When the fever breaks, the question is ringing loud in his head, too loud for him to ignore now, as though it had risen to make itself heard over the dull roar of the argument that raged around him during the worst of his sickness.
When he gets up he is still weak and he pulls a blanket around himself and stumbles downstairs into the kitchen. Standing on the linoleum floor, he lifts a large cardboard box from one of the kitchen surfaces and places it on the kitchen table. He runs a hand over the packets and tins looking for anything he has that is still edible. Among the disarray there is a half-full bottle of gin that came with him when he arrived. He pulls it out of the box and sets it down on the table in front of him, and when he has surveyed the rest of the box, he pours himself a glass.
The first taste of the gin makes him gag. He does not know how long it has been since he last ate, but the liquid burning its way down his throat takes his mind off the question in his head for a moment, and he drinks down the rest of the glass and pours himself another. Some time later, he has the urge to be in the company of others after being so long without conversation and he pulls on some clothes and walks down through the village.
15. Timothy
‘WHO WAS PERRAN?’
It is Timothy’s opening question and he slurs it as Tomas approaches the bar. It is the first thing he’s said all evening other than a few words he exchanged with the barman when he entered.
He has been there over an hour, working his way slowly through a beer, when the skippers of the fleet arrive. They acknowledge him, and the barman too, nodding towards them as they head towards a table as far away from the bar as it is possible to be in the small pub. By the time Tomas approaches the bar, the request has been waiting to be said for too long, and it comes out blunt and unlovely.
For a while it seems as though Tomas is going to wait for the barman to pour the pints and return to the others without answering him, but after the drinks are all gathered, he leaves the tray untouched in front of him and rests both hands on the edge of the bar. He then sits on one of the high bar stools and leans slightly towards the drinks, as though he is addressing them and not Timothy.
‘You’ll not hear about Perran from anyone here,’ Tomas says quietly and turns again to go, and Timothy is considering begging him for more information when the other man turns back towards him.
‘We held a eulogy for him at that table over there when he didn’t come back in, but you’ll not hear a word of it from anyone here,’ Tomas says, though he says it kindly. ‘Nor any of the words that were read out for him up on the beacon after. Nothing I can tell you, nothing any of us can tell you.’
‘And what about Ethan?’ Timothy asks. ‘He took it hard.’
‘Ethan blames himself. Figures he was the part of the reason Perran went out onto the rocks that night. Happened not long after they started to draw closer together again, like things were about to change for the better then. Figured he was the jinx that sent Perran down. Though whether he still believes that, or that he could have said anything else that would have kept him off the rocks that night, I’m not asking him, and I suggest you don’t bother him about it either.’
Tomas looks down at the tray for a moment.
‘Afterwards, Ethan wouldn’t believe he had gone, not for a long time. Kept a watch on Perran’s place these ten years gone. I guess he’ll have to give that up now.’
He continues to talk, but Timothy is no longer listening. He has the feeling he is no longer on land and that the village itself is a sea. He feels he has found himself surrounded by boats with their nets already cast into the water, spiralling in towards him in ever decreasing circles, and he knows he must retreat to Perran’s house. He steps down from the barstool onto a shifting floor and his knees buckle beneath him. Arms flailing and the sensation of being caught and released. Asking the question over and over again. Pushes and shoves and raised voices, the voices muddled and indistinct. Glass shattering on the stone floor and he is caught and held. Being carried, by two, maybe three. Arguing and flailing. Cold air on his face. Sweating and cold. Silence. Sleep.
When Timothy wakes, it is to a dark room and, trying to reach his hand up to his face, he realises he cannot move and panics. He arches his body and kicks his legs, but whatever is restraining him holds fast and the effort causes him to cough. And while he coughs, what he can see of the room spins around him. After a minute or so, his eyes start to make out details. He is back in the bedroom at Perran’s, lying in the narrow bed. Memories of being carried out of the bar come back to him, vague memories of being carried up through the winding streets to the house, along with the feeling someone is lying to him, or withholding the truth, and the question repeats itself over and over, though whether it remains unspoken inside him or he is repeating it out loud he is not sure. He has been laid on the bed and the sheets pulled tight over him, with bolsters of clothes laid out on either side of his body, presumably to stop him falling out of bed. He watches the walls rotate around him from where he lies and is aware he is not yet recovered from his sickness.
16. Timothy
WHEN TIMOTHY IS well enough to pull himself out of the narrow bed again, late the next day, he sees his clothes are now folded and laid out on a chair, and wonders who has done this for him. He pulls a sheet around himself and walks slowly down through the house, trying to get his bearings again, though the house feels strange, transfigured yet again in his absence from it, and he is still unable to feel Perran in it. Feeling cold, he fills a bath and lies in it watching the steam rise from the water towards the unfamiliar ceiling until the water cools.
The house has not been cleared, the agent had said to him from behind a wide empty expanse of desk, and the words come back to him as he lies back in the bath. Timothy gets out of the bath quickly and wraps a towel around himself, and not bothering to dry off, he goes down to the kitchen. With a growing puddle of water gathering around his feet, he stands in front of the kitchen units and takes the handles of the cupboards nearest to him in both hands, opening both units simultaneously. There is the briefest moment in which he feels the open cupboards retain their darkness for a fraction longer than they should before they allow the light in. Both cupboards are empty, and so too are the drawers in the kitchen and the small pantry cupboard by the fridge. All he finds is yellowed newspaper lining the bottoms of all the drawers and shelves. He takes some of the paper out of one of the drawers and, on the paper that is still legible and that does not disintegrate as he pulls it up, he sees the articles are written in a language he does not recognise and the pictures that accompany the articles are blurred, as though the hand that took the photographs was shaking at the time they were taken. Going through all the rooms he finds the small items of furniture that have been there all along and the items he has brought to the house himself, but no sign of any clothes that were there before he arrived, no personal belongings. His search becomes more and more frantic but he finds nothing that could give him any clue about the previous owner, as though all evidence of who he was has been erased.
When Timothy has been all through the house, he dresses quickly and walks out through the kitchen door and around the side of the house to the smaller garden at the back. He searches the garden, turning over stones and moving his hands through the long grass where he thinks he sees objects below the grass line, but comes up with nothing. He walks round to the front and stands for a while by the tree beneath which he had buried the fish, and looks down the garden. At the bottom of the garden, the strips of paper caught on the thorns in the bare hedge hang like the markers of a roadside shrine, limp without the breeze and colourless in the fading light of evening.