SHORT STORY COMPETITION WINNER
The winner of our short story competition was Carolyn Kirk. Here is her story:
ADRIFT
The child hangs around his mother. He tugs her dress and looks up at her, over and over, unnoticed. She just stands there waiting in the greenhouse on Fox Road, stolid in the heat beneath dilapidated dusty panes. A propped rooflight lets little drifts of wind fall onto the child’s face. Through it, he sees fat, driven clouds tumble across the Suffolk sky. His fists twist and untwist her skirts as he longs for escape. Boxed tiers of fruit and vegetables soften unchosen inside this light-filled house. It smells of tomatoes and earth. His mother wears a new linen dress. Yellow and blue dye has drenched its fibres into pictures of boats and sand. He dips his head, squats, stands up beneath tented skirts and observes sandaled feet netted with little veins. He puts his foot on hers and the dry-nailed toes claw down as she bargains for fruit, her voice lilted with unfamiliar laughter. The child stays hidden there, bathed in columns of light as his curls brush his mother’s legs. Through bunched fabric her hand rests on his head.
Once, the greenhouse served the kitchen of a cliff-top hotel. Now Edwardian holidays are past, unremembered, and the hotel’s high rooms house unsuitable offices for a company dealing in pesticide. The boy’s father works in one of them. Towards evening, quiet streets away, Tom will listen to his father start his walk home. He knows the crack of steel-tipped shoes on the pavement. His father is small, but his feet are noisy. And right away, the boy will run to the front door with its bright glass picture of a ship in sail, loosen the latch, and wait.
Now, as he picks bits of chrysanthemum leaves from the floor, he longs to leave this dusty greenhouse. His mother talks on with the old man, in the voice she keeps for people who don’t know her. The quest for cucumbers and onions, apples and strawberries is endless. At last the boy wanders away, the floor scuffed to dust by his new red sandals, backing and backing away until he reaches the door. Behind him, on the wall, jute sacking hangs, along with worn-handled garden implements, sieves and faded packets of seeds that will never come to flower. Dust-dancing light spills through the door to drench his feet warm. He turns towards it, then looks for his mother. She is stretching up for a string of onions, blind. He wanders outside. It is interesting here, in this vast, fruitful garden. Light glances off botched frames that shade cucumbers and marrows from salt air. Far off, an espalier pear burdened with cankered fruit battens a high wall. Beyond, a slight shift of light promises the sea. He can smell it too, its rank tang of seaweed and rotting fish leavened by something cleaner. On the beach he likes to play with pebbles and smooth white sticks of sea-bleached flotsam carried from Holland across the rise and heave of water. Much later, trapped in a cold school, a torn textbook will chronicle for him the North Sea fishing industry; he will trace the shadowed lines that chart the fathoms and tides of a shifting sea, and then he will remember today.
Every weekend, his father takes him to the beach. He rides his tricycle down the gravelled pavement outside the front gate, to the promenade at the road’s end. Far along, away from traffic and beach huts, his father jumps down to wait for him on the shingle. The child falls into his arms and together they walk to the sea. There on the tideline, concealed beneath blistered bladder wrack and slimy skeins of laminaria, he finds hidden coins, which go into the pocket of his shorts. They seldom talk. Only his father knows where to find the treasure. On other days when his mother gossips in the sun by the breakwater, nothing is to be found. But when the boy and his father tramp the beach alone, the child yelps, lets fall his father’s hand and runs to catch the glint beneath weed befor curdling surf sucks it away.
This afternoon, he finds the garden gate. It gouges into dust and weeds as he pushes. At once he is on the street. He passes hawthorn hedges entangled with ribes, pungent in tepid autumn air. Sometimes he totters, then stoops from the waist to pick up matchsticks, bits of silver paper and little pebbles. The gravel hurts the skin of his fingers. He sucks them a bit. Soon the road plunges downwards, curving towards the beach. Now he can see it through a thin hedge. The sea. Its massive greyness bleeds into white sky, the broad gleam of it disturbed by drifts of jagged, wind-driven light. In the distance a lightship spikes the horizon and, closer, he sees below him the felted roofs of beach huts, the shingle and the shore. Soon he crosses the road, unstopped by passers-by. Next, he squats in the lee of an upturned dinghy, turns over in his palm bits of crab shell, fractured frosted glass, rusty bottle tops, dried up cuttlefish. As the sun arcs, its cooling descent turns water silver and pink and the child plays on, unwatched.
He is happy here, as though his father is with him. Much later he sees him. He is coming along the beach from far off. He does not have their dog with him. The child wonders where it is. Behind the distant figure, the orange sun is low, and he cannot see his shadowed father’s face, only the male shape coming closer. Then, he realises that the man is not his father. This person is taller. He can tell from the way the man walks that he hasn’t noticed him. The child moves closer to the boat, retreating a little around the stern. His face rests on fat salty ropes as he watches. The man follows the tideline. Sometimes he reaches down for something invisible, then stands up again. Sometimes he holds his find up to the light. Once, he glances towards the beached boats. And then the child knows that he is seen. He turns and sits down, his legs stretched out in front of him, his back soft against wood. He picks up stones again, lots of them, and piles them onto his lap till they tumble down the hill he has made. He loads on more. Soon, the sound of sea crumping on the shore is amplified by the squeak and grind of trod pebbles. The man comes close. The boy picks up a bit of seaweed. He pushes his finger into a dried black blister that crumbles into salty dust. He doesn’t look up when the steps pass. He sees the man vault onto the low promenade, turn around and look at the sea from beneath a shadowing hand. Then he glances back over his shoulder, jumps back down onto the beach and approaches the child. His feet are noisy. The man wears blue trousers. They are not like his father’s. And his shoes are dirty too. He notices one of the man’s hands, loose-fingered, dirty by his side. There are little bits of bloody skin around the nails. He looks down at his own hands.
‘All right mate?’
The child doesn’t want to talk. He goes on looking at his hands and the held seaweed. This man is too tall, and is not his father. When he looks at him, the sun gets into his eyes. Overhead, a white bird swoops and calls. Its screeches drown out the low whisper of cars along the coast road, far off. And he needs to wee bujt he can’t tell this man. He wants his mother. So he turns and goes. His feet keep stepping into the big gaps between the pebbles which makes his legs twist and wobble and he is very slow. Right away, the man is close, right behind him. He feels his anorak start to come off. That man’s big hand has got his hood. He stops, and looks at the pebbles again, afraid.
‘Where you going mate?’
He doesn’t want that man’s dirty hand on his anorak. That anorak came off the washing line yesterday, and then it went into the airing cupboard. And when his mother put his arms into it this morning it was warm. It felt cosy when she zipped him into it, even though he didn’t like her hands, heavy on his shoulders as she told him to keep it clean. And now this man is making it dirty. That will make her cross. But he is afraid to tell the man not to do it. So instead he looks at his new shoes. Then he reaches right down to touch them, without bending his kees. Right away he stands up straight again, and, because he knows how to make a grown up person smile, he asks the man if he likes his shoes.
‘Great mate’.
These shoes come from the shop in the High Street next to the café, the one that has the bear at the top of the stairs and sugar in glass bowls that is pink and yellow and you can see llight gleam inside the little crystals. Downstairs there are chocolates in glass-topped cabinets, and the scent of coffee spills out onto the street. He and his mother had tea at the bear shop after he got his new shoes. Now the beach has made them dirty. And they are not big any more, but small next to this man’s boots.
‘How old are you?’
This is a question he can do. People ask him always.
‘I’m three’. It sounds like ‘free’.
‘Right’. The man does not care that he is a big boy now. Then the man says to him,
’What you up to?’
The child is silent. The sound of the waves on the shore is all he can hear now, and then the man smiles and says
‘Come with me’. And he does.
She notices he is gone as she piles carrots on top of the bagged-up fruit that fills her raffia bag. At once she runs into the garden, skirts catching on boxes, hands frantic on glass. A light breeze shifts tied aluminium scarers into metallic sprinkles of sound that are drowned out by her calls. She runs back through the greenhouse, straight onto the street. Her husband leaves his office. Together they search the busy shops and the town, the quiet side roads and the park. The beach is too empty. Apart from a couple of pensioners holding hands on a bench and another child digging, there is no-one.
‘Have you seen a little boy?’ they ask her.
‘When?’
‘This afternoon’.
‘Yes. Some.’
‘Did you see a three year old? By himself?’
The child looks up, startled by the woman’s stifled tears.
‘On his own?’ She sounds surprised and hesitates a moment, ‘No.’
‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Yes. I only saw one little boy and he was walking with his dad’. The girl shovels into shingle, where frothy water seeps and floods as she tries to beat the tide. They are turning to go when the child says to their backs,
‘He had yellow curly hair, that boy’.
Soon, she has remembered the red anorak with green inside the hood. The woman starts to shake; the man’s face is white, immobile as he leads his wife away.
It is nearly dark when the search starts. Then, small lights cross over and over the beach as people hunt and call. In the bright-windowed town, policemen ask questions at quiet front doors, where men and women stand in light porches grateful not to be involved. The girl who saw him sits with her parents in a room overlooking the promenade to tell a policeman about the boy and the man who was not his father.
The boy is close to the beach in a caravan with worn wheels and wired up windows. He used the toilet at the entrance of the car park, but he is not good at this, and has made a mess of himself. A few fine blonde curls stick to his cheeks, their skin crazed and red from the long afternoon in sun and salt air. His lower lip juts out full and red, some dribble hangs from his mouth. The man is saying’
‘Look. Telly. You watch that. I’ll make us some tea.’
Then he gets up from the seat beneath the window, and goes to a little sink where pots and dishes are stacked high. He reaches into the back pocket of his trousers and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, lights one and lets it hang from his lips. Its thin paper adheres to skin while he lets a runnel of water trickle over a plate. The door squeaks when the child pushes against it. The man is there in a second, and it shuts.
‘You can’t go out. Dark mate’.
His voice is too loud. The child is scared. He didn’t like it when that man banged the door shut. He begins to cry a little. The man picks him up. The hands grip him under his armpits, and the child looks right into his face. He has a dirty face. There are little red spots with yellow on them, and his eyes have red streaks on the white parts. Something crusted is on the man’s eyelashes too. The child looks away.
‘Listen mate. Just stay here. OK?’
The mother will not go home. She must hunt on for her son; if she stops he will be lost always. So she walks. Across town again, down and down familiar streets, into the warm houses of friends with her husband, begging and running and calling in parks and playgrounds. Above, stars glitter in dead space, and moonlight on the sea shadows its hollows into black. Someone has her boy. Someone else can touch his small body. She doubles over, howls herself breathless.
In a corner of the van are caged two small birds. Their squeaks pierce festooned ochre smoke. Books avalanche to the floor from unsteady stacks, roof high. Their covers depict huge flowers, trees displayed in patterns, boats cutting into water and the clean lines of angular, unfamiliar buildings; they spread across the floor, a spilt sea of bright images. The child looks around at sequinned hanks of fabric that cover crates and boxes. Years off, the smell of incense, the scent of the resin of far distant trees will carry him back to this night. Everything is dust covered. Dirt cakes the floor. Tangled blankets are in a twist on the bed. The exposed mattress exhudes another musky, unknown smell. A fat chunk of amber is crammed onto a tiny shelf beside the sink, along with a mottled bird’s feather, a jarred fistful of campion, as well as two blown eggs and a twisted white shell. Much later, in night-time stillness, he will recall again and again isolated parts of this paltry collection, the small savings of a junked and solitary life. He will try to imagine the slow drift into solitude of this remote and dirty person, bundled up alone in a broken van. Then he will see himself there in the van, the quiet child, parked with a shut-off stranger in the dark, alone together between cliffs and the sea. As though from a corner of the ceiling, he will see the top of the man’s head, the untidy hair, the thin shoulders clad in dirty denim and watch the way he negotiates the cramped van, shoves clothes, newspapers and stained sheets into cupboards that are too full of junk to take any more.
Now the man goes to the laden table, sweeps books, papers and bags onto the floor with the flat of his arm. He pulls from beneath the bed a box which he puts by the door. Then he goes for the child. He picks him up and sits him on one of the seats by the window. Years away, fractured images of the table happen; its scotched surface, the dried bits of food stuck there, a bent fork caked in something red and, close up in front of his face, the dumped box, brought from the floor. The printed image on its side is of a fat green fish, flat and eyeless above blocked letters he will never read. Now the man’s careful fingers open the top of the box, fold back the cardboard leaves and pull out, amid a cascade of screwed up newspaper, reels of cotton, a bottle, some string and a knife.
The next morning the sun like a host rises into pale sky. The parents have searched all night. Now they stand where the sea breathes softly into pebbles. A couple of boats drift across the water, far out. It is cold today. The mother cries for the son she cannot shelter. There will be no mist this morning, it is bright and clear. The deep blue of the sea is flecked with puffs of foam that catch fresh light. Behind, on the promenade, a police van is parked. Around it, a little group of people wait for news, or something worse. The red brick gothic offices on the clif where the father should be at work catch the rise of the sun and glow against lit sky.
‘I cannot live without him’, he says, his chin resting on top of his wife’s head.
‘I know’.
‘You didn’t watch him?’
She tears herself away frm him, and starts to march away, straight up the beach, her coat wrapped across her tight, arms folded, fists balled up under her armpits. There is nothing but wanting her son again.
‘Give him back’, she screams to no-one.
A boy of fifteen is waliing across sand by the boathouses towards the jetty when an image of the child comes, like a shadow crossing water. The face, looking out of the bottom of one of the windows of that beaten up van in the car park, the two small hands like stars flat on glass. As he turns towards the police van still parked up on the promenade thoughts of how he will become famous make him break into a shambling run as he shoulders his fishing rod, willing that the boy is found.
Soon the police are inside the van. The child will never recall what is said. He just watches the man run a dirty hand through his hair like his father does when he is tired, sees him turn and shrug on a jacket that seems to weigh him down. The man does not look at the child until he stumbles down the broke steps of his van. Then, he turns to look back in, right at the boy who struggles in the arms of a policewoman to point to the man, to say to him
‘Come back. Boat..’
‘Yours mate’
He will also like to think that it is the break in the man’s voice that makes the child cry then. For a long time, he will think about the bottle that stayed behind in the box with the fish on it. It is on the table now, as the man is taking outside, waiting for the boy. Before, during the long night, he watched the man tie with steady hands a thin stretch of cotton to fragile, collapsed sticks flat on the boat’s deck. He helped to pull the string, saw the sails rise inside the bottle, felt the boat become real inside a shut glass world where it sailed a static sea. Before he slept, the man put the bottle into his hands. He looked at it some more, and then slipped into sleep with the boat beside him.
He does not know why his mother is crying when she comes to get him from that man’s house. His father hurts him when he holds him, and makes sounds as he breathes into his neck. Outside, clutched between his parents, he points to the caravan again and again, and asks them to get the man.
‘That is a bad man darling. He has gone away now’. The child begins to cry, shouts for his left behind boat. Much later he will learn words that might have brought it for him and made the long night clear, but this bright morning only the pulse of the sea fills the air as he is taken away, becalmed.
Page last updated: 08.05.2007
