Cold to the Touch Read online

  They were both talking at once. Sarah started on it, sloshed the water on the block, soaking herself. Then she scrubbed randomly.

  ‘You’re using too much water and too much fucking soap, do it in sections so you know where you’ve been,’ Jeremy said. ‘No worries – where do you come from, by the way? Not round here, I’ve seen you out walking, I saw you on the cliffs, miles away on Sunday, only you don’t really know where to go, do you? OK, that’s enough, now for the hard part. Two kettles of boiling water, dissolves the soap, see? A gallon’s enough, the block’s only five by three, only then you’ve really got to get the shit out. Lots of clean sawdust on top of the water, cover it, go on, use more, pour it on.’

  He showed her: she did it. First the steaming water, which brought bubbles to the surface, then a thick layer of fresh sawdust poured from a sweet-smelling sack, absorbing the water. She spilled plenty. Then he showed her how to draw quarters on the sawdust with a finger, so she would know where she was and not miss out any part of the surface.

  ‘Now you scrub really hard, no, not the same brush, it’s dirty as well as the wrong kind of brush, see what I mean? You need a hard wire brush. Start at the corner of square one, you’ve got to scrub until that wet surface is so dry it’s white, scrub that sawdust in and scrub it out, big brush, use your arms. Good, you’ve got it, less water another time, then the next quarter, then do it all again. Watch it change colour.’

  Sarah scrubbed in sections as if her life depended on it, watching as the sawdust soaked up the moisture and the surface changed from dark to lime white as if it had been bleached. Jeremy chatted. Sam laughed at her clumsiness.

  ‘Would you believe,’ he said, ‘that stuck-up Mrs Hurly’s daughter used to like doing this when she was a kid. She liked it here. Kids do.’

  Sarah paused for a minute, let that sink in along with the sawdust. It figured. Jessica Hurly liked hard work. She continued to scrub, even after Jeremy said that’s enough. Then they scrubbed the legs of the table, leaving her exhilarated with the achievement. She stood back and admired.

  ‘Can I do this every day?’ she said.

  ‘We don’t do it every day.’

  The sun was leering through the window, the way it would for another hour. Sarah swept the floor and sprinkled more sawdust, the natural cleanser, forgetting how cold it was in the room. Sam put on his coat to go home and unlocked the front door.

  ‘You want a job, you got it, provided you don’t want pay. Scat, the pair of you. I’m off.’

  Sarah had never really explored the beach, concentrating on the heights and the fields behind where she could look down, so far preferring to avoid the sea at sea level. The single-track road to the next town ran roughly parallel to a flat expanse of shingle: scrub-covered beach for the first mile after the houses ran out. Beyond the flat expanse the beach dipped sharply, so that the point where the sea actually embraced the land was invisible except to someone who walked over the rim. Invisible but never inaudible, either murmuring or roaring at a safe distance, still scaring her down at this level with the knowledge that it could at any time either creep or roar up the banks of stone and engulf her, like the hungry beast it was. She had walked via the road to the next town, feeling exposed even there, because no one else walked and when a car hove into view she had to step back onto the bank. The road turned inland, leaving a bicycle track by the edge of the shore. Then the cliffs ran out and the beach became a broader, bleaker expanse without shelter, with a fabulous horizon but little temptation to venture over the shingle, which was hard on the feet. It had seemed unwelcoming and impenetrable, the scrubby bushes and hardy thistles forming a dense untidy litter, denying free passage anywhere away from the cycle track. She could not imagine it crowded, even in the height of summer. It was a million miles from the warm sandy beaches of holiday destinations, bleak, wild and empty in the late days of winter when she had arrived and avoided it. She told Jeremy she had been a sissy about the beach itself and was waiting for warmer weather, or at least a day without a stiff breeze coming straight off the sea, challenging anyone to come closer. She had definitely needed a guide to the beach, and now she had one, as well as a near-perfect day to broach its alien landscape.

  Jessica’s voice came back. I burned my boats. They were partway across the level stretch of half scrubland, half shingle that she had regarded as another kind of jungle, making for the sea, and she was full of the joy of discovery. Not only was this a whole new view, it was an alternative world: the scrub was not the grey stuff she had dismissed, but glorious harmonious growth in delicate shades of green and silver, tight buds of pink and the beginning of tufty yellow flowers on pale stems. There were drifts of feathery green fern close to the ground, bordering the myriad pathways which meandered forever onwards in an indirect route towards the bare shingle. It was like being in a benign maze of colour, nothing growing higher than the knees. There were shrubs blown sideways by the wind, still standing and creeping, determined upon survival albeit without elegance, nudging at thistle leaves still soft in the spring. Jeremy was telling her about the pinks and the red-hot poker flowers which would come later. You wanted herbs, he said; there’ll be plenty of fennel and sage and garlic anytime soon. Best in May, though.

  Once they reached the rim Sarah turned back to look at the land. The cliffs sloped away on this side of the village, flattening out but still hiding it. She realised that the most complete view of the place was from the sea itself, and even that was incomplete. Standing on the rim of the steep slope which led down to the now shockingly close waves, she felt she really was on the edge of the world and had the exhilarating sensation of having conquered something, plus the satisfying knowledge that she was going to come here again and again.

  ‘Can you swim here, Jeremy?’

  ‘Oh yes, but watch out for the current. Swim and fish, especially fish. More fishing than swimming. See the boats?’

  Yes, she could see the boats, a small colony of them parked on the sea side of the second shingle shelf, hidden either from the track or from anywhere except the sea itself. The colony of boats, winches and sheds was a startling reminder of humanity in the middle of nothing. Another invisible scene, solid shapes gaining focus as they walked closer. Sarah was puzzling out how they came to be there, how did they get there: how did they get from there into the water and how were they hauled back – a list of questions forming. It was clearer when they drew closer, crunching over the shingle, she awkwardly, he to the manner born, and she could see the wooden planked runway leading down to the water’s edge and away from the colony into the scrubland, see the winches and the chains and gauge the disparate sizes of the five or six solid boats, each with a cabin, room enough for two perhaps and for tackle. Two of them had huge bulbous motors attached to the stern, bent back into the boat: the others did not. They lay about in various attitudes of drunkenness, mostly old and worn and hard-worked. They all looked in need of repair, crippled boats, some with charred wood, hibernating for winter and spring, needing love and money. Sarah tried to imagine taking one of these out onto the ocean and could not, even though she had seen others this side of the horizon without ever thinking from where they might have started. The colony was deserted. Again she remembered Jessica saying I burned my boats.

  There was a purpose in everything, surely. Jeremy patted the prow of the first boat with the sort of absent-minded affection he might bestow on an old pet.

  ‘I’m working on this one,’ he said.

  This one stood upright: she could just see a random mess of nets and metal drums inside it, human detritus in the wheel cabin – abandoned thermos flask, a coat and a grubby cushion – and could see it also as someone’s home from home. Maybe no one took these old broken boats out to sea: maybe they just came here on warm days and sat in them until they reeked of fish.

  Jeremy had been a quiet companion, grinning over his shoulder and leading the way downhill and along, responding to questions without volunteering much while sh
e was content to be led. He did not behave as if he owed her anything, or as if there was anything odd about responding to an order to take a helpful stranger for a walk. He had been asked to show her the beach and that was what he was doing, simply taking the chance to return to a favourite place. Now he leant his long arms into the boat and stared across it.

  ‘Nobody fishing today,’ Sarah said.

  He nodded at her statement of the obvious.

  ‘Not every day. No point today, not a good day for it. Besides, these aren’t seaworthy yet.’

  She was grateful not to be blinded with science as to why it was not a good day for it, although she was curious to know if the boat colony represented the getting of a living from the sea or was merely for sport. It looked too businesslike to be a luxury activity; the boats were hardly streamlined for simply cruising around. The dinghies she had seen out at sea were for fun: these were workhorses.

  ‘We had one of these once,’ Jeremy said. ‘Least my grandad had. He took me out when I was little. I liked it best, but then when you’ve got a boat you like it better than anything.’

  She could see that: you would love one of these better than life, especially if it sheltered you and earned you a living.

  ‘What do you like doing best, Jeremy?’

  He thought about it.

  ‘Sex, if I can get it.’

  She threw back her head and laughed – there was no doubting his honesty now. It was probably what most truthful youths would say, perhaps only to a woman of her age who was beyond the pale.

  ‘Never there when you want it,’ she said, ‘that’s the problem. Or maybe too much of it when you don’t.’

  ‘That’s never been my problem,’ he said.

  He handed her the bunch of fennel he had picked from beside the pathways, looked up to the sky.

  ‘Otherwise I don’t know what I like best, down here or . . .’ He pointed back towards the cliffs. ‘Depends on the day.’

  Sarah decided to chance her arm.

  ‘Did you ever have sex with Jessica Hurly? Is that why Mrs H doesn’t like you?’

  Now it was Jeremy’s turn to laugh. He moved from the side of the boat, picked up a pebble and threw it towards the water. They were still a distance from the waves that were munching at the shore gently in unusual calm, twenty yards maybe, but she saw his stone drop into the water, felt she could hear it plop. There was nothing else to do on this beach other than throw stones, or launch a boat and go fishing and she could see herself baking on it in the summer, and had made herself an inventory of what she would have to bring, cushion, beach towel, water, food, before he answered. Over the last hour she had come to understand that he should not be hurried: he would hurry himself, his reactions were sharp, and he was far from being the village idiot. Translated into city terms, he would have been the computer geek who preferred screens to people; social graces were not his strong point.

  ‘Jessica Hurly?’ he shouted, throwing another stone that splashed into the water at exactly the same point as the first. ‘Jessica Hurly? Don’t be daft. Every lad else shagged Jessie, or she shagged him. Jessica was fucking nuts. Shaun Smith, Robert, Will, the whole lot from Primary, only girl I know who led a pack and shagged the lot of them, and that was only the kids, never mind the old men. Yeah, maybe she did have too much sex, I never got near, ’cos I was never part of any of them. It’s not that makes Mrs Hurly so mad, not me shagging Jessica, it’s her old man shagging my mother, that’s what counts with her. Want to go down to the sea?’

  They left the shelter of the boats and walked towards the sea. The land behind them and the village seemed irrelevant right at the water’s edge and the wind became stronger. Looking down the deserted shoreline, Sarah could see the beginnings of the next town in the distance, and then another outcrop of boats and sheds where the real industry was, as opposed to this deserted encampment of damaged goods. She let the sea lap over the toes of her boots and then retreated, then advanced, wanting to dance with it, resisting the impulse to scream like a child. The sea was so calm that he could skim stones across the surface, making them bounce, once, twice, three times before sinking, a talent she had always envied, and told him so. He shrugged it off, the way she imagined he might shrug off all praise, even if he stored it away safely.

  Throwing stones did not ward off the increasingly cold and darkening sky. By common accord they turned their backs to the water and half walked, half scrambled up the shingle bank to where the scrubland began, stopping at the boats.

  ‘Tell me things,’ Sarah said. ‘Tell me about the Hurlys. Jessica’s my friend, I need to know why she can’t come back.’

  Jeremy looked at her directly for the first time. He had blue eyes, like Jessica’s, but then so did others. They might resemble one another in that way, as well as in the abundance of hair and their gangly height, if only he were not so lacking in lustre when he was not moving. He had Jessica’s animation only when he was throwing stones and now, as he fumbled in his pockets for a ready-made reefer – the first of the day, perhaps, but certainly not the last. The smell of it hung on the air.

  ‘Hurly was brought up here. Was a butcher’s boy. Lived below stairs in that house you’re going to be painting, only then it was a leaking wreck and them as poor as mice, my gran says. Laughed at, they were, she says. He certainly knew how to hunt for food. Pennyvale was stinking poor then, not like now. Anyway, they all went away and old Hurly got rich in the butchery business and came back, bought two or three houses, and a shop, always wanted the vicarage, but couldn’t get it, see? Came back with a tart he’d married in London. King of the roost, he was, owned the abattoir. He wanted a fishing boat, too, but no one would sell him a boat, or let him moor it. Nobody liked him.’

  Jeremy sucked smoke into his lungs greedily. Sarah nodded encouragement and stroked the fennel in her hands. She wondered if ‘Gran’ was still alive, how accurate the information was. She would like to meet Gran – or Mum, for that matter.

  ‘Gran’s dead,’ he said, answering an unspoken question. ‘And Mum never says nothing, never will, I don’t think. She lives in Kingsley now, I don’t know where. Anyway, she worked for the Hurlys, cleaning and that, and old man Hurly shagged her and she had me, and Dad left. Funny how she’d never been able to have kids until she worked for him. Gran worked it out. So did Mrs H, although nothing was ever said.’

  ‘Gran might have worked it out wrong,’ Sarah suggested.

  ‘I don’t think so. Why else was she sacked? Why else did she have a bit of money, all of a sudden? Why else would Mrs Hurly get so mad about Jessica and me kissing as kids?’

  ‘Nits?’

  ‘We all had nits in that school, so did the teachers. Lots of silly nits!’

  They were back into the mysterious maze of plants: Sarah wanted it to be a forest. It was getting dark and she wanted to go home, but above all she wanted to know more.

  ‘Did Jessica ever know about this?’

  ‘No, not her. No one told her. She’d have come and found me if she did.’

  ‘That’s not why she left?’

  ‘Everyone leaves,’Jeremy said, ‘except me.’

  It was almost dark by the time they were back in the main street, walking home. There were few enough street lamps to illuminate the road. She thought of inviting him in for a cup of tea or something, decided this was presuming too much. All very well to be at close quarters with Jeremy in the open air, perhaps not indoors, even at her age; but something had been established between them, so she asked him anyway and was relieved when he refused.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ she said. ‘That was wonderful. I was scared of the sea. Perhaps you’ll show me the best place to swim when it’s warmer?’

  ‘Sure.’ He shrugged. ‘But you’d be better off learning to fish, at least you can eat it. I’d teach you how to fish if I had a boat still.’

  ‘What happened to your grandad’s boat?’

  ‘Don’t know. Might have been one of those that Jessica
burned. Look, I’ve got to go now.’ He nodded towards the house. ‘Nice house, this, I like this house.’

  ‘Are you sure you won’t come in?’

  ‘No, thanks. It’s Jack Dunn’s house, really. Jessica shagged him, too. He was dead keen on her. Called his dog Jess. Perhaps because she was pretty.’

  Once inside, feeling the warmth of home, Sarah paced up and down, thinking. There was an overpowering, interfering desire to acquaint Jessica with the fact that she might have a half-brother.

  No, she would never do that: that would be gross interference on the basis of flimsy hearsay. Phone her anyway: she wanted to hear her, tease her about cleaning the block and be teased herself. Confess that she had met her mother and it had not gone well. Weekends excepted, it was a rare day not to hear from Jessica for a brief hello, how-are-you-doing, hurried chat at least and it suddenly seemed a long time. Three days: Sarah felt lazy and disloyal.

  She tried all evening, but there was no reply. It did not worry her the first few times and then it began to nag like toothache. Jessica never ignored her phone unless she was ashamed of something: something was wrong; she had done something silly. It felt as if she might have known that Sarah was finding out about her, getting to know her from other sources and she had decided she did not want to be known. Withdrawing from contact. Jessica had the keys to Sarah’s flat, to use as she wished: if her phone was lost, she could phone from there.

  Maybe she was on her way here, wanting to surprise. But why not phone?

  Sarah slept uneasily, waiting for sounds, hoping for a knock on the door or the phone to ring.

  Ah well, another dawn.