Leas Foot
The faster the village shrinks in the mirrors the more violent the shaking in Daniel’s hands becomes, until it’s messing so badly with his steering that he’s forced to pull over. The exhilaration of the vandalism has become spent fuel. He winds down the window, hot and breathless, picturing an old man hurrying from his kitchen extension towards his beloved greenhouse, hastily tying the cord of his dressing gown before sifting through the shards of glass to rescue his lovingly tended tomato plants.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he mumbles as the engine dies, suddenly too ashamed to look Alex in the eye. He’s been well out of order. But then, hasn’t everything been at odds with the old order since their arrival – all these resurrected pasts, these bitter revelations, these childish emotions? Is it any wonder that he’s not behaving as he should?
“Don’t know what came over me back there. I just lost it, I think. Before we leave I’ll stick some cash in an envelope and put it through their door.”
Whether he will, or whether it’s just something to say, Daniel isn’t yet sure. They felled his greengage tree, after all. Already the sense of guilt is hardening into one of resignation. Wherever his feelings end up, the important thing is not to lose sight of the purpose of the trip. He pushes aside the man in the dressing gown and focuses instead on the old gent in the blazer.
“Let’s go and find that clubhouse.”
He restarts the car.
It’ll be a yacht club, most likely. The sea hides somewhere beyond the hedgerows. They leave the verge with a bump and begin a slow crawl along the coast road, Daniel keeping a close watch to his right, searching the spaces between the trees. Minutes later, as the land opens out, he catches a glimpse – not of the sea, but of the clubhouse itself. At the corner it comes properly into view: a sprawling shack of a place, not at all the classy joint he’d been anticipating. No seasoned wood panelling and leather armchairs for its port-sipping members, just a single storey, sixties-style square box totally encased in windows, like some giant conservatory knocked up out of plywood. There are no boats in sight, no sign even of a shoreline, just rolling hills heading off a short distance that stop abruptly against the skyline. But there is a car park, as he’d been led to believe. Pulling in, Daniel pauses to read the sign.
It’s not a yacht club.
No, it’s a golf club.
Of course. Golf: the neatly manicured hills he’d so often traversed in his mind, chasing Alex onto the cliff path. Now it’s coming back to him. This is good. This is very good.
A stinging, icy rain begins to fall as he unpacks the chair. Wheelchairs and rain, the two always in partnership, it seems. A strong onshore wind has whipped up since leaving the village. The pathway to the beach is marked clearly, even here the SOS notice pokes up above the horizon, and already the smell of kelp and salt is tangible, the rumble of distant waves at their ears. Daniel feels a sudden need to add his voice to the din.
“A golf course, Alex. Do you remember? Every time we tried to play out here we’d be shooed off by the golfers.”
Alex nods his head, but then he’s been doing that since the wheelchair began its bumpy ride over the track.
“So, I wonder whether Mum brought us here because…” As Daniel looks up again from the chair the thought is swept away. A vast cauldron of molten lead has just materialised ahead, seething and boiling, thrashing at the lips of the vessel that struggles to contain it – the craggy shoreline of Thurlestone bay. Slashes of silver-white foam surge across the surface, colliding, breaking apart and re-forming, causing the light to dance; every moment the shapes and colours fiercely satirising the changing sky above. The wind swells to a thunderous roar; sea grasses quiver and bow down before it, while a lone gull soars in defiance. There’s a smell of ozone, metallic on the tongue, stewing seaweed, dead fish. This is the scene he’s recalled so many times, but here, for the first time since he was a boy, laid out in all its high-definition, stereophonic and panoramic might.
To return here one day was an ambition he’d never allowed to die. Those defining childhood years had clung on through all the later misery. Yet for all that, he’d never once stepped into a boat, travelled abroad, or even made it to a seaside resort. And now he knows the reason. The sea leaves him aghast, its immense power and cruel beauty cheating him of words – something about this giant body of water, this living creature, this singular entity that encircles the globe; the same entity that once claimed the life of his father and so nearly that of his brother – and how it smoulders right here, pulses and snatches at the sand, fixing Daniel in its sights. A psychological drowning if not a physical one.
As for Alex, his reaction is not visible from behind the chair. What impact on him of encountering the very monster from whose clutches he’d once so narrowly escaped? Squatting down to check on his coat and covers, Daniel risks a quick look at his face. What he sees turns him cold. God knows what Gulnaz would say if she too could see this. He’d known it wouldn’t be an easy quest, not a time to be faint-hearted, but only now is it clear just what demons they’re up against.
“I want you to wait here a moment, okay?”
Daniel is on his feet again and running down onto the beach, setting off little landslides with every footfall as he stumbles and staggers. Like Gulnaz in his dream, he makes it to the water’s edge and stares over towards the cliffs. Holding that iconic image in his head, he closes his eyes in order to picture it, not as it is now, but as it was then, using again the eyes of a child. There, down in the surging foam, just beyond the line of rocks, out beyond the reaches of the sand, is there a boat? Is there? For them to be running along the cliff path, for Alex already to be shouting about their father coming home, they must have seen it first from this beach. And where was their mother at that moment? Those cliffs look so unbelievably dangerous. A mother must be insane to leave a child unattended up there. Insane or drunk. Was that it? Christmas afternoon – had she been hitting the bottle over lunch? Hell, was she already an alcoholic by then? Not later – not from losing Alex – but from being widowed? Or even before: when news from the South Atlantic had been bad and she’d emerged from behind closed doors, were those eyes reddened by tears or by drink? Jesus wept. To leave a child to run up there, to let him scramble over the edge to some horrible fate because she was too pissed to notice, too wasted to care. Daniel hates her suddenly like he’s never hated anyone.
But did it really happen like that? This is hopeless. His memory gives nothing away. It’s all just guesswork. Their only hope is to find the exact spot where Alex had fallen. Against the opposition of shifting sand, and against his own rising dread, Daniel fights his way back to his brother.
“I can’t remember, Alex. Any of it! How it happened. Come on, please. Snap out of this. This has gone on long enough. I need you to talk to me now. I need you to help me here!”
From beneath the covers an arm reaches out. Alex raises a palm in the same pawing motion he’d used at the car window. Always his left paw. And he gargles a single cry, a ‘yes’ according to their agreed code.
“No, no, no. Not back there! The other way. Come on, surely you remember that much. Up there’s where you fell – off those rocks.”
They’re pushing on that way now. The going is hard work for them both. Small retaining logs laid into the footpath keep jamming against the wheels. Each time Daniel must turn the chair on a sixpence, tug it towards him, then turn it again before continuing. The logs are a pointer to how much of the shoreline may have crumbled away over the years, the path rerouted time and again. This whole stretch could have changed beyond recognition since they were kids.
And yet a spot is approaching where the cliffs open up directly to their left, just as the man in the blazer had described. Only there’s a problem. If the boat had been down there they’d have had access across the rocks from the beach. They need to go further.
A second clearing a few minutes later must also be dismissed. They’re now some way around the bay fro
m Thurlestone Sands, but this drop falls to a deep cutting – any boat run aground here would be too far from the cliffs, or if dragged further inland would no longer be visible from the beach. But have they already reached Warren Point? Alex is becoming fretful and agitated. Everything in his movement is a warning to turn back.
“Okay mate, we’re nearly done. Just to the top there, see what’s on the other side. If we don’t find what we’re looking for we’ll call it quits for today, okay?”
But the right place is unmistakable. They see it the moment they top the hill – a vertical drop beneath them down onto lethal rocky waters, and there, just beyond it, stands the gentler sloping outcrop, unmistakeably the one Gulnaz had identified in the photo; the face down which Alex had almost certainly climbed. In confronting it again, Alex’s distress reaches critical point. He’s groaning now and thrashing about. Another fit must be just moments away. Frantically, Daniel tries to take it all in, kicking himself for not having brought a camera. Ahead, the path is protected on the seaward side by a hedging of gorse and open to the land on the right, marking a boundary to the golf course. Behind, the path winds back to the beach and the track to the car park. Looking inland, with its neat, rounded bumps and isolated hawthorns, its flags and sandy bunkers, the golf course stretches back to the club house. And all at once he remembers. Every detail. The sequence.
They’d been playing catch on the golf course. They’d gone there because they’d already lost their ball several times over the neighbour’s hedge. And of course, being Christmas Day, for once there was no-one on the fairway to send them packing…
Alex had thrown badly and Daniel had missed the catch. The ball had rolled away onto the cliff path…
Yes, that’s right. It was then that they’d seen the boat down in the water. Alex had become very emotional, but didn’t try to climb down there and then. He charged off down the path towards the beach. Daniel had eagerly pursued him.
He’s forgotten to breathe. The sudden gulp for air jolts him from the memory. Alex is staring up into his face. All signs of agitation and struggle have gone. In his brother’s eyes Daniel sees not fear or anguish, but – Christ Almighty – he sees pity.
“When we got down to the beach we realised we could no longer get to the boat. It was cut off by the tide.” Daniel’s voice trembles so much he can hardly spit out the words. “You said you’d seen someone struggling to right it. So you started running back up the coast path. I swear, Alex, at first I didn’t realise what you planned to do. I did chase after you – I called out to you to be careful. And then I saw you squeezing through the gorse hedge, right here.”
Daniel’s moment to face the truth has arrived. No more special pleading. “I was too slow. Too much of a coward. By the time I’d caught up, you’d gone.”
Both of Alex’s arms are now freed from the blanket. They’re reaching forward and upwards. They beckon Daniel down onto his haunches. Daniel leans forward and falls into his brother’s arms. “Why, Alex? Just look at that bloody drop. Why did you try to climb down? You bloody fool. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t… I couldn’t do anything to help.”
Locked together, their bodies are shaking, their soft cries indistinguishable from each other. But another sensation has already begun its crawl up Daniel’s spine to the hairs on his neck. The terrible realisation of something he’s been suppressing all along. The only possible conclusion to draw from these reclaimed memories.
“She wasn’t here with us, was she?”
“Nnnnuh, uuuh.”
“Mum played no part in it. It wasn’t after lunch, it was still morning. We were up here without her knowing; she was still in the kitchen, cooking. Christ, Alex! Christ! How many times had she rammed it down our throats never to come up here on our own?”
A history totally rewritten. Not a family outing to walk off a heavy Christmas lunch. Not some irresponsible adult too drunk on sherry to keep watch on her sons. But two unruly boys, defying their mother’s orders and bunking off to a place that was strictly off-limits. Clearer than ever now, he sees himself, standing helplessly at the cliff edge, looking down for his missing twin, hyperventilating, terrified out of his tiny wits, running home as fast as his feet would carry him. That’s when he’d seen the dread on his mother’s face that still haunts him to this day. When he told her. That crippling sense of guilt, and their frantic dash back to the cliff. And so to the memory of running behind, across the golf course, of that poor woman finding the glove. All these years their mother has stood accused, blamed for Alex’s death, when in truth her only crime was to let them slip away from the house – a single mother who, in trying to conjure a decent Christmas dinner on a shoestring, was too overworked to keep them under her watchful eye.
Very, very slowly Daniel rises, tucks his brother’s arms beneath the blankets and begins to push the chair back towards the car. It is time to escape this place. There is nothing to be gained from loitering here. The trip has brought the enlightenment they sought. Now they have to find a means of living with it.
~~~~~
Part Two: