Wolves Read online

  The railway runs unfenced over the shingle. At our current crawl, you could safely jump from the carriage and head off in any direction, towards any landmark. The tar-paper houses. The lighthouse. On the horizon, black hulks of old boats, upturned, make fishermen’s shelters.

  ‘We’re fixing up this boat,’ Michel says. It’s the third time he’s mentioned this in as many minutes, and already there is a pall of futility about the enterprise, especially here, where year by year, inch by inch, the shingle piles up on itself, making new land.

  ‘Hanna wants us to sail around the world.’

  Here the land gathers itself and rises to meet your footfall. What need of boats, round here?

  She looks like an urchin spilled from the chorus of an old musical. Hanna. A five-foot-nothing shit-eating grin above a threadbare green jumper and holed, varnish-spattered jeans.

  These, she tells me, are the clothes she wears while she works on the boat. Already with the boat. No sooner are we out through the ticket-hall-cum-giftshop than she has her arm through mine, as though we are old friends, and she is telling me about the dryness of the summer and how her skin, rashed with glass dust spilling from the sander, has tightened across her bones.

  I glance at her arm in mine – blonde hairs, strong tendons – checking her out in spite of myself, my reserve, my embarrassment. Christ, her skin! It glows.

  She asks, ‘Has Michel told you about the boat?’

  This is why I am here. This, by now, is obvious. They want someone they can show it off to.

  Together we walk to their house along what, round here, passes for a street. It takes me a few minutes to see it as that. There are no walls, no fences, not even ditches worth the name. Just a few little gullies that may be property boundaries, but could just as likely have been scooped out year by year by the rain.

  The houses, tar-paper shacks, cluster in unnecessarily tight groups that, for some reason, sit several minutes apart from each other. The road connecting them is made of cracked cement, reduced by infrequent traffic to parallel tracks. Between the tracks, bluish grass struggles to grow.

  Not all the houses are fisherman’s shacks of tar-paper, sticks and prayer. One, made of concrete, apes the epic slab-work of the power station, visible in the distance. Less convincing are a handful of barn-buildings, painted black to ‘blend in’ with the locals. Their long, floor-to-roof windows and sliding patio doors are a reckless extravagance round here.

  Hanna and Michel’s house is easy to spot – there is a thirty-eight foot ketch sat out in front of it on trestles. ‘Come and see.’

  They escort me, Michel on my right, Hanna on my left. Their every anecdote, remark, gesture and glance is rooted to or through this boat of theirs.

  I’m more interested in the house. It’s an old one. A tar-paper roof and plank walls – materials chosen to be easily mended and replaced. How much is left of the original structure? Round here, under a salt, corrosive rain, I imagine houses get by the way bodies do, by being constantly repaired and replenished.

  It looks too small, too flimsy to be an all-year place. It is not black, unlike so many of its neighbours. Once upon a time it was green. Paint has peeled from the wood and hangs in fronds. The walls and window frames are smothered in this mineral, yellow-grey creeper.

  Mick and Hanna crowd me, anxious, trying to fix my attention on the boat. The house, as though aware of their slight, rustles its lifeless foliage.

  The boat, then, since there is no avoiding it.

  They have parked it in front of their living room window to block their view – or, rather, so that they are confronted, morning, noon and night, with their beloved boat. They have knocked together those hefty trestles themselves. The boat sits upright, head-height above the ground. They’ve been working on the hull. ‘The hull is a mess!’ They stand either side of me, pointing out to me, in exhaustive detail, all that they’ve taken on. There’s a hole in the stern. The deck laminate crackles and pops when you walk on it. The fittings are corroded. The electrics are impenetrable. ‘The tiller and the forestay are sound.’

  It’s a shell.

  ‘We figure it’ll be as easy for us to tear out the old bulkheads and begin again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If we’re going to live on the thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We owe it to ourselves to make it comfortable.’

  ‘I suppose.’ What is it that they want me to say?

  Michel struggles with the tarpaulins covering the cabin. He wants to show me their work. All through the summer, they have laboured on this hulk, chamfering and filling. The masks and goggles they’ve been wearing while they sand off the old gel coat are lying on the table in the cabin. ‘Still, the dust creeps in under your mask. Into the pores of your hands. Look.’ Michel shows me his hands. He tells me that he hardly recognises himself in the mirror any more.

  ‘And Hanna’s skin comes out in a rash. Look – like paint over wet putty.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not the fibreglass at all,’ she says, running her small brown hands over her arms. She sees me looking. ‘It could be the sand blowing in from the dunes,’ she says. She rubs her hands against her jeans, cleaning off imaginary grit.

  Michel tells me that to wake sore and stiff from working long hours on the boat, to discuss practical things over a breakfast of coffee and processed bread, to come home sun-dazzled, their skins buzzing, and to work at their books silently and together – all this has added up to a life so clear-cut and so pure, it has begun to resemble a religious retreat.

  Hanna reminisces, ‘The deck was so waterlogged we had to strip it back to the ply in places. Whoever had it last drilled straight into the deck. Every hole is a sponge.’

  A stage laugh from Michel. ‘Thank God they never got around to resecuring the bulkheads! They’d have drilled straight through the hull.’

  We go indoors at last. We try to. The front door sticks; salt has swollen the wood. Tough grey grasses have taken root in the sand collecting under the porch. The blades are sticky and scaly, as though coated with powdered glass. While Hanna struggles to open the door, I bend to pluck a stem. It won’t give, and my fingers come away bloody.

  There is mould around the doorframe, damp in the corners of the ceiling, a mealy smell everywhere. The rooms have fibreboard walls. They give slightly if you lean on them. There are three rooms: bathroom, bedroom, living room. You step into the living room straight from the front door and at the back of the room is the kitchen. A thin brown carpet covers the living room floor. It peters out near the kitchen, where cork-effect vinyl floor tiles have begun to lift at the edges.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ There is no shortage of drink. There are several kinds of gin. There is tonic, kept in the fridge, but no ice.

  ‘That’s fine.’ I take the G&T from her hand. ‘Terrific.’ It tastes disgusting, an extract of hedge clippings.

  Michel cracks open a can of lager and sits beside me on the sofa. I move over for him, my palms chilling on the nylon-mix fleece they’ve thrown over it. I’m cold at the core in here. I’m not shivering. My hands and feet are fine. This cold begins on the inside, deep in the pit of the lungs. A tubercular chill.

  Hanna sits opposite us on a seat made of cardboard boxes and polystyrene packing. Everything here is reused. Everything is repurposed. Gear fills their living room. Clothing in plastic storage tubs. Boots and waterproofs. Damp-bulged books and curling maps are piled on every flat surface. In this room as cramped as a cabin, heavy with gear, carefully organised yet still tipping into an unavoidable chaos, where the stowage succumbs to sheer weight and numbers, it is possible, I suppose, that they are conducting a dress-rehearsal for their voyage.

  ‘It’s American-built.’ Hanna fetches me yachting magazines from a pile on top of the fridge. Michel gets up and clatters about, ‘fixing some more drinks’. Hanna moves me to her chair made of boxes (‘the light is better here’) and drops the magazines into my lap. She hunkers down beside me a
nd flicks from one dog-eared page to another, showing me pictures of boats similar to theirs, each with a slightly different rigging. We might be choosing shoes or handbags, except that the choices she makes now may make the difference between life and death. ‘This, you see; it’s a very heavy system.’

  Michel comes back with full glasses. He wriggles into the sofa’s damp and Hanna joins him there. They tuck the felty orange throw around themselves. Their hands dance and couple in the gloom. They’ve learned to compensate for their discomfort; they’ve made it cosy, made it theirs. They’re living through a little Fall here, ‘saving on bills’, taking baby steps in readiness for when the lights go off for real, forever, and the telephones stop ringing, and the pipes go cold and brittle, and the only water’s rain which they must boil.

  I should not have come. I seem to be gathering all the living room’s dampness into myself, pooling it behind my breast-bone – a big wet bag of phlegm I cannot even bring up. ‘I just need—Just a moment.’

  I fumble with the door knob, trying and failing to suppress the welling inside my chest. I have to get out. I have to get out now. The door squeals against the frame, and I stumble out of the shack, into the shadow of the ketch.

  Beneath the hull, on a shipping pallet and under clear shrink-wrap, there are sheets of marine ply. Next to them there’s a stack of tins and plastic gallon buckets – gelcoat varnish, stripper, paint. Unopened bags of chopped glass fibre ripple and crackle in the wind. This itself is a sort of garden, I suppose, its boundaries marked by shadows that develop even as I watch.

  The evening sun is still strong enough to burn through the haze. I move out of the shadows, into the light. Still I am trapped. There are no lines for me to cross, no boundaries to leap. This garden goes on forever. I keep walking. The distant houses are black and soft, sculptures of burnt sugar, without doors, without windows, silhouetted against the setting sun. The upturned hulls of the fishing boats might have been sculpted from blocks by winds howling off the sea. Their shapes are natural, circumstantial – no need to infer a human agency at all. Even the road, what’s left of it, might have been scoured by rain, a line as contingent as any runnel in the stones.

  ‘Conrad?’

  I half-expected Michel to come running out after me. Not Hanna. I am glad it is her, and embarrassed. What has Michel said about me, that she is so easy with me, so friendly, so concerned?

  She falls into step beside me – her errant house guest, bolting off. She does not question me. I don’t know where I’m going; round here there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go. She isn’t bothered. She does not try to stop me. I am glad of that. After a minute’s pointless ambling, gently, she slips her small, hard arm through mine. After Mandy, the feel of Hanna’s arm against the edge of my ribcage, the heat of it, is deliciously cruel. I should never have come. I squeeze her arm hard against me as though staunching a wound.

  Two lighthouses guard the point. Swirling round the modern, automatic one, a concrete ramp leads to a door half way up the tower. Why a ramp? As though the people who built this, for all their aptitude in cast concrete, never got around to inventing stairs.

  The old lighthouse is taller, massier, painted black. A board painted with opening times is screwed to its only door. This has already been padlocked shut for the night. ‘Oh,’ says Hanna. ‘Bugger.’ As though this lonely tourist attraction had always been our quarry. It is impressive, how Hanna is nudging me, gently, gently, back into the ordinary. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s go see the keeper’s house.’

  ‘Going to see’ anything round here is really just a form of words. To see anything from anywhere here requires no more than a shift of one’s attention. The house is behind and a little to the left of us. It is the biggest structure on the shingle. It is perfectly circular – a mansion bent round upon itself to form a perfect ‘O’. In the centre, where the back gardens should be twisted round to nothing, there is a greenish glass cupola. To bring so much expensive stone to such an out-of-the-way place, never mind pile it up and dress it in this radical form, suggests a level of self-belief the present age could not muster. The building’s big blocks of dressed honey-coloured stone are fitted together with a neatness that reminds me of Mandy’s townhouse with its bridges and canals, its traffic of exotic hybrid bicycles and semi-electric executive cars.

  I had better call her, after all.

  When Mandy speaks, she instinctively tries to wave her hands. She has not yet become accustomed to their weight. Her white plastic hands carve the air, lugubrious and slow, a knife in one, a fork in the other. I have phoned her in the middle of her dinner.

  She shrugs my sudden departure off, refusing to show the hit. She knows what my unannounced excursion signifies. She wants me to know that she is going to make this easy for me. She says, ‘You’re too young to commit, I suppose.’ Her formulation – that, being a few years her junior, I am too immature for her – is a generous one. It raises the kindly spectre of ‘irreconcilable differences’. She is, in fact, handing me an alibi.

  Even over this stuttery video link, I can see how hard she is working to deal with our sudden break-up. Her scars are red with the effort, and her face has screwed itself up in that odd, lopsided way that it falls into so easily now. It looks as though it has been stitched together out of rags. Which, I suppose, it has been.

  We discuss bills, forwarding arrangements, practicalities. (No mention of my mother’s table.) Already she is talking about when, not if, I should move out. That she despises me for running away is a given. Still, I expected this conversation to be much more difficult and, if I’m honest, to be a deal more flattering to my ego. Anyone would think that it was Mandy throwing me over.

  Then – at the very end – she says, ‘I don’t suppose you have to make a final decision yet.’ Her face, glassed and reconfigured, trembles over a forked mouthful of celeriac salad, and for a second the illusion – that her face might simply slide off the bone – acquires a ghastly realism. It is all I can do not to reach out to hold it in place.

  SEVEN

  Mum’s depressions were more or less regular, and always straightforward. In some ghastly way I looked forward to them. They made life simple. Mum in a slump was a loved object, someone to be taken care of, fed, read to, made comfortable, encouraged to wash and dress. She became my doll, as I became hers – once she was free of her black dog and rushing about designing wedding dresses or cooking up new kinds of make-up.

  ‘Sit up, Mum.’ ‘Mum, do you want to watch a movie with me?’ ‘What do you fancy to eat tonight, Mum?’

  She would take to her bed – not for long, a few days – and it was up to Dad and me to keep the house running. Life was rugged and clear – a set of operations to ensure our fitness and the hotel’s hygiene.

  ‘I’ll take the first shower.’ ‘Call and see if George can cover the bar tonight.’ ‘Bin bags. Tea. Eggs.’

  Mum’s manias were much more difficult. It is one thing to be brought low by a warring world, and the assured mutuality of destruction. It’s another thing to think that you can do anything about it.

  Mum’s political convictions, her financial ineptitude and her frequent mood-swings were mutually reinforcing. I remember how, in her euphoria, it would occur to her, as if for the first time, that she had never been ‘depressed’. She had been oppressed.

  Patiently, she would explain to me exactly how I oppressed her. Dropping her guard, she would then expand upon her theme, describing all the many ways – some of them wincingly intimate – in which Bill, my dad, oppressed her. Her chief oppressor, however, was money. Among the aisles of the supermarket (‘Marmalade (big tins)/Bleach/Serviettes’) I remember how she once attempted to anatomise for me the structural iniquities of a market-led economy.

  I was less entranced by her philosophy than by her shopping. Ignoring the list Dad had given her, she was gathering all manner of unfamiliar stuff: dried fruit, porridge, soya meals, packet soups. It took Dad and me a couple of days to
decipher this. It turned out that Mum, in her escalating mania, was preparing to abandon us for a protest camp that had grown up around a nearby military airbase. She would make friends there, she told us. She would meet like-minded women. She believed that friendships struck up around late night tea-brewing sessions were the soil in which her full potential would bloom, after so many false starts and wrong turnings.

  She explained all this to us with a strange mixture of assertiveness, enthusiasm and sullenness, drawing us in and locking us out in the same breath. The camp. Its emergent structure. Its spontaneous spirituality. Its rejection of paternalistic hierarchies.

  The camp became the site of an annual pilgrimage.

  Dad was never able to visit Mum at the camp. Men were not welcome. The women of the camp believed that patriarchy was imbued with violence – that all men were rapists. These were the kind of things Mum would say to Dad as she packed for the camp – in the weeks of her euphoria, before the next bite of her dog.

  Was it for better or for worse that Dad and I were forbidden to witness her first flame-outs, and the hours of her descent? Dad waited for her call. Her confused directions (‘I’m in a phone box.’). Her declarations of defiance and need. He would tell me to ‘look after the fort’ while he drove over and gathered up the wreckage. The camp wasn’t far. An hour by car. Two hours on train and bus, if you were clever with the connections.

  At last, provoked and frustrated by Mum’s accounts of the camp, concerned for her and jealous of this other life she hankered after so much – though it had yet to do her any good – I decided I would visit her. I would do it without Dad’s knowledge, or the camp’s, or Mum’s for that matter. It would be, I told myself, a surprise for her.

  Because of his work with blinded servicemen, Dad was invited to speak at conferences. These sometimes required an overnight stay. The next time I was on my own over the weekend, I put my plan into action.

  Mum’s rooms smelled close and sweet. In the corner opposite her daybed was the mirror-clad make-up table. I turned on the lights framing the central mirror and sat on Mum’s plush-upholstered piano stool. The time had come for Mum’s mannequin to prove herself: to strut her stuff in the real world, she who had been for so long trapped between mirrors.