The Ephemera (21 page)

A second glass of scouridge was nudged towards him. Damien watched the liquid slosh and caught a brief whiff of it, and this time remembered a feeling. It was the feeling of being thrilled by the mystery of the world. He remembered, not so many years ago, when he had been eight or nine and had been allowed for the first time to wander a little farther from home, he had spent the summer afternoons exploring the old parts of town. Every weathered house had a secret cellar that housed a smugglers' den. Every oddly regular pattern of bricks was a secret door that, if he could press the right sequence, would open a tunnel to a cave filled with forgotten contraband. Every cliff path was a potential route to a concealed cove, and a rotted jetty with rowing boats still tied up, waiting for a clipper to drop anchor at night and a coded sequence of lights to be issued in the darkness.

The feeling he remembered was the potential for magic as he explored every corner for the first time on his own. But that sensation of adventure had waned as Damien had become familiar with his town. Familiarity had bred boredom, then indifference; the contempt was a relatively recent emotion that had come with a teenager's increasing, frustrated awareness of the wider world.

"But there's more to our traditions than the smuggling," Peter went on. "The men round here have always gone to sea, son. They always go, and they always come home. Their hearts draw them back. That's what our sea songs are about. Going out and coming home."

Damien thought about that. True that a lot of songs the Knot sang had something of that at their centres—not the popular, well-known ones that all the other bands sang, but the esoteric ones of which Rodger and Peter seemed to have a never-ending supply. More than once Steve had confided that he thought the two senior members had made them up themselves. In these songs the sea was life's great unknown. Man's relationship with it involved forging a path outwards from land, and always ended with a homeward trip. Sailors voyaging to the new world returned with exotic promise, rescuers dashing out in storms came back either as heroes or ghosts, and fishermen forged the same path daily to keep their families fed and clothed. Nevertheless, he could think of an obvious counter-example to Peter's theory.

"What about
The Codsman
?" he said.

"What about it?"

"Well, he doesn't come back home does he? The wife waits for him to come home but he never does."

Peter grinned. "Ah, but are you sure you know the whole song?"

Damien regarded him, genuinely surprised.

"See Damien, son, there's more to that song than we normally sing. After all the fun of the rest of the song, it's a bit of a downer as you might say." He bent down, snapped his accordion out of its case and hitched it over his shoulders. Damien watched the older man's rough, raw fingers dance over the keys as he played the boisterously familiar melody and crooned the opening of the song's final verse.

"Well, the lampwick came to bring her light, and to bring her comfort in the night." Peter stopped playing. "You know this far, yes?"

Damien nodded.

"Well, this is what follows." He quickly ripped through the rest of the verse and fast-forwarded through the rollickingly saucy chorus that followed, as if it weren't after all the most important part of the song. Then he slowed right and squeezed out a swell and sigh that modulated into a minor key.

Well, she waited through the day and night
And the birds alone did hear her plight
And they lent her feathers dark and spry
So that she might seek him from the sky
And although she wandered far and wide
Of the Codsman there's no sight
Of the Codsman there's no sight

So she's waited long and she's waiting still
And she'll wait forever, good or ill
And the other shags might stroke her bill
But she sits there proud and lonely still
Yes she sits there proud and lonely

Oh, she turns her back on each dandy cock
And she waits the day long on her rock
Til the Codsman sails back home to her
Til the Codsman sails back home.

Damien was at a loss for what to say. The additional verses had added an entirely new layer to what he had thought of as an absurdly frivolous song. Peter's rumbling tones had brought the words a delicate melancholy, that as fantastical as it was, made the story oddly moving.

It took a moment to realise that, if this was now the complete story, his contention still held. "But the Codsman still didn't return, did he?"

Peter, resting his chin on the top of his instrument, had assumed his characteristic far off look. Damien could actually see the refocusing of his eyes as his attention returned to the kitchen. "Well, who says that the story is done, eh?" He chuckled quietly, then lifted his glass. "Drink up," he said, "and then I think it is time to go. To the Codsman's return!"

The drink burned as much as it had the first time, but this time Damien didn't gag. He might not have noticed if he had, since for a few moments his mind was occupied by other things: he could now taste kelp and brine, could feel the gritty texture of the sand that had been used to make the glass, could feel the tug and whip of a gale in his hair.

"Time to be on your way, Damien," Peter said.

"To where?"

"
Home
, and then home."

"Okay."

Peter crossed the kitchen. Damien, eyes now round and bright as wave-washed pebbles of glass, saw something he had not noticed before. Between the dresser and the sink, there was the outline of a door in the pine panelling. Or half a door at least. It was very faint because door and wall fit snugly and the grain of the wood had been chosen to mask it, but the join was clear enough to him now.

Peter produced a long hook from his pocket, slipped it under the door and pulled. The door opened with a painful crack. Peter looked back at him, and Damien understood what was happening.

"We're going in there?"

"Not us, son, just you." Peter's laugh creaked like timbers. "I know where my home is well enough."

That laughter, and something cold behind it, drew Damien forward. Somehow he had moved from his chair to the threshold of this new door, but he didn't remember moving a muscle. He looked through the gap. It was plainly just the entry to a cellar. He could see steps, brick walls, a flag paved floor, but beyond that darkness. And in the darkness ... the scent of the sea.

"Have you got a torch?"

"You won't need a torch, son."

Pressure in the small of his back, a gentle prod forward. A shot of fear.
You heard about situations like this, older men locking teenagers in cellars. What did he really know about Peter after all?
But the rough shove didn't come. He wasn't sent sprawling onto the stone floor, imprisoned in sudden darkness. And when he turned to look, Peter hadn't turned into some depraved monster.

"Just find your way down to the end, Damien," the old man said gently. "And come back up when you're ready. I'll leave the door open."

In the end it was the darkness that drew him, ducking, through the door;
the unknown
, that thrill of mystery that he had not experienced since he was a kid.

The cellar was not a cellar, but a passage. It didn't take long, with all the kinks and dog-legs to leave behind the light from Peter's kitchen, but Damien allowed the cold walls to guide him. The walls, and his imagination.

It was a proper smugglers' tunnel, finished without finesse, where it was finished at all. The further stairs he encountered, leading down, always down, were little more than shelves hacked out of the rock. The steeper sections had rusted cleats and the rotten remains of old rope hand rails. The wider sections had rough pens for stacking barrels and crates. A trick of the acoustics modulated the echoes of his own footsteps into urgent piratical conversation, either in the tunnel just ahead of him or where he had just been, that stopped as soon as he stopped to listen.

The further down he went, the damper the walls became, and the louder came the sound of the waves. And it was no surprise when he stepped out of a cleft between angled strata of rock onto a thin wedge of beach.

His heart spun gloriously, like he had finally worked out the combination of bricks to open the secret door.

There was little here but the rocks and the shingle, and the patient waves that had come and were now retreating, leaving the beach glittering under the moon. From somewhere nearby there came a chatter of bird call—
ka-ka-kaak
—not a sound of alarm, but a curious domestic noise that made Damien feel as if he were eavesdropping outside someone's house. There was something else on the beach too. A dark mass spread across the shingle. At first he thought it was weed, but it did not glisten the way kelp or wrack would. He bent down—
feathers
. A drift of feathers. He picked one up. It was long and black as oil, with a green sheen that revealed itself as he spun it between his fingers.

This was a magical place right enough. A rarely disturbed secret place.
A heart
. It wasn't what he would have wanted to find when he was a kid—there was no jetty, no boats, no smugglers' treasure—but why should his childish fantasies have anything to do with the reality of the town's secret centre?

Ka-ka-kaak.
Those gulls again. And closer by, a lower, gruffer sound like a cough and a groan. Damien peered into the darkness, where the shapes of the rock met the rhythmic shimmer of the water.

One of the shapes moved, or the moonlight moved across it, or ... no, it moved. It rose, it stretched. Slim shoulders flexed, and once identified as shoulders Damien connected them to the sweep of a spine, a full curve of buttock, legs tucked underneath. The pose was instantly reminiscent of a classical mermaid, or an advert for shampoo, and would have been incongruous in this place had it not been for the pitchy lustre of the skin, as dark as the night and the water, and for the great wings that extended finally with that flexing of the shoulders.

And, at last, for the head, that took an age to slink around on its goosy neck and fix Damien with such a look. It was a woman's face, of course—the eyes white and wide with outrage or loss, or perhaps just incomprehension—but the forlorn sounds that issued from it were not. The empty clack of the long, hooked bill preceded a very human sigh that became a deep, corvine
chuff
, and a long, frustrated wail.

Then she—it—folded her wings in, and turned her back on him, facing out towards the sea once more, and Damien lost her in the gloom again.

The journey back to Peter's kitchen was a blur of frustration. After that initial glimpse, all he wanted was to stay on the beach and see her again, but there had been such a clear note of dismissal in her turning away that he felt compelled to leave. In the passage, that dismissal was a pressure at his back that propelled him like water in a pipe until he emerged, breathless, into the electric light and the solid reality of the kitchen.

In Damien's absence Peter appeared to have done little except tidy away the scouridge bottle and put the kettle on. The earthy stink of fresh coffee flooded into him, swamping the last vestiges of salt and sea, and with the cellar door shut again, the entire experience shifted and became like a dream.

"Thought you might want a little sober-me-up before you go home to your mum," Peter said when Damien sat down. It was clear he wasn't going to say anything about the beach, and Damien realised that he was relieved. It was his own thing, and he didn't want to dilute it by sharing it.

"What's this?" he asked, indicating the book that Peter had been flipping through when he returned.

"It's called an
atlas
, son. What do they teach you in school these days?" The habitual grin within the beard told him the sarcasm wasn't real. Peter spread the book open at a map of the world. The paper was pocked all over with black ink crosses, and the oceans and seas were filled with cramped notes that spilled into the margins as if to say that the world wasn't big enough for all of Peter's travels.

"Thought you might be interested in how far you can go," he said, "before you need to come home again."

~

A long time ago, a bunch of writers got together for a social weekend in Robin Hood's Bay. Most of what happened that weekend remains protected by the usual secrecy of  shared shame, but I can tell you that there was an incident with a certain sea shanty band. The matter would have been forgotten if Sue Thomasson and Liz Williams had not announced their intention to publish Fabulous Whitby, an anthology of stories about that part of the East Yorkshire coast. The incident in question doesn't actually appear in the final story, but I suspect certain people will not be able to read it without experiencing flashbacks.

Crow's Steps

Malky shins up the drainpipe and onto the flat garage roof. He's not so nimble as he used to be. When he was eleven or twelve—when he earned his nickname—he'd have scaled that fourteen-odd feet in no time at all, but that was half his life ago. Now, although he's still a wee fella, he's got gravity on his back and so the rust flakes jab under his scrabbling fingernails, his gutties scrape a shower of stones from the rough cast and the roan pipe strains against its brackets. Still, he's up, and getting off the ground always was the hardest part.

The next challenge is to get onto the roof of the house itself. The eaves overhang where the garage extension joins the sprawling Victorian building, but they're too high to reach. There is a window, however. It probably belongs to the back stairs landing, and would have offered a decent view of the garden before they plonked a garage right under it. Malky risks a peek. The interior is dark and still, which is as it should be. It seems Haddow's information that the occupants are off on a winter cruise is right.

Malky jams a foot against the side of the window, then wedges the other against the sandstone opposite. Eases himself up, ankles straining at painful angles until he's high enough, his fingers digging into the grouting and his head folded under the eaves. Then he pushes himself slowly away from the wall, using one hand to feel his way around the edge before stretching fingertips up to grab the gutter. For a second he's balanced like that and then in one movement he grips hard and swings his other hand up to join the first. The gutter judders. Dirty water and clogs of moss slosh into his face. The gutter creaks, jolts again, and Malky wastes no more time in heaving himself up onto the pitched tiles of the roof proper. There, he lies on his back, listening to the breath roaring out of him, watching it form clouds that drift up into the deep night sky. His breathing eases, the clouds evaporate. The sky is a thing of black and glittering beauty. Like diamonds on jewellers' velvet. Sometimes he wishes he could buy something nice like that for Natalie but, even if he could afford it, people like Malky don't even get allowed over the threshold in those kind of shops.

A shrill R&B ring tone scares the living keech out of him. He unzips the pocket of his hoodie but the music chokes off before he can retrieve the phone. Red letters tell him who the missed call was from. He fumbles to return it.

"Thought I told you to put your phone on vibrate, Monkey." Davie Haddow's voice is an intimate growl. He's meant to be crouched down in the shrubbery inside the front gate with his bear of a boy, but it sounds like he is much closer.

"I know, I forgot."

"Aye, well. You'd better hope there's naebdy in that house to be woke up by the lovely Rhianna there."

"You said they were away."

"I did, Monkey. But you can never be sure, can you?" Haddow is distracted by a dull rumble away from the phone, then he's back. "Declan wants to know if you're up there yet." Another off-mic rumble, this time followed by laughter. Haddow responds with a dry chuckle. "Declan says that's what your wee bird Natalie's always saying. Is that right, Monkey?"

Malky ignores the jibe, dismisses thoughts of Declan Haddow being anywhere near Natalie. "Aye, I'm on the roof. What now?"

Haddow gets back to business. "Like I telt you, pal. Up the bit you're on now, and over the apex. Then head for the chimney breast with the crow's steps. The attic window's near that." The line goes dead.

Malky zips his phone away again then scampers lightly to the top of this part of the roof. There, he sighs out loud. The scenario he's faced with is not as simple as Haddow made it sound, but then it never is. Big houses like this are never straightforward when you get to the roof. People think a roof is two slopes of slates that meet at the top with a chimney pot and three wee puffs of white smoke like in a kiddie's drawing. In reality there can be all sorts of shite up there. And a house this size, well you just never know what you're going to find until you get up there. The second Malky saw this place he could tell it was going to be a monster.

He surveys the scene before him. There are peaked roofs and flat roofs, roofs that interrupt each other and abut each other. He counts three different designs of roofing tile, and two colours of asphalt. There are carpets of moss, shallow lakes of standing water, shrubs growing out of the mortar cracks and an emaciated forest of television aerials. There are chimney pots by the dozen. And there are crow's steps all over the place. The little brickwork staircases decorate the gable ends and chimney breasts, and in the centre of it all, where the chimneys cluster thickest, they converge, overrunning each other as if in an effort to climb highest. This busy arrangement makes Malky think of that book of optical illusions that Gavin Semple had owned. The wee man on the staircase that went round and round and always went down. The other wee man on the other side who always went up. Been a long time since he'd thought of that. Over in Gavin's book-strewn Shettleston flat, when his maw and Gavin were at it in the bedroom, the nine year old Malky had been happy to stare at the pictures in those books for hours. His favourite had been the Greek legends, with Hercules's labours and Theseus outwitting the minotaur in the maze, and the boy with the wings strapped to his arms. Icarus.

He'd liked Gavin. The big man had treated him as a person, not just an inconvenience, had talked to him almost as much as he had talked to his mum. When he got back from his shifts on the trains he had got the atlas out and showed Malky where he'd been.
Carlisle, Lancaster, Euston
.
Edinburgh, Durham, Kings Cross
. Malky's maw's had liked him too. She had laughed a lot with Gavin. But of course, she changed when she had a wee voddy in her. And that had been a lot of the time. Then it had been all of the time. And that had been that.

A buzz against his belly. No Rhianna this time, but Malky's heart still clenches as he fumbles to answer.

 "Well? Are you in?" Haddow's impatience keens his tone.

"Haven't found the window yet."

"I told you where it was." Haddow has a skill of conveying rising rage through sharpened syllables without actually raising his voice. "It's right underneath the crow's steps."

"But what crow's steps?" Malky hears the whine in his own voice, tries to match a little of the other man's aggression. "There's hunners up here."

"What are you on about? There's only one. Right up to the chimney stack. You can see it from here."

"Not all of it you can't."

In the silence that follows, Malky can practically hear Haddow weighing up a response. Either Malky is lying for some reason, or Haddow's information is wrong. And there is no way he is going to admit that. "Just get into that cunting house," he says. "Unless you want that wee Natalie to have to find another way to get her stuff."

Malky stares at the phone with hatred. For a second he contemplates throwing it against the nearest chimney, or better still chucking it as far as it will go into the night sky. But then he bundles it away in his pocket again, zips it safely up.

Malky wishes Haddow wouldn't keep mentioning Natalie. No doubt the old bastard thinks he's a mug, but then that's just how he operates. Soon as he has something on you, he plays you  and squeezes you. The druggies are mugs. Malky tells that to Natalie every time she picks up the phone to call Haddow. He makes it sound like a slogan, but it's had no visible effect. Not even when he told her about how his maw got in with him—not deep, just a weekend quarter ounce to go with the booze, but that was deep enough. When she got short of cash she hired her boy out for his climbing skills. Later, when she was hospitalised by the pneumonia, Malky managed to repay the debt enough to free himself from Haddow's employment, but it was only once she finally died and he sold the family home that he had been able to break the tie completely. There had even been some left over to get himself a room in a flat in Tollcross. He shared the place with a constantly changing rota of students. They didn't seem to dislike him too much, and even if they were a bunch of privileged wankers he liked joining in with their chat. They reminded him of Gavin.

Malky surveys the roof again. The obvious place to start has to be the massive confusion of brickwork in the centre. If Haddow can only see one set of crow's steps from the ground it surely has to be one of the ones here.

Malky skitters down from his pantiled ridge and skirts the water-logged asphalt. The mass of chimneys rears above him at what Malky guesses to be pretty much the exact centre of the building. In a big, old house like this the chimneys in the centre were originally from the kitchen fireplace, but a hundred and fifty years of modifications have turned them into a monstrosity. From this angle, the crow's steps actually look like a staircase, with each short flight of three or four stairs leading almost directly on to another, a genuine crooked stairway that winds up and around the chimneys. In all his time on people's roofs, Malky has never seen anything like it.

"Holy shite!"

The bluster of wings stills and alights on the bottommost of the steps. The glossy, black crow stutters on its feather-shanked feet, flexes its wings once more and settles. Then it eyes Malky through an alarming indigo eye, lifts its tail and shits on the coping.

"Aw, fuck's sake, man. That's honkin'."

"Get over yersel, ya wee nyaff." The crow snaps its beak. "We don't fly into your gaff and comment on your toilet habits, do we? Have some respect."

"Sorry."

"So you should be." The crow hops around, daintily avoiding the glistening dribble on the step, then regards Malky out of its other eye. "So, you're lookin' for something are you?"

"Naw." The defensive lie rings hollow out here under the sky.

"Course you are." The crow's tone is unburdened by judgement. "Humans don't venture up into the realm of the birds for the peace and quiet." The bird blinks at him, then it hops up a step. "Come on."

"What do you mean?"

The bird
tsks
in frustration, jumps up another step. "You always get a better view from up top, Malky, son," it says. "Hop up, now."

The roof here is steep, and Malky has to use his hands to haul himself up to the base of the lowest chimney before he can begin to climb after the bird. The steps are a little higher than his normal stride, and his progress is half step and half clamber. The first four take him right up to the brick face of the chimney breast, but from there he can stretch to the bottom of the next flight which takes him around the side. The stack is nothing as simple as a square; the faces are stepped and adorned, the angles marginally oblique. But the crow leads him on around the faces, always higher. After his fourth corner he is sufficiently high to begin wondering whether this was such a good idea. After his sixth, he has stopped paying attention to anything other than placing his foot on the next step and retaining his fingertip grip on the bricks. He doesn't even know if the bird is still in front of him, or if it has flown off, laughing to itself.

In the pocket of his hoodie, the phone vibrates. Malky pauses his climb and gingerly answers the phone. Haddow is doing his quiet-shouting thing, but the reception up here is poor.

"What?" Malky says.

Haddow repeats his diatribe, but Malky can only make out bits and pieces: "...bloody window...got all night...the fuck...the fucking...the
fuck
." Malky stares at the phone, and his vision does a weird thing: a vertiginous telescoping that shifts his focus from the phone and the white fingers wrapped around it, out and down, past the chimney brick and roof tile, rusting gutter and tree top, to the two figures that slouch in the dark corner behind the garden gate. "Declan, give that Natalie a buzz and tell her we're bringing the party to her place when we're done here." Haddow is no longer holding his phone but his voice is crystal clear. "Assuming this dozy cunt ever lets us in to this place." Declan rumbles something, prompting a dark laugh from his father. "Aye, all night," Haddow replies. "Might even freeze himself to death. It's not like we need the wee shite anyway."

When the line goes dead, a tug of wind restores Malky's attention to his precarious position. He moans, presses himself against the brickwork and is suddenly aware that his gutties barely fit onto these steps. He has to be absolutely out of his skull doing this. It's not even as if it's helped in his search for the attic window: he's too scared to look away from the chimney. He has to go back down. The question is how to turn around in such a small space. He shifts a foot experimentally, feels the lurch as his centre of gravity moves.
Bad idea
.

"Well, then." A different voice forces him to look up. The new crow is smaller than the last, more the size of a starling than a proper crow, and its plumage is white. The gaze from its black eyes is piercingly judgemental. The voice that issues from its silver beak is smooth and bored, like a school teacher. "Have you found what you came here for yet, Malcolm?"

Malky shakes his head.

The bird bounces neatly up a step, and then one more. It spreads its white wings for balance and they are exactly the same as Icarus's in Gavin's book of Greek myths.

"Then, Malcolm, you need to climb —"

"I don't want to go higher." Malky interrupts. "I want to go back."

The white crow turns its head to regard him over its shoulder. "Up and onward, Malcolm. There is no back." And then it flutters out of sight round the chimney. Malky stumbles after it as fast he can but before he can catch up, the bird has launched itself into the black sky. Malky follows its progress: a ghostly glimmer against the star field above and the blur of buildings below, until it alights on the ledge of a tenement window. The window sash is raised an inch because no-one can get it to shut and a breeze flutters the leaves of the potted herbs ranked behind the sink. There is warm light, indie music, laughter and, when someone plucks a few leaves of basil, there's a burst of the plant's metallic savour in Malky's nostrils, and that smell is followed by the meaty aroma of warm bolognese sauce.