Calabash Read online

  ‘I didn’t think you’d ever want to see me again,’ I began.

  ‘Believe me, for a while I really didn’t, but I have missed you. Are you okay? You’re working here at the arcade? We’ve got some catching up to do, you and I.’

  I might have known she would never hold a grudge. She had no temperament for bitterness or anger. ‘I would like that.’

  ‘So what do you think of the new me?’ She stepped back and looked down at herself. ‘Good, huh? A waist like Sabrina, my mum says.’

  ‘Listen, Julia, that day on the pier, I never meant to harm you, I was sorting out some problems—’

  ‘You can sit and tell me all your problems, isn’t that what we used to do? How long have I known you?’

  I tried to remember when we had first met. She couldn’t have been more than six years old. Her family lived two streets over from Balaclava Terrace. As far as I knew, they were still there. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘You were very small.’

  She laughed. ‘I was never very small. It’s the only thing that’s changed about me. I still tell my troubles to the sea. Still stand on the pier, like I used to do when I was young. Do you have time to grab a cup of coffee?’

  ‘I can’t today.’ I could, but something made me turn down the offer. I felt at a disadvantage. I’d been caught off guard, and her bright confidence had unnerved me.

  ‘What’s the matter? Is something wrong?’

  ‘There are things I have to do.’ I watched as disappointment dampened her spirits. ‘We can always get together another time.’

  ‘I guess so. I’d like to keep in touch.’

  ‘Sure.’ I nodded, falsely cheerful. ‘I won’t let you down.’

  ‘The ball’s in your court, Kay. It always has been.’

  ‘You’re a real sight for sore eyes,’ I told her as she drew close once more. And she was. Her cheeks were no longer smothered in spot-hiding makeup. She was wearing a light summer dress that showed off her tanned legs, and she moved about me with a loose-limbed grace she had never shown before. Now that she had a reason to feel good, there was a sense of bravery about her. I wished I wasn’t wearing my old brown elephant cords and my ratty fisherman’s jumper.

  ‘Anyway, it’s good to see that you’re—well.’ I realised that the shock of seeing me again was settling in, and she clearly didn’t think I looked so good. My defences suddenly returned. She had not spoken to me since the day I had frightened her on the pier. Why would she bother now, if not to gloat over the fact that she had managed to effect a change in herself, while I remained the same old loser she had known at school?

  ‘I didn’t know you were working here,’ she explained, searching for something else to say. ‘I don’t come down this end of town much any more.’ I decided that this had to be a lie, because the school was nearby and the bus came along the promenade before turning inland by the roundabout past my arcade.

  ‘Oh, I’m here rain or shine. Almost a local monument, pointed out by tour guides. People arrange to meet each other in front of me. Well, I imagine you have lots of better things to do with your time than hang around in this area.’ I didn’t even try to keep the bitterness from creeping into my voice.

  ‘I left school, Kay.’ She squinted up at the sky, checking the weather. ‘Dad moved to Spain and divorced my mother.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Don’t be. It was for the best.’ Her smile became a little less sunny. ‘Nobody seemed very surprised except me. He doesn’t even bother to keep in touch. There wasn’t any money coming in at home, so I had to find a job.’

  ‘But you wanted to be a biologist.’

  ‘Yeah, well. It’s like that Stones song. You can’t always get what you want.’

  ‘It looks like you got some of what you wanted.’

  ‘I decided that if I couldn’t get to be a biologist, I could make a few other changes.’ She looked down at her figure. ‘It bloody nearly killed me.’

  ‘Well, it’s paid off. I barely recognised you.’

  ‘I’ve been catalogue modelling, making a bit of money. I’m in Littlewoods under Brassieres and Sun Loungers. To be honest, I was struggling with my biology grades. It would have been a long and lonely battle. So don’t laugh—I’ve got a beauty salon. Just a small place, but it’s a start. Not just hair—therapeutic massage as well. Taking the stress out of housewives. It’s doing rather well, considering how many people around here are out of work.’

  ‘Well done, you.’ Any moment now I felt sure she would tell me she was engaged to someone I hated. At least I knew Malcolm Slattery was already spoken for.

  ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  ‘No—forgive me—I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I’m not.’

  ‘It’s just applying the things you read about in psychology books. If you can understand the reason why people feel bad about themselves, it’s easier to find a way to make them feel good. Sometimes I see them come into the shop, and I know exactly what they’re feeling.’

  ‘Maybe I should tell my mum to visit you.’

  ‘How are your parents?’

  ‘I moved out. I live above here.’

  ‘Oh.’ She searched for something to say, and I didn’t help her out. ‘How are things? Are you happy?’

  ‘Am I happy?’ I asked. ‘What kind of a question is that to chuck at someone? Fucking hell, does it look like I’m happy?’ I tried to stay calm, but something inside me gave way. ‘Why would I stay around here if I wanted to be happy? My dad’s about to be made redundant, my brother’s in jail, and I’m stuck here because I’ve got the lungs of a sixty-five-year-old chain smoker. How much worse can it get?’

  ‘I heard about them planning to close down the Scheherazade. Didn’t they find mice in the restaurant or something? And I read about your brother. They’re trying to get him released early, aren’t they?’

  ‘It was rats. They found rats. They would have had to have been the size of Shetland ponies and stampeding around Bob in herds before he noticed them, but he is the catering manager there, so you can see the problem.’ I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. ‘The legal people at the British consulate say they might be able to get Sean released early on a technical point about the sentencing procedure, but the same lawyers also said he’d get a reduced sentence in the first place because he’d been the innocent victim of a smuggling plot.’

  ‘But the papers said—’

  ‘The papers repeat whatever they’re told, and they even get that wrong. Sean had no idea what he was carrying.’

  ‘I thought the authorities caught him because he was suffering from an overdose?’

  ‘Oh, that. It was a con. O’Donnelly’s pals. They jacked him up with the overdose themselves. Put something in a bowl of soup and fed it to him, would you believe. They wanted him to get caught.’

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ said Julia. ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘My brother has a big mouth,’ I explained. ‘He upsets people. The consul got hold of the wrong end of the stick and the paper printed some rubbish about an overdose before anyone had checked the facts.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Yeah, life’s full of little surprises, isn’t it? Sean went off to see the world and lost his arm. The only good thing is that the plan backfired on O’Donnelly and the police got him.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about your troubles. I think I’d better go,’ she said sadly. ‘It was good to see you again.’ She started off, then came back. ‘I’ve often thought of you, Kay. It’s a shame to see you so—’

  ‘So what?’ I asked nastily. ‘I’m in great spirits, the rudest of health. Things couldn’t possibly be any better.’

  Typically, she took my remark at face value. ‘Well, it doesn’t look that way. Look, if you ever want to talk—’ She dug into her handbag and found a business card: The Oasis—Stress Therapy Centre. ‘—you can reach me on this number.’

  I stared dumbly at
the proffered card. I really wanted to refuse it.

  ‘Please, Kay, take it. I always wanted us to be friends.’ She hesitated, then decided to speak. ‘Well, perhaps more than friends. But you wouldn’t do anything about it. Everything just stayed the same between us. You never seemed to want—well, to see inside of me. It was like I didn’t matter to you.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me you fancied me?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course.’ She looked embarrassed, and cleared her throat. ‘Of course. I was in love with you. I thought you knew that.’

  I was amazed. ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know. You always had so many ideas in your head, you were so full of possibilities. I felt sure that you would do something special.’

  I had no answer for her. Dumbfounded, I watched her walk off along the sunstruck pavement, a little less confident than when I had seen her arrive.

  Chapter 34

  Sea Change

  And I suppose that’s how things might have stayed forever.

  In the days that followed, I sat on my stool in the doorway of the arcade and imagined myself in middle age, living on the outskirts of town in a semi-detached redbrick villa, weather-watching at the window, staring at the narrow grey band of sea that showed between the more expensive houses opposite. Perhaps I had married the shy girl who drank alone in the pub near the arcade. Perhaps I had bought myself a little business and failed to ‘make a go’ of it, so that now I worked in slot machine rentals, travelling along the coast in my Vauxhall Viva, lazily fantasising about pretty, young hitch-hikers, getting drunk in dingy third-rate hotels, fat and wheezy and free of desire. My dreams of Calabash were as distant as childhood memories.

  After a tentative summer, autumn drew in early. In a half-hearted attempt to make amends for my wasted life, I stepped up my hours as a hospital visitor at Cole Bay General. I took an evening course and began sitting with seriously ill children, reading to them, just being there to calm their fears and play with them. Perhaps my reasons were selfish; seeing those poor little buggers certainly stopped me feeling so bad about myself. Every time I visited them I thought of Miss Ruth, translucent and frail in her neat white hospital bed, lost without her beloved books.

  In a seaside town, the first sign of autumn is the reappearance of condensation on car roofs. There’s a bite in the air when you move into the shadows. The summer stalls begin closing up. After replacing the town’s vandalised floral clock half a dozen times, the council threw in the towel and paved it over. Calabash became a distant warm reverie, like a half-remembered holiday. As if to place the kingdom even further out of reach, the end of the pier was declared unsafe, and when the public money required to effect repairs proved unforthcoming, it was blocked off with scaffolding, bags of concrete and barbed wire.

  The helter skelter, the ghost train and the dodgems were boarded up and left to the ravages of the elements. The candyfloss kiosk was moved into the main arcade, but Katherine no longer worked there. Cottesloe informed me that she was pregnant and preparing to become a mum. He didn’t say who the father was, but I had a good idea. The pier, once Royal Victorian Cole Bay’s centrepiece of civic pride, became a blunted stump occupied by a handful of tacky amusements that amused no-one. Daytrippers left feeling short-changed, vandalism increased, and the town lost out. The resort was passed over by the companies who used to book the Churchill Suite of the Scheherazade for their annual general meetings, and most of Bob’s staff were laid off. In order to keep his own position he was put on short hours, and had to take a second job as a park-keeper.

  I began drinking in the bar on the pier chiefly because nobody I knew would have dreamt of drinking there. The toilets were labelled ‘Buoys’ and ‘Gulls’. Some nights I would nod to Mr Cottesloe and send him over a beer. His theatre was failing; the summer attendances for his ancient Agatha Christie plays had hit an all-time low. Even the town’s old age pensioners could spot the identity of the murderer before the final curtain. Cottesloe swore he could hear them all muttering to each other, ‘It’s the one in the cream jumper,’ before the end of the first act.

  From my seat in the bar I could see the red metal warning sign on the pier’s scaffolding, taunting me. One rainy Tuesday night, ten minutes before the final bell, I drained my sixth pint of bitter and rose unsteadily to my feet, determined to do something about the sign. The barmaid, a woman who looked as if any remaining pleasurable responses had been removed from her by aversion therapy, didn’t even bother to glance up as I left.

  Outside, the cold rain hit my face and I fell back against the wall, gasping for breath. Following the side of the building I reached the sheets of corrugated iron that had been bolted over the scaffolding, and squinted angrily at the offending notice. This was the closest I had been to the sealed-off section, and now I could see how easy it would be to climb through. Hoping that the council were too mean to pay for a security patrol, I clambered awkwardly between the poles, snagging my coat and tripping, but emerging unhurt on the other side. The way ahead was unlit, but I could make out the black hulk of the ghost train. The top of the helter skelter had blown down, leaving its ribs exposed like the remains of a half-devoured animal. The boards beneath my feet were slippery, but felt solid enough to support me. Although the rain was falling hard, the sea was flat and no storms were forecast, so I made my way to the very end of the pier, where I knew the lower fishing platform to be. But here it was too dark to see the steps at all, and, drunk as I was, I figured my chances of surviving a fall into the sea from this height were lousy.

  I knew that I needed to see the platform, just to be sure that it was still in place. There was only one other site from which I could do such a thing. The pier had its own speedboat, a great heavy motor-launch built in the 1930s, with SKYLARK stencilled across the bow. It was permanently moored beneath the pier a few hundred yards along from the platform, no longer used for pleasure trips, but kept in good order for use in emergencies; not that any had arisen since the escapologist who used to be thrown from the pier in a chained sack got pissed on stout one Sunday morning and didn’t come back up.

  Leading down to the Skylark’s embarkation point was a broad set of steel steps. I searched for the entrance and found it, ducking beneath the wooden admittance bar and hanging on to the railing. Several times I nearly slipped over on the seaweed-slick staircase. I stayed just above the water level, but here beneath the struts I could not make out the platform. The whole thing seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps it had been washed away.

  It was the clinking sound that attracted my attention. I looked down at the step below my shoes, and saw the object washing against it, caught in the green fronds that eddied around the stanchion. Reaching down to pull it from the water, I lost my balance and almost fell in. I knew at once what it was; I could tell from its strange stopper that this was the bottle I had thrown into the harbour in Calabash, in an earlier, happier life.

  Clutching the bottle, I ran back up the steps, my heart punching against my ribs. I slipped and stumbled across the boards to the barricade, then climbed through, scraping the skin from the palms of my hands. I did not allow myself to examine the object inside my jacket until I reached the lights of the esplanade. I stopped beneath a lamppost and held the scuffed glass high in the drizzle-misted light. The inside still appeared to be dry. After a great deal of difficulty I managed to unscrew the stopper. I tipped the bottle over my outstretched hand, thumping the end with my right fist. And there they were, the pieces of card that had puzzled me so much.

  Lee Hill Grammar School for Boys South Do

  This homework book is the property of Simon Jonathan Saun

  And on the other side, in my own handwriting:

  Kay James Goodwin,

  Residing at 14, Balaclava Terrace, Cole Bay, Southern England

  And Also a Resident of the Kingdom of Calabash.

  Chapter 35

  The Electrified Citadel

  But what did it really prove? Couldn’
t I have deluded myself into filling the damned thing out at the end of the pier? The bottle might simply have been lodged there in the seaweed all this time. Still, finding it filled me with resolve. Looking back, it was odd that this should have been the catalyst to my rediscovered sense of purpose, but I suddenly realised how long it had been since I had last taken any kind of positive action about anything in Cole Bay. At least in Calabash I had been able to effect changes, even though my actions had wrought potentially disastrous results. Here, my attitude towards Julia had been typical: moody, selfish and pathetic. But now I was determined to end my life adrift. I felt sure that the bottle was in some way a call to arms, even though I had thrown it into the sea myself. It had been washed to the steps of the pier for a reason.

  The following morning I began my investigation. If I had found the bottle on the pier and invented a story around it, I wanted to know why. If it turned out that my mental fortitude was as weak as my physical health, I needed to be able to understand myself before I could do anything about it.

  I examined the piece of paper again. The boy’s last name had to be Saunders, or perhaps Saunderson. They were the most popular choices listed in the telephone book. ‘South Do’ presented more of a problem. I began by searching places that came to mind: South Dorking, South Dorchester, South Doncaster, and so on. I tried nearly a dozen of these, but drew blanks. No sign of a Lee Hill Grammar School in any of them. Then it struck me that the name might be more of a description: South Downs. Along this stretch of coastline, most of the hilly plains above the sea were described as downs.

  This time I was in luck. Lee Hill turned out to be a small private grammar school for boys just outside of Worthing. The school secretary was understandably reluctant to give out details of individual pupils over the telephone, but I persuaded her to check the register for boys with the surname of Saunders or Saunderson. She had nothing beginning with the first four letters at all. She sounded busy and anxious to end the call, so I appealed to her vanity. I told her I was a local journalist preparing an article on education, and I had heard that the school’s academic record was excellent. I explained that I was tracing students from the area who had gone on to great things. The secretary couldn’t help me but thought that Mr Gregory, a senior teacher who had retired but still fulfilled the role of school archivist, might be able to draw up a list if I asked him nicely. She gave me his home telephone number.