Alice, Frank and Romaine return three hours later with a bag full of perfectly decent clothes from the Red Cross shop and a three-pack of boxers and a clutch of new socks from M&Co on the high street. It’s past lunchtime and everyone is starving so Alice has picked up a ton of fish and chips from round the corner, which they unfold at the kitchen table and tip on to china plates.
‘I do normally cook,’ says Alice as Kai squirts half a bottle of ketchup over his chips and puts three in his mouth. ‘It’s just everything feels a bit . . . out of sequence right now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘No! You don’t need to be sorry! It’s just – I’m not the most together person in the world and it doesn’t take much to make all the wheels fall off. I’m only one unexpected house guest away from existential chaos.’
‘I’ll go shopping for you,’ he says futilely.
‘They make you pay for stuff round here.’
‘I know. I just thought . . .’
She squeezes his hand and smiles. ‘I know what you meant and it’s very sweet of you. But I can send one of this lot out.’ She gestures at Kai and Jasmine, who both roll their eyes at her. ‘And tell you what, to prove that I’m not as Benefits Britain as you probably think I am, I’ll cook us a lovely dinner tonight. Pasta. Something like that.’
He nods. Her offer is genuine and warm but he still feels guilty. ‘Once I’ve worked out who I am, I’m going to take you all to the . . .’ He searches for the name. It begins with R. It evokes thoughts of 1920s glamour. It’s gone. He sighs.
Alice looks at him and chuckles. ‘Sounds great. But, seriously, you don’t have to do anything. Just accept the hospitality. That’s how we do things oop north.’ She puts on a northern accent and her children, who all have northern accents, tut at her.
‘Well, I’ll be paying you back for the clothes and the rent.’
‘That you can do,’ she says. She smiles at him over the top of Romaine’s head. It’s a worn-out smile, tired and faded around the edges. But there’s still a kind of thrilling glamour about it. Something golden and intoxicating. Like an old hotel, he thinks. Like . . . the Ritz.
He smiles to himself at the satisfyingly recalled name and he adds it to his collection: a priceless coin dug up on a beach.
Derry is at the front door. She has Daniel by the hand and looks very stern. ‘What’, she says, ‘is going on? Jules says she saw you in town this morning, shopping, with that guy.’
Alice clutches her heart and throws Derry a look of mock horror. ‘Scandalous!’ she says.
Derry grimaces. ‘But, Al, it’s one thing giving him shelter, it’s another spending your bloody money on him.’
‘Christ, Derry, I spent twenty quid in the Red Cross shop.’ This isn’t strictly true. It was closer to forty once you factored in the pants and socks.
‘Is he here?’
Alice sighs. ‘So far as I know. He’s in the shed. Having a nap.’
Derry is wriggling with frustration. This is the downside of allowing a friend to manage your life for you.
Alice holds the door open and says, ‘Come on then. Let’s get this over with. And just for the record,’ she adds in a low voice, following her friend into the kitchen, ‘Griff loves him. And so does Romaine. And kids and dogs know people.’
‘And what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘He’s nice,’ she says circumspectly. ‘What do you want me to say?’
Daniel finds Romaine in the back yard and Derry immediately starts tidying Alice’s kitchen. She doesn’t even know she’s doing it. ‘“Nice”,’ she mutters. ‘Well. I look forward to being able to draw my own conclusions.’ She drops a ball of chip paper into Alice’s bin, washes her hands and dries them. Peering through the window of the back door into the back yard she says, ‘He’s up.’
‘Up?’
‘Yeah. Your man. Playing with the littlies.’
Alice joins her at the back door. Romaine and Daniel have embroiled Frank in a game involving two dolls, a threadbare dog and a Transformer. He is on his haunches, following instructions very gravely.
‘See,’ says Alice. ‘He’s a fine man.’
‘That’s as maybe,’ says Derry, hanging up Alice’s tea towel and switching on the kettle. ‘But he’s an unknown quantity. And given your history, I really think you should call the police.’
Alice rubs the tips of her elbows. As much as she doesn’t want to fuel Derry’s paranoia, she does want to share. ‘I suggested it,’ she says. ‘When he first arrived. He blanched. Looked petrified.’ She shrugs.
‘Well,’ says Derry. ‘That’s not particularly reassuring.’
‘And there’s other stuff. He’s started remembering things. He remembers watching a man jumping into the sea and drowning. He remembers a teenage girl on the carousel at the steam fair.’
‘So,’ says Derry, ‘have you googled it?’
‘Googled what?’
‘Men jumping into the sea and drowning?’
‘What? No. Of course I haven’t. I don’t even know when it happened.’
Derry sighs. ‘Where’s your laptop?’
‘In my room.’
‘Bring it down.’
Alice does as she’s told. Jasmine is sitting at her desk in her room and turns when Alice walks in. ‘Sorry, love, I need the laptop.’
‘When’s he going?’ she asks, closing the browser and putting the laptop to sleep.
‘Frank?’
‘Whatever. Yeah.’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Soon. When he remembers.’
‘But what if he doesn’t remember?’
‘He will, love. It says, on the internet. It’s temporary.’
Jasmine stands up, adjusts her black-framed glasses and shrugs.
‘Griff likes him,’ she says to Jasmine’s back.
‘Right,’ says Jasmine. ‘He’s a dog.’
‘A fussy dog!’ she calls after her daughter, but she’s gone.
‘Man drowned in Ridinghouse Bay’.
Alice and Derry sit, heads almost touching, side by side at the laptop. Derry presses enter and they wait for the results to come up.
It is immediately surprising how many men have drowned off Ridinghouse Bay.
‘We need a year,’ says Derry.
‘I told you,’ says Alice. ‘I have no idea.’
‘You said he remembered a teenage girl. So maybe this happened when he was a teenager. How old do you reckon he is?’
‘Late thirties? Forty maybe?’
‘Right. So, say he was eighteen. And forty now. Twenty-two years ago. Nineteen ninety-three. Roughly.’
‘Very roughly,’ says Alice.
‘It’s better than nothing.’ She adds ‘1993’ to her search. ‘Check on them, will you?’ she instructs Alice.
Obediently, Alice goes to the back door and peers through the window again. The game is still very much on. Frank is voicing the threadbare dog. Romaine has one bare, olive-skinned arm draped nonchalantly around Frank’s shoulder, her hip angled against him. They look as though they could be father and daughter. No one would doubt it for a moment.
Alice sits down next to Derry. ‘He’s murdered them both,’ she deadpans. ‘Cut them to ribbons, is eating their warm flesh off the ground with the dogs.’
Derry nudges her hard. ‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘Look.’ She angles the screen towards her. ‘Not quite a drowned man, but the timings match.’
There is a story on the screen, from the Ridinghouse Gazette archives.
The Coastguard was called out to Ridinghouse Bay at around 1 a.m. this morning after reports of three people struggling off the coast. Two of those involved have yet to be located and are feared drowned. The third, a man named locally as tourist Anthony Ross, suffered a fatal heart attack on the beach moments after being swept to shore. Another man, believed to be Ross’s teenage son, was taken to hospital but released shortly afterwards. Police are investigating the incident.
Derry is already googling the names: ‘Anthony Ross’, ‘Ridinghouse Bay’.
Nothing else comes up.
They hear the back door clatter and the children run in, high on play. Frank follows behind them and stops shyly when he sees Derry sitting there.
‘Frank,’ Alice says, ‘this is my best friend, Derry Dynes.’
‘Hi,’ she says, a softness in her voice that wouldn’t have been there if she hadn’t just read the story about a teenage boy’s father dying on the beach. ‘Mother of Daniel.’ She points at her son.
‘Nice to meet you,’ says Frank. ‘Great kids.’
‘Listen,’ says Alice, exchanging a look with Derry who nods, imperceptibly. ‘We’ve just been looking into things, on the internet, seeing what we could find out about drownings in the area. And we found a story from a good few years back. Two people feared drowned on a summer’s night. A man and his teenage son found on the beach, just here.’ She gestures towards the front door. ‘Apparently the man died of a heart attack. But the son survived. Does that ring any bells? Nineteen ninety-three? Anthony Ross?’
She is talking and talking because Frank is not responding.
‘I mean, it could be entirely the wrong time frame. We were just taking a punt. You know, you mentioned the teenage girl. So we thought it might have been something that happened when you were a teenager. If anything actually happened at all of course.’
Still he does not respond. He is leaning against the kitchen counter, but as Alice watches she realises that he is not leaning but being held up, that he is sliding, that his face has lost all its colour. She sees his hands grip the sides of the work surface, his knuckles white and hard.
‘Frank?’
Derry jumps to her feet. ‘He’s fainting,’ she says. ‘Quick. Let’s get him sitting down. Help me!’
But it’s too late. He falls to the floor like a felled tree.