The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

  “Thank you.” His voice is croaky and he has to clear his throat and repeat himself. “Thank you.”

  “Eat.”

  The porridge is good, more milk than water. The coffee is good, too. He works his way slowly through both. There is a long painting on the wall to his right, a semi-abstract landscape from the forties or fifties, a patchwork of green, blue and grey planes, rough black lines in the foreground which could be trees or people. Just as he was with the woman he is convinced that he has seen the picture somewhere before but he cannot say precisely where. The woman is reading a book. The cover is not visible and the text seems to be in a foreign language, though having only one good eye he cannot see it clearly.

  He finishes the porridge and the coffee. The tabletop is a single piece of oak. He runs his hand across its surface and feels the soft burr of the sanded grain under his fingers. He looks around. He has never lived in a house where it is a pleasure simply to sit and enjoy the geometry of the internal space. If he stayed here would it fade? Would he become blind to this room just as one becomes blind to any room one sees every day?

  The woman is looking at him. He has the sense that something is about to happen and, indeed, at that very moment the light changes, a spooky dimming. Eclipse light. He turns and sees, through the window, that it has begun to snow. It is so warm in the house and he has been so comfortable in his pyjamas that he has forgotten what time of year it is.

  The woman seems to know what he is thinking. Or perhaps she’s simply remarking upon the serendipity. “Christmas Eve.”

  And this is when the stranger enters.

  Gavin does not recognise him at first. He no longer has a beard and his head is shaved. He is wearing a tailored charcoal suit with tan brogues, an open white shirt and no tie. Padding quietly by his side is the black retriever Gavin remembers only now from their last meeting on the railway line. Gavin is struck at first only by how out of place he looks, in this building, in this landscape. At school there was one Indian boy, Rajneesh. Everyone else was white. Everyone in his parents’ village is white.

  The stranger sits and pours himself a cup of coffee. “You are a very lucky man.”

  It is only when he speaks that Gavin remembers the accent he could not place first time round. Lucky is the very last thing he feels. Not once in the last twelve months has he thought about the stranger’s parting promise, and only now does he begin to wonder if the detail which seemed least important has in fact been the crux upon which the whole year has turned. “Are you going to shoot me?” He hears his own voice. It sounds like the voice of a child.

  The stranger considers this, or perhaps just pretends to consider it, before smiling and saying, “I think you’ve probably suffered enough.” The snow is thickening now, big white flakes against the deep green of the trees, the flakes falling nearest the house catching the peach-pink glow of the fire and the house lights. “But it is easy to forget the lessons we have learnt unless we have some permanent reminder.” His hand idly scratches behind the ears of the dog sitting at his side.

  Gavin shot this man in the chest. He wants to say sorry but it seems an insultingly small word. Perhaps this is what the stranger means.

  “Let’s not waste what you have gone through.” The stranger leans across the table and takes hold of Gavin’s wrists. He does not grip tightly but Gavin can feel how strong he is. His expression is calm and kind, the expression of a father holding a child who must undergo some painful medical procedure for their own good.

  The woman gets to her feet, walks round the breakfast bar and opens a drawer which is too small to contain the sawn-off shotgun. Gavin thinks she is going to take out a knife but when she returns to the table he sees that she is carrying a bolt cutter in one hand and a white hand towel and a first-aid kit in the other. Gavin struggles. The stranger does not tighten his grip, neither does he let go. He looks into Gavin’s eyes and says, “This is going to happen. And you will thank me for it.”

  The woman lays the towel on the table, puts the first-aid kit to one side and takes up the bolt cutter. It is an old and dirty object, wholly at variance with everything else in the house, the metal surface scratched and dented from years of use, black oil in its joints and crevices.

  “The index finger on your right hand,” says the stranger.

  There is nothing he can do. He curls his three other fingers into his palm and points upwards like John the Baptist in a Renaissance painting. He closes his eyes. He feels the cold weight of the metal as the woman fits the jaws around his finger between the knuckle and the first joint. There is no blade as such. It is sheer pressure which will do the work, the two plates sliding across one another.

  She says, “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  He feels her adjust her position, a little rock from side to side as if preparing for a golf swing. She takes a quick, deep breath and squeezes hard. The big teeth slice through the skin but come to a halt at the bone. It is a harder job than she expected. She changes the position of her feet and shifts her hands a little farther down the handles so as to get more leverage then puts all her effort into a second squeeze. This time there is a cracking crunch as the metal shears through the bone. It is surprisingly loud. It sounds more like a thigh bone breaking. He opens his eyes.

  The finger end falls onto the hand towel and blood pours from the stump. For a couple of seconds there is no pain. Then there is more pain than he has felt in his life. He feels sick with it. The stranger lets go of his uninjured hand, picks up the severed finger and throws it to the dog who catches it and trots away to chew it in the corner of the room by the snowy window.

  The woman takes a length of bandage from the first-aid kit, wraps it round the stump of Gavin’s finger as a tourniquet and knots it tight. The endorphins start to come online. The pain is replaced by a giddy nausea and the room recedes a little. The woman folds a wad of dressing over the end of his finger and secures it with a strip of plaster round his palm. She adds a second dressing and secures it in the same way. The stranger wipes the blood from the table with the hand towel and drops it into the waste bin. The woman replaces the contents of the first-aid kit and puts it back in the drawer together with the bolt cutter. She returns with two pills in the palm of her hand and a small cup of coffee. “Paracetamol. It’s the best we can do, I’m afraid.”

  He puts the pills into his mouth and washes them down.

  “And now,” says the stranger, “it is time for us to leave.”

  For a moment he thinks that they are talking about their own departure, that he will be left alone in this beautiful house, but they do not move and he realises that it is he who will be leaving. “Where am I going?”

  “Come on. It’s getting late.”

  They give him the shoes he has been wearing for the last seven months. They give him the coat has been wearing for the last seven months. Neither has been cleaned. They smell vile and he is amazed that he could have become inured to this.

  He is ushered out of the front door and into the rear seat of a black BMW. The snow continues to fall thickly and steadily. He is starting to feel his hand again. The stranger climbs into the driver’s seat and only as they are pulling away does he realise that the woman is not coming with them. In spite of what has just happened he feels both guilty for not having said goodbye and desperately sad that he may never see her again.

  It is impossible to work out where they are going. Through the windscreen he can see the constantly expanding funnel of illuminated flakes, the occasional lit window, the occasional glare of headlights from a car passing them in the opposite direction, then darkness again. They drive through a village, then another. He is no longer aware of anything outside the car. He has run out of endorphins. The pain in the stump of his severed finger is overwhelming and he must use all his energy to hold his hand as still as he can while the car bumps and twists along these country roads. He is crying. He has never cried with pain before.

  He has no real sense of how l
ong they are in the car. After a period that might be anything between half an hour and two hours they come to a halt. He had assumed that he was being taken back to the train line where the stranger had found him, but he can see lit windows on both sides of the street.

  The stranger turns the engine off, gets out, comes round and opens the door. “We’re here.”

  Gavin wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and climbs out. It is blisteringly cold. There are three or four inches of snow on the ground and he is surprised that they have driven so swiftly and with no obvious problems.

  The stranger shuts the car door behind him. “Follow me.”

  Partly it is the injury, partly it is the darkness and the obscuring snow, but he does not realise where he is until he sees that he is being led through the gates of the Rookery. He wants to turn and walk away. He does not want to see his family. He does not want to tell them what has happened to him over the previous year. It is entirely possible that they think he is dead. But he cannot turn and walk away. He knows that the stranger will not let him back in the car and he knows that he cannot survive a night out here without asking for someone’s help.

  “Look,” says the stranger.

  They are standing on the lawn now. In front of them are the French windows, lit up, uncurtained. He takes a couple of steps forward and thinks, at first, that his parents must have sold the house because what he sees is an old man making his way to the dining table using a walking frame. He wonders if he has been away for a fairy-tale number of years and it is his parents who are long dead. Then the man sits down and Gavin realises that he is looking at his father. Either the fall he had earlier in the year was more serious than he realised or something else has happened to him in the intervening months. He seems half the size and twenty years older.

  Gavin takes another step towards the house. His mother sits at the head of the table in the seat his father used to occupy. Leo sits on one side of her, Sarah on the other. His sister seems uncharacteristically subdued. A teenage girl sits beside her, willowy, dark. He guesses that this must be Ellie. It has been two years since he last saw her. Sofie and Anya are having an animated conversation, but he cannot see David, nor can he see a place set for him.

  A veil of snow swings between him and the house, breaking his concentration and reminding him how cold he is and how much his finger is hurting. He turns to find that the stranger has vanished. He is alone. He looks down at his hand and sees that the bandage is now soaked with blood which is dripping onto the snow at his feet. He needs to see a doctor. He needs warmth. He needs help of many kinds.

  He turns back to the house. Another gust of wind. He takes a deep breath. He steps onto the little paved area between the potted shrubs. The intruder light clicks on. He knocks twice on the glass. As one his family turn to look at him.

  THE GUN

  Daniel stands in the Funnel, a narrow path between two high brick walls that join the playground to the estate proper. On windy days the air is forced through here then spun upwards in a vortex above the square of so-called grass between the four blocks of flats. The Wizard of Oz in stained concrete. Anything that isn’t nailed down becomes airborne. Washing, litter, dust. Grown men have been knocked off their feet. A while back there was a story going round about a flying cat.

  Except there’s no wind this morning, there hasn’t been any wind for days, just an unremitting mugginess that makes you want to open a window until you remember that you’re outside. The end of August, a week since the family holiday in Magaluf where he learnt the backstroke and was stung by a jellyfish, a week till school begins again. He is ten years old. Back at home his older sister is playing teacher and his younger brother is playing pupil. Helen is twelve, Paul seven. She has a blackboard and a little box of chalks in eight colours and when Paul misbehaves she smacks him hard on the leg. His mother is doing a big jigsaw of Venice on the dining table while the tank heats for the weekly wash.

  He can see the white socks of a girl on the swings, appearing, disappearing, appearing, disappearing. It is 1972. “Silver Machine” and “Rocket Man.” He cannot remember ever having been this bored before. He bats a wasp away from his face as a car door slams in the distance, then steps into the shadow of the stairwell and starts climbing towards Sean’s front door.

  There will be three other extraordinary events in his life. He will be sitting at dusk on the terrace of a rented house near Cahors with his eight-year-old son when they see a barn on the far side of the valley destroyed by lightning, the crack of white light appearing to come not from the sky but to burst from the ground beneath the building.

  He will have a meeting with the manager of a bespoke ironworks near Stroud whose factory occupies one of three units built into the side of a high railway cutting. Halfway through the meeting a cow will fall through the roof and it won’t be anywhere near as funny as it sounds.

  On the morning of his fiftieth birthday his mother will call and say that she needs to see him. She will seem calm and give no explanation and despite the fact that there is a large party planned for the afternoon he will get into the car and drive straight to Leicester only to find that the ambulance has already taken her body away. Talking to his father the following day he will realise that he received the phone call half an hour after the stroke which killed her.

  Today will be different, not simply shocking but one of those moments when time itself seems to fork and fracture and you look back and realise that if things had happened only slightly differently you would be leading one of those other ghost lives speeding away into the dark.

  Sean is not a friend as such but they play together because they are in the same class at school. Sean’s family live on the top floor of Orchard Tower whereas Daniel’s family live in a semi-detached house on the approach road. Daniel’s mother says that Sean’s family are a bad influence but she also says that television will damage your eyes if you sit too close and that you will die if you swim in the canal. In any case Daniel likes their volume, their expansiveness, their unpredictability, the china greyhounds on either side of the gas fire, Mr. Cobb’s green BMW which he polishes and T-Cuts lovingly on Saturday mornings. Sean’s older brother, Dylan, works as a plasterer and carpenter and they have a balcony which looks over the ring road to the woods and the car plant and the radio mast at Bargave, a view which moves Daniel more than anything he saw from the plane window between Luton and Palma because there is no glass and when you lean over and look down you feel a thrilling shiver in the backs of your knees.

  He steps out of the lift and sees Sean’s mother leaving the flat, which is another thing that makes Daniel envious, because when his own mother goes to the shops he and Paul and Helen have to accompany her. Try and keep him out of trouble. Mrs. Cobb ruffles his hair and sweeps onwards. She is lighting a cigarette as the silver doors close over her.

  Sean’s jumbled silhouette assembles itself in the patterned glass of the front door and it swings open. I’ve got something to show you.

  What?

  He beckons Daniel into Dylan’s bedroom. You have to keep this a total secret.

  Daniel has never been in here before. Dylan has explicitly forbidden it and Dylan can bench-press 180 pounds. Daniel steps off the avocado lino of the hall onto the swirly red carpet of the bedroom. The smell of cigarettes and Brut aftershave. It feels like the bedroom of a dead person in a film, every object heavy with significance. Posters of Monty Python and The French Connection. Jimmy Doyle Is the Toughest. A motorbike cylinder head sits on a folded copy of the Daily Express, the leaking oil turning the newsprint waxy and transparent. There is a portable record player on the bedside table, the lid of the red leatherette box propped open and the cream plastic arm crooked around the silvered rod in the centre of the turntable. Machine Head. Thick as a Brick. Ziggy Stardust.

  You have to promise.

  I promise.

  Because this is serious.

  I said.

  Sean tugs at the pine handle of the
wardrobe and the flimsy door comes free of the magnetic catch with a woody clang. On tiptoe Sean takes down a powder-blue shoe box from the top shelf and lays it on the khaki blanket before easing off the lid. The gun lies in the white tissue paper that must have come with the shoes. Sean lifts it from its rustling nest and Daniel can see how light it is. Scuffed pigeon-grey metal. The words REMINGTON RAND stamped into the flank. Two cambered grips are screwed to either side of the handle, chocolate brown and cross-cut like snakeskin for a better grip.

  Sean raises the gun at the end of his straightened arm and rotates slowly so that the barrel is pointing directly into Daniel’s face. Bang, he says softly. Bang.

  Daniel’s father works at the local pool, sometimes as a lifeguard, more often on reception. Daniel used to be proud of the fact that everyone knew who his father was but he is now embarrassed by his visibility. His mother works part-time as a secretary for the county council. His father reads crime novels, his mother does jigsaws which are stored between two sheets of plywood when the dining table is needed. Later in life when he is describing his parents to friends and acquaintances he will never find quite the right word. They aspired always to be average, to be unremarkable, to avoid making too much noise or taking up too much space. They disliked arguments and had little interest in the wider world. And if he is often bored in their company during his regular visits he will never use the word boring to describe them because he is genuinely envious of their rare ability to take real joy in small pleasures, and hugely grateful that they are not demonstrating any of the high-maintenance eccentricities of many of his friends’ retired and ageing parents.