The Loney

Chapter Eight

Since we had decided to come back to Moorings, I had rehearsed the journey down to the beach many times, trying to re-imagine the road and what I used to be able to see on either side. Now that I was here and walking across the marshes with Hanny it all seemed to unfold as it should. I remembered the single, twisted hawthorn tree overhanging the road, like the sole survivor of a shipwreck that had staggered inland, torn and cowed by the sea. I remembered the way the wind rasped through the reeds and shuddered across the black water. The way the sea hung between the valleys of the dunes.

This was the real world, the world as it should be, the one that was buried in London by concrete plazas and shopping parades of florists, chip shops and bookmakers; hidden under offices and schools and pubs and bingo halls.

Things lived at The Loney as they ought to live. The wind, the rain, the sea were all in their raw states, always freshly born and feral. Nature got on with itself. Its processes of death and replenishment happened without anyone noticing apart from Hanny and me.

When we came to the base of the dunes, we veered from the road and took off our boots to feel the cold sand under our feet.

I slung the rifle around so that it sat against my back and helped Hanny up. He had insisted on bringing the stuffed rats with him in his school satchel and kept slipping down, gouging deep scars into the sand with his feet.

At the top we could see the grey sea spreading out towards the horizon that was pressed flat by the huge block of sky. The tide was coming in quickly, washing over the mudflats.

Everything here was as it always had been, apart from the botched swastika someone had spraypainted on the side of the pillbox as a companion to the letters NF.

‘How are you feeling now, Hanny?’ I said and put my hand on his brow, the way Mummer did to check his temperature.

He smiled and shook his head. The headache had gone.

‘Mummer means well,’ I said. ‘She’s just worried that you won’t get better. Fear can make people do funny things, you know.’

We walked down onto the beach, following a ragged trail of debris. Seagulls had been strangled by the sea into sodden, twisted things of bones and feathers. Huge grey tree stumps, smoothed to a metallic finish had been washed up like abandoned war-time ordnance. All along the beach, in fact, the sea had left its offerings like a cat trying to curry favour with its owner. The Loney had always been a dumping ground for the North’s detritus, and tangled with the seaweed were shoes and bottles, milk crates and tyres. Yet all of it would be gone at the next high tide, raked back into the jumble of the sea.

With a difficulty that I didn’t remember from the last time we’d come here, we climbed up onto the roof of the pillbox and stood either side of the hole. Inside it was deeply carpeted with sand. Pools of seawater sat in the gloom.

Hanny jumped down first and held me round the waist as I came down through the hole. Someone had been in here; the same person who had sprayed the outside wall, no doubt. It smelled of urine and spent matches. There was litter thrown up against one corner. Beer cans and chip wrappers. But despite all that, it remained more or less as sturdy as when it had first been built. There was never any bombing here and until we had claimed it for our own, I doubted that it had ever been manned at all. The Loney was just a place the Luftwaffe passed on their way to the Clyde. And the Third Reich never did come marauding up the Irish Sea in the end, of course.

We’d had to smash a hole in the roof to get inside — as the dunes had swallowed the back end where the door was — and the side facing the sea had begun to reveal its rusty skeleton, but it still felt as though it would last forever.

Using our hands we picked up and dumped the sand against the walls. Hanny worked like a machine, raking great clods of the stuff between his legs, checking his watch to see how long it was taking him.

Once there was space, Hanny opened the satchel and carefully arranged the rats on the floor and then his toy soldiers to face them. I took the rifle off my shoulder and positioned it through one of the gun slits, fitting my eye to the rubber cup at the end of the sight. It took time to get it right — for a few seconds there was only the magnification of my own eyelashes — but once I had the sea contained in the circle, it was brought to me sharp and silent.

The horizon I had seen with the naked eye from the top of the dunes was dragged closer and replaced by another much further out. A boat with a white sail that had been too far away to see before tracked slowly from one edge of my vision to the other, rising and falling, outrun by the terns and gulls scudding over the waves. There was another world out there that no one else but I could see.

I fancied myself as a naval captain on the lookout for U-boats, or a lone gunner charged with the defence of the coastline.

Those sorts of games only ever seemed real at The Loney. London was hard to convert into the kinds of places the men in Commando seemed to find themselves.

Although I had assassinated the park keeper — who morphed from one important Gestapo officer to another — several times from a hideout in the huge oak tree by the tennis courts and blown Mummer to pieces when she stepped on the land mine I’d buried in the vegetable patch, the parks, our garden, they were too prim and clean.

The cemetery up in Golders Green with its flat, white graves that looked as though they had been levelled by a bomb blast made for a half-decent blitzed town, but the groundsman had a dog that was supposed to be rabid. And anyway I could only play there on Saturdays when the Jews weren’t allowed to do anything, even visit the dead.

At The Loney, on the other hand, one could be at Sword Beach, Iwo Jima, Arnhem, El Alamein without much strain on the imagination. The pillbox was easily transformed into a cell in a German prisoner of war camp, which we’d fight our way out of with our bare hands, thwacking Achtunging! Nazis in freeze frames. Or it was a jungle hideout from which we watched a line of buck-toothed Japs come stalking through the marram and the sea holly and then we’d unzipper them with a burst of machine gun fire before they had time to draw breath. The Japs were cruel and devious but screeched like girls when they died. They were always weaker than the Krauts and the Krauts were always more arrogant than the Brits, who naturally won every time.

‘Here,’ I said and Hanny, half crouching, took over, adjusting his grip, squinting into the sight. I moved to the slit next to Hanny’s and watched the hordes of birds come in with the rushing tide, ransacking the foaming bore for the things dragged along in its thrust, or heading inland to the marshes with food for their young.

A flock of gulls came to land, squabbling over some dead thing from which they tore bits of fur and skin, the craftier ones making off with larger portions — a cluster of innards, or bones still jointed in the middle.

The sudden boom of the sea against the rocks close by scared them and they took off together, screeching and honking. All but one. A large gull thrashed about on the sand, trying to lift itself out of the incoming water. It beat one wing against the air, while the other stuck out from its body at an angle. It had been broken in the scrum.

It cawed, nuzzled at its leg and then resumed its strange dance, hopping one, two, three steps, lifting off and tumbling back onto the sand.

Hanny looked at me.

‘We’ll have to kill it,’ I said. ‘It’s cruel to leave it in pain.’

Hanny frowned. He didn’t understand. I took the rifle off him and mimed stoving the bird in with the butt. He nodded and we climbed out of the pillbox and watched the seagull floundering on the sand. It stared back, wide eyed.

‘It’s the right thing to do,’ I said, and gave Hanny the rifle.

He looked at me and smiled and then he turned his head sharply the other way, when he heard the sound of a car. I took the rifle back and ushered Hanny up onto the dunes, making for a natural trough in the grass, from where we could lie flat and observe the road across the marshes.

Once the car had passed the hawthorn tree, I could see through the crosshairs of the sight that it was the one that had passed us when we’d broken down on our way to Moorings.

This time there were three people in the car. Two in the front — a man and a woman — and one in the back, presumably the sleeping girl. The car slowed and as it came closer the tyres threw out waves of spray before passing through the gap in the dunes and coming to a halt on the fringes of the beach. Seeing that the sandflats were rapidly disappearing, the driver reversed. The engine idled for a moment, then shrivelled away to a rapid ticking as the mechanisms cooled under the bonnet. The birds that had been frightened away returned to what they were doing — the gulls coming down again to fight over the carcass on the beach, the curlews chunnering in the grass.

We moved carefully along the ridge and at the end where it sloped down to the road, we pressed ourselves into the sand. Parting the grass with the muzzle I could see the front passenger more clearly now. Mummer would have thought her common the way she was applying lipstick in the mirror of the sun visor, rolling her lips in and out. She was the kind of woman Mummer would have pointed out to Farther. The kind of woman she would have commented on.

Lifting her chin and turning her head, she began clearing up some imperfection in the corner of her open mouth with a folded arrowhead of tissue and then ran the tip of her little finger down her philtrum, giving it a flick at the end.

The driver distracted her for a moment and she turned to face him. There was evidently some kind of disagreement and the woman went back to her preening, impatiently dabbing powder across her cheeks and nose and pausing to shout something half way through the process.

Inching to the right, I could see the girl sitting in the back. She leant forward and tried to intervene, but the adults in the front ignored her and she stared out of the window instead.

She looked straight at me, but didn’t see me. I was careful to stay well hidden. I always was. When I played my games in London, I could be as silent as the dead in the Jewish cemetery. Deader than the dead.

Watching the girl, I didn’t even hear my own breath, only sensed its warmth coming and going on my trigger finger.

Hanny was shaking my arm.

‘What’s the matter?’

He showed me his empty wrist, marked red from his watch strap.

‘Did you drop it?’ I said.

Hanny looked at his wrist again.

The driver finally got out and stood with the door open. He adjusted his tweed trilby, looked up at the seagulls and at the marshes through which they had just driven, his face saying god-forsaken. I heard the clank of a lighter opening; a moment later the wind blew copperblue smoke towards me, bringing the sweet dung smell of the man’s cigar and the woman’s voice.

‘Leonard,’ she said to the man and he ducked down to speak to her.

I caught her name as he lifted his head again and tacked it contemptuously onto the end of his sentence. Laura.

Hanny was scuffling about in the sand looking for his watch. I nudged him to be quiet. Leonard slammed the car door, sending little birds flapping away, and stepped down off the road onto the sand. He walked away and stood watching the injured gull with an amused curiosity. He took off his hat, brushed it with the back of his hand and put it back on.

In his toffee coloured jacket and his expensive shoes, he looked as out of place here as his Daimler. He was a lounge lizard, a spiv, a bent bookie with fingers full of sovereign rings and his blue shirt open two buttons at the collar. A smell of aftershave drifted up from him — a coniferous sap stirred with a fumigant like the stuff Farther sprayed over his roses to kill off the aphids.

Laura got out and fiddled with the boot of the car, eventually unlocking it and calling to Leonard. He sloped back up onto the tarmac and went over to her. They had a conversation that I couldn’t hear properly, then Laura went to open the girl’s door. Leonard grappled with something in the boot, heaved, twisted and finally dragged out a wheelchair that by pressing some lever with his foot sprang open.

Laura held the door and Leonard parked the chair with its seat facing the girl. She inched slowly out, puffing and wincing as she held onto her belly. She was as pregnant as it was possible to be.

Leonard held her hand as she shuffled towards the open door and when she was close enough half fell into the chair, making it creak with her weight. She ran her fingers through her coppery hair and tucked it behind her ears and grimaced again. She was younger than me; thirteen or fourteen, I guessed. One of those girls that every school had. Even the Catholic comps. Girls that Mummer and the other ladies at Saint Jude’s pretended they didn’t like to talk about. They had probably brought her here to have the baby in this deserted place out of shame.

Leonard wheeled her to the edge of the road and carefully down onto the beach, where he headed towards the pillbox, leaving thin tyre tracks and scattering gulls from a pile of weed fizzing with flies. In her heels, Laura followed more slowly, coming to a standstill now and then as she decided how best to negotiate the swathes of wrack and litter.

She was dressed out of her time, somehow, like I imagined fashionable women might have dressed in the 1930s — a bottle green coat with a stole made from an entire fox, a short haircut parted at the side.

Leonard set the wheelchair so that it faced the sea. Laura stayed with the girl and Leonard went off to investigate the pillbox. I put him in the sights and tracked him as he crossed the beach slowly and awkwardly with a gait that suggested a gammy knee. He came to the pillbox, looked at it, removed his shoes and took his hands out of his pockets so that he could swing his arms and get up the drift of sand. Rather satisfyingly, he slipped a few times on his bad leg before he managed to put his fingers into one of the gunslits and pull himself up.

Making a visor with his hands, he peered inside and then suddenly jerked backwards, losing his footing and sliding ridiculously, one leg outstretched and the other crooked in such a way that it rolled him slowly but unavoidably onto his back. His shoes came out of his hand and tumbled away.

He got up, looked to see if anyone had witnessed his fall, and twisted to wipe the sand off his backside, before limping along the foot of the dunes in search of his brogues. He found one nestled in a pile of bladderwrack and stopped right underneath us to put it back on.

Having heard his involuntary cry, Laura made her way towards him.

‘Are you alright?’ she asked.

‘Full of bloody rats,’ Leonard nodded to the pillbox.

Laura smiled to herself and took out a packet of cigarettes.

‘Well you will come to these sorts of places,’ she said, lighting up.

Leonard gave her a look. She walked away and picked up his other shoe, tipped it over, let a stream of sand come out and gave it back. Leonard slipped it on and then bent down to pick up something else — it was Hanny’s watch. He thumbed away the sand, shook it, put it to his ear and then stuck it in his pocket.

I turned to tell Hanny, but he was staring past me over to where the girl was sitting in the wheelchair. The injured gull had stopped shrieking and was hopping tentatively over to her outstretched hand. When it was close to her, it angled its head and nipped at the weed she was holding, its damaged wing held out like a fan. It came again for another feed and stayed this time. The girl stroked its neck and touched its feathers. The bird regarded her for a moment and then lifted off silently, rising, joining the others turning in a wheel under the clouds.