Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

The orphaned boy and girl are driven to the house of a couple who foster for the local social services until their grandparents arrive tomorrow. The boy still believes his parents are living in France.

The reunited families have gone. The hall is almost empty now. The only people who remain are those waiting for family members who will never come.

None of the survivors sleep well. They wake from dreams in which the floor beneath them vanishes. They wake from dreams of being trapped inside a cat’s cradle of iron and wood as the tide rises.

2 a.m. Clear skies. The whole town so precise and blue that you could lean down and pick up that moored yacht between your thumb and forefinger. Only the surf moving and a single drunk shouting at the sea. The gaudy lights along the front have been turned off as a mark of respect, leaving a scattering of yellow windows and the hotel names in green and red neon. Excelsior, Camden, Royal.

3 a.m. Mars just visible above the Downs and a choppy stripe of moon across the sea. There is a dull boom as the far end of the pier’s landward half drops and twists like a monster shifting in its sleep.

The TV crews arrive at 5 a.m. They set up camp on the prom and outside the police station, smoking and telling jokes and drinking sugary coffee from Thermos flasks.

Dawn comes and for a brief period the wrecked pier is beautiful, but the epicentre of the town is already moving eastwards, down the prom towards the dolphinarium and the saltwater swimming pool. The pier is already becoming something you walk past.

People get their holiday snaps back from the chemist’s. Some of the pictures contain the final images of family members who are now dead. They smile, they shade their eyes, they eat chips and hold outsize teddy bears. They have only minutes to live. In one freakish photograph a teenage boy is already falling downwards, his mouth wide open as if he were singing.

Funerals are held and the legal wrangle begins.

Paint peels, metal rusts. Gulls gather on the roundabouts and the belvederes. Bulbs shatter, colours fade. Cormorants nest on the rotten decking. In high winds the gondolas on the big wheel sway and creak. The ghost train becomes a roost for pipistrelles and greater horseshoe bats; the tangled beams and girders underwater become a home for conger eels and octopus.

Three years later a man walking his dog along the beach will find a sea-bleached skull washed up by a winter storm. It will be laid to rest with full funeral rites in a corner of the graveyard of St. Bartholomew’s Church under a stone inscribed with the words, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind.”

Ten years after the disaster the pier is brought down in a series of controlled explosions, and over many months the remnants are lifted laboriously by a floating crane and towed to a marine breakers in Southampton. No other human remains are found.

She’s dreaming of the pines outside her window in the palace, the way the night wind turns them into a black sea that tumbles and breaks against the stone wall below the sill. She’s dreaming of the summer sound of trees being felled farther up the mountain, the hollow tock, tock, tock of the axe, the slow cracking of the trunk and that final thump, all that splintered yellow, still damp with life, the smell of fresh resin in the air and columns of midges rising and falling in the angled sunlight.

She’s dreaming of the wood being split and planed and toothed home into a curved keel that will cut an ocean in half. She’s dreaming of this morning, standing on the prow with her husband-to-be, the oars churning the waves to foam and the fat sails slapping in the wind, over the horizon his city where they’ll marry, behind them the home she’ll never see again.

She’s dreaming of the wedding, flames dancing in the sconces of a great hall. Flames multiplied in a hundred golden cups, painted plates heavy with roast meats and chickpeas, quinces and saffron and honey cakes.

She’s dreaming of the bridal suite, a snowfall of Egyptian cotton on the bed. Hanging above the pillows is a tapestry, the work so fine she could be looking through a window. In the centre of the picture is a woman weeping on a beach, and far out, in the chop and glitter of the woven sea, a single ship sailing steadily towards the border and the world beyond.

She moves a little closer so that she can see the woman’s face, and then it hits her like a punch. She’s looking at herself.

She comes round like a drowning woman breaking the water’s surface, thrashing and gasping for air. The light hurts her eyes, her throat is dry and the world is foggy from drink, or drugs, or fever.

She rolls over and finds herself in an empty bed. He must be awake and making preparations for today’s journey. She stands with difficulty and realises that she can hear nothing except the cry of gulls and guy ropes humming in the wind. She staggers to the door, uncouples the four leather ties which bind the canvas flaps and steps outside to find herself in a ghost camp, five squares of flattened, yellow grass, fishbones, a single sandal, the torched circle of last night’s fire and far out, in the chop and glitter of the sea, a single ship.

She tries to scream but there is a weight on her chest which stops her filling her lungs. Her mind bucks and twists, searching for ways to make this right. He’s coming back. The crew have mutinied and kidnapped him or left him somewhere nearby, tied up, beaten, dead. Then she looks down and sees, beside her feet, a jug of water and a loaf of bread, and on the loaf is the ring she gave him as a sign of their eternal love. He has abandoned her.

The sky revolves, she vomits on the wet grass and the world goes dark.

When time begins again she’s skidding down the scree on bloody hands and knees towards the beach, then stumbling over the slip and clack of pebbles to the surf. She yells into the wind and her cry echoes round the rocky cove. Her heart thrashes like a netted bird.

The boat shrinks. She has become the woman in the tapestry.

He is the only man she’s ever loved, and he has dumped her like ballast. She needs to find an explanation that does not make her a fool and him an animal, but every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made. She wants to hurl a stack of figured bowls across a room. She wants to weep till someone comes to comfort her. She wants to find a man who’ll track him down and break his neck or make him realise he’s wrong and bring him back.

She turns to take it in, this godforsaken place, bracken and sea pink, rye grass jerking in the wind, slabs of basalt rusty with lichen. Lying in a shallow pool, she sees the bloody head of a seal pup hacked off by the men last night then hurled off the cliff before they cooked the body. Its blind eyes have turned white.

She crouches on the hard, wet stones and hugs herself. No one has any idea that she is here except the crew of the departing ship, and no one else would give a damn. She does not know the name of this island. She knows only that this is the place in which she will die. She is off the heart’s map and her compass is spinning.

Minutes pass. Water breaks and fizzes on the pebbles. The wind sings and the cold begins to bite. She stands and starts the long climb to the bed they will never share again.

She is a princess. In twenty years she has never been alone, never cooked a meal, never cleaned a floor. She has bathed in clean, warm water every morning. Twice a day newly laundered clothes have been laid on her bed. She realises that this will be hard. She does not know the meaning of the word.