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I am smiling to myself (even allowing myself a gentle tut) and straightening up when – Oh bugger! – I see Mr Franklin D. Huff standing behind me, arms crossed, braces dangling (‘At ease, Suh!’), watching me from the back with a look full of what I can only call ‘deep misgivings’.
Sorry if there is something grammatically awry with that sentence. But I think you get what I mean. I respond with my broadest hayseed’s smile. This smile is doubly effective because of a missing canine (front top left).
‘Hello, Massa. I just be doin’ my work here, Massa. No need for the likes of you to be troubling yourself on my account, Massa.’
(Touch brim of pretend flat cap.)
I didn’t actually speak that out loud, I just compressed it into a slight bending of the knee and the broad smile, obviously. Especially the smile. Although there’s an extra (bonus!) atmosphere of ‘I might look like a moron – I am a moron – but if you mess about with my Carla – trifle with her – I’m going to … well …’
What might I do?
Bleat like a lamb?
Burst into tears?
Absolutely bloody nothing, same as always?
Oh God, I just had this … this horrible … this shadow-falling-across-my-grave feeling. An icy chill in my … A moment of …
She’s going to make me stand up to him, isn’t she? The cow Author. She’s going to make me act totally out of character – rise to the occasion, give the smug, ‘cosmopolitan’ arsehole what for – and then quickly kill me off. But it’ll be something mundane that does me in – a nosebleed or an infected toenail. Or something completely stupid and embarrassing like … like being squashed under a tractor after diving to save a duckling. Swerving to avoid a weasel and driving off a cliff.
I know that’s what she’s planning.
I suppose I should just be grateful that the over-tight jumper didn’t prove to be my undoing (Ch. 7? Ch. 8?). Although I’m not sure how that would’ve been managed, technically (I’m always interested in the technical side of things. This isn’t much of a virtue in your average romantic hero, I realize. ‘Sorry to interrupt you, Miss Eyre, but the axle on your carriage has noticeable signs of wear …’). To be perfectly frank, it doesn’t have all that much credibility as an idea (dispatched by an over-tight jumper?!). I mean this is only my second chapter! It’s early days yet. To kill me with a lethal piece of knitwear after – how many? – three pages? That’d be so … so clumsy, so amateur. The critics’d have a field day! Although she killed someone in another novel (forget the name of it, offhand) with a frozen, miniature butter pat and then she won a bloody prize. A prize! A big money prize!
What were they thinking?!
In fact there was this very sweet man in her last novel – kind and gentle, a bit of a wimp; rather like me, I suppose (sound the alarm bells!!) – who she hit with a sudden brain haemorrhage just when everything had finally started to work out for him. I don’t remember his name or all the circumstances exactly. But she’s probably planning something similar for me now. Right now.
What a nightmare. What an awful, bloody nightmare.
‘… store your bulbs.’
Franklin D. is speaking but I miss the gist of it worrying about all this other crap. There was one character who fed his fingers to an owl and then walked in front of a bus. Or a lorry. But he was the hero. And I don’t know if he died or not. I think she left it open so that if the book was successful she could write a follow-up. But the thing bombed.
Ha!
Although – damn! – none of this works, logically – logistically (Oh great, Mr Technical!). Because I’m thinking these thoughts in October 1984 and she only started writing seriously in 1987 on a student trip to Ireland while volunteering for the Council for the Status of Women. She wrote a wretched piece of teen fiction during that interlude called ‘The Perverse Yellow Flower’. It was inspired by three paintings of Christ she saw in a shop window in Windsor and a conversation she had while she was looking at them with a man called Marcus who wanted to make her join a weird cult called Sabud.
What?!
Hang on a second …
Where the heck did all that come from? How could I …? I … I just can’t be having these thoughts right now, about her other books and her sadistic urges and her … I dunno. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s … it’s unnatural, it’s supernatural.
‘… store your bulbs.’
Argh. Am I just sabotaging myself again? Same as I always do? Am I? Eh? Mr Bickerton, will you sign on the dotted line for your regular delivery of a truck-load of self-pity, please? Oh you’ve lost your pen. And your pencil. Boo-hoo-hoo.
There’s nothing positive or clever or rational about it, either, is there? I know that. I’m simply stewing in all this stuff – all these regrets. I really need to just try and … I dunno. Grow a set. Stop over-thinking. Stop making everything twice as complicated as it needs to be. Heroes don’t dither, do they? Do they? No. Heroes aren’t ditherers.
Uh. Sorry. Could you just feed me that line again, please?
‘Well that’s a very strange place to store your bulbs!’
Uh … Okay. Uh … I already did the smile, didn’t I? The hayseed’s goofy smile (my staple)? So how about I just repeat what he said back to him and then work the rest out from there?
‘A very strange place to store your bulbs. Yes. Very strange indeed. You must be Mr Huff. You were holed up in the bathroom when I first arrived. I’m Clifford. Clifford Bickerton. People call me Rusty.’
We shake hands.
‘Did you see the shark?’ Mr Huff asks, following me over to the front porch where I quickly re-fit the bulb. ‘Yup.’ I nod (Don’t give anything away, Clifford!).
‘Very convenient being so tall,’ Mr Huff observes.
‘Great for replacing bulbs,’ I affirm, ‘but not so great in other arenas. It’s hard to cram myself inside certain models of car.’
Mr Huff nods.
‘I sometimes break antique furniture.’
Mr Huff nods again.
‘And I play havoc with sofa and bed springs.’
Mr Huff considers this, scowling.
‘And everything’s dusty.’
Mr Huff looks quizzical.
‘I’ve noticed how women never dust above their own height. Up here I find everything’s dusty. It’s sad. I’ve often thought how there’s something deeply unloved about this altitude.’
Mr Huff’s eyes de-focus. I am boring him already.
‘I mean how are we going to dispose of it,’ he wonders, ‘with the bin stuck up on the Look Out?’
‘Follow me,’ I say, and walk around, through the little allotment (Ye Gods! He obviously hasn’t fed the badgers) to the front porch where the shark currently abides. I pick it up by the tail, take two steps forward and toss it over the cliff into the mess of rocky gorse below.
‘Bloody hell!’
Mr Huff is scandalized.
‘Something’s bound to eat it eventually.’ I shrug. ‘I’ll go and fetch you that bin now, eh?’
‘Will you climb up the little ladder?’ Mr Huff is intrigued. ‘It seemed a rather precarious arrangement when I went up there the other day.’
‘The ladder’s not a good option,’ I inform him. ‘The metal joists are corroded. It has a history of suddenly shearing off – falling out of the wall …’
Mr Huff blanches.
‘But there’s a series of thick planks hidden in some nearby bushes,’ I add, trying to keep the atmosphere positive, ‘and a quantity of corrugated iron. We generally construct a sloping walkway from the edge of the far end of the rock to the roof. It’s not especially stable …’
‘We?’ Mr Huff asks.
‘Local folk,’ I say, casually.
I stride out and Mr Huff follows. We retrieve the bin in no time. When we return we find a woman in the garden accompanied by two large red setters, tending the little girl’s shrine.
Mr Huff is not best pleased by her sudden arrival. One could almost go so far as to say that he is infuriated by it, and doubly so when one of the dogs menaces him as he opens the gate.
‘Do you know this person?’ he asks, stopping by the gate as I position the bin in its regular place, scowling.
‘Uh … no. But there’s a little gang of them,’ I say. ‘Good, decent Catholic women in the main. Locals for the most part. They aren’t too much of a problem. It’s the other group – the Romanies – you’ll need to keep an eye out for. They come up here in their vans and block off the roadway. Infuriates the people in the Coastguards’ Cottages, it does. Causes no end of trouble.’
‘But this is trespass, surely?’ Mr Huff persists.
‘If you try and stop them you’ll only make them more determined.’ I grin.
‘Faith is like bindweed,’ Mr Huff snarls, ‘an unremarkable enough plant, but give it any kind of leeway and you’ll find it pushing its fragile green shoots through thick inches of brickwork.’
‘They have Carla’s blessing.’ I shrug, moving past him.
‘Yes. Miss Hahn said as much in her Welcome Pack,’ Mr Huff grumbles, following. At the mention of Carla’s name he seems profoundly demoralized. I glance back at him as we circumnavigate the allotment to avoid the dogs. He looks ragged. I notice the pinkness of his irises, the bags under his eyes.
‘No point railing against it,’ I console him (emboldened by the Welcome Pack comment). ‘It’s going to be a major part of the plot at some point, I suppose.’
‘Sorry?’ Mr Huff looks confused.
‘The plot. The story,’ I repeat, ‘you know …’ I blithely indicate towards the little shrine. ‘Orla Nor Cleary. The truth behind what really happened back then. The subject of your book – the book. Everything else – the parrot, the landslip, this – it’s all just incidental detail, surely? Just filler. I mean I can’t speak for you, obviously, but I know I’m totally insignificant – just a minor character, a handy plot device. That’s it.’
Still nothing from Mr Huff, but it’s almost as if he starts to … to fade.
‘I’m very tired,’ he says, flickering. Or is it me that’s flickering? It’s hard to tell.
‘Mrs Barrow mentioned a rabbit?’ I quickly change the subject.
‘Rabbit?’ He instantly jumps back into sharp relief.
‘Mrs Barrow said you were building it a hutch.’
‘Yes,’ he sighs, ‘I suppose I am.’
‘It might be worth popping down to see Shimmy, Carla’s dad,’ I suggest. ‘His wife – Else, Carla’s mother – used to keep rabbits when Carla was a kid. She bred some kind of German lop. Huge beasts, they were. They ate them. After the war …’
Mr Huff is staring at me with a strange look on his face. You might almost call it a … a haunted look.
‘And they kept rescue dachshunds,’ I blather on. ‘She had about twelve of them, in kennels. It was a long time ago now, obviously. But he’s a great hoarder. He might still have something useful tucked away in one of his sheds.’
Mr Huff nods, but he doesn’t look especially taken by the idea.
‘I mean there’s no harm in asking,’ I persist.
‘It’s just that my … my wife ran over his cat …’ he starts off, then he frowns. ‘Although she’s not … she’s not … she’s not … not actually my …’
He shakes his head and his mouth suddenly contracts. He stops walking as we reach the back balcony, plops himself down on to the bench and covers his lean face with his skinny hands.
‘It’s all …’ he sniffs, trying to retain some vague hold on his dignity (failing dismally), ‘… all very confused … confusing.’
‘Can I …? Uh … Would you like me to …?’ I don’t even know what I’m suggesting I should do. Leave? Spontaneously combust? Gently evaporate? Quietly hang myself? (Oh she’d like that, wouldn’t she?! The cow Author? Well then I most definitely won’t be – hanging myself, I mean. No. I won’t be hanging myself. I’m far too tall to be hanging myself, for one thing. It’d be so difficult to arrange. Although there’s always the barn back on the farm, I suppose. Not that I’ve got any rope strong enough to … uh … aside from the blue nylon stuff Eddie’s been using to tether the …
What?!
No!
Why am I thinking like this?! I’ve never had these kinds of thoughts before – suicidal thoughts. And if I was going to kill myself it wouldn’t be by rope, it’d be sat quietly in the van with a grand view below me, up near the Country Park, maybe, engine running, blocked exhaust … Although with all that rust and the missing door there’s not much chance …
No!
I’m doing it again! She’s got me doing it again! I won’t be killing myself! I feel no urge to kill myself! None! I’m very much here – larger than life. I am substantially here. And I’m not going down without a fight, madam, you can be bloody sure of that! Bloody sure!
Good.)
I turn and take in the view. The sea view. This is the most beautiful view in all the world. Just scrubland and then sea. Well, the Channel, really. Just the bit of rough scrub, the ribbon of Sea Road following the sea wall, the pebble beach, the sea, the clouds, the sky.
‘Yes. No. My wife died,’ he blurts out (how much time has passed? Loads? None?). ‘Very suddenly. Three days ago. I’m just …’
‘Sorry?’ I turn, surprised (in truth I’d almost forgotten he was there).
‘My wife,’ he repeats, ‘died. Dead. She …’
I must look shocked – slightly disbelieving. Embarrassed. I mean this started out as a conversation about hutches – didn’t it? Didn’t it? About rabbits?
‘Not the cat woman,’ he commences, waving his hand about. ‘She wasn’t my wife. I was … it’s complicated. There’s a woman called … You might have heard of … she’s called Kimberly. Kimberly Couzens. She’s a photographer. We were married. She had the affair with … with him … you know. Bran. She was burned. In the explosion – the car – when he …’
‘Oh … Oh wow,’ I stutter, finally making the connection. ‘The Canadian? The photographer? She was your wife?’
‘Yes. Yes. I’m here for her.’ He nods, pathetically grateful to be understood. ‘I came for her. And I’m broke. Completely broke. I agreed to write the book as a sort of … a sort of favour. I’m not sure how it … I mean I’m not really sure … And then … then she just died. I mean she’s been disabled for years – with the burns being so severe … But this was something so sudden … so … so random, something to do with a tooth. A tooth! I’ve not eaten in four days. I’ve not … I’ve not told anyone … I’m just … The flight couldn’t be changed. I can’t go back for the funeral. Her mother has dementia. It’s been … then the shark … the flies. It’s been … I’ve been …’
Still the arm waving.
‘… really … really struggling,’ he finishes off, his voice cracking.
I don’t know what to say.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I say.
I’m furious. In fact, I’m steaming. I can’t believe the cow Author has sprung this on me. What a cow. What a cow.
