Orkney Twilight (2 page)

At first she thought his song-and-dance routine was funny, but he carried on being the madman just a bit too long and she could detect the familiar creeping edge of menace in his tone that made her wonder whether he really was slightly cracked. She began to wish he would stop, calm down, return to normal. Then she knew she had to tread carefully because she didn’t want to tip the balance. She sat silently and smiled at his antics.

‘And when you’ve proved yourself as the third man,’ he added when he had run out of steam and was standing by the desk again, ‘you can graduate to working at the Foreign Office and you can have a stab at being the third secretary.’

He snorted at his own joke. She laughed too, just to be on the safe side.

He stopped snickering and pulled his serious face. ‘But you mustn’t say anything to anybody. Not a word. Not even to Liz. It’s a secret. You must never let on you’re part of the team.’

She nodded obediently, noticed he was grinning to himself and decided then it must have been a joke after all, just like everything he ever said was always a bit of a joke, had the touch of a pantomime to it.

And that was the moment when it dawned on her that he wasn’t a real policeman at all; it was just another of his funny stories. In that one quick flash, everything – the office, the docks, the sky, the river – had risen up in the air like a disturbed flock of starlings and resettled back on the ground in a completely different formation. Suddenly it was obvious, crystal clear that he had been making it up, having her on. And now she couldn’t understand why she had gone along with his line in the first place, why she had told all her friends her dad was a sergeant at some unnamed cop shop, had a truncheon and handcuffs and went around locking up criminals, because now she could see there was absolutely nothing about Jim to show his story might be true. He didn’t wear a uniform. He didn’t chase robbers. He didn’t arrest people. The facts were as bright and as hard as the gleaming cranes of Tilbury. He couldn’t possibly be a proper policeman. The doubts in her stomach that must have been sitting there all along, fermenting like the windfall apples left lying in the grass to rot in their back garden, were becoming uncontainable, rising upward, making her want to puke. She felt the tears welling but she blinked them back because she knew crying made Jim cross. She swallowed hard and ripped another piece of tape from the dispenser.

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ he said, rummaging in his jacket pocket, ‘I’ve got a present for you.’

He produced a feather, amber and black striped. ‘I found it over in the container park. It must be from the kestrel’s tail.’ He considered its sleek form. ‘Funny things, feathers. Who would have thought that something so flimsy and light could be strong enough to keep a bird hovering in mid-air?’ He smiled and handed it over. ‘Here, take it.’

She smiled back. ‘Thank you.’

‘It’s a souvenir from Tilbury.’

She held it up to the light, admiring the fine vanes, the clean, sharp bars of colour, distracted and soothed by its beauty and, as she twiddled the quill between her finger and thumb, she decided that it didn’t really matter what he did. Work wasn’t that important after all. Who cared what job a person had, what they did for a living? What really mattered, she thought as she stashed the feather in a trouser pocket, were the birds and the sun and the river and the days off school when you could just read a book or daydream and you didn’t have to listen to some dreary teacher telling you things you had learned when you were three.

Later, much later, the touch of a feather would take her back to the day at the docks with Jim, and the delicate strength of the fine barbs able to hold a raptor aloft would remind her that nothing was ever quite as it appeared; reality always had an unsettling habit of turning out to be more like the knot in her stomach, a suppressed feeling, the half-familiar details of a story told once, long ago, and left buried in the drift of discarded memories.

7th June 1984

The crack of the motorbike’s engine made her jump. The beam picked her out in the dusk, its brightness blinding, her frozen silhouette caught in the oncoming glare of the headlight. Jesus wept, was he trying to kill her? At the last possible moment the front tyre swerved and the heat of the beam whipped away. She stared after the dancing red trace of the tail light as the bike roared off, leaving her alone again in the gloom of the oak-shaded road. She shook her head, sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, noticed her right arm was trembling, pressed it against her stomach, trying to stem the flow of fear and breathed in deeply. Her shoulders sagged. What was all that about then? What a wanker. Perhaps he had just lost control of the bike momentarily. Or maybe he was stoned. Jerk either way. Anyway, he’d gone now. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. She had overreacted, panicked.

She stepped back on to the kerb cautiously, pulled her second-hand overcoat around her slight frame and listened out for the crack of the bike’s engine. But there was nothing to hear now except for the normal suburban soundtrack: a backyard mongrel howling, the bass line of ‘Blue Monday’ pumping through a Ford’s open window, the drone of the traffic chasing south. Above her, a darkening track of sepia sky was just visible through the tangled branches of the trees. She tipped her wrist to the light to check her watch – it was past nine. How long had she been standing there? Ten minutes at least. Becky was late.

‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered under her breath, feeling edgy and, as she peered down the road again to search for the bus, she heard a low-pitched buzzing coming from behind. She twisted, saw a black bullet hurtling straight at her, raised her hand, ducked too late, felt the sting on the side of her face, half screamed, curtailed her yelp and smiled when she recognized the gross mandibles of a concussed stag beetle lying at her feet. Everything appeared to be targeting her tonight. The humidity must have brought it out from the wood. She hadn’t seen one in years. She squatted down on the pavement to admire its branching black antlers, its copper armour plating, its lumbering crawl as it blundered back towards the shadow line of the trees. She was so engrossed in its strange beauty that she almost failed to hear the crescendo crack-crack until the bike was almost on top of her again. Adrenalin hitting, heart racing, she straightened, just had time to tense her muscles for flight before clocking that the beam had swept past her and the bike had swerved off the road into the pub’s car park. So he had just been looking for an out-of-town bar after all. He wasn’t after her. Stupid. She bit her bottom lip and surreptitiously watched the bike manoeuvre into a space between two cars, caught sight of its black hornet-shaped thorax; off-road night-rider.

He huffed with the effort of hauling his heavy machine on to its stand, sauntered in her direction, leather-clad, helmet on, visor up, the scent of oil greeting her before he was halfway across the car park.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he drew near. Muffled voice. ‘I must have scared you just now. I thought I ought to apologize.’

She shrugged, made as if she didn’t know what he was talking about, hadn’t been scared at all. He removed his helmet, thick black greasy locks plastered against his dirt-streaked face. Mid-twenties she reckoned.

‘I was out for a bit of a ride. Not really sure where I was going, just looking for somewhere to have a drink. I saw you standing there, on the kerb.’

A twang was audible now, a lift at the end of his sentences leaving a trail of unanswered questions. Australian possibly.

‘I thought you were someone I knew. You look like an ex-girlfriend of mine. She’s Dutch. She came to England to train as a nurse. It threw me a bit. The likeness. Are you Dutch?’

‘No,’ she said. Course she wasn’t Dutch; first he nearly runs her over with his mad bike-riding and then he tries to chat her up with some lame bollocks about looking Dutch. She turned and stared down the road pointedly, hoped he would get the message and piss off.

‘Well, I’m sorry if I scared you.’

She folded her arms, glanced back at him out of the corner of her eye, caught sight of a hand disappearing inside his leather jacket, a flash, a compact, metallic object in his palm, raised arm. Shoot position. She blinked. It was just a gold box of Benson and Hedges.

‘Are you sure I didn’t scare you?’ he asked. ‘You look a little jumpy.’ He held the open packet out for her. ‘Want one?’

‘No thanks.’

He pat-patted his jacket with his spare hand, searching his pockets. ‘Do you have a light? I usually have my Zippo on me, but I can’t find it. I must have left it somewhere.’

‘I might have a box of matches.’ She rummaged in her coat pocket, felt the rough edge of a Swan Vesta box, was about to hand it over, remembered she had stashed her hash inside, retracted her offer and instead grasped a single matchstick, pushing its red head against the sandpaper strike. The match flared, licked the thickening dusk air, illuminating the man’s hands cupped to shield the flame, revealing the un-etched skin on his fingers. Not a mechanic, then, or a courier like most of her sister’s chopper-owning biker mates. He held the fag between his index finger and his thumb, took deep drags, cracked his jaw and sent a trail of smoke rings wobbling skyward. Not impressed. She scanned the road, slowly, deliberately.

‘What are you doing out here on your own anyway?’ the rider persisted.

It wasn’t an Australian accent. Kiwi perhaps.

‘I’m waiting for a friend.’

‘Are you going in there for a drink?’ He nodded his head over his shoulder at the mock Tudor façade of the pub set back among the trees. She nodded a tentative response. The corners of his mouth pulled sideways into the start of an easy smile, lighting up his face, and she thought for a second there was something quite attractive about him. He caught her checking him out. She flushed.

‘What’s your name anyway, if you don’t mind me asking?’

She spotted the bus lumbering down the road. ‘Frieda.’

‘Frieda what?’

‘Frieda People. My friend will be on that one.’

His eyes were on her back as she waved at the driver and waved again to make sure that Becky had seen her, make sure the rider got the message. The double-decker pulled up to the stop. Becky was dangling from the pole on the rear platform, snakes of mahogany hair writhing around her face in the backdraught of the bus’s forward movement. Becky Shapiro.

‘Am I late?’ Becky asked.

‘A bit. I thought I’d wait out here for you because I wasn’t sure you knew the right stop.’

‘Thanks. It’s not that easy to tell where you are once you are in the countryside.’

‘This isn’t the countryside. It’s the periphery. It’s all bypasses, golf courses and rubbish tips. And boring bikers.’

She flicked her eyes dismissively to indicate the rider standing behind, but the gesture was met with a blank stare from Becky. She turned. No one was there. She scanned the car park; the black machine was shimmering under the sulphurous cone of the solitary car park light. Its rider had vanished. He must have dived into the bar while she was greeting Becky. Odd.

‘God, I don’t know how you survive this far out,’ Becky said. ‘Where is everybody else?’

‘Inside.’

‘Come on, Sam.’ Becky grabbed her arm. ‘You don’t want to be late for your own party.’

The Coney’s Tavern was aptly named: a sprawling, airless warren of a pub that had taken to serving food in an attempt to turn a profit. Jim had objected to the venue, of course. He had tried to dissuade her from holding the party there with his usual combination of sarcasm and casual threats, declared he wasn’t prepared to eat in a place that catered to the golf-playing classes and specialized in microwaving everything to buggery. It wasn’t what he called a bar. She had dug in; insisted it was her birthday so it was her choice. But now, as she peered through the smoke and was confronted by a fug of florid self-satisfied faces, she wondered whether she had made the right call after all. She felt uneasy; she searched for the rider in the crowd, couldn’t see him.

‘There they are,’ said Becky, pointing to a long table in a side dining room around which her friends and family were gathered. The white plastic tablecloth made the scene look like a bargain basement re-enactment of ‘The Last Supper’. Becky dragged Sam through the pressing bodies filling the bar and she pushed the rider to the back of her mind.

She had drunk way too much, way too quickly. The table was littered with empty plonk bottles and discarded plates of sludge and chips stubbed with fag butts. She gazed blearily across the debris at Liz, her mother, sitting opposite; tight-lipped, hands clasped tensely in front of her on the table, recusing herself from the party. Even when she was annoyed, Liz had a natural elegance – unruffled, straight chestnut hair that always fell in a sharp-edged bob. Sam ran a remonstrative hand over her own frizzy locks and, in the absence of any engagement from her mum, turned to look at the far end of the table where Becky was holding court among their mates. Becky was recounting in gory detail the afternoon she had spent at the local hospital, watching surgery being performed on various bits of male anatomy: preparation for the start of her medical degree in September, Becky was explaining. Becky knew where she was heading. Becky was the rising star in their crowd.

At the nearer table end, Sam’s two sisters sat cawing raucously, snow-white faces and crow-haired heads rocking. The Coyle girls: three of them born at eighteen-month intervals. Sam looked different from her sisters – a smudgy sandy summer to the clarity of their dark and light icy winter – yet you could tell they shared a bond, unable to move as individuals without creating a ripple across the surface of the whole. And now here they were on the verge of going their separate ways. Helen, the eldest, had been desperate to find an excuse to move out of the family home and had been handed it when she landed a job in some shop in Camden selling post-punk, gothic glad-rags to her nightclubbing friends. She had moved out to a bedsit on the north side of the river that April. Jess was working part-time stacking shelves at Iceland, a job that just about paid enough to keep her bike on the road with a bit left over for a pint with her mates. As for Sam, she had surprised herself and everyone else by passing the Oxford entrance exam the previous autumn. Hadn’t really taken it seriously at the time. Jim had laughed when she had told him she had been accepted, and proudly explained to anyone within earshot that she had managed to pull a fast one on those old farts in their ivory tower, a girl from a comp no less, sneaking her way into the country’s top university. You could tell, he had declared, from which side of the family she had harvested her talents. He was right, she had suspected; she was a fraud, not really cut out for the bright lights, the glittering prizes. A bit of a cowboy when it came to academic endeavour.