2006 - Wildcat Moon

DECEMBER 1959

Clementine Fernaud arrived at Paddington Station, bought her ticket and asked a porter which platform she needed for the train to St Werburgh’s. He pointed her in the right direction with barely a glance at the matronly woman before him.

She stood alone, not seeking to make conversation with other waiting passengers, keeping a watchful eye out; she didn’t want anyone spotting her and ruining her plans, though she was sure that no one from her past life would recognize her dressed as she was.

Soon she would be safely out of London and on her way to her new post as a governess. She smiled wryly and stamped her feet to keep warm. Imagine! Clementine Fernaud a governess!

At least no one would think of looking for her in an isolated country house. How her old friends and acquaintances would laugh if they knew what she was up to. The idea to apply for such a job had been a stroke of genius. She had been shown the advertisement placed in
The Times
on the same day as her own photograph had appeared on the front page. Both started with the word
WANTED
!

Wanted. Governess to teach ten-year-old girl, French speaker preferred. Large country house close to the coast Immediate start. Good references required.

The wages offered were excellent and accommodation and food were provided. But she was hardly governess material, was she? She was well educated and trilingual, but she was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the serious studious type! She could think of nothing worse than being cooped up in a schoolroom with a bore of a girl.

Still, it would only be for a few months and when the fuss had died down she’d be able to go back to France, or Italy perhaps, and make a new life for herself somewhere she was not known.

She looked down at her clothes and grimaced. These sensible lace-up shoes were just too terrible. And the thick brown stockings quite disgusting! The dull grey costume she’d bought was drab to the point of being mannish. And her hair! Mother of God! It was changed beyond all recognition. Gone were the stylish golden curls, replaced by a neat grey bun coiled on the back of her head. The round spectacles gave her an air of bookishness, making her look very prim indeed. Why, if she had a best friend who was to pass by now she would not recognize the vivacious and fun-loving girl of her past.

She’d been amazed at how easily she had fooled the woman from the agency. Miss Vera Truscott had seemed perfectly happy with her and not glanced twice at the forged documents. She had telephoned straight away to a Mr Greswode and on Miss Truscotf’s recommendation he had offered Clementine the job there and then.

Tonight she would break her journey in a small hotel near Reading and tomorrow take the train to her destination. She was to arrive at St Werburgh’s Station in the early afternoon and a car was being sent to pick her up and take her to Killivray House near the village of Rhoskilly.

She smoked a cigarette with enjoyment then picked up her valise and boarded the train.

No one could remember how the Skallies got its name, or the name of the lunatic who built Hogwash House on the shelf of rock above the beach at East Skilly.

Legend had it that it was a ragged-arsed Spaniard washed up from the sinking Armada who didn’t have the strength to make it as far as Rhoskilly village. Yet this first house was followed by another and another until there were seven ramshackle houses huddled together in what became known as Bloater Row.

It was an inhospitable, unsheltered spot and the winds that blew in from the worrisome sea whipped sand into every widening crack and crevice of the Skallies.

Bag End, the Peapods, Skibbereen and the Grockles faced the sea and took the worst battering and in winter, when the storms came, the waves hit the base of the rock and the spray went up over the roofs trapping all but the foolish inside.

On the right of Bloater Row, backed up against the crumbling rock face, were Hogwash House, Periwinkle House and Cuckoo’s Nest.

There was a small inn called the Pilchard with porthole windows and a cellar where old bones were buried. And at the furthest point towards Skilly Beach there was a windblown wobbly chapel with a round window fashioned from fragments of glass washed up from the sea.

It was a wild, curious place inhabited by misfits and cripples, foul-mouthed women, talking parrots and wildcats. There were halfwits and Irish tinkers, and an army of bright-eyed kids and toddlers with nits and sharp teeth. A place where, when a house was suddenly deserted, someone miraculously drifted in from somewhere else to take their place.

The sun died and darkness came down swiftly over the Skallies. A frosty-lipped wind blew in from the sea sucking wisps of smoke from the chimneys of the houses in Bloater Row and making the wildcats yowl in the backyard of the Pilchard Inn.

Up in his low-beamed bedroom in Bag End Archie Grimble lit a greasy candle stub and placed it on the battered chest of drawers near the door.

He watched as the darkness weakened around the edges of the room. A whisper of light flickered across the curled-up picture of the Virgin Mary that was hung above the wash-stand and her eyes blinked as though she was waking from a long, deep sleep.

The growing light showed a small iron bed with blurred edges, a frayed rug on the bare boards and Archie’s own stooped shadow looming on the far wall.

Archie stood in front of the ancient wardrobe mirror and looked at his wobbling reflection in the mottled glass. His pale, bespectacled face stared forlornly back at him, and from behind his round, pink-rimmed National Health spectacles, his lazy eye flickered nervously. The other eye was hidden behind a lens covered with sticking plaster.

One-eyed Willy the other kids called him.

Cripple.

Stickman.

He pulled up his faded grey shirt, tried to puff out his belly and failed miserably.

He had a chest like a collapsed washing board. Tin ribs you could play a tune on.

He turned away from the mirror and glanced over his shoulder.

Jesus! Look at the state of him. The rag-and-bone man wouldn’t give a balloon for him.

He had shoulder bones like angel wings. Legs thin as a chicken’s poking out of his frayed shorts. His even skinnier left leg caged in an ugly metal calliper.

No wonder the other kids took the mickey.

Peg leg!

Peg leg!

He looked like one of the sad-faced collecting boxes that stood outside chemist shops, chalk-faced statue boys with a box at their feet in which to collect pennies and halfpennies.

He clenched his small fists in anger. He hated his bad eyes and his gammy leg, hated the bloody limp and the way it made him walk like an old codger.

One day, though; one day he was going to be rich, rich enough to buy one of those Charles Atlas kits he’d seen in the newspapers and he’d grow muscles as big as old potatoes.

Then he’d teach them all a lesson. All the ones that picked on him had better watch out then.

He’d be Archie Grimble, strong man of the Skallies.

He’d kick sand in their faces all right. And he wouldn’t be afraid of anything or anyone. Not even Donald Kelly.

He put up his fists. Boxed his reflection. Side-stepped. Right. Left Duck and feint. Leading with the left Jab with the right.

SMACK! WHACK! SPLAT!

“Take that, you lanky streak of piss!”

BASH
.

“And that, pea brain Kelly.”

He paused, wiped the imaginary blood from his fists, blew on them and set to again.

“Call me names would you, you big, bloody fat arse!”

BIFE! WALLOP! THUMP!

“What the hell’s going on up there, Arch? You’ll have the ceiling down in a minute.”

His mammy’s voice brought him up short.

He put down his fists, opened the door and called sheepishly down the stairs. “Sorry, Mammy.”

Archie sighed. He hated being such a weedy specimen and he hated having to hate so many people.

He hated his own father for a start and it was against the rules to hate your own father. But he did.

He hated him so much it made his belly fizz and his ears burn.

His father was a pig. Worse than a pig. A big, fat, stinking, hairy porker.

The way he spoke to Mammy was terrible.

Do this! Do that! Boil water for the bath. Fill the bath. Bank the fire. Where’s my tea, woman?

Oh, and when he ate it was sick making, stuffing the food in his slobbery chops, gravy running down his sandpaper chin. And the way he stubbed his cigarette butt out in the ruins of his food and then burped without even putting his hand over his mouth.

Archie pulled a face at himself in the mirror then walked nervously across to the sash window, opened it carefully and listened to the sounds of the windblown night.

He heard the rattling of glass in ill-fitting windows and the pounding of the sea on the rocks below the Skallies.

The words of the Donkey Song drifted up from the Boat-house on Skilly Beach where mad Gwennie lived all alone;

There’sa song in the air

But the fair señorita

Doesn’t seem to care for the song in the air
…

He was terrified of mad Gwennie. Everyone was, even the Kelly boys. Mad Gwennie was a wizened-up old thing, with skin as dark and hairy as a coconut and eyes crafty as a monkey. She was bent-backed and almost toothless and prone to violence when riled his mother had said many a time.

Once she’d taken a shotgun to a tramp that had knocked on her door in search of a glass of water.

When she was hungry she went on the hunt for hens like a fox, bit off their heads, squeezed out their blood and drank it down in one gurgling gulp.

The Boathouse was supposed to be stuffed to the rafters with things that she found on the beach. Glass bottles with messages from foreigners. Giant crab claws and whale bones. Sailors’ ribs coughed up from the deep. From Davy Jones’s locker. Broken lobster pots and sharks’ teeth. Rope thick with tar. Shrivelled-up mermaids.

Unexploded bombs and grenades that could go off at any minute. Blow you to Buggery. And back again.

Sñorita donkeysita, not so fleet as a mosquito
,

But so sweet like my Chiquita
,

You’re the one for me
.

Ole!

Archie braced himself. He had to do it some time. He didn’t want to though. He hadn’t so much as looked across at Hogwash House in weeks. He just couldn’t face it.

Ready steady go.

He glanced nervously across Bloater Row.

Hogwash House was all in darkness and a lone gull was perched on the chimney as though keeping watch.

Archie swallowed hard. There was no point being afraid. You had to face facts. Hogwash House was empty. No one lived there any more. Benjamin Tregantle had gone down with a crab pot and drowned not two weeks since.

And he wasn’t coming back. Ever.

Thinking of Benjamin made Archie shiver and he straggled to hold back his tears. Along with Cissie Abelson who lived in the Pilchard Inn, Benjamin had been his best friend even though he was a grumpy old bugger.

Ever since Archie had arrived in the Skallies Benjamin had always called out goodnight to him from his window opposite.

He wouldn’t any more though. Never, ever again.

Archie stifled a sob. Every night since the old man had been gone Archie had cried himself to sleep.

Moonlight shone now on the dusty windows of Hogwash House and turned the hanging cobwebs to silver drapes. Benjamin had never got rid of cobwebs like other people did. He used to say what right did anyone have to destroy other creatures’ homes that they’d worked so hard to build. Benjamin wasn’t…hadn’t been like other grown-up people at all. He was kind and funny and he swore an awful lot even in front of kids.

Archie willed himself to keep his eyes fixed upon the window and wondered if he stared long and hard would he be able to conjure up the old man’s face. Benjamin had a face like the man on the sardine tin only uglier.

Wouldn’t it just be the tops if it was all a mistake and Benjamin had come back from the dead and was there in Hogwash House? Any minute now a candle would be lit and the window would be thrown open.

He’d see the wrinkled old face and the bright blue eyes and hear his voice, a voice that sounded like a piece of coke trapped under the coal house door.

“Night Arch! To sleep, perchance to dream; aye there’s the rub.”

Archie had never really known what the last bit meant but he liked the sound of the words.

The window in Hogwash House stayed firmly shut even though Archie stared at it until his eyes ached and his face was frozen by the bitter wind that was blowing in off the rough sea.

Away over in Killivray House where the lah di dahs lived the clock on the stables tinkled the hour and was followed, seconds later, by the echoing dong of the church clock in Rhoskilly village.

Archie continued to stare at the window.

Mammy had cried when Benjamin died and said that she’d miss him something terrible about the place, but at least he’d reached a good age and now he would be up in heaven with the angels and happy as a sandboy.