Two days later, Talissa went with Seth to Penn Station and put him on the train to Boston. From the terminus, he took a cab to the address of a car rental firm in a warehouse near the Charles River, where he waited his turn at the desk.
‘Simon Green,’ he said. ‘You have a reservation for me.’
‘Sure do,’ said the clerk, a young man in a black cap. ‘It’s paid up front. Just need to see some ID.’
Seth’s hair had been shaved to a number-two length by a barber in Harlem. He wore brown-rimmed spectacles with a plus-one vision adjustment he’d picked off the shelf in a pharmacy. There was a third-day crust on his face where he hadn’t shaved.
‘Gee,’ said the clerk, looking at Seth’s proffered handset. ‘You have the same birthday as me. What are the chances?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re all set. You can pick out any one of the three at the back of the lot there.’
‘They just start?’
‘Sure. Just give this number and the zip code you’re heading for. Speak into the dash. There’s enough charge to get you five hundred miles. You connect to a point in the trunk.’
‘Got it.’
He picked out a white one. Somehow it seemed to stand out less. It had two cushioned seats in the middle and a bench behind. He strapped himself in and gave his instructions.
The car went back stealthily along the river before heading up for Chelsea, through the northern suburbs and out onto the old interstate. Seth turned off his handset to avoid being traced and followed his progress on a paper map Susan Kovalenko had given him.
He felt like a pioneer, a man from an older time. Some names were recognisable – Ipswich, Portsmouth, York. Maybe it was just that they had English versions. It all felt different, even when it was familiar. Wood-fired pizza. You wouldn’t see a sign for that by the side of a road in England. Or a big wine and liquor store standing in its own lot.
‘Pull over to the right and park,’ he said.
The car did as it was told. ‘Here you go, Simon.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘What name shall I use?’
Seth thought for a second. ‘Ken,’ he said. It was his second name, a popular one in Mary’s Japanese family.
‘Thank you, Ken.’
He went into the shop. Susan had warned him that the house, when he got there, would have a full larder but no drinks, only water from the tap, so he picked out two demijohns of Chardonnay and one of Cabernet. He hesitated, but, feeling the wealth of Talissa’s dollar transfer in his blipper, added a twenty-four-pack of beer and two bottles of bourbon to his cart. The woman didn’t ask for ID when he held his wrist against the reader. Maybe in his new guise he looked older.
Why should she care anyway? He loaded the drink into the trunk and carried on up the coast, high on the woman’s indifference.
There were yellow lines in the middle of the asphalt. On the verge, old orange signs warned of floods or skidding, but, apart from delivery trucks, there was hardly anyone to read them. It became more wooded. Then they were slowing in the town of Bath, whose clapboard houses looked like flats from a film set. There was a sign for the old navy dockyard, now a museum. Seth just wanted to be in his refuge, somewhere in the woods where no one would see him.
Decisively, outside a coffee shop, they swung right and began to head south into the peninsula. The smooth surface of the blacktop belied the gradient and adverse camber as the car roller-coastered on. The villages grew smaller, then the settlements petered out into woodland, into rocks and dunes where the road engineers had given up.
Down a one-lane path, hard left into dense woods, then onto a sloping track towards the sea, where as if by a seventh sense the car found an opening, just wide enough, down which it trickled, twigs and leaves grabbing at the doors, to an eventual halt.
Seth expected the car to tell him they’d arrived, but it remained silent. Rude, he thought. He seemed to be at the back of the house. He discovered the loose brick five courses up from the crawl space and pulled it out to reveal a key with which he let himself into a storeroom. He went through the house, opening doors onto a kitchen, living room and study with a screen rigged up to an ancient DVD player. As Susan had said, there were no computers and no internet connection. On the shelf were books about local history and weather.
At the front of the house there was a veranda with a couple of wicker chairs pointed towards the thin light of the sea, though any view was blocked by pine woods.
He went back to the car and brought in his backpack and the drinks. He put one of the demijohns of Chardonnay into the refrigerator. There was an old carton of UHT milk in the door, but nothing else. The freezer compartment held only desserts and pizzas. The main store cupboard had tuna, meat-flavoured products and vegetables in cans, as well as mayonnaise, ketchup and herbs. The packets of spaghetti looked old.
Going through the house, Seth hunted for a bedroom in which to base himself. There were two on the first floor and possibly more in an attic space above, up a staircase he hadn’t climbed. A door in the lobby opened onto wooden steps down to the cellar.
He opted for a ground-floor room with a comfortable bed and a light by which to read. There was a shower room next to it, probably intended for people on their way back from the beach, but it would do.
It was starting to grow dark as he pushed a pizza into the oven. Into a gas-station glass tumbler with a print of a cartoon lobster wearing a monocle he poured some bourbon, then added a lump of bearded permafrost from an ice tray in the freezer. He chucked the tray in the sink, where it could melt.
He ate his dinner in front of the screen, on which he watched an unmarked movie he’d slotted into the DVD player. After some whirring and thumping, it seemed to work fine. It was an old western and the shopfronts of the pioneer town looked like the houses in Bath.
Seth wanted to message Talissa to tell them he was all right. He ought to be in touch with his parents as well. They didn’t know he was in America. The last time he had spoken to them was ten days earlier, when he had called from a place in Scarborough. Mary had been out at a function, but he had told Alaric he was fine and would see them soon, when it was safe. Meanwhile, Susan Kovalenko had been strict: he was to switch off his handset completely for the time he was in Maine.
Although it was early summer, the air was cold and he was reluctant to undress after he had brushed his teeth. A shower could wait. He made sure the back door was locked and drew an extra bolt at the front. He latched the window in his room and closed the curtains before climbing into bed with some pyjamas over his underwear.
He felt sure he’d need to get up in the night, that someone would hammer at the door. Probably only the nearest neighbour come from a mile away to ask if he was OK, but he needed to be ready. He fell asleep at once, only to be woken by the sound of a crash. A window breaking or a vase falling.
The house was too big to investigate. God knew what was in the attic or in the workshops underground. He went into the hall and made sure the door to the cellar was locked.
Back in his own room, he put on a sweater and jammed a chair under the door handle.
Not sleeping was a new experience. At bedtime he normally just closed his eyes and lay on his side without moving for eight hours. That was his habit.
But the fear wouldn’t let him sleep. In each as yet unvisited corner of the house, behind every tree in the woods and in the shadows of the unexplored terrain beyond, there were threats he couldn’t accurately sense.
In the morning, he got up early and made coffee in a stove-top pot. There seemed to be no breakfast foods, so he sat at the table and started to make a list. Fetching the paper map from the car, he figured out where the nearest supermarket was likely to be.
Looking up from the basin in the shower room, he hardly recognised his sleepless face in the mirror. Good. He wouldn’t grow a beard. It would be like saying, Look at me, I’m in disguise. But perhaps he’d try a moustache, which, along with the unneeded glasses and the haircut, might be enough.
He went out onto the veranda and down the steps to the lawn. The lack of sunlight under the trees meant the grass was patched with moss and weed. He walked into the woods and on towards the light of the ocean. After a few minutes the evergreens thinned enough for him to see the water. The lawn began again in the better light and ran on down to stony sand among the rocks, at the end of which was a wooden landing stage.
Now he could see straight ahead across a bay to a wooded island, or perhaps another point of the jagged, many-fingered peninsula. The view to left and right was curtailed by trees and the uneven shoreline. His own private bay was about fifty yards across, no more, but the seawater was shallow and clear. It nudged up against the land like a half-teasing cat. He went onto the jetty, pressing with his foot to see if the wood was rotten. It held firm, and he sat at the end to survey his new world.
Later in the morning, he took the car and headed off. He didn’t have a zip code, but, once he’d made his accent more American, the car understood the name of the town. On the road leading in, there was a mall built in Roman style with pillars and pediments of beige synthetic stone. He parked on the lot and went inside. The air smelled of burnt coffee.
He found the supermarket and pushed his trolley down the aisles. The choice was overwhelming, apart from meat, which was hidden behind a small manned counter. The cheese looked better than at home and he bought four different kinds, piling them in with the peanut butter and breakfast cereals. He didn’t dare approach the butcher in case he had to show a doctor’s certificate, like a certified alcoholic in a dry state.
He blipped the reader and carried out his armful of swag in old-style paper bags.
I’ve been exaggerating things, he thought. No one cares about ‘the Parn’ or ‘genomes’ here. They wouldn’t even recognise the words. I can be free.
He spoke the zip code of his hidden house.
‘Is this Home, Ken?’ said the car.
‘Yes.’
In the afternoon, after a bland but heavy lunch, he slept on the veranda.
When he awoke, he went into the kitchen to boil a kettle. The teabags produced a pale liquid that tasted of cinnamon. He’d have another look through the hundred different brands in the supermarket. He took a blue ‘Freeport’ mug down through the woods to his landing stage. If the weather held, he could bring a chair and a book down and spend a day looking out over the sea. Almost all the titles in the small study seemed to be about the Maine coast, its climate and its natural history. Perhaps in the burnt-coffee mall there’d be a store that had a wider selection. Talissa had lent him a volume of short stories, set in Tamil Nadu, but he’d left it behind.
Seth let his mind linger on Talissa. If he himself was nearly twenty-five, she must be about fifty. But she seemed much younger, nearer to his own age. She moved quickly, both on her feet and in her thoughts. She was slim where Mary had become stout. But then again, Mary was older. Talissa had this nervous energy and drive, he thought. A bit like Rosalie in that way.
In New York, he’d seen the way she interacted with her old high school friend. You could tell how close they were beneath the banter. Susan was more outspoken, but she deferred to Talissa. On the other hand, it was clear that Susan was also a little worried for her. Maybe she’d had to rescue her from time to time. Talissa was someone you’d want to hang out with, though – so you could see what underlay that clarity, that speed, how they joined up.
A small boat was approaching the jetty. It was too late to disappear, so Seth stood up and waited for it. He was wearing sunglasses anyway.
The man on board killed the outboard motor as he came alongside. He threw a looped rope over an upright on the jetty.
‘You guys interested in any lobster today?’ He bent down and pulled a live specimen from a small tank on board. Its claws were held with elastic bands.
‘Sure. What else you got?’ Seth made his accent more American.
‘I have some striped bass. And some shad, but it’s a bony little guy, to be honest. I could fetch you some roe. That’s the best. Shad roe.’
‘Can I get a lobster?’ The idea of something fresh appealed to him when he thought of the row of cans at home.
‘Sure thing. How many for?’
‘Just me.’
‘I’ll let you have junior here, then.’ The man put a small lobster in a bag and passed it across. He held out an electronic receiver to Seth’s wrist. ‘You like fish?’
‘I do. I like tuna.’
‘Too big for me to carry. But you can get some at the dock. At the top of the village. I can stop by tomorrow if you like. Name’s Bill.’
‘OK.’
The boat puttered off into the bay again.
Back at the house, Seth remembered he had no idea how to cook a lobster. But he’d seen something about it on the plastic placemats in a drawer. Sure enough, on one there was a recipe for clarified butter and on another a step-by-step guide to cooking ‘Mr Pincers’, written in a children’s style.
He boiled a deep pan of water, dropped in the blue-black lobster with its coral spots and replaced the lid while he set about making a salad. He was still tearing up the lettuce when he noticed that the cover was coming off the pan as the lobster fought for its life. He had to hold the lid down with a cloth over his hand until the struggle stopped. Nothing on the placemat had warned of this.
His attempt at clarifying butter resulted in something dark brown, so he decided to put the cooked lobster in the fridge and eat it cold with mayonnaise later.
While he waited, he took a glass of Chardonnay out onto the veranda and began to make another list. Books, fresh tuna, friends … Company at least. He wasn’t meant to make friends.
The lobster tasted as good as he’d hoped, and the bottled mayonnaise went fine with it. The salad, however, tasted of … What was it …? He tried the shining lettuce and the bright tomatoes, the fresh carrot and, for comparison, a green apple. Then he sampled them with his eyes shut. The carrot was harder than the tomato, but the taste of all three was interchangeable. They had no flavour.
He turned back to the lobster and finished it off, wiping the plate with a piece of bread. At least the bottle of bourbon he took through to the study had some Kentucky fire in its belly. He put on another old, unlabelled DVD and found it was the story of a rich man who bought dresses for a woman with a big mouth and friendly eyes. He took her to a horse-racing track in her new clothes.
In the night, Seth heard no noises in the woods around the house and there was no crash from upstairs. But he sensed that there were people nearby, more than one of them, and was glad when the sun came up.
Back at the mall the next day, he discovered a bookstore, or at least a place that had some books for sale among its racks of souvenirs. Seth had read little outside his course at university (and not much on it), but he was open to the idea of stories. He bought half a dozen, some fact, some fiction and some he wasn’t sure of. He avoided local history since he had that covered back at the house.
There were eight weeks till he was due to meet Talissa in London. He ought to have a project, at least a way of speeding up the time till he could leave. Perhaps he could become expert in something. The saltwater fish of Maine, for example. He looked at the books in the bag. Ten Ways to Change Your Life; The Shadow Line; Dead of Night, a Stig Mallett mystery; The Twelve Caesars. He noticed that some of them were second-hand. The Peanuts Annual was antique.
It was hard not just to drink all day and listen to the feeble kiss of water on the stones where his garden met the sea. Bill came by at the same time most afternoons and about the fifth time, as he was paying for his catch, Seth asked him if he’d like a cup of tea. ‘Or something else. Beer. Bourbon.’
‘Not while I got a boat to get home. I’ll take a soda.’
‘You want to come up to the house?’
‘Sure thing. The skiff’ll be safe enough. No pirates here.’
They sat on the veranda, Bill with some iced tea Seth had found in a giant bottle in the store cupboard, Seth with a bourbon and water.
‘You on vacation?’
‘Kind of.’ Seth glanced behind him into the study. ‘I’m a meteorologist. Doing a little fieldwork.’
‘Where you from, kid?’
‘Boston.’
‘You sound kind of … British.’
‘I studied there. Three years. Rubbed off on me. Kinda.’
‘You going to be here for a while?’
‘I guess.’
‘If you wanted, you could join us for dinner? There’s a clam place just up the coast. They do real good steamers. What’s your name, by the way?’
‘Ken,’ said Seth.
They agreed to meet in a week. It was everything Seth was not meant to do, but he could no longer stand the solitude and strange noises of the house.
In the afternoon of the agreed day, he went on a tourist visit to an old lighthouse. The history of it was told by two young women in summer dresses, probably students, he thought, making money on the side. They were good at invoking the life of a lonesome keeper, seeing no one for weeks on end. Like me, Seth thought.
There were a dozen other tourists standing round. The tickets were cheap and you didn’t have to give a name to buy one. Seth was in his sunglasses and a cap with a lobster logo he’d bought at the burnt-coffee mall. He felt anonymous. Perhaps the guides were sisters, he thought. They both had short noses and fair hair drawn back from their faces.
Then came the climax of the show, when the sisters knocked at the door of the lighthouse. And out came a nineteenth-century keeper with a brass lamp and full period costume. The audience smiled as he launched into stories of wrecks and rescues.
As the keeper told his tale, Seth felt both student sisters looking at him. He couldn’t risk smiling back, even if he would have liked to have a drink after the show with one of them – or both if that was the deal. He looked away. It was dangerous to engage, he knew. How had Rosalie defused it all?
‘Hey, mister, want to get an ice cream?’ asked one sister when the thing was over.
‘Thanks, but I gotta head,’ said Seth, trying to sound like a Mainer as he went back to where the car was parked.
Bill had wanted to meet at six, so Seth still had time to kill. Driving towards the diner, he found a bar by the road. He went in, ordered a beer and took it to a dark corner. Two young men were playing a machine. A group of three old-timers were looking at a ball game on a screen above the bar.
If he was recognised, things would become unbearable. But if no one bothered him, his hermit life was all unnecessary.
People wanted to be known, acknowledged, reassured that they were more than nothing. He’d seen that. It was natural. If no one knew your name, you began to lose the edges of your outline. You could start to disappear.
Kantor’s Crab and Lobster House was a grey-shingled building on Main Street. At the back was a landing stage and a long walkway down to the stony foreshore. Like everywhere else nearby, it was a fishing not a leisure place. ‘Kantor’s – Food – Spirits’ said the rear awning, so you were in no doubt.
Bill was waiting at a table inside and introduced his wife, Marilyn, a woman in a pink polo shirt and wide jeans. It hadn’t occurred to Seth that Bill would have a wife. He’d pictured him living on his boat, spending the night in a bunk at the fish houses. Marilyn was too big for her chair but seemed at ease with how much of her was not supported. Seth kept his eyes on her face as she talked brightly. Another couple, Chuck and Barbara, joined them.
‘So,’ Barbara told him, ‘with steamers, the shells are soft, not like regular clams, and they have this siphon here. It’s what they use to breathe or feed, or something. First you have to take the sock off.’
‘The sock?’
‘Sure. The cover of the siphon. Like so. Put it in this bowl. You can eat the siphon or you just use it as a handle when you dip the clam in the butter here. Look at him, Bill. He’s a natural.’
‘So what brings you to our part of the world?’ said Chuck.
‘I’m on a project. I’m a climate scientist.’
‘Bill says you have the old Rodgers house up the coast. Kind of quiet.’
‘Yes, it’s ideal.’
Seth had flipped through a couple of books in the study and hoped he’d grasped enough about rainfall and erosion. Fishermen tended to know a hell of a lot about weather, but he could always say his work was too scientific to explain.
‘What do you do, Barbara?’ he asked.
‘I used to work in real estate,’ she said. ‘Then I stopped when we had kids. Now they’re grown-up, I’m looking for something new.’
‘Barbara’s a real good artist,’ said Marilyn. ‘She does these beautiful seascapes.’
‘In oil,’ said Chuck.
‘Do you like painting, Ken?’ said Marilyn.
‘No. I mean, not really. I don’t see the point.’
The world was what it was.
‘Home,’ he said to the car. ‘Please.’ He’d enjoyed the evening more than he’d expected. To follow the steamers, he’d ordered something called ‘scrod’, and Bill explained it was not a species but a name for whatever white fish they were trying to shift that day. It was good, though, whatever it was, fresh and with a pile of salted fries. Bill had a steak, which seemed odd, though maybe not so much when you thought about it. Barbara insisted on desserts. She and Marilyn both had deep quadrants of cheesecake with mugs of white coffee.
‘Those Vector people are making a nuisance of themselves again,’ said Barbara.
‘Schmucks,’ said Bill.
‘Yeah, they’re all wound up about this White Van guy,’ said Chuck. ‘Spitting blood.’
‘No one listens to those crazies,’ said Marilyn.
‘I guess the White House had to. Eventually,’ said Bill.
The four Americans became thoughtful. Seth coughed and said, ‘Do you guys know a good vegetable store? The stuff in the supermarket is—’
‘I know a little farm store, honey,’ said Barbara.
She told him where to find it and gave his arm a squeeze when they all said goodbye.
It was still only eight thirty when Seth got back to the house. He poured red wine into a beer glass and went into the study.
He wondered why they’d exchanged glances when they found out where he was living. Did they think the house was haunted? Did it have a reputation as a hideout for criminals?
It didn’t matter. He’d come to like it. The study was his favourite room. For a start, there was the lottery of the uncased, unmarked DVD in the evening. He didn’t know whether to ready himself for an old Scarlett Johansson picture or a thing about concentration camps. He promised himself he would sit through whatever came on. That was the game. Different occupants had left the marks of their taste, long ago.
The furniture in the study was cheap bentwood from a chain store, mismatched antiques, but someone had loved it once. The cushions had home-made crochet covers. There were rugs and knitted throws in clashing colours, little pots, ashtrays and souvenirs on the shelves. Despite its position, no one had tried to make much of the house, to up its real-estate value – even to clear the woods for a view to the sea.
Seth was not in the habit of noticing such things, but he made himself think about the house and its previous inhabitants as a way to defeat the loneliness. Some days, he tried to remember facts from school. The periodic table, rudiments of programming, French words. After a few weeks, some of it came back. He could visualise pages from books, and, if he tried hard enough, the sentences would take shape in his mind – or not so much in his mind as in front of his eyes. He could see stories from the Bible that Mary had left in his room when he was eight or nine. Like the soldiers who had to say the word ‘shibboleth’ to cross the Jordan, because how they pronounced it, lisp or not, showed if they were from the right tribe. Thousands were killed on the spot for being from the wrong place.
He knew it was risky to meet people, and refused Bill’s next offer of dinner. It was another two weeks before, as he bought his lobster at the jetty, he suggested a return visit to Kantor’s. He had read a long way into some books on local weather systems so felt he could withstand any questions about his ‘research’.
There were days when he tested the limits of the car’s co-operation by giving it instructions he knew it couldn’t understand. ‘Take me somewhere people will be kind to me but not ask too many questions.’ It dropped him at the burnt-coffee mall anyway. ‘Take me where the carrots taste of carrot.’ Fifteen minutes later, they were at the roadside farm store. Seth sat inside in the car and complained that the place was closed. ‘I just wanted some of those ugly potatoes to boil for the lobster tonight. And the shit-covered eggs from the real hens. Sometimes I’m so lonely I think I’ll kill myself. I just want someone to call me by name. To hear someone say it.’
‘You want to go home now, Ken?’ said the car.
On other days he found it hard to remember who he was. He saw himself from the outside, as ‘Ess’, the creature he had first become aware of as a child. He talked to himself as he paced up and down the garden, wondering if it was too early for a beer.
It was probably best not to see Bill and Marilyn again. The idea of lobster no longer drew him down to the jetty. Never imagined I could be lobstered out, he told the car.
Unable to hypothesise a future, he didn’t think how things might go with Talissa when he met her again in London and they set off for the Scottish wilds. Nor did he conjecture what might happen if he changed his mind. All he knew was that to hold himself together, he must focus on some other person. Not I or me or even he, but they.
Talissa was the fixed point of his future. He barely knew her, but there was a bond. She knew his name, who he truly was, and could stop him being erased from the world.
One evening, he drove into town and ate dinner at Mabel’s Famous Pizza. Although it was only eight o’clock, he had the sense that the rush was over and there wouldn’t be many customers after him. He read a little of the book he had brought and ordered another beer. He managed to spin out the time until it was at least growing dark. The waitress was quick to bring his check.
It was a twenty-minute drive back to the house. He began to wonder what would be on the DVD. Perhaps he’d drink wine with it tonight. As he turned off the road towards his house, he saw smoke coming from the woods. He went down the track with the branches grabbing at the doors. When he came into the clearing, he saw that his house had burned down. One end wall was still standing and a couple of internal partitions had resisted the flames. But the upstairs had vanished, and from the remains of the ground floor a few thin columns of smoke were still rising. The front door had been wrenched off and lay a few yards away. On it was painted a black plus sign in a circle: the Sun Cross.
Seth stayed in the car. ‘Airport,’ he said.
‘Logan Airport, Ken? Portland?’
‘Logan. Go.’