Mr. Flood's Last Resort(9)
It is as ordinary and complicated as any family snapshot.
A girl, no more than fifteen, stands on a boarded walkway flanked by sand dunes. She leans against the railing with her hip jutting out, her mouth unsmiling. Beside her stands a smaller girl, no less than seven. Her hair is tucked behind her ears and she is wearing an uncertain smile. Their hair is brown and they wear the same white sandals. Otherwise they hardly look related. It is a day of warm skies and settled winds. I can tell this because the marram grass that fringes the mounds around them is upright and they do not have that brittle look of people frozen to the bone.
I have no recollection of this photograph being taken. In fact, it couldn’t have been taken because we never saw another soul on that beach through the whole of that summer.
*
IT WAS a wild empty place, that beach. A place where the ocean met the sky and the seabirds screamed and reeled in wide, wide, borderless blue. The dunes were three stories high or no bigger than an anthill, great ancient breakers or new little hillocks. It was a place of shifting sand, singing sand, sinking sand, hard-packed made-for-running-on sand. Sand with a sheen to it, a certain luster in the right light (moonlight, starlight, dawnlight). A long crescent swoon of a beach, even its name was magical: Pearl Strand.
My sister said that when the tide was out you could walk all the way to America; the waves pulled back that far. So far that the starfish forgot there ever was an ocean and stiffened with dismay. So far that the seaweed wept itself dry on the rocks with nostalgia.
Pearl Strand was a place of great beauty and great treachery.
You needed to know where to put your foot, which direction home was in, and where to take shelter when the wind blew horizontally. The tides were fickle and the weather could change at any moment. Sometimes the wind dropped down and hid behind the dunes, sometimes it sent playful handfuls of sand skipping. Sometimes it raised colossal storms to scour your arse all along the strand. A gyre of needles abrading your cheeks and legs and arms. Closing your eyes and ears and mouth, plugging them shut.
*
YOU COULD escape into the caves.
These were not kindly, welcoming caves. They were purse-lipped, sinister fissures. Squeeze and duck, plash through freezing rock pools, over surfaces perilously slippery or rough enough to cut the feet off you. Follow inlets of wave-ridged sand into dank, secret places with fierce briny smells—the armpits of the sea!
Sometimes you found the empty throne room of a mermaid with bum-tail hollowed-out rocks and starry limpets studding the ceiling. Sometimes you found the mermaid’s salty larder, littered with dismembered crabs and frayed rope, and once a floundered eyeless fish.
Ten paces on, the cave might open up to a cathedral. An echoing masterpiece carved by the sea’s savage love, with ledges and striations and a year-round mineral winter.
Only that summer the caves were out of bounds, Deirdre said.
CHAPTER 4
I rarely make it up the stairs to my first-floor, purpose-built, rented maisonette in the arse-end of Whitton without my landlady emerging like a New Age butterfly from her ground-floor cocoon. Although, she doesn’t quite emerge; she rather sniffs the air with her heavily powdered proboscis from just inside the doorway.
I’ve long given up trying to sneak by her. The front gate, kept rusty, heralds my return with its grating alarm. What happens next is a well-rehearsed dance. I walk down the path. She raps on her kitchen window with a knuckle full of dress rings. I nod in a polite and faraway manner or put my head down and run. The result is the same: the kitchen window is thrown open and Renata’s voice issues forth with a velvety authority.
“Maud, darling, come inside.”
Each word glides out, enrobed in plush. Delivered with the precisely modulated, perfectly intonated accent usually found in the BBC archives. The speech equivalent of “Rule Britannia” at Last Night of the Proms: a cut glass, cannon-firing, wave-ruling, plummy stridency. A stridency Renata employs in arguments with the meter man. I’ve seen him edging away, bowing and grimacing with involuntary class deference.
One would never believe she came from the East End of London.
As I round the house I see Renata at the bathroom window, bobbing up and down behind the frosted glass. By the time I reach her door she’s standing there, wearing a rueful scowl and a kaftan.
“Maud, darling, come inside.”
I don’t mind visiting. Renata’s home provides the antidote to Mr. Flood’s apocalyptic squalor that my own flat doesn’t offer. At Renata’s, tea towels are ironed and the carpet is mown in straight lines. Renata once told me that housework was the only way her sister, Lillian, can express her love. Lillian comes twice a week to demonstrate her affection and they argue until Lillian slams the door in disgust, taking the washing with her.
I follow Renata into the hallway. The outdoor shoes she will never wear again are lined up on a rack. The twin icons of her life, Jesus Christ and Johnny Cash, look down from the wall, bestowing their mixed blessings.
Jesus Christ reveals his Sacred Heart: a rinsed orb of holy light. His eyes are gentle with mercy and his bright curls fall softly onto his robed shoulders.
Johnny Cash reveals nothing; his face is dyspeptic. He purses his lips against life’s fairground ride of moral vicissitude, damnation, and the dwindling hope of redemption.
Our money is on Cash.
“The kettle is on; will you step in?” Renata widens her eyes, which are already theatrically wide with a feline stroke of eyeliner along her top lashes.