There was no denying the brisk chill that swept up from the rolling tide as it reunited with the rocks. The sun had set, and the evening yawned into darkness. Still, I sat on the decked terrace wrapped in a trusty blanket, bobbly, fuzzy, and littered with holes—the one I’d grasped in my tiny fingers that first night here in Whitby.
It had been dark, the sea wild like an untamed beast rising to swallow the cliffs. I’d listened to the wind whistling through the little window of the attic room so long ago. And yet, my heart drum in that familiar march, rapid as it did that night. I suffered the fear of that small boy again.
If I could just stay, lock all the doors… not that anyone came to visit. No wife, no children, no family left. I had few friends, all of whom were through work. Were they real friends? I was a loner, a reclusive writer well known for my slightly eccentric hermit life. With no skill of peopling at all, I was not known as a people person. I preferred history and those who still lived there, with no care for what anyone thought, dealing with work through emails, phone calls if I had no choice.
My agent once made a surprise visit out of sheer frustration as I kept cancelling appointments. I had gone down to London in the early days with trains, taxis, hotels—the stuff of nightmares fit to put me in an early grave. The entire trip causing me nothing but a heart-stopping trauma. I have since firmly anchored my feet to my tiny piece of Yorkshire coastal land.
The wooden lounger creaked as I shifted to retrieve my glass from the table beside me. I wrapped the blanket closer around my shoulders, grappled with the edges while juggling with the tumbler. I’d planned to buy new garden furniture ready for the summer, something stylish I’d seen online, but I never had, just as I hadn’t for the four previous years. It was becoming a tradition. Obviously, I was meant to keep this rickety lounger. What was the point of a new one anyway? The salty sea air would see to its new varnish soon enough and bleach its richness as it did everything else.
I loved everything about the sea, about Whitby town, of being windswept and weather-beaten. It reminded me I was still alive.
But what I valued most was my anonymity.
My glass sloshed, the contents swirling a little too near the rim. It was my third gin, at least a double—I didn’t measure, the bottle poured just fine. No doubt it wouldn’t be my last of the night. It blurred the sharp edge of the past and everything it brought, the misery of it all being that I just couldn’t remember it in enough detail to reconcile my pain. The memories and stories of others? Yes, I remembered all those like they were my own. The only real memories that belonged to me were of when I arrived here in that winter—that desperate winter of despair, dramatic as it sounds.
I had been only a child, a young boy packed off in a whirlwind. A muddle of harried voices, large hands taking mine and leading me into a vehicle, a train, then another car. Hours and hours in the back, watching the darkness blur past the window while I gripped the blanket, now as familiar to me as my own skin. It was only in the cold light of the winter morning that I looked to see its colours: a vibrant mix of wools crocheted into an ever-decreasing pattern with a dark-red centre. It was my centre, my core. Desperation and loathing. Fear and panic. Pain and grief. I couldn’t put a name or understanding to those emotions back then. They stemmed from events I’d somehow, with a need for survival, washed from my memory, which left only the faded impressions of a tin of polaroid images. For a child, to put words to such a thing was unfathomable. Even as a man, these forty years later, I can’t find enough of those memories to make any sense of them or to speak them aloud.
I had been questioned. People, one after the other, face after face. Some I vaguely recognised, some total strangers in uniforms. I had said nothing. I had no voice. There were no words or explanations to convey, so I remained mute. It was much later, when many days and nights passed in a distortion of restless sleep and unconscious waking. When the sea air had filtered my lungs, purifying me somehow, that the words returned. But I remained adamant—I remembered nothing.
My foster family had been kind, forgiving. More than that, they had been understanding. It had been the seventies—boys like me with nothing; fell through the net all too often. I’d been fortunate to find a family rather than be placed in an institution for such kids. I’ve since heard the horrors of some children’s homes of that era, watched the news, read of the abuse and neglect. I’d been lucky, if only after unmentionable and unrecallable horrors.
I never called them my parents, and they never insisted I did. It didn’t make them any less. Vera and Bob, both locals and hardworking habitual creatures in their middle years. Loyal, trustworthy with no children of their own; I never asked why. Their dwelling had been a small terrace house nestled on a narrow road along the East Cliff, near the old steps up to the church and abbey. An old fisherman’s cottage, with a whitewashed exterior. Bob and I repainted it every couple of years. My efforts were probably more a hindrance, but Bob lavished me with his most valuable commodity: his time. First, the cottage’s tiny window frames were green, the shade of geranium foliage to match the ones Vera planted in baskets either side of the front door. Then, sometime in the mid-eighties, Vera decided to repaint them all in cornflower blue. I saw that colour, the vivid shade of August skies, when I closed my eyes with thoughts of her.
Vera was always cooking. I’d arrive home from school to a waft of frying fish or a stew. ‘Get those shoes off before you go any further, young man,’ she would shout. In my grey school socks, I stood at the bottom of the tiny staircase, holding the door open with my elbow as I flung my shoes up the stairs with my school bag in some meagre attempt to reach the top. One shoe would inevitably tumble back down.
They had been proud people, my folks. Bob had been a baker, rising before dawn each morning and whistling a tune as he put on his shoes and closed the front door with a soft thud that rattled to my tiny attic room. Sunday afternoons, he would lounge in his brown leather armchair the colour of toffee you had held in your hand for too long. The sun streaming in through the parlour window at the back, casting him and his chair in a beam that made my heart swell.
Outside those whitewashed walls, my childhood from then on had been as good as could be expected. I disappeared into myself, calling on fictional characters for friendship, burying my head in any book I could find. The kids at school left me be, as much as the odd name-calling was being left alone. But they hadn’t attempted to offer friendship, for which I’d been grateful. The changeling—that was what most called me, including adults, some to my face. More imaginative kids had come up with a more descriptive narrative: the ghost boy.
Those first few days here in Whitby—never leaving my attic refuge, wrapped in my newfound friend—I had looked in the small wooden mirror that hung on the wall opposite the window. I hadn’t noticed at first; its carved frame was all I saw, but there was a familiarity that kept dragging me back to that mirror and its precisely carved acorns that covered every inch of the polished wood. That fact had started a desperate churning. I spent hours staring, tracing my fingertip over each acorn, wondering why the mirror stirred something dark deep inside my gut.
That was when I first saw.
The sun had drifted. The late afternoon glare had caught in the corner of my window and sent a shaft of bright orange light onto my hair, clarifying my reflection. I saw more than just me. There was a silhouette, an outline of a memory. I wiped my hand over the glass surface and peered further into the mirror. It stirred behind me; I didn’t turn. I knew I wasn’t alone. Then the shadow disappeared as I ran my fingers through my hair and wondered what was different. It was one of those moments when you know something is amiss, only you can’t put your finger on it. Then, when I stepped back from the mirror, it hit like a thundering blow:
My hair was no longer the dirty brown of a dead mouse I had kicked around in the fields. It was white.
The ghost boy.
In my university years, Bob once told me that those kids were just too scared to come near me. ‘I can only imagine the stories that must have spread around those kids of seven and eight. The sort that chills you to the bone.’ Bob had eyed me over his pint as the words slipped in the smoky pub air. I hadn’t risen to it or given him any more than I had done for over a decade. ‘Aye,’ he continued. ‘But look at you now, my lad. All grown up. And clever, mind. Not that we doubted that of you. We knew you’d turn out a good’n, never mind the past.’
I stared at him then, unable to respond. What a childhood history to carry around on my shoulders. Bob, he’d had no idea.
I’d heard my folks discuss the matter on occasions. How I came to be there, and the circumstances. They called it the Happening. How I happened to be in the sleepy seaside town perched on the Yorkshire cliff when I belonged among the rural folk of Suffolk. I told them repeatedly that I had no memory of it, when in truth, it was not entirely so. I wondered if it would have lessened the burden had I told someone the snippets that hung like stray threads. As my years grew, I was glad I never had. I’d saved them that, at least.
I’d lost both those dear people in my early twenties—a freak car accident. The facts were unclear, only that they had been heading into Suffolk. At least they had gone together. I found consolation in that. Never having to live without the one that made you whole… I knew that agony. It never stopped ripping at your soul. Now I was alone again, and truly this time. No one to rush me off in the middle of the night. No blanket to bolster my grief.
I overheard a voice at their funeral, which I’d organised in the local pub. The voice mentioned Suffolk. I stood behind a pillar around the corner of the bar, listening. Then, quickly, an uneasy sensation crawled down my spine—I knew that voice. It struck with awareness so vivid it flashed red before my eyes. But it was more the darkness that began to burrow beneath my skin that made me move; I couldn’t listen any longer.
‘Oh, Oliver,’ she had said. ‘I didn’t see you there. You won’t remember me.’
But I had remembered her. And it had come to me then, crashing down like a freezing wave over my head, ready to drown me.
‘Mrs Scarfe?’ I stared at a jagged slice of my past in the figure standing in my present.
‘I wasn’t sure you would.’ A slight hint of something extra left her lips with those mundane words.
‘Why are you here? I don’t understand.’ The more I glimpsed back into the past, the more confused I became. The face I recalled was younger, but her flash of red hair and large eyes hit like a bullet. The main issue I had was placing her in any kind of scene or location. Instead, the red-tinged image was hovering, disconnected.
‘Vera was my sister.’
Those words dug out my heart with a spoon. The day I had said goodbye to the best part of my life—that I remembered, now had me greeting something vastly different. A cruel trick to play when I was already grieving.
I never set eyes on Mrs Scarfe again. She had written twice over the following couple of years, the general enquiring after my health and wellbeing, which felt misplaced. Even though I had tried to answer her, my letters had fallen flat. I’d never sent them. It was safer to bury past connections where they belonged: in a deep hole with Vera and Bob.
Enough wallowing.
Staggering from the garden lounger, I gulped down the last of the gin. Leant on the door, pushed my forehead to the frame as a wave of sickness swamped me, dragging me back to the phone call somersaulting my thoughts, churning my stomach.
What did this Fisk have that was so urgent?
And my brother?
Why had I agreed to catch the train down to Suffolk the following day? Not one word Fisk had spoken made any sense, not in the real world.
The moon was high by the time I stumbled inside. Relieved that I’d already packed a holdall, I slumped into bed. The room spun around me as my insides burned.