Loss of Separation (34 page)

We moved back to the harbour barrier in this way, me crawling like a penitent dog, him keeping pace behind me, both of us growling with pain. The car was up ahead. I'd left the keys in the ignition. I was wondering how much of a chance I'd have to get in and drive off before he shot me in the back of the head. He stopped walking. I twisted around, carefully, looking for a rock or a stick, anything I could use as a weapon, but there was nothing and it was too dark to see. He threw the harpoon down. He sat down opposite me and reached up a hand to grab hold of the mask. I almost cried out for him to stop. His doing that marked a beginning to an end I wasn't sure I'd be able to cope with.

The thunder was fattening, out to sea. It seemed impossibly loud now, metronomic. The sky enjoyed no respite from it. Lightning sizzled around the clouds and occasionally escaped them. The man pulled off the mask and Charlie was standing there, suddenly diminished, as if my recognising him shed him of all his threat. He was just Charlie, in a big coat. And I could see that the fight had gone from him. It was as if taking that mask off had stripped him of his desperation. There were tears there, I could tell, even through the rain. His eyes were liquid with them, as if they'd turned to this shimmering blue wetness and if only he tipped his head forward it would all come drizzling out.

Through the tears and the snot he mewled: 'I can't do this. I can't do this. I won't do this.'

I sat back in the mud, staring at him. I thought I'd heard him say this before. A long time ago. But it might well have been déjà vu. 'Jesus,' I said. 'Charlie... it's you. It's... Tamara, she's in your hut isn't she?'

'Forget it, Paul. Y'should get out. Leave Southwick. Now.'

'Did you take her? Let me see her, now.'

I'd got hold of the tail of his coat and was dragging myself upright. I was going to get hold of his throat and I meant to squeeze until he did as I asked, or he died, whatever happened first.

'I never wanted... but there was no way out of it, y'see? It's all my fault.'

He seemed far away, tied up in his own thoughts and emotions. The tears were coming freely now, despite his efforts to conceal them. Exhaustion and shock had us both. We were slapping each other's hands away, trying to find new purchase, grappling in the mud like children.

'What happened?' I asked him. 'While I was out of it. While I was in hospital. What happened to her? What did you do?'

I felt I could have barked questions at him for an eternity, but I bit my lip and gave him space to answer. I had to know. It was hard to hear anything beneath that racketing sky. Our faces were centimetres apart. I could see the pain and the time etched into his; he could see mine too. I could see mine, in the mirrors of his eyes. He smelled of smoked fish and sugary mints and hot wax.

His mouth was moving as if trying on the fit of the words before speaking them. But nothing came out. His eyes took on a wounded, pleading look, like a dog caught stealing from the dinner table.

'I always wanted to be a dad,' Charlie said at last, and it was as if they were the hardest words he had ever uttered in his life. They came out strangled, on tortured puffs of air. I could only sit there in the freezing mud and water, listening to him. I got the feeling he'd have been saying this even if he had no audience.

'And then, at the moment I was going to become one, things happened. My wife died. She haemorrhaged right there, on the table, while my daughter was inching out. I held her hand and there was nothing I could do. She was gripping my hand so tightly, right at the end. She was full of strength. And then the baby was born. I held Ruth in my arms while the nurses and doctors were running around trying to save my wife. And Ruth was so quiet. No crying. Until I saw my wife go slack. I saw the life go out of her. And then Ruthie screamed so hard I thought she was going to break.'

His eye caught mine and he stumbled a little, as if embarrassed at the extent of his revelation. 'I couldn't go through with it,' he said. 'She wanted to die, Ruthie, that day in Byrning's Pit.
It's all right, Da. I'm going to see Mum.
She wanted to go. But how can a father allow that? I've never been able to finish anything. That day out on the sea, fishing, I was supposed to... y'weren't to come back with me. There was meant to be an accident.'

'You were
supposed
to? What, you were under
orders
?'

'We're trying our best,' he said. 'We're trying our utmost to cleanse the soul by eating its filth. Like you, son, on that beach, with y'little burning piles of hurt and regret. What a role model y'proved to be.'

'Cleanse the soul? By kidnapping my girlfriend? Tell me where she is, Charlie. Or this time there
will
be a fucking accident.'

His face changed. It became sneering and furious, but there was a tremble beneath it all, as if it was underpinned with sorrow and doubt. It was not a face designed for violence.

He said: 'You would never understand. The one hope you had was that Ruth loved you. That saved you. And it would save... it might save...'

He punched me and I went sprawling. My nose became a hot, melting centre to my head. The pain was astonishing; I almost laughed out loud, I was so surprised by it. Shreds of Charlie's coat were trapped beneath my nails where I'd torn it as I'd been launched backwards. He stood there in the wind in his raggedy coat like a scarecrow blasted into life by the storm. He seemed incapable of making a decision and rocked there on his thick limbs as if torn between one direction and the other. Then he stumped towards the car I'd stolen.

'Stop!' I called out, but blood was pouring down the back of my throat and the plea turned into a choking fit. 'What about Ruth? You have to go to the police, Charlie. You have to do what's right. There's a child in the middle of all this. You... Ruth is having a baby. You can't just walk away!'

I started retching and sneezing. I thought I would drown out here on the floodwater and the stormwater and my own fleeing juices. I had to stop him. Something awful had happened to Tamara. I was sure of it. 'Give me the key, Charlie. To your hut. Do the right thing.'

He was looking at me, shaking his head, his teeth a clenched white rectangle. Eyes creased into confusion and pain and fear. His hand reached for the car door. I dragged myself upright, but my foot slipped in the mud and I went down again. I opened my eyes, blinking away mud and grit, and the gleam of the harpoon was there, directly in front of me, the very tip of its point fizzing with its own lightplay. Panic leapt in me like something alive in my stomach. I picked up the harpoon, disconcerted by how light it was, and screamed at Charlie to stop. And he did, for a moment, although that could have had as much to do with the violence in the sky as the warning in my voice. I saw him turn his head to the right, to the east, to the mass of folding, imploding cloud piling against the headland. It seemed impossible that the atmosphere could contain all of that, that the weather had somehow transgressed nature's boundaries, and that the storm was now trespassing in space. But I glanced at it too, and there was something else in that cloud, adding to its noise, providing a weird, black countermeasure to the cacophony. I thought it must be my heart arresting. I thought the injuries I had sustained might be life-threatening, that the harpoon that had sliced through me had taken some vital organ with it, or nicked an artery and I was now bleeding internally, had lost so many pints that there was nothing left for the heart to pump around and it was sucking in and chucking out little more than a red mist.

I didn't mean to fire the harpoon right at him. I meant for it to be a shot across the bows. Something to halt him, give him pause, make him come back so I could reason with him about Tamara. I needed him alive.

But he had slid in behind the wheel and the red lights of the car came on and my finger tightened on a trigger that needed many less pounds per square inch in order for it to execute its job.

At first I thought the car had been hit by lightning. There was a shower of sparks and a great belch of black smoke that leapt from the opened tailgate. I could hear the ricochet of hot metal fizzing against metal. There was fire now, so bright, so hot in such a short time that I was pressed back, despite standing over ten metres away. The tank of compressed gas. I must have ruptured it with the harpoon. I saw a shape jerking within that fierce orange glow. The driver's side door opened and Charlie collapsed on to the floor; the water put him out instantly. His clothes were smoking and his hair had been scorched down to stubble. He was writhing like a cut worm, trying to get away from the car, or out of his steaming skin.

I ran to him and dragged him clear of the wreckage, mindful of the petrol tank, but he was dead. What was left of his mind just hadn't caught on to the idea yet. There was a ragged fist-sized hole in the side of his neck; it looked like some animal had taken a great bite out of him. The heat from the explosion had cauterized it immediately. He kept shrugging, as if it were no more irritating than the remains of a haircut that had fallen down the back of his shirt.

He was flopping there like any one of the fish released on to the deck of the
Gratitude
. He was opening and closing his mouth. It was as if the mask was still on him. He had become what he was using to hide himself from the world.

'The Craw,' he managed. 'The Craw. It's coming.'

He died then, and I held it together long enough to frisk him for the keys to his shed. I slithered away from him through the mire, mouth rigid with shock. I was completely black with mud and blood. I eventually threw away the harpoon, which I was clenching so hard my fist had seized shut and I had to bite at the muscles in order to relax their grip. I was exhausted. I couldn't tell if the clouds were real or merely the cross-hatchings of my brain trying to shut me down for a while and feed me some desperately needed rest. Lightning might only be so much brain activity sparking around my lobes. Bad weather was in me. Here was a low.

I blinked. The cloud was changing. Something monstrous was pushing the ghost of its own shape before it. This thunder was man-made, mad-made. Thrust and lift. Approach speed. ETA.

Charlie was wrong. The Craw was not coming. Whatever held sway over this village, it had nothing to do with some childhood shade, a bad bedtime story, a hex. I closed my eyes. I said:

Flight Z

Arrival

Ladies and gentlemen, this is First Officer Roan here. Good evening. We have commenced our descent. The weather is dead wet, dead windy. The present temperature is dead cold. Death is all around. We'll be landing shortly. Please take off your seatbelts and observe the no smoking signs. This does not extend to the aircraft, which is already on fire. We apologise for the turbulence you're experiencing at the moment. It won't get any better. In fact, there are fatigue cracks the size of a tree trunk already in the fuselage. If you look out of your windows on the left hand side of the plane, you'll see your life flashing by.

I came out of a dizzy, grey spell and was sick again, although it was little more than a thick cord of spit that hung from the back of my throat like a squeeze of glue. I was losing blood. I was dying. I felt something hard and hot against my thigh. I thought maybe it was the harpoon, that it was still embedded in me, and that would be good - I remembered from my first aid training - that would be much better than it having gone straight through me. But no, it was just the knot. Charlie's old piece of string that he'd given me to practise my sailor's bindings. I pulled it out now; its shape was comforting to me, coming as it did from a time when things were much simpler. I slept, I burned, I walked, I tied knots.

I kept that weird little indented pile of string in my fingers and it helped keep my mind on staying conscious. That and the slap of the freezing wind was distracting me from the heat spreading through the right side of my body. My hand came away black when I felt there. I was numb. No pain. I guessed that was a bad thing. I stared up at the sky and saw the bulge of clouds, like something alchemic being fomented in a maniac's laboratory flask.

Flight Z tore through that weather like something being birthed out of nightmare, something emerging from a membrane. I saw pieces of it raining down into the sea and only realised they were bodies when I saw the pinwheeling of arms and legs, hideously illumined by the daggers of lightning. The engines were on fire, and screaming as if they possessed voices to give shape to the agony of their disintegration. I saw the two fuselages disengage with a soft, popping sound. One wing was sheared off and flipped lazily towards the sea. A great deck of seating fell out of the fissure in the belly of the aircraft. I could see the hair on the belted passengers snaking above them as if they were thrill-seekers on a fairground ride.

The wind dropped and the rain lessened, as if paying respect. I whispered something... it might have been
Advance the throttles.
But I was losing my grip on things. The jet hit the water. The noise and the fire might have become the thunder and the lightning. It might all have been the jags of pain shooting through my head.

Burning aviation fuel marked out the crude trajectory of the jet's final approach. Already I could smell it, charging inland, pressed on by the winds. I thought I saw a seal's head bobbing some distance away, perhaps curious about the commotion. But then there were more, and they weren't seals' heads. They were human. Some of them were still attached to bodies that ponderously trudged out of the sea, weighed down by waterlogged clothes and carry-on luggage. They came silently up the beach and crowded into the harbour, ovine, as if searching for the queue for passport control. A child carried in one hand a teddy bear that was singed and saturated, and in the other, the naked leg of a woman that she used as a walking stick to help her move the molten clubs of her own feet. A man whose face had been sealed shut with heat puzzled over a flight itinerary. Oxygen masks were fused into faces. Lifejackets and flesh were seamlessly joined. An elderly woman dragged herself and the metal skeleton of the seat she had burned into up the cindered path like a charity marathon runner whose choice of costume has backfired.