Whitstable (15 page)

***

Facing the sea he heard the tick-tick-tick of the wheels of a pushbike approaching. His was an old black Triumph from Herbert’s Cycles tending towards rust, with a shopping basket at the front, tethered to a bollard like an old and recalcitrant mare. The other, soon leaning against it, was one of these Raleigh ‘Chopper’ things (not hard to deduce as the word was emblazoned loudly on the frame) in virulent orange, with handlebars that swept up and back and an L-shaped reclining saddle like something out of
Easy Rider
.

The boy, sitting next to him and finishing a sherbet fountain through a glistening shoot of liquorice, said nothing for a while in the accompaniment of sea birds, then, when seemed remotely fitting, pronounced that the vehicle on display was a Mark 1 and had ten speeds. Cushing pointed with a crooked finger and said there was no attachment for a lamp, and the boy said he knew, and they were made like that. He said it was called a Chopper, which Cushing already knew but pretended he didn’t and repeated the word, for all the world as if the emblazonment had been invisible. But the object was new and gleaming and admirable, and dispensing some wisdom since he could, he advised the boy to look after it. Possibly the boy looked at the scuffed, worn, weary Triumph and thought that was like an elephant telling a gazelle to lose weight. But he’d been brought up by his mother not to cheek his elders, not that that worried him a great deal when it was called for, but on this occasion he chose to hold his tongue and nodded, meaning he would look after it. Of course he would. He wanted it to look new and gleaming forever.

When the sherbet was finished the boy walked to the rubbish bin and dropped it in. When he sat back down he chewed the remains of the liquorice the way a yokel might chew a straw, moving it from one side of his mouth to the other along slightly-blackened lips.

“You look younger.”

Cushing had almost forgotten he’d shaved for the first time in weeks. He rubbed his chin. Dr Terror’s salt and pepper was gone.

“I have a painting in the attic.”

“What does that mean?”

“Never mind. You’ll find out when you’re a bit older.”

The boy frowned. “I hate it when grown-ups say that.”

“So do I. Very much so. I’m sorry.”

He looked at the boy and beckoned him closer. He took out a handkerchief and rolled it round his index finger. “Spit on it.” Without considering the consequence, the boy did, trustingly, and Cushing used it to rub the liquorice stains from his lips while the boy’s face scrunched up, an echo, the old man thought, of the infant he once was.

“How’s your mum?” He folded the handkerchief away.

The reply was a shrug. “She cried a bit. She cried a lot, actually. I didn’t.” A show of resilience, sometimes stronger in the young. The show of it, anyway. “But I felt sorry for her. She’s my mum.”

“Naturally.”

Cushing did not enquire further. Out at sea beyond the Isle of Sheppey, a cloud of gannets hovered halo-like over a fishing vessel.

“They say it was an accident,” the boy said presently, with a secretive excitement in his voice. “But it wasn’t an accident, was it? It was you.”

“It doesn’t matter. It happened. He’s gone now. It’s over.”

“I know you can’t say because it’s secret, but it
was
you, wasn’t it? Acting on my instructions as a Vampire Hunter? I knew you would. I
knew
you wouldn’t let me down.”

Cushing tugged on his white cotton glove and pulled down each finger in turn, then lit a cigarette and smoked it, eyes slitting.

“How do you feel now? That’s the important thing.”

The boy wondered about that as if he hadn’t wondered about it until that very moment.

“You know what? It’s funny. It’s really weird. I feel a bit sad. I feel a bit like it’s my fault because I asked you to. I know he was evil and that. I know that, and I know he deserved it and everything. I don’t know…”

“It wasn’t your fault, Carl.” Would he ever truly believe that? “Look at me, Carl. Please.” The boy faced the old man’s pale blue, unblinking eyes and the old man took his hand. “When they choose people as a victim, it’s not the victim’s fault. It’s their fault. You’ve got to remember that.” Peter Cushing knew that now more than ever he needed to keep a steady gaze. “I’m the world expert, remember?”

The boy nodded and took his hand back.

“I know. No need to show off.”

Cushing trembled a smile and looked back to sea.

Periodically flicking his ash to be taken by the breeze, he gazed down between the groynes and saw a man in his twenties wearing a cheesecloth shirt and canvas loons rolled up to just under the knee and curly hair bobbing as he ran in and out of the icy surf. A dollishly small girl with a bucket and spade was laughing at him and he chased her and scooped her up in his arms, turning her upside down.

“She doesn’t like me saying it but I keep thinking about my real dad, my old dad,” the boy said, prodding a discarded Wrigley’s chewing gum wrapper with his shoe. “I keep thinking perhaps he’ll get tired of his new woman in Margate and come back to us. One day, anyway. I know he said he didn’t love my mum any more, but he must have loved her once, mustn’t he? So he might love her again. You never know. How does love work anyway?”

Cushing could hear no voices, but saw a woman join the man and the toddler on the shingle. The wind tossed the woman’s blonde hair over her face and the man combed it back with his fingers and kissed her.

“It’s very complicated, as you’ll learn, my friend. Very complicated—but in the end so terribly simple.” He felt a tiny piece of grit in his eye and rubbed it with a finger. The taste of the tobacco had gone sour and he prodded the cigarette out on the sea wall.

“Do you have bad dreams any more? You see, I have to check the symptoms, just in case. Are you sleeping well?”

The boy nodded, staring at the ground.

“Good. Very good.” The old man took off his glove, white finger by white finger. Carl was still staring at the concrete in front of him. “Remember if anything feels bad, if you are hurting, or worried… Anything you want to say—anything, you can say to your mother.”

“She won’t understand,” the boy said without looking up, as a simple statement of fact. “She doesn’t understand monsters.”

The people on the beach were gone and the waves were coming in filling their footsteps. Sometimes it seemed full of footprints, criss-crossing this way and that, people, dogs, all on their little journeys, but if you waited long enough or came back the next day the people were always gone and the only consistent thing was the slope and evenness of the shore.

When Cushing put his single white glove back in his overcoat pocket he discovered something he’d forgotten. Something he’d put there before going to the Oxford to meet Gledhill. He took it out and looked at it in the palm of his hand.

Helen’s crucifix.

Opening the thin gold chain into a circle he put it round the boy’s neck and tucked the cross behind his scarf and inside his open-topped shirt. The boy did not move as the man did it, and did not move afterwards, imagining some necessity for respect or obedience in the matter, or recognising some similarity to the procedure of his mum straightening his tie, in addition daunted perhaps by the peculiarity of the tiny coldness of the crucifix against the warmth of his hairless chest.

“I want you to remember what I’m going to say to you. The love of the Lord is quite, quite infinite. In your darkest despair, though you may not think it, He is still looking over you. Never, ever forget that.”

The boy thought a moment.

“Is he looking over
you
?”

Cushing had not expected that question, and found himself answering, as something of a surprise:

“Yes. Yes, I believe he is.”

Then the boy appeared to remember something, something important, and dug into the pocket of his anorak. He produced a rolled-up magazine, unfurled it and thrust it in front of the man, who had to recoil slightly in order to focus his increasingly ancient eyes on it.

Claude Rains in his masked role as
The Phantom of the Opera
stared back at him. Garish lettering further promised the riches within: films featuring black cats, Ghidrah the three-headed monster, and
Horror of Dracula
—the US title of the first Hammer in the series. What he held in his hands was a lurid American film magazine called, in case of any doubt whatsoever in its remit,
Famous Monsters of Filmland
.

The boy reached over and flicked through until he found a double-page spread of black-and-white stills. He flattened it open and jabbed with his finger.

“Look. It’s you.”

Indeed it was.

Christopher Lee as the predatory Count, descending upon Melissa Stribling’s Mina. Baring his fangs in a mouth covered with blood. Van Helsing—himself— alongside it, dressed in a Homburg hat and fur-collared coat.

“I can’t read very well,” the boy said. “But I like the pictures. The pictures are great. Who’s Peter Cushing?”

Cushing looked at the younger man in the image before him.

“He’s a person I pretend to be sometimes.” He thumbed through the pages, touched immeasurably by the gift. “Is this for me?”

“What?
No.
I want it back. But I want you to sign it, because you’re famous.”

“Ah. Silly me.”

Cushing thought of the close ups they’d filmed of him so many years before, reacting to the disintegration of the vampire whilst nothing was there in front of him. He thought of Phil Leakey and Syd Pearson, make-up and special effects, labouring away on the last day of shooting to achieve the purifying effect of the dawning sun. He thought of the sun, and of the perpetual darkness he had lived in since Helen had died.

He lay the
Famous Monsters
magazine on the sea wall between them, took out his fountain pen from his inside pocket, shook it, and wrote
Van Helsing
in large sweeping letters across the page, blowing on the blue ink till it was dry.

“Brilliant.” The boy held it by his fingertips like a precious parchment and blew on it himself for good measure. “Now I’ll be able to show people I met you. When I’m an old man with children of my own.” He stood up and held out his hand.

Cushing shook it with a formality the boy clearly desired.

“Enjoy stories, Carl. Enjoy books and films. Enjoy your work. Enjoy life. Find someone to love. Cherish her…”

The boy nodded, but looked again at the signed picture in
Famous Monsters
as if he hadn’t quite believed it the first time. The evidence confirmed, he pressed it to his chest, zipped it up securely inside his anorak, pulled up the hood and unchained his bike.

“Carl?” Cushing said. “Sometimes you can hide the hurt and pain, but there’ll be a day you can talk about it with someone and be free. Perhaps a day when you’ll forget what it was you were frightened of, and then you’ll have conquered it, forever.”

The young face looked back, half-in, half-out of the anorak hood, and nodded. Then he took the antler-sized handlebars and walked his Chopper back in the direction of the road and shops, another imperative on his mind, another game, idea, story, journey, in that way of boys, and of life.

As he tapped another talismanic cigarette against the packet, thinking of his own journey and footsteps filling with water as the tide came in, Cushing heard the tick-tick-tick stop, as if the boy had stopped, and he had. And he heard the cawing of seagulls, his nasty neighbours--The Ubiquitous, he called them—and heard a voice, the boy’s voice, for the last time, behind him.

“Will you keep fighting monsters?”

His eyes fixed far off, where the sea met the sky, Peter Cushing had no difficulty saying:

“Always.”

***

He sat in the forest dressed in black buckled shoes, cross-legged, a wide-brimmed black hat resting in his lap and the white, starched collar of a Puritan a stark contrast to the abiding blackness of his cape. Over in the clearing the bonfire was being constructed for the burning of the witch. The stake was being erected by Cockney men with sizeable beer bellies wearing jeans and T-shirts. The focus puller ran his tape measure from the camera lens. Art directors scattered handfuls of ash from buckets to give the surroundings a monochrome, ‘blasted heath’ quality. And so they were all at work, all doing their jobs, a well-oiled machine, while he waited, contemplating the density of the trees and smelling the pine needles. It was March now, and soon shoots of new growth would show in the layer of mulch and dead leaves and the cycle of life would continue.

Work was the only thing left now that made life pass in a faintly bearable fashion. As good old Sherlock Holmes said to Watson in
The Sign of Four
: “Work is the best antidote to sorrow”, and the only antidote he himself saw to the devastation of losing Helen was to launch himself back into a gruelling schedule of films. It was the one thing he knew he
could
do, after all. As she kept reminding him.
It’s your gift, my darling. Use it.
And the distraction of immersing oneself in other characters was an imperative, he now saw. A welcome refuge from reality.

The third assistant director brought a cup of tea, an apple and a plate of cheese from the catering truck to the chair with Peter Cushing’s name on the back.

“Bless you.”

Occasionally, very occasionally, that’s what he did feel.

Blessed.

It was a blessing, mainly, to be back working with so many familiar faces. Yes, there were new ones, young and fresh, and of course that was good and healthy too. The young ones, who hadn’t met him in person before, possibly didn’t notice or remark that he had become sombre, withdrawn, fragile behind his unerring politeness and professionalism—it was the older ones who saw that, all too well. In the make-up mirror he had never looked so terribly gaunt and perhaps they imagined, charitably, it was part of his characterization as the cold, zealous Puritan, Gustav Weil. But it was nothing to do with the dark tone of the film, everything to do with the dark pall cast over his life.