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Jim shuddered. He didn’t know why. Suddenly, though, he was wide awake. His nose was tingling. It was getting cold. Cold outside. Cold. Cold inside.
8
As far as Lily knew, her father, Ian, had been in Southampton for eight weeks taking care of her grandmother, who had suffered from a minor stroke three months before and was now fresh out of hospital and finding her feet back at home.
Lily’s mother, Sara, was taking care of the farm in his absence. Luckily, the farm pretty much looked after itself, because Sara was in a state of flux. She was forty-two and had shed over four stone during the previous year. A yeast allergy. When she’d avoided bread and buns and all those other yeasty temptations – the pizzas, the doughnuts, the occasional half pint of stout – the weight quite literally fell away. She’d been prone to extended attacks of thrush before, and now that had cleared up too, which was definitely an added bonus.
She was a new woman.
They had forty boar altogether. Which wasn’t many, actually. But the market for them had become increasingly lucrative over recent years. They were organic. They were shot at the trough. One minute they were gorging, the next they were dead. Quick as anything. The other boars took the shootings phlegmatically, each one just as keen to shove in their shoulder and take another’s place.
And in that respect, Lily felt, they were just like people.
Lily enjoyed the boars. She preferred them to pigs. They were hairier and even less genteel. They were bloody enormous. They were giant bastards. But they could be fastidious. They could smarm and twinkle if the mood took them.
Pigs, though, she’d observed, and with some relish, had very human arses. Like certain breeds of apes. Big, round bottoms. And they tiptoed on their trotters like supermodels in Vivienne Westwood platforms. But oh so natural. Boars were less human and they were less sympathetic, but they were so much more of everything else. They were buzzy and rough and wild.
Sara didn’t like Lily. Lily was not likeable. It was a difficult admission for a parent to make, but Lily was a bad lot. She was rough and she had no soft edges. She’d led a sheltered life. She’d been born premature and had lain helpless and bleating in an incubator for many months before they could even begin to consider taking her home.
And there were several further complications; with her kidneys, parts of her stomach, her womb. Things hadn’t entirely finished forming. Nothing was right. She was incomplete. So fragile.
And the bleeding. Her blood would not clot. Not properly. Even now, mid-conversation, her nose might start running, her teeth might inadvertently nick her lower lip, her nail might catch her cheek, her arm. Blood would trickle and drip, then gush, then flood. It wouldn’t stop. There were never any limits with Lily. There was never any sense of restraint or delicacy.
She was an old tap, a creaky faucet, she was an overflow pipe that persistently overflowed. She would ooze, perpetually. She seemed almost to enjoy it. She was a nuclear-accident baby. She was improperly sealed. She was all loose inside. She was slack. Thin. Pale. Blue-tinged. She was puny.
At first they’d thought they’d lose her. They’d prepared themselves. They’d almost bargained on it. They were on tenterhooks, year after year, just waiting for the life to be extinguished in a flash or a spasm or a jerk or a haemorrhage.
But Lily didn’t die. Her own particular brand of puniness was of the all-elbow variety. All-powerful. It burgeoned. It brayed and it whinnied. It charged and trampled. It essentially ran amok.
Her body remained weak but her mind hardened. She got stronger and stronger and crosser and crosser and wilder and wilder. She needed no one. And yet they’d made so many accommodations! They’d changed from an arable farm to a pig farm and finally to boar. Boar were less trouble. Less time-consuming. They’d stiffened themselves for some kind of terrible impact, but the impact never came. It never came. And so things began to fray. Slowly, imperceptibly. Down on the farm.
Sara, staring but never seeing, looking but never focusing, tried to search out probable justifications for Lily’s obnoxiousness, but she could find none. She searched her own heart. She wished Lily would do the same. But Lily wouldn’t. She didn’t. Not ever. And yet Lily had her own moral set-up, her own fears and beliefs, which were complex, abundant, comprehensive. They were simply well hidden. Like potatoes. Several feet under.
She worshipped a deity. It was her secret. The deity had a special name. It was called The Head. It survived in spirit but had been born and had died on one long, still night in 1982. An August night. So it made perfect sense that August should become the month that Lily set apart to celebrate The Head with some special rituals of her own making. She wasn’t unduly creative, usually, but in August she made an exception. In August she cut a neat incision on her arm with a piece of wire from the boar pens. Special wire. Then she killed one of the hens and blamed it on a fox.
Fox must’ve done it.
With the blood from the hen, and with her own blood, she soaked the earth behind the yew tree where she pretended that The Head had been buried. But The Head had not been buried there. It had been taken away by her father and incinerated, in all probability. Although they’d never discussed it.
The Head. A freak. Lily was five and had witnessed its birth. A reliable sow from the old herd had been mated with a boar. The farm’s first boar. They’d built a special enclosure just for him. It had been an experiment. Her father had wanted the best of both worlds. He’d called it ‘toe-dipping’. And sure enough, the sow had delivered eight healthy young, but then The Head had come, last of all, and it had taken the mother with it. Like Shiva. God of destruction.
Lily didn’t get a good look at it, initially. Her father had tried to hide it. He’d tossed it aside and kicked straw over it, like he did with all the stillborn babies whenever Lily was in attendance. But then he’d been obliged to run into the house to call a vet when the mother began struggling, so Lily had taken her chance to inspect the freak as it lay caked and smothered in its musty tomb of hay and grass.
When she pulled its cover aside, so tentatively, what had she seen? She’d seen a head – extended, elongated – and the remainder of a body; like a tiny, moist mitten. The body of a baby rat. Or a gerbil. No tail though. But it had lived! She knew it lived. Its mouth moved. Its eyes were as round and as trusting as a puppy’s. Its skin was pale and soft and glossy like blancmange. She wanted to touch it but her father returned, yelled at her and then sent her indoors.
The next day she could find no sign of it. The Head had gone. And she knew in her gut that he had done it in. Her own father. But The Head did not go, ultimately, because it infiltrated Lily’s dreams. It inked up her mind like an octopus. And it felt, strangely, as though there had been a space, a special gap in her imagination which was only just big enough to be inhabited by this particular creature. As though the creature had known that she lacked something. As if it had known that she needed it to feel complete. It satiated her. It became a deity. And so Lily celebrated it, and in celebrating it, she celebrated, however lopsidedly, her own sweet self.
Naturally, also, she blamed herself. And her father. She should have saved it. The Head. If only she could have touched it. If only, if only. It had needed understanding but it had received none. While the mother pig lay dying, Lily had watched coldly as the babies all struggled to suckle. They were not pigs and they were not boars. They were little, hairy hybrids. Striped. Distinctive. Cute, certainly, but neither one thing nor the other. Lily despised them. The Head did not consider suckling. He was looking for understanding, not food. He was set apart. The world would have different standards for him. For him things were much more complex. For Lily, also.
Nature was a hard taskmaster, Lily realized. That night she witnessed nature, nurture and then – the final blow – nothing. Lily alone grieved for The Head. She’d learned that nobody loved freaks. Not Dad, not Mum. No one loved freaks. Only she loved them. That was her role. And when The Head told her in a dream that she too was a freak, on the inside, and that the only reason Daddy didn’t kill her was because he hadn’t noticed what a freak she was yet, and that Mummy hadn’t caught on either, Lily saw no reason to disbelieve him.
But what if they did see? What was to stop them from covering her with straw? From getting rid of her? And acting afterwards like none of it had ever happened? What was to stop them?
Lily grew furtive. She grew stealthy.
She’d seen Jim. She’d noticed that he had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. He always wore a hat. Hiding something, she’d supposed. No hair. She imagined that he was ill, with leukaemia. He looked sick. Too pale. Always alone. Bent over like an old man, his body withered. She watched him. Nothing escaped her. She gathered information because it might come in handy, one day. You could never tell.
Sara was in the kitchen leaning against the Aga drinking hot Vimto when Lily arrived home, soaking wet. She demanded to know what was up. Her daughter should have been at college all afternoon, not dawdling on the beach. Lily couldn’t face a confrontation.
‘Here’s what happened,’ she said, licking the salt from her fingers. ‘I met this man down by Shellness Hamlet. Totally naked. He’s renting one of the prefabs.’
‘You mean the bald one?’
‘No. The bald one doesn’t use the beach. He keeps to himself. This guy was fat and smelled of fish. Anyhow, I told him he shouldn’t be allowed to walk on a public highway totally starkers.’
Sara frowned. ‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing. He didn’t get my point. He was heading down to the sea for a dip. But then I noticed that he’d gone and left his prefab door wide open. I was cycling past, so I couldn’t help seeing that all over the floor were these pictures of naked ladies. And I don’t mean just naked, I mean weird. Things stuck up their arses and everything. Animals.’
‘My God.’
‘Exactly. So I confronted him about it and he said it was none of my business. I didn’t like the look of him. I mean, he was naked. I thought he might turn nasty so I jumped into the sea to avoid him.’
Even Sara found this last bit difficult to comprehend.
‘You jumped into the sea? Why didn’t you just ride home?’
‘I dunno. I was angry, I suppose. He’s a sicko. This is a small place. There’s the nudist beach, which attracts the worst kind of people anyway. And now there’s this man. Attracted by the nudity. You know? Like this is a sewer. Our home.’
Sara shook her head. ‘It’s not good, certainly.’
‘It’s terrible.’
‘I don’t want you going down there again.’
‘Oh no,’ Lily smiled at this, her eyes icy, ‘no one stops me from going where I want to go and doing what I want to do. No bloody pervert, anyway.’
Sara felt vexed by Lily’s moral certainty. ‘Go and get changed. You’ll catch your death.’
Lily had dripped a puddle on to the kitchen flags. She held up her hands. Her knuckles were purple with cold.
‘I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the human body in its natural state,’ she said piously. ‘I’m not suggesting that for a moment. But what I am saying, though, is that one thing leads to another.’
She sounded just like her father.
‘I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the human body in its natural state,’ Sara said staunchly, ‘but what I am saying is that enough’s enough. My daughter is seventeen. She has a right to travel on a public highway without encountering this kind of thing.’
Luke was fully dressed. It was hard to believe that he would even consider walking a public highway stark naked.
‘Maybe you should step inside for a moment.’
He pulled the prefab’s door wide. Sara saw the picture of the woman with the high breasts. The woman, she noted, was not particularly attractive, which was good, somehow. Even so, she stood her ground. ‘No. I can’t stay.’
Lily was right. He did smell of fish.
Luke scratched his head. What should he do? Trouble was the last thing he’d expected here. He’d come for the emptiness. He’d come for an end to people and their associated burdens and stresses.
‘Lily arrived home soaking wet,’ Sara continued.
Luke nodded. ‘She jumped into the sea. I was very surprised.’
Sara shifted her weight from one leg to the other. Luke seemed harmless. But it was the harmless ones, she told herself, who were the real danger. Was that logical?
‘The thing is …’ she cleared her throat, ‘most of the people who live around here were upset about the nudist beach. It was a concession to the Hamlet.’ Sara pointed, uselessly, because it was pitch dark now. ‘I mean, the fenced-off chalets. And in general the rest of us don’t have that much to do with them. They tend to come and go. Summer weekends mainly. They aren’t what I’d call the community proper.’
‘And the prefabs?’
‘Pardon?’
‘This handful of prefabs. Are we the community proper?’
Sara frowned. Luke was thinking how gorgeous she was. If Sara had suspected, a feather could have felled her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly, ‘for some reason we tend to see them as separate.’
She thought for a moment. ‘I suppose that’s illogical, really.’
‘It is illogical.’
‘There’s the boatmaker at the end of the line. Two along. He’s permanent. And then there’s the artists down to the left. But they winter in Ibiza.’
Sara felt like she wanted to sneeze. Powerfully. But her nose was clear.
‘And next to me,’ Luke added, ‘is Jim.’
Jim.
‘You mean the sick one?’
‘He isn’t sick. It’s alopecia. It’s a condition. You lose all your body hair.’
‘Oh.’
‘He’s a nice guy. He keeps my cigarettes for me.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I gave up smoking, but I’ve entrusted him with a packet just in case. I’m actually purifying. That’s why I’m here. I’m downloading.’
Purifying? Downloading?
Sara stared at the picture again. Luke smiled. ‘My ex-wife.’
‘Really?’
She blushed. Luke noticed. He found it rather touching.
‘The only thing I don’t understand,’ Sara said, after a short pause, ‘is why her sandals are unfastened.’
Luke gazed at Sara with a sense of real wonder. And then he said, so softly that she could hardly hear him, in a whisper, ‘Is it you?’
Sara blinked rapidly. ‘Is who me?’
He continued to gaze at her, like his face was illuminated from the inside by a high-watt bulb. The glow of it made her step backwards, although she felt in no way intimidated.
‘We’ve never met before,’ she murmured. ‘I’m me. I’m Sara.’
And then, as if to contradict everything, a wild laugh flew out of her, so quickly, so unexpectedly, that it had filled each and every corner of the room before her own slow hand could move to mask her lips.
9
Jim found Ronny on the beach. Ronny was surrounded by several large piles of shells. It was six a.m.
‘What are you doing?’
Ronny was engrossed. He spoke slowly. ‘You know, one minute I was just sitting here, watching the sea, and the next I was sorting out these shells.’
‘Sorting them? What for?’
‘Into families. Into colours.’
Jim sat down. He took one shell from one of the piles and one from another. He held them next to each other. ‘I see no difference.’
Ronny inspected Jim’s two shells. ‘Then you aren’t looking.’
Jim put the shells back down. ‘So what will you do with them once they’re all sorted?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps you could create something.’
‘Like what?’
‘People cover wine bottles in them. Or they make shell frogs or shell dolls in shell dresses.’
Jim watched as Ronny picked up the two shells he had just put down.
Ronny displayed them to him. ‘You put these back on the wrong piles. Couldn’t you tell?’
