“Coming in in fourth place,” I said. He lifted Ruby onto his shoulders, clamped one arm across her feet, and nodded at me to take the handles of the buggy. Why couldn’t he push it one-handed, I was grumpy enough to think, before I found out.
He needed his other arm to put round me.
So it was pitch black and getting on for nine o’clock before he dropped the baby monitor into his jacket pocket and took me to the studio. It was in a dip in the field right by the headland, on the side away from the caravan site. Gus’s torchlight bobbed over the dark grass, and then he raised it to show me where we were heading. I couldn’t remember seeing so much as the top of the roof during the day, but there it was: a long stone building with grey slates, two sets of double doors, windows painted the same dark red as the cottage, a Bedford van parked alongside.
“Does the monitor really stretch all this-” I said. “Sorry. As if you’d-so what is this place? What was it, I mean.”
I felt Gus shrug beside me. We were walking close together, coats just brushing.
“Just a bothy kind of thing. A cow byre. Dave used it for a workshop as long as I can remember, and I just gradually took it over.”
“And how come they don’t still use it for the cows?” I said. I knew solid buildings with roofs intact were never going spare on a farm.
“It’s not theirs,” said Gus. We had arrived at the big double doors and he gave me the torch to hold while he opened the padlock. “Dave bought the cottage and this building for peanuts back in the sixties. He bought a right of way through the farmyard too, but they mump on till it’s not worth the hassle, so we come through the site.”
“They don’t mump on, the site folk?” I asked. “I met one today that won’t win any awards from the tourist board!”
“Oh, they wish we’d go away too,” said Gus. “They’d buy us out, change the name to Bayview, and charge a thousand pounds a week in the season.”
“You’d never get a grand for Stockman’s Cottage right enough!” I said. He hauled open the doors and paused with his hand on the light switch. I could smell a shifting cocktail of unfamiliar smells-oily, sharp, earthy.
“Becky always wanted to change the name,” he said. “Listen, Jessie. This-my work-it’s… What I mean is, if you think it’s crap-”
“Tell you straight?”
“No!” He sounded just like Dillon. “Keep your gob shut.” I laughed. “My br-well, folk that don’t get it come out with stuff you wouldn’t believe. And it usually starts with ‘I have to say… ’ And I always think, ‘No, you don’t.’ ”
I laughed again. “You’re dead right,” I said. “No more than you ‘have to say’ your mum’s cakes are like bricks or your friend’s kids are ugly.” I shot him a look, wondering if he’d think I meant Ruby. I didn’t. She was growing on me-stroppy, gobby wee madam. She’d go far in this world, and I’d be happy for her.
“Right,” said Gus. He switched on the light. I took a good long look around and got ready to be polite if it killed me. It was a single room, taking up half of the building. Sacks of concrete. Shovels. Planks. Scaffolding. Rolls of roofing lead. The usual power tools you’d see in any workshop, the usual orange extension cables. Shelves of boxes, labelled in code. And lamps. Loads and loads of lamps. Standard lamps, desk lights, bedside lamps, angle poise. Whole ones and parts of ones, boxes of bulbs. The edges of the room were stacked high with total junk, as far as I could tell. It smelled pretty lousy too.
“So this is… the workshop side?” I said, looking towards the other end of the byre.
“Yeah,” said Gus. “I use the other side to store finished pieces.” I must have sniffed, maybe my nose even wrinkled. “I know. There’s a grate over a pipe from when it used to be a byre. God knows how it can smell when there hasn’t been a beast in here for years, but it really does honk sometimes.”
“So, what are you working on just now?”
He walked ahead of me and set the monitor down on a tool bench. “Just finishing something off,” he said.
I waited to see if he’d show it to me. “And then what?” I asked, when it seemed he wasn’t going to.
“Lamps,” he said. “Well, lights. You know. Bulbs. Lamps, mostly.”
I couldn’t help remembering what Buckfast Eric had said.
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Hard to say.” He was sliding cardboard boxes out from the shelves, looking at their contents, and sliding them back in again. He pulled out a tangled string of fairy lights and started straightening them. “What would you do with them?” He was really asking me too. The truth was I’d wire them to plugs and use them to help me see things inside my house when the sun went down.
“Okay,” I said. “Could you… put them all in the… space with a ton of plug boards and a ton of bulbs and leave it up to the people who came to see it, what to do with them?”
I thought he would laugh. I’d have laughed. Gus, though, looked suddenly miserable.
“I haven’t got a space,” he said. “I’ve got one thing ready to sell. If it sells I might get asked to… But I don’t know if I can make myself sell it.”
“Is it here?” I asked. “Can I see it?”
“It’s next door,” Gus said. “Wait and I’ll bring it through.”
He left me and-it must have been habit-as he went out, he clicked the lights off. I blurted something out, but he was gone.
It was cloudy outside, no moon, and so the room was black as ink around me. I picked my way towards the open door, feeling ahead for obstacles, guessing where to go from the sound of the sea. I stepped out onto the grass and felt the empty air above me.
“Gus?” I said. There was no light from the other room, but one of its doors was slightly open. “Gus?” I said, louder. The door banged shut.
It could have been the wind. Except the doors this side didn’t move an inch. Had he just shut me out? Why would he do that? If he had one thing finished and he’d gone to get it anyway, what did it matter whether I saw the half-done stuff too?
I stood there, useless, doing nothing. Should I walk back to the house and wait for him there? Should I follow him through the door, banged in my face or not? Or stop being so touchy. I could find the light switch and wait in the workshop side. That’s the thing about therapy. Everything ends up meaning something huge. Nothing stays small like things really are. So in the end I picked my way back to where he had left me and stood there in the dark, waiting.
A minute later he reappeared, clicked the light back on, and smiled at me.
“Okay,” he said. “Here goes.” He turned and pulled something into the room. It was on wheels and was hidden under a dustsheet. “Ready?” I nodded. He swept the sheet aside and stood back. I stared.
It was a pram. One of those old navy-blue monsters with the painted sides and the big wheels. A double pram, both of its hoods pulled right up so it was almost round. Gus beckoned me forward.
“I can see it fine from here,” I told him, and my voice sounded strained even to me.
“You need to look inside,” he said.
“What’s in there?” I asked. “Nothing… bad?”
But he didn’t know what I meant. Why would he? So I stepped close and looked into the gap.
Except it wasn’t a gap. There was some kind of substance there, not quite see-through, not quite not. I touched it.
“Resin,” said Gus. And then something caught my eye. Behind the strip of resin, inside the belly of the pram, a light had gleamed, just for a second. It wasn’t a flash, it was a gleam. Slow, measured, as if some creature had opened its eye and then lazily closed it again. I turned as another gleam lit the other side. In its light I thought I saw movement, but it was too far away to be inside where I was looking. I waited. And waited. And just as I was raising my head, a stronger, brighter steadier light shone for a half a second. I missed it. All I knew was that there was more in there than there could be.