“All churches should have their roofs removed,” the younger O’Rourke said. “Then I’d go.”
“Why bother, when you can come here?” his dad replied.
“But you go sometimes?”
“Very occasionally … just in case.”
And being of the age when threads of desire were beginning to unravel in his imagination and the romantic poets were being forced upon him by Mr Pulman, Ellis decided that the Marsh had been the birthplace of his soul, somewhere in the past.
From beneath the pall of apprehension that was the legacy of being left responsible for this boy and his sister, Denny O’Rourke glimpsed a different future when he and his son were on the Marsh. He had first seen the Marsh from on board ship, in wartime. Then, in the first warless summer of his adulthood, he had borrowed a car and gone to visit his Aunt Mafi on the coast. The two of them had driven out on to the Marsh on a gleaming bright summer’s day and every colour and detail and field and dyke and bullrush and poppy and bugloss had reflected in the mirrors and panels of the car, a Technicolor peacetime. During a picnic on the shingle point, beneath the lighthouse, Denny had dwelled deeply on the vision of a boy he had had when looking at this peninsula from his ship. He had toyed with the idea of telling Mafi about the boy but had thought better of it. And by the time he was married and his son was finally born, he had locked that vision away, out of reach. Now that he and his son were regularly visiting this same place, the future took on a new appearance in Denny’s eyes. It was less solitary, with fewer battles. It was shinier, like a polished car crossing the Marsh in summer. It was beautiful.
Denny and Ellis marked the longest day of 1984 by watching the sun rise and set over the Marsh. They started at Fairfield, beneath a deep ocean sky that waited patiently for dawn. They sheltered in the shadow of the bellcote and drank tea from a flask.
“You want a bench here, really,” Denny said. “Right here, tucked against the wall. Port in a storm, dear boy. Someone should do that, put a bench right here.”
The first warm tones of gold and orange entered the sky and reflected in the still water of the drainage ditches. The sun appeared, showing up the lichen on the church bricks and on the tiles.
They ran with stooped backs to the Listening Posts at Greatstone, hiding from the crane operators excavating the gravel lakes. Ellis threw a pebble into an immense concrete dish expecting it to echo, but it didn’t.
“They used these to detect enemy aircraft,” Denny said. “Don’t ask me how.”
“How?” Ellis asked.
His dad lobbed a pebble at him. “Fool!” he laughed.
They stopped at the bikers’ café on the main Marsh road at Old Romney and had breakfast. They were the only customers. Ellis’s mug had lipstick on it and, out of nowhere, he announced, “You don’t have to worry about me sitting you down and asking for sex education or stuff like that. I’m pretty well clued up on that … from a visual angle, if you know what I mean.”
Denny didn’t flinch. “Good, ’cos I’m a bit rusty.”
They parked at the lifeboat station beneath a fluttering ensign. Denny O’Rourke followed the caterpillar tracks across the beach to the launch. Ellis walked amongst the fishing boats. In the windows of a winch-shed he was confronted by a reflection of his dad looking out to sea. Denny’s hands were clasped behind his back and from his stance Ellis knew that his dad was whistling to himself, through his teeth, the way he did when he was happy. When he was Ellis’s age, the man whistling at the water’s edge had presumed he would spend his whole life at sea. When he was told that he couldn’t, Denny O’Rourke thought he would never get over it. But he learned to live on land and life was bearable and then he met the butterfly-lady and life was wonderful again, as wonderful as the oceans for being loved by her.
Ellis did not wish to cross the seas as his father had, but their trips together to the Marsh, though only an hour and a half away, were planting in him a desire to see those seas from all the different continents that rose up out of them, and to then, one day, live back here at the water’s edge. Mafi once said to him that his mother had died of adventure. He wondered if it were possible to die of the lack of it.
They sat at the Point and Ellis noticed the wreck of a small fishing boat half buried in the sandbanks out to sea.
“This is the photograph next to your bed.”
“It is,” Denny said.
“I never noticed the wreck before.”
“No? Maybe the tide’s always been in.”
“Maybe … Did you take that photograph?” Ellis asked.
“Yes, from on board ship. On my last ever day at sea.”
“Is that why you kept it all this time?”
Denny didn’t answer for some time. He was distant for a while, as he toyed with the idea of telling a certain story. Then he smiled at his son.
“Sort of,” he said. “Partly.”
Streaks of pale pink cloud dissected the lowest horizontals of the sky and measured the sun’s descent. It offered up a glow of warm, pastel colours to the shingle peninsula and a small, white, timber-clad house accepted them, becoming saturated by the evening’s delicate hues. The house sat alone on the shingle, removed from the other houses there but constructed, like many of them, round the shell of an old railway carriage. It was surrounded by a wind-blown wooden fence which flapped in the wind.
“I am definitely going to live here,” Ellis said.
After the sun had gone, the sky continued to repaint itself every few minutes. Their footsteps were heavy on the deep shingle, then light and silent upon carpets of moss. The power lines crackled above a shanty town of magpie traps. The lighthouse beam threw monochrome patterns on to the shingle. The wind picked up. Neither of them wanted to return to the banality of being in a car or deciding what to eat. They wanted to remain together in the incomplete darkness of midsummer. Ellis flirted with the possibility of telling his dad that the crimson sunsets above the village were his mother appearing to them, but he said nothing. The knowledge that something immense was missing overcame him. It wasn’t simply that he couldn’t talk to his dad about her but that he shouldn’t. It had never been all right to ask. The moment was never right. He wondered if he could start by asking for the letters, the letters wedged inside the pages of Denny’s blue canvas-bound naval diary and locked in the bottom drawer, the ones from his mum to his dad, in the pale blue envelopes with foreign stamps.
Dad?
Yes, my dear boy.
When we get home, could I read those letters from Mum that are in your drawer?
Of course you can, dear boy. And I’ll tell you all about her.
Ellis let this imagined exchange drift away into the night. His dad was the sort of dad who gave him a day off school so that they could watch the sun rise and set on the longest day. Perhaps he shouldn’t ask for more.
The hay was harvested in early summer at Longspring Farm. Reardon kept Ellis and Tim busy, manoeuvring the herd around the grassland harvest. The boys watched a weasel suck the blood from the jugular vein of a rat. They discussed the idea of trying drugs for the first time, without having any intention of doing so.
“We should go up to the sun barn later on,” Ellis said, “browse some mags …”
Tim’s response changed everything between them.
“I’m not doing that any more. No need.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
Tim meandered away towards the farmhouse.
“Why does everybody in the blooming world walk away from me when I ask them a serious question?”
“Let’s make a cuppa,” Tim said.
Ellis ran to catch up with him.
“And say ‘fucking world’!” Tim added.
“What?”
“Say ‘fucking’ not ‘blooming’. You’re using words that don’t fit the bill.”
“What are you talking about?” Ellis asked.
“What the fuck am I talking about!”
“Yeah, what are you?”
“You’re not expressing yourself, Ellis. You need to revamp your vocab. What the
fuck
are you talking about, Tim!”
“But what
are
you talking about?”
“What the fuck am I talking about. Spit it out, it’ll do you good.”
“But what the fuck
are
you going on about?”
Tim handed Ellis the cigarette he’d been rolling.
“Swearing and fucking, mate. Vital. Get them both on your agenda, pronto.”
“Like you’ve done any fucking,” Ellis sneered.
Tim lit Ellis’s cigarette. “We’ll have a cuppa.”
Ellis seized him by the arm. “Have you done it?”
Tim smiled and headed off to Reardon’s kitchen.
“You’re doing it again. Walking away from me when I ask something important! It’s really annoying!”
“Fucking annoying!”
They drank strong, sugary tea in Reardon’s orchard and Ellis sat quietly, subdued by a premonition of being left behind. He didn’t ask Tim again, for fear of sounding desperate. Beyond the shade, the day was growing extremely hot. The grass was yellow and there were cracks in the earth.
When the windfalls land on grass this pale, Ellis thought to himself, it’s going to look pretty. Someone should take a photograph.
“My dad’s out this evening. Come over and I’ll dig out some alcohol.”
“Can’t,” Tim said.
Ellis drew shapes on the grass with a twig. “Please. I need you to pick a lock for me. Dad’s hidden something in a drawer and locked it.”
“It’d have to be early.”
They walked back through the farmyard, removing their T-shirts and throwing them on to the fence. Tim stepped into the hay barn. He placed his hands on his hips and arched his back to look up at the roof girder.
“What’s in the drawer?” he said, distantly.
“Nothing,” Ellis answered, remaining outside on the track. “Come on.”
“Not a lot of point opening it then.”
“Something of mine,” Ellis said.
“The thing is,” Tim said, “I’ll pick that lock for you if you cross the barn.”
The same panic swept through Ellis whenever Tim challenged him to cross the girder spanning the roof of the hay barn. Tim had done it but Ellis knew he wouldn’t be able to. He presumed that Tim was stronger than him, in exactly the same way he presumed every boy alongside him in class was more clever and every boy in the street more gifted with girls. He failed to see that he had all the same sinewy muscles that Tim had. They could hardly have been more similar physically. All Ellis lacked was whatever chemical it was that made a boy decide it would be a great idea to inch his way across a girder like that, hanging on by his fingers above a fifty foot drop. Tim possessed that chemical in bucketloads.
This moment had been and gone before, two or three times a year in the four years they had known each other, and Ellis had always withstood the suffocating process of pressure, refusal, pressure, refusal until Tim got bored or Ellis walked away. But today the balance was different. Tim was different. And Ellis wanted to read the letters inside that locked drawer a great deal. He surveyed the approach route, a stairway of hay bales stacked up to the roof at each end of the barn. He looked at the girder itself. It ran for fifty feet from one end of the barn to the other, and the same distance from the roof to the ground. In the centre of the barn, for a quarter of the crossing, there were no bales to break the fall.
“I don’t want you laughing at me or winding me up whilst I try to do it,” Ellis said, gravely.
“Course not! I’m going to be doing it with you anyway. You’ll follow me and do exactly what I do. I’ve always said that. Just trust me. I’d trust you.”
The trace of hurt in Tim’s voice comforted Ellis. Tim ushered him forward to the bales and for a moment it seemed that he was going to offer Ellis his hand. Ellis would have taken it. Tim climbed to the top of the bales and Ellis followed. Up high, sunlight leaked in through gaps in the barn wall, illuminating particles of floating dust as if the great movie show of grown-up life was trying to burst in and play. Tim turned to Ellis.
“Just follow me across and don’t stop to think. Don’t stop for a moment and the next thing you know you’ll be across and then you’ll have finally done it and you’ll feel great. OK?”
Ellis nodded. Tim wrapped his fingers round the
H-shaped
steel beam and stepped off the highest bale. His body-weight pulled his arms taut. He twisted his body with each extension of an arm and slid his hands along the beam, never letting them lose contact with the girder and never committing his weight to just one hand. Ellis reached up to the girder and placed one hand around it. He willed himself to move forward but his body didn’t respond. He watched the veins in Tim’s forearms and biceps fill with blood and he tried again to step off but his body was rigid and the two boys found themselves facing each other from opposing peaks of hay.
“You can do it!” Tim called across.
Ellis peered at Tim as if he was disappearing from view. He tried one more time to move but already knew that he possessed the wrong mind for the uncomplicated sort of boy he wanted to be. He felt the blood rise to his face in embarrassment. He looked at his friend again and was unable to stop himself asking, “You’ve done it, haven’t you?” His voice was resigned but not envious.
Tim sighed. “I have, yeah. But, after we’d done it, I swore to myself I wouldn’t be one of these guys who goes and blabs about it. She might not want anyone to know. So, don’t ask me about it or about her but when I know she doesn’t mind I’ll tell you first. That’s a promise. Who else would I tell but you? Come on, we’ll go open that drawer for you.”
They went to the drinks shelf in the larder as soon as Denny left for the evening. The spirit bottles were dusty and some stuck to the shelf, so rarely were they disturbed. The boys took their drinks up to Denny’s bedroom, where Ellis showed Tim the drawer.
“Easy as …” Tim muttered.
He took a leather pouch from his pocket, untied the shoelaces which held it together and rolled it open on the carpet. In the pouch were lengths of wire of different thickness, a penknife and some jeweller’s screwdrivers. He took one length of wire and bent it into the shape of a square hook at the end and slid it into the lock. Then he held two thicker pieces of wire close to his eye and decided between them.
“What time you meeting her?” Ellis asked.
“Half past eight.”
“That’s late to start an evening. Won’t you get a bollocking for being out so late?”
Tim looked hard at Ellis. “First of all, she’s worth it, believe me. Secondly, of course I’ll cop a bollocking but you just tell them. Or, in your case, you just tell him.”
“Tell who what?”
“Ellis-the-trellis! Parents don’t turn to their children at a certain age and suggest we start going out and having a good time. If you don’t do it, it won’t happen.”
“But I do have a good time …”
“Yeah, but you could have a better time,” Tim said. “Much better! It’s like this. You behave yourself, you don’t act like an idiot, but you just tell him, ‘Dad, I’m going out this evening and I’ll be back at eleven and this is where I’ll be.’ And he’ll say he wants you back at nine-thirty but you come back at eleven as you said in the first place and he sees you’re fine and you’ve not been arrested or behaved like a tool and the point is that you said you’d be back by eleven and you were. He will realise he can either have a life of arguing with you and you lying to him and him not knowing where the hell you are, or he can accept that you are going to start doing your own thing and he’s just got to get used to it.”
Ellis didn’t say anything. It sounded good in theory but he wasn’t totally sure where there was to go to round here until eleven at night.
Tim returned to the job in hand. “What’s in here that you’re so desperate to get back?”
“Letters.”
They were distracted by the sound of a car turning into the driveway. The boys watched from Denny’s bedroom window as Chrissie climbed out of the passenger seat of a convertible whilst a tall, besuited, slightly older man emerged from the driver’s side, wearing the sort of sunglasses that were 100 per cent reflective and Ellis had wanted to own until approximately ten seconds earlier.
“This is Dino. He’s a
journalist
.”
Chrissie announced this with grave reverence, mistakenly thinking it would impress two sixteen-year-old boys.
“Yeah, and …?” said Ellis.
“Where you from?” Tim asked.
“I’m from Malta,” Dino replied.
“Cool,” the boys said, in unison.
“Thanks. Glad you approve.”
Dino looked extremely old to Ellis and Tim and, sure enough, it soon came to light that he was twenty-nine.
“James was also much older than my sister,” Ellis observed, shortly before Chrissie slapped him on the head.
They all sat in the garden. Chrissie poured herself a glass of wine and Dino a vodka and tonic.
“Don’t you drink beer?” Tim asked disdainfully.
Dino ignored him and made an effort with Ellis. “Bet you miss your sister now she’s living up in the big city,” he said.
Ellis checkd his hair in Dino’s lenses. “How much?”
Dino took off his jacket and settled back with his drink.
“Whoa!” Tim said. “Your shoulders have come off with your jacket! And you’re actually pretty skinny underneath. That’s weird.”
“It’s trendy, you hick,” Chrissie intervened.
If Dino felt uneasy in the crossfire of Tim and Ellis’s disdain, that was nothing compared to the discomfort caused him by Ellis’s glassy silence as he drifted off into his own thoughts, achieving a vacant expression his sister and best friend took in their stride but which unnerved the newcomer.
Ellis was thinking how strange it sounded to be introduced in terms of what your job is. Dino is a journalist. Fine, sure, OK. But I’m really not bothered what his job is. How hot is it in Malta? How did he meet my sister? What sports does he play or watch? What’s his room like? Can he walk on his hands like me and Tim can? How long can he hold his breath? What age did he start shaving? Are his parents divorced? What’s his absolute best joke? How many times has he had sex in his life and is he knobbing my sister yet?
Somewhere between being his own age and Dino’s age, it was occurring to Ellis, you probably have to decide to
do something
and what you do defines what sort of life you have. So far, he had just
been a boy
and being a boy wasn’t a career option. Looming over him, all of a sudden, was the possibility that everything he had done and enjoyed up until now would soon be inappropriate or unsatisfying, and that possibility felt like a small death.
And all this change was appearing on the horizon simply because Tim had slept with a girl and Dino was a journalist.
Tim leant forward and confided to Dino, “You know those peope in Haiti that are buried alive, the living dead sort of thing, but real, like zombies? That’s what Ellis looks like when he’s thinking. Don’t be scared. He looks the same in lessons, too.”
They watched Ellis as his thoughts led him further from them. He was now considering his future. Basically, he wanted to farm but he didn’t want to be like a farmer. He wanted to be a sexy farmer, and a part-time explorer. The Indiana Jones of dairy. Or Ian Botham, he’d like to be Ian Botham. The way Ellis saw it, Ian Botham was naturally talented, therefore put no real hard work into being him, had great personal skills and a tremendous social life, could hold his drink, was massively respected and knew where to buy joints, or however it is you get hold of that stuff, and was married so got regular sex. So, yes, he’d like to be Ian Botham but without the cricket. A Botham-farmer. But, wait a minute, someone else was Ian Botham already: Ian Botham.
Becoming Ian Botham
was no more realistic a career plan than
being a boy
. This was hard.
He looked up. The others were staring at him.
“Hello …” he said quietly. Then he burst back into life. “Hey! Wait! That means you’re a Malteser!”
Chrissie slumped. “Please tell me it hasn’t taken you this long to come up with that? Jesus wept!”
Dino smiled, uneasily, and glanced at his watch. He and Chrissie didn’t stay long. They looked in on Mafi and then, whilst Dino gave Tim a tour of his Golf Cabriolet, Chrissie slapped her arms round Ellis and forced a kiss on to his lips. He feigned disgust. In truth, he liked her doing this, although he did sometimes wonder if the cause of his conversational inertia with girls might possibly be the fact that his sister remained the second most fanciable girl he’d ever known, behind Chloe Purcell.
She led him away. “I know Dino’s not your sort of bloke, but don’t be horrible. He’s a nice guy.”
Ellis put his arm round her, too. “You’re not gonna go and marry him, though, are you?”
“No way!” She stopped and faced him. “I’m knobbing him, as you’d put it. That’s all.”