of my bed. With her nurse's uniform on, she seemed fussier, more driven. She bustled about the living room, collecting things for her bag. I sat in the stiff, upright armchair that nobody else used and sipped tea, watching her, getting tired out by her industry. She was ordering me in that mock serious way of hers to relax today. I was not, repeat not, allowed to walk on the beach. The most effort I was expected to expend was in raising my arm to pour medicine, or fix myself lunch, by which time she would be back to check on me.
I gazed at her face and tried, again, to come to terms with what was happening here. Everything was new to me; it was not to her. She was clued up. I had been assimilated into her routine and was a part of her life now. I was three weeks into the biggest shock I'd ever experienced. Her face was at once the most familiar and the most foreign to me. I needed her, but I didn't know how much. At that obvious level, the nurse tending the healing, but I was beginning to feel something deeper, something uncoiling in me as it had when I first met Tamara. I was at a loss. I knew this sort of thing happened. Wounded soldiers were always falling in love with the angels who patted cold compresses against their fevered brows.
I sat there sipping tepid Typhoo, huddled in my musty old bathrobe, feeling cheap and nasty and unfaithful.
Ruth kissed my cheek, snatched up her keys and opened the door. A hesitation, a slight stiffening, then she was gone. I waited a minute or two, until I heard the struggling engine of her old Ford recede down Surt Road, and then hobbled to the door, thinking that even if I wanted to go to the beach I couldn't physically hack it.
On the doorstep was another shoebox. Blue. This had held a children's pair of all-terrain boots. The words Snow Field were written on the top of it. Whoever owned these shoes had bought them in France, where their foot size was 26.
1er Prix,
the box boasted:
12,90
€
.
I picked it up and brought it inside, smelling it first to check there was nothing on the turn. I had once been left a polythene bag of what looked like regurgitated chicken livers. A woman brought me ten garden refuse sacks filled with the soiled nappies of her six-week-old daughter. She had wanted to save everything, but it had overtaken her life, her home. People left me uneaten dinners congealing on paper plates. They left me dead pets.
Today there was nothing like that. A bunch of letters, some formal-looking documents, unmarked CDs in booklet-free jewel cases, a birthday card, a toy elephant, a toy car.
I felt a shiver as I thought of the person driving the car that had hit me. I wondered if he or she were local, whether they were aware of who I was, whether I had burned something of theirs. Maybe I had burned evidence that would have inculpated them. It wasn't worth thinking about; it would tear me up. But I decided to start paying more attention to the objects laid at my door, and to who was collecting them, placing them there.
I couldn't work out how this had started. It felt as though it was more natural to me than breathing. It was vital and dull in equal measure. It was like drinking water.
Deeper in the box, under the toys and the trinkets, a message written in red ink on lined notepaper:
burn the oceans, burn them all, ACCEPT THE CRAW, BASTARDS, BASTARDS. GOD HELP THOSE BABIES TO REST. WINTER BAY 1672.
I placed the box under my bed and spent the best part of half an hour getting dressed. I had developed a system for pulling on my socks that involved pretty much my feet and nothing else. It was amazing what you could do with your feet when there was no other option. I rested when the clothes were on, eyes closed to the warm throb in the middle of my back.
The vertebrae in the middle of the dorsal region are heart-shaped. Those bearing peculiarities are the first, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth. The way these bones lock together. The way they are designed. Separate, but needy. The faceting. The recesses for the tubercles of the ribs. I'd read the text books when I was able. I wanted to know what was wrong with me, to a tedious degree. I must have said the words,
what does that mean?
to the surgeon and the doctor and the physiotherapist maybe a thousand times in the past three weeks. I knew so much about the damaged parts of my body, and the body in general, that it became too familiar. It became so familiar, it became alien again, like a simple word recited so often that it loses its meaning. I examined the skeleton and saw what the child sees: a grinning, emaciated monster. That these were inside us, wrapped in meat and membrane and mucus, was a horrible thought. Something other than what looked human, but that, maddeningly, also looked human, was trapped in all that wet muscle, its mouth leering behind the visible lips no matter what the owner's expression. The skull was always happy. It knew it would have its day.