The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

  “He was an intruder—”

  “He was a guest.”

  “With a gun.”

  “Which he wasn’t even holding.”

  If Martin were a lawyer he might be able to see a way out of this particularly impenetrable thicket but God alone knows what form it might take.

  David wonders if he can take his phone out and get a photo of the corpse. He does not know if it would be considered more than usually insensitive because of it being a dead person or whether the extraordinariness of the situation would give him some moral wiggle room.

  “You’re asking nine people to lie,” says Sarah. “And you’re asking them to tell exactly the same lie, down to the last detail, for the rest of their lives. How is that going to work exactly?”

  His daughter should have been a lawyer, thinks Martin. And his son is going to prison. What a bizarre and wholly unexpected turn of events. His job will be to minimise the effect this has on Madeleine. It will be a difficult job and not one he relishes. He will start by sealing off this room and getting it cleaned and redecorated.

  “Any other objections?” Sarah revolves slowly, making eye contact with all the adults in turn. They know she is right. They are also mightily relieved that she is the one who is planning to set the inevitable process in motion. But Sarah does not call the police, because the silence is broken by a loud, sucking gurgle coming from the stranger’s body. Emmy screams and does a little dance, running on the spot and flapping her hands in front of her face, which would be very funny in almost any other context.

  “Emmy…?” says Martin. “Emmy?” He waits for her to calm down a little. “It’s trapped gases being released.” Also, very possibly, the man’s bowels emptying beneath him, though it seems unnecessary to add this clarification. He wonders how Madeleine is doing in the kitchen. Perhaps he ought to go and check on her.

  The stranger sits up and opens his eyes.

  Emmy sits down, slumps forward, headbutts her coffee cup then rolls sideways off her chair, too swiftly for Robert to catch her. Gavin makes a noise that can only be described as a dog-whimper. David is bedazzled. It is, by a country mile, the most amazing thing he has ever seen. Perhaps it was a magic trick after all.

  Apart from the fact that he is missing most of his internal organs, the stranger seems in better condition than Gavin. He strokes his bloody beard back into shape and gets to his feet as if he had merely stumbled in the street. He walks across the room and as he does so everyone can hear the soles of his boots alternately sticking to and becoming unstuck from the bloody floor. He retrieves his sawn-off shotgun. He walks over to Gavin and stands looking down at him. Gavin’s whimper becomes a low keening. The stranger smiles. He has the contented look of a man who has downed a good meal in fine company.

  Gavin is certain that these are the last few seconds of his life and he wishes he were able to act in a more manly fashion but the pain of his broken ribs and the emotional roller coaster of the last twenty minutes have left him too drained to do anything but close his eyes and wait for the lights to go out.

  The lights do not go out. The stranger says, “I will see you next Christmas.” He slips the gun into his poacher’s pocket and buttons his greatcoat over the carnage of his chest. “Then it will be my turn.” He straightens his back and turns so that he can address his last words to everyone in the room. “I bid you all good night and a merry Christmas.”

  He strides to the French windows, swings them open and walks through the resulting gust of flakes into the dark.

  Gavin sits with his head in his hands, staring into the woodgrain of the kitchen tabletop, waiting for his mother’s codeine to take effect. Sarah has made a pot of tea and put out a plate of biscuits and most of them seem comforted in some small degree by a custard cream and a hot mug they can wrap their hands around. Emmy has a livid bruise on her temple.

  David is finally beginning to understand the enormity of the situation. For a while he rang with excitement like a beaten gong, having sailed through a test of manhood the like of which his friends would never undertake. Disappointed that he had failed to get a photograph of the dead man, however, he sneaked into the off-limits dining room with his phone. The bloodstains themselves did not affect him, but his photograph of the bloodstains looked undeniably like the photograph of a murder scene, sad and sordid and profoundly unglamorous, and he realised for the first time that he had just watched his uncle kill someone. This fact was made no more acceptable by having watched the dead man get up afterwards and announce that he would kill his uncle next year.

  Upstairs, Sofie moves from room to room in a rising panic. “Anya…?” Is it possible that her daughter was so frightened that she left the house and ran into the night? In the little loft her daughter is unconscious and unable to hear her mother calling. Eventually Sofie returns to the kitchen. “I can’t find Anya.”

  “She can’t have gone far,” says Leo.

  “No,” says Sofie. “Listen to me. Anya is not here.”

  It takes a long moment for the penny to drop. “She ran out of the room.”

  “She ran out of the house,” says Sofie.

  “Oh fuck.” Leo is on his feet. “Dad. Find me a torch.”

  Leo and Robert scour the garden. They check inside the shed and behind the climbing roses which cover the long wooden trellis. They look in the compost bin. They take bamboo canes from the pot beside the kitchen door and push them into drifts. Leo tries not to think that if he finds his daughter using this method then she will almost certainly be dead.

  Ten minutes later, sitting in the kitchen, David says, casually, “There’s a place you can hide. In the top bathroom. There’s a kind of hatch in the wall.”

  Sofie runs upstairs. At her lowest point, in a couple of years’ time, she will slap her son viciously across the face and call him an “evil little shit” for not revealing this information earlier. And when her marriage to Leo falls apart she will know, deep down, that it was her son’s fault for sitting eating biscuits, untroubled by the fact that his sister was dying upstairs.

  She kicks open the bathroom door, tears the panel from the wall and pulls her daughter out through the hatch. Anya’s limbs are limp, her face grey, her flesh cold and damp. Sofie carries her daughter along the corridor to the bedroom. Martin takes charge. They undress Anya and put her into her dry rabbit onesie and lie her under the duvet. Sarah is made to sit with the hairdryer feeding hot air into the space around her shaking body. Emmy fetches her a bobble hat.

  Sofie says, “She needs to be in a hospital.”

  “And how would she get there?” says Martin. “This is what they would do for her in a hospital.”

  Sofie says, “Will she be all right?”

  Martin says, “I honestly don’t know,” and this is what Sofie will remember, not that her father-in-law helped saved her daughter’s life but his cool acceptance of the fact that he might not be able to.

  Madeleine arrives with a mug of hot sweet tea in one of the spouted beakers she has saved from when the grandchildren were small. Sofie works it between Anya’s lips and says, “Come on, darling, drink.”

  They call Leo and Robert. Leo returns, relieved that his daughter is alive then terrified all over again when he sees how unresponsive she is, the distance in her eyes. He leans down and kisses her. “Hey, little one.”

  It is a small bedroom and filling it with useless people is no help to anyone, so Sarah and Emmy retreat downstairs and wash up while Robert does what can be done in the dining room. He wipes down the clock. He rolls and bags the blood-soaked rug and puts it in the garden. He removes the map of Bedfordshire from its soiled frame and lays it in a drawer so that the frame and the glass can be soaped clean. He sponges bodily matter from pitted wallpaper. He takes down the curtains and leaves them to soak in a bucket of water. He turns off the light, closes the door and puts a symbolic chair in front of it.

  Throughout all of this Gavin sits at the kitchen table saying very little. He is no
t greatly troubled by the pain. There is a rough-and-tumble, tree-climbing, small-boy part of him which enjoys physical discomfort. Nor is he troubled by what has happened and what might be happening to Anya. He has always possessed the ability to ignore things to which he is not immediately connected. What troubles him is that he cannot see a way in which these events might be turned to his advantage, and this is a situation he has not been in before.

  Emmy hovers nearby, drying pans and casserole dishes. She longs to be back in London, stepping out of her mundane self every night and into that pretend sitting room with its view of the rainy fjord to greet Pastor Manders—“How good of you to come so early. We can get our business done before supper…” Because it was Gavin’s invulnerability, above everything else, which drew her to him and counterbalanced the arrogance and insensitivity. She knows now that he can be broken and she cannot shake the suspicion that she has climbed into the wrong lifeboat.

  Only Madeleine sleeps, and she does so only until 4 a.m. when the bloody images begin to sharpen in the clearing diazepam fog. Leo tells Sofie to take a rest but she can’t until she sees Anya up and walking and, in truth, he feels the same way. Sarah is too angry to sleep and Robert’s job is clearly to remain awake in order to absorb, defuse and deflect some of his wife’s anger so that she doesn’t complicate an already difficult situation.

  As for Martin it is the stranger’s resurrection which keeps him awake. The man was dead, then the man was not dead. They have been the victims of an extraordinarily sophisticated trick. But how was it done? By whom? And for what reason?

  David cannot sleep because when he went upstairs to see how his sister was doing his mother hissed at him to stay away, a note of unmistakable hatred in her voice. His father came out into the corridor and said that Mummy was feeling very tense, but an apology on someone else’s behalf wasn’t a real apology. Everyone knew that.

  He forgot about Anya’s hiding place. Then he remembered. Why is he not being congratulated? The answer is the same as it has always been. Because Anya was premature, the fairy child, the blessed one, who only just made it into the world. And sometimes he does wish she were dead, because everyone tells you to be good and look after yourself and not make a fuss and remember how lucky you are because Mummy and Daddy have a lot on their plate right now, so you are good and you look after yourself and don’t make a fuss and your reward is to be ignored.

  He dreams sometimes of having a terrible disease. He dreams of being crippled in a car accident. Sometimes he leans a little too far out of windows. Sometimes he pushes the tip of a penknife into his wrist till blood comes out. Sometime he googles fatal doses.

  And here he is again, standing in the wings of “The Anya Show.”

  Gavin lies under the duvet for the latter half of the night, so as to rest if not to sleep. The daylight, when it comes, restores some of his self-belief and lends the events of the previous day an otherworldly cast which allows him to frame and neuter them. He asks Emmy to fetch him more codeine, strong coffee and toast, and when the analgesia kicks in he showers slowly and carefully, comes downstairs and suggests a preprandial family walk.

  Sarah is speechless. How is it possible for him to ignore what happened in the next room? And why is everyone else colluding in this act of communal amnesia? She wants it talked about. She wants justice done. At the very least she wants her brother to admit that he did a dreadful, dreadful thing.

  It is one of the reasons many people are attracted to Gavin and many people find Sarah difficult, one of the reasons why the universe so often bends unfairly to his will and throws obstacles in her way. He is all momentum and confidence. He is entertained by the new and the interesting and bored by the old and the difficult. And he makes this choice seem noble and right.

  Madeleine’s hip is not good so Sofie stays behind to help with lunch. Anya, up and mobile now, is scared of what lies outside the house but decides to throw in her lot with the larger crowd for safety’s sake and they don Wellingtons and gloves and set off towards the church. Other villagers halloo them like fellow Eskimos across the snowy waste. A golden retriever bounces in and out of the deepest drifts, appearing and disappearing like a furred yellow dolphin.

  Robert sees David trailing at the rear and senses something off-kilter, an echo from his own childhood perhaps, when he was shunted between international schools. Worthless superficial glamour and loneliness in fourteen languages.

  “How’s it going, buddy?”

  David stares at him with the utter contempt of the young, and the image that comes to Robert is that of a child who has fallen down a well, so that any conversation they muster is pointless because the shaft is deep and there is no ladder. It is a moment that will haunt Robert over the coming years when he hears, periodically, about the successive downward steps of David’s long descent. And deep snow will always come overlaid with this faint image of his nephew’s sour little face and the parents who didn’t realise which of their children was in danger.

  Exercised and de-booted, everyone arranges themselves around the kitchen table for a stripped-down Christmas lunch to suit the less-than-festive mood, the younger and more limber perching on stools or sitting on the washing machine and eating on their laps. The turkey is good, and only Martin complains about the absence of swede and Brussels. The mincemeat tart and custard are even better and everyone is quietly pleased to finish the meal without feeling bloated for once, and while no one wishes to tempt fate by referring, even indirectly, to the reason why they are eating in this unorthodox manner it is tacitly admitted by the majority of the family that it is a very nice Christmas lunch.

  Gavin raises his glass of Malbec. “God bless you one and all.”

  After lunch gifts are handed out and what is sometimes a rather tense affair goes off without a hitch (last year Gavin’s present to his father of two walking poles was considered insulting and unsubtle). David gets the latest edition of FIFA. Martin gets a box set of the complete Beethoven sonatas for piano and violin by Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov. Sarah attempts yet again to broaden her mother’s cultural horizons by buying her a contemporary novel by a woman which will be shelved, unread, along with the others in what Gavin refers to as “the Black Lesbian Fiction Section” behind the gramophone. Leo and Sofie, in contrast, have brought many jars of blackberry jam from their allotment, ornately hand-labelled by Anya, which seem parsimonious at the time but are consumed more completely and with more enjoyment than any of the other gifts (Martin never reaches disc four of the Beethoven).

  The wrapping paper is cleared away and cake served. In other circumstances they might watch Skyfall but the television is anchored to the aerial socket in the dining room. Consequently the events of the previous evening begin to rise up in the absence of commensurable distraction. While the others play Monopoly Leo and Robert escape the house to retrieve Emmy and Gavin’s suitcase and discover that their car is parked on a road which has, miraculously, been snow-ploughed and gritted. Within the hour, Monopoly has been abandoned and Gavin and Emmy are heading south on the M1, Emmy at the wheel, Gavin reclined and semi-conscious in the passenger seat.

  Her brother gone, Sarah expresses her feelings about him loudly and at length. Her father asks why she has saved her anger precisely for the people who do not deserve it. This does not go down well and she exits in high dudgeon shortly thereafter taking Robert with her so that, come eight in the evening, Leo, Sofie and the children are the only remaining guests, and when Anya says that she won’t be able to sleep in the house Leo and Sofie seize the opportunity with poorly disguised relief, and set off on a night drive to Durham.

  By ten o’clock Martin and Madeleine are alone and about to experience a night of such profound ill-ease that they will spend the next seven days in a damp little holiday cottage in Shropshire, Martin arranging from afar for Andrezj, the Polish builder who did the conservatory after the alder fell on it, to return the dining room to the condition it was in before “a very troubled ex-p
atient forced his way into the house and tried to take his own life.”

  Gavin and Emmy spend the evening of Christmas Day on hard plastic chairs in the A&E department of the West Middlesex Hospital, waiting for an X-ray. “Last Christmas” by Wham! comes round seven times on the PA before Gavin gives up counting.

  On Boxing Day Gavin asks a friend at the BBC to dig up any information about a rumoured shooting in his parents’ village. A blank is drawn and he puts the matter from his mind.

  Emmy suffers occasional post-traumatic flashbacks over the next few weeks (the glutinous line of blood across the cheese plate, the gurgling noise…) but Gavin seems untroubled and this calms her. She wonders, sometimes, if it really happened and is reassured by her uncertainty, a sign that the event is rolling into the long grass at the edges of her memory.

  One night in late January, however, Gavin is woken by a gunshot. He opens his eyes and sees a ragged splash of fresh gore on the ceiling above the bed, little stalactites of blood turning, one by one, into drops which fall in slow motion towards the bed. He puts his hand to his chest and feels…absolutely nothing, lungs, heart, stomach, all gone. Something moves in the corner of his eye. The stranger is standing in the doorway, same camouflage trousers, same brass buttons, same insolent smile, preposterous steampunk weapon smoking. An eagle turns on the wind coming off the mountains. Smoke and dung.

  “Gavin?” Emmy is shaking him. “You’re safe. Please. Stop shouting.”

  This is how the unravelling begins.

  He remains awake for the rest of the night. He reads more of The Silk Road: A New History by Valerie Hansen. He googles locations in and around Kashgar. He sacks the graphic designer who has failed to come up with a decent identity for the production company he and Tony Weisz are setting up. The following morning he drives to the Standedge Tunnel near Huddersfield where they are filming the second season of Isambard’s Kingdom. He manages not to think about his nocturnal hallucination until the middle of the afternoon when Annie, the director, sits beside him and says, casually, “You look exhausted. On camera. Which is not good.” She affects a swagger he would accept in a man but finds grating in a woman. She is very possibly a lesbian though they are unlikely to have the kind of tête-à-tête in which such intimacies are shared. She is certainly immune to his charm in a way that puzzles and irritates him. He counts to three in his head, the way Tony has advised him to do. “I broke two ribs at Christmas. I’m still in some pain. I didn’t sleep well last night.”