‘What the hell is that thing?’
‘It’s a shark or something,’ says Natalie. ‘Can’t you let it go?’
Dan’s eyes are fixed impassively on the sea. He looks like he doesn’t give a shit, but when he glances down and taps his keypad, the message is: This is bloody brilliant. He plays it again. They laugh and cheer, even po-faced Natalie.
Suddenly the angle of the line changes. This plucky old gal’s coming up. The surface breaks fifty yards away: a flash of creamy white belly. Brenda reels hard, and her adversary thrashes air again, much closer.
‘What the fuck is it?’
‘It’s a conger. A big one.’
‘Can you eat it?’ asks James. Ron pulls a sour face.
‘Rather you lot than me.’
‘It’s all we have,’ says Mike. ‘We’ll take it.’ Ron’s eyes twinkle again.
‘Oh, “We’ll take it,” he says. If only it were that bloody simple. Can we move this gentleman back? And you, Miss — keep well back too.’ The five- or six-foot eel, thick as a man’s leg, thrashes madly in Ron’s biggest net. ‘Take that priest,’ he snaps at Mike, pointing to a short wooden club, ‘and give it two sharp goes on the noggin.’
Mike looks helplessly at James, who turns to Brenda with a pleading smile. For Christ’s sake. She makes good contact and the beast goes limp, but as they try to tip it into the crate it rears up and breaks loose, thumping around the small deck and lunging left and right. Everyone retreats, cursing. Brenda circles cautiously and, when the eel slumps for a moment, exhausted, jaws silently working, she gives it a mighty whack. Ron steps in quickly, traps the beast’s head between his boots and with a sharp, rusty, two-pronged stake severs its spinal cord.
‘Do not go gentle,’ murmurs James, in the stunned silence that follows. Dan taps his keypad.
There’s a lesson here somewhere.
James F. Saunders finds himself alone in Dan and Natalie’s living room-cum-office-cum-dining room as the mantelpiece clock — a brass thing with spinning balls — chimes seven. Dan is resting. Mike and Natalie are in charge of the cooking, but have recruited Brenda to assist in the formidable and frankly obscene task of skinning the eel.
The clock is a bourgeois anomaly in a room which, if James didn’t know the family circumstances, he would ascribe to an over-imaginative twelve-year-old boy. Mounted on the ceiling is an enormous poster print of outer space — one of those Hubble photos peppered with galaxies like snowflakes in a torch-beam. A dozen more posters on the walls: a motorcyclist leaning into a bend, knee almost touching the blurry road; a pelican gliding low over water; the earth seen from the moon; a topographic map of the Chilterns; a suspension bridge rising out of fog; the periodic table; a photograph of a blackboard covered in equations; an enlarged, incomplete Sudoku grid.
So this is where Becks has ended up. There’s not a single image that James would choose to place on his own walls (the eye candy now exhibited in place of his discarded Joyce icon: nothing), and he could never live with a chiming clock. Is this what happens to people who are dying? They revert to childhood? Dan doesn’t seem childlike in person — or childish, for that matter. More like a prophet. Perhaps it’s James’ own incapacity — his burned-out soul — that sees something juvenile here.
He sniffs his fingers. Despite much scrubbing in the hotel shower, they still smell of fish. And he didn’t catch so much as an old boot. The room is connected to Dan and Natalie’s bedroom by a pair of new-looking sliding doors with electronic controls, now closed. When they arrived, James caught a glimpse of two beds — an adjustable hospital-style one with a hoist beside it, tubes, cables and whatnot, and a small, low single for Natalie. For Becks.
James is happy to be hauled up mountains by Brenda. But if something like this happened to him, and he could choose anyone in the world to look after him, it would be Becks.
The conger did not die in vain: even Natalie has to admit that Mike’s slow-fried steaks with Spanish paprika are a triumph. The man can cook. When he produces two bottles of what he calls the queen of Riojas, James makes a poor quip about drinking red wine with fish.
‘Whereof you know nothing—’ begins Mike, a corkscrew materialising in his hand. ‘Just trust me on this, if nothing else, okay?’
Dan is too tired to join the table for long, but he makes an appearance. He asks to taste the wine, which Natalie presents carefully to his lips, and then collects back into the glass: thin liquids make him choke. Everyone waits for his reaction.
‘I’m getting apricots,’ he says. ‘Liquorice. Marmite. The faintest inkling of squid. Wait, that could be Nat’s hands.’
While the others laugh, Natalie reflects with private, loving irony that it has taken total paralysis and an electronic voice to make a comedian of her husband.
When the community nurse arrives to help settle Dan in for the night, the Mocks excuse themselves. Natalie gives the nurse her usual verbal report, playing down the boat trip as requested, then sees her out and gives Dan his goodnight kiss. Then she returns to the dinner.
‘What about you, Bren?’ Mike is asking as she opens the door. ‘What is it you love so much about wandering off to the arse-end of nowhere?’
‘I love being alone,’ says Brenda, her back to the door. ‘I love having no responsibilities except to myself. No obligations gnawing at me, no stupid misunderstandings, no boundaries.’ Mike sees Natalie, and tries to cut his sister off. Both bottles are empty.
‘I did warn you about Bren,’ he says to James, with a laugh. ‘Ah, Na—’
‘James understands,’ says Brenda, sharply. ‘He feels the same way, which is why we get along. Right?’ Natalie looks at James, who gives a noncommittal smile to them both. Right enough. ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ continues Brenda, oblivious, ‘I’m not about to start squeezing out babies. Sometimes I feel I’d like to take everyone who has any kind of claim on me, shove them in a top hat, wave a wand and make them disappear in a—’ she looks round, sees Natalie, and finishes her sentence in a softer, uncertain voice: ‘—puff of smoke.’
Disappear. Right. Natalie feels anger and sadness welling up copiously, without hope of containment. She turns, hurries out into the unlit kitchen, lets the sobs come.
‘I’ll go,’ says Mike’s voice, sharply, and then she hears chairs scraping and multiple footsteps. ‘Brenda!’ calls James’ voice. Sound of the front door opening and slamming shut. Mike is beside her in the dark, arm around her shoulders.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘She didn’t know. She doesn’t understand.’ Natalie turns on him.
‘And you do?’
Mike looks chastened. She’s never seen that ginger crest of his fallen like it is now. The look becomes him. ‘Let’s not argue,’ he whispers. ‘We’re all making this up as we go along.’
James’ face appears in the doorway, an apparition from the past, freezes and then retreats. His intimation, intended or not — that he was interrupting something untoward — is unworthy of a moment’s thought, but it nevertheless tempts her involuntarily to compare James to Mike as she once compared him to Dan. Another stupid thought-crime — she commits too many, each adding its fresh cut to her bloodied self-respect (and people keep calling her a saint).
Mike is the shallower pool, of course: a picturesque but insubstantial lagoon of a man. Likeable, untrustworthy and emotionally retarded — or so she always thought. But after all he’s done for them over the past eighteen months, for Dan but also for her — especially for her, perhaps — she might have to reconsider. This isn’t the first time they’ve stood whispering in the kitchen with good intentions.