He knew someone was there. Felt the familiar tingling at the back of his neck. He turned. But he was too slow to catch a glimpse.
He could not remember when he first saw that flicker of movement in his peripheral vision, when he first heard the crackling of dry grass stalks or the crush of stones behind him on an empty pathway. Weeks ago. Perhaps months. Or had it always been this way? He was never alone, not really. There was always someone nearby. A neighbour just beyond the hedge. A friend passing by on his way to work. A tourist wobbling on her bicycle. A ghost. So many ghosts. Whispering their accusations. Taunting him. Brushing the back of his neck with their icy fingers.
He shrugged. It was probably kids. The children of the children who used to follow him, daring each other to get as close as they could and then running away as soon as he caught a look at them. That’s how old he was. The kids had kids already. He was too slow now to catch them, and he wouldn’t even if he could. One of them had fainted once. Passed out cold as he’d grabbed the little bugger by the scruff of the neck. He’d only been going to give him a telling-off. He wondered what stories they told each other, what sort of bogeyman he was. He smiled. Nothing changed. Each generation had their monsters. Their horror stories. He and his friends had taunted an older lady way back when. Convinced she was a witch, they’d muttered charms whenever she’d passed, or crossed themselves and spat over their shoulders, lest she cursed them with her evil eye. Poor woman. Just a spinster. Old and alone. Like him.
He looked at his shoes. Fine yellow dust coated the dull, scuffed leather. It had not rained for days and the main road through the village was dry; small clouds of the pressed, sandy surface surrounded his feet as he walked.
He had gone out with a purpose this morning and managed to follow it through to completion. No mean feat these days. He pulled a trolley behind him. It was red-and-black tartan and heavy with bread, eggs, milk and butter. No national papers. There was fog over in Guernsey and the mail plane from the mainland could not land there in time to make the eight-o’clock sailing to Sark. No matter. He never read the papers anyway. And he had a copy of the Guernsey News, which would do nicely.
His smile slipped as he tried to remember why he needed a newspaper that he wouldn’t read. To start a fire, perhaps. No, that couldn’t be right. It was summer. Hot. So hot that even now, early morning, sweat trickled down his brow and stung the corners of his eyes. He closed them. Shook his head. A sudden, sharp vision. A boy crying. He could hear him. Smell him. That’s how it was now. Memories from years ago were clear as though they happened yesterday, and yet it was a struggle to hold on to a new thought for more than a few moments.
He wondered how long it would be before he stopped questioning his own behaviour. Before he was so lost there was no finding the way back, not even for a little bit. Perhaps one of his strolls would finish him off. He found himself in the strangest places at the strangest times. He would set out to watch the sunrise over the common and end up on La Coupée, the narrow, wind-battered isthmus that connected Sark to Little Sark, leaning on railings built by German prisoners of war, looking out over the sea to the sun rising from behind Jersey, the empty feeling in his stomach reminding him that he’d not yet had breakfast. It was a long way to walk without breakfast.
Or, in the dark, at the edge of the cliffs at Gouliot, acutely aware of the caves that riddled the earth beneath his feet, the island of Brecqhou rising out of the water before him. It had been deserted when he was a boy. Just seagulls and seagull shit, the odd puffin, sometimes a seal basking on the rocks. Now there was a mansion made of marble and gold, so they said, each step leading up to it costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. So they said.
Sometimes he would come round as if from sleep at Port du Moulin, sitting on the pebbles, the tide lapping at his feet, staring at the arch of rock that straddled land and sea, and reminded him of pictures he had seen in National Geographic magazine, of great stone arches in the American desert, Utah, or Nevada, he couldn’t remember which. Somewhere he’d never been. Somewhere he would never go. His was a life measured in footsteps, not air miles.
He lived less than three miles from anywhere on the island. Less than one from the village. It would only have taken a few minutes on his bicycle, but he had left it somewhere. He had forgotten where. He’d posted a note up, a few days ago, at the Village Stores. The scrawny girl working there had laughed at him as she wrote it. She was one of those seasonal workers who came over for a few weeks every summer. She’d said all the islanders had funny names and he’d had to spell his out for her. She’d had a tattoo of a butterfly on the inside of her veiny wrist, and her T-shirt had lain flat and loose over her chest. He preferred a little meat on the bones. Large breasts and fleshy buttocks. Like Rachel.
It was still on the board. The note. There had been no sign of the bike. Truth be told, he’d been struggling to ride it anyway, with his knees. Better to walk. Maybe if his knees got really bad, he could get one of those motorised scooters the aged seigneur had used after his hip replacement. Sir William de Bordeaux, the island’s feudal leader, was approaching ninety. There’d been a big to-do when he’d asked for permission to use a motorised vehicle. But after much consideration, the Chief Pleas, Sark’s government, had agreed that it was impractical for the seigneur to be taken everywhere on a horse and cart, and that a mobility scooter was less intrusive than a tractor. They were right about that. Used to be hard to get a tractor licence on Sark. Now it seemed like anyone could get one.
There was one now. Not just one—two, three in a bloody row. That was unusual, truth be told. And they seemed to be going very fast. He turned to watch them, spewing thick fumes into the heavy air as they chugged up the Avenue.
Outside the new coffee shop, two women were talking animatedly. They pointed after the tractors. One was holding a mobile telephone to her ear, talking into it, then pausing every now and then to check something with her companion. Time was he would have tried to find out what all the fuss was about. But he didn’t know the women. At least, he didn’t think he did. It was difficult for him to sort out the familiar faces from the unfamiliar. People stopped and talked to him as if they knew him, but he could not place them. Each face seemed to blend into the next, their features blurred by the haze that settled on his eyes overnight and often didn’t clear until lunchtime. He should get his eyes tested, at the very least, but that would mean a trip to Guernsey and he’d rather go blind than go there.
He passed the bank and some guesthouses. They were all covered in wisteria and advertised lobster rolls and afternoon tea and Prosecco in the garden on chalkboards outside. Fifteen pounds for a sandwich and a glass of wine. He shook his head, felt the sweat under his collar. It was like the desert sometimes. All the yellow roads and the sand and the dust and the shimmer of the heat up ahead. He would have liked to have seen a desert. The Sahara, perhaps. It froze there, sometimes, at night. Not many people knew that.
He set down his trolley and rested against the hedge, avoiding a patch of cow parsley, which on a day like today, with the sun blazing, would blister the skin if brushed against. The grass was cool. He closed his eyes for a moment, listened to the grasshoppers and the birds and felt like he could just drift off, right there.
The rumble of another tractor. It came into view and he stood and squinted at it. Ah, this one he knew. It was Malcolm Perré’s boy. He had forgotten his name. Malcolm’s boy raised a hand in greeting and he nodded his head in reply. He had never liked Malcolm, but the boy had been friends with Luke and was always polite, and he’d stayed here, to run a farm, which said something, he supposed, about the boy’s character. He coughed as the dust churned up by the tractor hit the back of his throat.
The tractor stopped.
‘Everything OK, Mr Carré?’
‘Yes, yes. Just enjoying the sunshine.’ He took hold of the trolley, made to continue on his way.
‘Have you heard about the body?’
‘What’s that?’ It seemed as if Malcolm’s boy was looking at him very intently and he felt a frisson of fear.
‘Well, not a body. Bones. Down on Derrible. The police are there now.’
The heat on his face was no longer from the sun but from the blood that rushed from his body and his limbs and surged into his head. His legs felt hollow and he did not trust them to hold his weight. He leaned back against the hedge again.
‘Nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Probably washed up from somewhere else. Do you need a lift home?’
He shook his head. Waved a hand. ‘I’m fine.’ Benjamin. That was Malcolm’s boy’s name. ‘Thank you, Benjamin.’
‘OK, Mr Carré. Take care now.’ The tractor rumbled away.
He stood up. Pulled his trolley, head down, one foot in front of the other. He needed to get home. To sit down in the cool darkness of the cottage.
Head still pounding. Legs still weak. The trolley felt heavy all of a sudden, a weight trailing behind him he could no longer bear.
Just get home.
But his vision blurred and the path began to resemble not earth but water, and he stumbled as the surface undulated, his feet continuing to travel through what his eyes believed was solid ground. He stopped. Searched his pockets for a handkerchief.
A rustle. The crushing of dry grass.
It was close now. He could feel it. Closer than it had ever been. The air thickened; the heat pressed down on him, hampered his breathing. He recalled the feeling of being buried on the beach, a game played as a child, sand shovelled on top of him, heavy as rocks piled on his chest.
And then he saw it. A dark flicker. In the field beside him.
He steadied himself. Swallowed down a gulp of the warm, heavy air. Turned. Let go of the trolley, which fell to the ground with a clatter.
It stood motionless, save for its tongue, which lolled out of its open, spittle-flecked jaws, rippling as it panted in the heat. Its coat was so black, so sleek, it shone almost blue in the sunlight, muscles quivering beneath it. Its eyes were fixed on him, flaming from within.
He felt sure if he moved, it would come for him. Even the flicker of an eyelash. The twitch of a hand. So he stood, tensing every aching muscle, holding every brittle bone in place. Still. So still. Until the breeze whispered through the undergrowth, sent leaves scuttling across the path and lifted his hair. It was enough. The beast stiffened. Crouched. Growled, long and low, and he could smell its breath, laden with dank and decay, like the soil in a graveyard. He had seen the Tchico. His time had come. It turned. Padded silently across the field and into the woods beyond.
He allowed himself to breathe. Felt the tension leave his body, only the old and familiar aches remaining in his bones. Not now, then. Not right now. But soon. He’d known all along that it would come to this. It wasn’t children following him. It was fate. He’d always imagined when it caught up with him that he would scream and run, that he would fight against inevitability.
As it was, he picked up his trolley, put his head down. Kept on walking.