Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

‘Don’t look so worried,’ I told her. ‘I was only going to say something about the tide.’

‘Oh, okay. Yes, it’s quite something, isn’t it, when it comes in like this?’

‘Yes, I…’ I looked down into her so-familiar face, wary and exhausted, every trace already gone of her recent laughter. I’d been about to tell her about the moon and the marsh and about that time in the quarry when I was fifteen years old, but now something even stranger was happening. I was seeing Josie . I was really seeing this person – dogged, stoical and wry – who’d been living alongside me now for nearly forty years. As I stood looking down at her, and she up at me, I wondered if I’d ever really seen her before.

‘Remember what you said before we came out?’ I asked her.

She was real , I was thinking! She was separate from me! Yet somehow we were together, both of us in the same world, standing here face to face under the sky.

Josie sighed. ‘I know it’s your turn to speak now, Bob, and I know some of the things I said were probably unfair, but could you possibly bear to leave it until we get home?’

‘No, listen,’ I said. I offered my hand to her, and she very tentatively and reluctantly took it, watching my face all the while, as if expecting some kind of trick. ‘Listen, dearest,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to argue now, and I don’t need to talk about it. I just wanted you to know that I’ve thought about what you said, and it wasn’t unfair at all. In fact, quite the contrary, everything you said was completely true.’

She held onto my hand, searching my face uncertainly with those wary, weary eyes. And then suddenly she burst into tears.

I put my arms round her at once and, after a moment of holding back, she melted against me, heaving with sobs. I was weeping too. I called her sweetheart, darling, precious, love. I kissed her on the back of her head. And then she lifted her face towards mine and we kissed one another. We kissed again and again, with lips and tongues, smearing the slippery mixture of her tears and mine all over each other’s faces.

I suppose some couples might say of such a moment that it was as if all the years had vanished away and they were right back at the beginning. But our beginning had never been like this. There was no point, not one, in all those years since that crappy little rock concert in King’s Lynn at which we’d ever been truly together. We’d been like two creeks side by side that had never quite touched. We’d always been waiting for the tide.

Jeremy Burnet’s neighbours were concerned about him, and the woman who phoned the police said she was calling on behalf of them all. They were fairly sure Mr Burnet was in his house – his car was parked in the street and his bike locked in its usual place – but he hadn’t been sighted since a Saturday afternoon just under four weeks ago, when some of them had seen him going out in his car and returning with items from a builder’s merchant, power tools and such, although there’d been no sign or sound of any work going on in the house either before then or since. Mr Burnet had looked as if he hadn’t washed or shaved for weeks. The woman who called the police had tried to greet him – she’d known him a number of years – but he’d just stared right through her as if he didn’t know she was there. And he’d always been such a tidy man, too, the sort that didn’t like anything out of place, and yet the garden was now completely overgrown, and the living room curtains at the front had been drawn for months, day and night, while the bedroom curtains were never closed at all.

What had finally prompted this call, though, was that one of the other neighbours had been contacted by Mr Burnet’s elderly mother who was too frail to visit him for herself. She said she was worried because her son never phoned any more, and never picked up when she tried to call him. And surely, said the neighbour who’d rung the police, even if Mr Burnet had somehow managed to slip away without any of them noticing, he’d have let his own mother know where he was going?

Two police officers went to Jeremy Burnet’s house, a policewoman and a policeman. Their names were Cheryl and Pradeep. They rang the doorbell for several minutes, and then called through the letterbox. ‘Hello, Mr Burnet? Are you there? It’s the police. Could we have a word? You’re not in trouble of any kind, but we’re just checking everything’s alright. Your neighbours are worried for you.’

There was no answer, though, not even that indefinable feeling of presence , that sense of something listening deep inside the house, that in Cheryl’s experience you tended to get when someone was in but didn’t want to be intruded upon. ‘Either he’s not there or he’s not well at all,’ she decided. Pradeep nodded. He was the younger of the two by some years, and tended to defer to his colleague’s wider experience.

Cheryl was about to make a call to the station about a warrant to break down the door, when one of the watching neighbours remembered he had a key. Jeremy had given it to him one hot summer several years ago, he said, ‘before all of this started’, so he could come in and water Mr Burnet’s patio plants for him when he was taking a holiday in Spain with his then-girlfriend. Mr Burnet had asked the neighbour to keep it in case he ever locked himself out.

The key turned in the lock, and the two police officers entered, stepping over a drift of mail. The door of the living room was open. There was a cream-coloured sofa and chairs, and expensive-looking curtains drawn across the window. The light was switched on, though it was the middle of the day. However, what they immediately noticed was the wide-open hatch in the middle of the floor, from which a rug had been rolled back and shoved aside. There was a concrete staircase descending inside it, and light shining up from below. It was a very odd place to put a set of cellar stairs, but there they were, and it seemed exceedingly probable that they would find Mr Burnet at the bottom of them.

Cheryl leaned over the hatch and called down the staircase. ‘Mr Burnet? Are you down there?’

‘We’re just checking to see if you’re okay,’ added Pradeep.

There was no answer, no sense of presence at all, though the echo was surprisingly deep and strong.

Cheryl drew in breath. She had dealt with a few corpses in her time – self-hangings, traffic accidents, a knifing once, a couple of people who’d jumped in front of trains – but you never really grew out of that initial shock of stark primitive horror. ‘Okay, Prad. Let’s go down and have a look.’

They’d assumed they’d descend for the equivalent of one storey, and perhaps find two damp low-ceilinged rooms down there. But that wasn’t what happened. A storey down, the stairs just turned and carried on their descent. The same thing happened again at the next level. It wasn’t until the third storey, when there was enough space between them and the living room above to insert another whole house, that everything suddenly opened up. Long corridors, well lit by office strip-lights, radiated out in four directions, with doors and the openings of side corridors arrayed on either side. And the staircase continued on down.

They could feel goosebumps rising on their skin, and a strange, pure, abstract kind of terror.

‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered Cheryl. ‘What is this?’

‘We need to call for help,’ said Pradeep in the particular, slightly strangled, voice he used on the rare occasions he asserted his recent training over Cheryl’s considerable experience. He would have been hard-pressed to say what they needed help with . Corridors, rooms, stairs: where was the threat in that? Yet Cheryl concurred at once, as almost anyone surely would have done in the same position. The police exist to maintain order, after all, to enforce boundaries. What the two of them had discovered was quite clearly so strange and inexplicable that reinforcements were needed to keep a solid boundary in place between reality and hallucination. Two people were simply not sufficient to reassure one another that what they were seeing was actually there.