No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories

  I became aware of time trickling by, but again I state: I don’t know how long I sat there. An hour? Maybe.

  Then something broke through to me. Something other than the voices of the gulls, the waves, the near-distant rain of stony rubble. A new sound? A presence? I looked up, turned my head to scan north along the dead and rotting beach. And I saw him—though as yet he had not seen me.

  My eyes narrowed and I felt my brows come together in a frown. Raymond Maddison. The pit-yakker himself. And this was probably as good a place as any, maybe better than most, to teach him a well-deserved lesson. I stood up, and keeping as low a profile as possible made my way round the back of the tarry dunes to where he was standing. In less than two minutes I was there, behind him, creeping up on him where he stood windblown and almost forlorn seeming, staring out to sea. And there I paused.

  It seemed his large, rounded shoulders were heaving. Was he crying? Catching his breath? Gulping at the warm, reeking air? Had he been running? Searching for me? Following me as earlier he’d followed us? My feelings hardened against him. It was because he wasn’t entirely all there that people tolerated him. But I more than suspected he was all there. Not really a dummy, more a scummy.

  And I had him trapped. In front of him the rocks receding into pits of black filth, where a second warning notice leaned like a scarecrow on a battlefield, and behind him…only myself behind him. Me and my tightly clenched fists.

  Then, as I watched, he took something out of his pocket. His new knife, as I saw now. He stared down at it for a moment, then drew back his arm as if to hurl it away from him, out into the black wilderness of quag. But he froze like that, with the knife still in his hand, and I saw that his shoulders had stopped shuddering. He became alert; I guessed that he’d sensed I was there, watching him.

  He turned his head and saw me, and his eyes opened wide in a pale, slack face. I’d never seen him so pale. Then he fell to one knee, dipped his knife into the slurry at his feet, commenced wiping at it with a rag of a handkerchief. Caught unawares he was childlike, tending to do meaningless things.

  “Raymond,” I said, my voice grimmer than I’d intended. “Raymond, I want a word with you!” And he looked for somewhere to run as I advanced on him. But there was nowhere.

  “I didn’t—” he suddenly blurted. “I didn’t—”

  “But you did!” I was only a few paces away.

  “I…I…”

  “You followed us, peeped on us, messed it all up.”

  And again he seemed to freeze, while his brain turned over what I’d said to him. Lines creased his brow, vanishing as quickly as they’d come. “What?”

  “What?!” I shouted, stepping closer still. “You bloody well know what! No Moira and me, we’re finished. And it’s your fault.”

  He backed off into the black mire, which at once covered his boots and the cuffs of his too-short trousers. And there he stood, lifting and lowering his feet, which went glop, glop with each up-and-down movement. He reminded me of nothing so much as a fly caught on the sticky paper they used at that time. And his mouth kept opening and closing, stupidly, because he had nothing to say and nowhere to run, and he knew I was angry.

  Finally he said: “I didn’t mean to…follow you. But I—” And he reached into a pocket and brought out a packet of cigarettes. “Your cigarettes.”

  I had known that would be his excuse. “Throw them to me, Ray,” I said. For I wasn’t about to go stepping in there after him. He tossed me the packet but stayed right where he was. “You may as well come on out,” I told him, lighting up, “for you know I’m going to settle with you.”

  “Josh,” he said, still mouthing like a fish. “Josh…”

  “Yes, Josh, Josh,” I told him, nodding. “But you’ve really done it this time, and we have to have it out.”

  He still had his knife. He showed it to me, opened the main blade. He took a pace forward out of the slurry and I took a pace back. There was a sick grin on his face. Except…he wasn’t threatening me. “For you,” he said, snapping the blade shut. “I don’t…I don’t want it no more.” He stepped from the quag onto a flat rock and stood there facing me, not quite within arm’s reach. He tossed the knife and I automatically caught it. It weighed heavy in my hand where I clenched my knuckles round it.

  “A bribe?” I said. “So that I won’t tell what you did? How many friends do you have, Ray? And how many left if I tell what a dirty, sneaky, spying—”

  But he was still grinning his sick, nervous grin. “You won’t tell.” He shook his head. “Not what I seen.”

  I made a lunging grab for him and the grin slipped from his face. He hopped to a second rock farther out in the liquid slag, teetered there for a moment before finding his balance. And he looked anxiously all about for more stepping-stones, in case I should follow. There were two or three more rocks, all of them deeper into the coal-dust quicksand, but beyond them only a bubbly, oozy black surface streaked with oil and yellow mineral swirls.

  Raymond’s predicament was a bad one. Not because of me. I would only hit him. Once or twice, depending how long it took to bloody him. But this stuff would murder him. If he fell in. And the black slime was dripping from the bottoms of his trousers, making the surface of his rock slippery. Raymond’s balance wasn’t much, neither mentally nor physically. He began to slither this way and that, windmilled his arms in an effort to stay put.

  “Ray!” I was alarmed. “Come out of there!”

  He leapt, desperately, tried to find purchase on the next rock, slipped! His feet shot up in the air and he came down on his back in the quag. The stuff quivered like thick black porridge and put out slow-motion ripples. He flailed his arms, yelping like a dog, as the lower part of his body started to sink. His trousers ballooned with the air in them, but the stuff’s suck was strong. Raymond was going down.

  Before I could even start to think straight he was in chest deep, the filth inching higher every second. But he’d stopped yelping and had started thinking. Thinking desperate thoughts. “Josh…Josh!” he gasped.

  I stepped forward ankle deep, got up onto the first rock. I made to jump to the second rock but he stopped me. “No, Josh,” he whispered. “Or we’ll both go.”

  “You’re sinking,” I said, for once as stupid as him.

  “Listen,” he answered with a gasp. “Up between the dunes, some cable, half-buried. I saw it on my way down here. Tough, ’lectric wire, in the muck. You can pull me out with that.”

  I remembered. I had seen it, too. Several lengths of discarded cable, buried in the scummy dunes. All my limbs were trembling as I got back to solid ground, setting out up the beach between the dunes. “Josh!” his voice reached out harshly after me. “Hurry!” And a moment later: “The first bit of wire you see, that’ll do it…”

  I hurried, ran, raced. But my heart was pounding, the air rasping like sandpaper in my lungs. Fear. But…I couldn’t find the cable. Then—

  There was a tall dune, a great heap of black-streaked, slag-crusted sand. A lookout place! I went up it, my feet breaking through the crust, letting rivulets of sand cascade, thrusting myself to the top. Now I could get directions, scan the area all about. Over there, between low humps of diseased sand, I could see what might be a cable: a thin, frozen black snake of the stuff.

  But beyond the cable I could see something else: colors, anomalous, strewn in a clump of dead crabgrass.

  I tumbled down the side of the great dune, ran for the cable, tore a length free of the sand and muck. I had maybe fifteen, twenty feet of the stuff. Coiling it, I looked back. Raymond was there in the quag, going down black and sticky. But in the other direction—just over there, no more than a dozen loping paces away, hidden in the crabgrass and low humps of sand—something blue and white and…and red.

  Something about it made my skin prickle. Quickly, I went to see. And I saw…

  After a while I heard Raymond’s voice over the crying of the gulls. “Josh! Josh!”

  I walked b
ack, the cable looped in my lifeless hands, made my way to where he hung crucified in the quag; his arms formed the cross, palms pressing down on the belching surface, his head thrown back and the slop ringing his throat. And I stood looking at him. He saw me, saw the cable in my limp hands, looked into my eyes. And he knew. He knew I wasn’t going to let him have the cable.

  Instead I gave him back his terrible knife with all its terrible attachments—which he’d been waiting to use, and which I’d seen no use for—tossing it so that it landed in front of him and splashed a blob of slime into his right eye.

  He pleaded with me for a little while then, but there was no excuse. I sat and smoked, without even remembering lighting my fresh cigarette, until he began to gurgle. The black filth flooded his mouth, nostrils, the circles of his eyes. He went down, his sputtering mouth forming a ring in the muck that slowly filled in when he was gone. Big shiny bubbles came bursting to the surface…

  When my cigarette went out I began to cry, and crying staggered back up to the beach between the dunes. To Moira.

  Moira. Something I’d had—almost—that he didn’t have. That he could never have, except like this. Jealousy, or just sheer evil? And was I any better than him, now? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know to this day. He was just a pit-yakker, born for the pit. Him and me both, I suppose, but I had been lucky enough to escape it.

  And he hadn’t…

  THE PLACE OF WAITING

  I sit here by our swimming pool with one eye on my son in the water and the other on the seagulls lazily drifting, circling on high. Actually they’re not just drifting; they’re climbing on thermals off the nearby fields, spiralling up to a certain height from which they know they can set off south across the bay on their long evening glide to Brixham, to meet the fishing boats coming in to harbour. And never once having beaten a wing across all those miles, just gliding, they’ll be there in plenty of time to beg for sprats as the fish are unloaded.

  It’s instinct with those birds; they’ve been doing it for so long that now they don’t even think about it, they just do it. It’s like at ant-flying time, or flying-ant time, if you prefer: those two or three of the hottest days of summer when all of a sudden the ant queens make up their minds to fly and establish new hives or whatever ant nesting sites are called. Yes, for the gulls know all about that, too.

  The crying of gulls: plaintive, sometimes painful, often annoying, especially when they’re flight-training their young. But this time of year, well you can always tell when it’s ant-flying time. Because that’s just about the only time when the seagulls are silent. And you won’t see a one in the sky until the queen ants stream up in their thousands from all the Devon gardens, all at the same time—like spawning corals under the full moon—as if some telepathic message had gone out into an ant aether, telling them, “It’s time! It’s time!”

  Time for the seagulls, too. For suddenly, out of nowhere, the sky is full of them. And their silence is because they’re eating. Eating ants, yes. And I amuse myself by imagining that the gulls have learned how to interpret ant telepathy, when in all probability it’s only a matter of timing and temperature: Ma Nature as opposed to insect (or avian) ESP.

  And yet…there are stranger things in heaven and earth—and between the two—and I no longer rule out anything…

  My son cries out, gasps, gurgles, and shrieks…but only with joy, thank God, as I spring from my deck chair! Only with joy—the sheer enjoyment of the shallow end of the pool. Not that it’s shallow enough, (it’s well out of his depth in fact, for he’s only two and a half) but he’s wearing his water-wings and his splashing and chortling alone should have told me that all was well.

  Except I wasn’t doing my duty as I should have been; I was paying too much attention to the seagulls. And well—

  —Well, call it paranoia if you like. But I watch little Jimmy like a hawk when he is in the water, and I’ve considered having the pool filled in. But his mother says no, that’s just silly, and whatever it was that I think happened to me out on the moors that time, I shouldn’t let it interfere with living our lives to the full. And anyway she loves our pool, and so does little Jimmy, and so would I, except…

  Only three weeks ago a small child drowned in just such a pool right here in Torquay, less than a mile away. And to me—especially to me—that was a lot more than a tragic if simple accident. It was a beginning, not an end. The beginning of something that can never end, not until there are no more swimming pools. And even then it won’t be the end for some poor, unfortunate little mite.

  But you don’t understand, right? And you never will until you know the full story. So first let me get little Jimmy out of the pool, dried and into the house, into his mother’s care, and then I’ll tell you all about it…

  Have you ever wondered about haunted houses? Usually very old houses, perhaps victorian or older still? Well, probably not, because in this modern technological society of ours we’re not much given to considering such unscientific things. And first, of course, you would have to believe in ghosts: the departed, or not quite departed, revenants of folks dead and long since buried. But if so, if you have wondered, then you might also have begun to wonder why it’s these old houses which are most haunted, and only very rarely new ones.

  And, on the same subject, how many so-called “old wives’ tales” have you heard, ghost stories, literally, about misted country crossroads where spectral figures are suddenly caught in a vehicle’s headlights, lurching from the hedgerows at midnight, screaming their silent screams with their ragged hands held out before them? Well, let me tell you: such stories are legion! And now I know why.

  But me, I didn’t believe in ghosts. Not then, anyway…

  My mother died in hospital here in Torbay some four and a half years ago. And incidentally, I’m glad about that; not about her dying, no of course not, but that she did it in hospital. These days lots of people die in hospital, which is natural enough.

  Anyway, it hit me really badly, moreso because I had only recently lost someone else: my wife, when we’d divorced simply because we no longer belonged together. It had taken us eleven years to find that out: the fact that right from the start, we hadn’t really belonged together. But while our parting was mutually acceptable and even expedient, still it was painful. And I would like to think it hurt both of us, for I certainly felt it: a wrenching inside, like some small but improbably necessary organ was no longer in there, that it was missing, torn or fallen out. And at the time I’d thought that was the end of it; what was missing was gone forever; I wouldn’t find anyone else and there would be no family, no son to look up to me as I had looked up to my father. A feeling of…I don’t know, discontinuity?

  But I had still had my mother—for a little while, anyway. My poor dear Ma.

  Now, with all this talk of ghosts and death and what-not, don’t anyone take it that I was some kind of odd, sickly mother’s-boy sort of fellow like Norman Bates, the motel keeper in that Hitchcock film. No, for that couldn’t be further from the truth. But after my father had died (also in hospital, for they had both been heavy smokers) it had been my Ma who had sort of clung to me…quite the other way round, you see? Living not too far away, she had quickly come to rely on me. And no, that didn’t play a part in our divorce. In fact by then it had made no difference at all; our minds were already made up, Patsy’s and mine.

  Anyway, Patsy got our house—we’d agreed on that, too—for it had made perfectly good sense that I should go and live with Ma. Then, when it was her time (oh my Good Lord, as if we had been anticipating it!) her house would come to me. And so Patsy’s and my needs both would be catered for, at least insofar as we wouldn’t suffer for a roof over our heads…

  Ma painted, and I like to think I inherited something of her not inconsiderable talent. In fact, that was how I made a living: my work was on show in a studio in Exeter where I was one of a small but mainly respected coterie of local artists, with a somewhat smaller, widespread band of
dedicated, affluent collectors. I thank my lucky stars for affluent collectors! And so, with the addition of the interest on monies willed to me by my father, I had always managed to eke out a living of sorts.

  Ma painted, yes, and always she looked for the inspiration of drama. The more dramatic her subject, the finer the finished canvas. Seascapes on the Devon coast, landscapes on the rolling South Hams, the frowning ocean-hewn cliffs of Cornwall; and of course those great solemn tors on the moor…which is to say Dartmoor: the location for Sherlock Holmes’—or rather Arthur Conan Doyle’s—famous (or infamous) Hound of the Baskervilles.

  Ah, that faded old film! My mother used to say, “It’s not like that, you know. Well, it is in some places, and misty too. But not all the time! Not like in that film. And I’ve certainly never seen the like of that fearsome old tramp that Basil Rathbone made of himself! Not on Dartmoor, God forbid! Yes, I know it was only Sherlock Holmes in one of his disguises, but still, I mean… Why, if the moors were really like that I swear I’d never want to paint there again!”

  I remember that quite clearly, the way she said: “It’s not like that, you know,” before correcting herself. For in fact it is like that—and too much like that—in certain places…

  After she’d gone I found myself revisiting the locations where we had painted together: the coastlines of Cornwall and our own Devon, the rolling, open countryside, and eventually Dartmoor’s great tors, which my dictionary somewhat inadequately describes as hills or rocky heights. But it was the Celts who called them tors or torrs, from which we’ve derived tower, and some of them do indeed “tower” on high. Or it’s possible the name comes from the Latin: the Roman turris. Whichever, I’ll get to the tors in a moment. But first something of Dartmoor itself: