The Pier Falls: And Other Stories Read online

  She looks up to the fringe of green grass high above her head. That was the place she had come from. There was a bed somewhere up there. But if there is a way back she is unable to see it from here. She can move her other leg a little. She thinks about trying to stand so that she can find a route but this rock is a kind of bed, too, and she has a memory of the other bed blowing away. She can smell the ammonia on her breath. She looks down at her damaged hand. One of the fingers is the wrong shape. It looks like a badly drawn picture of a hand.

  She is in a garden. There are fountains and lavender bushes covered in bees that rise in angry, humming clouds when her cousins hit them with sticks before the nurse drags them away. She trod on a bee once and her foot swelled to twice its size. There are bowers, too, where she can sit out of the heat of the sun. From her favourite she can look down over the wall to the quays and to the ships entering or leaving the harbour. She likes to imagine the countries from which they have come, the countries the old men talk about, countries made entirely of sand, countries where the people have skin as black and glossy as plums, countries where there are water lizards as long as a rowing boat.

  She is playing with a hoop made of stripped willow branches, the ends tapered and bound together with little spirals of fibre. If no one gets in the way she can run alongside it, batting it with a stick to keep it rolling, and do a circuit of the entire garden.

  It is the most beautiful garden in the world. She never wants to leave. If only she could remember where it is.

  There is a high wind and the sea explodes on the rocks below. The moon is full and the waves come in like black hills with a crest of blue snow, swelling and flexing and dropping onto the rocky shelf where they turn to freezing spray which falls on her like rain. She thinks how calm it must be out there, under those waves, in that dark that goes down and down, where the dolphins swim and the jellyfish drift on the current and the forests of seaweed swing back and forth, so much better than up here where everything hurts.

  Dawn comes. Her throat and mouth are dry and she cannot generate enough saliva to swallow. Her lips are cracked and bleeding. She can see nothing but fog through her right eye.

  There is a flock of gulls standing farther down the rock, all looking out to sea, preening their grey wings with their orange beaks and shaking out their feathers. Their eyes are little yellow stones with black holes drilled through them. The ocean is beaten silver. The seals have come back.

  She can hear the cymbals again, a distant, high ringing that comes and goes on the breeze, now louder, now quieter. She wonders if there is something wrong with her ears. Then she hears the faint but unmistakable sound of a big animal growling, that lazy rumble like a barrel on cobbles. The gulls scatter and the seals slip into the waves, leaving only circles of wash behind them.

  Everything is briefly still and silent. Then she sees him. He is a big man, naked except for a ragged cloak of red cloth, taller than she remembers from the boat, and more muscular. His head is too large and there is blood on his face. A leopard pads at his side. Behind him are six naked men and six naked women. Some have made themselves crowns and belts of creepers and green branches, some are carrying freshly killed animals—rabbits, foxes, pheasants.

  He stands in front of her, breathing heavily. His chest and shoulders are covered with wiry black hair and she can see now that he has horns. There is dung on his legs and his penis is thick and erect. He bends down and picks her up. She can smell wine on his breath and the rot of his teeth. He licks her. She recognises him from somewhere. She does not feel frightened. No one can hurt her anymore. There is no longer enough of her to be hurt.

  He turns her over and lays her down and pushes himself into her. The movement back and forth inside her is the movement of the waves back and forth against the rock, the coming and going of the birds, the pulse of day and night, summer turning into autumn, to winter, to spring to summer again, the heart squeezing and releasing, the pulse of the blood.

  Then they are on top of her, the men and women, biting, tearing, ripping her skin, pulling out her hair, breaking her fingers, gouging her eyes, hacking out the fat and muscle, pulling free the greasy tubes and bags of her innards till she is finally free of her body. Rising now, she looks down at the skeleton lying on the rocks, gulls picking at the remaining shreds of meat and gristle. She sees the grass blowing in the wind, the fringe of restless surf, the island shrinking till it is no more than a lump in the fastness of the sea, the sea an azure tear on the surface of the globe itself which shrinks rapidly in the haze of the sun as she floats into the great, black vault, becoming a buckled ring of seven stars, Corona Borealis, the northern crown.

  She is immortal.

  BUNNY

  He loved Mars bars and KitKats. He loved Double Deckers and Galaxy Caramels and Yorkies. He loved Reese’s Pieces and Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. He could eat a whole box of Quality Street in one sitting and had done so on several occasions, perhaps more than several. He loved white chocolate. He was not particularly keen on Maltesers, Wispas and Crunchies which were airy and insubstantial, though he wouldn’t turn his nose up at any of them if they were on offer. He disliked boiled and gummy sweets. He loved chocolate digestives. He loved Oreos and chocolate Bourbons. He loved coconut macaroons and Scottish shortbread. He would never buy a cereal bar but a moist, chunky flapjack was one of the most irresistible foods on the planet.

  He loved thick, sweet custard. He loved Frosties and Weetabix with several dessertspoons of sugar. He loved chunks of cheese broken from a block in the fridge, Red Leicester preferably or cheap, rubbery mozzarella. He loved Yazoo banana milk, the stuff you got from garages and service stations in squat plastic bottles with foil seals under chunky screw-tops. He could eat a litre tub of yogurt if he added brown sugar or maple syrup.

  He loved hot dogs and burgers, especially with tomato ketchup in a soft white bun thickly spread with butter. He loved battered cod and chips with salt and no vinegar. He loved roast chicken, he loved bacon, he loved steak. He loved every flavour of ice cream he had ever sampled—rum and raisin, Dime bar crunch, peanut butter, tiramisu…

  At least he used to love these things. His eating was now largely mechanical and joyless. It was the sugar and the fat he needed, though it gave him little pleasure. More often than not it made the cravings worse. He hated people using the phrase “comfort eating.” He had not been comfortable for a very long time, except sometimes in dreams where he ran and swam, and from which he occasionally woke up weeping.

  He was twenty-eight years old and weighed thirty-seven stone.

  There was a creased and sun-bleached photograph of him at nine, standing in the corridor outside the Burnside flat wearing his new uniform for the first day at St. Jude’s. His mother had run back inside at the last minute to get the camera, as if she’d feared he might not be coming home again and had wanted a memento, or a picture to give to the police. He’d been wearing grey flannel shorts and a sky-blue Aertex shirt. He could still smell the damp, fungal carpet and hear the coo and clatter of the pigeons on the window ledge. He remembered how overweight he felt, even then. Whenever he looked at the photo, however, his first thought was what a beautiful boy he had been. So he stopped looking at the photo. He dared not tear it up for fear of invoking some terrible voodoo. Instead he asked one of his care assistants to put it on top of a cupboard where he couldn’t reach it.

  Three weeks before his tenth birthday his father disappeared overnight to live in Wrexham with a woman whose name Bunny was never allowed to know. At supper he was there, by breakfast he had gone. His mother was a different person afterwards, more brittle, less kind. Bunny believed that she blamed him for his father’s departure. It seemed entirely possible. His father played cricket. As a young man he’d had a trial for Gloucestershire. He was very much not the parent of an overweight, unathletic child.

  To Bunny’s surprise he wasn’t bullied at St. Jude’s. Mostly the other children ignored him, understanding perhaps that isolation
was both the cruellest and the easiest punishment they could inflict. His friend Karl said, “I’m sorry. I can only talk to you outside school.” Karl was a wedding photographer now and lived in Derby.

  Bunny had kissed three girls. The first was drunk, the second, he learnt later, had lost a bet. The third, Emma Cullen, let him put his hand inside her knickers. He didn’t wash it for a week. But she was chubby and he was aroused and disgusted and utterly aware of his own hypocrisy, and the tangle in his head when he was with her was more painful than the longing when he wasn’t so he cold-shouldered her until she walked away.

  He scraped through a business diploma from the CFE then worked for five years as an assistant housing officer for the county council until he was no longer able to drive. His GP said, “You are slowly killing yourself,” as if this had not occurred to Bunny before. He took a job in university admin, digitising paper records, but he was getting larger and increasingly unwell. He had a series of gallstones and two bouts of acute pancreatitis. He had his gall bladder removed but his weight made the operation more traumatic and the recovery harder than it should have been. Sitting was uncomfortable and standing made him feel faint so he lay down at home and after four weeks of statutory sick pay he got a letter telling him not to return to work. His sister, Kate, said it was illegal and maybe she was right but he was tired and in pain and he felt increasingly vulnerable outside the house so he applied for Disability Living Allowance.

  His sister said a lot of things that were meant to be helpful, over the phone from Jesmond mostly and very occasionally in person. She had married a man with a red Audi RS3 who owned three wine bars. They had two children and a spotless house which Bunny had seen only in pictures.

  Bunny’s few friends began to drift away. For a brief period his most frequent visitor was a bear of a man from the local Baptist church who was charming and funny until it became clear that Bunny was not going to see the light, at which point he too was gone.

  Bunny had visited his mother every fortnight since he left home, though she had always given the impression that it was she who was doing him the favour, stepping off the merry-go-round of her busy life to make tea, feed him biscuits and chat. She worked in the Marie Curie shop and had an allotment. At fifty-seven she had started internet dating using a public terminal at the library and lightly dropped so many different names into the conversation that he didn’t know whether she was promiscuous or picky or whether no one stuck around after the second date. Despite the two miles between them she had come to his house over the past few years only when he was bedbound after his three visits to hospital. Now he couldn’t keep her away. She collected his benefit and spent most of it on his weekly shop. She made him eat wholemeal bread and green beans and sardines. She said, “I’m going to save your life.”

  Once a week, using a walking frame, he made an expedition to the Londis at the end of the street where he bought a bag of sugar and a slab of butter. He left the butter out till it softened then mixed the two into a paste and ate it over three or four sittings. He would have done it every day if he had more money and cared less about what Mrs. Khan and her son thought of him.

  Bunny’s paternal grandfather had been a policeman before the Second World War. He joined the 6th Armoured Division and was burnt to death in his Matilda II tank during the run for Tunis in December 1942. Bunny had a library of books and DVDs about the North Africa Campaign. He read biographies of Alexander and Auchinleck, Rommel and von Arnim. He made ferociously accurate military dioramas, sharing photos and tips and techniques with other enthusiasts around the world on military modelling forums: filters, pre-washing, pin-shading, Tamiya buff dust spray…

  He watched porn sometimes. He didn’t like images of lean men with big cocks which served only to make him acutely aware of his own body’s shortcomings. He preferred pictures and videos of solitary women masturbating. He liked to imagine that he had found a hole in the wall of a shower cubicle or a dormitory.

  He had thrush in the folds between his gut and his thighs. His joints were sore, which might or might not have been the beginnings of arthritis. His ankles were swollen by lymphoedema. He had diabetes for which he took Metformin every morning. God alone knew what his blood pressure was. He ate Rennies steadily throughout the day to counteract his stomach reflux. Moving from room to room made him breathless. He had fallen badly climbing the stairs a while back, dislocating his knee and giving himself a black eye on the newel post so he slept now on a fold-out sofa in what had previously been the dining room, and used the toilet beside the kitchen. Carers came in to give him a bed bath twice a week.

  Sometimes the kids on the estate threw stones at his windows or put dog shit through the letter box. For a period of several weeks one of them with some kind of developmental problem stood with his face pressed to the glass. Bunny would shut the curtains and open them half an hour later only to find that the boy was still standing there.

  He played Rome Total War and Halo. He watched daytime television—The Real Housewives of Orange County, Kojak, Homes Under the Hammer…He spent a great deal of time simply looking out of the window. He couldn’t see much—the backs of the houses on Erskine Close, mainly, and the top corner of next door’s Carioca motorhome. But in between, on clear days, there was a triangle of moorland. If the weather was good he watched the shadows of cloud moving across the grass and gorse and heather and imagined that he was one of the buzzards who sometimes came off the hills and drifted over the edge of town.

  On the mantelpiece there were photos of Kate’s children, his niece and nephew, Debbie and Raylan, blonde, washed-out, borderline albino, in generic grey-blue cardboard frames with thin gold borders and fold-out stands at the back. He hadn’t seen them in seven years and did not expect to see them again for a long time. Next to the photos was a small wooden donkey with two baskets of tiny oranges slung across its back, a memento of his only foreign holiday, in Puerto de Sóller, when he was nineteen.

  Mostly he was tired. Hunger and disappointment were, in their own way, as painful as pancreatitis and he would have willingly swapped the former for the latter. And while his mother thought she could save his life, there were days when he wondered whether it was worth saving.

  Then Leah came.

  It was meant to be a temporary arrangement. She would live with her father until she got back on her feet and had sufficient money in the bank to feel safe. Gavin had pushed her out of the front door with nothing, not even her wallet. In Barclays she discovered that the joint account was overdrawn. Too ashamed to put in a reverse-charge call home she spent the first night walking around the centre of Manchester, sitting at bus stops when she grew too tired to stand, kept awake by the fear that she would be preyed upon in some way. She rang her father the following morning but he took too long to arrange the money transfer. It was a further twenty-four hours before she could pick up her train fare from the building society, so she spent the second night in the women’s hostel to which the police had directed her. It was not an experience she wanted to repeat.

  Leaving the estate had been the first part of the grand plan. But you never did leave the estate, not really. You carried a little bit of it inside you wherever you went, something grubby and broken and windswept. You never trusted anyone who was kind. You married a man who made you feel ugly and weak and scared just like your mother once did, because deep down there was a comfort in being hurt in the old, familiar ways. So in the end the two miscarriages seemed almost a blessing, because they would have been Gavin’s children, just like it had been Gavin’s house and Gavin’s car and Gavin’s money. He would have let her do all the hard work then rolled up one day, lifted them out of the playpen and taken them away like he’d done with everything else.

  So here she was, working as a dental receptionist and returning each evening to the front room where she’d spent her childhood, sitting on the dove-grey leatherette sofa which stuck to the back of her legs in hot weather, filling the dishwasher in precisely the
way her father said it had to be filled, having tea at six forty-five every day and never, ever moving the speakers off the masking tape rectangles on the carpet despite the fact that her father only played R&B and soul from the sixties and seventies which was music about dancing and sex and not giving a fuck about whether the mugs were on the top or the bottom rack of the dishwasher, because her father was coping with retirement and loneliness and ageing in the same way he had coped with her mother, in the same way he had coped with being a parent, by looking the other way and concentrating very hard on something of no importance whatsoever.

  She met Bunny while scouring the neighbourhood for a strimmer. Her father’s was broken and chores which took her out of the house were becoming increasingly attractive. She rang the doorbell twice because she could hear the television and after forty strimmerless houses it was becoming a challenge. She’d given up and was walking back down the path when the door opened behind her. “Leah Curtis.” She was too shocked by the size and shape of him to hear what he was saying. The liquid waddle, the waist which touched both sides of the doorway. “You were at St. Jude’s. You won’t remember me.”

  He was right. She had no memory whatsoever. “You haven’t got a strimmer, have you?”

  “Come in.” He rotated then rocked from side to side as he made his way back towards the front room.

  There was a yeasty, unwashed smell in the hallway so she left the front door open.

  He bent his knees and rolled backwards onto a large, mustard-yellow sofa bed. Storage Hunters was on the TV. The wallpaper must have gone up circa 1975, psychedelic bamboo shoots in red and orange, peeling a little at the edges. On the table beside the sofa was a tiny model battlefield—soldiers, sand dunes, an armoured car—and beside the battlefield, a neatly organised collection of paint tubs, aerosols, brushes, folded rags and scalpels, the tips of their blades pushed into corks.