Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

Would it have clouded their holiday mood? Could they have fired up those barbecues in quite the same way?

But it had come in November, and by the spring it would all be history. And if the regular Lookouters, meanwhile, had noticed it at all, seen the name in the papers and made the link, then he and Ellie might have dealt with the questions, such as they might be, faced any music, without being still in the immediate shock.

Though, now, Jack thinks, they won’t have to face any music at all.

He looks down at the site. It was what they’d done, with a lot of help from ‘Uncle’ Tony, whom neither of them had met, since he was dead, but who’d lived here once, so it had emerged, with Ellie’s mum (her third husband and with this one, it seemed, she’d landed squarely on her feet), and run the Sands, as it was then.

People could help by dying, by dying at the right time. Had that always been Ellie’s position? Even with this?

And perhaps those regular Lookouters, scattered now in their homes round the country, wouldn’t have noticed. Though they’ll notice now , Jack thinks, they’ll notice this story. That other story, it wasn’t such a big one, not even necessarily headlines these days, though Luxton wasn’t such a common name.

There was a war going on, that was the story. Though who would know, or want to know, down here at Sands End? A war on terror, that was the general story. Jack knew that terror was a thing you felt inside, so what could a war on terror be, in the end, but a war against yourself? Tom would have known terror, perhaps, quite a few times. He’d have known it, very probably, all too recently. It was saying nothing, perhaps, to say that he’d also have been trained to meet it.

Does Jack feel terror right now, with a loaded gun behind him? Oddly, no. Terror isn’t the word for what he feels. Has he ever known terror? Yes.

What they meant, of course, was a war on terrorism . But then it became a matter of who and where, of geography. Was it conceivable that terrorists — Islamic extremists — might want to operate out of a holiday facility on the Isle of Wight? Or, on the other hand, want to crash a plane into it? Target a caravan site? He didn’t think so.

Yet it was sometimes, nonetheless, a subject among the Lookouters. It was surprising how often, in fact, people who were here to have fun, to get away from it all, to have a holiday , could drift, of an August evening, with their sun-reddened faces, into conversations about the dire state of the world and how, one way or another, there was no hope for it. Jack would try, which wasn’t so difficult, not to get too involved. It was simply part of his obliging, humouring proprietor’s role, to go with the flow. So he’d nod and smile and now and then throw in some meaningless remark.

But once, down at the Ship — he couldn’t remember if it had been the war on terror then or some other global emergency — it had all got too much for him and he’d blurted out suddenly (the Lookouters present would remember it): ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry, any of you. In a few years’ time, if what they say is true, we’ll all have gone down anyway with mad-cow disease.’

‘CARAVANS,’ Ellie had said, as if it were a magic word, the secret of the universe she’d been saving up to tell him. And she must have known how it would have touched something in him and made him prick up his ears and listen and not just think it was a damn stupid answer to anything.

‘Caravans, Jacko.’

There they were, sitting up in the big bed at Jebb on a July afternoon, and he’d realised later that she must have planned it that way. Not that he’d resisted. And anyway for him the word did have a kind of magic.

Ellie would have remembered — though she hadn’t been there — those weeks in Brigwell Bay. One week in July, two years running. She’d have remembered him talking about them afterwards, talking at a gabble, perhaps, that wasn’t like Jack’s normal way with speech. He was thirteen, fourteen, so was Ellie. Not so long before her mum made her run for it.

Ellie hadn’t been there. ‘Send me a postcard, Jack.’ And he had. Greetings from Brigwell Bay. ‘Miss Eleanor Merrick, Westcott Farm, Marleston …’ God knows if she’d kept it. Or kept them, since she’d got another one too, the second year.

Maybe they were here right now, those postcards, in the Lookout, in some secret stash of hers. Maybe they were at the back of a drawer, right here in this bedroom. They might have been the first postcards Ellie had ever received. They were certainly the first Jack had ever written. And the first of the two would have been a serious struggle for him, if his mother hadn’t helped him and, after a little thought, suggested he write, ‘Wish you were here.’ And he had. He hadn’t known it was the most uninventive of messages. He’d written it. And he’d wished it. He’d even thought sometimes, there at Brigwell Bay with Mum and Tom: suppose it was just him and Ellie, just him and her in the caravan. It was a sort of burning thought. But on the other hand, sometimes he was having such a whale of a time that he forgot altogether about Ellie.

And then again, perhaps those unoriginal words on the back of a postcard might have touched a tender, even burning spot inside Ellie, such that she would have wished to send an answer back (though it was only a week), ‘Me too, Jack.’ But she hadn’t sent an answer or even, later, expressed the wish. And after he’d come back and spouted on about the good time he’d had, she hadn’t even given him much of a thank-you for that postcard or seemed to want to pursue the subject. By which Jack understood, at least by the second time around, that she was jealous.

And then her mum had skedaddled.

So Jack had been careful, ever since, out of respect for Ellie, not to mention those visits to Brigwell Bay or the postcards he’d sent each time. As if, even for him, after a while, those two trips hadn’t really meant so much or remained so special in his memory. Whereas the truth was they were fantastic. They were the best times of his life up to that time. Maybe even, he sometimes thought, the best ever.

How could he have said that to Ellie, ‘They were the best times of my life,’ when she wasn’t even there, without inflaming her jealousy? Girls. But how many girls did he know? He only knew Ellie. How could he have said it by the time they were having those private sessions at Westcott Farmhouse, without getting into even hotter trouble. What, not these times, Jacko?

Let alone say it when they were sitting up like that, each cradling a mug of tea, stark naked, in the Big Bedroom.

So he’d shut up and pretended it was all forgotten and had never been so important to him. For Ellie’s sake. He could be good to Ellie.

But Ellie would have known he was only covering. He had a wall of a face, he was born with it, but Ellie was trained in seeing through it. And she’d have known, that afternoon, what a tender spot she was still touching in him and how it couldn’t fail to put a seal on things when she said that word. Caravans. As if it was the password and the key to their future.

And the truth still was: those weeks had been fantastic.

When Jack was thirteen and Tom was not yet six Vera had taken them both for the first of two holidays at Brigwell Bay, Dorset, not far from Lyme Regis. And what had made them particularly fantastic was that they’d stayed in a caravan.

They’d gone on their mother’s instigation and insistence. She must have said to Michael, with perhaps more than her usual firmness with him, that she was going to give those two boys a holiday, a seaside holiday that when they’d grown up they’d always have to remember. They weren’t going to go without that. And Michael must have relented — for two years running — though Jack would have counted then, even at thirteen and fourteen, as full-time summer labour on the farm.