Andrew Hurley - The Loney

Lifting her chin and turning her head, she began clearing up some imperfection in the corner of her open mouth with a folded arrowhead of tissue and then ran the tip of her little finger down her philtrum, giving it a flick at the end.

The driver distracted her for a moment and she turned to face him. There was evidently some kind of disagreement and the woman went back to her preening, impatiently dabbing powder across her cheeks and nose and pausing to shout something half way through the process.

Inching to the right, I could see the girl sitting in the back. She leant forward and tried to intervene, but the adults in the front ignored her and she stared out of the window instead.

She looked straight at me, but didn’t see me. I was careful to stay well hidden. I always was. When I played my games in London, I could be as silent as the dead in the Jewish cemetery. Deader than the dead.

Watching the girl, I didn’t even hear my own breath, only sensed its warmth coming and going on my trigger finger.

Hanny was shaking my arm.

‘What’s the matter?’

He showed me his empty wrist, marked red from his watch strap.

‘Did you drop it?’ I said.

Hanny looked at his wrist again.

The driver finally got out and stood with the door open. He adjusted his tweed trilby, looked up at the seagulls and at the marshes through which they had just driven, his face saying god-forsaken . I heard the clank of a lighter opening; a moment later the wind blew copperblue smoke towards me, bringing the sweet dung smell of the man’s cigar and the woman’s voice.

‘Leonard,’ she said to the man and he ducked down to speak to her.

I caught her name as he lifted his head again and tacked it contemptuously onto the end of his sentence. Laura.

Hanny was scuffling about in the sand looking for his watch. I nudged him to be quiet. Leonard slammed the car door, sending little birds flapping away, and stepped down off the road onto the sand. He walked away and stood watching the injured gull with an amused curiosity. He took off his hat, brushed it with the back of his hand and put it back on.

In his toffee coloured jacket and his expensive shoes, he looked as out of place here as his Daimler. He was a lounge lizard, a spiv, a bent bookie with fingers full of sovereign rings and his blue shirt open two buttons at the collar. A smell of aftershave drifted up from him — a coniferous sap stirred with a fumigant like the stuff Farther sprayed over his roses to kill off the aphids.

Laura got out and fiddled with the boot of the car, eventually unlocking it and calling to Leonard. He sloped back up onto the tarmac and went over to her. They had a conversation that I couldn’t hear properly, then Laura went to open the girl’s door. Leonard grappled with something in the boot, heaved, twisted and finally dragged out a wheelchair that by pressing some lever with his foot sprang open.

Laura held the door and Leonard parked the chair with its seat facing the girl. She inched slowly out, puffing and wincing as she held onto her belly. She was as pregnant as it was possible to be.

Leonard held her hand as she shuffled towards the open door and when she was close enough half fell into the chair, making it creak with her weight. She ran her fingers through her coppery hair and tucked it behind her ears and grimaced again. She was younger than me; thirteen or fourteen, I guessed. One of those girls that every school had. Even the Catholic comps. Girls that Mummer and the other ladies at Saint Jude’s pretended they didn’t like to talk about. They had probably brought her here to have the baby in this deserted place out of shame.

Leonard wheeled her to the edge of the road and carefully down onto the beach, where he headed towards the pillbox, leaving thin tyre tracks and scattering gulls from a pile of weed fizzing with flies. In her heels, Laura followed more slowly, coming to a standstill now and then as she decided how best to negotiate the swathes of wrack and litter.

She was dressed out of her time, somehow, like I imagined fashionable women might have dressed in the 1930s — a bottle green coat with a stole made from an entire fox, a short haircut parted at the side.

Leonard set the wheelchair so that it faced the sea. Laura stayed with the girl and Leonard went off to investigate the pillbox. I put him in the sights and tracked him as he crossed the beach slowly and awkwardly with a gait that suggested a gammy knee. He came to the pillbox, looked at it, removed his shoes and took his hands out of his pockets so that he could swing his arms and get up the drift of sand. Rather satisfyingly, he slipped a few times on his bad leg before he managed to put his fingers into one of the gunslits and pull himself up.

Making a visor with his hands, he peered inside and then suddenly jerked backwards, losing his footing and sliding ridiculously, one leg outstretched and the other crooked in such a way that it rolled him slowly but unavoidably onto his back. His shoes came out of his hand and tumbled away.

He got up, looked to see if anyone had witnessed his fall, and twisted to wipe the sand off his backside, before limping along the foot of the dunes in search of his brogues. He found one nestled in a pile of bladderwrack and stopped right underneath us to put it back on.

Having heard his involuntary cry, Laura made her way towards him.

‘Are you alright?’ she asked.

‘Full of bloody rats,’ Leonard nodded to the pillbox.

Laura smiled to herself and took out a packet of cigarettes.

‘Well you will come to these sorts of places,’ she said, lighting up.

Leonard gave her a look. She walked away and picked up his other shoe, tipped it over, let a stream of sand come out and gave it back. Leonard slipped it on and then bent down to pick up something else — it was Hanny’s watch. He thumbed away the sand, shook it, put it to his ear and then stuck it in his pocket.

I turned to tell Hanny, but he was staring past me over to where the girl was sitting in the wheelchair. The injured gull had stopped shrieking and was hopping tentatively over to her outstretched hand. When it was close to her, it angled its head and nipped at the weed she was holding, its damaged wing held out like a fan. It came again for another feed and stayed this time. The girl stroked its neck and touched its feathers. The bird regarded her for a moment and then lifted off silently, rising, joining the others turning in a wheel under the clouds.

Spring drowned The Loney.

Day after day, the rain swept in off the sea in huge, vaporous curtains that licked Coldbarrow from view and then moved inland to drench the cattle fields. The beach turned to brown sludge and the dunes ruptured and sometimes crumbled altogether, so that the sea and the marsh water united in vast lakes, undulating with the carcasses of uprooted trees and bright red carrageen ripped from the sea bed.

Those were the worst days; the days of mist and driving rain, when Moorings dripped and leaked and the air was permanently damp. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait for the weather to change. And sitting by the bay window of the front room watching the water flowing down the fields and the lanes, listening to the rooks barking in the cold woods, filled me with a sense of futility that I can remember even now.

I’ve not said anything to Doctor Baxter about Moorings or The Loney but he says he can tell that I’m harbouring a lot of negativity from the past — his words — and that I ought to try and let it go.

I told him that with me working in a museum the past was something of an occupational hazard and he laughed and wrote something down on his notepad. I can’t seem to do or say anything without him making a note of it. I feel like a damn specimen.