Lucy Wood - The Sing of the Shore

Crystal and Gull Gilbert were throwing stones at a limpet on a rock. The rock was covered in a rind of barnacles and there were anemones deep in the cracks; dark red and glistening like sweets.

Crystal picked up a handful of stones and threw them. One of them hit the limpet but it didn’t move. She went up and pressed her hand against it. The limpet grated a few millimetres across the rock. ‘That one up there looks empty,’ she said. She was pushing the limpet, but staring at a house on the cliff.

‘Let’s do something else,’ Ivor said. The week billowed and sagged around them, like a tent that might stay up, or might at any moment collapse. It was a school holiday. They’d already wrecked Crystal’s TV and been forced out of Gull Gilbert’s house by his brother, who had a girl hidden in his sour, dim bedroom. Ivor had seen her feet sticking out from under the bed.

He put his hand in one of the pools. Sea gooseberries rolled in the wind, scattering like a smashed chandelier. The ripples in the pool were dark and bright. Crystal’s hair was the same dark, dry colour as charcoal – you could rub your hand over it and get an electric shock. Sometimes it got tangled and clumps had to be cut off with scissors. She was the biggest person in their class, bigger even than Gull Gilbert, and could put a safety pin through the skin on her elbow. Last year she’d pushed over a teacher.

‘We’ve been in there already,’ Gull Gilbert said. He picked up a stone with two hands and swung it through the air. There were blotchy freckles on his wrists and neck. He never wore a coat. He picked up another stone. He was frowning like he always did when he was concentrating. He would throw for hours until he hit his target in exactly the way he wanted. When he was concentrating, you knew exactly what he was doing. When he wasn’t, anything could happen.

‘We haven’t,’ Crystal said.

‘Let’s go back into town,’ Ivor said. There was an indent in the rock, shallow and easy to miss at first, where the limpet had been before it moved. It was exactly the same size as the limpet’s shell and it had the same rough curves, the same fluted edge.

‘I want to go in that one.’ Crystal pushed her foot in the sand and turned a fast, lumbering pirouette.

Gull Gilbert put his stone down slowly.

Ivor closed his eyes and leaned into the wind. If he did it right, it was like falling without ever hitting the ground. The cold found its way through his jumper, puckering the folds of skin. Goosebumps, goose barnacles, sea gooseberries. There weren’t as many geese as there used to be, his father said. He had mended Ivor’s jumper with lumpy stitches.

They’d already tried most of the other empty houses. There was the white one with the blue door, which had a porcelain doll on the windowsill that stared at them with its cracked face. The ceilings were streaked with yellow and the whole place smelled like a stale tin of biscuits. They would prise up slates and scratch their names underneath, pick at the bare walls until the plaster flaked off like confetti, and lie on the stiff, damp beds. But this time all the lights were on and someone was standing in the kitchen.

The big house with the red roof had people in it as well – there were bags and suitcases by the door, and the sound of voices and laughing. Sometimes they would go in there, sit on the leather chairs and read the tourist leaflets, then open all the cupboards to see if anyone had forgotten to pack anything – they’d found watches, cigarettes, a silky dressing gown that they’d taken turns wearing. Once, the oven had been left on by accident and Gull Gilbert had turned it off, then, after a moment, turned it back on again.

And then, just as they were testing the door of the stone house, the cleaning man had driven up and shouted something. Crystal had run first, then Gull Gilbert, Ivor struggling behind, his armpits streaming, that shivery almost-laughing feeling in his throat and bladder.

The wind dropped and Ivor tipped forward. The sand creaked under his knees like polystyrene. He opened his eyes. The others had already gone. Their footprints crossed the beach, sloppy as leftover cereal. Water rose up and filled each print, stretching them until they disappeared.

They were circling the house when he got up there. Gull Gilbert was trying the front windows, which faced out to sea and were rimed with salt.

Ivor lifted the doormat and looked under. There was nothing there. Sometimes the keys would be in locked boxes on the wall and you had to know the right combination to get in. There were a thousand different combinations, maybe a million. You could try all day and never get it right. Sometimes people left back doors open. Sometimes you could slide old windows down. Or, if you watched long enough, you might see someone hiding a spare key – behind flowerpots, underneath paving slabs, pushed into the thumb of a glove.

He let the doormat drop back down. What they should do was go into town and get some of those coins out of the wishing well. Then they could sit in a café and order drinks and talk about things, even though he couldn’t imagine what drinks they would order, or what things they would talk about.

There was a grinding sound and Gull Gilbert swore. The grinding got louder, then, suddenly, Crystal was standing inside the house.

Ivor went round the back. One of the windows was open – the bottom pane had been forced up and there were splinters of paint and wood on the ground. A saucepan crashed onto the floor somewhere, something kept clicking, there was a drift of gas, then nothing.

He climbed in. The house was cold in that deep, quiet way that meant no one had been inside it for a long time. The window went into the bathroom, then the bathroom went out to a narrow hallway lined with pictures. The pictures showed the same three faces over and over – a man and a woman and a boy who was sometimes a baby, sometimes older.

Gull Gilbert was methodically checking each room. ‘There’s a load of crud in here,’ he said. ‘Shoes and shit.’ He disappeared into the bathroom, then came back out. ‘Where’s all those small, wrapped-up soaps?’

‘It’s not one of those places,’ Ivor told him.

‘What?’

‘Where different people come every week. It’s not one of those places,’ Ivor said. He kept looking at the pictures on the wall. The family were eating together round the table, they were walking outside on the cliffs, they were sitting on a rug on the beach.

‘There’s weird food they’ve left behind back here,’ Crystal shouted.

Gull Gilbert jerked round, almost skidded. ‘I’ll pay you to eat it.’

‘How much?’

Crystal was in the kitchen. The fridge was open and there was a pot of something on the table that smelled bitter and plasticky, like dentists’ gloves. She was chewing on a strand of her hair. Whenever she got it cut, there would be a smooth, pale strip of skin on the back of her neck. In the lunch queue, she’d slipped her hand up Ivor’s sleeve and held her palm against his shoulder blade. But that skin had been rough and almost scorching.

‘How much?’ Crystal said again.

Gull Gilbert went over and examined the food. ‘Twelve,’ he told her.

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘You won’t have it tomorrow.’

Gull Gilbert was pacing the room with long strides. ‘I’ll pay you every week. Over the summer.’

Crystal reached out towards the pot, then stopped. ‘I won’t be here in the summer.’

The sea sounded like gunshots through the house. ‘Again?’ Ivor said, too loudly.

The last time Crystal had gone away, it had been to Cyprus, and it had been for a whole year. Before that, it was somewhere he’d forgotten the name of, for six months. One day she was here, the next she wasn’t. It was because her parents worked at the Dishes. They had to go to places where there were other Dishes. She’d been born on an island called Ascension, which meant going up in the air and not coming back down.