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I turn and inhale the view again. I refuse, no, no, I won’t be drawn into this bloody farrago! And I’m angry that I thought I had it all down pat … this … this situation … the set-up … the plot … but now to find out that my knowledge has been … well, just selective … compromised. He was married to the photographer! Why didn’t I know that?! I mean if I knew about the parrot. Why’d I know about the sodding parrot – all about it! – but nothing about this?
I breathe in deeply and force myself to enjoy the view. The view is still here. The view is still beautiful.
Behind me I hear him sobbing.
Oh God, why? Why?
‘Well, you still need a hutch,’ I maintain. Still looking at the view. Still feeding off the view. I really love this view. I could happily die looking at this view.
‘Yes,’ he sniffs.
No more thoughts about dying. I reach into my pocket.
‘Tangerine?’
I turn and offer it to him.
‘Thanks.’
He accepts the tangerine.
‘I don’t think I actually met her,’ I say. ‘Your wife. The photographer. But I did see her around and about the place. On the beach with her camera photographing everything …’
He glances up, sharply. ‘You were here back then?’
‘I’m always here.’ I nod. ‘That’s me. A part of the landscape – a blot on the landscape. In fact I was … uh … Carla and I were …’ I shrug.
‘Oh. Oh, really?’
Mr Huff looks slightly surprised. ‘So you were … Oh. So you were here – resident – when everything uh …?’ He scowls. ‘But why didn’t I already know that?’
I shrug (cow Author not doing her job, I suppose).
‘That’s never been mentioned,’ Mr Huff persists, ‘I mean there isn’t any physical evidence, any testimony … and documentary evidence in all of the … all of the …’
He starts feeling for his pockets (grief briefly forgotten) as if the information relating to my early life in Pett Level might be miraculously contained therein.
Oh, here it is – here’s the little bit of paper all about what an insignificant lump of crap you are (cheerfully holds out tiny till receipt with hardly anything printed on it).
‘It’s my size.’ I shrug. ‘I’m so huge that people kind of … they pass me over. It’s difficult to engage. They ignore me the way you’d ignore a giant bear.’
‘You’re the elephant in the room.’ Mr Huff grins, weakly.
‘Yes.’
‘But how odd,’ he repeats, shaking his head again, ‘that Kimberly never mentioned you, never photographed you. She worked as a war photographer for several years. Her photographs were amazingly … I don’t know … comprehensive, habitually copious, all-inclusive …’
As he speaks I quietly remember Kimberly and her camera. On the beach, in the garden, the house. Yes. I remember the camera always snapping. I remember – countless times, countless times – being briefly blinded by the flash.
‘I should go and take a quick peek at that bathroom window,’ I say. There are dark feelings in my heart. That’s the only way I can describe them – the feelings. Dark. I mean to be so easily … so … so routinely ignored.
Who’s behind this I wonder? Who’s at the back of this? Is it her? The Author? Has she gone back into the photographer’s portfolio, the photographer’s mind and just … just silently erased …?
Oh for heaven’s sake!
Just fix the window, Rusty! Just go and fix the window!
I walk through the cottage to the bathroom (ducking to avoid the door lintels, the light fitments). When I get there I realize that I have no tools with me. The ceiling is very low. I can’t straighten my neck. And there is a rabbit in the bath. A tiny rabbit. It has a very … a very deep, a quiet, an almost … a mystical quality about it.
Pink eyes. Pink nose.
I perch on the edge of the bath and I watch it. I look like I am communing with the rabbit (from the outside, in the uncut footage), and I am – but I am also hatching a plan. Yes. Me – I – Clifford Bickerton, Rusty Bickerton. I am hatching a plan. A secret plan. Which I won’t divulge here, because it’s a secret, obviously.
Every so often I think, Is this her? Is this her plan? Or is it me?
And then I expunge those thoughts (expunge? Is that a word I would use, naturally? Is it my word or is it … Oh God, is it her word?). I stare at the little rabbit.
Hello, rabbit! It’s me, Clifford, the Invisible Man!
The invisible man, eh? Ha! Well we’ll see about that, shall we, my little pink-eyed friend, hmmn?
12
Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
It’s because I’m so over-wound, so damn tired. I mean to be … to find myself intent on building a rabbit cage (a rabbit cage! A rabbit cage!) when I should actually be … I don’t know … arranging the flowers. She loved freesias, hyacinths, old-variety pinks (those foul, dirty-looking ones), anything aromatic, anything with a scent in other words.
Yes. I should be involved – on hand. Worrying about the details. I should be selecting the coffin, bearing the coffin. Choosing the music (something scruffy and pointless and suitably inconclusive by The Band). I should be planning the eulogy. Just being … being there. But instead I’m here. Here. In this hell-hole with its maddeningly attractive English view and its slightly broken-down, chaotic, self-satisfied, bohemian … And the only solid food I’ve consumed in the past three days (that I’m consciously aware of) is a tangerine. Or a satsuma. Or a clementine.
I’m broke. Broke! Kim had promised to send me a cheque just as soon as the advance came through …
Dammit!
And now she’s … she’ll be … for ever … indubitably … incontrovertibly …
Ka-ka-ka-put.
Ker-plunk.
Doiiiing!
So I go over to Mr Hahn’s cottage (it’s only a short walk) to enquire about the rabbit cage … A rabbit cage? This is ridiculous! Ridiculous! And I am approaching the front door when I hear a kind of … a little wail. A pathetic, little wail. A cat? An injured hedgehog? An amorous fox? So I jink left, to the side of the property, down a badly kept gravel path and I see … I see … How to put this politely? A bum in the air. High up. Halfway over a tall gate. Two slim legs kicking aimlessly.
Of course to free up my hands to help (of course – but of course!) I am obliged to fill my mouth with the rest of the tangerine – satsuma – clementine. But then I can’t … I can’t communicate! Ridiculous! So I … I kind of … I pat the bottom gently, to alert it to my presence, move the bike (yes, there’s a bike), try and grab the foot to …
I know. Yes. I do know that it’s Carla Hahn’s foot (who else could it possibly belong to but she?). It is, isn’t it? Yes. It is. It’s her foot. And (for the record), one of her deck shoes is falling off, revealing an old sock with a giant hole in the heel (so unfeminine! So unedifying!). She kicks out this foot, emitting another curious little yelp. And I see that her awful trousers with the roped-up waist, or another pair just like them – equally unflattering – have become hooked over a little jutting piece of wood. The belt has become hooked, I mean, the rope belt. So I say … I mean I’m speaking, although not especially well … what with the half tangerine (all this is happening very quickly, much more rapidly than I could hope to describe it – a mere matter of seconds) … I say, ‘Brace yourself. I’m going to unhook your jeans from a little … uh …’
And I unhook them. In fact I untie them. And then she falls like a bag of potatoes, out of the trousers. She disappears from view. The heel of her old white plimsoll almost smacks me in the face.
Oh balls!
‘Hello? Can you hear me? Are you all right?’
Short silence, followed by a door opening and someone speaking in a thick, German accent, followed by the gate-person, the fallen person (Miss Hahn) yowling plaintively, ‘I’ve dislocated my thumb!’
I’m not sure why, exactly, but I suddenly think that this might be a good time to make myself scarce. I’m not … I’m not running away, as such, no. I’m just not … not emotionally equipped to engage with all this right now. I didn’t … I didn’t ask for this to happen. I mean I should be planning a funeral, attending a funeral. And if not in fact, well, then at least in my fevered brain. The perfect funeral for Kimberly. A fantasy funeral for darling Kimberly, my recently deceased …
I just don’t need all this … all this … uh …
When I return to the cottage (a little out of breath, slightly furtive, perhaps) I find the big man, Clifford Pemberton (Is it Pemberton?) sitting out front on the bench. He is deep in thought. He has the rabbit in his hand. It fits, in its entirety, into his giant palm.
‘That was quick!’ he remarks.
‘Nobody home,’ I lie.
‘Oh. Well I had a thought while you were gone,’ he says, pointing towards a partially dismantled chest of drawers which is lying on its back close by on the lawn. ‘I found it in the shed,’ he says. ‘She was planning to chop it up for kindling – but in the meantime …’
I go over to inspect it.
‘We’ll need some kind of …’
‘Already thought of that …’
‘Oh yes. Genius.’
Inside the upturned chest is the cover of an old sewing machine.
‘It’s a perfect retreat,’ he says, ‘there’s a little hole in the front, the exact size he needs – custom made, almost! I filled the insides with straw. He’ll need food and water then he’s set up. Obviously you’ll want to bring him indoors at night or the badgers will suck his brains out.’
I wince. The badgers really are – they really are – the most awful blight.
‘It’s milking time,’ Pemberton continues, in a loud voice (stiffly, awkwardly, almost as if delivering the lines of a bad play). He stands up. ‘But before I head off …’
He gives me an intense, one could almost call it a meaningful look.
‘Is there a problem?’ I ask. What an extraordinary man he is! So messy. Like he’s been drawn with a broken brown crayon by a bored child with an excess of imagination.
‘You made Carla cry on the beach the other day,’ he tells me (very quickly, garbled, almost). As he speaks, I suddenly feel myself fading (or is it him? Is he fading?). Exhaustion. Lack of food, I suppose.
‘I don’t understand what happened there,’ he continues (he almost looks fierce – so big, so decent, all that dark hair, the red beard), ‘but I do know that in all likelihood it was Carla who left the shark under your bed. It’s just …’ He shrugs.
There follows a period of what I can only describe as ‘white noise’, ‘static’, and the most I can decipher is ‘Sword of Truth’ and ‘Web of Artifice’. He gives me a ten pound note and then passes me the rabbit.
‘The cow will probably kill me now,’ he says.
The cow? Sorry? The cow? Is he referring to Miss Hahn? Someone else? Mrs Barrow? His sister? His mother? Is this simply all about his being late for milking? For milking the cows? I wish I could … but the sweep of noise … like a giant … a giant wave crashing. A Lear jet flying at low altitude. A malfunctioning washing machine perpetually stuck on its spin cycle rocking its way across the kitchen tiles.
Uh …
What a strange man he is! Look at him! Look at his lips working! Like the mouthparts of a giant wasp – a bee – in astonishing close-up! So hairy – huge – confused …
Bumbling! Yes. Intense! Certainly. Deluded? Hmmn. But he seems decent enough (journalist’s first instinct. Gotta try and trust my initial gut …), uh …
Okay – okay, yes, the way he immediately knew where that missing bulb could be located. Highly suspicious. And the custom-made planks in the hedge by the Look Out? Strange. His desperate need to get shot of me for a while (Miss Hahn’s mother and the giant, German rabbits? I know for a fact – a fact! – that rabbit isn’t even kosher). Yup. He’s got an agenda a mile wide, I’d have thought.
Did Miss Hahn ever actually date him? It seems an improbable union. And what about the signal lack of any documentary evidence (photographic, earlier testimonial etc.) to this effect? And the parrot? Which parrot? Whose parrot?
What is he? Who is Clifford né Rusty Pemberton? What does he amount to, narratively? Is he a mere nothing? A nobody? Is he a missing link or a red herring? A loose cannon? A pointless distraction? A blind alley? A freak? A fanatic? A fantasist?
Because why would he be so determined to push Miss Hahn into the fray if he wasn’t (all of the above – none of them)? By outright accusing her? Why would a friend – a protector – feel the urge to behave in that way? So disloyal – so ungentlemanly. I mean I won’t pretend that I hadn’t suspected her myself – before. But now? No. Now, she’s the only person I don’t suspect! Our dear Mr Pemberton on the other hand … Oh-ho! With friends like these, Miss Hahn, who needs …?
Perhaps I’ve been slightly rash in confiding in him? Should’ve kept up my guard. Stiff upper etc. Although if he’s as strange and as skittish as he appears, then why would local people believe anything he says?
He prepares to leave.
Oh dear. Did I really make Miss Hahn cry the other day? On the beach?
We attempt to shake hands but this is rendered impossible by the ten pounds and the rabbit. So instead he kind of … he sort of curtseys.
Once he’s gone I sit down for a minute to try and gather my thoughts together. After about ten or so seconds the white noise diminishes. Well thank God for that! But then another sound neatly replaces it. Barking. Yes – barking! – followed by a series of profuse apologies. A woman’s voice. Then Mr Pemberton – Rusty – saying, ‘It’s fine. It’s absolutely fine. It isn’t deep. I actually … I … I sort of expected it, to be perfectly honest.’
13
Miss Carla Hahn (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
Poor old Rogue is no more. Which is terribly sad. But worse still is the knowledge that I – yes, me! – am going to be chiefly responsible for burying the body. Tatteh is too busy focusing on the onerous task of preparing a brief funeral oration and gathering together Rogue’s favourite toys to be buried alongside him (I note that several of these are items I have given to Tatteh myself – among them a Clarks’ sandal, a Johnson’s cashmere scarf and a little, plastic flamingo which I bought to commemorate the arrival of a lone bird of that species on Pett Pools in 1978, 1979 or some time thereabouts).
I have a fork and a spade, but the ground is pretty hard. And space is limited because numerous other dog corpses have been deposited here in years past. Upwards of thirty and counting, I’d have thought.
And Rogue was so huge! The sheer depth required to cover his bulk, and the terrible likelihood that if he isn’t buried deep enough the foxes will dig him up again haunt me as I work. I have bound up the thumb which aches horribly. In fact I am unwinding my makeshift bandage (consisting of a mesh washing-up cloth) and attempting to reapply it when Clifford Bickerton comes charging into the garden.
‘I saw your bike out front as I was driving past,’ he puffs. ‘Your dad says you dislocated your thumb.’
‘Rogue had a heart attack,’ I explain. ‘I was climbing over the side gate and my pesky belt got snagged on a piece of wood …’
Rusty takes off his work coat, folds it over his arm in order to put it down and grab the spade and commence digging, but as he does so a clementine (satsuma? Tangerine?) falls out of the pocket and rolls into my partly dug hole.
I stiffen.
‘Then after I’d been hanging there a while,’ I continue (more halting, now), ‘some big goose … some … some Smart Alec happens along and … and without warning … they untied my trousers. I fell head first on to the gravel below. Dislocated my thumb. Then they buggered off.’
‘Bloody hell!’
Rusty looks shocked, then ruminative (not quite the reaction I’d have expected). His eyes briefly de-focus.
I reach down and retrieve the satsuma, once again remembering – quite clearly – that very strong smell of tangerine. Or clementine. Or satsuma. From earlier. I proffer him the fruit.
‘Keep it,’ he suggests, ‘I’ve been eating the bloody things all morning. Mum bought a giant sack of them for the B&B-ers. I’ve actually got a little ulcer on my tongue.’
