Canvey Island (28 page)

I wondered what it would be like to phone one of these women instead of Linda.

But why would I do that?
I thought.
Why am I even thinking like this? What is wrong with me?

I looked at the record player in the lounge, a Fidelity GF110. I remembered my father dancing with Vi as she held on to a port and lemon, her husband asleep in an armchair in the corner, his head lolling below the antimacassar. The records looked like they were waiting for a school jumble sale: Ray Conniff's ‘Honey', Glen Campbell's Greatest Hits, the Charles Lloyd Quartet, Bobby Darin's ‘Inside Out'.

In the bathroom, I found a small greying rectangle of Imperial Leather and a dried-up sponge in the space where the model of a trawler used to be. The showerhead was blocked with limescale and by the time the first trickle of water came through it was a pale and crusted greenish-brown. I tried to work out when my father must have last stood in a shower. Would he have sensed that getting in and out of the bath was too risky, or would the decision have been made after the first fall? How often had Dad realised it would be the last time he would ever go out in his boat, walk briskly or put on his socks unaided?

Outside the kitchen window lapwings were piping over the estuary mud. Two jets roared in tandem overhead, making their way back to Lakenheath, the sound far behind the sight of them, and then, almost in imitation, a marsh harrier hovered in the air, its wings fluttering before the kill.

I remembered my mother sitting at the window when it was too wet to go down to the beach, holding me steady, her arm round the back of the red jumper she'd knitted, and stroking my hair, laughing at the sight of the wind blowing the scarf off Mrs Morrison's head as she scuttled back to the dairy.

I began to clear the rooms, remembering that I needed to make them look large and uncluttered for the estate agent. I would be ruthless, discarding the past, bagging up objects for the dump, the charity shop and for sale. Then the house would need decorating. I phoned Ade.

‘Bit short notice, Marty boy …'

‘I'm sorry …'

‘It being summer. Lot of people away. You can do cash, can't you?'

‘How much would it be?'

‘Eighty a day for each of us; then the materials. Do you want us to do weekends?'

‘Does that cost more?'

‘Not for you, but you might have to tip the boys a few quid extra: drinking money. Say twenty quid?'

‘Each?' That would make it a hundred.

‘No, don't be daft, for all of us. We're not taking you for a ride or nothing.'

I would have to raise some money and talk to the bank. At least I had arranged to sell some of my father's things: the furniture, the clocks and the bookcases. We should have kept the stuff we had from the fifties instead of chucking it away in the sixties and seventies.

I started to clear cupboards of crockery, trinkets and faulty kitchen machinery that my father had been given and never mastered: an electric mixer, a liquidiser, a juicer, which even Dad had thought optimistic when Claire had presented it at a birthday ten years ago.

In my mother's old desk in the bedroom, I found a set of keys that had not been used for years, the stubs of old chequebooks and discarded perfume bottles. It was an Edwardian bureau with lockable drawers. I remembered my mother waxing the drawers with the base of a candle to make them glide.

I pulled down the foldaway metal ladder to the loft and climbed up. I could see the dust circling in the light of the Velux window above boxes of memorabilia, papers and magazines. Tins of paint had been stacked under the eaves, their colour dribbled down the side: magnolia, duck-egg blue and dusty pink. Rolls of wallpaper samples leant against a Black & Decker workstation.

Starting with a tea chest from Ceylon, I found my old fossil collection wrapped in faded copies of the
Evening News
(SUEZ SITUATION GRAVE, SAYS EDEN; LOVE DIARY NEAR SWEETHEARTS DEAD IN CAR). All the objects I had discovered in the petrified mud of the coastline, the survivors of the brittle cliff strata, were here; the silicified trunk of a willow tree, seed-fern fronds, a shark's tooth, ammonites with curling French pleated shells and serrated chambers. At the bottom of a Start-Rite shoebox was an essay I had written on the Swiss naturalist Jakob Scheuchzer. I could see my teacher's marks in red. ‘Very good, Martin. Excellent work.'

Scheuchzer was a name I had forgotten, but I saw my own childish hand telling of the book
Complaints and Claims of the Fishes
in which fossil fish complain about the flood being brought about by the sins of humankind and how they had suffered as a result. The great palaeontologist had produced a skeleton from the time of Noah, proof that a man had witnessed the Universal Deluge and seen the face of God.

I put the essay and the fossils back in the tea chest. An orange crate with MARTIN written in black on the side contained a folder of school reports and I remembered Vi reading the bad comments aloud, never praising me, concentrating only on those areas in which I should do better.

There was a school photo that must have been taken around the time of my eleven-plus. I saw myself standing with my arms behind my back in the third row, looking abnormally thin, my hair parted to the right. I tried to remember the names of my friends: Terry Osborne, Johnny Milner and Ade, of course, Adrian Burrows, already looking like he might do someone in if ever they crossed him.

Underneath was a picture of the football team and a beach photograph of me holding hands with Vi and my father and all of us laughing. I couldn't ever remember being happy in her presence.

I had hoped to find some memories of Linda but there was nothing; not even a Christmas card. I put the photographs back in the crate and picked out a manila envelope. Inside was a tinted colour studio portrait of my parents' wedding: Dad with his chest pushed forward, dressed in a three-piece civilian suit; Mum in a white satin dress and veil carrying a bunch of dahlias wrapped in white lace. A silver horseshoe hung from her waist.

Then there was a photograph of my mother under a parasol with George and a baby. They were arm in arm with the child between them, looking proud as they stood together under a striped awning with the sea behind. The baby must have been me.

I tried to imagine the lifetime of my parents when they were hopeful and the world was all before them, dancing the Gay Gordons and the Paul Jones.

I went downstairs and drank a can of lager I found in the kitchen. Then I put on one of my father's records. Frankie Lane singing ‘That's My Desire'.

I thought I should phone Claire, go for a walk, get out of the house.

I packed the car with the rubbish sacks and drove on to the dump, past the Haystack pub where ‘the fun never stops', the tattoo studio and chiropody clinic, and took my place in a queue of
people listening to the sounds of summer. Nirvana's ‘Nevermind'. REM's ‘Nightswimming'. The Lemonheads singing ‘It's a Shame About Ray'. Fans were phoning in with their stories of Glastonbury or of Guns n' Roses at the Milton Keynes Bowl.

At the dump, everything was being thrown away: beer cans and wine bottles from summer barbecues, white plastic patio furniture, branches of trees and stretches of wisteria from garden clearances. A ripped leather three-piece suite waited forlornly for collection. I imagined Claire's voice: ‘Only men buy white leather sofas.'

People in shorts, socks and sandals struggled with heavy black bags between saloons and estates, fearful of car alarms or scratching the edge of the nearest Mitsubishi. They lurched up steps and catapulted their past into the compressor as Blur sang about ‘Parklife' from a radio in the council Portakabin.

I imagined old computers, dead rechargeable batteries, ordnance and pacemakers, lying under the landfill golf courses of the future.

When I got back to the house the phone was ringing.

‘I thought you wanted to make some money?'

‘I do, Dad, I do.'

‘Well, hurry up and make it. The bank's been on to me. Want to work out how much I'm giving away. Wanted to know if I could trust you.'

‘And what did you say?'

‘I said you were a lying deceitful little bastard. What did you expect me to say?'

‘Thanks, Dad.'

‘Found anything interesting?'

‘Some old photographs …'

‘I'd like to have a look at them.'

The following day Ade came with Nigel, Jason and Al to sort out the house. They began to steam off layers of wallpaper in the hall, some of it sticking and refusing to peel so that faded regency stripes bumped up against the brown and orange roses from the seventies, then a grey and pink skylark design, and finally the original blue thread was revealed. It fell away with the flaking plaster, taking whole sections of wall with it.

‘Big job here, mate. Sure you don't want Anaglypta? Cover all this up?'

I could smell the paint at the back of my throat and on the front of my tongue. I even began to taste it. I kept brushing the tips of my fingers, rubbing off the thin film of white powder that had fallen like silent snow. Al and Ade, Nigel and Jason were laughing and whistling as they worked, singing fragments of songs while listening to
Sports Talk
, discussing Tottenham's chances, the purchase of Klinsmann and Dumitrescu and if Ardiles, the manager, was going to last the season.

They had found a wasp nest in one of the air bricks and were busy spraying the space before returning to steam off the paper, burning off layers of the past and replacing it with bare white walls and wooden flooring.

Ade was installing new sockets in the front room. ‘You can never have enough these days, Martin.' He began to whistle, then stopped and looked up. ‘I forgot to say, I saw that Linda of yours the other day.'

‘She's not my Linda.'

‘No, but you know what I mean. Told her I was doing a little job for you.'

‘What did she say?'

‘She said to say hello.'

‘Is that all?'

‘She wasn't that interested, to tell the truth. Still, I suppose it was a long time ago.'

‘What's she up to?'

‘Works at Spar, I think. Married to Dave, you remember, in the band …'

He returned to his work, adding another socket by the window, and I stood in the centre of the room.

She wasn't that interested, to tell the truth
.

That night I cooked a fish pie. I had bought mussels, haddock, bay leaves, parsley and potatoes together with two bottles of white wine. I put the smoked haddock in the saucepan with the bay leaves and added the milk, letting it simmer for a few minutes. I opened the wine and looked out of the window as I had done every night as a child.

Don't let the giraffe in, Mummy
.

What do you mean?

The giraffe. You said close the door to keep out the giraffe
.

A draught. Not a giraffe, silly
.

I began to rinse the mussel pan and melted some butter. I remembered my mother scaling, gutting and filleting fish with her strong hands, cutting off the fins with scissors, running the back of a knife against the scales from the tail to the head, slitting the stomach without sentiment, removing the gall bladder, then sliding the knife under the backbone from the head to the tail so the fillet came neatly off the bone.

I tried to think what it would be like if I'd had a different life, if my mother had lived, if I'd never met Linda, and if I'd never married. I wondered what it would be like if I rented some other place, told no one and never went home. Perhaps I could even disappear, like Linda's father. He had walked out when she was eight. The next time she saw him was fifteen years later when she had to identify his body. People did it all the time. Missing. I began to like the sound of the word.

I wondered what it would mean to go back and begin again, shrinking away from the second half of a life, the unknown approach of age and strain, and return to childhood where I once, despite my memories and misgivings, might well have been happy.

Linda would tell me, of course. She would know.

And why, pray?
I heard Claire ask in my head.
Aren't I enough for you? What is wrong with what we have?

Nothing
.

So why return? Why can't you leave the past alone?

I want to see her again
, I thought.
I can't discard it all as if it never happened, as if Linda was never part of me
.

You can't?

No. But this is why we don't have these conversations
, I thought.
I can't describe it to you because if I do then it will hurt you and we will not be as you want us to be
.

I want you to be honest
.

I know you
, I thought.
I cannot talk about her at all, however much you say you want me to tell you everything. And I need to do this
.

Oh, you ‘need' to, do you? And why is that?

Because I can't stop thinking about her …

You can't stop. Or you don't want to stop?

I can't stop …

Then you have to make a choice, Martin
.

And it's because seeing her is forbidden
, I thought.
Because it is the one thing I must not do. And so I cannot stop wanting to do it
.

It was a damp evening and mist hovered over the estuary. I could see the steam from the power station in the distance merging into the low rain clouds. I walked through shacks, shanties and allotments, listening for the chiming of ships' rigging.
If clouds be bright, ‘twill clear tonight. If clouds be dark, ‘twill rain – d'ye hark
. The outlying waters of Smallgains Creek lay in the distance and with it came the memory of looking for Saxon fish-traps and learning the Battle of Benfleet at school; an heroic defeated nation caught in the fog of war.