Authors: Peter Robinson
She liked to run in the damp sand by the shore and feel the foam wet her feet. As she ran, she would watch the sun coming up behind the mountains, the light growing in the water, and breathe the ozone that the crashing surf seemed to exhale into the atmosphere.
This morning, as she ran, her reading of
The Good Companions
made her start thinking about her own childhood and how she began playing parts to escape the grime and the coal dust, the suffocating aura of defeat, poverty and broken dreams all around her. She remembered the time she organized a couple of her friends and, with sheets borrowed from the washing-line, they improvised the story of Ruth among the alien corn that they had learned in Sunday school the previous week.
Sarah’s mother had been livid. Not only had her daughter been participating in the trivialization of a Bible story, she had also dirtied freshly washed sheets. In her mother’s mind, Methodism and theatre weren’t as close as cleanliness and godliness.
Sarah hadn’t run more than a quarter of a mile when she noticed something about a hundred yards ahead of her in the sand. It was an odd, humped shape she couldn’t quite make out. Probably driftwood.
It had been an odd relationship, she thought, the one she had had with her mother. Alice Bolton’s religion had been deeply enough ingrained to make her theologically opposed to most forms of human artistic endeavour, even if they were dedicated to the praise of God, yet she had been proud of her daughter. More so than her father. If only—
Sarah stopped dead in her tracks as another childhood memory thudded into her mind with the force of a hammer blow.
Let’s bury Daddy in the sand.
It was a game they used to play on seaside holidays in Blackpool, on the rare warm days. She and her older sister, Paula, would dig a hole in the sand and Daddy would lie down in it, then they would cover him with sand and pat it down. In the end, only his head would be showing. He would stay there for a while, then all of a sudden he would jump up and chase them, as they giggled and screamed, into the cold, grey Irish Sea.
The figure that lay in front of her now hadn’t been quite so well buried. The hands and forearms stuck out, as did the feet. The face was above the surface, but it was covered with a light dusting of sand, as if blown there by the breeze, and she couldn’t make out the features. She couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.
Sarah stood and stared, hands on her knees, panting for breath. She didn’t know what to do. In panic, she looked around but there was no one in sight. There never was at this time. Only the gulls screeching and squealing overhead in the pale morning light. Was the person dead? She thought so. Should she run back to the house and phone an ambulance? Maybe she should make sure first?
Gingerly, she leaned forward and grasped one of the hands. She braced herself for the weight, but as soon as she exerted the slightest pressure, she fell back on the sand.
Then she saw it. In her hand, she held a human arm, severed just above the elbow, where she could see the dark, clotted blood and tissue matted with sand. She dropped it and got to her feet. Blood roared and waves pounded in her ears.
Just before she turned away to run back to the house, she saw something else, something that made her blood freeze.
The image looked as if it had been drawn in the sand with a sharp stick. It showed a heart pierced by an arrow, like the ones teenage lovers used to carve into trees or chalk on walls. Inside the heart was her name: Sally.
Sarah put her hand to her mouth and staggered back a few paces before turning to run back to the house.
Part Two
10
Judging by the expressions of delight and surprise when the captain announced that it was a clear and sunny day in Manchester, with a temperature of fifty degrees, Californians had just as many illusions about the English weather as the Brits had about theirs. Either that or global warming was messing everything up. No one took off their jackets, though; fifty was still too cold for an Angeleno in December.
As Sarah had a British passport, she avoided the long queue at immigration. Her one large suitcase, packed with Christmas presents, arrived quickly at the carousel, and though one of the officers gave her a second glance when she walked through the ‘Nothing to Declare’ exit, it wasn’t because he thought she was smuggling something in.
The airport was noisy with the clamour of waiting relatives. Sarah’s plane had arrived at the same time as a Jamaican flight, which explained the colourful costumes and the steel band. Here to greet a visiting dignitary or a sports team, she guessed.
She stood by the barrier holding on to her pushcart and scanned the crowd for Paula. There she was, waving both arms in the air behind a group of Indian women in colourful saris.
Sarah pushed forward, muttering excuse-mes as she went. The arrivals concourse was so crowded that it was impossible to get through without bumping into people. She almost ran over a small child and earned a dirty look for catching an elderly woman a glancing blow on the shin before she reached Paula. They hugged briefly, then Paula pushed Sarah back to arm’s-length and examined her.
‘Let’s have a look at you, then, our Sal.’
The broad Yorkshire accent came as a shock to Sarah, though she didn’t know why it should. She had spoken that way herself once, but now it sounded awkward and primitive to her, the mark of a certain class. She felt embarrassed for thinking such thoughts and cursed the English class system for always leaving its mark, no matter what you achieved. Had she been born to the upper classes and bred for success, Sarah thought bitterly, she wouldn’t always be so consumed by self-doubt and lack of confidence, wouldn’t always feel the bubble was about to burst.
‘Well,’ said Paula, ‘I must say it’s a big improvement on the last time.’
‘What is?’
‘Don’t you remember? The make-up, the frizzy hair, the leather?’
Sarah laughed. ‘Oh. Yes, of course.’ She didn’t remember, though, which was hardly surprising given the condition she had been in during her last visit home. That was before California, before the U.S. tour with Gary and his band, but it wasn’t before the drugs and the drinking; though she hadn’t recognized it immediately, the craziness had already begun. She didn’t remember
anything
very clearly about that period of her life. Nor did she wish to.
This time she was wearing stonewashed jeans and a red sweatshirt, carrying her quilted down coat of many colours over her arm, and her blonde hair was trimmed neat and short. She also wore no make-up, a real treat after having the stuff plastered on every day at the studio.
‘Mind you,’ Paula went on. ‘You could do with putting a bit of meat on your bones. Have you been slimming and going to one of them health club places like they do in Hollywood?’
Sarah laughed. ‘I run every morning on the beach, but that’s about all.’
In fact, only yesterday morning I stumbled across a dismembered body,
she almost added, but stopped herself in time. No point getting into
that
with Paula. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s illegal to sell fatty foods in California.’
‘Is it?’
‘Only kidding. Though sometimes you’d think so.’
‘Well, you looked a bit better padded last time I saw you on television. How long ago did you make that programme?’
‘Not long. Television puts at least ten pounds on you, didn’t you know that?’
‘How would I? I’ve never been on telly.
I’m
not the star in the family.’
‘I just thought people knew, that’s all,’ Sarah said. ‘Anyway, I hope I don’t look that fat on the series.’
‘I didn’t say
fat
did I? Just a bit better padded.’
‘Well, thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it. Anyway, I suppose you look healthy enough,’ Paula went on. ‘Though for the life of me, I can’t see where you’re hiding your tan.’
‘Which way?’
Paula pointed and Sarah started pushing the cart through the throng. ‘I don’t tan well,’ she said. ‘I never did. You know that. The sun just burns me.’ Besides, she might have added, the studio prefers my ‘porcelain’ complexion; they say it goes with the plummy Brit accent.
‘Well, pardon me for mentioning it.’
Sarah laughed. Same old Paula, prickly as a cactus, quick to take offence when none was intended.
Finally, they arrived at the car park and found the red Nissan.
‘Unless you’ve learned to drive since you were last here, love,’ Paula said, ‘I’d try the other side.’
Sarah blushed. ‘Sorry.’ She’d gone automatically to the driver’s side. She got in the correct side and fastened her seat belt. ‘How was the drive over?’ she asked.
Paula lit a cigarette and breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Not bad. Roadworks near Barton bridge and an accident just past Huddersfield, but other than that . . .’ She negotiated her way out of the car park, refusing Sarah’s offer of money to pay the man in the booth, and headed for the motorway. ‘It’s a bloody maze round here,’ she muttered.
The car felt cramped and tinny to Sarah after Stuart’s gigantic hunk of Detroit steel. She wriggled around in the seat to get comfortable, but still the roof was too near to her head and the windshield too close to her face. Cars made her more nervous than planes, which was one reason why she had never learned to drive. The smoke made her cough.
‘All right?’ Paula cast her a sideways glance.
‘Yes, fine.’
‘I’ll open the window if you want.’
‘No, it’s all right.’
‘Really. I don’t mind. It’s no trouble.’
‘Well, maybe just an inch or so.’
Paula opened the window a crack and pretended to shiver. The draught blew the smoke right into Sarah’s face.
‘Shit!’ Paula missed a turning and went around the roundabout again. Sarah thought of the little roundabout in Venice, one of the few she had seen in the United States. She felt a momentary pang of homesickness for her beach house. It was the only place where she had felt truly at home in years, perhaps because it was where she had started putting her life back together after Gary.
But thinking of the house also brought to mind a fleeting image of the severed arm and the heart in the sand. Then she remembered the letter she had slipped in her luggage, unopened. She had found it when she dropped by the house with Stuart to pack – at the last minute, as usual – before going to the airport.
She looked out of the window and saw a local diesel train rattling along beside a canal. Two boys stood on the stone banks leaning over the water with fishing nets. She doubted they had much hope of catching anything there in December, mild as it was. A yellow sign showing a man digging with a shovel appeared by the side of the road, then another. Soon the motorway was reduced to two lanes and they were crawling along between a silver Peugeot and a juggernaut from Barcelona. But there were no men digging with shovels.
Only when they had left the Manchester conurbation behind did Paula seem to relax at all. She still sat hunched forward in her seat, though, gripping the steering-wheel so hard her knuckles were white and squinting at the road and the cars ahead as if they were some sort of malevolent entities bent on her destruction. She doesn’t like driving, Sarah realized. It must run in the family. Her father and mother, she remembered, had never owned or driven a car in their lives.
Soon the Pennines loomed ahead, furry green hillsides made eerie by mist swirling on their lower slopes.
There was still plenty of traffic on the motorway as it passed through the grimy urban sprawl round Rochdale and Oldham, but the cars thinned out as it climbed a long, slow hill and cut a swath through the Pennines.
All around, sheep grazed and becks and streams trickled through deep clefts in the dark green hillsides, flashing in the winter sun. They passed lonely barns, hamlets, small stone bridges, a reservoir. At one point the motorway got so high up that Sarah’s ears went funny like they did on the plane. She yawned.
Paula glanced sideways again. ‘Tired? You’re quite a hit over here, you know. There’ll be plenty of people in the village wanting your autograph. Just thought I’d warn you. You probably get enough of that over there.’ She jerked her head back, indicating the Atlantic.
‘Not really,’ Sarah said. ‘Hardly at all, in fact.’ In the first flush of her television success, Sarah had worried about people recognizing her and approaching her in public places. She dreaded living the kind of life Elvis Presley had, for example, imprisoned in Graceland, having to hire a whole movie-theatre just to see a film, or an entire fairground to go on one ride, always surrounded by bodyguards.
But after a while, she had learned a very interesting thing: people tended not to recognize her unless she went out of her way to be noticed. As herself, she could walk along the street, shop in the Beverly Center, or browse along Rodeo Drive, and nobody came up demanding autographs.
On the other hand, if she dressed more like Anita O’Rourke, then people spotted her immediately. Most of the time she went around in jeans, a T-shirt and a Dodgers cap. Even the detective she talked to at the beach hadn’t recognized her at first.
Again, she thought of the letters and the body in the sand. She remembered the touch of the hand, cold and stiff like a broken marble statue, and then the dark blood clotted with sand. There
had
been a body, she couldn’t deny that, but it had nothing to do with her. When she went back there with the police, the heart had gone. She had been under so much stress she must have started seeing things, she told herself.