The Unblemished (19 page)

Among all of the gale-assaulted, deracinated faces angling into the
wind around the village, there was one that remained in Sarah's
thoughts almost all the time. A great number of the Southwold
populace were aged, relaxed into their bodies with the fragile grace of
those having had years of practice, but this one, this tall man with a
long, steel-grey ponytail and glittering eyes, seemed utterly out of
context. He seemed simultaneously ill at ease with people and space.
She often saw him walking unsteadily on the beach, or metronomically
sipping from a pint glass of dark beer in one of the pubs, as if it
were some new task that he had recently learned. She might have
become used to him, assimilated him as part of the background
like the fishermen, or the tankers on the horizon, were it not for his
habit of becoming animated whenever she took Claire out for some
fresh air. He always seemed to be at the edge of things. He always
seemed to be watching. Sarah berated herself at first, blaming her hair
trigger, suspecting a connection to Manser. But if Manser knew she
were here, he'd be here too. Manser was not one for delicate
probings, spies and reports back. He'd be here with his fists and his
fury.

Still, it was creepy, the way this old man cropped up. He'd be in
the aisle at the Co-op while Sarah did her shopping. He'd be on a
table near to theirs when they stopped at the café for hot chocolate
and shortbread. Sarah had taken Claire to the pub one night for hot
toddies and the old man had been sitting in the corner shadows, wet
gleams where his eyes should be. One windy day they'd been caught
by the rain as they walked up to the pier. She'd hurried Claire beneath
it, appalled by how thin and light she felt when she placed her hands
upon her. They had sat in the sand and Sarah finger-combed Claire's
hair dry. Claire, as she always had, leaned into her mother and Sarah
had to stop herself from pushing her away at the feel of that large
lump swelling her armpit and the area beneath her shoulder blade.
Sarah had dabbed the lump with ointments and cold compresses, but
it refused to settle. Her mind was filling with black futures.
Chemotherapy. Surgery. Implacable faces over case notes bound for
a file that read DECEASED. The old man came up from a groyne like
the gradual lengthening of its own shadow. Sarah only realised there
was somebody else there when he coughed into his fist. In his other
hand he held a parcel of greaseproof paper, its base darkened by
whatever was steaming inside. He stood there like an imbecile,
nodding at them, bizarre jerks of the head, like a horse with its bit too
tight in the mouth. Sarah ignored him, but Claire became more and
more agitated. She fidgeted and mewled and ground herself into the
sand as she were some kind of burrowing insect. The man half offered
the parcel, thought better of it, and moved away, looking
back over his shoulder half a dozen times until the swell of the beach
swallowed him. It seemed to Sarah that he was memorising their
position, or more, fixing them in his mind, their aspects, their shape
in the sand before him. Sarah had felt a sudden belt of fear. It wasn't
that he was following them. That didn't bother her too much. She
could cope with that known factor. What got to her was that he
wasn't being subtle about it. There was no acceptance of any
politesse, the rules of engagement in terms of stalking.

She stayed on that beach with her daughter far longer than she had
planned, long after the rain had ceased and the fishermen with their
tents began arriving on the shingle. Claire had relaxed again at the
disappearance of the old man. They held each other and their hearts
beat like those of trapped, confused birds. He was old. He looked
very tired. He looked a man out of time. There was no meat on him.
No paunch, no dewlaps. But he had been anything but frail. His
hands were large, the fingers slim and long. The fingernails had been
like arrowheads. He moved like someone preserving their energy. It
was cattish, stealthy, disarming. There was speed in him, and agility.
He looked to have been bred for it.

'We might be leaving soon, Claire,' she said. 'It might be that we
have to go.'

Her daughter did not nod, or shake her head. She did not ask why.
Sarah was almost there with her, at that resigned state, allowing life
to happen to her rather than being in some position to be able to
shape it. She hugged her daughter more tightly and wished that
whatever strength she had left, some of it might pass into her child,
enough to see them through this.

He was on the beach again the following morning.

Sarah had already seen him, shortly after starting her shift at the
junk shop. She had been trying to free up the routes around the shop
– restacking plastic chairs, tidying piles of battered luggage,
redesigning the flow of bookshelves – when she had been conscious
of a face at the window, a figure watching her work. She could see,
through the misted glass, the tight, gleaming shell of his hair, the deep
shadows hollowing the area under his cheekbones. The banished
tremors of dread on the beach stole back into her. This seemed to be
her default feeling now. This was normality for her. He was gone as
soon as she saw him, his head ducking down out of sight beneath the
window frame. She heard the muffled sound of footsteps scraping,
hurrying away. The armful of magazines she had been shifting spilled
from her grasp and slithered to the floor. She thought of sickness; she
thought of guts. She had seen a pig opened by a slaughterman at an
abattoir when she was ten. The pig had emptied as though everything
inside it was untethered, sloshing around as random mess. Whenever
she heard someone refer to butterflies in the stomach she balked at
the lie. Not butterflies. Christ. She turned her mind to the task of
clearing up, eager to rid her mind of the clinging, craven figure. She
shifted a deck chair, its hinges rusted, its fabric worn to the point of
disintegration. Behind it was yet another bookcase rammed with
swollen paperbacks. She yanked the edge of it towards her. Dead
termites and about half a pound of bone-dry sawdust tipped off the
back of it on to the floor. The books were beyond rescue. Peeling the
covers apart to identify the authors only succeeded in tearing the face
off them.

What was he doing here? What does he want with us?

She swept the books into a black plastic bin sack and tied it off.
This she left with the deck chair in a growing pile of items destined
for recycling skips. She'd have to run them past Ray first, but he
surely couldn't sell this stuff. She paused a moment, listening. The
shadow at the window was long gone, but her disquiet was not so
eager to depart. She heard the grind of springs in the ancient sofa in
Ray's staff room as Claire shifted. She was trying to sleep, but the cyst
under her arm was making it difficult for her to relax.

His face whenever Claire was around. That soppy, doe-eyed look.
That yearning.

Sarah stared at the junk awaiting her attention. This was a building
with far too much stuff and not enough space. She could rearrange all
she liked, and get rid of the things that she'd be hard-pressed to give
away to the most needy, and still it wouldn't make much of a difference.
God, even her job was a mirror.

The snick of a lock. The creak of a hinge.

Sarah felt the slam of a door vibrate through her body, but when
she looked around, the entrance was still open. Must have been her
heart, then, she reasoned, as she hurried back to the counter and the
ante-room where she had left her daughter. The stifling threat came
at her like a swarm of wasps. It was all around; it didn't have a centre.
She couldn't understand her instinct to flee, but it was in her and she
could not ignore it.

Just an old man. Seeking comfort, seeking company.

She clattered through the counter, slamming the hinged partition
back with enough force to crack it. She saw that Claire was asleep, or
whatever passed for sleep in her lexicon these days, and the thin man
with the iron-grey ponytail and pale-green eyes was leaning over her
like a concerned grandparent. Claire's left arm was flung back over
her head; the lump tucked into the armpit radiated black lines of
decay through the muscles arranged around it. What wasn't that
colour of badness was an angry red. Sarah thought she could feel heat
driving out of her, even at a distance of six feet or so. The man was
cooing over it. A big butcher's knife hung from his fist.

Sarah slammed into him, piling her fingers into his hair and
dragging him backwards, her eyes fast on that flashing slice of metal
as it slit the air a foot away from her face. The smell of pear drops
did nothing to soften his appearance. Claire was waking but was
unable, it appeared, to invest any emotion in the scene playing out
before her beyond a kind of vacuous amusement, as if it wasn't real,
or was the dregs of a dream she had been having.

'Run, Claire!' Sarah screamed, as hard as she could, trying to
pierce that infuriating bubble. The man was lying on top of her, but
he wasn't struggling to get up. In the calmness he was displaying,
Sarah believed she was dead. He seemed to know that he was going
to disentangle himself, deal with this minor impediment, and
continue his pursuit. He was calm, relaxed, sighing as though
burdened by a particularly wearisome task. It wasn't helping that
Claire was rising with the urgency of someone about to spend a lazy
afternoon picnicking by the river.

She had to kill him, fast, and fuck any consequences.

She stretched out for the petty cash box at the same time that he
was levering himself up on the hand holding the knife. She pushed
herself off the floor and stamped down hard on it, trapping the
weapon and his fingers against the concrete floor. In the same
moment she swung the heavy metal box in a broad arc over her head,
so hard that she was almost facing in the opposite direction, so she
didn't see it connect with his left cheekbone with a crunch that
reminded her of the sound celery made when you bit into it.

She whipped her head around to see him leaning against the wall,
his face coming apart in his hands, expressionless, that same sigh
whispering out of him. She came again, swinging the box in the
opposite direction, a better aim now. She was going to take the back
of his fucking head off. But he shifted at the last moment and
propelled his right fist into the angle of her jaw, the petty cash box
impacting harmlessly into the wall beside him. The world tilted
violently away from her and she was almost amused to find that you
actually did see stars when you were knocked senseless. She went
down like something without bones, knowing what was coming to
her but somehow unable to send the right signals to her muscles to
get her out of trouble.

But it didn't land, that final sting, that switching off. She groaned
and managed to turn her head enough to get a better view of the
room. It was slanted, weird, a Dr Caligari room. The unusual
perspective was giddying. A wedge of black was the underside of the
sofa almost touching her forehead, the sofa where Claire had been
sleeping. The room sprang up white and painful beyond it. The man
was sitting by the doorway, regarding her daughter. His mouth was
filled with blood; it ran down in parallel lines to his chin from each
corner, turning him into a ghastly ventriloquist's dummy. His good
eye was wide open, almost pained, almost beseeching. The eye she
had damaged was a jellied, red thing sitting in its crackled orbit like
some small, fatally shelled mollusc.

He tried to speak and the reason for the blood in his mouth fell
out: a chunk of flesh, still dressed in a little patch of crimson denim.
Sarah almost fainted when she realised it was a part of her own leg,
the voice of its pain piping up as soon as the morsel had plopped
free of his jaws, as if in recognition of itself. The man was shaking
his head slightly now, and trying to say something, or saying
something that she was failing to hear. Shadows played like black
flames over his face.

Sarah struggled to her feet and the world turned the grey of cold
porridge. She vomited a brown spray of partially digested croissants
and coffee across the blankets on the sofa, crazily grateful that they
were brown too and would help to reduce her embarrassment. The
man didn't even register her any more. It seemed that his injury had
caught up with him. He gazed beatifically at Claire as blood bubbled
at his lips and his fist flopped around the handle of the knife as if it
had become too slippery to hold.

She ushered Claire to her feet, dragging her by her cardigan and
bullying her to the door. Claire moaned, flinched, as Sarah's hand
connected with the swollen mass of tissue under her armpit. Sarah
hesitated for a second, having to grit her teeth to the whiff of rot that
breathed up from her daughter when she flailed, trying to break free
of her mother's grasp. Fear was muddying her mind. What was
wrong with her daughter? What had this swine done to her? She
couldn't keep running. She couldn't maintain this level of anxiety
without suffering. The moment she succumbed meant the end of
things. Her daughter would be lost. As she left the room she saw the
thin man turn his head to watch her leave. He was slithering in his
own blood, trying to get up.

She took Claire out to the car and fastened her into it, then locked
the door, knowing she could not leave without warning Ray about
the monster in his shop. She felt squirts of piss lubricating her inner
thighs. She yelled with shock as she saw a shadow grow on the shop
porch.

Somehow she drove the six hundred yards to the pub without
slamming the car into a shop front or a bus stop and parked as close
as she could to the Lord Nelson. She was clambering out when she
felt those black flames of shadow gather again behind her eyes. She
clenched her fist against it, this mass of exhaustion and pain and
panic as it tried to eclipse her, and fell from the car. A moment or two
of grey, a solidifying in her mind of what was real. A second gone?
Maybe more. A second too many. She pulled in a few breaths of cold
sea air and made 'stay here' gestures with her hand, but Claire wasn't
going anywhere. She had the thousand-yard stare. She was other
places.