of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, among other things. Outside the community centre was a bronze statue of a boy fishing on his haunches, with an elbow on either knee and an expression of great concentration. The statue had been commissioned for the hall’s fiftieth anniversary, which had coincided with the Queen’s silver jubilee in 1977. It had been unveiled at the height of a street party, trestle tables snaking down the whole length of the Fore street, and was instantly and universally known, even in the hand-printed guide to Hanmouth the second-hand bookshop sold, as the Crapping Juvenile. As for the rest of the Fore street: the new Tesco out of town had had no effect on the excellent butcher, the fair-to-middling greengrocer. Had no power, either, over the knick-knack shops, the amateur jewellers making a go of it, or the Oriental emporium run by the two retired sisters, stocked by bi-annual trips to the markets of south India; they returned from Madurai with triumphant rolls of bright silk, hand-made soap, and encrusted, elaborate, tarnished silver trinket boxes to be sold at twelve times the purchase price.
On the other side of the Fore street, as the railway line grew more apparent, the bohemians, the aspiring many who had escaped only so far from Barnstaple, lived in polite and tidy houses, designed for eighteenth-century churchwardens or pre-war shopkeepers. Here, their view was of their neighbours’ windows, principally. In the town, there was one school, supposed to be very good, one fortnightly French-style market, twelve antiques shops and a junk market, a fishmonger with an almost daily van and seven churches, ranging from those that turned to the east during the Creed with hats on, to one that frankly and openly prostrated itself before spiritual emanations, this last in a converted bike shed with a corrugated-iron roof. Miranda Kenyon, who taught at the university and lived in a Dutch house on the Strand, often announced that she had promised herself she would go into that last, mad church one of these Sundays.
That was the part of Hanmouth people thought of when they aspired to live there. It was the part that pronounced their town Hammuth. The bright upward side of leisurely high-fronted Dutch houses, their glass-punctured façades big and shining with the sun setting over the westward hills, its inhabitants pouring a first drink of the evening behind leaded, curving windows, occupying themselves by counting the long-legged wading birds in the shining estuary. They thought of the square Protestant whitewashed houses in the streets behind, or at worst the Edwardian villas further back, towards the railway line. The railway, bearing only the trundling little train to the coastal stretch around Heycombe, was charming in final effect, rather than a noisy interruption of Hanmouth’s postcard qualities. The flowerbeds at the station were well kept, with ‘HANMOUTH’ in topiary, and a level crossing at which widows with woven wicker shopping baskets lined in gingham always seemed to be waiting patiently. A couple of hundred yards down from the station, a white wicket gate and a footpath across the track showed that this was a rare surviving branch line of the sort that was supposed to have been eradicated decades ago. It was quite charming, and harmless.
The people of Hanmouth were conscious of their pleasant, attractive, functioning little town, and they protected it. A police station with a square blue lamp and a miniature fire station added to the miniaturized, clockwork impression. Its one nuisance was represented by the twelve pubs of the town; there was a sport among the students of the university to embark on the Hanmouth Twelve, a mammoth holiday pub-crawl, which sometimes ended with drunken manly widdling off the jetty, as gay Sam put it, late-night vomit on the station platform to greet you with your early-morning train, and once, a smashed window in the florist’s shop at the quay end of the Fore street. These small-town irritations, the responsibility of outsiders, were talked over in the newsagent’s and in the streets. Mr Calvin, to everyone’s approval, took the sort of initiative only newcomers were likely to take, and formed a Neighbourhood Watch. There was some nervous joshing that you’d have to join in a prayer circle before the meetings got going, but in the end they’d been a great success, as everyone agreed. In the last couple of years, security cameras had been put up over the station in both directions, and at the quay where people waited for buses into Barnstaple. Then a little more lobbying secured six more, and as John Calvin said he had explained to Neighbourhood Watch, and Neighbourhood Watch would explain in turn to everyone they knew, now you could walk from one end of the Fore street to the other at any time of the day or night without fear, watched by CCTV. Even quite old ladies knew to say ‘CCTV’ now. ‘You’ve got nothing to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong,’ John Calvin said. ‘Nothing to hide: nothing to fear,’ he added, quoting a government slogan of the day, and in the open-faced and street-fronting houses of Hanmouth, often wanting to boast about the elegant opulence of their private lives, the rich of Hanmouth tended to agree.
The security and handsomeness of the estuary town drew outsiders. It also, less admirably, persuaded those outside its historic boundaries to appropriate its name. Some way up the A-road towards more urban settlements, there were lines of yellow-brick suburban houses, a golf club, a vast pub on a roundabout offering Carvery Meals to the passing traffic on a board outside. In its car park feral children romped, and, fuelled on brought-out Cokes and glowing orangeades, ran up and over the pedestrian bridge across the A-road. They had been known to shy a half-brick at lorries passing below. There was an extensive and spreading council estate on either side of the traffic artery, surrounding the Hanmouth Rugby Club grounds; it provided a flushed and awkward audience to the field’s gentlemanly battles, over a leather egg, mounted for an afternoon, a drama bounded between two dementedly outsized aspirates.
All these things, encouraged in the first instance by estate agents, had taken to calling themselves Hanmouth too. They, however, called it Han-mouth, to Hanmouth’s formal scorn and comedy. It was one of Miranda Kenyon’s conversational set-pieces, the speculating about where the boundaries of Hanmouth would end. On the whole, Hanmouth thought little of the despoiling and misspeaking suburbs that surrounded it and had taken on its name. Though they poured right up to the gates of Hanmouth, they were obviously the city’s, Barnstaple’s, suburbs, not Hanmouth’s. Hanmouth could never have suburbs.
In these suburbs and estates, men washed their cars on a Sunday morning; kitchens faced the front, the better for wives doing the washing-up to watch the events in the street; children kicked footballs against the side of parked cars until bawled out; support for local or national football teams was made evident in displayed scarves, emblems stuck in windows, flags flown from the back of cars; and, at seven thirty or eight o’clock on weekdays, a ghostly unanimous chorus of the theme tune to a London soap opera floated through the open windows of the entire suburb. There was no reason to go there, and Hanmouth knew nothing much of these hundred streets. It was in the early summer of 2008 that an event in these suburbs, whatever settlement they could be said to belong to, rose up and attached itself to Hanmouth, and could not be detached.
No one in Hanmouth proper had ever heard of Heidi O’Connor. Unless she cut their hair, and then they still wouldn’t know her surname. She did her shopping where no one hailed each other or equably compared purchases, in the Tesco’s on the ring-road. She was not one for going to the pub for social reasons or any other, even to the roadhouse on the Hanmouth roundabout. She would have said she found it ‘common’, a word most of Hanmouth would have been astonished to discover a Heidi O’Connor knew or attached any particular meaning to. She had four children, Hannah, China, Harvey and Archie, from nine down to eighteen months. She lived with Michael Thomas, a moon-faced reprobate seven years younger than her. The four children, two with a version of Heidi’s white-blonde hair, two with a dark, thick, doglike scrub on top, were said to get on with their ‘stepfather’, as Micky Thomas generously termed himself when events made a definition necessary. He was the third such ‘stepfather’ the children had known and the eldest two could remember. Only Hannah could remember, or said she could, her proper father and China’s.
With four children at twenty-seven, Heidi’s existence had its circumscribed aspects. She rarely went into Barnstaple—the opening of a new shopping centre represented an unusual outing. She and Micky and the four kids, walking
