Hands trembling, Justin picked one up and held it to the light. The complex centre revealed itself at once. He closed his fist round the ancient drop of sap, smoothed by the sea and set alight by the sun. It was light and warm in his hand. In a burst of excitement, he picked up one after another until he held twelve glowing drops of flame. Each revealed a different internal landscape, from palest yellow to a reddish marbled gold.
And then the sun moved and they were gone.
He searched the shoreline, frantic, in vain. The sun had dropped below the horizon and the entire beach was thrown into shadow. Justin stood motionless, watching the glow fade from the sky, taking with it the last faint flickers of warmth.
Boy appeared at his side and he held the stones out to the greyhound, who sniffed at them delicately, then turned away, unimpressed.
Justin stood cradling his handful of warm stones. Then he headed back towards Agnes through the fading light.
43
On the way home they stopped for dinner at a pub with dark varnished beams and flashing fruit machines. They found an empty table and ordered sausage and mash from the bar. The gas fire in the little saloon bar managed to throw out enough heat to make them drowsy. None of them felt inclined to speak, so they ate in silence.
‘Did you find your amber?’ Justin posed the question, through a mouthful of Agnes’s treacle pudding.
Peter reached into his pocket. ‘I guess I’ll have to come back. I found something that looks right, but I think it’s yellow quartz.’
Justin took the small yellowish stone from Peter. It looked as if you might see through it, but it was heavy and cold. Lifeless. He shrugged and gave it back.
They drove home in silence. Justin might have fallen asleep with Boy’s head in his lap, had it not been for the roaring of the motorway and the icy sliver of wind blowing down his neck through the loose window. Instead, he stared out into the blackness at the double pinpoints of light travelling in the opposite direction and thought about amber.
Warmth, he thought. And brilliance. Transparency. Timing too. Peter telling him what to look for.
Fifty-million-year-old sap.
Five minutes of illumination.
The sun at just the right height.
Chance.
A series of events, combined to make a coincidence.
Leading to a revelation.
He could have walked on that beach forever without noticing its treasures. Perhaps his past and future were also hidden somewhere on it, carved on to a single pebble, a Rosetta Stone with the key to the whole of his existence. Perhaps all the answers lay dormant somewhere, waiting to be discovered.
Justin thought of all the events of his life, collecting and dispersing like a handful of dust. Things happened and didn’t happen a billion times a second.
How many events add up to a coincidence?
How many coincidences add up to a conspiracy?
‘Justin?’ Agnes called softly, searching for eye contact in the rear mirror. ‘We’re nearly home. Peter’s fast asleep. Why are you so scrunched up in the corner?’
He didn’t talk to Agnes about Boy and so he didn’t answer, just frowned in the darkness. He stretched his cramped muscles as best he could without disturbing his dog.
‘I’m so glad you came,’ she said, her voice intimate, despite the rattling car. ‘I knew you’d like it there.’
He nodded again, but inside he felt hard and cold as quartz.
Of course you knew I’d like it. You know so much about me, so much more than I do. You know what’s real and what’s not. What’s useful and what’s not. What endures and what’s just for one night. So many things you know about me.
Agnes stopped the car in front of Peter’s house and he woke up immediately, the sudden absence of racket deafening. They all squeezed out of the car and stood, dazed and a little awkward, by the front gate.
‘Good night,’ said Agnes, kissing Peter on the cheek. But Justin backed away, afraid of the smell of her hair and the feel of her skin. The two boys began walking stiffly up the path.
‘Justin!’ called Agnes after him, and he turned back. ‘Justin, please don’t be angry with me.’ She caught up and took his arm, pulling him close. He didn’t move away and they remained at an impasse a few seconds too long, unable to move forward or back until finally Justin pulled free, dug a piece of amber out of his pocket and placed it in her hand, closing her fingers around it.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Amber.’ Warm and enduring like love, he thought, his heart contracting.
Before she could say anything, he had disappeared into the house. Agnes sat in the front seat of her little car with the amber in her hand for some time before starting the engine again.
Justin and Peter undressed at opposite ends of the room and turned off the lights without speaking. It was still early, but the long walk and salt air had left them feeling windswept and tired.
Peter fell asleep immediately and dreamt of a beach littered with fiery stones.
Justin returned to the warmth and safety of his rock pool and floated there weightless in the winter sunlight until dawn.
44
On the evening Agnes’s show was due to open, Ivan took the train up from London with a group of like-minded fashion types. He told them not to expect much: a small collection of photographs in Luton, ha ha. It was hardly going to set the world alight. But Agnes was his friend. There was, after all, such a thing as loyalty.
The Londoners arrived at Luton station like a flock of geese, squawking and huddling together in a noisy gaggle, pecking nervously at the disorientating suburban vision around them.
‘Dear, dear,’ Ivan said, eyebrow raised. ‘So this is what Kansas looks like.’
One of the stylists gripped his arm and wobbled slightly on her stiletto heels. ‘It’s called the suburbs, darling.’
‘Isn’t there some sort of government rescue initiative?’
‘Of course not. They like it like this.’
‘Impossible.’
The woman shrugged. And then with a great deal of vowing that they would never again leave the safety of the big city, they piled into a small fleet of taxis and made their way to the gallery.
Agnes was there to greet them, wearing a short, sky-blue woollen pinafore shot full of tiny holes. Each hole was beautifully backed with red felt and stitched and finished in black surgical silk. On her head she wore a felt hat hung with tiny glass and metal charms. As she moved, she tinkled gently like a wind chime. A narrow unravelling scarf with a little glove at each end trailed down her back and on to the floor.
Ivan’s crowd sniffed grudgingly at her outfit and began to peer around.
Agnes had chosen her best photographs of Justin and blown them up to two-metre by one-metre panels. There were four sets of three panels, twelve portraits of Justin in total. Six pictures ran down each side of the gallery, the gigantic figures looming over the empty white space. On the far wall were three panels forming a triptych, like an altarpiece. The three panels in the triptych were photographs taken during the airport crash: melting windows and tangled limbs, burning metal, tormented faces, severed body parts, and Justin, always Justin. Justin smiling weirdly at the scene of the disaster. Justin confused, Justin angry, Justin lost. The vertical format meant that each photograph encompassed floor, windows and ceiling of the airport terminal. They gave her compositions a sense of spatial grandeur that brought to mind early Renaissance paintings.
Around the room, soft, featureless mannequins wore the clothes Agnes had made. They were fashioned like rag dolls out of white muslin and wore felt gloves in innocent bright colours, each with a ragged edge where it looked as if fingers had been severed. There were linen shirts with the arms torn off, pale bags lined in red silk that Agnes had pulled in long fraying streams through small slits in the surface. Sweaters and T-shirts were perforated, the holes stitched carefully along the edges with surgical silk and backed with red fabric.
It was beautiful. A
nd deeply unsettling.
Justin arrived by way of the mall, where he had stopped to shop for his brother. He’d been on the verge of giving up the search, but today had girded his loins, braved the mall, and found exactly what he wanted. When he asked the shop to wrap it, he was directed to the queue at the Christmas wrapping station, where he waited half an hour with a dozen other disgruntled shoppers.
When finally he reached the front of the queue, the official wrapper took one look at his gift and demanded double payment. ‘It’s not regulation size,’ she said with distaste, ‘and it’s the wrong shape. And it won’t go in a bag, either.’
Next year, thought Justin, handing over his £4, I’ll get the kid a pile of bricks if it’ll make your job easier.
It was only after he left the mall that Justin realized he was stuck with the package for the evening. At more than a metre long, covered in reindeer paper and tied with a huge green and silver bow, it would not contribute to the air of casual insouciance he had hoped to convey.
He met Peter and Dorothea outside the gallery. Peter had placed himself carefully in front of the title lettered on the front window, and a smiling Agnes Bee pushed through the crowd to greet them. She kissed Peter, but Justin took a step backwards, and Dorothea managed to make herself look unkissable. The atmosphere in the little group was tense; none of them quite dared look beyond Agnes to the walls, which left them nowhere to look but at each other.
Agnes glanced at Justin’s parcel.
‘Don’t worry,’ he sighed wearily, ‘it’s for my brother.’ Not some kind of pathetic attempt to win you back. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anywhere to put it down.’ Justin’s eyes skated off in search of a cloakroom, accidentally encountering twelve large panels mounted with gigantic representations of himself on the way.
He brought his eyes back very slowly to meet hers, emptying them of expression on the way. And then even more slowly, he took in what she was wearing, saw the unravelling scarf round her neck with the tiny hands knitted into each end; the little red holes bound up with surgical silk; the delicate shards of metal and glass tinkling on the dome of her hat. He took in the entire vision of Agnes dressed in postmodern disaster-victim chic, surrounded by portraits of her moody, miserable spurned lover, her discarded, distressed virgin youth, who happened also to be present here, in the flesh, conveniently clutching (for maximum dramatic, or perhaps comic, effect) an oversized, garishly wrapped soft toy.
Him, in other words.
Agnes had chosen her portraits precisely, presented him sad, confused and blank. She had displayed him at his most vulnerable and beseeching. He looked incontrovertibly pathetic.
Doomed Youth, indeed. When he had contemplated his doom, it never occurred to him it would be like this, would play out here, in a brightly lit room surrounded by people.
Oh god, he thought. How much disaster was he expected to survive?
‘What do you think?’ Agnes chirped, much too brightly.
Justin stood very still. He said nothing. Boy gazed up searchingly at Agnes’s face. Dorothea didn’t breathe, and Peter had to turn away from the spectacle of pain seeping out and pooling at his friend’s feet.
‘Look, Justin –’ she began, but just then heard her name called, and retreated, with evident relief.
‘Do you want to leave?’ Dorothea whispered.
Justin still said nothing.
‘Come on,’ Peter said, with an Englishman’s stoicism under fire, ‘now we’re here, we may as well look around.’
As the little group moved into the gallery, Justin caught sight of a dress sewn all over with tiny red dots. Blood, he thought, horrified. It’s spattered with blood. He shuddered and turned away, to a linen shirt with a jagged tear where one of the arms should be.
Justin froze, his face a mask. A buzz spread through the room; once someone had made the connection between the boy in the coat and the photographs of the boy in the coat, his presence attracted the attention of the entire company. ‘He’s good-looking,’ someone whispered, ‘but obviously not quite himself.’
On the contrary, Agnes thought, he is quite himself.
Peter came up beside her. ‘You should have told him.’
She folded her arms, defensive. ‘How could I?’
Peter said nothing.
‘I do love him, you know.’ She paused and looked around the room. ‘Just not in the way he wants me to.’ Her voice had a petulant note.
So that’s how it is, Peter thought. Justin, desperate to be loved, and Agnes, desperate to be absolved of blame.
Despite their cruelty, the photographs of Justin were beautiful. Agnes had captured the hesitant nerviness that lurked just beneath his friend’s fine, translucent skin. The pictures pierced him like X-rays, peeled back the flesh to expose a soul so raw it could have revealed itself only in trust and love.
The way he looked at the camera was the way he looked at Agnes.
Peter moved away, embarrassed, as if he’d witnessed something private.
The plane crash scenes came almost as a relief with their depictions of clear, unambiguous horror. It was a more comfortable sort of voyeurism. How terrible, one could think. How wrong, how painful, how tragic. And how expressive, how courageously witnessed. He had to admit that Agnes had captured something unexpectedly moving in the juxtaposition of tragedy and victim.
He turned back to the crowded room, scanning it for familiar faces, and saw Justin pushing his way through the gallery towards him.
The triptych was surrounded by people, and even before Justin could see the entire work, his brain filled in the missing pieces of the panels from memory. Slipping quietly, insistently, to the front, overcome with something between outrage and fear, he already knew what he would find there.
These pictures. She should never have…
Have what? Taken them? Printed them? Shown them?
Yes.
He searched the room for Agnes. Shoving his way through to her, he wrapped his hand tightly around her upper arm and dragged her away from a small group of acolytes.
‘What were you thinking, Agnes? It’s horrible.’ He glared at her, eyes burning. ‘You’re horrible. What have you done? You’ve turned me into some kind of freakish spectacle. And you didn’t even ask me.’ Fury boiled in his blood. He felt capable of killing her, himself, everyone in the room.
‘I’m sorry, Justin. I should have warned you.’ She sounded defensive. ‘But I made something of it. That’s all.’
‘You made something? Of corpses? Of me?’
She followed his eyes over her shoulder to a suit jacket that had been sliced to pieces, then stitched roughly back together with brown string.
Justin collected himself. ‘I have to go now, I just wanted to stop for a minute.’
Someone called Agnes and she turned away, leaving Justin tumbling slowly towards the exit. There appeared to be plenty of time as he fell, time to experience quite distinct waves of anger and disgust.
‘Justin –’ Agnes called after him without much conviction. She didn’t add wait’.
He opened the door, and the gallery coughed him out into the street.
45
Outside, bathed in the faint greenish light of a winter thunderstorm, Justin ducked his head against the frigid wind. From the shadows, puffing calmly on a cigarette, Ivan watched, amused.
So, Agnes hadn’t told him he was the star of her little show? Tch, tch. Shocking omission. Well, there’s no such thing as a free shag, Justin, my boy. There’s a lesson for you, for next time.
Justin raised his head to look back through the heavy plate glass. Everywhere he looked, his own image stared back, twice as large as life, mocking him.
It’s not me, he felt like shouting. That person isn’t me. The need to rid himself of the person in the photographs, to destroy the hideous, pitiable figure in the beautiful grey coat, took him over until there was nothing left but rage. And so as it began to rain, big icy drops that turned the grimy road slick with
mud, he peeled off the precious garment and hurled it as hard as he could. It landed flat and heavy under a steady stream of traffic and sleet.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said to Boy, and began to run, head ducked, his brother’s Christmas present pressed to his chest, shirt collar pulled up against the rain. If he’d waited another few seconds, he might have seen Ivan dive into the traffic after his coat with a furious oath. He might have heard the skid and screech of tyres and seen the stormy oblivious world close over the man one last time, seen the sodden coat and its maker become indistinguishable from roadkill.
But Justin’s head was down and it was dark. It was all he could do to keep upright against the driving needles of freezing rain. Which is how he came to collide with a middle-aged woman walking towards him on the pavement. Her head and neck were stiff and painful and she walked quickly, eyes downcast, anxious to be home in bed. The rain stung her face and ran down into her eyes, a tiny percentage pooling and mixing with fluids contained in the conjunctiva.
In the exact moment of the glancing impact of Justin’s body against her own, she blinked, and momentum caused a drop of fluid from the mucous membrane surrounding her eye to traverse the few inches into Justin’s slightly open mouth. It was the sort of event that happens a thousand times a day – on trains, in lifts, wherever strangers in close proximity cough or sneeze or shake hands.
In its entirety, the encounter lasted about two seconds.
Justin, soaked and freezing, regained his balance, mumbled an apology and continued to run. At Peter’s house, he towelled off his dog, threw a blanket on the floor, placed his brother’s gift on the radiator to dry, stripped off his own clothes, ran a hot bath and lay in it until his bones thawed, his fingertips accordioned into whitish folds, and the water began to cool. Then he dried himself and crawled into bed beneath a pile of quilts, his steaming body warming the cold sheets.