I lay stranded on the shingle until the pain was no longer a sky of sharp stars like ground glass, until it became a dull but insistent dawn over-cast with cloud. And then I got up and stumbled towards Seaton with the breaking summer weather and the cloud boiling up out of the hazy estuary and the thunder beginning a low throat-clearing grumble somewhere far off. It was hot. Too hot. All the frustrations and non-events of the summer precipitating out and taking solid form in the sweat on my neck and the blood crusting my clothes and the bruises swelling like clumsy purple fists in my flesh. Going to rain soon, and hard.
Charlie said Yan was damaged goods and now I was damaged to match. Broken nose and a couple of teeth gone and when I tried to move my left shoulder there was a twang like a snapped elastic band and a bright shaft of pain. When a dislocated shoulder jumps back into its socket there’s a sudden agony like a star imploding and then bliss, but it had left something torn in there – muscle, ligament, tendon. My ribs were the worst, a hot blade of it every time I breathed or jigged an arm, a rusty saw quartering my chest cavity.
Seaton Carew, shambling and downtrodden in the heat. Boneheads in the crumbling art deco bus station, drinking from cans and stomping them down into the concrete. I thought of Paul. Every time I’d seen him over the summer he was bagged off his head.
The beach sprawled out towards a leaden North Sea, shabby gift shops and chippies along the road. A herring gull perched on top of a waste bin and the cowl of its head was aspirin white and painless but the beady yellow eye connived in the world with a fullstop at the centre. I stared back and the gull cracked the snowy head open like a snapdragon and showed me its gape all slick and sharp-tongued like a spread vulva.
Hissed. Tossed its head back and ululated somewhere in between alleycat and pterodactyl.
Down the road a man came out of a chippie and chucked a bag of scraps across the pavement and there was a mugging of wings and beaks and howling, yelling, ripping.
They’ll fucking eat anything these, he said as I passed. Bog roll, johnnies, turds off the sewage outfall. Rats of the sea, I call them.
Aye, I said, smiling at him. He was short and bald, a film of sweat on his scalp.
When you think what it eats, he said. Where it sticks its head. How can it stay so fucking white? Crystal white. That’s what I don’t get.
I pressed on. People were hurrying now as clouds bulked up like bruises. A sudden wind revved up from the sea, squalls of dry sand scampering across the road. And then the rain, vertical and vindictive, gouts of water bursting on the hot concrete and the tarmac. I was drenched in seconds, rain hammering at me like pebbles. The shingle beach.
I knocked on the door of a pebbledashed grey house in one of the bleak streets behind the sea front. Small windows to keep out the North Sea. The rain was unabated, rivulets of water gathering and beginning to hurry down the roadway. The door opened and a man stood there in a rumpled tee-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, no socks. His dark skin was wrinkled and his hair was cut close like grey ash. Jonah. He had a can in his hand, regarded me for a moment as if weighing things up.
Danny, he said. Come in man.
He ushered me into the doorway and I stumbled through into a front room littered with bulging ashtrays and empty beer cans.
I’d give up the boxing if I was you, he said. Looks like you’re not much cop. I started out on a smile but my face knacked so I stopped.
You should see the other bloke, I said.
He grinned.
I can’t go back to the pub, I said. Wondered if I could stop here. Just for a day or two.
Lowered myself into an armchair, which bulged lazily under my weight. No lights on in the house. Livid stormlight slopped through the windows, through broadfingered fronds of rain.
Temporary problem, said Jonah apologetically. Had a slight disagreement with the electric. A few modifications I made to the meter.
He winked at me. I knew better than to try a smile.
We’re still cookin’ on gas though, he quipped.
He sat down opposite me, glanced at the doorway through to the back kitchen. A slow arc of lightning flapped across the sky, and we waited a second or two for the bellow of rage to reach us. The window frames rattled. I didn’t think the rain could get any louder, any harder. And then it did. A small pool began to well under the front door.
All the time I’ve been in the merchant navy, it’s been me biggest fear, boomed Jonah, over the noise. Trapped inside a ship that’s going down. In a bubble of steel and air with miles of water closing over your head. I never thought it’d happen to me in my own house.
The lightning crawled again and the shell burst, closer this time. Jonah looked pensive.
Let’s have a look over you son, he said. I got some medical training at sea, years ago. We need to work out what’s what. You might have to go to hospital.
I nodded acquiescence, wearily.
Jonah swam over and perched on the edge of the armchair. He commenced measuring me with his nimble, quiet fingers moving like a draughtsman’s compasses, pinching here, appraising there.
Heard you’d been away, he said. Does that hurt?
I shook my head through gritted teeth.
Should have come and told me how you got on. How about that?
I bellowed in affirmation as pain shot through me, synchronized with another lightning bolt, another explosion.
Still, he said. It’s your funeral.
With a flick of the wrist he twisted my nose straight, and I almost passed out.
Sorry about that, he said. Diversionary tactics. You’ve been lucky, I’d say. Nose. Ribs. A bit of ripped muscle. The rest of it’s just bruising. Nothing medical science can do to help you there. Rest and healing, that’s all. So how did you get on then?
He was a waster, I said. Wasn’t he? A right feckless bastard. Didn’t connect right with anyone – just thought of himself.
That doesn’t sound like you talking, said Jonah. Who’s been working on you?
Never mind that. It’s true, isn’t it?
It’s easy to be swayed, said Jonah. Easy to paint a caricature of the man. But sometimes the real thing isn’t black and white and you got to make your own mind up about that. Weigh things up for yerself. Nobody’s whiter than white.
He looked appraisingly at my face.
Looks like you’ve been getting into some chew yourself, he said. Maybe you’re not the one to point the finger.
I looked down at the floor. Jonah stood up and shifted from foot to foot.
Do you want to see it? he said, almost shy. He slid a drawer open in the dresser and passed me a slim package wrapped in tissue paper. I opened it, curious. There was some kind of transparent membrane folded in there, crisp and weightless like the husk left behind when a reptile slips its skin.
It’s your caul, he said. Part of you, once. Like you were part of your dad. Do you want it back?
No. I don’t want it.
I thrust it back at him with a fierceness I didn’t understand. He took it, sort of reverently.
Hope it brings you luck, I said.
He winked at me.
You should go and get some kip, he said, but there’s someone here you ought to meet first.
He glanced round again. Then he led the way through the rain-streaked room to the kitchen door.
In the grate a young fire was fledging, trying out new feathers. It mewed and bawled and puked gently, knitting the darkness into a dense knot of red coals and flame. The room gravitated around it, a twilit solar system leaning towards an infant sun, and the distant rumbling of rain and thunder were forgotten, in another galaxy altogether. A couple of shabby armchairs were pulled up close to the fireguard, and in one of them an old man sat gazing into the fire’s heart and into his own thoughts. His hair was long and straggling and dirty and the bald patch at his crown glowed a deep red in the firelight. He raised a hand to his lips and sucked on a skinny hand-rolled cigarette. The nub glowed brightly in the draught of oxygen and then it subsided. Jonah cleared his throat and the old man turned to look at the two of us framed in the doorway. His eyes were grey and crinkled at the corners and as limitless as the sea. They seemed to frame a question, eyebrows slightly raised. These disparate features blurred and swam and finally knit together into a familiar grin. It was Yan.
Nice weather for ducks Danny, he said.