Draca Read online

  A brassbound clock, a barometer and a compass ranged along the mantelpiece, beneath a framed Admiralty chart of local waters. In the recess on the other side of the fire, Eddie’s magnificent, wooden model of a Viking longship sat on white-painted cupboards beneath more shelves of books. Grandpa had made that longship; he’d been quite a craftsman before his hands gave out. The smell of French cigarettes still lingered in the room, a year after he’d finally kicked the habit.

  Jack couldn’t stay in the room, not that evening, not on his own. He felt too much of an intruder. He took his wine into the garden, where Grandpa had made a seat by burying an old, wooden dinghy stern first in the ground so that the bows made a protective arch. It stood at the highest point of the garden, near the cottage, where there was a view through the treetops to the water. The bench he’d fixed to the thwart had been a perfect size, when Jack was younger, for an old man and a boy to sit side by side and tell stories. Since the previous winter, the boat seat had also been home to Draca’s figurehead, a piece of ancient, carved timber that Grandpa had found poking through the mud below the cottage one morning, on a day when extreme low tide and a northerly storm had combined to push the sea away from the land. Eddie had restored it, fitted it to Draca and brought it home after Draca was laid up. He’d cut a slot for it at the end of the bench so it would sit upright and stare at the sea beside him.

  Ugly great beast. ‘My pet dragon’, Grandpa called it. ‘A piece of Draca to keep me company.’ It was about four feet long, carved with a lattice of scales, and curved like a question mark or a bishop’s crozier, except that the hook bending down over the shaft formed a snarling mouth that could have been any animal with a long neck and jaws. Once it had probably been much longer, but the neck ended in a scorched stump that Grandpa had trimmed, squared and fitted to Draca’s bow, like a figurehead. It had spoiled the lines of the boat, in Jack’s view.

  It had its own smell, that dragon. In still air it was strong enough to overlay the garden’s pine resin and salt with something older: a charcoal and leather, old wood and male sweat kind of smell. Eddie had soaked it for months in the same stuff that they used to restore that Tudor ship, The Mary Rose: a polymer that drives out the salt water and hardens the timber. Somehow the carving still leaked scents trapped deep in its core. Jack had told Eddie it was probably an historical artefact, and that he should take it to a museum, but Eddie just laughed and said they were meant to be together: a Viking figurehead found by the descendant of Vikings.

  Jack forced himself to remember the good times in this spot, not the ravings in the hospice: the stories, the shared confidences. He and Grandpa would come out here even in winter, light a fire in a cast-iron stove by the seat and talk, staring at the flames. This place, this panorama of the great natural harbour, had been part of Jack’s childhood and youth. Freshwater Bay curving out to Witt Point; the island-dotted water stretching away until it met the hills rising beyond the sailing resort of Furzey; this vista had framed his times with Grandpa. Him and Grandpa. Always, in the good memories, just him and Grandpa. Jack wedged himself into the corner by the carving, put his phone within reach, cradled his wine and watched the long summer evening fade over the water. He and Grandpa’s dragon would keep vigil together.

  *

  Jack woke with the kind of jolt that he’d have had if he’d let himself doze on patrol, resting up within an ambush position, and one of the sentries had woken him with a gentle touch and a wordless signal. Contact! For a moment he felt the adrenalin rush that comes before action, that familiar dry mouth in chill night air, but as his eyes probed the near-darkness he saw only the first stars over the harbour and the outline of Witt Point looming like a dark mass low against the water. His tension faded into mild loneliness as he remembered the names of the men he had thought were around him. ‘Chalky’ White, Donovan, Wolfe, ‘Dusty’ Miller…

  But something had woken him, and he searched his memory for the sign. There’d been a noise, perhaps just the creak of the boat seat settling as the temperature dropped, and he stood, senses still tuned. Behind him, to the west, the sky was pale enough to outline the hills rising beyond the cottage. In front of him, the water shone faintly, showing the nearest islands dotting the harbour, patterns of darkness that merged into a black mass, like low cloud. A light mist forming over the water dissolved the shorelines in irregular patches. A stand of Scots pines covered the slope from the garden down to the water, and if Jack held his line of sight high in the trees he could let his peripheral vision scan the space beneath them.

  He knew those trees. There was no reason why they should suddenly seem threatening. Their trunks stood clear against the mist below, their outlines and spacing irregular; the way a body of men might stand, watching, waiting. He began to understand why a deluded old man could think there was someone among them. A whole troop stood there, and any one of them could be a ghostly warrior. Two branches, lifting almost horizontally from a trunk, had been perfect for a childhood rope swing that had taken him far out and high where the land fell away. Look at me, Grandpa! Now they looked like two arms stretched in crucifixion.

  But tonight there was movement between the trunks, a shadow among shadows. And again, between different trees. The shape was indistinct, and always at the edge of his sight, disappearing into the background dark when he looked directly at it. If he’d have been on patrol, Jack would have snapped on his night-vision goggles and crouched into cover, weapon ready. As it was, he grabbed Grandpa’s torch from the kitchen and threw a searchlight beam down the slope.

  Nothing. The glare panned through the trees, making shadows dance, until the beam met the mist above the beach and was lost in a circle of opaque greyness. No people, no animals darting away, no eyes shining in the beam. Jack wondered whether to go down there. The torch was big enough to double as a club, if necessary, but he wasn’t fully fit. Not yet. If he fell over a tree root he could set himself back weeks. He snapped off the torch and waited, listening to the whisper of branches in the wind. The tide must have been out. He could smell seaweed from the mudflats rather than the sharper salt of open water. He waited until his eyes readjusted to the dark, and when he still saw nothing, he turned to go inside. The day had been hot, but this early in the season the night was chill, and he was only wearing a light fleece and jeans. He’d sleep in his old bed, in the little room at the back of the cottage.

  Getting to sleep was usually easy, with a little liquid help. It was staying asleep that was the problem.

  *

  One summer when Jack was a kid, the family stayed on a farm for their summer holidays, and the farmer set a magpie trap in his yard. In the centre, in a little cage within a cage, was a live one. The ‘call bird,’ the farmer said. He’d left it a dish of water and even a bit of dead pigeon to eat, but the thing flapped around making a lot of noise in that harsh, rattling way of magpies. As Jack and the farmer watched from inside his barn, three more magpies arrived and hopped down through the wire door to see what all the fuss was about. They went frantic when the farmer walked over and they couldn’t get out, and he shot them, one by one, with a .22 rifle he kept for vermin.

  The Taliban hadn’t killed Jack outright because he was their call bird, but they’d used Dusty Miller for target practice. It was usually Dusty who woke Jack in the black hour before dawn, and always with the same pleading look, that way he’d stared at Jack as if he could do something. Dusty had come running back for him through the firefight in a mad, heroic, suicidal dash, and he was still coming back for him, pulling him out of the fug of sleep when the alcohol drained from Jack’s system and all that was left was the sour taste of guilt. Sometimes, in those first moments of wakefulness, Jack could smell roasting meat. Then he’d have to walk outside and breathe clean air, whatever the hour, whatever the weather. He’d have run, if he could. Even in summer, the air just before dawn can be pure as snow.

  There was a line of peach in the sky to the east as Jack laced his boots outside the door,
enough to show the silhouettes of trees and the outline of the boat seat, hunched like a monk’s cowl against the night. Grandpa’s carved dragon would be in there, invisible, black within black. Jack reached in to touch its snout, and settled beside it until there was enough light to see his footing.

  On calm, moonless nights the dawn starts in the sea, not the sky. Its flat surface reflects a light the human eye can’t see. In time, the light softened to show tendrils of mist, still hanging between the trees and floating over the water. The outlines of the Scots pines began to form against it. Now the same two branches could be arms raised in surrender.

  When the tide was just on the ebb it sucked at the beach below the cottage, a soft susurration at the limit of hearing. In the pre-dawn darkness it sounded like whispering, so human that he strained to distinguish the words. The break of each wave could be a soft consonant, an ‘f’ perhaps, followed by a longer vowel as the water spread over the shingle and left a softer, lisping retreat. F-aay-th, f-aay-th, endlessly repeated. It was as if a mass of men waited there, watching, murmuring among themselves and all of one, menacing mind.

  Enough. Jack didn’t want to start that line of thought again. Breathe the dawn. He stood, walking towards the threat, not running from it. Soon the sandy path beyond the garden gate was a faint paleness between black gorse, and its softness masked his footsteps through trees that were just trees. The track led along the coast and away from the beach until the dominant sound was not waves but the pre-dawn cacophony of seabirds. A stream flowed out into the harbour in Freshwater Bay, tumbling off the hills fast enough to stop the inlet silting, and sweet enough to allow banks of reeds to form at the water’s edge. Their sound was a soft, silken rustle, as real a bridge onto the peace of Witt Point as the rough logs across the stream.

  On Witt Point, Jack sat on a stone, sniper-still, at one with nature and its morning routine. Navigation lights winked out in the harbour, sending brief pulses of green and red over the water. Grandpa said he found them comforting, these signposts of the sea. Now there was enough light to see shapes moving, black within grey: the snuffling waddle of a badger, the dainty steps of a deer through the trees. He could inhale sea smells and pine resin and dew-damp grass. There used to be a Saxon chapel here, though there was nothing left of it but mounds in the grass and a few corners of dressed, mossy stones that had been brought up when some trees blew down in a storm. Even so, the place was cleansing, as if it had absorbed centuries of devotion and could give back a little of that peace. It was a spot where thoughts could be allowed to float to the surface of the mind.

  And that morning, Jack could feel his grandfather slipping away with the tide.

  II: JACK

  Grandpa Eddie did not have a good end. He was drifting in and out of consciousness when Jack arrived, wired up to a morphine pump by his bed. Harry was already there and Jack hung back, feeling sorry for his father because he didn’t seem to know what to do. Harry sat on a plastic chair, a little hunched but still with the sergeant-major’s set to his shoulders, watching Eddie die. Harry’s hands twisted in his lap and emotions crossed his face like cats’ paws of wind across water.

  ‘I called Tilly.’ Harry spoke without taking his eyes off Eddie. ‘She said she’d already been.’

  ‘A few days ago.’ Jack had given the hospice his sister’s number. Tilly had clicked into the hospice in high heels, tight skirt and trout pout. She didn’t bring her kids, and Grandpa had been sad about that. She’d seemed surprised that Jack was there. ‘You never come to see us,’ she’d moaned, and Jack had bottled his anger as Tilly wasted one of Grandpa’s lucid moments, filling the silence with bright, brittle inanities until Grandpa closed his eyes, feigning sleep.

  Now Grandpa was beyond conversation. There might have been things that Harry wanted to say, but he didn’t have the chance. Jack left them alone for a while, but when he came back Harry hadn’t moved so Jack stayed, waiting for his own turn to say goodbye. The windows were open, and a gentle breeze lifted and dropped the net curtains, letting in the sounds and smells of town. Traffic. Diesel fumes. The clatter and calls of workmen nearby.

  The rip of machine-gun fire had Jack diving out of his chair, shoulder-rolling over the carpet, with his mind screaming at the impossibility and certainty of combat. Close range. Close enough to feel the vibrations of each round resonate in his body. Low cyclic rate, heavy calibre. He ended up crouched on the carpet, the fingers of one hand splayed, the other hand reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there, and his father still sat in his chair, looking down at him with his eyebrows lifted in surprise. The burst finished with a scrape of metal over tarmac as a pneumatic drill was repositioned, and Jack’s shoulders slumped in humiliation.

  Idiot. Stupid, stupid, bloody idiot. He stood, brushing his hands down his trousers, too ashamed to meet Harry’s eye, and turned away towards the door, muttering that he’d ask them to shut up. He stopped as Grandpa screamed from the bed.

  ‘Don’t let him take me!’

  Grandpa was trying to get out of bed, but didn’t have the strength. Harry held him by the shoulders, easing him back, and Grandpa looked up at him in a way that seemed to plead for something: mercy, forgiveness, understanding, who knew what?

  ‘I tried to give it back. Honest. I tried…’

  Jack lurched out of the door towards the main entrance, his shame hardening into anger, brushing past a nurse running in the other direction.

  He’d lost it. Totally lost it. Thirty yards down the road they’d set up temporary traffic lights and plastic barriers, and two guys in hard hats and high-visibility jackets were digging a hole. They didn’t hear him coming. One of them worked the drill, with vibrations rippling over his beer gut, while the other watched, leaning against a mechanical digger. He flipped the drill man on the arm to stop him when Jack stood beside them, shouting, and they swivelled their ear defenders up onto their hard hats. Jack had to repeat himself.

  ‘There’s a man dying in there!’

  They both shrugged in a way that said That’s not our problem, even though the words were, ‘We didn’t know about that.’

  ‘Then for fuck’s sake let him die in peace.’

  The man against the digger pushed himself upright and squared his shoulders.

  ‘You’ll have to talk to the council if you want us to stop. We’ve got a job to do.’

  Jack made a fool of himself again, and started shouting. All they needed to do was pull down their ear defenders and start the drill with studied insolence every time he opened his mouth and he was left raging at nothing like a kid in a tantrum. Someone behind him grabbed his arm as he started to swing at them, holding him while the two workmen dropped the drill and backed away, lifting their fists.

  ‘Jack!’ Sandra, the nurse, stared at him, forcing eye contact. Some buried logic in Jack’s head told him she’d had training in restraint. ‘It’s too late, Jack. Come away, now.’

  Grandpa lay across the bed, with his mouth open in a silent scream and his eyes staring upwards, but sunken so deep that they seemed to have fallen back into the skull. A look of absolute terror was frozen on his face.

  Jack had never seen that before. He’d seen dead people, too many of them, and usually their faces were slack, as if they were asleep. Some looked slightly surprised until you closed their eyes. A few had faces still stretched in agony. But Grandpa looked petrified, and Jack wished he could have been there with him, even held him. Eddie’s institutional pyjama jacket had fallen open so that his old man’s body lay bare-chested in a tangle of sheets, a parchment husk of a man. Harry still sat on the same chair, staring at the body. Slowly, as uncomfortably as anyone breaking decades of distance, he reached out and touched Eddie’s arm.

  III: JACK

  Jack picked Grandpa Eddie’s raspberries that afternoon, a mindless task while his brain was numb with grief. The berries hanging in full sun were oven-warm, almost musty. Others hid under the leaves, cool and fat on a day when the heat had turned the shado
ws black and stunned the birds into silence. There was just the drone of insects wavering in the air. The hills rising inland, beyond the roof of Grandpa’s cottage, were fading into a heat haze.

  Jack’s bad leg made him stumble on his way back to the house, and he laughed with black humour. Dropping the raspberries would have been too much irony.

  Jack had a memory of early childhood. They’d all been here at Grandpa’s on a rare, family visit, but he’d sneaked out alone to hide between the staked lines of fruit. He might have been escaping an argument in the cottage. He’d been very young, so small that the highest runners were out of reach, but loose canes arched over him, drooping down as if offering themselves for picking; succulent, pendulous fruit that burst on his tongue. The bowl that day had been porcelain, pretty enough for even a boy to wonder if it was quite the right thing for the garden and to hold it with solemn care on the way back. He’d been so pleased with himself that he didn’t sense the tension in the kitchen.

  Daddy Daddy look Daddy see what I got. He’d lifted the bowl in ruby-stained fingers into a thunderclap bark of anger. The shock jolted him so that the top layer of berries went upwards while the bowl fell, tumbling, spilling, to shatter across the flagstones in a blood splash of pulp.

  Sorry Daddy sorry Daddy I didn’t mean to do it.

  Tears at the heart of rage, and the little dance on the spot that kids do when they’re frightened and can’t run. He may even have wet himself.

  Look what you’ve done you stupid boy that bowl was your grandmother’s.

  A frozen, photographic image of a moment. His mother in the hall doorway, silent fear on her face as she cradled a chubby Tilly on one arm. Tilly wide-eyed, sucking her thumb. His father standing by the kitchen table, shouting, with both hands clawed in anger.