Thieving Fear

ONE

'Shall we walk along the beach for some more exercise?' Ellen said.

They were at the end of the road that led from Thurstaston to the cliff. Above the Welsh coast the sky was padded with white clouds that kept displaying and repacking the sun. As sunlight outdistanced a mass of shadow that raced across the common alongside the road, the grass seemed to breathe the light in. A child cried out beyond the thorny hedge that had just turned more luminously green, and it wasn't until a man shouted 'Shemp' that Charlotte realised the child had been startled by a dog. By then Hugh had told Ellen 'Good idea before we have to drive.'

Ellen raised her almost invisible eyebrows and then narrowed her bluish eyes and pressed her full lips together as if searching for a way to render her round face less plump. 'You're supposed to say I don't need any exercise, Hugh.'

His long face tried on an apologetic smile as he passed a hand over his cropped scalp before patting his prominent stomach. 'I meant I did. You need to keep fit in my job.'

Rory shook his head, wagging his black ponytail. His face was even longer than his brother's and bonier as well, which emphasised his large sharp nose. His habitual wry but weary grin, so faint it was close to secretive, scarcely wavered as he said 'Say what you see or you'll never be a writer.'

'I'm not one,' Hugh said as though he'd failed to grasp that Rory wasn't addressing him. 'You're the artistic lot. I'm Supermarket Man.'

'That's art if you do it right,' Rory said. 'Everything is.'

'You're just as important as the rest of us, Hugh.' Perhaps in a bid to heighten his tentative smile, Ellen added 'More than I can be just now.'

'You've been crucial to people who needed it,' Charlotte assured her. 'So are we having our last walk on the beach?'

Rory's shrug might have been intended to dislodge her wistfulness. He turned fast along the path that skirted a caravan park. An assortment of steps up which several large dogs and their less energetic owners were scrambling led to the beach, where the tide had pulled the river back from the cliffs. Halfway down Ellen glanced around at Charlotte, then hurried after the brothers, her slightly more than shoulder-length blonde hair swaying as if to deny she'd had a question for her cousin. They were all on the beach by the time she murmured 'I shouldn't think anyone's had time to look at my little novel.'

'Not so little,' Hugh protested.

'Not so novel either,' Rory said.

'You've been reading it, then,' Ellen said like a gentle rebuke.

'Some of it,' he said and glanced away from the unfurling of a swathe of windblown sand. 'I liked the bit where you had some old character muttering silently. Good trick if you can bring it off.'

'I thought it was pretty original,' Hugh said. 'The whole book, I mean.'

'You've never heard of anybody having nightmares that turned real before.'

'Not old folk giving them to people who mistreat them.' Hugh bit his lip before asking Ellen 'It couldn't give you any problems if someone you didn't want to hear about it heard about it, could it?'

'Gosh, that's a mouthful. Who would they be?'

'They couldn't say at the industrial tribunal you'd been making stories up about old people being treated badly, could they?'

'It would have to be published first, Hugh. I'm sure they'll see I was telling the truth.'

'You haven't said what you thought of it yet,' Rory told Charlotte.

She'd kept feeling that the conversation was about to converge on her. 'To be honest, Ellen –'

'That's what I want you to be. I absolutely do.'

'I think it needs some work.'

'You're saying you can publish it if she works on it?' Hugh enthused. 'That's great news, isn't it, Ellen?'

'I don't know if she's quite saying that,' Ellen said and gazed at an approaching rush of sunlight that snagged on clumps of sedge.

'I'd have to see your revisions before I could be too definite. I'll email you when I'm back at my desk.'

'That's still great news, isn't it?' Hugh insisted. 'You won't be paying her anything on account yet then, Charlotte.'

'No contract for the first book till it's publishable, that's the directive that came round last month.'

'Even for family?' Perhaps sensing that he'd gone too far, Hugh made haste to add 'I was only wondering if you were hard up, Ellen. You could have my thousand and pay me back whenever you can.'

'You can have mine too by all means,' Charlotte said.

'It wouldn't buy her much in London,' Rory seemed to feel he should reassure Ellen. 'Hardly worth getting the train for.'

Charlotte thought that was a remark too far. 'I didn't come for the will,' she said, 'I came for the funeral.'

'Then you're no better than the rest of us. You can stick my handout in the bank as well, Ellen. I'd rather still have Albert and Betty, and I don't need it for the stuff I'm playing at.'

'You're all too generous. You treat yourselves and don't worry about me. I'll make do if I have to.'

Charlotte refrained from pointing out to Rory that she'd spoken at the funeral – Albert's, who had died less than four months after his wife. Some of his colleagues had reminisced about working with him at the library to which he'd donated his collection of old books, and a bearded guitarist rendered a twenty-first-century folk song about giving oneself back to the earth. Other librarians read favourite passages of Albert's from The Pickwick Papers and Three Men in a Boat, earning muted amusement that sounded dutiful, and then it had been Charlotte's turn. She'd kept panicking while she rehearsed the eulogy in the shower or on the roof terrace above her flat, but as she climbed into the pulpit she'd seen that she just needed to talk to her cousins. She reminded them of the word games their uncle had relished inventing, the one where you had to say an even longer sentence than the previous player, and the game of adding words to a sentence spoken backwards, and the conversations made up of words in reverse, when Betty had vacillated between tears of frustration and of helpless mirth . . . 'Rebmemer, rebmemer,' Charlotte had finished, prompting mostly puzzled looks and a few guarded smiles from her uncle's friends and token laughter from her cousins. The all-purpose priest had brought the proceedings to an end with a Cherokee homily, and as curtains closed off the exhibition of the coffin while speakers emitted one of Albert's favourite Beatles ditties, the congregation had vacated the unadorned chapel to accommodate the next shift of mourners. Charlotte and her cousins had to represent the family outside the crematorium, since their various parents were either abroad or estranged from Albert since he'd closed into himself after his wife's death. Charlotte had felt uncomfortably presumptuous, especially since the rest of the occasion was so lacking in ritual. 'We all came, that's what matters,' she belatedly said.

'It's like we've never been away,' Hugh said. 'Nothing's changed along here except us.'

'What are you using for eyes?' Rory was amused to ask. 'Everything has. Not a single grain of sand's the same.'

'I shouldn't reckon even you can see them all.'

'I'm saying there's not a solitary bloody thing that hasn't moved or grown or died or come or gone.'

Charlotte had a sudden notion that neither of the brothers was entirely right. 'Depends on . . .' she almost began and wondered why the phrase should feel unwelcome. She gazed along the miles of cliff that stretched to the mouth of the river. Spiky tufts of grass turned towards her in a breeze as if sensing her interest, while the cliff face that sprouted them appeared to stir, acknowledging her concentration. A flood of shadow lent a darker substance to the cliff, and she was trying to decide why its presence had grown oppressive when Rory said 'Have we walked enough of us off yet?'

'Up to Ellen,' said Hugh.

As she responded with a gentle frown Rory said 'I've had tramping through sand, that's all. Bungs my senses up.'

Charlotte didn't notice the path, a series of zigzags lying low in the grass on the cliff face, until he turned towards it, and then she remembered falling onto it out of her teenage dream. 'Beat you to it,' she declared and strode upwards.

The cliff crowded into one side of her vision and then the other as the path, which was only inches wider than her waist, changed direction. Tufts of grass caught her feet or emitted whispers of restless sand. The cliff top would be safer, and only the low wadded sky made her feel as if she were under a lid. She remembered lying in the tent that night, unable to stay asleep for the thought of closing a trapdoor on herself and utter darkness. She tried to leave the memory behind as she climbed onto the open common.

A gorse bush scraped its thorns together as a wind dissipated through the grass. The clump of about a dozen bushes was the only vegetation other than the green expanse that stretched more than a quarter of a mile to a hedge, and Charlotte was wondering why the view should contain even the hint of a threat when Hugh stepped up behind her. 'This reminds me of the last time we camped out,' he said.

'It should. It's where we were.'

He tramped past her and gazed about before rubbing his scalp as if that might electrify his brain. 'I don't think I know where I am.'

Rory joined them and shook his head at his brother. 'How could you get lost up here?'

'Charlotte did last time.' Less defensively Hugh asked her 'Have you sleptwalked since?'

'Has she what again, Hugh?' Ellen clambered onto the common and tucked her dishevelled blouse into her jeans. 'Don't all look at me,' she begged.

'Sleptwalked, sleepwalked, I don't know. Does it matter that much?'

'Not enough to have an argument about,' Charlotte said. 'I was the one who did it, after all, just that once.'

'I'd have expected you of all people to care about words.' With no lessening of reproachfulness Ellen said 'I was the one who looked after you. Shall we walk?'

Charlotte couldn't help peering at the grass as she followed Ellen. She recalled how a slab of it had risen in her dream, and felt as if the memory wouldn't go away until she identified the spot. Of course she was on edge only because of the funeral, and at first she was glad to be distracted when Hugh spoke. 'We had a bad night too.'

'He means we kept waking each other up. We were asleep when you girls were on the wander, though.'

'Good gracious,' Ellen said as their aunt used to. 'What were you boys up to in your bags?'

'Just dreaming,' said Hugh.

'Nothing to blush about, then.'

'It wasn't,' he said, though her question had mottled his cheeks. 'Just I couldn't find my way somewhere.'

'I couldn't see where I'd got trapped somehow,' Rory offered. 'Might have been a house with no lights in.'

'It's not like you to be so unobservant.'

'He said I was asleep,' Rory retorted, though Ellen's comment had been affectionate. 'Your turn.'

'I was saving Charlotte, if you remember.'

As Charlotte thought the answer had been too quick and glib, a mass of blackness seeped out of the earth all around them. Although it was the shadow of a cloud, it made her feel shut in. 'We're heading back, yes?' she said and set out for the gate through the distant hedge. Even when sunlight washed away the shadow, she could have fancied that darkness was pacing her and her cousins under the earth.