WE WALKED SLOWLY up the harbour, our hands in our pockets, a bit subdued after the incident at the pub. It didn’t take long for the place to begin working its magic, though. I loved the harbour: the bell-like clang of the rigging, the gulls, the piles of fragrant netting. I loved the rows of fishing boats, their decks lined up in tempting, tilted platforms. They were three-deep at the quay today, because of the storms.
In the summer, Dad and Dom and me would often leap from boat to boat, fishing rod in one hand, tackle box in the other. We’d make our way out to the furthest boat and spend the day in the company of gulls and crab-shells, reeling in mackerel and sprat, eating cheese sambos with fishy fingers and drinking tea from a flask.
‘We should get Dad to bring down the tackle, and we can spend the day up at the Head with him,’ said Dom.
I was about to reply when I remembered there was no tackle anymore: no rods, no hooks, no lines. There was nothing but a smouldering blob of melted plastic and nylon, in the charred hole that used to be the cupboard under our stairs.
Our faces fell and we simultaneously swallowed and looked away.
‘Fancy a Fanta and some crisps?’ Dom ground out. He was gone before I could answer, digging in his pocket for change and heading for the little whitewashed harbour shop. I sat on the slip to wait for him, my thoughts a dark undertow to the sparkling water, the bright boats bobbing on the swell.
Dom came back. He handed me a bag of Tayto and a can of Fanta and we ate in silence, crushing the crisps into crumbs in the bag, then sucking them off our fingers, swigging the Fanta, warm and frothy, from the can. We weren’t going to talk about it. That was a mutual, silent decision. As we moved off again, dropping our rubbish into the bin, wiping our fingers on our trousers, Dom pucked me and grinned. ‘Race yah.’
He ran. I took after him. He leapt a lobster pot and fled with a whoop.
It took a while, but once we’d dodged our way up the harbour and through the stone gate at the end we were well on track to regaining our good humour. By the time we’d got on the path to the lookout poles we were yelling and belting each other and making machine-gun noises and dying dramatic, writhing deaths on the grass.
I leapt up from one such twitching demise and hurtled up the slope to the totem poles. Dom trailed behind me, a worried grin on his face. I always freaked him out on those poles. Sometimes I did it on purpose. In the summer, our cousin Sean and I would clamber right to the top and stand there windmilling our arms and pretending to fall. Dom and the others would linger at the bottom in delicious fear, their hands to their mouths or covering their eyes.
Admittedly it was a bloody stupid thing to do. The totem poles were about ten feet high and hardly a foot in diameter. There was barely enough room to stand with your two feet tight together. But God, what a thrill! You could stand up there with the blue sky just in reach and look for miles out to sea.
This time I was content to stop at the top foothold and hold on, surveying the landscape. The wind was wild. It filled my eyes with tears and instantly snatched them away again. My nose began to run like crazy. Dom was calling to me, his voice indistinct in the blustering air, but I ignored him because something had caught my eye on the path further up the headland. I squinted against the wind. What the hell was that?
There came a breathless greeting in my ear. ‘Hey!’
‘Jesus!’ I jumped and grabbed the top of the totem pole in fright. I had to grit my teeth and swallow hard just to stop my heart from flying out of my mouth. ‘Dom! You lunatic!’
He had climbed the other pole and was standing on the third rung from the top, his arms wrapped around the wood. He grinned up at me, delighted at his own daring and my startled reaction. ‘Woo!’ he said. ‘It’s windy! What were you gawking at?’
Oh yeah! That guy at the top of the headland. I straightened up again, craning to see. Was it the auld fella from the bar? No, this guy was taller, straighter. He looked like he was wearing a uniform. I pointed him out to Dom.
Look at him!’ I said. ‘What’s he up to? He looks like some ‘sort of soldier.’
Dom stretched as high as he could dare without letting go of the pole. The soldier was just at the brow of the headland, where the grass sloped out of sight and down to the sea. His long coat was whipping around him in the frenzy of wind coming up the hill and, if I hadn’t known better, I would have said he was staring straight at us. His eyes were hidden beneath the brim of his military hat, but I could feel them, even at that distance. They were pinned on mine. I just knew it. As we watched, he slowly lifted his arm and pointed down towards the rocky shore that lay past him and out of our sight.
I felt the hairs prickle up on the back of my neck. I didn’t like the thought that this man could see me.
‘Is he a soldier?’ asked Dom uncertainly. ‘Or is he just dressed up as one? That uniform’s not right.’
The soldier just stood there, calmly pointing down the hill and staring at us, his coat slapping and snapping in the wind, his unseen eyes locked on mine. I felt myself climbing down the totem pole, and before I knew it I was on the path again, walking slowly up the hill towards him. He was out of sight now. But waiting. I knew it. Waiting for us to come.
Dom grabbed my arm, breathless from catching up with me. He stared into my face, pleading.
‘I.. . .I don’t want to go up there,’ he said.
Neither did I, but still I broke away from him, walking backwards, keeping eye contact for as long as possible before I was turned back to the path. It was as if I wasn’t in command of my own feet, and they were carrying me of their own accord to the place where the soldier stood. Dom followed me, begging me not to go, miserably telling me that he didn’t want to go, but following me just the same. We quickly mounted the brow of the hill and continued on up to the spot where the soldier had been standing.
He was gone.
I looked all around us. There was nothing but empty grassland and seagulls drifting up on the breeze. I scanned the horizon, all up and down the path. There was no one there but us.
He’s gone.’ Dom sounded absurdly relieved. ‘Maybe he was ‘waiting for someone and they’ve gone off together. Maybe . . . ’
‘He was trying to show me something,’ I said. ‘It was important. I could feel it . . . ’
I looked down the slope to where the soldier had been pointing and my heart gave a startled little bump in my chest. The man had been showing me something. I grabbed Dom’s arm, pointing down to the sea. ‘Look!’ I yelled.
Then we were running down the slope together, yelling and waving our arms. Screaming, ‘No! Stop it! Stop!’ though there was no way the man on the shore could have heard us.
There was no doubt in my mind who it was – his unmistakable cloud of white hair whipping about in the wind, his dark, shabby coat and long twiggy arms. It was the old man from the pub, and he was trying to commit suicide in the sea.
I DON’T KNOW IF the wind and the heavy surf drowned our voices as we got closer or if the poor old sod was just too far gone to hear us, but he never paused. His arms were up, Christ crucified, as though he was afraid to get his sleeves wet. The tails of his coat trailed behind him in the waist-high water. God knows how he kept his footing in that heavy swell. Each wave lifted him slightly and dropped him like flotsam, but he kept going, his expression calm and dreamy as the water rose above his waist.
‘Mister! Hey! Mister!’ The wind whipped great yellow curds of sea-foam into our faces as we waded into the waves. ‘Mister! Come back!’ We forged out into a deep, narrow channel that cut between two jagged ridges of rock. Up ahead of us, the old man was making alarming progress into deeper water. We were soon up to our chests.
‘Mister!’ shrieked Dom. His cry ended in a choking gurgle as a wave broke across his mouth, and he gasped, turning his head to try and catch his breath. I overtook him, both hands up to protect my mouth and eyes.
The old man had stopped, shoulder-deep in the water now, and looked up into the sky, his arms still outstretched. He lurched with each swell, but still managed to keep his feet. His eyes were fixed on the rapidly scudding clouds and he looked very peaceful, almost happy. Then he let himself fall backwards. He slid under the foam in one easy movement. His hands and the tails of his coat were the last things we saw.
‘No!’ I launched forward, plunged my hands under, groping for him, straining to keep my face above the waves. Dom struggled up beside me and swung his arms about under the water, his eyes scanning the foam for some sign. I was still groping blindly this way and that when Dom took a huge breath and submerged. I did the same, my eyes open. There was nothing but churning grey. Bubbles clogged my ears.
We surfaced. I went to shout ‘He’s gone!’ but Dom just took another breath and went under again. I must confess, I hesitated. I had lost all sensation in my arms and legs. The wind was stripping the skin from my face, and my wet hair felt like stinging wire whipping at my eyes and mouth. I screamed at the empty water, my voice cracked with panic and cold, ‘Dom! Dom!’
Dom surfaced, so close that his wake submerged me for a minute. His face was raw and streaming. ‘Can’t . . . ’ There was no breath in him to finish. The next swell pushed him against me and we both nearly went down, gripping each other in a panicky realisation of the danger we were in.
We were up to our necks. Each swell hid the beach from view and filled our mouths with water. And we weren’t just battling the cold anymore; our clothes were so heavy! The water sucked and tugged at our leaden jumpers and trousers, using them to drag us under and out.
I tried to say, ‘We need to get back.’ But my chattering teeth and repeated mouthfuls of water garbled my words. Dom understood me. He nodded and we began to drag each other to shore.
A choking gasp made us turn back. It was the old man. He’d broken the surface just a few feet from where we stood. For a moment he just lay there looking at the sky; then he began to slip quietly under again. Without a thought, I grabbed the scruff of his neck. Dom took hold of his shoulder and we laboured to shore, the old man an unresisting weight that we towed behind us.
We staggered out of the waves like a drunken resurrection, making our way up the beach with the old man slung between us. He could hardly support himself, but with our help he managed to totter along. Dom and I were shivering uncontrollably, our clothes a tremendous, chafing weight. I’d heard people say they thought they’d die of cold, but until that day I’d had no concept of how that might feel. It took all my concentration to just put one foot in front of the other, and when we got to the path and the wind hit us full blast I nearly stopped dead at the icy shock of it.
Dom began shouting, his voice broken and wavering. I was barely capable of taking one step, then another, but Dom was still using his noodle, trying to get the old man talking.
‘Wh . . . where do you luh . . . live, mister?’
The old man didn’t even lift his head. Dom’s teeth began clicking like epileptic castanets. He was shaking so badly that his head wobbled, but he kept pucking the old man, yelling at him to tell us where he lived. There was no response. The old man didn’t even open his eyes. But he did keep dragging one foot in front of the other, so we just kept going with him.
When we staggered and stumbled our way to the little shop on the harbour, the young wan behind the counter shrieked and ran into the back room. Her mother came tumbling out, her hands to her face. ‘James!’ she cried. ‘Oh, James, you old fool! What happened to you?’ She rushed around the counter and claimed the auld fella. He stumbled into her care, his blue eyes blinking without comprehension into her face. ‘Oh, you silly old sod,’ she said.
We stood in a miserable shivering huddle in the middle of her tiny shop, water literally pouring off of us. She looked at us over the old man’s shoulder. ‘What happened?’
We glanced at each other and came to a mutual decision.
‘He fell in the sea,’ I said.
‘And youse rescued him? You little angels, youse! God bless youse, lads! God bless your hearts.’
‘Wuh wuh . . . we wanted to buh . . . bring him home to his fam fam family . . . ’
‘James doesn’t have a fambly!’ cried the girl.
I don’t think Dom even heard her. He was shuddering in great jerking spasms now, his arms wrapped around himself. I began to feel sick, I was so cold. My head felt like someone had driven a metal spike from temple to temple. I started to sway on my feet.
The shop woman looked alarmed. ‘Don’t be worrying about James now, lads. Sure, doesn’t he just live three cottages down? Sarah and I’ll get him all fixed up. Have youse far to go? Will I phone someone for youse?’
‘Wuh wuh . . . we’re uh up by the huh huh huh . . . ’ I tried.
‘Hurdy . . . guh guh . . . gurdies,’ finished Dom. ‘Nuh . . . no phone.’
‘Well, run, boys! Run.’
And we did, turning stiffly and shambling out the door on numb legs. She shouted after us as we did our best to sprint up the harbour. ‘Run, boys, or youse’ll catch your deaths! Run and don’t stop ’til youse get home!’