The Facts of Life and Death (28 page)

‘Bring the bait,’ he shouted.

Ruby dithered. ‘What about your chair?’

‘Leave it.
Bollocks.’

Ruby snatched up the bait box and her net and went after him. The path back to the beach was always treacherous with rough rocks and wobbling pebbles – all with a lethal frill of algae and weed – but nothing like this. Now it was also narrowing fast and – washed by the sea – sometimes it was even invisible. What Ruby had carefully picked her way across before, she now had to negotiate at speed, and with the tide tugging at her ankles. Every few strides a bigger wave broke right over the Gore and she was knee-deep in water. More than once she slipped and nearly fell, only the thin bamboo shaft of her little fishing net keeping her upright.

She looked up and saw that Daddy was twenty yards ahead of her now, and between them there was more water than Gore.

She froze. ‘Daddy!’

He turned at her cry.

‘Come
on
, Ruby! Don’t just
stand
there!’ he shouted.

But she couldn’t move. Not even if she’d wanted to. That day of the dog in the forest, her legs had decided to run all by themselves. It had been terrifying, and the fear had only got worse and worse and worse, all the way to the blind terror of the Bear Den.

This time her legs decided
not
to run. This time her legs downed tools and told her to stay
right there.

A swell pushed her sideways and she almost fell over. Only a quick hand on a sharp rock stopped her, and when she staggered upright again, her palm was bleeding, her jeans were wet right up to her crotch, the bait box was gone and her net was floating away from her – out of reach.

‘Daddy!
’

She looked up through the spray and saw Daddy – rod and tackle box in one hand, bucket in the other, looking at her with a strange expression on his face.

Not panic. Not worry. Not fear.

Just.

Looking.

He was going to leave her there. Ruby
just knew
it.

Her chest went tight with terror as the dirty green ocean tried to knock her down and swallow her whole.

‘Daddy! Help me!’ she shrieked.

He did.

Of course he did. He was her Daddy. He wouldn’t leave her to drown. He took a few uneven strides towards her and then swore soundlessly and discarded the bucket. Ruby saw the dogfish spill back into the waves and wriggle away.

Daddy splashed towards her. She stretched out her arms, as if he might pick her up and carry her – the way Granpa had lifted her on to the kitchen counter – but he just grabbed her wrist and pulled her along behind him. She still stumbled; she still fell; the waves still knocked her sideways and threatened to wash her off the spit and into the hungry sea.

But now Daddy was there to take care of her.

When they were only ankle-deep, they stopped and looked back. Ruby’s teeth chattered with cold and fright. She couldn’t believe how close they had been to not making it. The sea had swallowed the Gore – all but the highest rock right at the end, where Daddy’s chair still perched. As they watched, a large, dark wave slapped it down and dragged it off.

And then there was just the sea and the foam and the gulls laughing overhead.

‘Fuck,’ said Daddy. ‘That was a twenty-quid fish.’

Then he squeezed her hand and said, ‘Don’t tell Mummy.’

Ruby nodded, shivering and blue in the lips, even though she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to not tell Mummy about – the lost dogfish, or the
fuck.

Or the way she’d nearly drowned on the Gore.

MARION MOON WASN
’
T
sure Donald was ever going to get over the Frannie Hatton thing.

Stepping on a dead woman’s face in the half-dark was bad enough, but the subsequent questioning and searching and suspicion had almost finished her husband off.

‘It’s almost finished me off,’ he sighed several times a day when she least expected it. Staring at his uneaten dinner; in the ad-break of
Countdown;
waiting for the cat to come in.

The Big Sheep had been very patient with him, but after six weeks of calling in sick, they finally had to give him an ultimatum. If he didn’t return to work by Monday, they’d have to find someone to replace him. Permanently. Donald told them that he understood and he’d do his very best – and then hung up the phone and cried for everything he’d lost and was going to lose.

‘Come on,’ said Marion after an hour or so. ‘We’ll go litter picking. That’ll cheer you up.’

It was a universal truth that however tragic and unfair life got, nothing ever seemed so grim once it was tidied up a bit. So Donald changed out of his pyjamas for the first time in three days, and he and Marion took their pointy sticks and Day-Glo vests and their big green plastic bags over to Instow beach, which was always a safe bet for blue rope and used condoms.

And parking tickets.

Donald raised his pointy stick up to his face to examine the third one he’d found in fifty yards. And all of them unopened. Therefore unpaid. That was a lot of council revenue being denied the taxpayer right there.

‘I’ve got one too,’ said Marion.

‘Cheeky monkeys,’ said Donald. ‘Probably think by throwing them away they won’t have to pay ’em.’ He speared another one, closer to the sea wall that separated the beach from the road, with its line of parked cars.

‘In
fact
,’ he went on, ‘in
fact
, they’ll have to pay
double
.’

Marion said nothing. But in a minute she’d say, ‘Why’s that?’ and let Donald tell her that it was because of computers linked to the DVLA in Swansea.

This was how their marriage worked: this measured back-and-forth of Donald knowing all, and her requesting knowledge. It wasn’t that she really didn’t know things, of course; Marion knew plenty. But most importantly, she knew that Donald liked to take the lead and tell people things, and so she saw no harm in following and being told. It was a habit she’d fallen into in the early days of her marriage just to avoid petty disagreements, but which she’d have found hard to break now – even if she’d wanted to. She joked about it to her friends occasionally, but now that that back-and-forth hadn’t been there for six weeks, she missed it.

They’d been the hardest six weeks of Marion Moon’s married life. It would have been easier to pull a two-headed lamb out of a virgin ewe than to cheer Donald up since he trod on Frannie Hatton. The whole affair had knocked the stuffing out of him, and had made Marion realize that the stuffing was the best bit of her husband.

But now, on Instow beach on a blustery, spitty day in late October, it felt almost like old times, and Donald already seemed perkier.

So a minute after he said that in
fact
the driver would have to pay double, Marion said, ‘Why’s that?’ and jabbed a cigarette packet. They were a rarity nowadays because branded cigarettes were so expensive. Most people who were really devoted to getting cancer had to roll their own. Rizla packets, plastic water bottles and knotted black bags filled with dog poo – these were the litter pickers’ new stock in trade.

Marion looked up, wondering why Donald hadn’t said
Computers linked to the DVLA in Swansea
, but Donald was standing upright, peering at something over the sea wall.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Marion.

‘They’re all off the one car,’ said Donald.

‘What?’

‘They’re all off the one car, I reckon. All these tickets. Come see.’

Marion trudged through the soft white sand to the sea wall and peered over it to the line of parked cars.

Directly opposite them was a yellow car with two broad black stripes down it.

‘Mark II Capri,’ said Donald. ‘Duncan had one of those.’

Duncan was Donald’s younger brother. He’d had one of everything at some stage. Now he had one ex-wife, one daughter who didn’t speak to him, and one stupidly big house so encumbered by negative equity that it was actually subsiding under the weight.

There were three more parking tickets under the windscreen wipers, fluttering their slow way towards freedom on the beach.

Donald tore open one of the tickets on his stick and confirmed that it did indeed come from the Capri.

‘See?’ he told Marion.

‘I do,’ she nodded. ‘I do see. Well spotted, Donald.’

With a new spring in his step, Donald strode off the beach, round the sea wall and over to the Capri, with Marion in tow.

‘One a day, by the looks of things,’ he said. ‘I should call the council.’

‘What for?’ said Marion dutifully.

‘Well, to let them know about the car. All these bits of plastic blowing about aren’t helping the situation, are they?’

Donald shook open a new green bag and stuffed all the parking tickets in it and then tied it to the aerial, where it flapped about like last place in a balloon race.

‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘what’s the point of a warden just sticking a ticket on it every day? Owner’s obviously not bothered. It should be towed away. Impounded. Owner fined. But instead it’s sitting here on two flat tyres, being used as a rubbish bin by some idiot in epaulettes filling his quota. No joined-up thinking, see? Bloody local-government robots.’

He’d worked himself up into a pedantic fugue, and Marion couldn’t have been happier.

Donald just wasn’t Donald without a bee in his bonnet.

When they got home, Marion made tea while Donald called the county council’s highways department and then their environmental services department. Then he rang the district council’s car-recycling department. Marion noticed that he was on the phone longer each time, over-explaining and under-listening to make sure he got best value for his council tax.

She’d made Donald’s favourite – lamb chops on mashed potatoes – and when it was ready she went into the hallway to summon him to eat.

Marion stopped dead.

Donald was on the phone, talking to the Big Sheep.

Marion stood and cocked her head to hear him better, and felt a long-lost smile start to stretch her face.

He was telling them he’d be at work on Monday, come hell or high water.

INSTOW WAS A
pretty village, but apart from the beach there wasn’t much to see or do. It had no amusement arcades or fairground, or shops selling tat, or pedalos for hire. Instow was smarter than that – it had Paul’s Deli, a couple of small galleries, the Commodore Hotel and three or four upmarket bistros painted fashionably dark grey or maroon.

It was nice.

But it was dull.

Which is why, when the council caved in to Donald Moon’s campaign of harassment and sent a truck to tow away the illegally parked yellow Ford Capri, the operation drew the kind of crowd more usually seen under a man threatening to jump off a bridge.

Old ladies got the plum seats. They squeezed on to the benches in beige quartets, armed with their 99 ice creams and plastic rain scarves and with tissues up their sleeves, ready for dabbing.

Then came the dog-walkers – with their wet, sandy charges panting on leashes – and mothers with buggies. And once the dog-walkers and the mums had stopped to stare, it seemed the whole village got wind of something happening on the sea front, and by the time the tow-truck driver had hitched up the Capri and was ready to start winching, there must have been a hundred people waiting patiently to be mildly entertained.

The truck driver’s name was Andy Shapland and he enjoyed the audience, especially the small boys, who he could see were truly impressed by his retaining straps and his road cones and his big hook – rather than the idle bystanders who simply had nothing better to do on a rainy Wednesday afternoon.

Shapland took care with the Capri. His father had had one, although not so well cared for, even in 1976. Luckily the doors were unlocked, so he hadn’t had to break a window to release the handbrake. Now he lined the wheels up with the ramps, put on the steering-wheel lock, and pressed the big red button on the remote, which started the winch.

Slowly the car’s nose started to rise on to the low-loader, and the small boys burst into a smattering of spontaneous applause. Andy Shapland grinned and took a little bow, and they clapped harder.

Distracted by uncommon glory, he didn’t notice that the Capri was heading for disaster. It was a low-slung car, even when new, but this one had been restored and repainted and lowered again. Not a lot. Not so you’d notice unless you were used to seeing Ford Capris every day – which, of course, nobody was any more. But it had low-profile tyres on it, and shorter shocks, and – most damning of all – it had a big fat exhaust system with far fewer inches of ground clearance than was really prudent.

At maximum tilt – just as the Capri was almost home and dry – the big fat exhaust hit the ground hard. The nasty metallic scraping noise drew an ‘Oh!’ from the idle bystanders and then a ripple of laughter, as the boot clicked open in response to the jolt, like a sleeper opening half an eye to see what all the fuss was.

Shit.
Andy Shapland hit the big red button to stop the winch.

He could see from where he was standing that he’d broken the exhaust. He’d done that once before with a Lotus and the owner had had a meltdown on the A361, but, to be honest, cocking it up on an old Capri in front of a crowd was much more embarrassing. From the corner of his eye he saw the small boys looking disappointed. And if he knew small boys, it would only be another few seconds before their childish disappointment turned into shouts of derision. Especially as the boot popping open had lent the whole thing a comedy air.

He walked over quickly to slam the lid shut, then stopped, staring down into the black-lined interior of the Capri.

Then he said, ‘Shit!’ and ‘Call the police!’

‘What?’ said an old lady on the nearest bench.

‘Call the police!’ shouted Andy Shapland in a panic. ‘Call the police!’

Several people laughed, thinking it was part of the show.

‘Call the police!’ He’d do it himself. He could do it himself. He suddenly realized that
he
could call the police. Andy Shapland’s fingers felt numb. His head felt numb. He put the phone to his ear and it was only when everybody laughed again that he realized he was trying to call the police on the remote for the winch, speaking into the big red button.