The Loney

Chapter Twenty-four

Hanny slipped away sometime in the night. His bed was empty and his boots and coat were gone. I always slept lightly at Moorings — even more so since Parkinson’s visit — and I wondered how he had managed to leave without waking me. But as I got out of bed I realised that he’d laid towels down on the floorboards so that I didn’t hear him go.

I felt his mattress. It was stone cold. Even the smell of him had vanished. I couldn’t believe he had been so devious and dissembling. It wasn’t like him at all.

In the middle of the room, the pink rug had been turned back and the loose floorboard lifted out. I felt around inside the cavity. The rifle was missing and he had taken the bullets from my coat pocket.

I knew where he had gone, of course. He had gone to Coldbarrow to see Else and his baby.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Monro lifted his head and pined when I came in. I stroked his neck to quieten him down and saw that the floor was littered with the treats Father Bernard had brought for him. Clever Hanny.

Monro sneezed and lay down and went back to chewing the bone shaped biscuits that he discovered one by one in the folds of his blanket.

Outside, a light drizzle, briny and ripe, spread across the fields and its moisture grew on me like fur. The tandem was leaning against the wall, the tyres repaired. That was why Father Bernard had come in so late. He hadn’t been at The Bell and Anchor as Mummer said, but out in the yard in the rain fixing the bike.

I pushed the tandem away from the house, manoeuvring it around the puddles and lifting it over the cattle grid so as not to wake anyone. Once I was around the front of the house, I set off down the lane, met the coast road, split the deep puddles that were standing there, and was soon passing through the marshes.

After days of rain they could become six or seven feet deep with no discernible bottom, only a jelly of mud and dead vegetation. I called Hanny’s name, strangely hoping that he had stumbled into one of the pools. Better to go that way than whatever Parkinson had in mind.

But there was nothing. Only the hiss of the reeds and the slop of the ink-black water as the wind came across the marshes bringing a flurry of white flakes.

For a moment I thought it was snowing — it wouldn’t have been unheard of there, even in the late spring — but then as I got closer to the hawthorn tree I could see that it had burst into life well before it ought to have done, like the apple trees and the fresh green grass up at Moorings. Each gnarled limb held a garland of petals, the way Father Wilfred held the white roses as he lay in his coffin.

At the dunes, I had to heave the tandem through the col as the wind had piled sand a foot thick over the road. Hanny’s footprints were there, mixed with the impressions of car tyres. Leonard had passed this way and recently.

I called for Hanny again, thinking that he might be hiding in the marram somewhere. I waited and looked up at the grass bending in the wind, the grey clouds scudding overhead.

The tide was starting to come in. The sandflats were slowly sinking under the water, and way out, almost at Coldbarrow was a figure leaning into the wind, his white shirt fluttering. It was Hanny. He had the rifle over his shoulder.

I made a cup with my hands and shouted, but he couldn’t hear me, of course. And in the event I was glad. The last thing I wanted him to do was start to come back now that the tide was racing in. It was better that he went on and waited.

I left the tandem against the pillbox and began to run across the sand, following the posts as far as I could. In places there was no water at all, but further out in the full blast of the wind, the sand had collapsed into deep gutters, the edges of which fell apart alarmingly as I jumped over each that I came to.

The roar was all about me as the sea thrust itself towards the shore, breaking into foaming crowns when it smashed down into some hidden declivity. Driftwood and weed sped past, rising and falling on the grey swell, turning, breaking, and then sucked under by the currents.

To my right I could make out one of those temporary pathways the water and wind would conjure up at The Loney now and then; long backbones of sand that only became apparent when the high tide left them exposed above the water. I waded over and climbed up to the highest point and saw that it wound in a long, meandering ribbon towards Coldbarrow.

Yet, even that pathway ran out well before I got there. The ground broke and slipped away, and I was pitched forward into the sea, my legs suddenly kicking into nothingness.

The cold of it took my breath out like a punch and squeezed my scrotum into a walnut. I reached down, swiping my hands through the heavy, grey water, trying to hold on to something, anything, whatever unidentifiable thing of plastic or wood I could grasp — but the tide whipped everything away and there was nothing else to do but swim as hard as I could towards the shoreline of Coldbarrow.

I was a decent swimmer in those days. Quite hardy to the chill of open water and unafraid of the deeps. There weren’t many brooks and pools around the Heath that I hadn’t explored. But breast-stroking Highgate Ponds was one thing, The Loney was something else. The swell came at me from all sides and seemed determined to pull me under. There was a movement in the water that flowed and gripped and sucked at the same time. I swallowed mouthfuls of salt water and choked it out in bouts of desperate coughing, my throat and my nose burning.

I seemed to be getting no closer and after striking again and again towards land, it occurred to me that I was in the early stages of drowning; in that period of fighting, sinking, re-surfacing. And a panic took hold of me. I could barely feel my body. My hands were locked into claws. I would soon get too tired to move. Then what? An ache in the lungs. Silence. Nothing.

Through a burst of blind splashing, the sky, Coldbarrow, the churning horizon were turned vertical first one way and then the other, but through the swing of the world I was aware of a blurred figure on the shoreline. Then, slipping down into the muffled darkness under the water and out again, they were suddenly closer. Something was being thrust out for me to hold. I made a grab for it and felt my fingers close on a frayed leather strap. I felt a pull that countered that of the tide, felt my thighs and knees eventually scraping against the cobbles of the slipway and then the clutch of the sea was gone and Hanny was standing over me. I let go of the rifle strap and he knelt down and touched my face. I could hardly breathe. Words came out juddering. Hanny cupped his hand to his ear, wanting me to repeat what I said, but I pushed him away and he went over to a rock and sat down with the rifle across his knees.

Still shivering, I took off my parka and then my sweater and twisted it into a thick knot to get some of the water out.

‘Why did you go off like that?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me where you were going?’

Hanny looked at me.

‘You’re an idiot,’ I said, looking back across the sands which had now disappeared completely. ‘We’re supposed to be going home this morning. How the hell are we going to get back? Everyone will be wondering where we are. Mummer will be cross, and it’ll be me that gets it in the neck. It’s always my fault when you do something stupid. You do know that, don’t you, Hanny?’

Hanny patted his pockets. He took out his plastic dinosaur.

‘You’re always sorry, Hanny,’ I said. ‘Why can’t you just think before you do things?’

Hanny looked at me. Then he bowed his head and fumbled in his pockets for the gorilla mask. I went over and took it off him before he could put it on.

‘You’re not frightened, Hanny,’ I said. ‘You weren’t afraid to go sneaking off without me, were you? You weren’t frightened of coming all the way here by yourself.’

He didn’t know any better, of course, but I was angry with him all the same. More than I should have been. I threw the mask into the sea. Hanny looked at me and then went to the edge of the water and tried to scrape it back towards him with the rifle. He made a few attempts but the mask filled with water and disappeared. He rounded on me and looked as if he was going to hit me. Then he stopped and looked in the direction of Thessaly and kissed the palm of his hand.

‘No, Hanny,’ I said. ‘We can’t go and see her. Not anymore. We’ve got to stay away from that place.’

He kissed his hand again and pointed.

‘Jesus Christ, Hanny. Don’t you understand? If they find us here they’ll hurt us. We just need to keep out of sight until the tide turns. No one’s going to come this way for now, not while they can’t get across. If we stay here they’ll never know that we’ve even been. Give me the rifle. Let me keep watch.’

Hanny turned away from me and held it close to his chest.

‘Give it to me, Hanny.’

He shook his head.

‘I can’t trust you with it. You’ll hurt yourself. Give it to me.’

He turned his back to me completely. I took hold of one of his arms and twisted it. He struggled and easily got free and pushed me to the ground. He hesitated for a moment and then swung the butt of the rifle towards me and caught me sharply on the wrist when I put up my hand to protect myself.

Seeing me in pain, he looked momentarily concerned, but turned away and started walking across the heather.

I called him back. He ignored me. I put my sopping coat on and went after him, stumbling through the matted grass and the peat-haggs. I grabbed him by the sleeve, but he shrugged me off and carried on, more determined than I’d ever seen him before.

A dense fog was coming in off the sea now and I thought that he would be too frightened to go much further. But, despite the grey thickening and the silence that fell upon the place, Hanny went on, taking long strides, jumping across the bogs and pools of water, eventually coming to the remains of an old farmhouse or a barn, it was hard to tell what it had been. Only a few ruined walls remained, roughly forming a rectangle that was littered with other rocks and roof slates. Perhaps people had once lived here. Scavenged from the sea. Worshipped at the chapel and tried to pin God to the island like one of the butterflies in our room at Moorings.

Beneath the sound of Hanny’s boots going through the debris I could hear something else. Voices, calls. I tried to make Hanny stop so that I could hear it properly and in the end had to kick away one of his feet so that he fell. He sprawled and the rifle clattered away. He went off on all fours to retrieve it and sat down on a rock to wipe off the mud.

I put my finger to my lips and Hanny stopped what he was doing and looked at me, breathing hard with anger.

‘Listen,’ I said.

The sound of a dog barking came out of the mist, but it was hard to tell where it was coming from or how far away it was. I had no doubt it was Collier’s. It was the same harsh barking that I’d heard in the field outside Moorings where the ewe had led its lamb to feed on the new grass.

‘Hanny, we need to go back,’ I said. ‘We can’t let them find us here. And I’m cold. Aren’t you cold?’

I had started to shiver. My clothes seemed to be wrapped around my bones.

Hanny looked at me and although a flash of concern passed over his face, he turned and clambered over the broken down wall he was sitting against without waiting for me. I didn’t have the strength to hold him back anymore. All I could do was follow him as best I could as his form slipped in and out of the fog.

I eventually caught up with him at the edge of a brook that came gushing milky-white down a gully of rocks and slid away through the limp bracken towards the sea.

Something was wrong.

I touched Hanny on the arm. He was staring straight ahead.

‘What is it?’ I said and, following his eyes, saw that there was a hare sitting on the other side looking back.

It turned its head to one side, sniffed the air, looked back at us, twitched one of its tall spoon ears, and then bolted just a little too late as a dog emerged from the fog, careered into it and tumbled it over in the mud. The hare kicked with its back legs, once, twice, trying to rake off the jaws that were clamped to its neck, but was limp a second later as the dog thrashed it from side to side and chewed out its throat.

This time I got a firm grip on Hanny’s arm and tried to pull him away. If we went there and then I thought we could get away. But he stood rooted to the spot, still looking past me, over my shoulder, not at the hare or the dog but at the two men that had come out of the mist and were standing there watching us.