Hemispheres (41 page)

He’d like to see you, she said. It’d do him good. Not that he’ll be able to talk to you, but it’ll still do him good.

Okay, I say.

She leads the way through the house and up to the front bedroom. The house hasn’t changed much and it feels odd, just twenty
years more threadbare. The thunderstorm that’s been threatening suddenly breaks and it’s hailing outside, door handles rattling
and green storm-light
at the window like ferns. I think of that afternoon at Jonah’s.

Mr Shahid’s propped up in the bed and there’s a telly on in the corner but it’s hard to tell whether he’s looking at it or
not. The eyes are dark and liquid but not particularly focused on anything.

Dad, says Raz. It’s Danny, from the Cape. You remember Danny? Used to do his homework here, scoff the frozen pizzas out of
the freezer.

Mmm, he says.

You took me to Darlo station once, I say. When I was doing a runner with the takings.

The limpid eyes move above the little moustache. I don’t know where to look, end up half watching some bollocks on the telly.
And then his hand slides into mine like a child’s, the palm dry and crackling like brown paper. And above the miracle of his
body working and the heat of his hand I don’t need the Southern Ocean and I don’t need crazy birds on South Georgia. We’re
going down with the ship, with the green fingers of the rain, and the house is drowning but it’s a good sort of drowning.

We’re going to the beach tomorrow, yells Mahmoud from the front room as I leave. For my birthday.

I peer round the door and find him plugged into some console game, wasting oversize space bugs.

What, in the rain?

It’s going to be sunny, he says. We can have candy floss. You can give us a lift if you want.

So the next morning we’re sat in the van on the front at Seaton watching rain bounce and boil on the bonnet and the steam
from a flask of coffee grazing the windscreen. Stormclouds are bullying and brawling like cattle, blue heifers of the sea
with splinters and rifts of pure brightness between. Cracks in the hairline of the world.

It’s not fair, says Mahmoud.

He’s bought a penny floater from one of the tat shops but it’s sitting unused in the footwell.

Actually, I say. I’ll tell you a secret.

What? he says.

No. Maybe I’d better not.

He thumps me on the arm and it hurts.

Tell me.

Ah, go on then. Human beings, you know, are actually waterproof. You can go out in the rain and all that happens is you get
wet.

Right, he says.

Opens the door.

You be in goal, he says.

The beach and sea and sky are one surface running with silver tide and rain, the three of us walking on water, walking on
a skin of mercury. Soaked to the fucking core. Mahmoud runs ahead, booting that penny floater around with the hair plastered
down to his skull. I look at Raz, a triangle of face in the headscarf, her slap running in the rain. She looks like herself.

How’s Sean? I say. I was surprised when you two got together. Always thought you’d go to university.

He left me. Some girl who worked in the cab office.

Right. Sorry.

Ah, it doesn’t matter.

Remember how you used to say there were a zillion different maybes, all hanging around in the wind.

Aye. It feels like that when you’re sixteen.

But not now.

She shrugs and smiles sideways.

Maybe there’s just one, she says. And the others are make believe.

Or maybe you grab one, I say. And the rest just shrivel up.

It’s the same difference, she says. In the end. A human being is just about the weirdest, most improbable thing you can get.
The chance of me being in that bar at the same time as Sean, the chance of him deciding to come over. Millions to one. And
without all that Mahmoud
would never have been. He’s improbability made solid.

Aye.

What happened to your dad? she said.

Well, you know he went out to Thailand.

I heard something about it.

He died out there, not long ago.

Sorry to hear that. What are you going to do now?

I dunno. Might buy a boat, take it down to Whitby.

You got the money?

Not really.

We carry on along the empty beach. Rain tatters our senses on a vacuous wind, sending car alarms off in the town. Raz slips
her hand through my arm, pale fingers on my sodden sleeve. Mahmoud looks round.

Dan, he yells.

I finger the lighter in my pocket. Improbability made solid. I’d forgotten it was there.

The hand slips away from my arm.

Danny, she says. It’s good to see you, but there’s no way I’m looking for a relationship right now. No way.

Aye, I know, I say distractedly. I’m only just getting a divorce meself.

Oh. Right.

Dan, yells Mahmoud. He boots the floater and it lands in the sea.

You’ll have to wade in, says Raz. People are waterproof, after all.

I grin at her. Plodge over towards Mahmoud with my hand in my pocket around the lighter. It’s empty. The fluid must have evaporated
away. It’s been months since that night at Billingham House. The ball’s bobbing on the waves, slowly drifting away from the
beach.

Right, I say. I take my shoes and socks off and roll my trouserlegs up. Mahmoud laughs. Maybe the social will never ring and
maybe the police will never turn up. I know the development’s stalled because of the recession. Maybe there’s no safety net
after all, like Yan said. Don’t get old in this country.

I wade into the sea, my feet white as dead things under the water and splinters of seacoal between my toes. It’s hellish cold.
I’ve half a mind to hurl that old brass lighter out as far as I can, but then I don’t. Yan said talismans don’t work. I drop
it back down into my pocket but I know I’ll never fill it up with fire again. Not even once.

One morning the daylight nudges me awake and I walk out of the door into the dog-barking, baby-crying dawn, pregnant with
rain.

Down at Seal Sands hide I sit in the comfortable darkness for a few minutes. The smell of creosote, cracks of light winking
between rough-hewn planks. Finally I rise, knees clicking quietly, and crack open the long shutter. Light floods into the
hide but there’s no epiphany, no slow-burning sunrise igniting the river. The light is white and constant and sober. Outside
there are long expanses of wet mud glittering like melted chocolate and separated by fronds of water. A sharp scent of earth.
And the chemical industry still hovers on the brink and the familiar shapes are dark and damp like exposed formations of wet
rock and the long low humming underneath it all is just a quiet breathing.

I raise the bins and scan the flats. Plenty of waders feeding out there, pattering the shining surface with a tangled cryptography
of footprints, punctuated by the looping casts of invertebrates. There are tiny pale sanderling and burly knot, nervous redshank
with heads bobbing. But the dunlin are in for the winter and it’s them I’ve come to see. Dunlin roving across the mudflat,
worrying at the surface with bills like black dibbers. Standing still with one foot tucked for warmth into the soft belly
fur. Nervous and mousy and neck-twisting to scan for danger. Dumpy and dowdy like harassed mums in the shopping centre. Sleepy,
with the black button eyes blinking, hunched up with heads withdrawn, shuffling and reshuffling their scalloped backs like
restless drifts of leaves. Drab and beautiful, familiar and alien, overlapping without touching. Mouse-grey dunlin, mudcoloured
and ordinary. There are thousands of them.